By "I can fix him" women mean "I can manipulate him"

You know, one of those sounds better

I’m continuing my It Sounds Better series.

I came across some online comments concerning the looks of the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer as captured on video cameras. It seems the killer looks attractive to some women, a fact that initiated discussions on “why it is that women love criminals”.

I noticed some people—some women actually— answering that this is because women have an “I can fix him” attitude.

This is something one often hears women say about men and much less often men saying about women. That’s the first thing to notice—that there is probably a sex difference in the desire to “fix”.

The second thing to notice is that you can mostly hear it in the mating context: women often express a desire to “fix” (or “change”) men they see as potential partners, but rarely apply this attitude to other women or non-romantic men.

So what is this “fixing” thing anyway?

It can’t be that women are more inclined to fix things in general. There are many more repairmen and handymen in the world than repairwomen and handywomen. Repairing things in general is simply not reflected in women’s average occupational preferences.

I would argue that from an evolutionary perspective—a perspective this substack is committed to— “fixing” makes no sense other than one of “succeeding in steering others' behavior in ways that align with the interests of the steerer”.

In other words, by “I can fix him” what women actually ‘mean’ is "I can manipulate him".

Another way to put it: "I can control him".

The evolutionary-relevant social niche for women was such that the primary way of them getting what they wanted was not by applying physical strength but via manipulating and controlling men who could apply physical strength to get what they wanted.

Of course, the implications of this fact are rarely sufficiently recognized.

This is not to say that there's anything “wrong” about it: both sexes manipulate each other. This is why we talk about the battle of the sexes.

So why don't they just say “manipulate” or “control”?

Answer: because "fixing" sounds better. It is not as if they consciously represent their behavior as “manipulating”.

Introspective machinery is geared toward finding narratives that sound better, toward finding reasons that would be plausible to the audience consuming those reasons.

“Fixing” vs “manipulating” is just another example of the Inside-Outside View Asymmetry I talked about in my previous post.

“Fixing” sounds almost as if one is doing something noble, and even though it may not be quite the correct framing, it is not clear to me that our social life would benefit from “telling like it is”. A lot of the games we play in our everyday lives rely on the existence of trust which is hard to build and easy to break. Perhaps we all need to be somewhat deluded about the motives driving others and ourselves in order to get along.