Standing there Being Hot Isn’t a Love Language

The temptation of being tempting, the mismeasure of love, and the risky work of intimacy.

The greatest inspiration for Second Person is this tweet by Visakan Veerasamy:

people wanna be fuckable more than they wanna fuck

fucking is labor, fuckability is capital

The rest of Visa’s thread is full of examples that prove that observation, if it wasn’t apparent from a casual observation of everyone you know and/or yourself. When I read it, I wrote an earnest but somewhat naïve post about fuckability and the trap of endless self-improvement which amounted to yelling “hey if you find yourself doing this, stop for fuck’s sake!”

Five years later, it’s time to revisit it with fewer imperatives and more curiosity. Visa’s maxim says a lot, but also leaves a lot unsaid. What exactly is “fuckability”? Why do people want it? Does it tempt people towards a relationship with you, or tempt you away from relationships?

Rating Strangers

Hold on. Isn’t “increasing fuckability” just what you do if you wanna fuck?

This hypothesis is compelling in its straightforwardness, but it’s not a tautology. It presupposes that sexual and romantic success results from increasing a particular trait, as opposed to, e.g., being a matter of effort or skill or pure chance. If there was a trait that increased one’s ability to fuck, it should be closely to related to “sexual marketplace value”, or SMV. Let’s focus on this narrow concept first.

SMV means “sexual attractiveness in the eyes of the general public, measured by convention on a 0-10 scale”. Women’s SMV mostly comes down to looks and age. Men’s SMV combines looks with perceived wealth and status. People who use the term often imply that it’s the main determinant of your dating outcomes: If you’re hot you date other hot people; if you’re a lookcel you post about SMV online a lot.

This stance is popular, but paradoxical. SMV is the momentary, superficial judgment of strangers. Dating is the ongoing process of finding out all the non-superficial traits of the other person for the purpose of a relationship. It’s the process of obviating SMV — at least partially. SMV essentialism seems to conceive of “dating” that occurs entirely between strangers and entirely in the present moment. A one-night stand devoid of conversation, perhaps, as one would have with a cheap escort¹. Not many people aspire to this sort of relationship; the few that do are almost all men. And yet it is women who put huge effort into looking as young and hot as possible. Weird!

Also weird: SMV is defined as other people’s assessment of someone’s attractiveness for the purpose of a “sexual market transaction”. Almost everyone has a “type” that diverges from the global consensus and specific sorts of “sexual transaction” they’re after. Even by pure cold market logic, your dating opportunity depends on the relative supply of your type and demand for the type that you are, not on relative global SMV.

When you’re finally dating someone, SMV mainly impacts how other people will judge you based on your partner’s attractiveness. I can’t imagine many women or men feel that this is the main thing they care about in a romantic relationship of any length.

SMV essentialism is a reaction to the trope² that looks don’t matter. Obviously looks matter! But what they matter for seems removed from the actual process of dating and building a relationship. In study after study and everywhere around you, attractiveness correlates strongly with the attractiveness of your sexual partners and not at all with relationship quality or longevity.

People don’t imagine their soulmate saying “yeah, I’m dating this person because they’re the highest SMV I could get”. SMV increases your apparent optionality, especially for short-term encounters, but matters less and less as the relationship progresses. Loving partners aren’t “purchased” on the “sexual marketplace” with SMV as the currency.

Capital Markets

SMV can’t buy you a loving relationship, but perhaps there is more to fuckability than that. Visa tells us that fuckability is capital, a resource that can be exchanged for something of value. And indeed, hotness capital can be readily exchanged for other forms: social capital, parasocial, professional, financial, even moral.

Everyone wants to be around hot people. If you’re attractive, people will invite you to socialize more readily, forgive your transgressions, fight for your attention. Hotness projects an aura of hotness on everyone in its vicinity, and a halo of esteem on its source.

Beautiful people have more employment opportunities, more social media followers, win more elections, get out of more traffic tickets. Their opinions carry more weight, especially on matters of taste such as aesthetics or personal character. A lot of occupations are looks-gated — not just obvious cases like modeling or acting but also vocations like con-man or groupie.

Women, in particular, have more opportunities to trade hotness for resources, respect, social access, and favorable treatment. This is the reason they put more effort into being attractive. And specifically: attractive in ways that are valuable in society broadly (classy, appropriately modest) and not in ways that maximally appeal to the male gaze.

“Fuckability” includes all of the above. It’s your desirability in the eyes of everyone who wants to fuck you, date you, or trade for your hotness capital. It includes not just superficial traits but also your quirky hobbies, impressive credentials, cool friends, and progress on your spiritual healing journey.

We can now rephrase the original quote and attempt to explain the phenomenon:

People naturally move towards increasing the self-perception of their own desirability, not towards engaging in a relationship. They often conflate the two. But these are actually in conflict, for two reasons:

1. Perception of desirability is driven by society at large, not by your one true love.

2. Engaging in a relationship can threaten your perceived desirability.

Let’s unpack these one at a time.

Looking Goodhart

If you ask women who they’re investing in their appearance for, the most common is “for myself”. Perhaps this begs the question³, but it’s true in terms of a woman’s personal experience. She has her own gauge of her own attractiveness, and experiences joy or displeasure based on how she measures up in her own eyes. The same is often true of men’s striving to appear impressive and high status, though I think more men would admit to these being a means to an end.

Regardless, the standard of attractiveness is always set externally. There’s the broad “SMV” consensus of what’s hot and what’s not. There are the various constituencies that reward attractiveness with other forms of capital.

People can choose their audience. You may follow the incentive gradient of professional capital and dress up in a way that gets rewarded at work. You can maximize subscribers via cosmetic procedures that look great on Instagram but not in real life. You may choose an aesthetic subculture with more explicit and idiosyncratic standards, like hipster or Juggalo or transcatgirl coder with knee-high socks. You can go for pure SMV, judging your rating by the lingering of glances as you strut about. Often it will be some combination of the above audiences whose standards you will internalize as your own.

Your chosen audience is not your partner in an intimate relationship, current or potential. Attractiveness is relationship adjacent: SMV makes the initial approach easier, lookism capital gets you things that your partner also values. But it’s a poor proxy for what it takes to actually build a relationship: dedication, understanding, a lifestyle someone wants to be a part of and a set of values they want to share.

The former is a tempting proxy for the latter because it’s so much more salient. You get constant feedback on how hot you are from everyone around you while getting very sparse feedback on the relationship-building qualities. You track the exchange rate of your attractiveness capital like a CEO watching his share price tick up or down every second, distracting her from the mission of building the company for long-term profit.

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It’s very hard to measure your life progress towards the relationship of your dreams. It’s much easier to measure your fuckability. And when fuckability itself becomes the optimization target, it detaches even further from dating success.

This isn’t just because fuckability introduces the evaluation of so many strangers that shouldn’t be part of your intimate relationship. Dating success itself can put your fuckability at risk.

Use It and Lose It

We laid out two important features of fuckability:

1. The main aspect of a romantic relationship that correlates with your fuckability is your partner’s fuckability.

2. Fuckability is always judged socially, through the eyes of others.

A corollary of these two features is that your partner’s fuckability has a big impact on your own and can drag you down to their level. This means that if you care about your own fuckability, being hot can shrink your dating optionality instead of expanding it.

Imagine: you are a highly fuckable woman, skilled at converting your fuckability capital to other kinds like money, access, and attention. You’re not fuckability-brained — you also (famously) seek to get fucked and are proactive about this. Your only requirement is, naturally, that the man be highly fuckable himself:

But then, you are also looking for a more committed relationship. Again, you aren’t stupid or superficial. You have thoughtful and meaningful criteria for a serious partner:

The problem is that the fuckability criteria doesn’t go away. For a guy to get Aella wed and wet he needs to be accepting, curious, and at least as fuckable as she is. This isn’t an unfair standard — Aella can say that she herself meets all three requirements and more besides — but it makes the search problem very difficult. It would be easier to find a husband if she could relax the fuckability requirement. But she can’t: that would hurt her own fuckability, and she needs that for other things!

Even if your partner is highly fuckable, merely being in a relationship is a drain on your fuckability. Most obviously since it means other people aren’t actually able to get with you. That’s not the main obstacle, though.

Fuckability entails scarcity, independence, mystery. Relationships require availability, compromise, disclosure. The last one is the biggest threat to a carefully cultivated image made for strangers. Someone who knows you intimately sees a different version of you than outsiders do. And the things that will make them want to fuck you year after year, how you smell after a shower or how you hum when you’re cooking, all have very little to do with your “SMV”.

Seeing that other, intimate side of you that your partner knows and loves makes it harder to maintain your most fuckable self for public consumption. With every relationship, some of your fuckability is gone forever.

The Work

Five years ago, I wrote:

If you get a lot of “I can’t believe a great guy/gal like you can’t find a girlfriend/boyfriend” from your friends, that’s a sign. Your friends saying that is not a compliment, it’s a mockery of your misguided self-focus.

Now I don’t think that’s true. Your friends are genuinely complimenting your fuckability, which they genuinely enjoy being around. To them, your apparent fuckability deserves an equally fuckable girlfriend or boyfriend, a confirmation of the way they perceive you.

But you need to remember that your fuckability is for your friends and acquaintances and followers and coworkers and everyone else. For your actual partner, it’s just the starting point. Fuckability is your resume⁴ — it can get you an interview, but it’s not doing the actual job. Dating and loving and being together requires labor — including the labor of finding out what they and only they like about you and want from you.

Three years ago, I wrote:

just standing there looking hot is not a love language

That’s still true. Being hot takes a lot of work, but it’s not the work of building a relationship. Consider doing both.

Being fuckable is easier, not because it takes little effort but because it carries little riskl. Progress is slow but easily measured. You get positive reinforcement: not just from everyone who perceives you but also yourself, the jolt of dopamine and validation you get from a glance in the mirror on a good day.

The work of relationships, even just the work of opening up to one, is always uncertain. Progress is hard to gauge, rewards are rare and unpredictable. And it’s risky — risky to your fuckability.

People convince themselves they’re doing both when they’re truly just doing the former. “I’m working to be the best version of myself.” “I want someone my friends will respect.” “I’m waiting for my soulmate.” The excuses are always fuckability-preserving. People wanna be fuckable.

And that’s fine. I lift weights, I cut my hair, I write a Substack — my wife doesn’t care much about these. I do them, in part, to be fuckable in the eyes of people I haven’t ever met. My life vastly improved once I embraced my own desire for fuckability. I feel less conflicted and more motivated. I work hard on every post to make it worthy of a crazy e-girl DMing me.

But I never hesitated to risk fuckability for an actual relationship. My fuckability will eventually be gone no matter what. The relationships will endure.

Standing there looking hot is preserving capital; love requires spending capital down in labor. Cash out while you can.

1. The expensive ones offer a “girlfriend experience” that includes a convincing show of getting to know each other in more depth. Johns are willing to pay extra for this!

2. This trope is mostly present in media that targets teenagers, an age of physical transformation, anxiety, and acne. In the fairytales aimed at my 3-year-old daughter, every princess gets her prince because she’s the most beautiful girl in all the land.

3. Answering “for social approval” or “for my future husband” isn’t hitting the bedrock of ultimate cause either, and “for my inclusive genetic fitness” isn’t very productive as a beauty guide.

4. These days people write actual dating “resumes” expecting them to do the work of flirting for them, and they don’t even write them flirtily.