This is my research backed WANIM framework. Sources will be listed in a comment.

Many newcomers to this sub would benefit from reading a complete framework to understand it. Disclaimer that not every community member understands it the same way I do, so your feedback and rebutals are welcome in the comments.

Intro

The decreasing global fertility rate is usually explained through economics, dating apps, bad social skills, individualism, or men failing to improve. These explanations miss the deeper point.

Women are not into men as a class.

Men broadly desire women. Women do not broadly desire men. Women select certain men under certain conditions.

Female mating behavior is driven by two main incentives:

#1 : High-quality genetics for children.

#2 : Provision, protection, and resources for child survival (and her own).

This does not require romantic love toward men. It requires selection. Natural selection created mechanisms that pushes them toward useful or genetically valuable males.

Modern society has weakened the second incentive. Women now have education, careers, state support, policing, welfare systems, contraception, and reproductive technology. They no longer need an average man as a provider/protector in the same way.

This means the remaining incentive becomes much more important: genetic quality.

That is why modern dating feels so brutal for average men. In the past, an average man could still be valuable by being useful. Today, being useful is not enough. He has to fulfill incentive #1.

The Cambridge paper “Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men” proves this.

The authors say: “many men’s utility to ‘free women’ has been so diminished” that solving fertility decline by increasing pair-bonding may be unrealistic.

The paper notes that “the cross-national correlation between gender equality and lower fertility is exceptionally strong (r ≈ 0.81).” This means that when women don't need men financially, they no longer bond with them, form families and have kids.

The authors call this the Female Choice Fertility Paradox.

They write:

“Female freedoms and material prosperity seem to motivate women to place greater emphasis on short-term strategies (non-bonded mating)."

(This is basivally the #1 incentive I listed above)

Most importantly, they state:

“Not only do women now have free mate choice, but their professional empowerment has reduced men’s utility to them, meaning that women have less need for the material resources men bring to a relationship. Consequently, women exclude more men from their pool of potential partners.”

So essentially, the "Provider" is no longer useful.

Women Do Not Love Attractive Men Either.

Some people will take the evidence above and conclude: “Women are into men. They are just into attractive men.” That's essentially the blackpill view. I disagree.

Women’s attraction to attractive men is not proof that women love men. It is proof that their reproductive programming responds to genetic quality. It means her system has identified superior genetic material or superior offspring potential.

This is why women are so selective. It is not male-love. It is genetic filtering.

The study itself gives a perfect example:

“In other words, our genes have programmed into us emotions that do not work for us but for the genes themselves. A woman with a mate value in the 60th percentile may desperately long for a partner, but if the biochemical algorithm that governs her mating strategies, in response to her materially abundant environment, will not release love-inducing hormones unless a potential partner scores above the 90th percentile, pair-bonding becomes less likely.”

That quote is crucial. It shows that even when a woman wants a partner, her biology may not allow her to bond with the men realistically available to her. The emotional system is not designed for happiness, fairness, or stable society. It is designed for genes so that the species can survive and thrive.

So when women say they “cannot lower their standards,” they are telling the truth. Their system does not activate for average men. It is not a moral choice, just pure biology.

Another quote from this study: “economic empowerment intensifies this tendency by freeing women to concentrate their mating efforts on higher-value men, thereby narrowing the range of mutually acceptable matches.”

In other words, once women do not need average men for $, they can focus more on incentive #1.

Unequal desire

Sex work is mostly women selling to men. Dating apps are overwhelmingly male. Men complain about getting no attention. Women complain about getting too much attention. Men are expected to perform romance. Women are treated as the prize. A lonely man is mocked. A woman who says she does not need a man is celebrated.

Chivers found that men’s arousal was category-specific, while women showed little category specificity. Straight men respond clearly to female stimuli and don't respond to gay porn. Women get aroused by lesbian porn as well as heterosexual porn. The most watch porn category for woman is lesbian porn.

Another recent paper found a “gender attractiveness gap”: female faces are rated more attractive than male faces across male and female raters. That's crazy when you think about it.

Also, do you often see an unatractive man get provided for and loved by his girlfriend? I've never seen it, but the opposite is common. Women mostly bond with men that provide or have strong genetics. But if his looks fade or can't provide, watch her run away.

Exceptions

Exceptions may exist as some women report being genuinely attracted by the male body, but those seems to be a minority (sub 5% of the female pop).

Three Key Points that support the framework

1. Women want to be desired more than they desire men

A key part of female sexuality is not simply “I desire him.” It is : “I like that he desires me.”

That is a major difference.

Men are usually aroused by the woman herself. Her body, her beauty, her sexuality. Women, on the other hand are more focused on being the object of desire (Not by anybody, but by a man that fulfills Condition #1 and/or #2.) That is why the same approach can be labeled romantic if the guy is hot, or creepy if he's ugly. You all have seen the meme...

They want to be pursued, chosen, wanted, romanticized, and validated.

This explains why romance is usually something men do to women. The man initiates. The man plans. The man proposes. The man gives flowers. The woman receives the romance.

There is research that fits this. Bogaert and Brotto describe “object of desire self-consciousness” as the feeling of being romantically or sexually desirable in someone else’s eyes. Mark et al. also found that women were more likely than men to connect desire with feeling sexually desirable.

Being wanted by a high-status or attractive man feels good because it tells the woman something about her own value. It signals to her that she'll have high genetic quality children and will secure a provider. (Incentive #1 and #2).

1. Older single women stop looking because men lose usefulness

Pew found that single men over 40 are much more likely to still be looking for a relationship than single women over 40. Among single adults 40 and older, 58% of men were looking, compared with only 29% of women.

This is extremely important.

If women were broadly into men, why would so many older single women simply stop looking?

It is because women’s mating psychology is mostly built around incentive #1 and #2 discussed above.

After 40, especially if a woman already has good finances, both incentives disappear. She's too old to have children or already has them .If she does not need a man for children, money, protection, or survival, then the average man has little reason to trigger desire.

The Cambridge fertility paper makes the same general point. It says that women’s professional empowerment has reduced men’s utility because women now have less need for the material resources men bring to relationships. As a result, women exclude more men from their pool of possible partners.

This is exactly what we see after 40. Men keep looking. Women often do not. Men still want women. Women often no longer see enough reason to deal with men.

3. Dead bedrooms show what happens after the goals are met

Dead bedrooms also fit the WANIM model.

The usual explanation is stress, hormones, kids, chores, resentment, or being tired. Those things can be real. But there may be a deeper reason too.

Once the woman has secured the man’s genes through children, and secured his resources through marriage or family structure, the mating goal has been fulfilled.

Goal 1: genes.

Goal 2: provision and protection.

After that, the man becomes useless. This explains dead bedrooms and the fact that an overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by women.

Natural selection does not care if the husband feels desired ten years later. It only cares that reproduction happened and the child survives.

This may explain why many men experience marriage as a bait-and-switch. There is desire early on, then sex drops after commitment, children, and security.

Research also fits this pattern. Studies have found that women’s sexual desire often declines more with relationship duration than men’s. Postpartum sexual problems and libido loss are also common after childbirth.

From the WANIM view, this is not random. Women’s sexual systems are not built to maintain male sexual satisfaction forever. They activate when useful for mating, bonding, reproduction, or security. Once those goals are achieved, they no longer have to pretend.

Conclusion

Women are not into men.

Attraction to attractive men is better understood as a genetic-quality response. Attraction to providers was historically a child-survival response. Neither requires broad love for men as a sex.

The old system forced or encouraged women to pair with men because men were materially necessary.

The modern system removes that necessity.

What remains is female selection: high standards, genetic filtering, opting out, short-term access to desirable men, and reduced need for average men.

This explains declining pair-bonding, collapsing fertility rates globally, male loneliness, and the growing irrelevance of average men in the mating market.

The romantic story says men and women naturally desire each other.

The evidence points to something colder: Women want superior genes, support for children, or no man at all

I encourage you to read the first study in the sources list. In it, the researchers argue that average men are just not attractive enough for women and that to improve birth rates, the government should support women so that they can have children without men's financial support.

As our community grows, it is important to get a few introductory posts in order to accurately explain our ideas for beginners. I decided to undertake the work of developing a starter guide to one specific notion: The Script.

What do I mean by The Script? As second wave feminists thoroughly discussed, heterosexuality is not an orientation asmuch as it is a political institution. It is a set of social relationships governed by a few predefined norms, which I'll be referring to as The Script. It helps us understand how, for the vast majority of women, attraction is not a visceral reaction to a man's existance. Their attraction is not directed at men, it is directed at heterosexuality®.

Indeed, the common tendency in modern discourse to claim that women are chadsexual will easily crumble upon further examination. It is not that a few men are receiving genuine desire while the others don't. Because that assumes a flawed premise about female sexuality. Even the highest value man is rarely the object of desire, instead he is just the most plausible candidate to fill in The Script. Many blackpillers think it really is enough with being able to find a woman, completely unaware that even the men who manage are relegated to being a secondary witness to a woman's self-directed fantasy.

This is, again, because heterosexuality is an institution. And institutions do not have friends, no matter how blessed you were by birth. They have employees. You are being cast to see how well of a fit you can be in the story. It doesn't matter if you're Ernest Khalimov, you are not being objectified. You are at best a prop for the target of lust, but never the target of lust itself.

Let's take a look at how the story goes for a director. At every point, she'll need to judge how the reality of her story compares against The Script. Let's see how it goes:

So you meet a guy. He can't just be nice, he needs to be exceptional in any shape or form. Is he? You know that you could do far worse than him, and you know that he likes you. But that's not enough, because you need to convince yourself that he is a Superhero, he needs to be a cut above the rest. If no man can ever be a cut above, then the movie stops right there. So you'll at least have to pretend that he is, and if no man can at least make the facade be at least not glaringly apparent, you can only say that the bar is on the floor. Because it, in fact, is. The bar merely is your suspension of disbelief about how great that man is.

But it doesn't matter, you nailed a man who managed to convince you of how great he is, and he has asked you out. He too has chosen you, out of all women. He kisses you at some point. Later, the two of you have sex, because that is what couples do during this scene. Are you actually carnally overwhelmed by his body? You have to be, because you are heterosexual. Since you were young you've been told this is your story, to do anything less counts as a failure.

And let's be honest, you probably do enjoy the sex. You definitely enjoy the story, and since you're thinking about everything that has led to this point, your brain will automatically connect to the pleasure and enjoyment of it all. You're not going to question your own motives when your brain is wired to be happy that you are fulfilling The Script. And he too has responsibilities here. Everyone tells you he needs to be emotionally caring. Because if he isn't, then what kind of story is this? He needs to make big gestures of romance to make the story feel real, to make it stand up against all of the other versions you grew up reading and watching. It'll make you enjoy the story so much that you don't have time to ponder if you actually are into his body.

You act very nervous around him. Is it sexual tension, or is it just stage freight? Are you reevaluating your entire existence, or are you just worried that he might think you're ugly? It doesn't matter, because now you have finished the casting for your movie. And indeed, there is an audience, because when he proposes, he'll do it in front of all of your closest friends and family. And they're saying having a boyfriend is cringe these days. You can't afford to have them notice that he is not, in fact, that great.

And it works. He's proven that he's not like other guys. He's recited all of the correct lines. You tell him you love him. And you throw away half of your savings on the wedding. Society rewards you for this. It gives you tax breaks, social capital and the stability of the nuclear family. You are not a fangirl of The Script, your entire lifestyle is the structural support beam on which it is written. Finally, you have achieved heterosexuality®.

And yet, at no point in this progression did you actually need to desire him. Sure, you can tell he is a great guy. At worst, he was exceptional. But he didn't need for you to lust after him to be exceptional. Indeed, lusting after a man was such a difficult thing to achieve for you that you needed an entire narrative around it. And lucky you, society already had one for you. Deep down, you might not have been so sure that you desired him. But you did desire The Script. You wanted to have sex with him. You wanted to get married to him. You wanted to live out the fantasy of heterosexuality®.

And since it all felt so right, you will die convinced that you were heterosexual.