Feminists Don't Understand Female Sexual Attraction
The myth of "Happy Wife, Happy Life"
Ross Douthat of The New York Times recently interviewed feminist Louise Perry about the failures of the sexual revolution. Many of the issues she raised are reasonable, but her prescription for how to move forward proves she either doesn’t understand female sexual attraction, or she isn’t being honest about it. Without accounting for the reality of female sexuality, feminist’s ideas will remain incomplete and incoherent.
In case you don’t want to read or watch the interview, here’s the summary:
Louise states that the sexual revolution, defined as the normalization of casual sex enabled by the birth control pill, ignores how women bear the risk of unplanned pregnancies while men have a stronger drive for casual sex. She states that early radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin were too extreme, leading to “heteropessimism” and low birth rates among feminists.
She then explains how social media exacerbates gender division by exposing each other to locker room talk and female gossip, causing young women to become radicalized against men while young men develop a hostility towards women.
The interview leads to Ross asking Louise why it’s a good thing that modern men need to actively help women pursue their careers while being mothers. I was in agreement with most of her positions throughout the interview, but this is where she finally lost me.
“Happy Wife, Happy Life” is a destructive and false myth grounded in a warped understanding of attraction.
Louise and most feminists frame men and women as two figurines playing house. The plot typically sounds like this:
The man is a potential violent rapist. If properly socialized by a feminist society, he might possibly overcome his wicked nature and evolve into a nice guy who sees women as equals.
The woman is a potential corporate titan, but she’s burdened by her biology as a potential mother. If only she would meet a nice guy, her dreams of becoming a mother and corporate titan can be achieved simultaneously.
This understanding of men and women is completely twisted.
Women’s stated versus revealed preferences confirm they’re more attracted to men who lean misogynist than outright male feminists. A 2019 study showed that women are more attracted to men who display benevolent yet sexist attitudes towards women over men who are more egalitarian.1 Given these men see women as distinctly different from them despite being chauvinistic — women perceive them as more willing to invest, protect, and commit to them.
Multiple studies have shown that both men and women report lower life satisfaction and relationship quality when women are the breadwinners, compared to when men are the breadwinners or there’s a dual-earner arrangement.2 Women also report being more attracted to men with higher earning capacity, income, ambition, and resources. These findings have been replicated across cultures.3 This shows that women tend to be more attracted to men who embody the hunter-provider instinct.
“Happy Wife, Happy Life” has been proven false. A large-scale longitudinal 2022 study found that men and women’s satisfaction are equally strong predictors of overall relationship satisfaction4. This shouldn’t be surprising. If you truly love someone, their happiness will make you happy. Any relationship that is solely one-sided is doomed to breed resentment.
It’s fair that feminists want women to have the right to pursue their ambitions, but this is an outdated concern. Women have been emancipated and are now fully participating in the labor market. Since then, men and women are more polarized than ever. This suggests that merely enabling women’s career ambitions doesn’t bring men and women closer. If anything, the data on female sexual attraction contradicts the feminist ideal of the male egalitarian. Until feminists like Louise Perry actually grapple with this contradiction, their recommendations on how to move forward will remain hollow.
Feminists often have good intentions, but they don’t incorporate the reality of female sexual attraction into their philosophy. It’s impossible to assess the present circumstances of women without being honest about their sexual nature. If feminists want to offer more coherent solutions to the gender divide, they should start being more honest about which kind of men they are attracted to, and why.
Gul, P., & Kupfer, T. R. (2019). Benevolent sexism and mate preferences: Why do women prefer benevolent men despite recognizing that they can be undermining? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(1), 146–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218781000
Kowalewska, H., & Vitali, A. (2024). Female-breadwinner well-being ‘penalty’: Differences by men’s (un)employment and country context. European Sociological Review, 40(2), 293–312. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad034
Ong, D., & Wang, J. (2015). Income attraction: An online dating field experiment. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 111, 13–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2014.12.011
Johnson, M. D., et al. (2022). Both partners’ relationship satisfaction predicts future relationship quality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209460119
Thank you for writing this!
While feminism is a gift, it definitely becomes an illusion and rather disempowering if taken too far because it does not incorporate the reality of women's nature.
It is beautiful to be able to be feminine and relax into your own nature and not be forced to stray far from it 💗
Also amazing if it doesn't force you to lie to yourself about your sexual nature either (sexual energy is creative energy)
Most people would prefer to not-work than to work. I'm fairly staunchly feminist but would agree to a semi-trad life (not working, cooking a couple times a week, doing chores a little more often, raising a kid or a few) if the guy was bangable (my physical standards are not astronomical: has to smell good, white, brunet, hygienic, at least 5'6" and not obese but can be a little chonky) and, VERY IMPORTANTLY, not live in a shithole (for me, not a McMansion or new construction, but not a stinky dump that smells like sewage, mold, and ketchup for some fucking reason, where he lives like a slob), not be a "truck guy" or a "sports guy", and have a decent allowance for fitness classes and gear, clothes (upscale second-hand), body maintenance (probably $10k a year), etc.
The first complication for women, is that there is a relatively small pool of men who make enough to enable them to not work. It can be argued that before women were normalized into the workforce, or before the effects of leaving the gold standard materialized, or before the prescriptions of the Hays Memo were enacted, basically any sufficiently productive man could provide something better than "living like a goddamned child with her parents".
The second complication is that receiving support from someone almost always involves relinquishing a degree of sovereignty -- some men are strict and some are permissive, some have aligning priorities and others don't. The best case scenario is finding a man who will not only afford some of these pleasures, but permit the woman to have them.
Those two things combine and mean that the men who can afford to provide are not only more elusive than they've ever been, but also can afford to have disproportionate standards and be very demanding. There are not enough men for the women who want them.
It makes sense that women default to maximizing their individual earning potential while not totally writing off being provided for at a certain standard.
In my case, because women have such a constrained time window, the choices I narrowed down to were: a) do I want to be provided for by a guy I don't want to bang and he fucking spikes my cortisol? b) do I want to work like I would anyway and be with a guy I like, in whatever form that takes? I chose the second and am regularly thankful that society has allowed me the ability to do that.