Women’s Unrealistic Online Standards Are Like Ice Cream

A reader claims to note a trend in online personals:

[T]his is a trend I’ve noticed online, women who are QUITE comfortable with dating someone a handful of years younger but do NOT want anyone more than a few years older than they. What accounts for this trend? I mean, you could meet a 28 year old fat dude, or a 40 year old paleo-hardened guy who looks young. Why pre-emptively discount age like that? Most women I’ve met prefer someone same age or older.

I don’t know how widespread women’s aping of men’s standards in online ads is, because I don’t do online dating (at least not recently). However, from what I’ve read about the subject, most women’s preferences in online ads is for men older than they are; which makes sense, since age is a status marker for men in a way it isn’t for women. But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a small but growing contingent of cougars explicitly seeking younger men in what amounts to a mirror image of the universal trend for men to seek younger women, I believe I have an explanation.

First, keep in mind that it doesn’t matter what women demand in online ads, because outrageous standards that are far removed from reality are quickly weeded out of contention, leaving such delusional women sad and alone in real life. A lot of loser women who do the online thing subconsciously know they aren’t going to get laid by the man of their dreams, so they throw all reason and sobriety to the wind and just go hog wild laundry listing their fantasy criteria. For these women (admittedly greater in number now than every before in Western history), it’s more about ego catharsis than about actually meeting a man. ASCII therapy with a public audience of like-minded Medusas one-upping each other to the top of the entitlement heap.

Happily punching in a feverish list of ridiculous expectations in an online ad is the emotional equivalent of plopping in front of the TV (all shows cater to women except ‘Mythbusters’ and sports) and wolfing down a tub of ice cream. Feels SOOOOO good, even if it’s SOOOO bad for her health, looks and love life. Kinda makes a tidy little metaphor for civilizational decline.

Second, the few cougars who aren’t ugly, ragged or grossly obese but who left their prime years far behind in a haze of drunken binges and cock hopping, will sometimes recognize, on a primal level, that their odds of getting a good (read: high value, sort of charmingly dickish) man of the type they pined for at age 20 to commit to them in a loving long-term relationship are very low, and that their efforts are best spent putting out for horny younger men who will at least offer a short term thrill in the sack. This phenomenon — of older woman transforming into clitorally turgid quasi-men — is not common, certainly not nearly as common as the media would have you believe. But they do exist, and you can be pretty sure that most of them could cut glass with their jaws and suffocate small dogs with their jungly, frosted pube patches. Do note, as well, that as women age their testosterone levels rise in step with their lowered expectations, making the prospect of loveless one night stands more palatable to their still feminine egos.

Let’s just say that these horncat cougars are not exactly the sorts of women older men with options want at all, and they aren’t the sorts of women younger men with no options want for more than a few no muss no fuss bangs in which to drain their aching teen balls. Because younger men, just like older men, prefer the exquisite intimacies of young women. Cougars probably know this on some deep supraegotistical level, so they respond to their constrained sexual market choices by pretending to prefer the company of younger men when in reality all they’re trying to do is avoid the soul crushing loneliness that would inevitably result if they adhered to the standards of their real desires and had to face the brutal and merciless cruelty of the sexual market head on.

Women never really lose the ability to extrapolate a one night stand into some fantastical dramatic relationship story arc, so a cougar having a couple of perfunctory fucks with an indiscriminately horny college student in a dating slump can sometimes mean the difference for her between having the will to live for another day and resigning herself to gardening and obesity. It’s not an avenue most older single women are willing to take, but for a few desperate specimens with male-like sex drives and bodies that haven’t yet gone completely to shit, it beats suddenly and unceremoniously being dumped into the invisible fringes of forgotten wastelands. At least for a few more years.

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Bad News For Smart Nerds

You aren’t going to win over the hot babes with your profound pontifications.

Studies show the most attractive women have the highest standards for men in most every category surveyed — except intelligence.

Via Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?: Bodies, Behavior, and Brains–The Science Behind Sex, Love, & Attraction:

The evolutonary psychologists recruited a rotating team of male and female interviewers who paired up and evaluated more than two hundred married participants in the Midwest. Each subject was judged for physical attractiveness and assessed in three separate sessions for the factors they valued and insisted on in choosing a mate. The prettiest women had the highest standards — they wanted and expected their partners to be masculine, fit, physically attractive, loving, educated, a few years older than themselves, and desirous of home and children, with a high income potential. Surprising to the researchers there was only one quality beautiful women did not insist on more than plainer women did: intelligence.

No surprise here that the hottest women have the highest overall standards. Hot chicks and high status men have the sexual market options available to them to plausibly hold very high standards for themselves. What is perhaps interesting to the game neophyte and the nerd proud of his electric ham’s horsepower is the finding that beautiful women don’t place much stock in a man’s intelligence. If you can score that CEO gig with a 90 IQ and a psychopathic personality, women will still love you just as hard.

This study comports with the Chateau Dating Market Value Test for men at the top of the blog front page, which has a section on male intelligence that only added a point for smarts that were somewhat above average, and deducted a point for smarts that were in the stratosphere (where personality defects start to manifest.) Women may say they want a smart guy, but in my observation of couples in which the girl was hot, the guy was more usually kind of a douchey middle of the road mental mediocrity. But he had the right attitude, and alpha attitude trumps smarts any day of the week.

This is not to say smarts won’t help a man with women. A very smart man uses his gift to seduce, but also to conceal or ameliorate the most obvious vestiges of his mental prowess. In other words, since most chicks are average intelligence, it is paramount for the master seducer to calm women’s fears of being mentally outclassed by a wide enough margin that discomfort arises. All else equal, women like smart men, but they’ll choose cocky mediocrities over cloying geniuses every time. Nerds who hope to bank shot their encyclopedic knowledge of male-centric hobbies into hot babe pussy are shit out of luck.

<nasally whine>

“But why does she go for IDIOTS? I’m a Mensa member!”

</nasally whine>

Back to the masturbatorium with you, nerdling!

The usual caveats apply to self-assessment studies like this one: what women say they want in a man and what they actually go for are often enough not the same thing. I tend to frown upon self-reported sex surveys because of this psychological anomaly; however, I do think the conclusions can hint at, and reveal the shady contours of, women’s innermost desires. But your best teacher is still real world, direct experience.

As for why women, and particularly hot women, don’t much emphasize men’s intelligence as an attractiveness trait… well, it’s hard to say for certain, but I’d stick with the fundamental premise that our sexual desire is fully ensconced in the same hindbrain we had way back in the ancestral environment, where aloof, socially savvy and dominant men pounded pussy “Quest for Fire”-style in front of teary-eyed slabworms who looked upon the proceedings with visions of missile technology to take out the alphas dancing in their heads. And then, of course, the alphas stole credit for the new tech invented by the beta nerds, and still got the women.

There’s a lesson there.

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Should You Call Out A Girl’s Bad Behavior?

The question of whether to call out, or confront, a girl over any behavior of hers that is disrespectful to you is less cut-and-dried than it sounds. For instance, what do you do when you ask a girl out through text and she replies a day later? The he-man, tough guy traditionalists would say you don’t put up with shit from women, you be a man, and that means reprimanding women when they get out of line. Ok, great, but will that get you any closer to getting laid, which, remember, is your primary goal?

(He-men will say to that “Getting laid is less important than sticking up for your principles.” I’d tell them that having principles is fine up until the point those principles become recurring obstacles getting in the way of enjoying a satisfying love life. After which point it’s time to reevaluate your principles so that they’re geared to your personal advantage.)

Back to the scenario of the girl who texts a day late. It just so happens that I put the “calling out” theory to the test about four years ago when I went through a string of dates and flings with about fifteen girls in two months. Three of the girls totally flaked on me: two cancelled a first date at the last minute and one stood me up. A fourth girl took forever to reply to my texts. I was pissed at these flakes and was searching for a fail-safe method to deal with them and bolster my dignity in the process. At that time, I had been hearing a lot from a couple of naturals I knew who claimed that they never hesitated to call girls out on their shitty behavior. They recommended I do the same. Up till then, I was fairly content to just ignore or tease girls when they acted out their female flake algorithm.

To the two girls who cancelled at the last minute, I texted one and left a voicemail with the other expressing my displeasure along the lines of (paraphrasing) “My time is valuable. Last minute blow-offs are not cool.” To the girl who stood me up, I left an angrier text telling her not to make plans if she wasn’t going to see them through. The fourth girl who waited forever to reply to my texts got this in response: “I don’t hang with girls who can’t be bothered to text back in a reasonable time frame.”

The idea here was to rattle the girls with a strong, but non-needy, alpha display that they normally didn’t experience from most men they flaked on. In theory, it sounded plausible. However, in practice it was a total failure. None of the girls ever replied to my stern rebukes.

Conclusion: disciplining prospects = failed game.

Early in the seduction process, before you have cemented the bond with a few nights of fuckfare, stern paternal rebukes, however much delivered from a position of non-neediness, will turn girls off. A girl will never — I mean NEVER — accept that she bears responsiblity for her poor behavior. I don’t care if her fucking life is on the line, she’ll find a way to excuse her actions. Calling an inconsiderate girl out will only add pellets to her hamster’s food dish, and she’ll happily rationalize your scolding so that her decision to flake seems like a good one to her: “Wow, that guy is weird. Good thing we didn’t meet up.”

If you want to blow up any bridges to sex for the thrill of chastising a girl when she’s acting like a bitch, and for helping other guys out who might have to deal with her in the future, I say go for it. I suggest brutally dressing a girl down in front of a group of her friends, or in a public place. “Did your parents raise you to be this way?” is a good line that’ll shut most shrikes up.

But I wouldn’t make a habit of it. The best way to handle misbehaving, flaky girls that most consistently results in furthering positive interactions with the girls (should you choose to further them) is to do the following, in no specific order of effectiveness:

– Ignore
– Tease
– Misdirect
– Demote

Here are some examples of the above methods.

Ignore:
Self-explanatory. A girl texts you a day later, you don’t immediately reply, and you don’t let her know that her tardiness even registered in your consciousness. You act like this is just how girls are, and they deserve no better in return. Proceed as if nothing is wrong.

Tease:
“-10 points for lack of prompt reply. you’re losing me. you got ground to make up.” Also see this post for more examples of teasing a girl to reverse her flaking.

Misdirect:
“What was this about?” Forces girl to explain the context of her reply, which reframes back in your favor. Another good misdirection involves answering as if you were talking to a different girl, which will compel her to figure out what you mean: “Ok, i’ll drop my stuff off at your place later”, to which she will likely ask “what?” and then you reply “my mistake. what’s up?” (credit: Lara).

Demote:
(credit: YaReally) I wouldn’t call her out I’d just act as if I have 10 playboy models on the go and simply reply “sorry too slow lol made other plans. Next time” and then not respond for a few days. That teaches the lesson of “don’t dick around” without coming off insecure and angry.

I can say with a good degree of assurance that calling girls out for crappy behavior is counter-productive in the early stages of a seduction or dating trajectory. It might make you feel better, but it won’t pry open many vaginas. It’s a different story once you’ve been sexing a girl or are in a relationship; at that stage of the fuck cycle, you should establish your dominance when she starts pulling shit on you to test your alpha mettle. Bemused mastery is the alpha attitude women love, and there isn’t much room for indignant anger in that attitude. Especially at the beginning, when neither of you knows each other very well.

If you act like the typical shit that girls pull gets to you, then she’ll think (rightly) that you don’t have much experience with women.

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The Reason Beta Males Pedestalize Women

Why do so many betas harbor gauzy delusions about female sexual nature? Why are monogamously inclined traditionalists, manginas and white knighters so quick to sanctify women and paint their misbehavior in rose-colored hues while simultaneously offering unconditional support and shitlapping amen choruses for women when they accuse men of committing a litany of hackneyed misdeeds?

I’m here to provide what I believe is the most parsimonious answer to this riddle:

Beta males are rarely in a position to witness the worst of women.

Put yourself in the typical beta male’s shoes. He spends a goodly chunk of his horniest years — teens to mid 20s — when holes in watermelons look like acceptable vagina substitutes, pining for ethereal hot chicks who don’t pay him a lick of attention as they swoop by him on a cloud of incandescent purity. He sees them only from afar, where his imagination is free to feverishly fill in the gaps with only the most pleasant assumptions about his dreamgirls. When the rare communication does occur, she is as nice and kind as a saint to him. He is too smitten to recognize the hint of pity and condescension laced in her polite chat.

Later, usually college, he fumbles his way through awkward social interactions with plainer janes, the great majority of which end up with him being used for emotional sponging and ball-twisting, torturous friendships. All these girls are exceedingly, superficially kind to him because, after all, why look a gift herb in the mouth? A girl loves beta male attention, as long as it’s platonic, on her terms, extractive, and focused on feeding her ego. Naturally, these girl-friends never talk about their sex lives with the beta, never reveal what really goes on behind closed doors, and never invite the beta to join them on any adventures that really matter to him. Contrary to media popularization, betas rarely hear “This one time, at band camp…” from girls in their social circles. What they often hear instead are requests for help with term papers.

Then, due more to a combination of luck and (ovulation cycle) timing rather than bold effort or charm, the inoffensive beta male might find himself in a fledgling relationship with some semi-cute shut-in nearly as awkward as he and already past her beauty prime. She really likes him and treats him well… more sincerely than the cuter girls who made a sport of cockteasing him at any rate… but like ‘Rat’ Ratner from ‘Fast Times’, he labors for months and months waiting patiently for her to put out. For reasons beyond the beta’s ken, she is an extremely modest girl. He interprets her chasteness as evidence of women’s all-round goodness and saintliness, but of course he is sorta pissed off that she won’t satisfy him without months of “getting to know each other” warming up. When he finally does bust that cherry, after painful years wandering the celibate desert, it’s all he can do to stop himself mentally affixing a halo atop his girlfriend’s head, and pronouncing all women the undistilled essence of goodness.

A few pitiable betas, like those with bitch tits, horizontally stretched navels, and receding chins who wear ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirts, get trapped in sporadically sexual relationships with manjawed femcunts at grad school, mostly because long-winded bull sessions among their kind occasionally spin up enough libidinous energy to resolve in PBR-fueled late night groping, which is promptly regretted and/or rationalized by one or both parties the next morning, usually the girl.

Eventually, the beta male gets married, and his lack of experience — one to three lifetime “partners” (and I use the term loosely) is the norm — has cultivated in him a strong inability to read women’s signals, which sometimes leads him into blissful ignorance where infidelities can linger for years unnoticed, and “Surprise! I have a divorce paper!” gambits accost him like hammer blows to the head. Mostly, though, he floats through his marriage thinking the best of his wife, and worst of himself should feelings turn sour or the sex dry up. Because this is just what men are supposed to do when a woman is less than happy: take the blame. Women are the weaker sex, after all.

So you see, in the final analysis, it is very likely, by dint of the beta male’s ignorance, inexperience and habituated veneration of women and reflexive indulgence of women’s motives, that his view of women is severely constricted, child-like in its naivete. The beta male is not privy to what Tyler Durden famously called the secret society of women. He was never invited, and he was never apprised of the secret society’s goings-on by any woman in his life. He lives in a pinched world with only a peephole to the wonders beyond, given him not by insight but by stumbling into depravity or by the good grace of a sympathetic alpha male. As far as he knows, women don’t have much sex, and they are very nice and polite most of the time.

The beta male pedestalizes women because one, that’s all women have deigned to show him of their sexual inner world, and two, he cannot bear the contrary thought, affirming and cementing as it does his lackluster place on the sexual totem pole. (He is mired down in the sticky pubes, his vision obscured, while alphas dance joyously at the tip of the glans.)

As for the women, those few who have not experienced the thrill of the alpha male often are nearly as chaste as the beta imagines, because they have never been tempted. All they know are a parade of beta males, whom they lash out at occasionally for unwittingly stifling their truest desires, but who, for the most part, they treat in a nontoxic manner that buttresses heavenly notions about their secretive natures. A woman is ever aware of the precariousness of her reputation, and this goes double in rural outposts of heavy religiosity.

And so the beta male has his crimped worldview confirmed by the asexual, undersexual women in his life. But should he ever step outside his empillowed existence… take that daring step into the gritty, grimy world where the female id roams free across fruited plains of phalluses… screw up the courage of heart to face head-on the previously unimaginable… he will find that a bigger universe has existed all along, enveloping the bubble of his life, surging with unleashed energies just out of his reach like uterine aurorae, and if his soul isn’t killed dead right then from shock, he’ll cross the boundary into this new world — he won’t really have a choice — and never look back.

Nor ever again blindly assume the purest of women’s motivations. The stronger among them do with this newfound knowledge the following: acknowledge, accept, incorporate, delimit. He rules his knowledge, but he does not let it rule him.

Such boundary crossing is rare. The beta and alpha male worlds are almost as separate and distinct now as they have been since the dawn of anonymous urban living. Though that is changing.

If betas knew what alphas experience, it would blow their minds. Completely, utterly. Out from under the judgmental Eye of Proper Society, equipped with the requisite beauty to pay the price of admission, the wild female libido is insatiable, crass, debased. It is willing to surrender to the most vile sexual plunderings, screaming in ecstatic pleasure at every enthusiastically welcome violation. Women of the sweetest daytime dispositions and most innocent countenances — smartly coifed women in demure business suits who expound drily on cost-revenue projections and wait tidily in lines for healthy lunch alternatives — will unleash vaginal hell in the arms of alpha lovers, squirting glorious love over dominant men who swap them like baseball cards, presenting like beasts in heat for throbbing units in dank dive bar restrooms, casually spreading as far as they can go in locked office rooms for illicit lovers, giggling in breathy whispers in their lovers’ ear about the clear and present danger of getting caught, deliberately effusing a fake sorrow for the cheated-on boyfriend back home unawares, bemusing wistfully about a history of letting alpha lovers snort coke off her ass while claiming another headache to evade hubby’s entreaties.

Beta males never see this world. To them, it doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly how women want it.

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Women Understand the Concept of Hand

When privy to the secretive, gated world of women, you learn that the idea of relationship leverage — aka “having hand” — is as well-known and accepted among women as it is among pickup artists and naturals. Women are no innocent angels, passively idling their time like pretty mannequins until a good man sweeps them off their feet. Oh no, they are as devious as any hardcore male player with hundreds of notches. The difference is that women channel their deviousness into screening for alpha males and steering relationships in the direction (marriage) they want them to go in. Your average beta male channels his manipulative tactics — or what passes for them — into impressing girls on the first few dates. After that, he’s on auto-pilot. Against the combined relationship management weaponry of your typical woman, the beta male stands no chance.

Having hand is, in fact, so central to women’s interests, that when god created woman, he said “Let there be hand!” And there was. I swear, it’s in the Bible.

Case in point. I was chatting with a girl who was working the angle with some putatively high value guy she likes, but with whom (according to her) she had not yet banged, or even formally dated. They had met at a party, and it had been all texting since then.

So she was showing me text messages that she exchanged with him earlier in the day, hoping for my advice. The text ratio was 4:1 against her favor (i.e., she sent four to every one of his). She thought it would be a good idea to sext him — send him racy sexual texts — and she later admitted that the reason for the sexts was to “get hand” over him by teasing him about what he was missing, and getting him to dance to her tune. Apparently, she has a history of cockteasing beta males into lavishing attention and glorious pursuit on her.

I read one of her sext exchanges.

HER: well we will c what is waiting for us next time. could b good. im wearing those kneehighs u said u liked.

[ten minutes later, after no immediate response]

HER: and fyi, i might be a voyeur. but dont get any ideas.

[twenty minutes later, after no reply]

HER: sorry if im teasing u. im a flirty girl.

[two hours passed]

HIM: Okay!

And he never responded again that night.

That, my friends, is a pure alpha move. She dropped the stinky, sweaty, sexy beta bait in the form of sexts, hoping he’d bite (which is something most men would do), and instead he returned fire with a hilariously ambiguous (and glibly spelled-out) “Okay!”. What’s a girl to make of this? Well, everything. And nothing. And then everything again. That one word text sent her hamster spinning so fast its fur was flying out in tufts. Naturally, she wanted to know my opinion.

“Where should I go with this? What does it mean?”

“It means he’s dating other women and isn’t desperate for sex, so you can’t use that on him. Or he knows how to play the game.”

“But I wasn’t playing a game!”

“Yes you were. You just don’t realize it.”

“So now what?”

“You’re texting him way too much. Every text you send him that he doesn’t reply to makes him think less of you. Stand down. No man who writes ‘okay’ deserves your reply. No more texting, even if it means you never see him again.”

“That’s going to be tough to do. We really hit it off.”

“Sounds like you hit it off with a player!”

“You think he’s a player? Sheesh, yeah, he probably is.”

“Yup. Trust me on this. Stop contacting him from here on out. Then there’s a good chance he’ll reach out to you. If that happens, you’re back in the driver’s seat. You’re back to having hand.”

“Oh, yes, every woman wants to have hand!”

“You bet.”

[lingering high five]

***

Women are quite well aware of the power of having hand, and just about everything a woman does in a dating or relationship context that you suspect is a tactic designed to give her hand, IS a tactic to give her hand, whether intentional or subconsciously coincidental. The good news for my super manly male readers is that men’s hand is FAR MORE DEVASTATING than women’s hand, because men so rarely use, or even comprehend, the concept of having hand. So when a man flips the seduction script and uses the same hand-getting tactics on women, the surprising force of it hits a woman’s ego, superego and id so hard her vagina blossoms like a field of spring tulips after a rainstorm.

I don’t know if my female friend above eventually sealed the deal with her lust interest, but I can tell you with certainty that had he wanted to, Mr. ‘Okay!’ could have easily sealed the deal with her. And at his leisure, on his time, under his discretion. Because his pimp hand was strong. And one strong pimp hand trumps a hundred daintier ho hands.

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Using Women For Ego Boosts

It’s a common complaint heard from the insufferably self-absorbed and eternally single SWPL chick:

“Why didn’t he call?”

Ladies, I’m here to tell you why that guy didn’t call. You’re not gonna like it. Most likely, he was just using you for an ego boost.

Yeah, some guys don’t call back because they’re afraid they’ll be rejected on a first “formal” date. Or the momentum was lost, and he thinks in your sobriety you’ll be less open to meeting again. We call these guys lesser betas.

Fact is, most men don’t think that way. If a guy gets your number, and he’s interested (i.e., he finds you hot enough to fuck and possibly date) and single, he’s going to call you.

I’ve seen attack bitches burning off the shoulder of Club Orion, and thanks to these experiences I can say pretty confidently that men will often not call back because all they wanted was the instant ego boost of a woman’s sexual interest, usually manifest as a phone number close or a make-out. (For the players, a one night stand that precludes any extra dating investment is their idea of a quick ego fix, not to mention pleasure fix.)

If a man doesn’t call you back, it’s because

a) he’s already dating someone and just wanted to see if he still has the pickup magic, or

b) he’s already dating someone but you aren’t hot enough to risk getting caught cheating, or

c) you were a confidence-building stepping stone to test out his game for use on hotter chicks.

That’s pretty much it.

Exceptions to the above rules exist. Some men won’t call back because they didn’t know how to end the conversation with you when you first met, and felt obligated to ask for your number. This is what true niceguys do when they aren’t interested in you. Jerks will never labor under an obligation to number close girls they don’t feel inspired to fuck. The jerk will simply walk away when he’s tired of your witty banter.

Other men are so crippled with anxiety and self-doubt that they frequently defer to thinking the number close ended on a weak note, and won’t risk calling back when a video game with instant status assuaging leveling is a mere chair roll across the floor.

But mostly, when a man doesn’t call you back it’s because you didn’t meet the threshold of further pursuit, but you did meet the threshold for boosting his ego. So the next time you’re staring at your silent phone, remember to think to yourself “Yes, it’s me, not him. I’m not hot enough for him.” If it helps the awful-tasting medicine go down, try to imagine this cruel woman-baiting by egotistical men as the analogue of you ladies outrageously flirting with beta males you have no intention of fucking for the ego thrill of their courtly supplication.

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Charles Murray’s One-Sided Shaming

Charles Murray addresses critics of his book “Coming Apart: The State of a Politically Acceptable Bell Curve” who complain that he didn’t focus enough on economic factors driving the disintegration of lower class whites. He presents data in this Open Borders Journal article that shows working class men have been dropping out of the job market even during good times.

It is true that unionized jobs at the major manufacturers provided generous wages in 1960. But they didn’t drive the overall wage level in the working class. In the 1960 census, the mean annual earnings of white males ages 30 to 49 who were in working-class occupations (expressed in 2010 dollars) was $33,302. In 2010, the parallel figure from the Current Population Survey was $36,966—more than $3,000 higher than the 1960 mean, using the identical definition of working-class occupations.

This occurred despite the decline of private-sector unions, globalization, and all the other changes in the labor market. What’s more, this figure doesn’t include additional income from the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit now enjoyed by those making the low end of working-class wages.

If the pay level in 1960 represented a family wage, there was still a family wage in 2010. And yet, just 48% of working-class whites ages 30 to 49 were married in 2010, down from 84% in 1960.

I don’t have an argument with his economic numbers, although I think he probably understates the role automation, immigration and skill prerequisite inflation have had in the gutting of working class men’s job prospects and ability to merge seamlessly into functional family formation.

Murray is closer to the truth than a lot of his critics are when he blames cultural factors and bad policy for the dysfunction of the left side of the bell curve. Here he is on that:

If changes in the labor market don’t explain the development of the new lower class, what does? My own explanation is no secret. In my 1984 book “Losing Ground,” I put the blame on our growing welfare state and the perverse incentives that it created. I also have argued that the increasing economic independence of women, who flooded into the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s, played an important role.

Simplifying somewhat, here’s my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear. The sexual revolution exacerbated the situation, making it easy for [ed: alpha] men to get sex without bothering to get married. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.

Right-o! The Chateau has been beating a similar drum for quite a while now, so it’s nice to hear a quasi-mainstream pundit embrace the same sordid maxims bolted to the oaken doors, Luther-like, at Chez Heartiste. But then, just when you think the ugly truth has seeped into every corpuscle of the respectable class, a huge backpedal slams the brakes on enlightenment.

The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn’t even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren’t working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.

To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up. Don’t call them “demoralized.” Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren’t feckless with respect. Recognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor’s college-educated son who won’t take a “demeaning” job. Be willing to say so.

This sounds like a familiar refrain. Say it with me, folks. It’s time for men to…. wait for it…. hold…. hoooooold….. HOOOOOOOOLLD…..

Man up!

Bill Bennett would be proud.

How absolutely brave… brave, I say!… of Murray to apportion most of the blame for the current state of affairs to men. Or, in this case, white men. This will surely win him lots of enemies amongst the feminists and social elites whose cocktail party invitations he haughtily throws in the trash in righteous, principled fury.

Look, I have no problem with shaming men who don’t want to work, or who can’t muster the motivation to at least try to find work. It’s not like the existence of self-destructive male bums is unheard of. But Murray DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS his proposed shaming solution with his explanation for the bleak male employment scenario just a few paragraphs above in the very same article! Once more:

Simplifying somewhat, here’s my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear.

Where, pray tell, in that explanation does it follow that men are primarily to blame for their poor employment numbers? Doesn’t the exact opposite conclusion — that women’s mate choices are to blame for men dropping out — seem more obvious? Shouldn’t it be the case then, that single working women on the fast track to single motherhood and alpha cock carouseling are the ones deserving of shame?

Murray, like most pundits, is deathly afraid of confronting female hypergamy. For to confront it in full, with all the consequences that entails, would mean arousing the ire of every dim-witted, aggressively stupid feminist, mangina and talk show snarktard with a sympathetic media at its instant disposal. To confront female hypergamy would be to confront the very foundational rationale for the sexual revolution and the fifty year program to equalize social and economic outcomes between men and women.

I have spent time in SWPL-land and in proleville, and I can tell you the forces shaping our ongoing dysgenia are spearheaded by women’s sexual market choices. It isn’t a conscious campaign of male disenfranchisement; it’s an emergent one. Men, like men always do, are simply reacting to the conditions set on the ground by women.

Murray sees this, but doesn’t run with it. Women’s improved employment numbers, education and earning power (some of it contributed by government largesse) has had the effect of SHRINKING their acceptable dating pool. Material resources and occupational status are one way women judge men’s mate worthiness (not the only way, but the one way that viscerally matters to most beta males), and the innate female sexual disposition to be attracted — ANIMALISTICALLY ATTRACTED — to men with higher status and more resources than themselves necessarily means that financially independent women and government-assisted women are going to find fewer men in their social milieu attractive.

Result? Men slowly discover that the effort to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness that Murray lambasts is actually a rational male response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.

And make no mistake, the jerks are exactly to whom women, particularly lower class women, are dispensing their favors. When earning power and employment as a male attractiveness criteria has been subconsciously debased by women who don’t need male provisions, then women will shift their sexual adaptation algorithm to sexy cads for their thrills and romantic chills.

Knowing this, it makes more sense to shame women equally as vigorously as one shames men for social and family breakdown. In fact, as I have argued, if a prosperous, civilized, self-reliant society is your goal it actually makes sense to shame women MORE than men, because women are the gatekeepers of sex, and as such their combined sexual marketplace decisions carry more import in the direction the culture takes.

So to Murray, I would say this: rewrite your program of shaming so that it better reflects reality, the VERY REALITY you yourself identified. In descending order of lethality, your death star powered shaming ray should designate the following targets:

Shame women who actively try to have bastard hellion spawn out of wedlock. “Oh, the child won’t have a father around?” BACKTURN

Shame women with kids from multiple fathers. “Half sister?” BACKTURN

Shame women who get fat and thus make themselves unattractive to men and artificially tighten the dating market. “Those jeans are a little small on you.” BACKTURN

Shame women who date jerks. “Oh, so the guy you’re seeing has no job and gave you Skittles for your birthday?” BACKTURN

Shame sluts. “Nice tramp stamp. Just the thing to make a guy want to marry you.” BACKTURN

Shame eat, pray, love SWPL divorcees. “Was it worth destroying your kids’ emotional health for a romp with Alfonso?” BACKTURN

Shame Samantha types whose weekly highlight is Sunday brunch mimosas. “In real life, Samantha dies alone with her cats nibbling on her flesh for sustenance.” BACKTURN

Shame aging single cougars. “You should really consider settling for a nice, reliable man. You’re not getting any younger, you know.” BACKTURN

Shame “empowered”, overeducated women who wave their degrees around men like it matters. “You’ve just made it harder on yourself to find love.” BACKTURN

Only after you’ve shamed the above basket cases should you move on to shaming jobless, video gaming and porn watching men.

Although it would go a long way toward fixing the problem with lower class men and women’s reluctance to marry them, I don’t see women being persuaded out of the job market any time soon. Never mind the feminists, the whole consumerist regime depends on women working and spending their discretionary cash on useless baubles. The culture will sooner devolve into a dystopian hellscape than women will quit their HR jobs en masse and give up a portion of their frivolous spendthrift ways.

Not to say something can’t be done. We can start with stopping the encouragement and advocacy of women’s economic advancement. There’s no need to kick women out of the cubicle. Just stop affirmative action for women, stop special programs for women (Title IX), stop pushing them down career paths, and stop making them feel like victims of an imaginary patriarchy. Little steps like this will add up in a big way.

Oh, and ruthlessly mock feminist ideology whenever you get the chance. Bonus: it’s fun for the whole family!

Murray ends on this note:

It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn’t make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on.

I’m a big proponent of non-judgmentalism, but as a metaphysical riddle, isn’t disrespect going to necessarily disproportionately fall on the losers in life? Do these losers really “deserve” their disrespect? There is plenty of evidence that positive character traits like ambition, conscientiousness, diligence, future time orientation, lawfulness and yes, even morality, are genetically influenced and that some people have more of these beneficial genes than other people. The working class likely has a higher concentration of deleterious genes (deleterious in the context of a modern economy) than does the SWPL class.

As a practical matter, though, Murray is right. You can’t have a well-oiled, functioning, K-selected society if you’re not willing to call out the losers for their dumb choices because you think they can’t help themselves, they were born that way. This is really the grand bargain that the fortunate have to make with their moral worldview. “Do as I say, even if you can’t do it as easily as I do.”

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