Success Quote by Susan Blackmore

Under the cool, quasi-scientific phrasing, Blackmore is doing something more abrasive than describing dating: she’s describing status as a mating market and daring you to flinch. “Male strategies for success” frames romance as optimization, not intimacy. The sentence moves like an evolutionary-psych elevator pitch: stack “advantages” (looks, brains, social capital) and you’ll “generally” pursue “very high quality females.” That “generally” is the rhetorical escape hatch that lets the claim sound empirical while still smuggling in a big normative assumption: that women can be ranked like products.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, she’s trying to puncture sentimental stories about choice being purely personal. In her framing, attraction is less a mysterious spark than a predictable output of incentives: if you can “afford” a partner with high social and reproductive value, you’ll shop up. On the other hand, the vocabulary (“females,” “quality”) imports a cold, male-coded gaze that many readers will hear as endorsement rather than analysis. It’s the language of animal behavior applied to human lives, and that’s exactly why it hits: it collapses romance into logistics, then watches the moral discomfort bloom.

Context matters: Blackmore’s work sits near memetics and evolutionary psychology, fields that often translate culture into competition and replication. Here, she’s not just talking about men; she’s spotlighting how privilege amplifies preference. The most telling tell is “advantages”: the quote isn’t only about desire, it’s about who gets to have standards without paying a price.