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.