It's very complex and convoluted. I'm working on a reply to your comment here on The Science of Sex on Substack, actually, this week because I think it's important people explore the topic. I'll share the final version with you if you'd like. :)

I'm not tall at all, have been poor most of my life, dressed in shabby clothes, etc., so I belie perfectly this idea that only rich or high-status men are successful, as I've been wildly successful. I'm also very poetic in tone and personality, plus a square jawline goes a long damn way.

I've noticed it's always easy to convert a short-term relationship into a long-term one. Once you're already having sex, it's super easy to convert that into a long-term thing. But when you're trying to traditionally court someone, it's difficult to convert that into a short-term sexual encounter.

This is why I disbelieve the crap about status being super important. If you can get someone attracted to you, it's easy to expand on that once you're already having sex. Nature takes over.

But trying to bait someone with money won't make them “feel” horniness inside. You're appealing to their logic, their desire for security, not their feelings and desire for romance and arousal.

Logic isn't sexy.

I think women date “attractive guys” and those attractive guys tend to be assholes because they've always gotten their way without any effort whatsoever. The same happens to super hot women, having everyone kiss your ass all the time distorts your reality.

I actually think the black-pill dudes are more onto something than the red-pill dudes. They're right that “good genes” play a crucial role in finding a partner. But rather than “good genes” I think it's better to look at them as “compatible genes.”

In terms of evolutionary environment, there seems to be two camps: the noble savage camp who believe that before civilization, all tribes were happy, healthy, and egalitarian. This is obviously insane, as our ape cousins are almost all pretty ruthless at times. Then there's the totem camp who believes everything was hostile and life was nasty, brutish, solitary, and short. This is also insane. Humans succeeded evolutionarily because of our ability to cooperate.

I actually don't think there's a conflict here.

Once you put the two groups together and assume that some tribes were aggressive and ruthless and others were cooperative and egalitarian, and that any single tribe could alternate between these two dispositions, you see the human condition in all of its fullness. That's how people are, we're capable of mass murder or acts of incredible selflessness, every single one of us.

So I think people adapted to all sorts of things before civilization, from how to survive in a ruthless dictatorship to how to cooperate and succeed in an open and fair society. People trying to claim that either way is more “natural” than the other are embarking on a fool's errand.