This story is an exclusive chapter excerpt from MATE: Become the Man Women Want.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. —Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

You have no fucking idea what you’re doing.

Not when it comes to sex and dating and women, anyway. Don’t beat yourself up about it, though, because it’s not your fault. Your culture has failed you and the women you’re trying to meet.

We have been working with young single men in our capacities as educators, public figures and authors for more than 30 years. In that time, the most common question we’ve gotten from guys centers on how to increase their confidence with women.

But there’s a much deeper problem: at least 70 percent of their questions reveal a total failure to understand the woman’s point of view.

Why does this matter? As a man, it is impossible to be better at mating until you understand the subjective experience of a woman, because it is fundamentally different than yours in many ways. If you can account for those differences, you will be well on your way to increased success because most men spend zero time thinking about this.

The differences start from the very beginning, at our deepest primal levels.

When a man interacts with a woman, his greatest fear is sexual rejection and humiliation. This causes him to spend as much time and energy (if not more) on defensive strategies to protect against rejection as he does on mating strategies to attract women.

Women are totally different. In these interactions, they are not much afraid of rejection. Rather, when a woman interacts with a man, she is afraid of being physically harmed or sexually assaulted.

Right now you’re probably thinking the same thing we did when we first learned about this when we were young men: I’ve never hurt a woman in my life and never would.

And we bet you’re right. You are probably perfectly safe.

But she doesn’t know that: when she meets you, you could be Jack Ryan, Jack Sparrow or Jack the Ripper. Any one of those is equally likely. Even more terrifying is the fact that, over the course of her life, the biggest threats to her are men she knows. This is not some idle, irrelevant statistic. The overwhelming majority of women that suffer physical or sexual assault suffer it at the hands of a man they know intimately.

And their fears don’t stop at physical harm; they are just as vulnerable to social and emotional harm, as well. Socially, you can spread lies about her or damage her reputation (with men and women), sometimes just by being associated with her. You can pretend you love her, get her pregnant and then abandon her. This is only the beginning of the harms she potentially faces at your hands.

We cannot emphasize this enough: mating success requires cross-sex insight. You need to understand how women evaluate your qualities and how they perceive the status, danger, opportunities and threats that you could present. The better you learn to see these things from women’s points of view, the less unattractive you will be to them and the less confused, resentful and frustrated you will be by how they respond to you.

We’re not suggesting you have to become a gender psychologist or feminize your whole worldview. You are a man, and women like men; turning into a woman would make you less attractive to (most) women.

We’re telling you to simply understand women. And this is for the simple reason that understanding the female perspective helps you do much better with women, whatever your goal—whether it’s a one-night stand, a friend with benefits, a girlfriend or a wife. It will help you avoid and resolve arguments, saving you hours of grief. It will help you have better dates, cooler conversations and hotter sex. It will help you to stop acting like a self-sabotaging dick. And it will also help your relationships with your mom, sisters, daughters, female friends and co-workers.

To be clear: the insights in this chapter are not a collection of opinions and moralizing lessons. They are based on the best, current scientific knowledge that we have about women’s psychology and sex differences. We’ll also focus on women’s vulnerabilities, concerns and anxieties that you might not have considered before, because these are the aspects of the female experience that have long stood between men and a greater understanding of—and success with—women.

She Is Tired of Being Objectified, So Subjectify Her Instead

Go to a sports bar in any major city or college town on game day, and invariably you will run into a crew of gorgeous young women in skin-tight, cutoff referee outfits or school jerseys walking around, selling shot specials or beer buckets. This is how everything, not just liquor, is sold to men—hand tools, shampoo, Doritos, porn, cars. All of them shamelessly use beautiful, scantily clad women with big boobs, tight asses and long legs as the vehicles to deliver their message. And it works.

The problem from a mating perspective (besides the obvious ethical one) is that normal women feel this objectification acutely. On the one hand, the media have established an unrealistic expectation of beauty for them to live up to, and this makes them insecure. On the other hand, this expectation has created in women the belief that most guys care only about a woman’s boob-to-ass-to-leg ratio, which is a recipe for resentment and distrust.

Here’s the thing, though: when women say, “Don’t objectify me,” they don’t mean “You’re never allowed to look at my boobs or notice my butt.” Actually, they kind of like their boobs and butts, and hope you do, too, if you’re a good guy and you also appreciate their other features, like their eyes or their opinions.

To attract women, you must be able to take their point of view and think of them not as marketing vehicles to objectify, but as living, thinking, feeling individual humans. You have to subjectify them: accept, understand and acknowledge their individual, subjective consciousness.

Ironically, a great way to understand a woman’s point of view is to think of her as a marketing consumer: a savvy customer evaluating your products (traits) and ads (proofs) to see if they’ll add value to her life. If you want to guarantee mating failure, all you have to do is think of her as nothing more than an inanimate object—as an “8” or a “9,” as a simplistic robot with a set of “triggers” and “hot buttons” to manipulate. At that point you’ve reduced your customer to nothing more than a cash dispenser, or, since we’re talking about objectifying a woman, a sex dispenser.

Objectifying women isn’t just a moral failure. At the purely practical level of attracting women, it’s stupid. It might temporarily reduce your anxiety about approaching them (about making your pitch), because if you think of them as targets, you can try to trick yourself into thinking that they won’t be judging you when you walk up to them. But they are judging you—and that’s O.K., as long as you understand how and why.

She Is Physically Vulnerable, and She Knows It

Picture this example:

You are a young, relatively inexperienced gay man. You’re single, it’s Friday night after a long week and you’ve decided to go out and have some fun. You and some friends decide to check out a new gay bar that you’ve heard has a lot of hot guys.

When you walk in, you encounter an overwhelming sea of men. These guys are all as tall as NBA players, as muscular as NFL linebackers and as sexually aggressive as a felon on his first night out of jail.

They are all bigger, stronger, faster and hornier than you. Their heads all swivel toward you, and their eyes look you up and down like sexual Terminators.

You haven’t even met them, but you can see the gears turning behind their eyes. Any one of them could grab you, carry you out of the bar and put who knows what God knows where, and there is little you could do to stop them. You’re just a piece of meat to them.

But there’s strength in numbers, so you and your friends gather whatever sober courage you can muster and head to the bar. Soon enough, you’ve had a couple drinks, and some of these huge guys approach you and begin talking to you.

Some of them are really lame and unattractive and make crude, ham-fisted passes at you. Some are awkward and annoying. Some are even kind of angry and mean. All of these guys are very unappealing. You don’t want to talk to them.

But lo and behold, some of them are actually pretty intriguing. Yes, they are still big and intimidating, but they want to buy you drinks and pay you compliments. Some of them are really interesting and fun; they do amazing things with their lives and seem to really be into you. They’re cocky and funny. They have that sublime masculine energy that is very appealing.

How would you feel in this situation? Nervous, worried, scared, guarded, self-conscious and vulnerable? But also flattered, desirable and excited (remember, you’re gay in this exercise).

Some of the same male traits that frighten you the most also seem to be the most attractive to you. The guys who pose the greatest physical threat are also the same guys you can envision making you feel the safest. The guy who seems like the most egotistical player in the bar is also the one making you laugh so hard that your ribs hurt. It’s all a giant, swirling, pulsating contradiction.

This is the world of sex and dating for women.

And this is what it is like for women every day, in every social situation, with straight guys just like you.

Women are surrounded by bigger, stronger, faster men who probably want to have sex with them and could take it by force. This is their experience not just at bars and clubs, but at school and work, on the street and the subway. Men stare at them, leer at them, make crude passes at them, and interact with them all day every day, with sex clearly the subtext of every interaction—even the briefest, most innocuous non-mating exchanges.

Her: “I would also like fries with that.”

Him: “Yeah, you would!”

While this is just a thought experiment, the facts that underpin it are very real. For Americans over age 20, the average man is five inches taller than the average woman (5’9″ vs. 5’4″). He’s 30 pounds heavier (196 pounds vs. 166 pounds), and he carries less body fat (18 percent vs. 24 percent), so he’s got about twice the upper-body strength (what he’d use to pick her up) and twice the grip strength (what he’d use to hold her down). An average woman is as physically vulnerable to an average guy as a big guy (6’0″, 190 pounds) would be to the average NFL lineman (6’5″, 310 pounds)—which is to say, very vulnerable.

Think about how weird that whole situation is: to be sexually attracted to beings that could so easily do irreparable physical harm to you.

Most dating advice to guys fails at this first hurdle. It’s built around the assumption that men and women think alike about sex, romance and dating without even acknowledging the basic physical differences between male and female bodies and the resulting male vs. female vulnerabilities. This is totally wrong. If you can understand women’s sexual and physical vulnerability, dating should make a lot more sense.

For instance, if a woman seems like she’s sending “mixed messages,” or acting “hot and cold,” or there’s a mysterious push-me/pull-you erotic dance going on, it’s not that she’s being weird or manipulative (at least, typically). It’s that she’s trying to express interest from a defensive posture, and she’s got a hair-trigger threat-detection system that makes her withdraw into her shell when you start pushing too hard. Maybe you really are the good guy who won’t take advantage of her, but she has no way of knowing that when she first meets you. She has to evaluate you herself.

Think about how weird that whole situation is: to be sexually attracted to beings that could so easily do irreparable physical harm to you. Think about the anxiety that internal contradiction could create on a daily basis. For women who are on the more anxious and delicate side, think about the raw physical courage it must take just to go out and meet men. If she pushes when you pull, your question shouldn’t be, “Why won’t she have sex with me?” It should be, “Why would she ever put herself in a situation of sexual vulnerability with any guy?”

The best (and funniest) explanation of this dynamic we’ve ever heard comes from the famous comedian Louis C.K.:

The courage it takes for a woman to say yes [to a date with a man] is beyond anything I can imagine. A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane, and ill-advised. How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number-one threat! To women! Globally and historically, we’re the number-one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them!

And yet, here we are. Women have evolved this ambivalent arousal/fear, love/hate response to male size, strength and power. If you want to be successful in modern mating, the more you understand this, the better you can deliver what women love while eliminating what they fear.

She’s Been Dealing With Creepy Douchebags for a Long Time

A woman can tell how well your life is going from how you look in about two seconds. Your face and body are leaking all kinds of cues about your sexual experience, self-confidence and personality—and she can see it all in one glance. Before you approach her, she’s already decided whether she wants you to talk to her, and she’s already judged your mate value and your status before you toss the first lame, derpy pickup line at her. She can smell your over-practiced pick-up artists tricks from a mile away. It’s like her superpower.

By the time you’ve met her, a normal American woman has spent years honing that superpower. She had to develop it after putting up with so much shit from lame guys hitting on her, catcalling, sexually harassing and potentially even stalking her. Since puberty, when she started developing hips and breasts and pretty facial features, she’s had to deal with creepers and sketchballs to some degree or another, and she’s probably pretty sick of it.

It’s hard for guys to appreciate what it would be like to grow up being stared at and sexually harassed every day of your life from age 12 onward. So instead, what you need to realize is that all this sexual attention a woman gets sows in her a fear of raw physical violence—reactive assault—that could be sparked if she ignores your come-ons, rejects you in a way you find demeaning or dates you for six months before finding out you’re a paranoid, jealous control freak.

That’s the female reality of living in sexual fear. She’s afraid of creeps, weirdos, crazies, losers and stalkers. And believe us when we say that, from her perspective, they make up a high proportion of men—especially the ones likely to hit on her in inappropriate ways, places and times. Psychological and environmental factors explain much of this perspective.

The psychological research, for instance, shows that, from a woman’s point of view, most guys she meets will be less kind, less agreeable, less empathic, less conscientious, less reliable, less clean—less everything really—than she and her friends are. Even if she accepts those sex differences, she still has to wrangle with the fact that many mental illnesses and personality disorders are more common among men (the more dangerous ones, no less). These male-dominated disorders include alcoholism, drug addiction, autism, schizophrenia, narcissism, white-collar sociopathy and criminal psychopathy. All of which make each random encounter with a man less likely to end in love and more likely to end with a fight-or-flight response.

Most guys reading this right now are probably sitting there thinking, “WTF, I’ve never done any of that creepy shit. Don’t lump me in with those assholes.” And we agree. Most of you guys are solid dudes. You’re just suffering for the actions of the highly non-random sample of guys who hit on every woman in sight. That’s why it’s so important to understand the world from a woman’s perspective.

Think about women’s experiences with guys like a city cop’s experience with people in general. Cops spend 90 percent of their time dealing with the scummiest 5 percent of humanity. The ones who’ve been around a while often develop a cynical, negative and fatalist view of humans, based on the totality of their bitter experiences. It’s not that humans are all bad. It’s that cops see only the worst.

Likewise, women spend a big proportion of their time in the mating market avoiding the small percentage of guys who are the most intrusive, obnoxious or insane. Psychopaths are sexually predatory, uninhibited and confident, so although they’re only 4 percent of the American male population, they might account for 40 percent of the men who have hit on any given woman. Guys with Asperger’s are another factor; although they’re often introverted (and so less likely to approach a woman), if they do approach, they’re bad at reading nonverbal cues of non-interest or rejection, so they’re more likely to persist beyond a woman’s comfort zone. There are almost too many other types of men who do things women find repulsive to name them all.

Simply put, her experience is that the worst guys come straight at her while the best guys are nowhere to be seen.

She’s Probably Just Not That Into You, and You Need to Be O.K. With That

The average guy finds the average woman at least somewhat sexually attractive. Think about it. The next time you’re walking down the street or hanging out in a mall or student union, ask yourself seriously, what percent of these women would I be willing to have sex with right now, if it was safe, easy, consensual and no strings attached?

If you’re like most young guys, the answer would be well over 70 percent—even including the moms and older women. For some of you freaks, especially including them.

By contrast, the average woman finds the average man sexually invisible, neutral, disgusting or repulsive. Only a tiny percentage of guys inspire immediate lust in women. And most of those guys have already moved to New York or Los Angeles to become actors or models. If you are over 18 and haven’t done that, you’re not one of those guys.

This is a huge sex difference in initial choosiness, documented in both scientific research and online dating data, that plays out in every domain of sex and dating. (Of course, if a relationship develops between a man and woman, he gets a lot choosier about whether to date her exclusively, move in with her or marry her—but that’s a discussion for another time. All you need to know at this point is that women are choosier about whom they have sex with; men are choosier about whom they commit to.) Guys have sexual fantasies about almost all the women they know, whereas women have fantasies about virtually no men. She doesn’t have as many sexual fantasies per month as you do, she doesn’t masturbate nearly as much and sex is usually more in the background of her consciousness than the foreground.

Another reason she’s not attracted to most men is that she thinks their outfits are stupid and their clothes don’t fit. Because they are and they don’t. She’s right. She also knows what your body would look like naked, and she probably thinks you’re either a lazy loser (out of shape) or a narcissistic gym rat (in too-good shape). None of this should be particularly surprising or contentious. She likes what she likes, and, statistically, the chances are you’re not it.

Women are trying to do the best they can to reject you without humiliating you.

Where it gets problematic is when you don’t get the picture and she has to tell you, because women don’t like having to reject men explicitly. There is a deep evolutionary logic to this preference, and it has a lot to do with minimizing the very real risks they face from publicly humiliating their suitors. It was almost always better for an ancestral woman to keep a guy within her social orbit as a possible non-sexual friend rather than alienate or upset him. Women aren’t being ambiguous and mysterious and elusive because they’re “playing games” or “fucking with your head.” They’re just instinctively trying to reduce the risk of provoking harassment or stalking or violent retaliation.

Here’s how women tell you they aren’t into you: their first line of defense is simply to play it cool, professional and neutral. They keep their physical and emotional distance, minimize contact and chatter and eliminate any signs of affection or interest that could be misconstrued as sexual.

If that doesn’t work, they might escalate the subtle rejection vibes by acting in a way that naive young men interpret as “cold” or “stuck up” or “bitchy.” This vibe is not cruel—it signals that you failed to appreciate their earlier cues of non-interest, and they’ve reluctantly had to make their lack of interest even more obvious to get it through your thick head that they do not wish to fuck you. If women wanted to be cruel when they rejected you, they would ask their brothers to cut your belly open with sharp flints and pull your guts out for the wild hyenas to eat—or whatever the equally painful equivalent on Facebook would be.

Women are trying to do the best they can to reject you without humiliating you. The more experienced and confident they are, the better they are at rejecting you obviously enough that you go away, but not so obviously that you’re ashamed in front of your friends and other women. But it’s not their responsibility to reject you in the way that would be least costly to you; it’s your responsibility to take the hint as best you can and go away.

She Already Knows She’s Pretty, and She’s Still Self-Conscious

If you meet a woman who strikes you as beautiful, you’re probably not the first guy to notice. In attractiveness research, men show very high agreement in their ratings of women’s faces and bodies. This means that as long as she has been objectively beautiful she has been admired, hit on, masturbated to and harassed by guys from ages 16 to 60, including many of her classmates, teachers, peers, coaches, co-workers and bosses—not to mention total strangers, pickup artists and alleged “talent scouts for modeling agencies.” Many of the guys who hit on her were nasty sociopaths, because the nice guys found her too intimidating. And enough women have found her threatening that she’s had trouble keeping more than a few close friends. Her beauty has already been both a blessing and a curse for years before you ever laid eyes on her.

This is one reason why it’s pointless, and often counterproductive, to go up and compliment beautiful women on their beauty. Tell her something she doesn’t already know and hasn’t already heard from a thousand guys. Better yet, don’t tell her anything. Ask her about her interests, ambitions, friends, background—anything that requires some social intelligence to appreciate behind her “hot girl” persona. Just talk to her like you already understand that (a) she’s beautiful, and you both know it, (b) she’s felt ambivalent about her beauty for years, and (c) she’d like to be appreciated for things she’s achieved in her life through her own efforts, not through winning the genetic lottery of physical attractiveness.

Yet here is the great irony about female beauty: she’s still very self-conscious about her face and her body and her clothes and her accessories. Frankly, she doesn’t really understand why you’re attracted to her. This holds true even for a very good-looking woman, because she compares herself to the world’s most beautiful models and actresses, air-brushed to perfection, staring her down from the cover of every women’s magazine and billboard. She doesn’t typically consider what men actually find attractive or she misunderstands it completely.

Most women think that men are most attracted to the rail-thin models or skinny actresses that grace the covers of the magazines they buy. They’re wrong. Studies show that most men are attracted to women with curves and meat on their bones; the high-fertility hourglass shapes (like Kim Kardashian, Sofia Vergara or Halle Berry), not low-fertility apple shapes or no-fertility chopstick shapes. Also, guys prefer women who are physically healthy and capable, with strong muscles, bones, connective tissues and immune systems, because this predicts being a sexually energetic girlfriend; a capable, protective mother; and a long-lived partner. (Think Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Biel, Rhona Mitra, or Jennifer Garner…) Men want just the right amount of fat, in the right places, on a strong, healthy frame.

Unfortunately, most women think the male conception of beauty is binary: “fat” (bad) or “thin” (good). So they diet using bad health advice and spotty willpower to strive for the supermodel plank shape, and they lose both their cues of fertility (boobs and butt) and their cues of capability (muscle), undermining their attractiveness.

Remember, she didn’t evolve to be attracted to women or their feminine traits, so she’s sort of mystified that you could find her sexually desirable in the first place. It just doesn’t make sense to her. There’s a part of her that was incredulous during puberty when boys were starting to notice her, and that part is still there. She’s got a bit of impostor syndrome about her own erotic power.

This self-consciousness extends to nearly every aspect of her appearance, including many areas of her body and most of what she wears. Women put a lot of thought into their appearance. Everything they wear and display is probably a conscious choice. Every choice is a statement—but not every statement succeeds. Often, women can’t tell if they’ve struck the right balance between formal and casual, tight and loose, sexy and slutty, classical and avant-garde, earnest and ironic. Are they projecting “sexy vamp” or “meth-head jailbait”? Are they projecting “sophisticated Brooklyn hipster” or “Jersey Real Housewife”?

The problem is that they almost never get accurate feedback about what image they’re projecting. Her friends are too polite to tell her the truth one way or the other, and guys are too horny to tell the difference. Most guys are oblivious to clothes altogether, let alone the specific, conscious choices that women make. When it comes to what we wear, most of us just throw on whatever’s clean.

The fact that most guys can’t tell the difference between haute couture and Juicy Couture (or the respective differences in effort and taste) only amplifies her self-consciousness. And if you want to turn her self-consciousness up to 11, be the guy who can’t seem to pick up on her signs of interest in you either. That one is a killer for any young woman who has put herself out there. If a woman’s really interested in you, she will go out of her way to be around you and to be visible and available for you to approach. If you’re oblivious enough not to get those signals, she may even have the gumption to wave at you or ask her friend to say hi. Sadly, if you’re younger than 20 and/or have had sex with fewer than four women, you’ll probably overlook or misinterpret all of those female choice cues. Pay more attention next time.

She Is Worried About Her Social Status, and You’re a Big Part of That

Just like males compete against other males for resources that matter to males, females compete against other females for resources that matter to them. Typically, female-female competition in other animals is more about food, territory or other resources required to reproduce.

But if you’re in a competitive mating market with a limited number of attractive, desirable males that all the women want, then women are going to compete against each other to get and keep those males. And they are going to use any tactics that work—seduction, manipulation, gossip, physical violence, verbal violence—anything that works to get those guys and make them stick around.

Science has started to delve into female-female competition in a serious way only in the last five years or so, and we still don’t understand its intricacies very well. For example, it might seem weird to men that female-female competition would ever involve something as arbitrary as the specific brands of high-heeled shoes or handbags that women wear and carry.

A woman’s entire social life could be ruined by one mean sexual rumor that has been perpetuated through social media by people who barely know her.

But think about guys bragging about which micro-brewed beer they like, which concealed-carry pistol they favor or which car they drive. The red soles of Christian Louboutin heels and the stitching on Céline handbags don’t make that much difference to their function—but the same is true for the nuances of the Congress Street IPA, the Springfield XDs and the Maserati Quattroporte. Both sexes are suckers for status-seeking through consumerism.

Guys know that some of our male-male competition tactics are stupid and ridiculous. Same with women. If you’re smart enough to be reading this, then the women who are smart enough to be good mates for you already understand most of the absurdities of female-female competition. They’re just as disgusted by stupid women as you are by stupid men. But just as you seek social approval from guys you don’t really respect, women seek social approval from women they don’t really respect—and they’re often appalled that they instinctively care so much about it.

This is where the similarities end, however. Women face much different social vulnerabilities. On average, they’re less anxious than men about being bad at athletics, fighting or making money. But they worry a lot more about their sexual reputation among their acquaintances, co-workers, family and neighbors. Specifically, they fret about the existential reputational threat posed by slut-shaming in modern society.

Women are vicious to each other about slut-shaming. A woman’s entire social life could be ruined by one mean sexual rumor that has been perpetuated through social media by people who barely know her. By the time a woman is out of college, she’s had years of hearing women rag on other women (in their class, in their dorm, in their sorority, at their work) for being sluts and whores. Imagine the anxiety that comes with an ill-timed one-night stand or an indiscreet friend with benefits. It can be paralyzing for some women.

As a guy or even just a functional member of society, it’s important to realize that female slut-shaming isn’t the product of some deep self-loathing or in-group hatred. Rather, it is as prevalent as it is because a promiscuous rival is a woman’s biggest threat to keeping a good boyfriend. “Sluts” aren’t derogated because women are uncomfortable with their sexuality; it’s because they’re experts at mate poaching, which is a very real threat to most women. So when women are thinking about short-term mating with you, they’re also thinking, “Who at school or work might find out about this?” and “How will I feel about this when I’m Skyping with my mom later this week?”

Female promiscuity also has a “tragedy of the commons” effect in the mating market. If one woman offers blowjobs on the second date, it’s harder for other women to keep them in reserve until the fourth date as their special treat. This creates a downward spiral of young women feeling like they have to offer more and more sex to more and more guys just to stay in the mating game. Thus, slut-shaming is a way of enforcing a more restrained sexual norm on other women so that not all women have to become more promiscuous than any of them would like.

The slut-shaming then seeps down into a woman’s emotional matrix, where it can fester and undermine her self-respect. That’s why women typically do not feel great about themselves the morning after a one-night stand unless they have a lot of self-confidence and sexual experience. There’s a reason they call the journey home the morning after a hookup the “walk of shame.”

Given the risk of slut-shaming, a typical female strategy is to pursue short-term mating quietly, with a lot of plausible deniability, adaptive self-deception and circumstantial rationalization. Any credible excuse for casual sex can reduce the slut-shaming risk—“It was my birthday,” “I was drunk,” “It was spring break,” “It was Jamaica, after all,” “I’ve always admired his writing.”

These special-circumstance explanations help women create plausible deniability to other women that any given short-term sex was not representative of their usual longer-term mating strategy. Even the euphemisms that women use for sex (“hanging out,” “hooking up,” “partying,” “dating,” “going out together”) help obscure the key issue of whether intercourse actually happened.

Understanding all this is especially important if you meet a woman who’s with her friends. She knows they are watching and judging. If you talk to her for a few minutes and she’s charmed, maybe she’ll want to leave immediately to go have sex with you. Weirder things have happened. But she probably won’t do that, because she knows she will be accountable to her friends the next time they meet. They will ask about what happened. She’ll have to come up with a story about why fucking a guy within an hour of meeting him should not undermine her sexual reputation.

So guys in that situation should not try to steal a woman away from her friends as soon as possible. Instead, just get her number so you can text her about getting together later, in private. That way, she can make her own judgment about whether to tell her friends anything about the night, and she’s much better protected against the long-term effects of slut-shaming.

Her reputational concerns don’t just end with whether or not she had sex with you. If she starts dating you, that too will affect her status within her peer group, either positively or negatively. She can already anticipate how that will play out. Partly it depends on your qualities as a guy. Are you such an awesome guy that she’ll get an immediate status boost from you having chosen her? Or are you such an embarrassing mess that she’ll suffer a status loss—at least until she fixes you up and makes you presentable? Her friends will also judge her based on how you treat her. Are you sexually exploiting and emotionally neglecting her like that creep last year? That lowers her status. Or are you taking care of her like a potential Mr. Right would? That raises her status.

You can do everyone a huge favor before you even get to this stage by making an effort in that initial moment of contact to charm her friends—even the grumpy ones—so that they think you’re a cool, funny guy and give you the benefit of the doubt from the jump.

This is as much for you and her as it is for her friends, who face a harder job in evaluating you than she does. You were an unknown quantity after all, an uncertain bet. They need time to appreciate your strengths and accept your weaknesses. But while their jury is still out, your new girlfriend will suffer a temporary loss of status. Making a good impression right away speeds up their deliberation.

She’s Terrified of Pregnancy, Abandonment and STDs

Pregnancy has been the most fundamental sex difference in mammals for more than 70 million years. Women get pregnant, men don’t. Most of the sex differences in human mating strategies emerge, directly or indirectly, from that basic fact.

It’s a complicated issue for young women. In the long term, pregnancy with a great husband is one of most women’s greatest aspirations—it can be a true blessing. But in the short term, unwanted pregnancy is one of their biggest fears. Getting knocked up can be a career-wrecking, family-shaming, mate-value-decreasing disaster, even if the baby daddy has great genes and promises to be there when the shitty diapers hit the fan.

We know from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies that if a guy abandons a woman or he has a hunting accident and gets killed, the likelihood of her baby surviving drops alarmingly. It’s a potentially huge cost, and it’s why women have evolved a pretty good radar for detecting unreliable flakes.

Being stuck with a little kid also seriously lowers a woman’s attractiveness to future men. Whatever her mate value was before the baby, it’s going to drop afterward. Very few guys want to become a stepdad, and women understand this. Their instinctive worry about unwanted pregnancy is often stronger than their conscious trust in birth control. Female mammals have been getting pregnant since before the dinosaurs went extinct. Reliable rubber condoms weren’t invented until 1855. The pill arrived only in 1960—that’s just two generations of reliable female birth control. That’s not enough time for evolution to have re-calibrated women’s mate preferences to this new reality that they could, in theory, have lots of casual short-term sex without getting pregnant.

Let’s say a woman gets through high school, college and young adulthood unscathed on the pregnancy front. She still has to worry about the armada of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) sailing toward her aboard your dirty penis. Or at least that’s what’s going through her mind, unconsciously.

For STDs like gonorrhea, genital herpes or HPV, it’s much easier for the viruses or bacteria to go from your penis to her vagina than vice versa. Even if you always use condoms, there’s still a risk of breakage, slippage or incomplete coverage (if you have warts or sores near the base of your dick). When a guy gets an STD, it’s usually a temporary inconvenience. When a woman gets one, it can often lead to infertility, or it can infect the baby during birth. The STD stakes are simply higher for women. This is one reason why women evolved a stronger propensity for sexual disgust toward anything that tends to promote the spread of STDs: promiscuity, group sex, anal sex, whatever. If a sexual activity has a high STD risk, but doesn’t bring her much pleasure, build an emotional connection with the guy or help her pass along good genes to future babies, why would she do it?

You could be the nicest guy in the world with everything going for you, but if you roll up to a woman trying to run game looking or smelling like you just climbed out from the bottom of a third-world public toilet, these are some of the fears that may be driving her to keep her distance. In fact, she cares more about how you smell than you can imagine. It’s a mammalian thing—pheromones are real. And so is poor hygiene. Some women will decide they’re interested in hooking up with a guy just from his online dating profile, and the live, in-person date is basically to see if he smells as good chemically as he looked digitally.

She Is Just as Frustrated by Dating as You Are

Even apart from women’s physical vulnerabilities, sexual-reputation anxieties and practical physical needs, women’s minds evolved to be different from men’s minds. They evolved to want different things at different times.

As a man, it’s easy to envy women’s sexual power if you’re ignorant of their romantic desires. You might think, like the seduction peddlers in the PUA community often do, that if you were an attractive woman, you could sleep with any guy you wanted, get laid every weekend, and it would be awesome. And you could. But you wouldn’t enjoy it. Because that’s not what women evolved to want—that behavior did not serve their evolutionary interests.

In fact, this might be hard for you to believe, but it’s true: it is much harder for a highly attractive woman to get what she wants, sexually and romantically, than it is for a highly attractive man.

Yes, every beautiful, bright woman knows she could seduce almost any man for a quick fuck. But that is rarely what she wants. She usually wants a boyfriend, at least. And her experience, if she is single, is that she has failed, over and over and over, to get the guys she really respects and admires, the great catches, the Mr. Rights, to stay with her as long as she wants.

If you don’t realize that even the very first hour of talking with her constitutes a type of relationship that needs some level of mutual respect and nurturance, she will especially not have sex with you.

This is due in no small part to her struggle to understand her own taste in men. There are some guys she thinks she should logically be attracted to but isn’t, while there are other guys she knows she should stay away from, but she can’t.This internal conflict is more pronounced in younger women than older, more experienced women; but it never fully goes away, and it only makes dating that much more frustrating.

She’s also frustrated by the dating scene because time is running out. Most young women want it all—education, career, money, status, love, marriage, kids, meaning and purpose. But they can’t see how all that could plausibly happen by age 40, when fertility plummets. Do the age-math. If the average American woman is about to graduate college (typically around age 24), she might think about being a doctor—but that’s another four years for an M.D. (until age 28), and 6 years of exhausting residency (age 34) before she can even start building her independent practice, which can take years. By the time most bright women are in their late 20s, they’ve realized that the clock is ticking for both their career plans and their family plans and that the two are not going to fit together very well. She’s going to be looking for a guy who can help her manage these heartbreaking trade-offs.

That’s why, if your early-stage relationship is going well—even just the first hour of chatting—she might want to have sex with you very soon. And if it’s not going well, she probably won’t have sex with you ever—even if you’re an otherwise attractive guy. If you don’t realize that even the very first hour of talking with her constitutes a type of relationship that needs some level of mutual respect and nurturance, she will especially not have sex with you.

If she does decide to have sex with you, though, what she is most concerned about is not whether you will break the bed, but whether you’ll break her heart. Women naturally fall for guys they’ve had several orgasms with. The oxytocin magic works reliably. This makes them emotionally vulnerable. The better the sex and the more they like you, the faster it happens.

So will you fuck her for one night and never call her again? That hurts for a week (or longer, if she really liked you). Will you hook up for three months until she falls in love with you, then evaporate for no obvious reason? That will hurt her for a year (or longer).

All of this makes the dating scene incredibly frustrating for women. Understand that and you’ll understand why women aren’t bending over backward to satisfy your unquenchable sexual thirst.

She Has Sexual Fantasies Just like You Do, Except She Gets a Bunch of Shit for Hers

Men have phone sex; women talk dirty. Men are “bad boys”; women are “dirty girls.” Most women have that naughty, “dirty” side that drives many of their sexual fantasies. Most of those fantasies aren’t literally bad and dirty, however. Women don’t fantasize about being sexually assaulted by bridge trolls on top of floating garbage skiffs. But they do fantasize about being sexually dominated and controlled by handsome, caring and capable men who operate secretly on the fringes of acceptable society. The Fifty Shades series has sold more than 100 million copies for a reason.

What is a modern woman to make of this part of her sexual-emotional circuitry? She’ll probably bury it deep in her private bedroom habits and worry that if she ever disclosed it to a guy, he’d be such a reductive idiot that he would think she wants to be dominated and controlled all the time, in every aspect of her life. Or worse, he might take it as license to unleash the really fucked up shit he’s wanted to try.

It doesn’t seem fair (aren’t all fantasies created equal?), but the reality is that women are more prone to sexual disgust than guys are, and the average guy wants the average woman to do stuff that she’d find at least moderately gross—anal, bondage, threesomes and more.

She’s unsure how to think about this. If she holds her ground and only does what she’s comfortable with, will a good boyfriend abandon her for some kinky skank? She’s also vaguely aware that her dad would want to kill you for whatever you want to do to her body, and his judgment hovers over her bedroom like the Eye of Sauron. Even if she’s sexually open to some of the weird shit that you want, she’s not confident that she can do it right. The sexual skills they require are baffling and intimidating to her, and cultivating them would increase her risk of being slut-shamed from certain corners of her life.

And just to add insult to injury, she knows she probably won’t reach orgasm the first few times she sleeps with you. When you have sex with a new woman and you’re under about age 60, you can be pretty confident that you’ll enjoy the experience and be able to come. For guys, sex is reliably pleasant. But for women with a new guy, she won’t feel safe and relaxed enough, or she won’t be attracted enough to him yet, or he won’t know her body well enough. Especially in one-night stands, most women don’t climax with most men. They might still have a wonderful time—women can enjoy non-orgasmic sex a lot more than you realize, especially if you’re really into them. But she usually won’t reach that world-melting, mind-blowing orgasm that she might be craving.

Also, she resents your putting pressure on her to orgasm. She knows you want her to come, and she knows that to you it’s some weird test of your sexual skills and gentlemanly altruism. But, honestly, if she just wanted to come, she’d have stayed home with a bottle of white wine, Fifty Shades of Grey and her vibrator. If she’s with you, it’s because she wants more than just an orgasm. She wants a sexual connection. She wants to feel sexually desired. And she wants you to have a great time so you’ll call her again. And often, the best way for you to give her all that is to just enjoy the hell out of her, without worrying too much about whether she comes. By all means, be great at foreplay—but do it because you love it, not like you’re warming up a car engine on a cold morning.

Practice Perspective-Taking

You should now have a much better grasp on the issues women deal with on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, week-to-week basis. Uncertainty about and threats to their physical, emotional and social safety surround them. You get that at a general level. But what about at the specific, individual female level? How do you grow your insights into her point of view? How do you subjectify her? You do it by practicing perspective-taking.

Next time you’re in class or sitting in a Starbucks, pick out a woman in the crowd (a pretty classmate, a customer, the barista), and for a few minutes imagine yourself in her skin in the most non-Silence of the Lambs way possible. Then ask yourself questions like these:

What is something unique to her life and central to her identity that is impossible for me to know just by looking at her?

Who are the potential threats around her in this place right now?

What does she think about all the guys in here?

What is the likelihood she thinks I’m among the most attractive guys here?

What parts of her body is she most embarrassed about and most proud of?

Why did she choose to wear those specific clothes and accessories today?

Who are her friends, and which ones would be most judgmental if she had casual sex? How does that impact her behavior and choices?

If she got pregnant tomorrow, what would she do?

What kind of men does she date, and do they sexually satisfy her? Are any of them here right now?

You won’t necessarily guess the right answers, and you should never go up and ask her if your guesses are correct—unless you want to know what a restraining order looks like. This is just a thought experiment for you to practice, to put your attention on a woman’s mind before you ever approach her so that you might understand her a bit better.

Women are pulling their weight in trying to understand you. They subscribe to women’s magazines that devote thousands of words a month to trying to get inside your head. (Sadly, those magazines suck.) They chat with their female friends about what men might be thinking or feeling and what a man meant by this particular sentence or that particular action. They even become psych majors. If you can meet them halfway, you’re going to do great.

Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller are the authors of Mate: Become the Man Women Want, released September 15 through Little, Brown & Company and available at all major retailers.