In Defense of Superficiality

I love when girls call me superficial. This usually happens when I comment on how I couldn’t date someone who is overweight or otherwise unattractive. They probably expect me to correct myself, or defend my positions or feel sorry for my sexual and aesthetic preferences. Little do they know about what my response to their hypocritical posture is going to be.

Yes, indeed. I am superificial. But, under the risk of sounding obvious, we are superficial. That’s our most basic nature. The way things look matters… a lot. It always did and it always will, as long as humans have eyes. It matters in just about anything. We buy homes, and go out to restaurants, bars and clubs to a large degree based on interior design (i.e., those establishments’ appearance).

When it come to buying just about anything, form wins over substance almost every time. Let’s not fool ourselves; as mechanically inclined as we might be, the way cars look and the image they portray is still the main deciding factor in buying a car, and not so much the speed, torque and other features. Even reliability doesn’t seem to matter as much. Otherwise, BMW’s and Audi’s wouldn’t be as popular, considering their highly shaky electrical system and lack of durability of some other vehicles.

A few years ago I asked my friend, who at that time was a high-level VP at Apple, whether iphone 2 had a particular functionality. He looked at me, smirked and said: “Who cares? Don’t you get it? The only thing that matters is how it looks and how it feels in your hand. Who cares what it does, as long as it does the same things as any other phone? As long as it’s thin, metal, and slick, people are going to prefer it over other phones. The very flat and thin Motorolla Razr was just the beginning.”

At that time, it sounded like a mildly cynical joke to me, but with time, the ipad, the Mac Air, and alike have been proving his point over and over again—we buy that which looks good in our hands and which looks like a flattering accessory. We can deny it all we want, but that’s not going to change the bottom line. Design seems to be more important than the substance, and the wine for some bizarre reason seems to taste better when you drink it out of a nice wine glass, rather than a cheap coffee mug.

If looks and form matter so much in objects to us, how can they not matter to us even more in far more critical and fundamental things to our nature, such as sexual attraction and selection of dating and sexual partners? It’s time we, men, stopped feeling embarrassed of what we like and why we like it. We don’t have much control over it and neither should we have any. It takes us a fraction of a second to make the “hot / not hot” determination. Surely, we don’t do it consciously, and very little analysis is going into that process.

Ironically, the women who blame us for being superficial are just as or even more superficial than us. A straight guy with a healthy sex drive is not going to be as picky about selecting a female partner, as an average woman will be about selecting a guy to go out with, let alone have sex with. As long as the girl has a decent body and her face is not ugly, she is “doable” in most guys’ eyes.

An average Western girl, however, is ready to dismiss a guy initially based on petty and extremely superficial details that would never matter to a guy in a woman, such as unpolished shoes, non-matching socks, a suit that doesn’t quite fit well, dorky haircut, etc. This is why how you dress and your overall style really matters to your game. But, if the is hot, she will be hot and desirable to us, even if she drives an old beat-up van, and even if she got her dress at a vintage store for $10. On the other hand, if she is not hot, the latest Ferrari is not going to make her any more desirable to us.  However, in many cases an average looking guy will be far more noticeable if he drives an expensive sports car. This is not to blame women or point fingers at who is better and who is worse, but to simply point out facts about our nature.

The next time a girl calls you superficial, look her in the eye, smile and say, “Really? I thought I was just being human.” Then watch her walk away. She is probably on her way to doing far deeper things, like buying lipstick that matches her new shoes a little better than the twelve other lipsticks she bought over the past few months. And remember – the right girl – the one who likes you and who is sexually attracted to you will have no problem with your superficiality and being objectified in a tasteful, seductive way.

Don’t Miss: The 15 Magical Years of Womanhood