Contra Wentworth on Physical Attractiveness for Men

This is a response to John Wentworth’s recent article, Why Physical Attractiveness Matters for Men’s Dating Prospects. I have no quibble with the thesis stated in the title, but a lot of the body of the article struck me as off-base. When John sent me the article, I told him the article seemed “fundamentally confused.” He asked for details, and this article is my answer.Here I list and argue with four premises I detected in John’s article. Some of them he said in so many words; some are my (possibly-incorrect) inferences.I have my own weird perspective on a lot of this stuff that isn’t necessarily to be trusted. To avoid just arguing purely from that weird perspective, I ran several glosso surveys to gather data. Glosso data itself is pretty sus! I could only survey people’s self-reports, which could easily be inaccurate. The surveys have pretty low N. The population on glosso is itself weird; it’s Aella’s social network, originally seeded with Aella’s slutty, high-body-count, looks-conscious friends. (I say this with love, as someone pretty firmly rooted in that social network, sharing those characteristics!) So we shouldn’t put too much weight on any of this data. I used this data source because it was readily available and better than just going with N=1.Premise #1: Eye contact is typically on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting”One woman’s ungeneralizable field reportIn John’s article, he seems to take it as a given that eye contact is on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting.” This premise was the one that stood out the most to me as misguided.I flirt a lot. I get to know people pretty easily. I’ve navigated the strangers-to-flirting transition hundreds of times. But I can’t think of a single time in my entire life that it started with wordless eye contact.Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m the weird one? But this is where I wanted to start my investigation.First, why doesn’t making a connection run through eye contact for me?Well, becaus