Arthur Brooks: Looksmaxxing Is Repulsive
And sure enough, while women’s physical attractiveness plays a significant role in men’s mate preferences—particularly at the beginning—behavioral science shows that for men it confers only a modest advantage in permanent pair-bond mating (what you civilians call “marriage”). Other factors, such as dependability, hard work, and character, are much more predictive of mating success.In other words, at least I am a leather sack of ropes with good character.ADVERTISEMENTSome observers claim this double standard is changing. If you’re following new trends on social media, you can’t avoid hearing the word “looksmaxxing,” a practice based on the idea that, because fleeting first impressions are everything, a man’s physical attractiveness is his most important attribute if he ever wants to get a mate.
- ▪And sure enough, while women’s physical attractiveness plays a significant role in men’s mate preferences—particularly at the beginning—behavioral science shows that for men it confers only a modest advantage in permanent pair-bond mating (
- ▪Other factors, such as dependability, hard work, and character, are much more predictive of mating success.In other words, at least I am a leather sack of ropes with good character.ADVERTISEMENTSome observers claim this double standard is c
- ▪If you’re following new trends on social media, you can’t avoid hearing the word “looksmaxxing,” a practice based on the idea that, because fleeting first impressions are everything, a man’s physical attractiveness is his most important att
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| Original publisher | The Free Press |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thefp.com/p/arthur-brooks-looksmaxxing-is-repulsive |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:23:32 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T15:31:24.551Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T15:31:32.960Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Xp4E0Iujh4Ia · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Arthur Brooks: Looksmaxxing Is Repulsive“By looksmaxxing, men do not send traditional male mating cues,” writes Arthur Brooks. (Illustration by The Free Press)If there was ever a bigger disjunction between technology and evolutionary biology than this, I haven’t seen it.By Arthur Brooks07.27.26 — The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur BrooksFOLLOW COLUMN --:----:--Upgrade to ListenProduced by ElevenLabs using AI narration419READ IN APPREAD IN APPADVERTISEMENTEveryone knows there is a gender double standard when it comes to physical appearance. And to this, I say, “Thank God.”When my wife and I got married, 35 years ago, she said that embracing me—I was 6′2″ and 142 pounds at the time—was like hugging a coatrack.
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