Latest Baumeister Paper Supports CH Concept Of The Sexual Market

Baumeister, the primary coauthor behind the seminal 2004 paper titled “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions”, has released online the latest addition to that work, titled “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends“, another steely-eyed examination of the sexes that pretty much validates the core Chateau Heartiste concept of the existence of a merciless sexual market, and its primacy among all markets.

I was planning to write a sole synopsis and commentary on the recent study, but others, like Mangan (back from hiatus), have done a good job covering the essential hypotheses and conclusions in the paper, so instead I’ll post in addition, in the near future, an email from a reader who forwarded to CH his astute objections and comments to the original Baumeister paper in an email sent to the author. (I don’t know if Baumeister replied.)

(Quick aside: Mangan asks a related question regarding a prominent claim in the Baumeister paper that men supported the entrance of women into the workforce to increase men’s sexual access: “Is there a direct relationship between looser morals and more women in public life?” I would bet that there is, and that a trend toward higher female participation in the workforce, and particularly in government and similar social gatekeeper occupations, is one of the crucial indicators that a nation is beginning the downward spiral into stasis and eventual decline.)

Continuing, some choice quotes (with editor commentary) pulled from the latest Baumeister/Vohs (a woman!) paper to give you a flavor for its contents.

In simple terms, we proposed that in sex, women are the suppliers and men constitute the demand (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). Hence the anti-democratic, seemingly paradoxical sex ratio findings that Regnerus describes. When women are in the minority, the sexual marketplace conforms to their preferences: committed relationships, widespread virginity, faithful partners, and early marriage. For example, American colleges in the 1950s conformed to that pattern. In our analysis, women benefit in such circumstances because the demand for their sexuality exceeds the supply. In contrast, when women are the majority, such as on today’s campuses as well as in some ethnic minority communities, things shift toward what men prefer: Plenty of sex without commitment, delayed marriage, extradyadic copulations, and the like. [ed: yep, life has been good for those of us who know the score.] […]

Sexual marketplaces take the shape they do because nature has biologically built a disadvantage into men: a huge desire for sex that makes men dependent on women. Men’s greater desire puts them at a disadvantage, just as when two parties are negotiating a possible sale or deal, the one who is more eager to make the deal is in a weaker position than the one who is willing to walk away without the deal. [ed: this is why practiced male aloofness is attractive to women — it signals that the man is holding a stronger market position, and that his goods are therefore valuable.] Women certainly desire sex too — but as long as most women desire it less than most men, women have a collective advantage, and social roles and interactions will follow scripts that give women greater power than men (Baumeister et al. 2001). [ed: culture emerges from sexually differentiated genetic roots.] We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage (see Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Women have often sustained their advantage over men by putting pressure on each other to restrict the supply of sex available to men. As with any monopoly or cartel, restricting the supply leads to a higher price. […]

Recent work has found that across a large sample of countries today, the economic and political liberation of women is positively correlated with greater availability of sex (Baumeister and Mendoza 2011). Thus, men’s access to sex has turned out to be maximized not by keeping women in an economically disadvantaged and dependent condition, but instead by letting them have abundant access and opportunity. [ed: was the sexual and feminist revolution fomented by undersexed beta males? a case can be made.] In an important sense, the sexual revolution of the 1970s was itself a market correction. Once women had been granted wide opportunities for education and wealth, they no longer had to hold sex hostage (Baumeister and Twenge 2002). [ed: that is, they no longer had to suffer the indignity of beta provider courtship. now that they had the resources, it was open season on alpha male cock hopping. the sexual revolution appears to have backfired on beta males expecting a bigger slice of the snatch pie.]

What does all this mean for men? The social trends suggest the continuing influence of a stable fact, namely the strong desire of young men for sexual activity. As the environment has shifted, men have simply adjusted their behavior to find the best means to achieve this same goal. Back in 1960, it was difficult to get sex without getting married or at least engaged, and so men married early. To be sure, this required more than being willing to bend the knee, declare love, and offer a ring. To qualify as marriage material, a man had to have a job or at least a strong prospect of one (such as based on an imminent college degree). The man’s overarching goal of getting sex thus motivated him to become a respectable stakeholder contributing to society.

The fact that men became useful members of society as a result of their efforts to obtain sex is not trivial, and it may contain important clues as to the basic relationship between men and culture (see Baumeister 2010). Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization, and it cannot at present be considered a proven fact, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. [ed: that last clause is critical. men will always take the path of least resistance to sex. it is up to women to make that path more difficult if they want to extract more concessions from men.] (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, “If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.”) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that. This puts the current sexual free-for-all on today’s college campuses in a somewhat less appealing light than it may at first seem. [ed: what’s interesting and unspoken here is that the sexual free-for-all is chugging along nicely well beyond and outside of the college years, with the difference being that, in their 20s and 30s, a select number of fewer men (let’s call them… alpha males) are enjoying the ample premarital rewards of sexually available women.] Giving young men easy access to abundant sexual satisfaction deprives society of one of its ways to motivate them to contribute valuable achievements to the culture. [ed: damn, i’m torn. do i want a thriving society or easier access to sex? yeeeeah… i’ll take the latter and leave the self-sacrifice required of the former for the anti-poolside chumps.]

The changes in gender politics since 1960 can be seen as involving a giant trade, in which both genders yielded something of lesser importance to them in order to get something they wanted more (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). As Regnerus states, partly based on our own extensive survey of research findings, men want sex, indeed more than women want it (Baumeister et al. 2001). Women, meanwhile, want not only marriage but also access to careers and preferential treatment in the workplace. [ed: women are the reproductively more valuable sex, and so it makes sense that evolution would have “gifted” women with an oversized entitlement complex and the inability to engage in self-criticism.]

The giant trade thus essentially involved men giving women not only easy access but even preferential treatment in the huge institutions that make up society, which men created. [ed: but the grand bargain did not work out as intended for the masses of beta males who acquiesced to the new girl order. while alpha males certainly saw more action from “liberated” women, the average joe did not. instead, all the average joe got in return for sacrificing his workplace status in hopes of easier sex was… a heaping helping of humiliation and wage stagnation and anti-joe animus, which continues at an accelerated pace to this day. this is a critical distinction i would like to see Baumeister address.] Today most schools, universities, corporations, scientific organizations, governments, and many other institutions have explicit policies to protect and promote women. It is standard practice to hire or promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man. Most large organizations have policies and watchdogs that safeguard women’s interests and ensure that women gain preferential treatment over men. Parallel policies or structures to protect men’s interests are largely nonexistent and in many cases are explicitly prohibited. Legal scholars, for example, point out that any major new law is carefully scrutinized by feminist legal scholars who quickly criticize any aspect that could be problematic or disadvantageous to women, and so all new laws are women-friendly. Nobody looks out for men, and so the structural changes favoring women and disadvantaging men have accelerated (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). […]

Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near-equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small. [ed: what do you think will happen to a nation’s cultural progress when it goes out of its way to give preferential treatment to its women who, as a sex, prefer tawdry one-to-one relationships to men’s preference for the growth potential in large shallow relationships? that’s right, the economy and the culture come more and more to reflect women’s preferences. result: progress that is the hallmark of rising empires grinds to a halt.] […]

Why have men acquiesced so much in giving women the upper hand in society’s institutions? It falls to men to create society (because women almost never create large organizations or cultural systems). It seems foolish and self-defeating for men then to meekly surrender advantageous treatment in all these institutions to women. Moreover, despite many individual exceptions, in general and on average men work harder at their jobs in these institutions than women, thereby enabling men to rise to the top ranks. As a result, women continue to earn less money and have lower status than men, which paradoxically is interpreted to mean that women’s preferential treatment should be continued and possibly increased (see review of much evidence in Baumeister2010). Modern society is not far from embracing explicit policies of “equal pay for less work,” as one of us recently proposed. Regardless of that prospect, it appears that preferential treatment of women throughout the workforce is likely to be fairly permanent. Because of women’s lesser motivation and ambition, they will likely never equal men in achievement, and their lesser attainment is politically taken as evidence of the need to continue and possibly increase preferential treatment for them. [ed: the preferences shall continue until morale improves.]

But this pattern of male behavior makes more sense if we keep in mind that getting sex is a high priority for men, especially young men. Being at a permanent disadvantage in employment and promotion prospects, as a result of affirmative action policies favoring women, is certainly a cost to young men, but perhaps not a highly salient one. What is salient is that sex is quite readily available. As Regnerus reports, even a man with dismal career prospects (e.g., having dropped out of high school) can find a nice assortment of young women to share his bed.

Mangan makes a valid objection to this Baumeister theory that affirmative action for women increased men’s sexual access by noting that it was likely contraception and cost-of-sex-reducing technology — the Pill, abortion, and penicillin — which opened the floodgates to “free” love. I put “free” in quotes because in reality, the sexual revolution did not benefit all men equally; alpha males got the lion’s share of premarital sex from economically self-sufficient women. Beta males suffered more than usual, having to endure watching from the sidelines as alpha males cleaned up, while simultaneously being deprived of the best leverage they had in the sexual market: their promise of marital resources.

However, I do think Baumeister is onto something true, in that increased female workplace participation meant that men with reasonably high status jobs had a lot more fleshy temptresses from whom to conveniently choose, and that women must certainly have felt less restricted in their sexuality once they were meeting their own financial needs and could afford to risk happy dalliances with sexually desirable, but more non-committal, alpha males.

Again, Le Chateau was on top of all this years ago, when we proposed a sea change in the American cultural landscape heralded by the coming of the Four Five Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse:

1. Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and the de facto contraceptive abortion).
2. Easy peasy no-fault divorce.
3. Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio is any indication).
4. Rigged feminist-inspired laws that have caused a disincentivizing of marriage for men and an incentivizing of divorce for women.
5. Penicillin (reduced the cost of contracting STDs)
6. Widely available hardcore porn.

I added numbers five and six to the list of Sexual Apocalypse Sirens, because they seem to me just as important to understanding how the sexual market changed in the last fifty or so years.

So, a crib sheet of quippy replies if you ever need it to send a feminist or manboob howling with indignation:

1. The Pill
2. No-fault divorce
3. Working women
4. Man-hating feminism
5. Penicillin
6. Porn

Toss into a social salad bowl already brimming with an influx of non-European immigrants thanks to the 1965 soft genocide act, mix thoroughly, and voila!: a huge, inexorable, relentless leftward shift in American politics, an explosion of single moms, wage stagnation, government growth, upper class childlessness, lower class dysgenics, and a creaking, slow deterioration in the foundational vigor of the nation and the gutting of the pride of her people.

Into this pot pie of portent throw in the Skittles Man, Bring the Movies Man, Nah Man, and Disappeared Again Man, for whom girls have always swooned but who now, thanks to relaxed pressure from women themselves requiring men to put a ring on it before getting any huggy or kissy, and the incentivizing of risky sexual behavior by government policy and contraceptive technology, could enjoy sex without the entanglement of marriage or gainful employment.

Game, for all the shit it gets from the usual suspects, was just a rational response to a radically altered playing field. It didn’t cause this calamity; it just profited from it.

Meanwhile, beta males are left scratching their block-like skulls, wondering what the fuck just happened.

Back to Baumeister.

Nowadays young men [ed: correction: alpha males] can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex. Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forego other women forever. Female sex partners are available without all that. [ed: …to those men with charm in the game.]

So maybe the young men don’t care that much about how the major social institutions in the world of work have become increasingly rigged to favor women. Sex has become free and easy. This is today’s version of the opiate of the (male) masses. The male who beds multiple women is enjoying life quite a bit, and so he may not notice or mind the fact that his educational and occupational advancement is vaguely hampered by all the laws and policies that push women ahead of him. After all, one key reason he wanted that advancement was to get sex, and he already has that. Climbing the corporate ladder for its own sake may still hold some appeal, but undoubtedly it was more compelling when it was vital for obtaining sex. Success isn’t as important as it once was, when it was a prerequisite for sex. [ed: success isn’t as important for beta males, either, because success doesn’t provide the same sexual market leverage like it used to for them. how is a no-game-having, 9-to-5er beta male supposed to woo a lawyercunt pulling six figures?]

If men don’t need career success to get sex, then what if anything do they need success for? Some research indicates that career motivation really intensifies for men when they become fathers. Indeed, it has long been known that the transition to parenthood has opposite effects by gender. New mothers withdraw from their work and careers; new fathers embrace work and career with enhanced seriousness and motivation (for a review see Baumeister 1991). [ed: the “pay gap” explained.] […]

With regard to work, the societal changes are producing less contribution by men and more by women. These might offset, with few or no costs to society. Still, replacing male with female workers may bring some changes, insofar as the two genders approach work differently. Compared to men, women have higher rates of absenteeism, seek social rewards more than financial ones, are less ambitious, work fewer hours overall, are more prone to take extended career interruptions, and identify less with the organizations they work for. They are more risk averse, resulting in fewer entrepreneurs and inventions. (Baumeister 2010, noted an appalling gender imbalance in new patents; nobody is seriously suggesting that the U.S. Patent office systematically discriminates against women, but women simply do not apply for patents in anything close to the rate that men do.) Women are less interested in science and technology fields. They create less wealth (for themselves and others). [ed: the roman empire wept.] […]

The female contribution of sex to the marriage is evanescent: As women age, they lose their sexual appeal much faster than men lose their status and resources, and some alarming evidence even indicates that wives rather quickly lose their desire for sex (Arndt 2009). To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, many husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality—and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography, and extramarital dalliance.

Baumeister is a serious realtalker.

We speculate that today’s young men may be exceptionally ill prepared for a lifetime of sexual starvation that is the lot of many modern husbands. The traditional view that a wife should sexually satisfy her husband regardless of her own lack of desire has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband. […] Today’s young men spend their young adulthood having abundant sex with multiple partners, and that seems to us to be an exceptionally poor preparation for a lifetime of sexual starvation.

Game can save marriages from the fate of sexual starvation. At least until the wifey is no longer attractive enough to stimulate the hubby. Ah well, waddayagonnado?

Although we have noted warning signs and problems, we remain optimistic. [ed: i don’t.] Despite the obstacles and changing contingencies, men and women have always managed to find each other and work together to create a modicum of happiness for both and to create a sphere in which children can grow, thrive, and sustain the culture for another few decades. [ed: yes, men and women will always find each other. the question is, what form will that finding take? that is the issue which matters for those who seek to maximize the social good.] The coming generation will face novel challenges, but somehow we think they will muddle through and manage to reinvent family life yet again. [ed: sometimes the reinvention is not as good as the original.]

All in all, a stellar paper that lays down the hammer of hurt on the pushers of pretty lies. For this reason, I expect the liars and degenerates and serpentine sophists currently running the country into the ground to thoroughly ignore and/or distort it.

My main objections to the paper center around the fact that Baumeister/Vohs don’t explore female hypergamy and alpha male/beta male distinction in much detail, which is a shortcoming I hope the both of them will address in the future. Nonetheless, their work is essentially a huge vindication of the concepts that the proprietors at Chateau Heartiste have been elucidating since the first day this blog drove a stake through the heart of the reigning discourse and claimed a piece of this decaying culture for itself. And someday, perhaps soon, a real rain will come and wash all the lies off the streets.

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How Much Do Your Smarts Matter To Women?

This question comes up regularly at Le Chateau. You’ve got two schools of thought. The first insists that smarts, like any other positive attribute, can only raise a man’s dating market value because women are hypergamous and appreciate a smarter man than themselves. The other school says that women are put off by men who are too much smarter than themselves, and that experience shows women fall for lunkhead jerks all the time, perhaps because these types of men are less introspective and more unthinkingly assertive about hitting on women.

The science I’ve read on this subject has been all over the place, but the consensus seems to be that having some smarts is a net plus to a man’s desirability.

Where do I come down on this perennial issue? I stick by the Dating Market Value Test for Men at the top of this blog. A better-than-average IQ is beneficial, but the benefits to picking up women begin to dissipate past a certain degree of brainpower, because very high IQ seems to be associated with a lack of social savviness and other off-putting personality quirks. If you know a lot of Ivy grads in the sciences and maths (a group of smarties if there ever were) then you can’t help but notice how awkward they can be in social settings with women who are more likely to represent the meaty part of the IQ bell curve.

Anyhow, both schools of thought have a point. Chicks are more viscerally turned on by raw male power and alpha attitude than they are by male smarts, but because chicks are wired to seek men who are higher status than themselves on as many metrics as possible (except looks; no pretty girl likes to be upstaged by her man in the looks department) they will generally be turned off by men who are dumber than they are.

This isn’t just theoretical musing. I say this from a position of real world observation. I’ll use a short anecdote as example: I was once hanging out with some girls in my group of friends when one of them got hit on by a very good-looking guy. She had previously noticed him and was tittering about him with her girlfriends when he approached, so she was already emotionally lubed to accept his entreaty.

Having a ringside seat to this blossoming courtship, I happily eavesdropped on the proceedings from a half-concealed vantage among the crowd. It didn’t take long for the whole thing to implode in entertaining failure. The flash point was when she used a two-dollar word and he replied in a way that proved he didn’t know what the word meant. Lemme tell ya, you never saw a woman’s flirty face turn sour so fast.

Afterwards, she confided that his apparent dumbness made him seem so much less good-looking to her.

So maybe this is the best way to view male smarts from the perspective of pickup success: all else equal, it’s better to be smarter than the girl you are hitting on than dumber than her. Sounds obvious, but I think this simple point gets missed. Girls may not be immediately turned on by men who are smarter than them, but you can bet girls are immediately turned off by men who prove themselves dumber than them. Men’s smarts then, act as a threshold test of fuckability for girls; too much won’t necessarily help or hurt you, but too little (relative to the girl) will definitely hurt.

The above is not a maxim, because I find that it applies primarily to overeducated girls in the cities. Less educated and less intelligent girls, who, it should be reminded, occupy the bulk of womanhood, are neither as impressed by male smarts nor as turned off by male stupidity as are their smarter sisters. Mostly this is because the mediocre mamacitas are not going to be throwing around two-dollar words that test the verbal acumen of the men they meet. Secondarily, dumber girls don’t have the cortical horsepower to quickly ascertain male dumbness the way smarter girls do; therefore, other sexy male traits, like dominance, loom larger in the dumb girl’s head.

But no matter how smart you are, if you aren’t using your smarts to light up a woman’s limbic lust center, you may as well drop your pretense to genius and try to speak to her on her level; no man ever incited tingles in a girl by solving quadratic equations or philosophizing deeply about deep stuff. After all, the reason women are drawn to male smarts is not smarts per se, but the promise of resources and power that typically accrue to the smart man. It’s proxies all the way down.

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Proof That Power Corrupts Absolutely

Power has an effect on the brain almost identical to cocaine.

More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ scientists claim the saying is biologically true.

The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women.

This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive.

We all know women are unable to control their primal attraction for powerful men. A cursory examination of the world around you will aptly demonstrate. It makes sense, if you are a man who loves the company of women, to work to become powerful OR to adopt the mannerisms of the powerful, which can have the same influence on dopamine release as possessing objectively measurable power. The behavior of powerful alpha male baboons has some game lessons for humans.

Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine leading to more negative effects such as arrogance and impatience.

The claims by Dr Ian Robertson may go some way to explain the outlandish and impulsive behaviour of city fatcats, tycoons and celebrities.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph today, he said: ‘Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly.

‘This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power.

Women don’t love *power* per se. What they feel instead is a visceral attraction for the ATTITUDE that powerful men exhibit. Attitude and personality are more important to a man’s success with women than his looks, bankroll or material possessions. You can have the latter but still fail with women if you act like a self-doubting beta. But if you have the former you can succeed with women without having the latter. Of course, having all of it is better than having either, but if you had to choose, choose jerkitude.

Arrogance, impatience, outlandishness, entitlement, aggression, sexual voracity and overconfidence — these are the male personality traits that win women over. If you don’t want to toil for 30 years to gain the social or economic power that will imbue you with these sexy characteristics, you can take a short cut and plug into the god machine directly by altering your personality to one that is sexier to women.

“Just be yourself!” is really girl code for “Just be your beta self so I can quickly screen you out!”

Fuck that. Just be your better self. Then sit back and enjoy the exquisite pleasure of screening girls in and out of your rotation.

A reader writes:

How does the elite justify its consistent fucking over of the beta males today?

Glib answer: Because they can.

Glib Lite answer: They’re power tripping.

Have you ever tried to bring a coke fiend down from his exhilarating high? It’s impossible. Nothing will bring those fuckers down until the drug wears off. And coke is so addictive that you are searching for the next bump within seconds after the first one has stopped working. Same with the elite. Their dopamine rush is going full blast. They’ve been snorting lines off whores’ asses since 1965. Best we can hope for now is that they OD and their hearts just give out.

Game is like the cocaine version of power. Same feelings, quicker rush, less work. I know guys who run their best game while doing coke. Cocaine Game. Combine any two of the three and you are unstoppable. Game + societally high status = ladykiller. Game + cocaine = ladyslayer. Societally high status + cocaine = golddigger glue. Game + societally high status + cocaine = Plunderer of Vaginas.

This is all in the Bible somewhere, isn’t 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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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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Game, Obesity And Men Dropping Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ps this post hate-list approved.

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Barack Obama, June 4, 2008 (via Mangan’s):

Now let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable.

. . .

Any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a jewish state, with secure, recognized, defensible borders.

Barack Obama, January 6, 2012:

Illegal immigrants closely related to U.S. citizens would no longer have to leave the country to try to obtain legal status under a proposed change in immigration policy announced Friday by President Barack Obama’s administration.

The change, which would greatly reduce the amount of time U.S. citizens are separated from undocumented family members seeking legal status, is the latest attempt by the Obama administration to use its authority to implement some immigration reforms without congressional approval.

It makes one wonder. Are the American elite ignorant of their hypocrisy and double standards, or is it that they just don’t give a shit?

PS I have no quarrel with the premise of the quote in the top half of this post.

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