Women’s Standards Crumble Easily Given The Right Incentives

Maxim #39: A woman’s standards are like a house of cards: kick out one from the bottom and the whole edifice crashes down.

I was mingling with some friends, a mixed group, when one of the girls — 7.5, ~0.75 waist-hip ratio, lithe, A cups, mid-20s (because this info is vital to any discussion) — piped up about her standards in men. She went on for some length describing the kind of man she would deign to date. (She is single.) Now based on looks, age and lack of sprog baggage, she has the sexual market value to make some weighty demands. And she knew that on a logical level. Her 463 bullet point checklist she recited was quite impressive in its detail:

• worldly and well-travelled; must have been someplace besides Europe
• athletic; football or lacrosse player at a Div 1-A school preferred
• spontaneous
• generous; must have done volunteer work at some point in life
• Cute but with a rugged edge; a cross between Orlando Bloom and Christian Bale
• good conversationalist; can speak intelligently on any number of subjects, but especially film history
• stylish; not a J. Crew guy, but more like a Banana Republic-slash-Marc Jacobs guy
• muscular, but not too beefy; deltoids must be developed to bulging perfection
• tall, but not more than 8 inches taller than her
• a connoisseur of fine wine
• shuns video games

This was not the full list. It is the list I could remember for this post. Two weeks later, we all met again, and this time she was with a man, someone she had just started dating. He was:

• a full-time bartender
• a local who has never left the country (yes, he admitted this, with some pride)
• dressed in jeans and a button-down
• a couple inches taller than her (average male height)
• a state school grad
• tattooed
• a very chill, amiable guy; you could see yourself having a beer with him
• not particularly built, but not fat either
• better than average looking, but no Christian Bale
• socially savvy, but not intellectual
• confident
• a big video gamer (we discussed the finer points of the Kinect)

I hope you can see where I’m going with this. What she claimed were her inviolable standards and what kind of man she actually dated were very different. And she seemed oblivious to the disconnect. Bless her cutie pie hamster.

This isn’t the only example of a woman’s standards not being worth the mental paper they’re written on. I’m sure we’re all acquainted with the online spectacle of average-looking, and even ugly fat chicks, pumping their dating site profiles and Craigslist personals full of demands that would make a princess blush. But oh how quickly those standards evaporate when the harsh klieg lights of reality intrude!

A woman’s standards, however emphatically and insistently declared, are more like a fantasy dating team: free of the constraints of market barter, she happily indulges in a little of the ol’ ultradelusion. That is, if you ask a woman her standards, you will never –

and I mean never

– get an honest and realistic answer from her.

This is because women are, on the whole, incapable of accurate self-assessment. A woman’s prime directive in life is to sell herself the moon. A man’s directive is to sidestep paying her inflated price for that moon.

Given the right incentives, every woman’s standards will wilt into accommodation. And by incentives, I mean everything from the sex ratio to her actual sexual worth to the subversive level of game the man plays. A single, smart 60 year old woman, financially well-off and occupationally accomplished, can demand in the most florid and haughty language a sophisticated and wealthy man all she wants, but where the rubber meets the road she will jettison most of her ridiculously unrealistic standards for an average old schlub who tickles her pink because he managed not to fall asleep during an hour long dinner date with her.

And the hot young babe who wants the Hollywood caricature? Well, as we can see by the above anecdote, (played out millions of times over across this great land), if the guy is cool, aloof and has game, and maybe has the sort of conventionally low-status job that puts him in direct contact with lots of competitor women, our 463 bullet point heroine is gonna shred her list of demands like so many Vince Foster papers. (Why couldn’t the verklempft fag leak those cables?)

That’s the meaning of Maxim #39. If you have game, that is like pulling a card from the bottom of her stack of standards; she will quickly forget all about the cards on top that you aren’t holding.

Now women, being constitutionally hypergamous in a way that relatively more indiscriminate men aren’t, will by nature have more and higher standards than men, and will more often than men attempt to satisfy those standards. This leads to the laughable phenomenon of single mid 30s lawyer chicks futilely chasing after the same kind of guys they did when they were in college, except this time around the guys aren’t even bothering to give them the gratification of a pretend commitment.

But this shouldn’t dissuade you from recognizing a very important truth — for all their bluster and trumped-up demands, women will surrender rather easily to a dude with a righteous tattoo.