Sex and Status (again)

Steve Sailer republishes his 2001 review of the Ashley Judd / Hugh Jackman romantic comedy Someone Like You. The money paragraphs:

The sociobiologists may have the last laugh over the plot, since they argue that much of what we call the War Between the Sexes is really a War Within the Sexes. Kinnear's behavior turns out not to be driven by novelty after all. He merely left Judd and returned to his old girlfriend, played by Ellen Barkin. But that revelation makes Judd dislike him even more, since it shows Kinnear preferred another woman to her.

At the fade out, Judd falls into the manly arms of Jackman, who really has been living out the [playboy] lifestyle. Yet, his years of promiscuity make him all the more desirable to her, since snagging his love means she's triumphed over all the other women he dumped.

This reminds me of an observation I posted over at Bobvis:

Here is an anecdote from one of those "date-off" shows whose name I forget, but it features a girl interviewing two guys who want to go out with her. Unbeknownst to the guys, the girl has a female friend secretly listening to the interviews and feeding her advice through a hidden earpiece. The guys have been prescreened for their attractiveness and photogenicity.

So one of the questions she asks the guys is, "When was the last time you had sex?" One guys says a couple of months. The other guy says, last Wednesday. Both girls are horrified that a guy who had sex so recently is here pursuing another woman.

At the end of the episode, the girl picked the guy who had sex Wednesday.

Observation: it is fairly apparent to me that, while the girls may have disliked the fact that he had sex on Wednesday, this fact indicated to them that he was the type of man who could have had sex on Wednesday, and this they liked very much.

I think this observation could be generalized to all kinds of behavior that women complain about, but yet serve as proxies for qualities they desire.

Now, sho'nuff, another commenter came along and said, well, the girl must have really picked him because of the same qualities that got him laid. (These qualities did not appear, to me, obviously superior to his competitor.) But while I would not insist that these are uncorrelated, I will insist that the attractiveness alone does not account for all the variation. The sex life served as a proxy for status, and women respond to that independently of attractiveness.