Polyamory Is Disguised Polygamy

The Man Who Was once wrote:

The basic problem with the Sex at Dawn thesis is that I just don’t see how it gets around two problems. First, men who get more than their share of sex and who exclude other men will pass on more of their genes. Second, women who only mate with the top males will get higher quality genes for their offspring which means they are more likely to survive and reproduce. Given those Darwinian incentives I don’t see how polyamoury is anything other than a disguised version of polygamy.

To get around this problem one would have to posit some kind of group selection, but that opens up a whole thorny nest of problems. While I find some of the group selectionist ideas of D.S. Wilson rather intriguing, especially as regards religion, I remain extremely skeptical, as the objections to group selection put forward by George Williams and others are really quite devastating. There would have to be some sort of really strong mechanism for punishing cheaters and equally distributing the sex for it to work and I just haven’t seen any evidence put forward of such a mechanism in our evolutionary past.

I’ve cast a jaundiced eye at the Sex at Dawn thesis in this post. The commenter above is onto something. Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy. Multitudinously and concurrently. Polyamory cheerleaders, like Christopher Ryan, note the shape of our penis heads and go on to weave a happy utopia of free love where all the men and all the women get their rocks off whenever and however they wish, like the bonobos (who, by the way, are territorially squeezed compared to their more prodigiously successful chimp cousins). But he has to ignore female hypergamous mate choice and male jealousy to concoct this vision of a peaceful hedonist paradise.

The reality would be considerably darker; women would still want to bang the alpha, leaving the beta male out in the cold, clawing and scratching for rode-worn scraps, but now shackled with the obligation to help provide for kids that are likely not his own. What then happens is a complete breakdown in male investment in women and families. Men spend their working hours battling it out in vast, unproductive “Who’s the Sexiest?” competitions for privileged access to a veritable harem of vaj. If you think this is a recipe for creating and sustaining an advanced modern society filled with creature comforts, I have a grass hut somewhere in the Congo to sell you.

How, in a polyamorous society, are you going to arrange things so that women dispense their pussy equitably among high and low status men? As noted by the commenter, this would require some major group selection modulated behavior to be workable; a woman would fuck for the survival of the tribe, instead of the survival of her offspring. That would be awfully magnanimous of her! It’s like arranging a society where men are happy to boff fat, old and ugly chicks with equal attention to romantic detail that they give the hot young babes.

If anything, a culturally endorsed polyamorous dating market that virtually guaranteed a steady provider payout for disloyal, promiscuous women and their bastard spawn would help resolve the female tension for male commitment and good male genes in favor of the latter. Betas would be sexually shunned even more than they are now. LJBFing and undignified platonic beta orbiting would reach epic proportions. This blog would be classified as treason against the state and an incitement to rebellion and be shut down.

A happy hippie free love egalitarian commune it would not be. Widespread polyamorous practice where childrearing is done by the village and all men, uncertain of paternity, contribute resources to the well-being of the single moms and their unholy bastard squirtage, will not convince women to equally distribute their sexual favors among the men. Just the opposite; it would liberate women to single-mindedly pursue the few alphas in their purview, knowing full well that a beta blood-latticed safety net exists to protect them from destitution. In other words, socially-sanctioned and state-supported polyamory lets women have their cake and eat it, too. The only trade-off is that they will have to share scarce high value lovers with other women. Yet as any tour of a college campus will demonstrate, most women in their prime would prefer to share an alpha stud than extract commitment from a beta schlub. Until the wall looms, that is. Heh.

But why speculate? We now have evidence of what happened to polyamorous early human ancestors in the distant past — they went extinct.

The team found that the fossil finger ratios of Neanderthals, and early members of the human species, were lower than most living humans, which suggests that they had been exposed to high levels of prenatal androgens. This indicates that early humans were likely to be more competitive and promiscuous than people today. […]

Emma Nelson, from the University of Liverpool’s School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, explains: “It is believed that prenatal androgens affect the genes responsible for the development of fingers, toes and the reproductive system. We have recently shown that promiscuous primate species have low index to ring finger ratios, while monogamous species have high ratios. We used this information to estimate the social behaviour of extinct apes and hominins. Although the fossil record is limited for this period, and more fossils are needed to confirm our findings, this method could prove to be an exciting new way of understanding how our social behaviour has evolved.”

Until we can reengineer hypergamy out of women’s hindbrains, advocacy for unconstrained polyamory in all but the most backward societies is DOA.

So what does nonviolent, consensual polyamory look like in modern real life when it’s purposefully tried? (No, it’s not SWPL. Even in that hothouse culture the chicks swarm to the top hipsters.) Think aging beta boomers milking their last ounce of testosterone by swapping barren hag wives. It’s best summed up in the following Chateau maxim:

Maxim #109: Consensual polyamory is a contrived hookup service for undesirable sexual market rejects.

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The Elusive 10: Found!

The votes have been tallied and the verdict is in:

Paulina Porizkova was the only babe (in her prime) who got a plurality of 10 votes. Zeta Prime (nee Catherine Zeta Jones) came in a close second with a bare plurality of 9 votes edging out her 10 votes. Here is a better photo of the young Paulina:

Great Zeus’ beard. Her body may be a little too lithe for some of you, uh… drum and bass butt lovers, but there’s no denying her face is perfection. It simply doesn’t get any better than her when she was young. There may be equally beautiful women, but you’d have to search high and low to find a woman objectively *better* looking. Ric Ocasek, inarguably one of the ugliest men in the world, got to bang this ethereal beauty during her prime. He continues monopolizing her pussy today.

Look at their properly polarized body language. She truly loves him. And he her.

From Wikipedia:

Ric has been married three times; he married early in life, but divorced and was married to his second wife, Suzanne Ocasek in 1984. Ric was still married to Suzanne when he made the acquaintance of model Paulina Porizkova during filming of the music video for The Cars’ song “Drive” (directed by Timothy Hutton). At that time, Porizkova was just 19 years old and Ocasek was 35.

Five years after meeting, in 1989, Ocasek and Porizkova married. This was Ocasek’s third marriage, and Porizkova’s first. In 2009, the couple celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary and their 25th anniversary since they first met. Ocasek has a total of six sons, two from each of his three marriages.

Ric Ocasek is a super alpha. He has spread his seed far and wide, and enjoys the love of a beautiful woman. His fame, voice and catchy pop tunes whisked away his ugliness. No ugly woman with talent and fame can claim the same compensating appeal to men. Kathy Bates, a great actress with an ugly face and a fat body, once went on Letterman and lamented the trouble she had meeting men despite the advantages of her money and fame.

Ocasek hit the jackpot with Porizkova, which is why their marriage endures today after 25 years together. He really can’t do much better. Although, as Porizkova ages — and admittedly Porizkova started off her aging trajectory with such an overabundance of beauty that it might take a decade or two longer than the average woman for her to hit the wall — Ric may start feeling that old feeling again and eyeing little sluts with bad intent. I doubt he’d need much more game than taking a chick home and popping in one of his circa 1980s music videos.

Let Ric’s and Paulina’s love be a lesson, ladies. If you want a shot at winning commitment from an ugly-ass rock star, you had better be a 10 with a heart of gold. And preferably foreign-born.

Speaking of Porizkova, she recently had this to say about the occasion of her 40th birthday:

Former supermodel Paulina Porizkova has described the pain and frustration of losing her looks in the ageing process – insisting she has felt “invisible” since she turned 40 years old.

Porizkova shot to fame in the 1980s and became one of the world’s highest paid models, gracing the covers of the most high profile fashion magazines and spending seven years as the face of cosmetics giant Estee Lauder.

The 45 year old has stepped away from modelling in recent years, turning to TV instead with a regular role as a judge on America’s Next Top Model and a stint on Dancing With The Stars.

Porizkova now admits she misses her days as a model and feels “sad” her beauty has faded.

She tells the New York Post, “Nothing ages as poorly as a beautiful woman’s ego. When you have used your beauty to get around, it’s like having extra cash in your pocket. I was so used to walking down the street and having the young guys passing by at least give me a flicker of a look. But once you’re over 40, you become invisible. You’re a brick in the building and it’s sad. It just feels like the sun went down a little bit. It got a little cloudy outside.”

But the former supermodel is adamant she would not consider cosmetic surgery to regain her youthful appearance, insisting her former catwalk pal Janice Dickinson looks worse since she went under the knife.

Porizkova adds, “She was one of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen in your whole life. Now she looks like a transvestite.”

Another brick in the building. Any fat part of the bell curve women reading Paulina’s pained regret probably felt their hearts drop into their flabby stomachs. After all, if a ravishing beauty and former supermodel like Porizkova can suddenly become “invisible” to men at the age of 40, what hope do they have? Porizkova looks as good as a 45 year old woman can possibly look (she’s up there with Monica Bellucci for defying the hands of time), and yet even she has noticed the men’s eyes have stopped undressing her.

In comparison, this is where it is so much better to be a man. With an attractive lifestyle and a charming demeanor, a man can enjoy the lustful yearnings of younger women many more years than the average woman can expect to enjoy the pursuits of men, younger *or* older.

I have read that beautiful people suffer more psychologically from aging than plain-looking or ugly people, because they have more to lose. A twenty year deterioration can turn a hot babe into a barely recognizable hollow-eyed zombie of her former self, while an ugly MFer will still look pretty much like an ugly MFer twenty years later. The only thing unusual about Paulina’s observation of her rapidly declining sexual market value is her willingness to publicly acknowledge it. This marks her as a woman of excellent character.

Paulina is right about cosmetic surgery, too. The procedures aren’t good enough yet to slip past the quasi-tranny valley where aging broads surgically altered in the hopes of regaining their youthful glow instead resemble puffy bat-faced transvestites. Hopefully, science will advance on this front and true anti-aging breakthroughs will bless the world with more beautiful women for me to plunder.

***

Some other notes from the “Elusive 10” voting:

Lollygirl got the most 7 votes. The person who submitted her pic as an example of a 10 clearly has a jones for natural redheads. Truth be told, so do I. Unfortunately, Lollygirl was a little too skanky looking to compete with the exquisite beauties on display in that post. May her lolly forever shine on suggestively. Too bad redheads may disappear from the face of the earth.

Seven of the girls got rated a 9. This demonstrates that wide agreement exists on what constitutes 8s and 9s, but once you attempt to nail down feminine perfection, you run up against a dividing line of growing subjectivity past which men have individualistic tastes, and that this taste likely differs based on race. The reason for the boisterous disagreement probably arises from the fact that 10s are simply too rare in the state of nature to have exerted much of a selection effect on men’s mental beauty templates.

10s are not 10% of the population. Whoever claims that is living in a bubble. Female beauty isn’t on a linear scale. 10s are no more than 0.5% of all women. Probably more like 0.01%. You people need to get out in the world to reacquaint yourselves with the sad fact that most women walking around day to day are repulsive warthogs. If you limit your visual scope to non-obese women between the ages of 15 and 25, then you can plausibly claim a lot of women are bangable 6s and 7s, but you’d have to have laser-like focus to erase from your peripheral vision the aforementioned warthogs.

80% of the voters were white. (Voters and readers are not necessarily identical sets.) I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that white men are more transfixed by female facial beauty than are black men, who tend to focus more on the voluptuousness of the female body.

9% of voters were Asian, which far exceeds their proportion in the American population. Perhaps they boosted Hyori Lee’s rank? Of course, some of those self-identified Asians may be subcontinental Indians, in which case Aishwarya Rai got the boost.

The Finnish race represented 2.65% of the Chateau votes. Finns are 0.0008% of the world population. A fling I had with a Finn chick (you can see her arm in this post) was a twilight zone-ish experience. Pleasurable, but weird. She had incredibly soft skin.

Blacks accounted for 4% of the voters. The black girl got 6% of the 10 votes, which means there’s some jungle fever going on! The Finns, gotta be them.

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Why The Elites Prop Up The Blank Slate

Dennis Mangan nails it:

But it also occurs to me that Orszag and his ilk have another motivation beyond pushing their blank slate theories, and that is self-justification. Those like him who have made into the elite are made of sterner stuff, practicing their 10,000 hours, and thus deserve to be part of the elite, unlike you proles, wasting your time on TV and Nascar.

No, connections and intelligence have nothing to do with becoming a Cabinet member, or even a New York Times columnist. All that success comes from the superior morality of someone who buckles down to the task.

There is a lot of speculation about why the elites (and at present, the elites in America are mostly megaphone-wielding whites) are so insanely and stupidly gung-ho about the infinite malleability of human nature and the policy implications that follow therefrom.

• They want to drive a wedge between themselves and “the wrong kind of white people” using the underclass as pawns so that they face less competition from those most likely to give it to them for the top career slots.
• They are brown-nosing amongst fellow SWPLs for those ever-crucial status points that can only be signaled by hating and obfuscating the common sense that is the currency of thought with putatively less enlightened whites.
• They are true blank slate believers.
• They are creating artificial social obstacles designed to make it difficult for less intelligent whites to navigate their way into polite society, thus selectively filtering for only the most socially savvy to rise to the top.
• They are paying the danegeld and rationalizing their extortion.
• They are secretly ashamed of acting in ways in their own lives that deny blank slate theology, and therefore seek to assuage their guilt. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
• They want to squeeze the middle class — their main competitors — and establish a virtual hereditary aristocracy of globalized ruling class transnationalists. Patriotism, religion, tribalism, and ethnic kinship all work against that goal.
• They are bored with national prosperity.
• They abhor hopelessness.
• Do-gooderism is their replacement religion.
• They are sadists who like sticking it to dumber people.

All the above reasons have a kernel of truth, but for a glimpse at what motivates the seemingly self-duping elites in their crass status whoring and propagandistic myopia, you have to peer beneath all that straight into the thermal core of their souls where self-conception resides and the ego sloshes in a cauldron of lifeblood. This is where Mangan’s answer hits upon the ultimate truth —

A defeat of the blank slate robs the elites of their self-satisfaction. Their pride is the beast that stands guard at the last gate, claws and fangs bared, a giant warhammer held aloft to stop those who would raid the castle. At this gate — the last stand before they must relinquish everything that defines their smug superiority — they will spare no quarter for platitude smashing barbarians. Here they fight with a viciousness that belies the nobility of what they claim to fight for.

If genes for intelligence, conscientiousness and discipline account for half or (probably) more of one’s success in life (i.e., success over others), then what does that say about the elite that doesn’t remove a large plank propping up their zealously guarded pride? What successful person really wants to hear that a big reason for their success was…

dumb fucking luck?

(This post has been a 9-11 remembrance, mothafuckaaaaaas.)

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Sex At Dusk

Just what is our sociosexual evolutionary heritage?

Here is a comment left by Christopher Ryan, author of “Sex at Dawn“:

The ‘ancient biological reasons’ that you’re referring to are currently being called into question by serious primatologists and anthropologists.

It is not really obvious that ancient homo sapiens really gave a fuck about paternity, because it wouldn’t have been obvious to them how sex and reproduction were actually related considering everybody was banging everybody.

Also add to this the fact that not only are women naturally promiscuous, but men are attracted to other men having sex with women ( your web browser history will back this up. )

This is why women scream during sex. to attract more men to join the fight. Literally, almost, considering the fight that takes place inside the woman. Not only does one sperm compete against millions of your own, but millions of other men. Considering women’s immune system treats sperm as invaders, women select their mates on a cellular level regardless of what their instincts might tell them.

A lot of this research calls the science behind the alpha male / game worldview into question. It isn’t that I’m arguing against evolutionary biology, either. I’m arguing for it, against a conception of it which mistakes our very recent cultural shifts ( agriculture ) as a constant in our 200k year + history.

It only made sense for men to care about virgins with the invention of private property which is passed down along paternal lines, agriculture, and a division of labor. This is a cultural adaptation not an ancient biological fact.

How do we know ancient (i.e. pre-agricultural man) didn’t give a fuck about paternity, or that they didn’t know that sex eventually led to children? And if it’s true that they were unconcerned with who’s the daddy, what relevance does this have for modern post-agricultural humans, who have had 10,000 – 12,000 years to evolve a different reaction to the threat of false paternity and female sluttiness? We now know distinct traits can evolve rather quickly in different human population groups. See: Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, northern European lactose tolerance.

From what we know of modern hunter-gatherer societies (the Yanomamo, for instance), homicide rates are incredibly high. Something like 30% of men in those tribal societies are killed off by acts of male-on-male violence. This would release some of the competitive pressure on the men for mates. In a society with a heavily skewed male-female ratio favoring men, “everybody banging everybody” wouldn’t elicit as much of a jealousy response if each man was spreading his seed with multiple women, increasing his chances to procreate.

Women are naturally promiscuous, true, but to a lesser extent than men and in a different way. Women’s impetuous promiscuity is a function of their ovulatory cycle, in large part, where they seek alpha genes one week out of the month. Men’s promiscuity is noncyclical. Men can cheat whenever and wherever, and can do so whether in love or out of love with their primary partner. Women are often emotionally unable to cheat if they are in love with their partner.

Addressing Ryan’s other points, there is no evidence that men in any significant number outside of a tiny fetishist minority enjoy cuckold porn, or are attracted to other men having sex with women. If you look at porn, you’ll notice that the most popular videos (really, 90% of the videos on major porn sites) block out the male actor’s face. The camera zooms in on the penetrating cock and the woman’s body and face contorted with (albeit faked) pleasure. The man’s face and chest are deliberately excised from as much of the sex scenes as possible. What men really like to watch is women having sex with a disembodied cock, (hence, point of view porn, which is very popular), into which the viewer can imagine he is the one fucking the girl.

Do women scream during sex to attract more men to the fight, or to warn other men away? I don’t see how the former is more clearly the reason than the latter. Or is there another explanation why women scream during sex? Perhaps to advertise their attractiveness to alpha males to other women, as a sort of status competition?

It’s understood that the penis is shaped like a sperm scoop, and that this is evidence that there is some amount of sperm competition resulting from female promiscuity going on. But there is also the powerful emotion of jealousy, a painful emotion which is not socially constructed, but is instead a visceral hindbrain reaction in the majority of men to thoughts of their women fucking other men. Did jealousy really evolve in just the last 10,000 years, or has it been with humanity for eons? It is possible that jealousy is a more recent evolution in the human psyche, and perhaps there are population group level differences in how much jealousy is experienced as a motivating impulse. (Maybe Africans feel less jealousy than Asians toward cheating partners.)

Whatever the evolution of jealousy, it is clearly an indicator that men DO give a fuck about paternity, and are NOT Ok with promiscuous women as long term partners who have been chosen to carry their young. If virginity weren’t valued by men, there would be no market for it. But in many large scale societies, not only is there an implicit market for virgins, there is an overt market for them. Did the invention of private property cause this powerful drive in men to seek out virgins in many parts of the world, or has the drive been a part of the neuronal network of the male brain for longer than that? Occam’s Razor normally falls on the side of biological imperative rather than social construction, as the latter is rarely an answer for anything except as a comforting illusion to help feminists and assorted blank slate lefties to sleep at night.

Bottom line is that there seems to be evidence for some kind of a balance between the sperm competition-female promiscuity nexus and mate guarding jealousy, and that this balance varies by population group. (r selected populations may lean more toward the large male genitals-female promiscuity part of the spectrum.) Double bottom line: Do you really want to live in a society where men don’t give a fuck about paternity and “everybody is fucking everybody”? We already have an example of what such a society might look like: sub-saharan Africa.

***

Interesting comment left by Rum:

What is the advantage to a woman of being less-than-aware of her actual arousal? It helps with her pretending to love a type of guy that her pussy really does not want. After all, if we accept the 80:20 rule regarding men and gina tingles, a lot of women are doomed to be paired via monogamy with a guy they never truly wanted – for sex. It is simple math. How could too much awareness of her true pussy-feelings help her attract a beta? It is just an extra burden for her to carry. So nature gives her an anesthetic for those unwelcome, burdensome insights.

This angle deserves further reflection. A lot of supposedly low libido women are simply women who settled for resource providing beta males who don’t sexually excite them. It’s already been shown that women are more likely to orgasm when they step out with an alpha male during that golden week of ovulatory sluttitude. If women were consciously aware of the connection between what they find attractive and what arouses them — in the same way men are aware of the connection — then women might be less inclined to remain loyal to the beta provider, and thus jeopardize the raising of their young. Or maybe the arousal ignorance is the cause of the infamous female caprice, which serves as a mate-selecting strategy ensuring that only men who are good with women will be able to navigate her seemingly illogical whims.

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Feminists Still Not Getting It, Never Will

McArdle has a follow-up post to her contention that the men women love are girly.

Incidentally, I’m being accused in the comments of engaging in some sort of conspiracy to keep the Beta Man down.

These things are never conspiracies. They’re more like hindbrain blurts.

More on primate theory later, but for now let me point out that as a married woman in her thirties, I have very little possible interest in the behavior of the PUAs; I’m not their target, and they’re sure not mine.

Marriage is no plenury indulgence from the soul ripping cenobite chains of the sexual market. You are being judged always and forevermore, and you are always wishing to be judged in the best light possible, even though you may not have practical reasons for feeling so. Lest you think I’m kidding, tell me what happens to the glowing love your hubby lavishes on you if you bloat up 70 pounds in the next year. Similarly, let’s see how much love — sexually and otherwise — you feel for your husband should he find himself unemployed for years on end and devoting himself to herb gardening. The attentions of the PUA (or, as I like to call them, the freelance seducer) is just a single infidelity away. Don’t tempt disaster by thinking that dropping out of the fuck market is an acceptable lifestyle choice.

To a person with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and to a person with a sociobiology theory, everything starts to look like some primeval competition for resources on the veldt.

The dismissiveness of the anti-reductionist (complicationist? squid inkist?) never ceases to amuse. All your extravagant and high-minded appeals to human rationality, individualism, and exceptionalism are but a coat of desperately hopeful rhetoric concealing the animal motives below. To those with the eyes to see, the veldt is everywhere. Indeed, the veldt is written into the machine code of your brain. The average American woman has a hippo grazing in her brain.

But it’s misleading to claim theory as a sole teacher. Years of messy real world experience and observation endorse sociobiological theory, while the theory offers guidelines to men looking for answers and a plan of attack. Game is, if nothing else, field tested and motherfucker approved. And that’s what gives it credibility, as opposed to the lofty academic discussions that waft like a stale fart across women’s studies departments. Once a tactic stops working, it is jettisoned in favor of something that does work. If a tactic is proven ineffective, it hardly lasts more than a few approaches before being discarded. And with the zoom zoom of the internet, proven tactics are uncovered and disseminated very quickly.

This tendency should be strenuously resisted; not everything fits into a neat primate model, whether your Preferred Primates are bonobos or silverback gorillas.

Human nature can be observed and analyzed to form a working generalizable sociosexual theory without resort to knowledge of the habits of our ape cousins. The fact that there exist those precious special snowflake exceptions that hearten rationalists and equalists alike does not disprove the rules.

My off the cuff observation was a genuine one; this whole thing sounds like what girls used to do.

Yeah, because we all know how much girls try to figure out how to pick up women. And “used to do” — what, have girls suddenly changed their nature in the last few years?

McArdle is conflating the learning process with the execution. For example, a PUA teaches himself how to walk and stand and motion such that he signals nonverbal alpha dominance which is universally attractive to women, and this process may sound odd to women accustomed to imaging courtship as something magical that “just happens”. But once the PUA is “in set” and executing his game plan it will all seem natural and unforced to the woman if he is doing it right. She won’t be thinking “oh how girly he is”; instead, she’ll be thinking “wow, this guy is kinda cute and really cool”. (“Cute” being the internationally accepted girl code for describing any man — cute or otherwise — they are attracted to but unable to verbalize exactly why they are attracted.)

And in fact, at some level the PUAs have to know that it’s not really particularly manly.

Men use many tactics to attract women. It’s just the socially approved ones that transfer wealth from men to women, like slaving away in a corporate hellhole and buying dinner at expensive restaurants, that don’t raise the shaming hackles of banal, unreconstructed feminists like McArdle. It happens to be the fact that game is successful because it co-opts a woman’s tools of the seduction trade to use against her. Qualifying? Negging? Teasing? Takeaways? Push-pull? Aloofness? All are tactics that women use naturally in their dealings with male suitors. That perhaps is why game strikes older women as girly; there are indeed elements of femininity in seduction, and it is well known that this is highly attractive to women. The classics of literature abound with examples. The best seducer must get into the mind of his quarry, and to do this requires a level of empathy that is almost transmutative.

In the final analysis, though, I doubt many men getting their dicks wet are gonna fret that they might be perceived as girly by a scornful married feminist.

Why do I think this?

Because you’re a masculine woman? nttawwt.

Because if your girlfriend (however temporary) caught you mimicking Tom Cruise in front of the mirror, or spending your spare time trolling message boards for magic tricks to impress women with . . . well, would she be more enamored, or would she slither out of bed in disgust and start looking for her clothes?

The mirror thing is a red herring. No freelance seducer spends his waking hours posing in front of a mirror to get his stance right. That’s the domain of bodybuilders. Dominant body language can be learned by observing alpha males in the field. As for reading online seduction material, I was once discovered by a girlfriend to be reading one of those forums. Looking over my shoulder, she asked me what it was about, and I explained it exactly as it was, describing the science of human social dynamics and male female psychological differences. I didn’t cringe in embarrassment or apology like some weaker betaboys would have. I was matter of fact. She became intrigued and read along with me. The only slithering that night was her receiving my meaty intrusion.

I am not against people attempting to upgrade their social skills, nor am I horrified at the thought that “beta” males will somehow sneak into the gene pool; after all, I live in the city often called “Hollywood for Nerds”.

Beta is a state of mind that can be found anywhere. It is anhedonic. Game is the cure.

But the combination of artificiality, superficiality, and manipulation in the PUA manifestos makes it really hard not to snicker.

Ok. So her beef with game can be best summed up in this:

Artificiality — makeup, zit medicine, pushup bras, high heels, wrinkle creams, nail polish, botox, bikini wax.

Superficiality — Lavish adherence to fashion and culture trends, consumption of celebrity gossip, fascination with the supernatural and occult, upholders of PC shibboleths, ingrained sexual preference for tall men, lantern jawed men, and high social status men.

Manipulation — Making a guy wait for sex, wearing sexy clothes and pretending to be offended when he notices, flaking on dates, coyness, not picking up the phone on the first or second ring, expecting paid-for drinks on dates, shit testing.

I wonder if McArdle is aware she has indicted her own gender?

By the way, the manipulation criticism is one I hear all the time from detractors of the crimson arts. It’s a tawdry conceit. All goal-oriented communication — verbal or nonverbal — is a form of manipulation. When a woman advertises her cleavage she is manipulating men to do her favors or otherwise impress her. When a man works hard at his job to buy a nice car and house he is manipulating women’s attraction mechanisms. When both refrain from picking their noses or farting in public they are manipulating people’s impressions of them. McArdle and her ilk need to get over this manipulation mental roadblock they construct to assuage their feelings of lost power. If seduction is manipulation, then women don’t want guileless entreaties. The spread pussy speaks louder than the snickering blog post.

A reframe: if soccer is the beautiful sport, seduction is the beautiful manipulation. The herculean efforts required of the vast majority of men to seduce women that strike McArdle as unseemly and calculating when compared to the relatively easy go of it women in their prime years have when setting about to seduce men is just a reflection of the biological inequality between the sexes in their value on the sexual market. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, and all that. McArdle is mistaken to assume this disparity in degree of mating effort caused by intrinsic sex differences is proof of men’s venality or women’s nobility.

(We will return to our regularly scheduled programming of learning about actual game, rather than jawboning about its cultural significance, tomorrow.)

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Aging Urban Broads: The Manliest Of Women

Yet another churlish, resentful SWPL broad is on the warpath against game, armed with the same primitive stone tools all the other anti-game broads wield.

Reading the half-baked hate, I can’t help but get the impression of a very nervous woman. A woman apprehensive that men are gaining power in the sexual market and perhaps appalled that she is not any longer the primary target of that invigorated male sexual power. I can imagine her speaking truth to her indignation by assuming the role of the wise SWPL lady to a generation of younger women, admonishing them to never settle and scolding men to grow up.

But, you know, the times they change. The cock has no interest in your feeble hate. It doesn’t believe in synthesis, or syllogism, or in any absolute. What does it believe in? Pussy. And whatever it takes to get it. It’s self-evident.

The hater, McArdle, read an article by S.G. Belknap in The Point Magazine about pickup artists and seduction technology. McArdle sneers that men who learn game to attract women are “girly”.

I find it hilarious that the pick-up artists think of themselves as especially manly.  When I read this piece, what they sound like to me is girls–specifically, girls in the 14-17 age group.

The “learning seduction is girly” sneer is one of the most tedious repressed neoVictorian sniffs at game. It’s almost as if McArdle reads the comments here and sent a private shout out (and a pizza) to a bunch of my haters (hi, spoogen!) to agree on what they thought would be the most cutting sort of jab with which to poke the PUAs.

Spending all of your time thinking about how to attract the opposite sex?  Check.  Practicing poses in the mirror to figure out which ones are most attractive?  Check. Talking about it endlessly with your friends who only seem to care about the same, one, thing?  Check. Increasingly elaborate strategems for getting attention?  check.  Eventual evolution of said strategems into rituals as mechanical as playing the opening levels of an old-style video game?  Check.  If I close my eyes, I can still smell the bubble-gum scented lip gloss . . .

Worried that all that strategizing works? Check. Worried that all that strategizing will help men date younger, hotter, tighter women? Check. Doubly worried her lip gloss not be poppin’ anymore? Check.

For a supposedly rational liberdroid, McArdle seems oddly afflicted by the effervescent romantic idealism of the “just be yourself” and the “it should happen naturally” schools of nonthought. I’ve got news for her: courtship, attraction, and seduction ARE biomechanical processes that can be extracted from the misty ether and reduced to their core components. From such knowledge, generalizations can be made about the sexes. Does this fact bother many women? Sure it does. And I explained why in this post:

Generalizations offend women in a way they do not offend men because they breach the perimeter ego defense and strike right at a woman’s core self-conception — her belief in herself as Princess On A Cloud Carried Aloft By Admiring Suitors. If it’s true that her genes account for nearly all her success or failure with the men she wants, then there isn’t much she can do to improve her chances to fulfill her deepest desires. If it’s true (and it is) that men value beauty above all else, then it is logically inescapable that she is, to an unsettling degree, interchangeable with any women who are at or above her level of physical attractiveness.

Game, by stripping the seduction process into a flowchart for ease of learning and applying in the field, offends women’s sense of mystery and prerogative to act on intuition. Things better left shrouded in the unknown is the working preference of most women, not because they are more romantic than men (just the opposite is true), but because women are constitutionally wired to abhor the thought that men can exert calculated influence on women’s sexual desires and choices. Women want total and untrammeled choice in the dating market, and they want to prohibit men from enjoying the same extraordinary power. Game brings balance to the force, and that is highly threatening to women, particularly aging women for whom options are rapidly running out. (Reminder: Maxim #98: Marriage is no escape from the sexual market and the possibility that you may be outbid by a competitor with higher value.)

Ultimately, women hate the thought of game, (not game itself; that they love), because they want their alpha male – beta male distinctions predigested and unsullied by interference from proactive men intent on bringing chaos to the male hierarchy. This is why women love royalty and kings and princes so much; in that world, the alphas are identified and known. There is little churn. The women have only to concern themselves with competing with other women for the cocka of the top dog. But in a world of game, where the status of men is in a constant state of flux, ever-shifting and spoiling the tidiness of the women’s preferred caste systemed zero sum sexual market, there are additional stresses and concerns. Now the women have to figure out who among the millions of men trundling through their gleaming anonymous urban jungles tingling ginas left and right are the alpha males of their dreams and expectations. By muddying the waters, game makes this filtering process more difficult for women. More exhilarating, too.

McArdle imitates a snarky lip curl:

Do they send out for pizza while they talk, or would that just make Erik cry because he looks so fat in his new jeans?

Projection, it’s what’s for dinner!

She continues:

Who–over the age of 25–believes that investing most of your time and energy in attracting another person means that you’re gaining power over them?  At least the little girls eventually learn that sex and flirting are supposed to be fun.  And very few full time jobs are fun.

First, a man invests time and energy in attracting women in almost anything he does. Directly, he does this through courtship and game. Indirectly, he does this through status increasing activities which his genes have programmed him to do because it is an effective way to attract a lot of fertile age women. How does that Chris Rock joke go? If a man could get blowjobs with no effort, he’d be satisfied living in a cardboard box. That one method is considered less noble than the other and frowned upon by polite PC company is not a man’s moral crisis.

Second, in what warped fembot universe is successfully attracting women so that they have sex with you a sign of powerlessness? Is McArdle unaware of men’s ultimate goal? Hint: insert penis into vagina.

I’ve previously responded to the hackneyed hate from the likes of McArdle and her sisterhood of the traveling prigs. See this classic post. It’s nothing new. On the subject of “girly” male seducers:

12. Fallacy of Misdirected Obsession Hate

Hater: A guy who spends his life obsessing over how to get women is a loser.

A guy who spends his life obsessing over climbing the corporate ladder to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over mastering guitar and playing in a rock band to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over pursuing financial rewards and acquiring resources to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who….. ah, you get the point.

[…]

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

According to McArdle’s impeccable logic, I suppose the billions of women who studiously do their hair, dress in the latest fashions, wear makeup, tone their glutes, play hard to get, and consume everything from herbal elixirs to plastic surgery in order to turn back the hands of time are acting manly. Yes, I find it hilarious that all these women think of themselves as feminine.

There is also something to be said for the power of contrast. A man who displays dominant body language (learned or inherited) can strengthen and speed the seduction of women by handicapping himself with feminine flash. This flash can be expressed either through peacocking (exaggerated male fashion) or by running vulnerability game. Women are very attuned to male status, and a man can signal high status by refusing to play by the rules or fall in line with the norm. Defying a woman’s expectations is an effective seduction strategy.

Allow me to get personal for a moment. (double heh) This “men who learn the science of seduction are girly” meme has been spreading like a dumpy middle-aged ass among the cackling witch crowd lately. Perhaps a little of the old remote psychological diagnosis is in order. I wonder if these yuppie broads are projecting their deepest unmet desire for a sexy man who can properly seduce them after they daydream their way through another tepid rutting session with their pasty, doting, domestic chore-splitting beta provider husbands and boyfriends. Ya know, too much relationship exactness and complementarity is sand in the gears of the female soul.

(Note: Regular commenter Thursday has a number of insightful comments over at McArdle’s blog. Go check them out.)

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Sex Ratio, Redux

For those who are interested in a syncretism of competing sex ratio theories (an elite audience, I’m sure), Jason Malloy sent me an email responding to my ‘Sausage Fest‘ post, and responding indirectly to Peter Frost whose quote I used in that post:

Hey, I just came across your sex ratio post from several weeks ago. I’m surprised I missed it at the time, because I read fairly often.

Just to clarify a few issues:

A common misunderstanding which I kept addressing on Dr. Frost’s blog was that I was claiming that women have some absolute preference for Dads over Cads. This was not my argument. My argument was that: “Females are never as promiscuous as men (as a group) prefer, therefore when male scarcity puts females at a sexual market disadvantage, females give in to male sexual pressures more easily.” And this innate differential preference is the ultimate basis for sex ratio dynamics.

Peter Frost’s claim that I “ignored”  some crucial wisdom from Guttentag & Secord isn’t true. I left numerous comments on his blog explaining to him why Guttentag & Secord’s social constructivist understandings about sex differences were wrong. Frost is suggesting that, sans social pressures, women are just as oriented towards low investment mating as men. This is wrong. Sex ratio dynamics are based on biological differences between men and women, not on gender politics. The wider society will likely never be as libertarian towards women’s sexuality as a college campus, but even there we see that more women = more male “misbehavior”; because even on college campuses men want lower investment sex than women: “Think of it as a game of chicken that men will always win. In an environment where women are ok with one night stands, men will push for the glory hole.”

I realize your primary interest is in how gender dynamics shift with male quality, but on this issue I don’t think I’m missing much. e.g. The number of top quality males increases on a male-biased campus, but female promiscuity still decreases. There are, no doubt, many hidden dynamics to sex ratio, but they don’t seem to monkey wrench the general predictions.

Jason

Sounds intuitively correct to me. What I’ve witnessed in social venues where the sex ratio is skewed in favor of women: when men outnumber women, the women set the terms of the courtship, and this is true regardless of the number of alpha males in attendance. They flit about soaking in the attention of all the male suitors, act bitchier, and play harder to get. Shit tests are locked at maximum deflection. The men are more animated and become agitated toward the end of the night, which sometimes spills over into (literally) pushing and shoving the male competition aside, and getting blotto once they realize the odds will not work in their favor.

Of course, more alpha males is always better than fewer alpha males from a woman’s perspective, because alpha male attention is almost as good as alpha male sex (though not as good as alpha male love). In fact, for most women, alpha male attention is better than beta male sex and love. So while women may be less promiscuous in male-skewed environments, they are going home happier in their chasteness if the male attention they lapped up came from higher quality men.

In contrast, those heavenly times when the women outnumbered the men, pickup up could not not have been easier. I sometimes had women approach me.

It’s like shopping for a TV in a store that has an abundance of TV choice. You might very well walk out of there empty-handed because you figure you can afford to take your time deciding which brand best suits you, and that there are so many brands there’s bound to be an even better value in there next week.

The part where sex ratio dynamics gets interesting is what influence it has on rates of male violence. As I mentioned in my previous post on this subject, when I’ve been in bars that skewed male the drunkenness and rowdiness hit a fever pitch. Male friendships temporarily sundered when a target was in sight: hos before bros. It’s sad watching a bunch of angry dudes squabble over the few remaining fat chicks at garbage hour. I suppose it helps in sex ratio discussions to define what we mean by male “misbehavior”. Maybe it should be divided into two categories: male violence and male caddishness. They overlap, but they aren’t synonymous. This accounts for the observation in some contexts that more men = more male agitation but not more male caddishness, whereas more women = more male caddishness but less silverback posturing and fighting over the abundance of women.

A lot of what I write about on this diaryetic outpost is based on personal experience, and only second-hand do the forces of science get summoned when I feel like putting in the extra work to buttress my steely-eyed observations of reality. If you want (mostly) hard science and bursts of numerical flavor, GNXP is a good place to go.

In general, I find that about 80% of what I observe in real life is eventually corroborated by scientific evidence. The remaining 20% left with question marks can be explained either by experiences peculiar to some subset of my life circumstances, or idiosyncratic personal observations insufficiently examined by science. My belief is that most people go through life lying to others, and to a lesser extent to themselves, about 90% of the nature of reality. Everything from the finality of death, to the horrors of aging, to the pitiless churning of the sexual market, to the true costs and benefits of human diversity is sheathed in a velvet scabbard of pretty lies. Pessimists would argue the excalibur of truth-examination is best left sheathed, for some truths bring nothing but distress. Optimists would argue the sword is a figment of negative minds, a weapon of the haves to dispirit the have-nots. Chaotics such as yours truly revel in the paroxysms the unsheathing of the sword causes those who stumble into the id monster’s lair.

It is possible to make it to the endgame having avoided the worst travails while refusing to acknowledge 90% of reality, as long as you don’t act in accordance with your stated beliefs. For example, a fat woman looking for love may console herself without consequence that it’s what’s on the inside that counts as long as she pays the lie to her beliefs by dieting and exercising. Her hypocrisy, from her point of view, is win-win — her psyche is soothed by her lies while her love life is invigorated by her sexier body. Similarly, a single mom anxious for love can tell herself she is choosier than her single female counterparts without bastard baggage, but when the quality of suitors willing to commit to her and her child by another man predictably degrades she will ignore her little lies and act like a woman with fewer options, smartly offering more concessions in the zero-sum race to settle for Mr. Better Than Nothing. If, however, she insists on living by her lies she will likely spend the rest of her dreary years half-nourished by a child’s love instead of fully nourished by the added romantic love of a male partner.

Despite evidence of hypocrites acting in ways contrary to their lies and in accordance with the reality of the mating market, in the double helical arena of all against all, it is those who acknowledge more of reality who will win out over those who acknowledge less of reality. Hypocrisy costs mental energy, and when incentivized enough and fully internalized can lead to bad decisions. The few who can look the chaos in the eye and not flinch will best those whose ego-assuaging lies act to divert them from the path of personal happiness. A downwardly spiraling feedback loop can result when hypocrisy is allowed to run rampant, as one bad decision after another coaxes ever more contorted pretty lies to stave off the chilling self-realization that creeps up in the deep black of night when solitude enshrouds.

There is one truth that will always be heard. The shiver down the back of your neck late at night never lies.

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