Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

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No.

If you went up to them on the street and asked, "Hey, how important is it that a guy be tall?" you would get a response that would sound a lot better than what they fill out with nobody looking. You have to take it out of a public context and also bury it along with a bunch of other things to de-emphasize it. Meanwhile, at one point Tumblr, Twitter had a run of women pulling faces of disappointment and/or disgust with the caption "When his height starts with a 5." And that's an in-group thing, neither private nor public.

People have a lot of different facets of themselves -- something that Zuckerberg really didn't get -- each shown to a different audience. If you've ever watched a bunch of women do this "performative disdain" routine, wherein they make displays to other women that they, too, have high standards, that's definitely a facet that is neither entirely public nor completely private. I recall a recent car commercial to that effect, where women were inferring something about a man due to his choice of vehicle, and were doing performative disdain based on that.

Interesting. "Performative disdain." Is there an actual formal study that accounts for it? Doesn't it actually look worse for a woman if she acts like she cares about height?

I think your claim has merit. But I want to see studies that bypass the psychological bias. Are there any? What did you see with your data? Not just the divide in general but actual trends and actual examples.

Right, so, the question is: to who?

It looks bad if she cares about height if you just flat up ask her, alone, without peers.

It does not look as bad if she admits to it with and to her peers. You get to see mate pre-selection in action! There's a lot of chiming in. This is where the performative disdain appears. Disdain, because you will see expressions and utterances of distaste or even disgust; performative, because she is communicating this preference with her peers, partially for validation. You can catch women and even girls doing this. There's a hint of social jockeying in there. After all, by rejecting (or even pre-rejecting) someone, you're ranking them lower than you in some fashion. And there's really only two ways to increase your relative status: bring yourself up or tear someone else is down. Which is easier?

It also doesn't look that bad if the height question is mixed in with tons of other questions, and she isn't looking anyone in the eye when answering. This is the private milieu. Here, it's a questionnaire. She's at least taking a swing at being honest with her preferences.

Well, it's been a few decades, so my memory is limited. "Attractiveness" was a general self-reported category and women rated themselves higher. Interestingly, attractiveness and height overruled religion for women, even those who reported the religion answer as being at the highest rating on the scale.

We did have some psych tests besides the "barely above astrology" MBTI, namely the Taylor-Johnson.

I don't think you're going to see a lot of hardcore studies. Even OKCupid redacted their conclusions. It's really one of those areas where average people aren't ready to hear the results. The results would be unpleasant for the tabula rasa crowd and their buddies, the people who are against gender essentialism. And if it might present women in a less than brilliant light, consider the "Women Are Wonderful" effect.

>I don't think you're going to see a lot of hardcore studies.

There are ways around it. Not all studies are done by asking women and men questions about their own behavior. Psychologists are certainly aware of the biases when doing that.

For example: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

Of course the logical implication of the above where 17 women reproduce for every 1 man means that 1 man sires 17 children (or more) with 17 women.

Do female preferences cause this where they seek a single alpha? Or is it forced? One thing is for sure though. This outcome certainly does align with theory where the "performative disdain" by a number of women isn't actually a performance. Nothing conclusive here.

Additionally your theory here implies imitation via actual existence. Women and men create such performances to be put on display for "someone" or what's the point of the performance? Therefore enough "someones" with those preferences actually exist for such performances to become widespread.

I definitely think your theory is real. I think it's wide spread too. But I do think the performance only influences the general result by something like 30%. Roughly 30% of women are putting on a performance for the majority who do have these darker desires.

Additionally here's an interesting thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs_zs8qQGXk&t=185s

are these answers a performance? Certainly a portion. I would say though as a man if the reverse question was asked whether or not it was cheating if a woman used a male prostitute, almost every man would call it cheating and that answer is NOT a performance.

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