Imagr description: Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss and Jeffrey Epstein, posted as per tradition when either of the latter two are mentioned

Having now read it (I have regrets), I think it's even worse than you suggested. He's not trying to argue that women are attracted to dangerous men in order to prevent the danger from happening to them. He assumes that, based on "everyday experience" of how he feels when dealing with "high-status" men and then tries to use that as an extension of and evidence for his base-level theory of how the brain does consciousness. (I'm not going to make the obvious joke about alternative reasons why he has the same feeling around certain men that he does around women he finds attractive.) In order to get there he has to assume that culture and learning play no role in what people find attractive, which is just absurd on it's face and renders the whole argument not worth engaging with.

I feel like this is some friggin' Kissinger "power is an aphrodisiac" nonsense. Which is hilarious because while yes Kissinger spent more time out on the town with beautiful women than you would expect for a Ben Stein-esque war criminal, when journalists at the time talked to those women they pretty consistently said that they enjoyed feeling like he respected them and wanted to talk about the world and listened to what they had to say. But that would be anathema to Rationalism, I guess.