Jerky Men and Crazy Women

1. Two Stereotypes

There’s a stereotype held by men that “women are crazy”, and a stereotype held by women that “men are jerks”. Here’s an example of the former, the famous “Hot/Crazy Matrix” video:

TL;DR: Women vary in both hotness and craziness. The speaker tells you how much hotness and craziness are acceptable for different purposes.

What do people mean by these things? Why do these perceptions exist? Are they founded in reality, and if so, why is reality like that?

2. Are Men Jerks?

2.1. What are jerks?

I think it mostly means people who are overly self-centered. They think too much about their own interests and desires and not enough about others’; they have an overly high opinion of themselves, especially without justification; they tend to be too aggressive in interpersonal interactions.

2.2. Why are there jerks?

Evolution. The genes we have are those that, in our evolutionary history, caused people with them to leave behind more copies of their own genes, compared to their alleles. In general, having a very strong focus on oneself causes one to serve oneself, which tends to enhance one’s reproductive fitness. So, to the extent that personality is heritable, we would expect jerkiness to spread.

2.3. Why men?

But are there reasons why men would be especially prone to jerkhood, compared to women? Perhaps:

1. There is stronger competition among men, compared to women. In our evolutionary past, most women reproduced, but most men did not reproduce. (8,000 years ago, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man.) Most societies practiced polygyny, in which high-status men take multiple wives, which means that other men must have no wives. So men had to fight with each other to get a chance to reproduce at all. So self-centered and harmful behavior was more needful for men.

2. Historically, children were usually raised by women. Jerky people would probably be less attentive to children’s needs and thus worse at raising children. (Even accounting for the fact that character traits are to some degree situation-specific, e.g., a person might be less jerky with their own children than with strangers.)

So it’s plausible that average jerkiness would be higher in males than females.

2.4. The selection effect

There is also a stereotype that women like jerks. This could help explain the stereotype (held by women) that “men are jerks”: granted, many men are jerks; but women also overestimate men’s average jerkiness because women disproportionately tend to date jerks. In brief: if you keep finding that men are bad, it could mean that you are choosing bad men.

2.5. Why do women like jerks?

Surely few if any women would say that they like jerks. But they might prefer certain traits that are correlated with jerkiness.

(Aside: Everyone likes people who are “attractive” or “hot”, but these terms just refer to whatever causes a certain subjective reaction in the observer. We don’t necessarily know what descriptive traits cause that reaction in us, and when someone asks us, we confabulate.)

First, it’s plausible that men who are higher in the social hierarchy are higher value mates, since they could give more advantages to their wives and children. But a certain degree of jerkiness probably enables men to climb the hierarchy. (Not too much, though.) So women might have evolved to be attracted to jerkiness, or they might have evolved to be attracted to status, which correlates with jerkiness.

Second, it is widely known that women desire confidence. Confidence may help one to succeed in life. Moreover, it is a sign of general success: The more you succeed in getting what you want, the more confident you feel. People who tend to succeed are generally going to be higher-value mates, so women might want to select confident men.

But that is a simplification. Actually, there are at least two reasons why someone might be highly confident:

1. Competence: Normal people start out with low confidence when they first start to do anything, because they know that they don’t know what they’re doing. As they gain skill and success (if they do), their confidence builds. This includes physical skills as well as social and intellectual skills.

2. Confidence hacking: Once other people have learned to associate confidence with competence, a personality type might develop to “hack” the system, so to speak, by just projecting confidence automatically, regardless of actual ability. These are people who are simply confident as a standing personality trait. This enables them to get the benefits of being perceived as competent, without actually needing to have high ability.

   1. Aside: Why doesn’t everyone have this trait? Because it also has a downside: when you are overconfident, you tend to bite off more than you can chew and to take too many risks.

Confidence Hackers are likely jerks. They feel confident without basis, which means that they are at least a little narcissistic, and their personality type is an adaptation to manipulate other people. Of course, as with all of these things, they need not know what they are doing; they just find themselves feeling confident and feeling as though they themselves are great, without knowing why.

So that could be why it often seems like “men are jerks”.

3. Are Women Crazy?

3.1. What is “crazy”?

In this context, I think it means, roughly, having strong and volatile (or unpredictable to men) emotions, especially unpleasant emotions. (No one minds if you easily get happy.)

3.2. Are women crazy?

It is well-established in psychology that, in the 5-factor Model of Personality, women are higher than men in the trait of “neuroticism”. (See: “Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five”; “Sex differences in neuroticism”.)

(Aside: This fact enrages woke ideologues; it is part of why James Damore got fired, i.e., because he mentioned this fact. If you find yourself getting upset at this point, then you are probably not suited to thinking about human nature, or reality in general.)

Neuroticism is susceptibility to negative emotion, esp., anxiety, depression, anger, self-consciousness.

The difference isn’t huge, though; Cohen’s d= about 0.4.

3.3. Why women?

Why would women be higher in negative emotions?

Jordan Peterson says the most logical explanation is that women are more vulnerable. E.g., they are more easily physically hurt and less able to defend themselves. However, note that ~80% of murder victims are in fact men, so on that score, it would seem that men should be more anxious and fearful.

But in relationships, women are at higher risk, at least in the near term. They risk getting pregnant, and they suffer the risk that the man will abandon them and leave them holding the baby. Men have essentially zero risk and zero cost in having sex. So it makes sense that women would be more susceptible to negative emotions surrounding relationships with men.

In general, it makes sense for males to be more risk-seeking and females to be more risk-averse. Again, in history, many more women have left behind offspring than men. Most men had no offspring, but the relatively few men who did had lots of offspring. (It is said that Genghis Khan has 16 million male descendants alive today.) So in reproductive success terms, males have little to lose and much to gain by taking risks to their safety. Women have comparatively little to gain by risk-seeking behavior.

How does nature implement risk aversion? Through negative emotion, especially anxiety and fear. How does nature implement risk seeking? Through self-confidence and low levels of worry. That’s probably why women score higher in neuroticism.

Aside: “Crazy” is the male description of high volatility and susceptibility to negative emotion. Women, however, might regard men as the crazy ones for not having appropriate negative emotions and for being prone to foolish risks. Both are correct: women worry too much, and men take too many risks.

3.4. The selection effect

Just as in the case of male jerkiness, female craziness may be overperceived due to a selection effect: perhaps men preferentially tend to date “crazy” women, which makes men perceive women as more crazy on average than they are. Why might this be?

Probably men don’t select for craziness, but they might select for a trait that is correlated with it. There is a stereotype that “hot” women are more likely to be “crazy”, so men are likely selecting for hotness. I don’t know of any scientific study on this, but many people have this impression. Why might it be true? I found two explanations on the interwebs (no doubt there are more):

1. Sadia Khan says it is because hot women see the worst of men, because men are constantly pursuing them for sex, which makes it seem as if men care about nothing but sex. That, in turn, makes these women much more suspicious when they get into a relationship with a man:

2. Orion Taraban says it is because people do not speak honestly to hot women, because they (particularly men) are constantly trying to curry favor with these women. After many years of this, the women develop a distorted perception of reality. We need other people’s honesty to keep us in touch with reality:

Here are two other possibilities that I thought of:

3. The less hot women behave more agreeably (especially to men) because they have to, if they want people to like them. Hot women can get away with doing more things that men don’t like, so they are on average going to do more of those things.

4. Hotness is partly in the way you dress, your makeup, etc. So in part, hot women have chosen to be hot. And this is basically choosing to appeal to sexual desire. (N.B. “hotness” isn’t just looking good. It is specifically looking sexually desirable. And as far as men are concerned, the more explicit the sexual appeal is, the better.)

   • But the typical female sex drive is a small fraction of the male sex drive and can be more than satisfied without advertising one’s hotness. So if a woman works to be hot, something unusual is going on. What might be going on?

   • The woman might seek a sense of power over men, from men’s sexual desire.

   • Or it might be that the woman actually wants more sex. But this is unusual for a woman and thus needs further explanation. The explanation might be:

     • The woman has self-esteem problems and is trying to assuage them through sex. (Which won’t work.) (This is very different from men; most men naturally want more sex, and it will really make them feel better.)

     • The woman just has very low emotional engagement when it comes to sex, which makes it easy to be promiscuous. But this is very unusual and could mean other emotional reactions are out of the normal range.

   • Of course, none of this is about normative judgments. It’s not that women “should” want less sex than men do (I find it ridiculous that people think that; indeed, it is a serious problem for our society that male and female sex drives are so far out of sync). It is that as a matter of empirical fact, women just have evolved to have a lower sex drive.

   • So hot women are more likely to have other emotional traits that men will find abnormal.

4. Conclusion

The right partner for you is not the sexiest person that you can get. The right partner is the one who will make you happiest. Evolution, unfortunately, did not design us for happiness. So to choose the right partner, you have to think beyond your natural impulses and emotions and consider who objectively has the best character traits.