Coldequation, the world’s most underrated HBD/race realist blogger, disputes my contention that a surfeit of unattached young men is bad for societal stability. He writes:
But large numbers of unattached males were once the rule, not the exception. Here’s a quote paraphrase (you can’t copy and paste from Google Books) from Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms“, page 74, about pre-industrial mating habits in Northwestern Europe:
1. The average age of first marriage for women was late – 24-26.
2. 10-25% of women never married.
3. Ilegitimacy was low – 3-4% of births.
#3 implies that there wasn’t a lot of extramarital sex going on, at least not with unmarried women, given that birth control and abortions weren’t as available, safe, and effective as they are now. If there wasn’t a lot of extramarital sex, then the proportion of women who were married was about the same as the proportion of men who were having sex, outside of visits to prostitutes (making the extremely generous assumption that all married couples have sex). This could be a little off due to the tendency of marriage to involve older men and younger women. This would mean that a greater proportion of men would eventually marry, but at an older age – than 24-26, which by our already standards is already quite old to have sex with somebody you didn’t pay for the first time.
His analysis is flawed, as it considers only the number of single men outside of all other factors. There are three ingredients that must come together in order to create a bachelor uprising:
1) A considerably out-of-whack sex ratio. Coldequation’s data only mentions the number of perennially single women, from which he extrapolates the number of single men. The data in Clark’s book doesn’t contain any info on the sex ratio in northwestern Europe at the time. Given that the only info on womanless men comes from looking at the percentage of manless women, this suggests that men who remained unmarried during that time period did so out of choice, as Peter Frost elucidates:
These examples, however, differ on one point from the new society we’re entering—where over a third of all men will be frozen out of marriage and fatherhood. In the past, a lifelong bachelor was often a self-selected individual with a low sex drive and probably low testosterone levels. As for the immigrant who stays single for 10 to 20 years, he would eventually bring out a wife from the old country—typically 10 to 20 years his junior. Neither example violates the social contract we once offered young men: work hard, obey the law, and you will become a full-fledged member of society.
The problem is that young men in China and other such places are not bachelors out of choice, because not only are there not enough women to go around, the hypergamous nature of women leads them to crowd around an increasingly smaller pool of alphas. The difference is the difference between the voluntarily celibate and the involuntarily celibate.
2) Open polyamory and polygamy. At no point in the history of the West was having a harem considered socially acceptable. Every man was expected to commit to one woman only. Adultery was always an option, but any illicit relationships a person engaged in had to be kept secret. In contrast, concubinage has been a part of Chinese culture for centuries, and is making a comeback.
3) Lack of ways to keep the men occupied. Men who don’t have families to take of need either effective ways to contribute to society, or in the absence of these, bread and circuses in order to remain pacified. As Christopher Orlet writes in the New English Review, many of the artists, inventors, and innovators in Western history were bachelors:
Dr. Burton was neither the first nor the last to comment that marriage is a hindrance to “all good enterprises.†“Woman inspires us to great things,” remarked Alexandre Dumas, “and prevents us from achieving them.†The bitter Friedrich Nietzsche believed marriage (if not women, in general) a distraction from philosophical pursuits. It is a commonplace that most important writers, artists and philosophers have been bachelors, or in the least effectively single in the way Abelard, Franklin, Rousseau, Milton, Thomas Paine and Shakespeare remained. “Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men,†wrote Sir Francis Bacon (not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were). H.L. Mencken, who once suggested bringing back the dollar-a-day bachelor tax (it was worth that much to be single) likewise commented on the superiority of the bachelor- only to Mencken it was the bachelor’s great intellect and creativity that kept him single, not the other way round. “The bachelor’s very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.â€
Orlet then lists off the famous bachelors in Western history, including Beethoven, Michelangelo, Newton, and others.
The spirit of individualist inquiry that has thrived in the West and made those contributions possible is nonexistent in China. For instance, as Satoshi Kanazawa has argued (hat tip: Dennis Mangan), East Asians, including the Chinese, lack the ability to contribute to science in innovative ways, due in part to Asians’ inability to break out of the collectivist box:
1. Asians can’t think
And they certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science.
4. The conformist culture of Asia
Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology (“academic conservatism”) is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution.
With this option exhausted, the only option is to keep unruly bachelors content with a steady diet of porn, video games, or other distractions. This requires a strong economy, which China (hat tip: Al Fin) doesn’t possess:
The current development of SOEs [state-owned enterprises - ed.] is not conducive to China’s economic structural adjustment. It leads to duplication and production surpluses, not only wasting financial resources, but also increasing banks’ credit risk. SOEs tend to lack any sense of responsibility for society and disrupt the normal market order, as with the “enclosure movement” in real estate. With the advantage of dominance in finance and state favor, they exacerbate unequal social distribution. Their ill-use of economic resources and driving out of private investment inhibit employment growth. SOEs are the dinosaurs of China’s economy, and it is time that evolution began to consider extinction.
There have been no end of reports in the past few months that the Chinese economy is headed for total breakdown:
China’s fortunes over the past decade are reminiscent of Lucent Technologies in the 1990s. Lucent sold computer equipment to dot-coms. At first, its growth was natural, the result of selling goods to traditional, cash-generating companies. After opportunities with cash-generating customers dried out, it moved to start-ups — and its growth became slightly artificial. These dot-coms were able to buy Lucent’s equipment only by raising money through private equity and equity markets, since their business models didn’t factor in the necessity of cash-flow generation.
Funds to buy Lucent’s equipment quickly dried up, and its growth should have decelerated or declined. Instead, Lucent offered its own financing to dot-coms by borrowing and lending money on the cheap to finance the purchase of its own equipment. This worked well enough, until it came time to pay back the loans.
The United States, of course, isn’t a dot-com. But a great portion of its growth came from borrowing Chinese money to buy Chinese goods, which means that Chinese growth was dependent on that very same borrowing.
Now the United States and the rest of the world is retrenching, corporations are slashing their spending, and consumers are closing their pocket books. This means that the consumption of Chinese goods is on the decline. And this is where the dot-com analogy breaks down. Unlike Lucent, China has nuclear weapons. It can print money at will and can simply order its banks to lend. It is a communist command economy, after all. Lucent is now a $2 stock. China won’t go down that easily.
All in all, this spells trouble — a big, big Chinese bubble. Identifying such bubbles is a lot easier than timing their collapse. But as we’ve recently learned, you can defy the laws of financial gravity for only so long. Put simply, mean reversion is a bitch. And the longer excesses persist, the harder the financial gravity will bring China’s economy back to Earth.
So, sans opportunities for individual success or economic placation, the excess Chinese men are not going to “suck it up.” Put a lot of sexually frustrated young guys in an area and impoverish them, and they’ll take to the streets, slitting throats, flinging Molotovs, and destroying everything in their wake. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.
{ 55 comments… read them below or add one }
every society that had harems also had lots of castrated men -eunuchs- and non-castrated celibates like monks, dervixes and so on
COunter Strike, WoW are the new monasticism. What is missing in the world today is the rebirth of eunuchdom. Christianity, in its glorious days, extinguished it on Earth. But as Christianity declines and harems are reborn, it is a matter of time before eunuchs start reappering in force.
So this is what China wil look like: exactly as it has always been before the West eliminated its barbaric cultural practices. Harem formation for the Communist Party officials, tens of m illions of men living on porn and video games, mass arrests of people for minor offences and eventual collapse when the son of heaven turns to be particularly incompetent
I bet that once China starts arresting men for uber-minor offences like driving a bike on the wrong way, some party official will propose chemically castrating them, or at least more serious offenders so “women can be protected” and can serve shorter terms because they won´t leave as angry and bitter as testicled-men would.
I do think that the proportion of single women is a good proxy for the proportion of single men, given the mostly monogamous society in Europe at that time. The only way that this wouldn’t be true would be if enough men were dying off to make up that difference (and the usual male-skewed sex ratio from birth) by the time men were in their 20s and 30s. But if that was true in Northwestern Europe, why wouldn’t it be true elsewhere?
From this book, p 169:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZluHqgMuoqkC&pg=PA184&lpg=PA184&source=bl&ots=oD47M8soXj&sig=jeU6uAQZqrIfcdwQFJ9co835Vqc&hl=en&ei=o-awSsrjOuePtgeW4PGgCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false
“[The Western Nuclear family] explains the contrast between the large, sometimes complex households characteristic of eastern and southern Europe – numbering 10-15 souls and often including more than one married couple – and the small, simple nuclear family households found in northwestern Europe. It also explains why women waited unitl they were roughly 23-26 years old before marrying for the first time and why, over the early modern period as a whole, one woman in eight never married. In eastern Europe almost all women were married by age 20.”
I also find it hard to believe that there are a lot more low-testosterone, asexual males in the west than in the east. I don’t see any explanation for the difference between Eastern and Western Europe other than that Westerners couldn’t afford marry because of their expectation that they should be financially independent first.
Peter Frost was talking about your middle-aged bachelor uncle, who is either gay or a Star Trek fan, who didn’t get married when marriage was almost universal, in the recent past. I don’t disagree with him, but I’m talking about 200 years ago, not 20 years ago.
Your three ingredients for a bachelor uprising are not necessary to have a lot of unattached males. Why would involuntary bachelors behave differently depending on whether their unattachment is caused by sex ratio, polygamy, or the factors that kept people single in NW Europe?
I don’t disagree that the current sexual marketplace is a problem. But I do disagree with you about its consequences. Here’s a quote from a commenter of yours, reproduced in the Frost post you linked:
“Using myself as an example, I have a good job, but no wife, no girlfriend, and no children, which has alienated me from society. Sixty years ago, I would have been married and a pillar of the community. Today, I have no respect for women or societal institutions, don’t vote, don’t go to church, and don’t donate money to charity. I save most of my money for retirement and spend the rest on hookers.”
This is the kind of reaction we actually see from guys who are shut out. It’s a problem, but it’s not “The Road Warrior.” If you want that, go to the hood, where, on the authority of Obsidian, the sexual marketplace favors men.
I don’t have too much to say about China – I was just using your post to illustrate the “bare branches” meme, not sticking up for China. But:
>the only option is to keep unruly bachelors content with a steady diet of porn, video games, or other distractions. This requires a strong economy, which China (hat tip: Al Fin) doesn’t possess:
They’re certainly richer than pre-industrial Europeans. Porn and video games are cheap. You can do both for free all day with an internet connection and a $500 laptop.
>So, sans opportunities for individual success or economic placation, the excess Chinese men are not going to “suck it up.†Put a lot of sexually frustrated young guys in an area and impoverish them, and they’ll take to the streets, slitting throats, flinging Molotovs, and destroying everything in their wake.
Even if they were inclined to do so, in China, they would be ruthlessly crushed. Same with Europe in the past. There have been lots of uprisings by lots of societal losers who had it much worse than some guy who can’t get laid, but they have generally been crushed unless the rulers were weak or unsure of themselves. That may be the real lesson here. Most of these uprisings were actually led by more successful men (the Taipeng rebellion leadership kept concubines). Maybe the element of truth to your thesis is that, if you’re an elite looking to start a factional war against other elites, mobs of single men are obvious pawns to use.
Here’s an example of one of the few rebellions in history that was mostly run by losers, for losers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie
>peasants “killed a knight, put him on a spit, and roasted him with his wife and children looking on. After ten or twelve of them raped the lady, they wished to force feed them the roasted flesh of their father and husband and made them then die by a miserable death.”
That’s sort of like what you’re talking about. But even then, the peasants were put down in a season. The ultimate impact on France was not that great. Note that France at the time had weak leadership, which is why it got as far as it did.
Finally, I suggest that you take a look at Jason Malloy’s comments in the Frost post. I wont try to recap it here, but he convincingly argues that single, sexually deprived men are well-behaved.
The issue with the sex ratio theory is that it doesn’t seem to be playing itself out as predicted.
The high sex ratio theory predicts, does it not, that a high sex ratio society is characterized by stable monogamous relationships because women can “force” this (presumed to be their preferred norm) due to their relative control of the sex and mating market when there is an excess of men.
Is this really happening? The United States has developed in the last few decades a slightly high sex ratio, but over the same period absolute rates of marriage have declined, divorce rates have stabilized at a fairly high % for most demographics other than the highly educated 100k+ earners, and out of wedlock births are soaring in *all* demographics other than the aforementioned, small, high earner bracket. If the sex ratio theory were correct, shouldn’t the United States be characterized by remarkably stable, monogamous relationships, rather than the trends we are seeing?
As a result I think other factors are at play here. Perhaps the sex ratio has prevented things from getting even worse than they have in terms of relationship stability and so on, but even if that’s the case, that’s an admission that there is much more going on when it comes to sexual mores and relationship formation and stability and that, at this point in time, those other factors are leading to results that are different from what sex ratio theory would predict.
In reality, what appears to be happening is that women are using the high sex ratio not to force men to tow the commitment line, but rather to play the field for a number of years, and avoid commitment themselves out of fear of “settling” in a market that offers them so many alternatives due to the favorable ratio. I think that the sex ratio theory assumes a rather monolithic female motivation scheme (always prefer to force commitment), whereas what we are seeing is that socioeconomic factors (economic independence of women, removal of consequences to women of sexual license) have a strong influence on female motivations and behaviors, even in a high sex ratio setting. As a result of that, I’m rather skeptical of the sex ratio theory’s usefulness when applied to the current conditions. It may be true enough if the assumptions it makes about female preferences were more uniformly valid, but the current behaviors we are seeing in the dating and relationship markets are not the ones that high sex ratio theory would predict.
Ferdinand,
i love this topic. novaseeker, you bring up some interesting points.
the subject is multi-layered.
i’m currently reading a book by Secord and Guttentag called “Too Many Women?” It was printed in 1983 but it is the seminal work in the field. The authors posit that sex ratio is a multi-faceted animal with numerous feedback loops all contingent on two types of power structures: dyadic (high or low sex ratio) and structural.
we can form a matrix of those two power structures. very few societies have ever had feminine structural power although they are nearing it in the West (the one society where there were lots of men but with female structural power was in africa. the men had crappy jobs while the women had multiple partners.) when that occurs, with a high sex ratio (female dyadic power), we see sexual liberation and reversed gender roles – a situation the authors termed “Libertinia”.
Now, looking at China or the Middle East with their high ratios, there is something else at play. Both of those areas have strong patriarchal structures. In such a society where there are lots of men and strong patriarchal structures, we’d expect to see traditional gender roles and conservative sex roles. The Middle East especially keeps their young men in line with religion. The Far East seems to keep theirs in line with allegiance to the collective mixed with the naturally low testosterone measurements of males there.
I find this statement to be false:
“However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science.”
China has a long history of creating things before the west: Paper, crossbows, gunpowder, large ships, navigation gear, ceramics, ect.
How does this jive with Asians not be able to invent new things? Admittedly a lot of these things were invented by eunuch, but a man unable to find a wife might as well become a eunuch.
That leads to an interesting question: what’s a greater driver of tech a man without balls or a man who will not marry?
In my opinion, a sex ratio favouring females does work against de facto polygamy and is working against de facto polygamy in China right now. But female hypergamy is so strong that it cannot eliminate it. Hence, even with the current sex ratio working against them, the top dogs in China can still have multiple women.
As for the sex ratio starting to favour women in North America, Agnostic has demonstrated, women have become a slightly less slutty. I would say that the changing sex ratio probably helped that.
I have to agree though that there are multiple factors at work here and that looking at the sex ratio alone won’t always tell you that much about what is really going on.
“East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science.”
LMAO – what a laughable joke!
China beat the West in most scientific inventions (until hitting a cultural cyclic low the last 2 centuries) by centuries. Read “The Genius Of China” by Robert Temple.
And Yoshiro Nakamatsu singlehandedly invented most of our modern technology today – including the floppy disk, CD, DVD, digital watch, etc.
The US took a leap past them in the last 2 centuries due to Asia losing wars and the US winning them. Not to mention secret technology transfers from the Grey aliens. The truth comes out and normalizes over time, though.
I am amazed at how similarly the sexual market follows traditional market dynamics.
Level of market interventionism (the price of women), from socialist (Indian, Christian, Islamic etc. ) to laissez faire (sub Sahara Africa) to Oligopoly (Western world).
Stratified pricing and perishable goods.
Buyers (men) and sellers (women).
Supply and demand.
Under supply (sex ratio) and high prices (economically independent women) are pushing buyers out of the market and buyers are simply readjusting their expectations.
Typically, buyers that can’t purchase a luxury good (women) settle for less and don’t kick up a fuss.
It’s interesting how the Roissysphere is populated by libertarians that hanker for for the good old socialism of yesteryear but begrudgingly accept the libertarian PUA lifestyle.
“Not to mention secret technology transfers from the Grey aliens.”
Way to completely destroy your credibility.
There has also been very bloody uprisings when social losers not only overthrow the ruling elite, they kill it off and take over at least for a time. All the while, a lot of bloodshed and killing ensued. Even in China, there are limits to how far the government can push the population and still remain in power.
“So, sans opportunities for individual success or economic placation, the excess Chinese men are not going to “suck it up.†Put a lot of sexually frustrated young guys in an area and impoverish them, and they’ll take to the streets, slitting throats, flinging Molotovs, and destroying everything in their wake. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.”
The Nien rebellion would be a more fitting example than Taiping.
Coldequation — I think you are far too sanguine about the current situation. First off, the men AND THE WOMEN of the 1700′s — mid 1800′s were far different in social controls:
*NO PILL/CONDOM — cheap reliable birth control.
*NO anonymous urban living.
*NO vastly improved living and freedom and income standards for women.
The women who did not marry until late in Northern Europe were not out bar-hopping, they were mostly in the same villages they were born in. Living mostly sexless lives. The men were in the same boat, and getting enough to eat dominated their concerns most of the time. In fact, the growth spurts of modern humans post WWII almost anywhere, shows just how much wealth (measured in food) there is. You can see this in Vietnamese and Mexican adolescents towering over their parents. Same genetic material, far different food inputs, caused by wealth.
The CLASSIC pre-revolutionary situation is a prolonged period of rising expectations economically and socially, and then collapse. This includes 1789, 1775, 1848, and 1919. The other one of course is military defeat: 1917 Russia, and post WWII China.
Porn is a substitution that only goes so long, couple an economic collapse that puts a $500 laptop out of reach (much less the internet) and various regional, military and other leaders with ambition, and China is a cauldron of violence. Just last mont the regime was FORCED to sack highly connected Provincial Party and Police leaders in Urumqi over Han Chinese riots against the failure of both to protect them against Uighurs. Add to China considerable Ethnic, Racial, Religious, and regional tension (most dialects are mutually unintelligible) and you have a recipe for disaster once State Owned Enterprises start collapsing, or oil spikes, or the US can’t/won’t import Chinese junk anymore.
You’ll have 30-40 MILLION young men willing to roll the dice on ANYTHING to get a wife, and the BIGGER RISK THE BETTER. This has also been traditionally how Emperors were overthrown — by various regional revolts that attracted huge internal armies of angry, bitter young men willing to risk it all.
You also don’t look at the elephant in the room — Arabia. Where nearly 30% of marriages are polygamous, the supplies Mohammed Atta types is basically inexhaustible. Michael Yon reveals that the average price the would be Saudi JIHADI PAYS TO BLOW HIMSELF UP in Iraq is $1,200 US. These guys PAY to blow themselves up to get 72 virgins in the afterlife.
China has indeed been a historic source of great inventions … by Eunuchs … that go absolutely nowhere.
Meanwhile, Western Europe took them, and families, fathers and sons, constantly improved: firearms, printing, paper money, astronomy, compasses, etc.
Nations of eunuchs are by definitions — DEAD ENDS.
Agnostic’s “findings” fly in the face of every other data available: single motherhood, multiple partners, social attitudes in entertainment, etc.
If women were becoming “less slutty” then WHY is White Single Motherhood now on the rise, from 4% in 1965 to now 40% among the Working class and 20% among the Middle class (Charles Murray, AEI blog).
Sex ratios don’t work in raw predictions, because powerful men can seize all social control, women can and will be hypergamous, bands of men can use force (South Africa’s men have achieved a remarkable metric — 25% of them have committed rape). And so on.
What matters also are income, living standards, education, anonymity, loss of social control/shame, and birth control for women, and status, power, equality (among men), and income/status RELATED to most women for men. Tinker with any of these and any sex-ratio effect can blown out of the water. By changing not only what women WANT but how they and men behave (also of course changing what men want).
That only works when there is a substitution for a good. There is NO substitution for women, and what you see when men don’t form families is the following:
*Matriarchy — violent uprisings, mass rapes and murders, mutilations, as in West Africa, Congo, Rwanda, etc. Produced by men whose role is singing, dancing, and FIGHTING to compete for women. These places tend to be impoverished loser societies ripe for colonization by more patriarchal societies.
*Hard Patriarchy ala Saudi Arabia — most men priced out of the market (literally by not being able to pay families dowry) and a few men having most women. Most women are illiterate and unable to work, having production of the workforce, and worse, are illiterate, superstitious, and hostile mothers (having had no choice in husbands they often hate their offspring). These societies are good at producing waves of jihadis, suicide bombers, and men on camels and horseback to conduct raids, but little else. Their suicidal manpower advantage (all those excess men) are good to overwhelm weak regimes, but offer tempting targets for societies with high male cooperation. These societies suffer from chronic underachievement economically.
*Soft Patriarchy — theses societies are characterized by relatively flat male hierarchies, restrictions on harems, in theory at least powerful men having no more than one mistress, women having free choice of mates, women generally educated and independent, but significant restrictions on female sexuality: adultery frowned on, limits on pre-marital sex and divorce, celebration and orientation towards the nuclear family. Since women have free choice of a mate, historically the curbs on female sexuality have held … until cheap reliable contraception, anonymous urban living, and vastly increased female wealth blew it apart. Formerly, these “soft” patriarchal systems had the highest economic achievement, the best mothers (producing the best, most loved, and educated children), and the highest male cooperation.
Leading to a critical advantage: far greater wealth and far greater cooperation among soldiers and sailors in the battlefield. Western militaries are characterized by unified, cooperative, relatively fluid forces that seek out mass battles of annihilation of the enemy until said enemy is destroyed or stops fighting. Rather than endless “I’ll raid today, sleep in tomorrow” caravan-raiding that characterizes the Hard Polygamists or the mass rabble “armies” that are an orgy of rape and murder but won’t fight on the battlefield against a foe that seeks their destruction.
–The conformist culture of Asia—
That can also be a blessing in disguise. We may not produce an einstein or newton, neither will we produce a bunch of people that glorify individualism(non-conformity) at the cost of the group.
FYI,
Jason Malloy and n/a are taking the Roissysphere to task over the definitions of “Alpha” and “Beta.”
Link
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/09/black-men-out-alpha-white-guys.html
“Your three ingredients for a bachelor uprising are not necessary to have a lot of unattached males. Why would involuntary bachelors behave differently depending on whether their unattachment is caused by sex ratio, polygamy, or the factors that kept people single in NW Europe?
…
This is the kind of reaction we actually see from guys who are shut out. It’s a problem, but it’s not “The Road Warrior.â€
You’re missing the point. A skewed sex ratio and polygamy must be occurring at the SAME TIME in order to breed societal unrest. One or the other is insufficient, because both are necessary to cause resentment in the minds of the involuntarily celibate. Even if you’re correct on NW Europe, the absence of harem formation throughout all of that region’s history negates your point. The absence of open polyamory/polygamy is also the reason why we haven’t – and won’t – see a bachelor uprising in the modern U.S. despite having a slight excess of men. That was the purpose of this post – an excess of single men has to combine with open mate-hoarding by high-status men and a poor economy in order to foment unrest.
“If you want that, go to the hood, where, on the authority of Obsidian, the sexual marketplace favors men.”
I’m not arguing that having a deficit of men will result in peace and harmony. Both extremes cause social instability. See my Russia post.
“You can do both for free all day with an internet connection and a $500 laptop.”
A third-world country can’t manage either of those things. China is a third-world country and will remain one.
“Even if they were inclined to do so, in China, they would be ruthlessly crushed. Same with Europe in the past. There have been lots of uprisings by lots of societal losers who had it much worse than some guy who can’t get laid, but they have generally been crushed unless the rulers were weak or unsure of themselves. That may be the real lesson here.”
The strength of a government is dependent on its ability to placate its subjects. If sufficient numbers of the populace are losers, the government is weakened accordingly. Enough losers, and the government will be toppled. Beijing’s ability to keep the masses content is dependent on the nation’s economic success, which is soon to reverse.
“Most of these uprisings were actually led by more successful men (the Taipeng rebellion leadership kept concubines).”
The Taiping leadership did have concubines, but they enforced moral puritanism among their followers. That is what matters. The people are willing to forgive indiscretions on the part of the leadership so long as they promise to crack down on the greater excesses.
“Maybe the element of truth to your thesis is that, if you’re an elite looking to start a factional war against other elites, mobs of single men are obvious pawns to use.”
You make a good point. Leaderless rebellions are doomed to failure. It wouldn’t surprise me if pro-democracy elites of the Tiananmen type latch on to these single men as foot soldiers.
“That’s sort of like what you’re talking about. But even then, the peasants were put down in a season. The ultimate impact on France was not that great. Note that France at the time had weak leadership, which is why it got as far as it did.”
The Jacquerie was a disorganized, leaderless revolt, as were all of the revolts of that time period. See above point on leaders and revolution.
“Finally, I suggest that you take a look at Jason Malloy’s comments in the Frost post. I wont try to recap it here, but he convincingly argues that single, sexually deprived men are well-behaved.”
I read Malloy’s comments over at Evo and Proud. I don’t have time to offer a complete critique of his gestalt (why doesn’t he have a blog like the rest of us?) but from what I can tell, his claims are undermined by the fact that he bases them on a false premise. In his own words:
“Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences. Women prefer a committed, cooperative relationship with a high quality man who will invest in her offspring and not defect at a critical period. Men prefer relatively uncommitted sex with a large number of women. The reason for this is that men have a chance at winning the “reproductive lottery,” while women do not. It’s possible for a man to have kids from 1000 different women, but not possible for a woman to have 1000 children. Women want DADS, and men want to be CADS.”
The presumption is that women are monogamous. This is false. Women are hypergamous – see Unwin or Devlin. Additionally, it’s not as simple as saying that women want CADS or DADS. Ideally, women would prefer men who are both sexy/have good genes (“CADS”) and can act as providers (“DADS”) – since they can’t most of the time, they’ll go for “CADS” (alphas in the Roissy lexicon), and when they can’t get them, they go for “DADS” (betas). This is precisely what is happening in China: the sex ratio enables men who are both sexy and wealthy/high-status to collect harems. Malloy’s dichotomy doesn’t account for this at all.
Malloy is correct in stating that a scarcity of men leads to promiscuity among women (as I stated in the Russia post), but his claims that women really want commitment are not considered in light of female hypergamy. Women want a relationship…with an alpha. To quote Devlin:
“When a young girl becomes erotically aware of boys, she is endowed by nature with a set of blinders that exclude the majority of them — including many who can make good husbands — from her sight. What gets a male within her narrow range of vision is called “sexual attractiveness.” What is it?
…
When women claim to be seeking kindness, respect, a sense of humor, etc., they mean at most that they would like to find these qualities in the men who are already within their erotic field of view. When a man asks what women are looking for, he is trying to find out how he can get into that field of view. Women do not normally say, either because they do not know themselves or because it embarrasses them to speak about it. The advice they do give harms a lot of lonely men who mistakenly concentrate their mating effort on showing kindness and courtesy to ungrateful brats rather than working to gain the things females actually respond to.
…
What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead — while the one to whom they feel attracted makes all their dreams come true. One of the keys to deciphering female speech is that the term “men” signifies for them only the very restricted number of men they find sexually attractive. All the dirty articles in Cosmo about “giving him the sex he craves” and “driving him wild in bed” concern this man of her dreams, who by some amazing coincidence usually turns out to be the man of some other girl’s dreams as well.”
Finally, Malloy doesn’t take into consideration female economic and sexual emanicipation. Provider betas (“DADS” in the Malloy lexicon) are valued primarily for their material utility. If a woman is financially independent, what does she need a provider for? I’ve argued that the high rate of single motherhood among American blacks is in part due to the welfare programs introduced in the 60′s eliminating the need for a provider beta among poor black women. And as Whiskey noted, cheap and reliable contraception has drastically reduced the consequences of poor mating choices.
Whiskey, not a perfect substitute, but do remember that the perfection of sexbot technology is one of the Four Horsemen (maybe about twenty years down the road, unless delayed by feminist sabotage and legal maneuvers). That will free men from dependence on the real thing, and perfection of in vitro fertilization will break the female monopoly on reproduction as well.
Until then, I am reminded of a graffito I saw a few years ago: “If women didn’t control 100% of the world’s supply of pussy there’d be a bounty on their heads.”
PS. The distinction you draw between “soft” and “hard” patriarchies is the same one that Philip Longman identified in his 2006 article “The Return of Patriarchy”.
Excellent post, Ferdi.
I think another country to keep our eye on is Iran. Quiet as its kept, the Ahmedinejad gov’t has been an abyssmal failure wrt achieving its stated goals-Male unemployment there is through the roof, inflation is so high that apartments and housing costs are comparable to the USA, and as a result Men can’t marry Women because of the traditional view that Men had to have a home ready for the new bride. This has been the source of considerable social unrest and instability.
Put this together with the fact that Iranian Women are among the most educated not just in the Middle East but in the world, while Male educational attainment is falling, and it all adds up to some seriously volatile, explosive stuff. Literally.
I remain amazed by how we as human beings can so willfiully and deliberately blind ourselves to the facts of life. Blue Balls ain’t no joke, and many a Man who was fed up with not being able to bust a nut inside a Woman has done terrible things. One would tink that after Atta, Cho and Sodini, we’d finally get a clue. Oh, well.
The Obsidian
“What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead — while the one to whom they feel attracted makes all their dreams come true.”
Which is why I pay little attention to women, I can feel the contempt many feel towards me so I ignore them. This is also why many men see no immorality in going to prostitutes, watching pornographic movies, or pumping and dumping women dumb enough to allow it. In the most extreme cases, it’s why men rape or kill women when they’re scorned time and time again. That is why men need to understand at a young age the dark side of women and how to deal with it, without their frustration or anger getting the better of them. Most importantly of all, the men who are alone should count their blessings, because women thanks to feminism are competitors in every sphere of life. When men see past their pussy power, women lose all power over men.
Again, the sex ratio theory is most useful when assessing what the impact of ratios is in a pre-feminist environment. The factors that have impacted behavior in the past several decades (economic emancipation of women, reproductive technologies leading to sexual emancipation of women) are independent variables that have a strong impact on female mate selection activity. Where the supporters of a “strict sex ratio” theory, like Jason Malloy, fall down is in their assumption that female mate selection preferences are static and mostly not impacted by these newer variables. That’s a very false assumption, as even a casual examination of what is happening in the real world easily reveals.
I’ll agree with Thursday that the ratio has *some* impact. If the sex ratio in the US were lower, it would be even more promiscuous than it is now. But these other independent variables have a huge effect, and at this point it would appear that the sex ratio has a somewhat mitigating, rather than definitive, impact on actual behavior.
This is an important point.
I think that men need to *understand* women. To understand them is not to hate them, but also to see that they do have indeed a rather dark side to themselves, as we men do as well.
Much of the hatred comes from the juxtaposition of a culture that feeds people pretty lies about women over and against the reality of women being more empowered today to indulge their dark sides than at any time in history. It’s that disconnect that can make people angry: angry at women, angry at society and so on.
The better approach is to see women as flawed human beings who have their dark sides, and as society as being very much too indulgent of those dark sides at this particular moment. That won’t last, of course, because the net negative impact of all of that feminine dark side activity will eventually well and truly gum up the works, but for now it’s best to simply realize it, and realize that women are, for the most part when it comes to men, not sympathetic — because that’s just how they are.
I most definitely see women as flawed beings, just as I regard men, myself include as flawed beings. That is why people need to take the blue pill and stop putting women on pedestals, they neither deserve not need it. Over the long haul, that has harmed women tremendously, and anything that harms one sex harms both sexes. Women are going to rue the day they even heard of the word feminism. It’ll be sooner than later because fate has it’s own sense of justice.
This goes off on a tangent…but research the Greada Treaty of the 50s…
On the night and early hours of February 20-21, 1954, while on a ‘vacation’ to Palm Springs, California, President Dwight Eisenhower went missing and allegedly was taken to Edwards Air force base for a secret meeting. When he showed up the next morning at a church service in Los Angeles, reporters were told that he had to have emergency dental treatment the previous evening and had visited a local dentist. The dentist later appeared at a function that evening and presented as the ‘dentist’ who had treated Eisenhower.
The missing night and morning has subsequently fueled rumors that Eisenhower was using the alleged dentist visit as a cover story for an extraordinary event. The event is possibly the most significant that any American President could have conducted: an alleged ‘First Contact’ meeting with extraterrestrials at Edwards Air Force base (previously Muroc Airfield), and the beginning of a series of meetings with different extraterrestrial races that led to a ‘Greada Treaty’ that was eventually signed. This astonishing First Contact event, if it occurred, will experience its 50th anniversary on February 20-21, 2004.
——–
In May 1954 again under the Eisenhower administration the third extension of this treaty was signed called ‘The Greada treaty’. The greys and reptilians blatantly broke the terms of this treaty as we shall see later in this information. The greada treaty was agreed upon at the Holloman air force base in New Mexico by the greys and the ‘Ultra’ unit in the NSA. The original document of this treaty and the ET materials from it can be found today at the NSA facility called ‘Blue moon’ underneath Kirkland air force
base in New Mexico. The entrance to this underground base is in the Manzano mountains. Also at this location is the technological base of the secretive department of energy (DOE). Today free energy devices developed from grey and reptilian technology are being built for use in space at the DOE base.
On April 15 1964 two intelligence personnel met under ‘project Plato’ with the greys in the New Mexico desert to arrange a meeting on April 25 at Holloman air force base in New Mexico. This meeting was to renew the treaty again in a psychological bid to buy time in order to solve the problem of the greys and reptilians.
Ferdinand:
“Malloy’s … claims are undermined by the fact that he bases them on a false premise. The presumption is that women are monogamous. This is false. Women are hypergamous … Malloy is correct in stating that a scarcity of men leads to promiscuity among women (as I stated in the Russia post), but his claims that women really want commitment are not considered in light of female hypergamy. Women want a relationship…with an alpha. To quote Devlin:”
Hi, someone pointed me to the discussion. Just to respond to this comment:
A) I don’t accept “Alpha/beta” as a valid social or scientific taxonomy. They’re fine for the pedagogical purposes of the pick-up community, but they are not consistently defined or useful terms for explaining society. “Alpha” is alternately used to describe men with high social status, men that have promiscuous sex, men that have promiscuous sex with attractive women, and men that have high mate value. The four are not the same, and can’t be used interchangeably. ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’ are used to imply many other (sometimes contradictory) behaviors and traits as well, making them weasel terms that mostly muddy rather than clarify discussions. They also are not-so-subtly used to imply that men who are monogamous are inferior to men who are promiscuous. In that sense, I find the terms value-laden and morally dubious. Monogamous men are the backbone of civilized society, and I won’t participate in their mockery or degradation.
B) ‘Hypergamy’ and ‘monogamy’ are not contradictory terms, they are orthogonal. What hypergamy means is that women mate upwards (e.g. men higher in status than themselves). Women are both hypergamous and monogamous relative to males. “Relative to males” is an important concept for me to underline here, since numerous people have distorted my claims. Sex ratio dynamics are only important in so far as men and women are different. 2009 women are promiscuous compared with 1950s women, and perhaps even 1950s males, but are still less promiscuous than 2009 males, and that’s all that’s fundamentally relevant to my sex ratio discussion in the Peter Frost thread.
3) “Hypergamous” does not mean “polygamous”. The claim that women prefer to be the second-tier woman to a first-tier man rather than the first-tier woman to a second-tier man is not supported and has a weak basis in evolutionary theory. Evidence from anthropology indicates that polygamy is a system that benefits, and is propagated by, high status males. Women mated polygamously have lower reproductive success than women mated monogamously. This subject gets a whole chapter in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature. Here’s her discussion of the Dogon:
“Typical for this area, child mortality among the Dogon is very high. According to anthropologist Beverly Straussman, 46 percent will die before age five. What is more noteworthy, though, is that the chances of a child dying are seven to eleven times higher if the mother is living in a polygynous family, working together with and sharing meals with the cowives, than if she is married monogamously. In a monogamous union, a mother’s loss is equally the father’s. But in the case of a man married to three wives, the polygynist comes out ahead reproductively even if more than half his children die.”
Women are programmed to prefer both good genes and commitment. They select more commitment when that option becomes available. That option becomes more available when there are high sex ratios.
D) Polygamous societies are associated with violence, but polygamy increases when there are low sex ratios, not high sex ratios.
Also:
“it’s not as simple as saying that women want CADS or DADS. Ideally, women would prefer men who are both sexy/have good genes (â€CADSâ€) and can act as providers (â€DADSâ€)”
What part of my “Women prefer a committed, cooperative relationship with a high quality man” exactly implies women don’t want high quality as well as commitment?
” since they can’t most of the time, they’ll go for “CADS†(alphas in the Roissy lexicon), and when they can’t get them, they go for “DADS†(betas).”
“Alphas” and “cads” are not equivalent terms, as I explain in a comment linked by the Undiscovered Jew above. The closest approximation here might be a cad of exceptionally high mate value.
I’ll note that roissy has defined “Alpha” before as simply a man with high mate value. This is the inconsistency in usage I’m talking about that makes these terms unsuitable for scientific discussions. It can’t mean ‘sexy man’ one minute and ‘sex player‘ the next minute if you want to use at as a meaningful sociological category.
Women select the best balance they can get between quality and commitment. There are individual differences in the balance different women prefer. When there are low sex ratios the balance in female preferences shifts more towards quality and further away from commitment.
Erp. Should be: “It can’t mean ‘sexy man’ one minute and ‘sexy player‘ the next minute if you want to use it as a meaningful sociological category.”
Why, then, is our high sex ratio society not utterly dominated by the female-preferred stable, committed relationships outside of the narrow demographic of two high earner couples?
novaseeker, I already answered your same questions extensively in the Frost treads. I provided research that female economic integration leads to higher rates of illegitimacy and promiscuity, while higher sex ratios lead to lower rates of illegitimacy and promiscuity. Here is one such paper, which I already linked.
If you have to choose where to target your blame for various social changes, at least do it in a manner consistent with the empirical evidence. It’s called strong inference.
Your problem is you demand that different trends all lead in the same direction. That’s not how social changes work. There are lots of forces pulling society in lots of different directions. You decide how these forces are at work by comparing data points, not by extrapolating from anecdotes.
If anything the high sex ratio has been one force acting against the college campus-ing of America. But there are many other forces pushing us in the opposite direction.
I see. So you and I basically agree, then, that the sex ratio effect is being largely countered in overall effect by other social trends. If that’s what you think, then I think we basically agree. If anything, from my perspective, the sex ratio perhaps has mitigated to some degree the impacts of other changes — which means that it is interesting, perhaps, but not the most determinitive of the bunch in terms of end effect.
Cool, yes. As I said in the Frost thread, I think sex ratio is a very minor force. The only reason it was worth discussing at all, is that Dr. Frost was claiming that high sex ratios were a socially destructive force that demanded urgent, radical government intervention to “correct”.
Okay now I understand what you were debating over there a bit better. Thanks for the clarification.
This flies in the face of so many women writers, from Virginia Woolf, to Sandra Tsing Loh, to Barbara Ehrenreich, to Germain Greer, to Betty Friedan.
Who, to a woman, demanded passionate, short-term, chaotic relationships. I.E. “Apha” (designated as socially dominant, aggressive, exciting) men every few years or so.
If anything, sex ratios favoring women (not many women compared to men), allows women to flit from guy to guy, not NEEDING COMMITMENT.
This is my main beef with your points Malloy — you assume women always want commitment when they can get it, when the evidence suggests that they SETTLE for commitment when forced by economic/social circumstances.
Iranian fertility rates fell from 5.0 to 1.8 in just 25 years.
Their population pyramid is effectively a diamond.
One would tink that after Atta, Cho and Sodini, we’d finally get a clue. Oh, well.
I am actually surprised how infrequent this is.
The differences that you point out between our/China’s situation and that of 18th century Euros seems to boil down to envy. They (both men and women) stayed single because they were poor, whereas modern men (not women) can be shut out without being poor while other guys of comparable or even lower SES are doing well.
>The CLASSIC pre-revolutionary situation is a prolonged period of rising expectations economically and socially, and then collapse.
I would add weak leadership.
>You’ll have 30-40 MILLION young men willing to roll the dice on ANYTHING to get a wife, and the BIGGER RISK THE BETTER.
That I can believe. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the potential rebellion will materialize and go anywhere. It’s true that various rebellions have probably found recruits who were more eager to get their dicks blown because they weren’t using them anyway, but it’s also true that lots of guys have accepted far shittier situations without doing much about it. They need leadership (alphas almost by definition), and they need the current regime not to strangle that leadership in its cradle.
If I’m right, this means the US has more to worry about than China. In the US, a protester (think of the WTO protests 10 year ago) might get tear gassed, hit with a billy club, or put in jail overnight, which wins him points with girls who have green dreadlocks – in other words, he stands to gain by participating. In China, that same protester, well, there aren’t many girls where he’s going.
>You also don’t look at the elephant in the room — Arabia. Where nearly 30% of marriages are polygamous, the supplies Mohammed Atta types is basically inexhaustible.
And yet Arabia is mostly peaceful, except when idiot do-gooders from the West try to install democratic governments and protect human rights and crap like that – getting rid of the only thing that can keep these people in line, which is a strong government. In the countries where the US has not meddled, you might see a occasional terrorist bombing, but it’s not such a big deal in the great scheme of things. Note that these guys are blowing themselves up at the behest of guys like Osama bin Laden, who has the Islamically correct maximum of four wives, dozens of children, and, most likely, perpetual exhaustion combined with a face that looks like a glazed donut.
The thing to remember about sexbot tech is that it doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough. All this talk about how the sex market follows economics is correct, but it misses something, namely that the current sexual market has become a massive economic bubble. One of the things that happens during economic bubbles is investigation into alternatives (i.e. sexbots and artificial wombs). With women at every step increasing shaming language “good enough” for sexbots becomes that much less since women become less and less worth it.
The “pussy bubble” is the largest bubble is the history of man. Of course, when it does collapse women will have no idea what happened and just continue to blame men, guaranteeing the continued success of sexbots.
>You’re missing the point. A skewed sex ratio and polygamy must be occurring at the SAME TIME in order to breed societal unrest.
OK, I see what you mean now. It’s not just sexual deprivation, but sexual deprivation along with envy fueled by the sense on the part of the deprived that they deserve what they can’t have. Actually, in that case, the polygamy is the key. The sex ratio makes it worse, but polygamy alone is enough to shut guys out.
Sex is one of many things that people feel resentful about missing out on. Sometimes these resentments boil over into violence, and sometimes people live in quiet desperation and never do anything about it. China is going into uncharted territory. Never before has a country had such a lopsided sex ratio, excepting frontier and boomtown areas (UAE has nearly 2 men for every woman now – but those men are mostly self-selected immigrants). In ten years or so we’ll know what this really means.
As far as China goes, I’m still disinclined to bet against sufficiently iron-willed dictators when it comes to internal disputes. As far as America goes – well, I know some of these marginalized white guys, and they’re a bunch of pussies – though perhaps this could change if enough bad things happen to them.
>A third-world country can’t manage [Internet or laptop]. China is a third-world country and will remain one.
China’s per capita GDP is about $6000. A laptop would be less than 10% of one years pay. An Xbox would be 5%. A PS 2 would be less than 2% Since we’re talking about guys who are probably below the median income, you can double those figures, but they’re still within reach. Internet access is cheap. Already around 20% of Chinese are using it, and it will be exceedingly cheap once 4G wireless networks like Clearwire are mature.
>Leaderless rebellions are doomed to failure. It wouldn’t surprise me if pro-democracy elites of the Tiananmen type latch on to these single men as foot soldiers.
Yup. It’s better to look at elites than the bottom 30% of young men. Somewhere I read something by Peter Turchin that said that polygamy causes instability – not because of sexual envy, rather because you have all of these elite kids, most of whom aren’t going to get much of an inheritance and are not going to be able to get a prestigious position in life like dear old dad. Those are the ones who have the ability to cause real trouble, and would end up using the bare branches. He says this is why Middle Eastern dynasties have tended not to last long compared to European ones.
>(why doesn’t he have a blog like the rest of us?)
Malloy has posting privileges at GNXP, but he apparently prefers to write epic-length posts in week-old comment threads that only 3 people in the world are reading.
I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but I was thinking mainly of his evidence that sex ratio imbalances have not, in fact, led to problems – but then I found some more sources on my own that say that they do.
“Not to mention secret technology transfers from the Grey aliens.â€
Way to completely destroy your credibility.
__
Your not kidding, Ferdinand!
Interesting point, Whiskey.
So you are saying that essentially women are just as ‘polygamous’ as men, the difference being that they want to screw around with a much narrower range of prospects??
Whereas men will take it FROM ANY ‘HO’ that will ‘put out’.
No wonder women are as arrogant and conceited as they are today!
–
[...] Us women are more egocentric and narcissistic than we ever used to be, according to extensive research by two leading psychologists.
More of us have huge expectations of ourselves, our lives and everyone in them. We think the universe resolves around us, with a deluded sense of our own fabulousness, and believe we are cleverer, more talented and more attractive than we actually are.
We have trouble accepting criticism and extending empathy because we are so preoccupied with ourselves. [...]
[...] Of course, I joke, but researchers say there is growing evidence of an epidemic of ego-itis everywhere.
Once a traditionally male syndrome, narcissism generally begins at home and in schools, where children are praised excessively, often spoiled rotten and given the relentless message that they are ’special’. [...]
[...] But the sphere in which the signs of self-obsession are perhaps most obvious, and the consequences most immediately felt, is the dating one. [...]
[...] ‘They tend to be in their 30s, and there is a wide discrepancy between how they perceive themselves and how others see them.
‘They are often very plain, but see themselves as being absolutely fabulous, exceptional people.
‘They invariably reject every guy’s profile I send them. But if a guy rejects their profile, there is all hell to pay. There is disbelief. They are really saying: “I’m so fabulous. How dare he turn me down?â€
‘In the past few years, I’ve noticed a real sense of entitlement among this small group of women. The idea that a guy might not find them as amazing as they find themselves doesn’t enter their head. [...]
~ The ego epidemic and how more and more of us have an inflated sense of our own fabulousness | Mail Online
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1213212/The-ego-epidemic-more-inflated-sense-fabulousness.html
TFH,
I think the reason for the infrequency, thus far at least, has to do with what Ferdi calls the “bread and circuses” effect, basically offering diversions to the sexless Males, like porn, sports and video games, among other things. I think this can and will work for most guys, but as we both know, we’ll continue to get our fair share of Chos and Sodinis regardless…and that doesn’t even count guys like Atta, who come from a different area of the world.
O
I think he’s saying that there are multiple factors that impact behavior. The sex ratio has an impact in one direction, but there are other factors that have a stronger impact in other directions. So the net is still an increase in female promiscuity, despite the sex ratio, but the sex ratio being what it is post-college may prevent things from being even sluttier in that context.
Because of the nature of this comment, I’ll be cross-posting it to Ferdinand Bardamu’s In Mala Fide blog shortly.
Recently, at the aforementioned blog, there has taken place a somewhat heated debate, between the SocialCons, and Gamers. The pretext of course, was that the former was trying to “save” Western Civ, while the latter was adding fuel to the fires of its destruction. Both sides were, as one might imagine, impassioned for their side and cause.
But as I took a step back from that particular debate, and just looked at the “haters” of Game in general-in my experience far more Male than Female-one common theme emerges:
They all tend to be deeply adverse to the idea of Change.
Whether they be a dedicated SocialCon like Larry Auster, or a self-professed “sub-human male” like David Alexander, the biggest detractors detest Game, I think, because at its base is the core tenet of changing oneself as a prerequisite to success with Women. And that’s something that I’ve found, is deeply problematic to A LOT of Men.
It’s even here in the current and recurring “Fatty Girl” theme-threads – the focus is on changing someone else, instead of CHANGING ONESELF.
Why are so many Men afraid of Change?
I think there are several reasons for it.
One, because I think a lot of Men think that to change something about themselves, means in essence, that they are not good enough as they are. Well, guess what-they’d be right. As they currently stand, they are not good enough for Today’s Women, most of whom are saavy, edcuated and earn very good livings. In short, they don’t, nor shouldn’t, have to put up with what their moms and grandmoms had to put up with back in the day to land and keep a Man. It’s not good enough to simply be a Nice Guy with a Good Job. So what.
Today’s Guy has to offer more than a steady paycheck. Game helps a Man deliver the goods. Simple as that. And those who adapt to the new environment will do well. Those who don’t, won’t or can’t, will go the way of the Horse & Buggy.
The second reason why I think a lot of guys are so resistant to the core message of Game is due to Fear. Of course, admitting fear on any level is a Cardinal Sin amongst the Brotherhood, but every Man knows Fear at some point in his life, and truth be told, quite a bit often than he’d like to publicly admit. In this case, it’s a Fear of the Unknown, a major stumbling block for a lot of guys. Game asks its students to take quite a few leaps of faith, on what appear to be flimsy, silly or counterintuitive grounds-which, for quite a few Men, is a bridge too far. And that’s too bad. Because by not taking any chances, they choose not to truly live.
Roissy has said that Game can and will, change a Man. I’m a witness.
And so is one blogger formerly known as Beta Prime, of Beta Revolution; as of Sep 12, 2009 though, he has simply decided to call himself “Prime”, in honor of his discovery of Style’s book The Game. Seems he’s finally seen the Matrix. Welcome to the Real World.
My friend, The Fifth Horseman, has said a number of quite provocative things wrt Game; one that a Man with what he considers “Moderate Game Competence” is approximately worth about $2 MIL in quality of life, that such a Man has a skillset that cannot be taxed, seized or goes out of style; he can use it until the day he dies. The second thing TFH posits is that some 80% of all Men anywhere will never “get” Game, that the relative few who do, do so because they are what he terms OTBs-Outside The Box thinkers. People who can see the Matrix, if you will.
I think most Men won’t get Game because they refuse to change. And most Men refuse to change because they’re afraid of the unkown.
I’ve often said that for me, learning Game has given me a deeper appreciation and respect for Women, not the other way around, as some of my brothers have lamented. Because I can see a bit from their point of view various things.
Many Men recoil at the idea of “being someone else”, while never stopping to think the lengths so many Women go to, to become “someone else”. This can and does range from wearing uncomfortable shoes and sitting in a hairdresser’s chair for five hours or more, all the way to laying on a cosmetic surgeon’s table and literally risking her life to look good. The vast majority of Men out there, including those reading this now, including guys like Style and Mystery themselves, will NEVER undergo that many changes in order to have a chance at competing for the opposite sex’s attention. That’s something to keep in mind the next time some guy balks at making some relatively minor adjustments in his overall life situation in order not to windup with Chronic Blue Balls.
At some point, all the smokescreens, all the bullshit, really needs to stop. Guys have to understand that this aint Leave It To Beaver no more, if it ever was, nor are we going back. And instead of pissing and moaning about what we’ve lost, instead focus on what we’ve gained. I, for one, am GLAD that I no longer have to work at a job I HATE, just so I can have a decent shot at getting a Woman. Most of our dads and grandads didn’t have a choice in the matter, and most of them died, in many cases, premature deaths as a result. There have been studies done that show that Men tend to have the most heart attacks on the way to work Monday morning. Don’t know how true that is, but I know for a fact I’ve seen it happen, several times. That doesn’t have to happen to me.
And I rejoice in the fact that any Woman I’m with is with me because of ME, not because of what I do or make. In fact, I can and have been broke, and it didn’t make a difference in the ladies dept. Not. At. All. TFH was right. Game is worth more than a million dollars.
At least it is, to those who are not afraid of Change.
The Obsidian
Obsidian,
Absolutely. The Social cons are thus ‘conservatives’ who are afraid of change, and thus effectively against free-markets, since Game is the ultimate adaptation to the free-market, and the creative destruction of existing order that ensues.
That is why Posec and others say that a better solution is a ‘profound and punctilious study of history’ while being unwilling to, instead, adapt for the future.
Also, they cannot accept the change of Game, since they still have not grasped the first change – that feminism has provided women with a different set of rules, and so social cons playing by the old rules get left behind.
One cannot understand the need for Game before even realizing the changes that women have undergone prior to the emergence of Game. That is why social cons are so susceptible to boilerplate female shaming language. That is also why they strenuously deny that ‘LTR Game’ even exists. That one would need to learn things to sustain even an LTR is troubling to social cons, who cannot admit that it is harder to sustain an LTR now than 50 years ago.
The rate of change in society is increasing. This causes more and more stress to people, and fewer of them can cope.
“That is why Posec and others say that a better solution is a ‘profound and punctilious study of history’ while being unwilling to, instead, adapt for the future.”
It is possible to adapt for the future while also studying the past. History would explain how “feminism has provided women with a different set of rules” by examining the origins of that ideology and how it allowed “the changes that women have undergone prior to the emergence of Game” to happen at all.
“The Social cons are thus ‘conservatives’ who are afraid of change, and thus effectively against free-markets, since Game is the ultimate adaptation to the free-market, and the creative destruction of existing order that ensues.”
Any conservative ought to be wary of change. Obama was quite a political change so is he to be unhesitatingly embraced as an emanation of the free-market? Besides, the present sexual free-market, where women are autonomous and promiscuous, is upheld by leftism.
Wow, Obsidian. That was the equivalent of a dozen home runs, in a row.
“One, because I think a lot of Men think that to change something about themselves, means in essence, that they are not good enough as they are. Well, guess what-they’d be right. As they currently stand, they are not good enough for Today’s Women, most of whom are saavy, edcuated and earn very good livings. In short, they don’t, nor shouldn’t, have to put up with what their moms and grandmoms had to put up with back in the day to land and keep a Man. It’s not good enough to simply be a Nice Guy with a Good Job. So what.”
A less misanthropic version of a point I love to make. Most people don’t cut the mustard as they are. From my entry on Conor Friedersdorf:
“The neg is “terrible†because “it changes you?†That’s one of the side benefits of game – it makes you a better human being. This masturbatory worship of “being yourself†is one of the most sickening aspects of modern American society. You expect someone else to love you just because you are who you are? Screw you. Chances are, if you’re not a worthless sack of shit, you’re pretty close to being one. Most humans in their natural state are wretched beings, and it takes considerable work and effort to make ourselves into decent people. The increasing coarseness and stupidity of Americans is partly due to the fact that we’re expected to accept others as they are, “warts and all.†No. If you want anybody worth their skin to like you or love you, you get the warts removed or you cover them up.”
TFH, Ferdi,
Thanks, fellas. I think we should get together at some point. We have much to discuss.
O
Any conservative ought to be wary of change.
If so, then ‘conservative’ and ‘right-wing’ can be distinctly different, even opposing ideas on a number of issues. Until now, everyone considered the two to be the same.
Thus conservatives would have more in common with the ‘status-quo, big Union left’, than the ‘free-market, highly adaptive, entrepreneurial right’.
I think of right-wing as free-market, first and foremost. A free-market by necessity is always changing, and celebrates technological creative destruction and the inherent unpredictability of such. Left-wing is socialist and statist.
That is also why Game is highly attractive to the flexible, adaptive, entrepreneurial, self-improving thinker. The Outside the Box thinker. And it takes one to know one (as well as identify another as not being one).
“If so, then ‘conservative’ and ‘right-wing’ can be distinctly different, even opposing ideas on a number of issues. Until now, everyone considered the two to be the same.”
They were the same until the great confusion that ensued upon the neocon ascendancy and the statist surge under Republicans. It seems today that the term conservative is outmoded because it connotes a person who seeks to preserve the status quo, a social condition which is repugnant to those who are on the Right. I think so as well but I continue to use ‘conservative’ because it can signify thinking that predates the neocons. While the status quo may be intolerable, the Right-wing must refrain from being revolutionary and being unwittingly ensnared by Leftism, as radical revolutions are an outgrowth thereof.
The best sex ratio for all-round happiness as well as reproductive efficiency is a society of 60% women and 40% men.
That way, Alpha polygamy is normal, Betas have it good enough to get one wife, but Omegas still rightly lose out. It would also keep the divorce rate low, AND crime against women much lower than it currently is.
But God is a stupid Beta, which is why he didn’t design mammalian chromosomes to offer that ratio.
If the Boxer rebellion’s motive was gender imbalance due to hypergamy, then one of the explicit goals of the rebels would have been the institution of monogamy. Yet I cant find any history book mentioning this issue.
It seems today that the term conservative is outmoded because it connotes a person who seeks to preserve the status quo, a social condition which is repugnant to those who are on the Right. I think so as well but I continue to use ‘conservative’ because it can signify thinking that predates the neocons. While the status quo may be intolerable, the Right-wing must refrain from being revolutionary and being unwittingly ensnared by Leftism, as radical revolutions are an outgrowth thereof.
This is the rub from the right wing perspective, though, isn’t it?
I mean that you are quite right that conserving the status quo is not what the current right is about. It’s more about reaction/restoration — but using either of those words, in addition to the word “revolutionary”, is toxic, really. It leaves the right in a bind of sorts, I think, from the self-conceptual as well as the pragmatic points of view.
The Social cons are thus ‘conservatives’ who are afraid of change, and thus effectively against free-markets, since Game is the ultimate adaptation to the free-market, and the creative destruction of existing order that ensues.
TFH: You are far too celebratory of the new order. We may be forced to accept the new order as being real, perhaps even as being inevitable, but we should not jump from this to thinking that it is desirable.
The free market in economics is great because it harnesses individual self-interest in positive-sum activities. I make money by creating value, which helps me and helps other people too. We have nothing to fear from people seeking their self-interest in this positive-sum game.
At the same time, we have to watch out: it’s quite possible to end up with a market where negative-sum games predominate. Externalities are an obvious example. Anyway, see the extensive literature on market failure.
Now, is the new “free market” in sex a positive-sum game or a negative-sum game? Is Game a positive-sum game or a negative-sum game?
To the extent that Game results in self-improvement among men — higher confidence in all areas of life, better social skills, better self-esteem, etc. — it strikes me as an unqualified positive.
To the extent that Game results in status-seeking behavior among men, it strikes me as a mixed to negative bag. One of the prime lessons of Game is that the kind of “status” that women are looking for is *not* the wealth of a provider. Instead, a big part of what it encourages is social dominance. Or, more bluntly, boorish and antisocial behavior. This is a lose-lose proposition. The social dominance hierarchy is a zero-sum game — for one to rise, another must fall — and so any resources expended on trying to raise one’s status on it are resources wasted.
Now given the choice between “boorish behavior” and “not getting laid”, I, like many other men, will choose “boorish behavior”. (Granted, there is a huge middle ground between these extremes.) Great. Game wins. But we as a society lose.
That’s the key difference. Wealth-seeking in the economic market is a positive-sum game. Status-seeking in the sexual market is a negative-sum game.
In turn, this suggests that it’s OK for the economic market to be left largely unregulated, but that an unregulated sexual market would be a disaster for our society.
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