leF
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Let's have a full, nuanced debate on the topic of the blackpill. Is it compatible with self-improvement? Is it true, and to what extent? I believe the blackpill can help people with self-improvement. Please do not strawman blackpillers as I have seen in many other instances in the community. And also a request to blackpillers who agree with me, please do not call other perspectives 'cope' and "low IQ normie talk," it does not allow for constructive debate.
Without further ado, let me get into it. To have a debate about it, it is necessary to define the blackpill. Below I will use a definition from incels.wiki . The full definition can be seen on https://incels.wiki/w/Blackpill :
The blackpill is a philosophy that argues that physical attractiveness is the most critical factor in determining men's dating success, especially in modern Western countries.[1] A man's money, status, and social skills are argued to be other factors of secondary importance, which is known as LMS theory. An expanded or alternate definition proposes that a man's dating and life outcomes generally rely on genetically determined traits.[2][3]
As a consequence of these beliefs, blackpillers often argue that men's dating issues require systematic rather than individual solutions, if there is any solution at all for the most disadvantaged males.[4] Someone who holds a certain amount of blackpill beliefs is called a blackpiller or blackpilled.
Below are some of their common arguments, also found on the incels.wiki page for Blackpill:
The following list contains typical themes, memes and shitposts found in blackpill communities. They largely overlap with themes from the redpill and the manosphere overall. Not all blackpillers agree with all of the positions and claims referenced here, nor are they necessarily factually or scientifically correct or proven by the Scientific Blackpill, nor endorsed by the wiki, but they are only collected for reasons of completeness and for the documentation of blackpill subculture.
Nature arguments
Women bad
Society
Blackpills often means that "it's over" for incels with poor looks and low social status or other flaws—that is, that they have next to no chance of 'ascending' or attaining sexual and social fulfilment. The blackpill gave rise to various spin-offs with varying degrees of seriousness, for instance, the 'dogpill' or 'birdpill'.
The main driving force behind the blackpill is the scientific blackpill. These are the scientific studies that support the blackpill. Typically, whenever most people try to refute the blackpill, they fail to acknowledge the existence or the validity of these studies. Below I will have them linked.
The main page which houses a plethora of data and sources in support of the blackpill is found on the Scientific Blackpill page on the incels.wiki website.
It is a comprehensive list of sources, too long to list on here so I'll just link the page. Please view at least some of these sources:
https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill
Another source of valuable resources in support of the blackpill is reddit.com/r/blackpillscience:
It has just as comprehensive of sources in support of the blackpill:
Here are some of the main sources that support the blackpill. Note that these are not all of them nor are they the primary sources in support of the blackpill, rather just a small percent of the totality of r/blackpillscience:
Within races, the inter-rater agreement on physical attractiveness is very high, typically Cronbach's α > .9. Across races it is only slightly lower.
There is lots of variance in ratings of averagely looking people (SD of ~2-3 on a 10-point scale), but very little variance in ratings of very attractive or very unattractive people, i.e. people strongly agree about the extremes.
http://www.michelleschoenleber.com/uploads/5/4/0/4/5404776/wood___brumbaugh__2009_.pdf (Wood 2009)
https://psychology.stackexchange.co...r-rater-consistency-of-attractiveness-ratings
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4079334/ (Coetzee 2014) (See Table S1 for inter-rater agreements.)
A single glance of 100 ms is sufficient to form reliable, consensual first impressions about trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness (Cronbach's α ≈ .9).
http://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617732388 (Palomares 2017)
In a blind date setting, the correlation between evaluation of the date's physical attractiveness and liking of the date was .78 when male subjects rated their date, and .69 for when female subjects rated their date. Personality and intellect played no role.
Women judged and valued men based on physical attractiveness to the same degree as men did women.
In long-term dating settings, other factors besides looks do play a role (especially social status of males).
http://doi.org/10.1037/h0021188 (Walster 1966)
Even congenitally blind men prefer the female hourglass figure.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.10.001 (Karremans 2009)
Even babies prefer attractive people over unattractive ones, and are more likely to trust them.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6355-babies-prefer-to-gaze-upon-beautiful-faces/ http://archive.is/ziyCI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00499 (Ma 2016)
Chickens trained to pick either a masculine or feminine face more often picked exaggerated masculine or feminine faces to the same extent as humans of the opposite sex considered the faces more sexually desirable (r² = .98).
The preference for exaggerated masculinity or femininity is thus likely a neurological/mathematical necessity rather than a cultural option.
http://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 (Ghirlanda 2004)
Physical attractiveness is weakly correlated with health and ability (blackpills for attractive people):
Research results that found a strong link between facial symmetry and health have been exposed as scientific fraud:
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/a-fluctuating-reality-46903
Highly specific markers of attractiveness, e.g. facial symmetry, a deep voice, chiseled chin, women's hourglass figure etc. are largely unrelated to health and ability.
Our strong preference for these features has likely evolved in a positive feedback loop (Fisherian runaway and sensory bias hypothesis), not because they signal health or ability.
(This does not hold for all aspects of attractiveness though, e.g. aversion toward irregular skin might have evolved to avoid infectious diseases. Such adaptations useful for survival might have initiated the runaway selection.)
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Beauty-Darwins-Forgotten-Theory/dp/0385537212 (Prum 2017)
The feedback loop consists in one sex evolving to be more attracted to a particular feature in the other sex for the mere reason that it is selected by others, but as the population overall evolves stronger attraction to the feature, the evolutionary pressure grows exponentially to be even more attracted to the feature. This results in exaggeration or overcomplication of said feature in the other sex in efforts to evolve to become more attractive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
Human's cognitive abilities and all sorts of complex social behavior and courtship behaviors may have evolved in the same way as they are unnecessarily sophisticated for the needs of hunter-gatherers to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Sexual_selection
Different aspects of beauty are also not inter-correlated, e.g. no correlation between attractive faces and attractive voices.
https://psyarxiv.com/2avu3/ (Zäske 2018)
The waist-to-hip-ratio/fertility link is weak at best.
http://doi.org/10.1177/1474704918800063 (Lassek 2018)
10 cm more body height shortens lifespan by 5 years, leading to more joint wear, cardiovascular disease etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/bin/48856-23f1_F2OT.jpg
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/ (Samaras 2002)
The relationship between health and mating success is weak, i.e. people select for physical attractiveness rather than health.
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/1/160603 (Foo 2017)
Physical unattractiveness only correlates weakly with various diseases (asthma, depression, ADHD…), e.g. probability of diabetes in unattractive people is 4% and 2% in attractive people, 20% vs 11% for depression, 15% vs 13% for migraines. Beauty is not a health certificate.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.06.004 (Nedelec 2014)
Deeper male voice is not linked to immunocompetence even though women are strongly attracted to it.
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.06.003 (Arnocky 2018)
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.08.029 (O’Connor 2014)
A meta study found a large publication bias in the literature on the correlation between physical attractiveness and IQ and only found a very weak correlation of r = 0.07.
The halo effect of attractiveness on perceived intelligence is enormous (r = 0.81).
This might explain the existence of blonde jokes, as attractive women with low IQ probably maximally expose this bias, probably one of the largest cognitive biases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ (Mitchem 2016)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4757567/ (Talamas 2016)
More intelligent men are regarded as more attractive, but only up to a sweet spot of 120 after which attractiveness declines.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289617301551 (Gignac 2018)
Men prefer women with a youthful appearance (blackpills for women):
The largest known psychological sex difference is age preference (d = 2.0).
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-38707-001 (Buss 2018)
Women tend to prefer slightly older men, but men of all ages prefer women in their early twenties. In the following graph, the first and second quartiles of the average attractiveness of each age group are represented by shades of red.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385347391 (Rudder 2015)
Women's partner preferences regarding age are typically fulfilled, but not men's.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.09.003 (Antfolk 2015)
Women's reproductive value peaks in their early 20s (most women cannot conceive easily after 30). Men's annual income peaks at 50.
https://osf.io/qn3w2/ (Barbaro 2018)
The age difference between husband and wife in hunter-gatherer societies is 5.12±3.61 years (excluding Australia where it is 14.64±4.5), compared to 3.5±1.7 in modern societies.
In only 1 of 57 hunter-gatherers societies was the bride older (-1.5 years). The mean maternal age at first birth in less-developed countries is 20.5±1.0 years and 19.46±1.9 years among hunter-gatherers.
http://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20188 (Fenner, 2005)
Provided unrestricted mating choices, old men choose fertile young women (younger than 30).
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.06.007 (Sohn, 2017, p. 19)
Age preferences by males also reflect in the prevalence of hebephilia (attraction to ~13 year olds), which is thought to be high as 20% among men.
https://www.ipce.info/sites/ipce.info/files/biblio_attachments/every_fifth.pdf (Schuster 2014)
Contemporary confusions about hebephilia might result from the fact that the age of puberty has fallen in western countries: Menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years (reasons unknown; perhaps pollution, cosmetics or better child health).
https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20188 (Fenner 2005)
https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dey337 (Harley 2018)
Based on all of these, I'm curious to hear your perspectives. I hope this could be a high IQ thread. Let's think critically and have respectful debates.
Without further ado, let me get into it. To have a debate about it, it is necessary to define the blackpill. Below I will use a definition from incels.wiki . The full definition can be seen on https://incels.wiki/w/Blackpill :
The blackpill is a philosophy that argues that physical attractiveness is the most critical factor in determining men's dating success, especially in modern Western countries.[1] A man's money, status, and social skills are argued to be other factors of secondary importance, which is known as LMS theory. An expanded or alternate definition proposes that a man's dating and life outcomes generally rely on genetically determined traits.[2][3]
As a consequence of these beliefs, blackpillers often argue that men's dating issues require systematic rather than individual solutions, if there is any solution at all for the most disadvantaged males.[4] Someone who holds a certain amount of blackpill beliefs is called a blackpiller or blackpilled.
Below are some of their common arguments, also found on the incels.wiki page for Blackpill:
The following list contains typical themes, memes and shitposts found in blackpill communities. They largely overlap with themes from the redpill and the manosphere overall. Not all blackpillers agree with all of the positions and claims referenced here, nor are they necessarily factually or scientifically correct or proven by the Scientific Blackpill, nor endorsed by the wiki, but they are only collected for reasons of completeness and for the documentation of blackpill subculture.
Nature arguments
- Nothing can change female sexual desire (biological essentialism) in a free mating market, post-sexual revolution
- SMV is determined by things men cannot easily improve on such as looks, money, status, physical stature, race, IQ, and neurotypicality. It is argued that women don't care about a man's personality, which is often conflated with morality. Some argue that only looks matter. Some say stuff like 'confidence' etc. matters a little but much less than readily observable material factors. SMV is argued to be the same as dating success, and it is commonly argued that direct female mate choice is primary in determining a man's sexual success, and not other external factors, apart from rare circumstances
- Cosmetic surgery can drastically improve men's mating success
- That men's genetic quality is accurately determined by women at large (good genes hypothesis) and that this applies today; therefore incels have 'bad genes'
- Women like big penises
- Women care greatly about a male partner's height
- Forced sex is not so bad and many women like it, at least if the rapist is an attractive and/or high-status man. Popular BDSM themed porn aimed at women like "Fifty Shades of Grey" and the like are often cited in support of this position
- Women are hybristophilic and attracted to male dominance and displays of violence in general
Women bad
- Women are only capable of love in case of high status men. Basically that women can only love conditionally, which most wouldn't consider 'love'
- Women reject 80% of the male population, or would if they could perfectly optimize their mate choices
- Women will reject a man because he is a virgin, unless he is very attractive
- Women mostly have a horrible character, if any
- Women take joy in bullying at least as much as men
- Women only love what men can provide for them, financially or sexually
- Women's depression and loneliness are at best self-inflicted, at worst a means of getting attention. It is generally argued that women suffer less than men, as they live life on 'easy mode'
- Women love playing victims to get their way
- Women are sneaky and lie a lot
- Women behave like children
- Women exhibit a dual mating strategy, where men who financially provide for them are often cuckolded by more masculine or attractive men
- Women have a passive, transactional and opportunistic love style
- Women are solipsistic
- Women are particularly shallow about the looks of men, and care as much, or more about looks in a romantic partner than men do
- Women's sexuality is more primitive than men's, who are argued to be the romantic gender, but they conceal this to receive investment from male partners. Some argue that they are stuck r-selected past as they have been subject to less selection pressure
Society
- Men need sexual intimacy and romantic intimacy
- Inceldom is harmful
- Making women non-financially dependent on men for survival reduces them to their looks
- Polygamy in general is bad and always unworkable on a community level, as it creates incel men who are excluded from reproduction and sexuality
- Eliminating traditional gender roles destabilizes society through creating demotivated male incels, as women are claimed to 'ride the cock carousel' and engage in de facto polygynous arrangements with 'Chads' in contexts where they are free to select males and defer marriage
- The patriarchy would solve or mitigate inceldom to a substantial degree
- Wife sharing and other forms of extreme promiscuity are pathetic and necessarily chaotic
- Religions were right about women
- Rich men are often merely betabuxed
- Women are compatible with forced marriage as they naturally fantasize about sexual coercion
- Sexual coercion is a natural part of human sexuality
- Revoking women's right to vote would be a good idea
Blackpills often means that "it's over" for incels with poor looks and low social status or other flaws—that is, that they have next to no chance of 'ascending' or attaining sexual and social fulfilment. The blackpill gave rise to various spin-offs with varying degrees of seriousness, for instance, the 'dogpill' or 'birdpill'.
The main driving force behind the blackpill is the scientific blackpill. These are the scientific studies that support the blackpill. Typically, whenever most people try to refute the blackpill, they fail to acknowledge the existence or the validity of these studies. Below I will have them linked.
The main page which houses a plethora of data and sources in support of the blackpill is found on the Scientific Blackpill page on the incels.wiki website.
It is a comprehensive list of sources, too long to list on here so I'll just link the page. Please view at least some of these sources:
https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill
Another source of valuable resources in support of the blackpill is reddit.com/r/blackpillscience:
It has just as comprehensive of sources in support of the blackpill:
Here are some of the main sources that support the blackpill. Note that these are not all of them nor are they the primary sources in support of the blackpill, rather just a small percent of the totality of r/blackpillscience:
- The Economist: Short Guys Finish Last
- Psychology Today: "Short men have to deal with enormous stigma when it comes to romance."
- Harvard Bias Test (1700 sample size): "There is a height bias... on the order of things like race or age... The degree of bias is in your face."
- Research found taller men were more likely to lose their temper. The research was designed to test Short Man Syndrome - or "Napoleon complex."
- "Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. We show that height has a significant effect for the occupational sorting of employed workers but not for the self-employed. We interpret this result as evidence of employer discrimination in favor of taller workers."
- "5 separate groups of 22 students were asked to estimate the height of a man presented before them whose academic status changed with each of the 5 groups. Results indicate that as ascribed academic status increased, students' estimation of height increased."
- "Because we expect people to prefer more physically formidable leaders, we predicted our subjects would tend to draw a taller leader meeting a shorter citizen, with height measured by the vertical size of the figures. In fact, that is what we found. More than twice as many subjects drew a taller leader..."
- In this experiment about the halo effect, people instinctively assume the taller man is more successful than the shorter man.
- Malcolm Gladwell: "In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2″ or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2″ or taller. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5’6″, a grand total of ten–in my sample–have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American."
- "During one of the Republican presidential debates before the 2016 election, the web search company Google tracked what terms Internet users were searching for while watching on TV. The results were surprising. The top search wasn't ISIS. It wasn't Barack Obama's last day. It wasn't tax plans. It was: How tall is Jeb Bush? The search analytics unearthed a curious fascination among the voting public: Americans, it turns out, are fascinated with how tall the presidential candidates are. And they tend to vote for the tallest candidates, according to historic election results and research into voter behavior."
- "We found a twofold higher risk of suicide in short men than tall men... The pattern didn't seem to stem from socioeconomic or prenatal influences, the researchers write. The results also didn't change much when the researchers excluded men with psychiatric diagnoses."
- Dutch men are the tallest in the world because that’s what women prefer.
- Sperm banks require that men be at least 5 feet 8 inches tall.
- The top word men are drawn to in online dating is "love." The top thing women look for in a man's bio is 6'.
- Experiment about height & dating (women admit they would only date a short doctor if all the other men were convicted criminals.)
- Compilation of disgust towards short men
- The Ultimate Physical Attractiveness Compilation
- The Ultimate Hypergamy Compilation
- The Ultimate Male Horniness and Female Dependence Compilation
- The Ultimate Benefits of Sex, Companionship and Monogamy Compilation
- The Ultimate Female Gossip Compilation
- The Ultimate Female Misogyny and Nastiness Compilation
- Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the prettiest: The science of beauty. Anchor, 2011.
- Prum, Richard O. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World-and Us. Anchor, 2017.
Within races, the inter-rater agreement on physical attractiveness is very high, typically Cronbach's α > .9. Across races it is only slightly lower.
There is lots of variance in ratings of averagely looking people (SD of ~2-3 on a 10-point scale), but very little variance in ratings of very attractive or very unattractive people, i.e. people strongly agree about the extremes.
http://www.michelleschoenleber.com/uploads/5/4/0/4/5404776/wood___brumbaugh__2009_.pdf (Wood 2009)
https://psychology.stackexchange.co...r-rater-consistency-of-attractiveness-ratings
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4079334/ (Coetzee 2014) (See Table S1 for inter-rater agreements.)
A single glance of 100 ms is sufficient to form reliable, consensual first impressions about trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness (Cronbach's α ≈ .9).
http://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617732388 (Palomares 2017)
In a blind date setting, the correlation between evaluation of the date's physical attractiveness and liking of the date was .78 when male subjects rated their date, and .69 for when female subjects rated their date. Personality and intellect played no role.
Women judged and valued men based on physical attractiveness to the same degree as men did women.
In long-term dating settings, other factors besides looks do play a role (especially social status of males).
http://doi.org/10.1037/h0021188 (Walster 1966)
Even congenitally blind men prefer the female hourglass figure.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.10.001 (Karremans 2009)
Even babies prefer attractive people over unattractive ones, and are more likely to trust them.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6355-babies-prefer-to-gaze-upon-beautiful-faces/ http://archive.is/ziyCI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00499 (Ma 2016)
Chickens trained to pick either a masculine or feminine face more often picked exaggerated masculine or feminine faces to the same extent as humans of the opposite sex considered the faces more sexually desirable (r² = .98).
The preference for exaggerated masculinity or femininity is thus likely a neurological/mathematical necessity rather than a cultural option.
http://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-002-1021-6 (Ghirlanda 2004)
Physical attractiveness is weakly correlated with health and ability (blackpills for attractive people):
Research results that found a strong link between facial symmetry and health have been exposed as scientific fraud:
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/a-fluctuating-reality-46903
Highly specific markers of attractiveness, e.g. facial symmetry, a deep voice, chiseled chin, women's hourglass figure etc. are largely unrelated to health and ability.
Our strong preference for these features has likely evolved in a positive feedback loop (Fisherian runaway and sensory bias hypothesis), not because they signal health or ability.
(This does not hold for all aspects of attractiveness though, e.g. aversion toward irregular skin might have evolved to avoid infectious diseases. Such adaptations useful for survival might have initiated the runaway selection.)
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Beauty-Darwins-Forgotten-Theory/dp/0385537212 (Prum 2017)
The feedback loop consists in one sex evolving to be more attracted to a particular feature in the other sex for the mere reason that it is selected by others, but as the population overall evolves stronger attraction to the feature, the evolutionary pressure grows exponentially to be even more attracted to the feature. This results in exaggeration or overcomplication of said feature in the other sex in efforts to evolve to become more attractive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
Human's cognitive abilities and all sorts of complex social behavior and courtship behaviors may have evolved in the same way as they are unnecessarily sophisticated for the needs of hunter-gatherers to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Sexual_selection
Different aspects of beauty are also not inter-correlated, e.g. no correlation between attractive faces and attractive voices.
https://psyarxiv.com/2avu3/ (Zäske 2018)
The waist-to-hip-ratio/fertility link is weak at best.
http://doi.org/10.1177/1474704918800063 (Lassek 2018)
10 cm more body height shortens lifespan by 5 years, leading to more joint wear, cardiovascular disease etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/bin/48856-23f1_F2OT.jpg
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/ (Samaras 2002)
The relationship between health and mating success is weak, i.e. people select for physical attractiveness rather than health.
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/1/160603 (Foo 2017)
Physical unattractiveness only correlates weakly with various diseases (asthma, depression, ADHD…), e.g. probability of diabetes in unattractive people is 4% and 2% in attractive people, 20% vs 11% for depression, 15% vs 13% for migraines. Beauty is not a health certificate.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.06.004 (Nedelec 2014)
Deeper male voice is not linked to immunocompetence even though women are strongly attracted to it.
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.06.003 (Arnocky 2018)
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.08.029 (O’Connor 2014)
A meta study found a large publication bias in the literature on the correlation between physical attractiveness and IQ and only found a very weak correlation of r = 0.07.
The halo effect of attractiveness on perceived intelligence is enormous (r = 0.81).
This might explain the existence of blonde jokes, as attractive women with low IQ probably maximally expose this bias, probably one of the largest cognitive biases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ (Mitchem 2016)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4757567/ (Talamas 2016)
More intelligent men are regarded as more attractive, but only up to a sweet spot of 120 after which attractiveness declines.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289617301551 (Gignac 2018)
Men prefer women with a youthful appearance (blackpills for women):
The largest known psychological sex difference is age preference (d = 2.0).
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-38707-001 (Buss 2018)
Women tend to prefer slightly older men, but men of all ages prefer women in their early twenties. In the following graph, the first and second quartiles of the average attractiveness of each age group are represented by shades of red.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385347391 (Rudder 2015)
Women's partner preferences regarding age are typically fulfilled, but not men's.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.09.003 (Antfolk 2015)
Women's reproductive value peaks in their early 20s (most women cannot conceive easily after 30). Men's annual income peaks at 50.
https://osf.io/qn3w2/ (Barbaro 2018)
The age difference between husband and wife in hunter-gatherer societies is 5.12±3.61 years (excluding Australia where it is 14.64±4.5), compared to 3.5±1.7 in modern societies.
In only 1 of 57 hunter-gatherers societies was the bride older (-1.5 years). The mean maternal age at first birth in less-developed countries is 20.5±1.0 years and 19.46±1.9 years among hunter-gatherers.
http://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20188 (Fenner, 2005)
Provided unrestricted mating choices, old men choose fertile young women (younger than 30).
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.06.007 (Sohn, 2017, p. 19)
Age preferences by males also reflect in the prevalence of hebephilia (attraction to ~13 year olds), which is thought to be high as 20% among men.
https://www.ipce.info/sites/ipce.info/files/biblio_attachments/every_fifth.pdf (Schuster 2014)
Contemporary confusions about hebephilia might result from the fact that the age of puberty has fallen in western countries: Menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years (reasons unknown; perhaps pollution, cosmetics or better child health).
https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20188 (Fenner 2005)
https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dey337 (Harley 2018)
Based on all of these, I'm curious to hear your perspectives. I hope this could be a high IQ thread. Let's think critically and have respectful debates.
