That's not true. Being overtly self-aggrandizing to women is a turn off. It makes sound like you are trying too hard to impress her. (Cockiness works, but not overt boasts).
Men do need to be more aggrandizing in professional life. Men do not carry a baby to term and nurse it for years. All they bring to the mating game is wealth, status, and genes. Thus, professional success is much more important in order for a man to attract a mate. Thus men are much more aggressive and do whatever it takes to rise the ladder.
On the flip side, when a women is self-aggrandizing it is quite a turnoff to a man. It much more actively harms her reproductive success. So women learn not to do it, and that rubs off in professional life.
When I drink I tend to be a bit of a jerk. I tend to be blunt and not care what people think about what I'm saying. I also tend to view myself as being more smooth/interesting/whatever than I actually am. Of the times I've gone out and barely drank or not drank at all, I've never left with/taken home anyone. There have been at least five separate occasions where I've been somewhere between pretty drunk and absolutely wasted and ended up going home with someone (and this isn't the beer goggle effect at work either).
Call it an anecdote or a small sample or whatever you want, but being more aggressive and boastful and jerk-like has clearly worked better for me, even if I feel kind of bad about it sometimes the next day.
Why? This seems to be a common sentiment, but it's definitely possible to find a mate without crossing the line from "taking some initiative and dressing nicely" to "self-aggrandizing jerk". I and many of my male friends do have girlfriends; many of my female friends have boyfriends. To the best of my knowledge, no-one behaved like a jerk.
Which doesn't even imply "your" strategy isn't more succesful, however you want to define that, but it's definitely not the only way.
Obviously women want men that are good to them. But they also want high quality mates (which tend to be jerks, because they can afford to be, the same way they prettiest women tend to be bitches, because they can afford to be). They're also more likely to dump a guy that's way too nice because he seems desperate, which means she could probably do better.
So the end result is that a woman might date the high quality male even though he's a jerk and dump the nice guy, simply because she's looking for quality.
I could be way off here, but you sound very young. I remember believing the world worked this way when I was about 19. Get towards thirty and my, how the tables turn. Now, practically everyone I know (including me) is in a happy, stable, long-term relationship. Nobody I know fits that description. Of the ones that aren't, their main complaint is that they can't find a nice, down-to-earth mate. The very few people I am still in touch with who remain as superficial as you describe, are miserable.
The alpha-male / hot bitch thing works okay when everyone is looking for a one-night stand. When you get a little older and thoughts turn to finding someone to spend the rest of your life with, that sort of behavior just seems idiotic.
You believed that's the way things worked when you were 19, because it did. And now when that you're 30+, it's different. You're not smarter, things have changed.
For men, the late teens to mid-twenties is the period where most mate competition takes place. This is where testosterone rates soar, as do accidental deaths as a result of risk-taking behavior http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep026685.pdf
No one you knows fits that description because like you said, everyone you know is in a relationship. What I described happens when people are trying to compete over mates. When everyone has a mate, i.e. past their mid-twenties for most part, they become much nicer.
Well, except for the occasional 30+ yo that likes to make cheap shots about folks over the internet via an implied link between maturity and intelligence.
Remind me again why we're suddenly talking about "smarter", "intelligence" and "cheap shots"?
It's funny, another thing I vividly remember doing around that time was flying off the handle and insulting people who had no beef with me and meant no offense whatsoever :-) The follies of youth...
Get towards thirty and my, how the tables turn. Now, practically everyone I know (including me) is in a happy, stable, long-term relationship.
That's how it was when I was getting towards thirty, too. Ten years later, most of the people I knew then have divorced at least once and are far more cynical and bitter, with lower expectations relationship-wise.
I'll be 50 this year. My experiences match the guy you're trying to call "very young."
> When you get a little older and thoughts turn to finding someone to spend the rest of your life with, that sort of behavior just seems idiotic.
True, but then my office is full of people who've been divorced more than 3 times, and each spouse isn't significantly different from the preceeding one (or at least what the co-workers complain about). I don't think that most people are that logical when looking for a mate.
I find it interesting how, in discussions on this topic here and elsewhere, people tend to come down strongly on either side.
Perhaps it's careful selection of company, perhaps it's different circumstances (none of us are really the type for one-night stands; note the boy-/girlfriend theme of my post!), or perhaps we read events to fit our theories about how dating works; but I've very rarely read someone arguing the middle ("being a jerk can work with some women, but many other women ultimately prefer a caring partner").
Going meta on the logic of the argument, you've made a quantification error.
The parent post said "Men need to be arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks to get women's attention" and you responded "it's definitely possible to find a mate without [being arrogant]".
The fact that there are exceptions does not argue against the generalization; if you want to attack his point you need to attack it in general.
I don't really understand your objection. I'll try to explain what I understood and tried to say, and perhaps you can tell me where I was unclear/incorrect?
The original statement, on a literal reading, is universal ("the only way for men to get women's attention is to be a jerk"). Clearly, this was not what was intended: you call it a generalization, and that's the only reasonable reading, I'll agree.
As a counterpoint, I offered my personal experience. Admittedly, the plural of anecdote is not data; however, the fact that I know of literally no case where being a jerk got someone a girl does suggest that a closer look may be in order.
This argument works as a counterexample against a universal statement, but that doesn't mean you can't argue a more statistical version of truth based on these observations.
I can't seem to find the original studies right now, but it is fairly well established that men and women are mostly the same except for then it comes to negative and positive extremes.
Men are over-represented at both ends of the spectrum. A possible explanation for this is male productive capacity which varies greatly compared to women.
And yes, behavioral tendencies which are biologically based tend to have broad effects. Testosterone encourages men to be aggressive in all things. On average, it must turn out better for them.
But there is a direct effect on getting a recommendation letter on mating success. Women like successful men.
Garbage. You've derailed the argument to one about sexuality. This is about professional advancement, not courtship.
The author is comparing men's success in impressing an authority figure of an unknown gender against a woman's success in the same. Yet, you've at once implied that the authority figure is necessarily male, and that any male/female relationship is inherently framed by sexuality.
Not only do I think that's bullshit, it doesn't relate to the author's original argument.
