Game, Obesity And Men Dropping Out

Over at Cheap Chalupas Central, asdf comments on an assertion by Charles Murray, regarding conclusions from his book “Coming Apart”, that falling marriage rates and rising single mom rates are due solely or mostly to men dropping out and eschewing marital responsibility:

Murray: “If you are arguing that 22-year-old men are saying to their girlfriends, ‘I just need a job and then I’ll behave responsibly…’ Well, that’s just bullshit.”

There are a lot of men this is probably true for. Men know, instinctively, that unless they make more money than their spouse the relationships can never be serious or a family formed. So if they consider their chances of getting a good job slim they will likely not try to do the other things necessary to become a family man.

asdf is spot on. I like Charles Murray. I consider him a leading light in the anti-lie movement. But like a lot of sociologists examining trends in the functioning of the sexual market, he misses or glosses over the relevance of female hypergamy. I understand why feminists would want to avoid confronting the deepest, darkest desires of the female id (aka My Secret Vagina Tingle!), but I can’t see a reason why putative iconoclasts like Murray would ignore it except as a reflection of an instinctive white knight complex that so many beta males harbor.

If women are offering men — well, really, just coolbreeze alpha males — the sex for free, then those men will revert to taking the path of least resistance. They won’t “man up”, because they won’t need to. This reading of market forces implicates women more than it does men. Women are making sexual choices, and men are responding to those choices.

It’s not entirely a female-driven decision tree. Women, particularly women in lower socioeconomic strata, are refusing marriage to jobless layabouts. Men could choose to raise their mate value by getting jobs, however undignified the work. In the past, this “manning up” brought the desired result: those jobless men would improve their marital prospects by taking on work. But the overarching change in the current culture is a one-two punch to the guts of men, especially lower SES men, that damages their ability to raise their status (i.e., their sexual market value, or SMV) via employment:

1. More jobs require advanced skills that left side of the bell curve men don’t have the innate mental capacity to learn, and more jobs require female-oriented dispositions that most working class men don’t care to learn.

2. Women have priced themselves out of their dating pool of men by becoming economically independent. A woman’s entirely natural and reasonable hypergamous instinct (hey, she’s only got so many eggs to spare) to mate with higher status men than herself dooms her to limited prospects if her own status has gone up relative to the men in her dating milieu.

Men are intuitive creatures, as well, even if not as holistically intuitive as women. Men will respond to depressed status enhancement from work by retreating from the employment field. Men will respond to women’s sexual choices by adopting the behavior of those men whom women lavish with their discounted derrieres. In some mating circles, this means men will learn game (i.e. the charismatic arts) and try to catch spillover from the maglev pussy express that roars along during women’s contraceptively-abetted prime years from the late teens to late 20s.

A feedback loop of alpha cock carouseling, single mommery, video gaming and porn watching results which will, in time, begin to infiltrate the upper classes. You can only insulate yourself from dystopian trends for so long before the uruk-hai batter down your private school walls.

In short, no sociological theory into sex, marriage and family trends is complete without a long, hard look at female hypergamy, the one biomechanical force to rule them all, and its intersection with economic realities. The science is out there; when women become financially empowered, they begin to choose men based on criteria other than their ability to provide.

But that’s not all that Murray, et al are missing. I’m here to tell Murray and others perusing his findings that there is another, MASSIVE factor at work skewing the sexual market, and one that, just as unsurprisingly, gets almost no attention from the PC-soaked punditariat: female obesity.

Imagine you are an unmarried working class dude recently unemployed. You look around you and marvel at a sea of grotesquely misshapen fat women, rolls upon rolls of undulating flesh hiding stores of cheesy poofs, porky hellion spawn trailing their wakes, chins resting atop chins, bloated diabetic cankles stomping the Walmartian grounds like lumbering elephants. In some towns, close to 40% of the available single women are clinically OBESE.

This is obesity folks, not just overweight. Overweight women are physically repulsive, but obesity renders them monstrous. To clarify this assertion for the modern indoctrinated female reader: an obese woman is as sexually undesirable to men as a jobless, charmless, humorless, enfeebled, dull man is sexually undesirable to women.

So back to our realistic scenario: Our typical unmarried working class man surveys his cellulite-blasted kingdom (and it does not matter how fat he, himself, is, for fat men and thin men alike prefer the exquisite sight of slender female bodies), and he makes a quick hindbrain calculation. Does he bust his ass in a crappy service sector job doing women’s work for a shot at legally bound long-term commitment to a shuffling shoggoth dragging the bastard spawn of a hundred alpha males in tow, or does he say “fuck it” and turn to video games and porn featuring hot, thin chicks for his status and dopamine fix?

You see where this is heading. It’s entirely reasonable, and expected, that a lot of men would drop out of the intensified competition for the few remaining childless slender babes in a world full of fat asses, single moms, and fat assed single moms. And even among the small contingent of sexually appealing women, they make enough in government and HR paychecks to cover expenses plus gifts for their Skittles Men. What working stiff beta provider can compete on those terms?

Men aren’t refusing to man up; they’re doing exactly what women do, and what both sexes have done since time immemorial: they’re acting in their self-interests. Incentives matter. You’d think Murray, of all people, would know this.

Women are as complicit in the current deterioration of family structure as are men; and, in fact, because of women’s natural roles as sexual gatekeepers, I’d argue that women are more complicit than men. In the arena of sexual choice and fulfillment, men are, on average, followers, and women are leaders. This is not to say that men exercise no choice; only that they exercise less choice in sexual partners than do women. A double whammy of women’s financial independence restricting their mate choices, coupled with a female SMV-destroying obesity scourge restricting men’s mate choices, has compounded to help usher forth the dysgenic shitfest we as a nation find ourselves in today.

If the reigning paradigm is unsustainable but also immune to rectification, as I suspect it is, then perhaps the only solution now is to wait out a total collapse of elite authority. Tick tock…

ps this post hate-list approved.