Hanna Rosin wrote a stream of consciousness diatribe against men in The Atlantic recently called “The End of Men“. As with most of these articles written by foot soldiers of the femborg collective lamenting — or celebrating, if the tone is any indication — the regression of men into second and third class status in American society, evidence for certain assertions is woefully lacking, and where the authors uncover something truthful about the condition of modern men, they only paint half a picture because of their refusal, out of ignorance or deceptiveness, to confront the full reality of the sexual market; in particular, female hypergamy. Without grasping the very different compulsions that animate men’s and women’s sexual drives, one will never have a clear understanding of male-female relations and cultural trends. Because ultimately, all culture, all markets, spring from the fundamental sexual market.
In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so [fertility] clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
Leaving aside the possibility of selection bias in the couples who make gender requests at fertility clinics, a trend toward proactively favoring girls over boys would be expected and predicted by evolutionary psychologists in a culture where an individual woman had an increasingly better chance of reproducing in adulthood than an individual man. As women are the limiting reproductive variable, and as men’s provider value is decreasing at the same time they are falling behind in the resource acquisition race relative to women, it makes far more sense for parents who, subconsciously, want children who can grow up to give them lots of grandchildren, to favor daughters over sons when a choice is available. It’s a reasonable bet hedge.
Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. “Now they just call and [say] outright, ‘I want a girl.’ These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”
That’s one reason. The other reason is that young girls are simply easier to raise than young boys. I have little nieces and nephews, and it’s easy to observe how much louder, rambunctious, temperamental, and ill-behaved the boys are compared to the girls. This is not an excuse to drug them; that same whirling dervish quality also imparts boys with the innate ability to invent, improve, and build civilizations from the ground up… and fight and screw like champs. For dual earning, self-absorbed parents on the go go go, better behaved daughters who don’t demand so much of their attention are a welcome relief.
Up to a point, the reasons behind this shift are obvious. As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest.
“Thinking”? I can see an innate advantage in communicating, as women are generally more extraverted and verbally adept than men, but in the thinking department men have the edge. Not only do more men occupy the far right tail of genius on the IQ bell curve, they also have a higher mean IQ than women.
And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized.
There is agreement among the commentariat that societies with emancipated and economically empowered women outperform societies with traditional sex roles, and that it is assumed this performance differential will hold up for eternity. But things change, the center cannot hold. Who’s to say gender egalitarian societies don’t contain within themselves the seed of their destruction? Or: this ride ain’t over yet.
What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?
Conscientious application to menial desk jockey multitasks is what women’s brains are best at. Our society exists at a strange moment of economic limbo between two worlds — the past manufacturing based world and the future transhuman world — a limbo where paper pushing, legalistic gear grinding, government welfare administration, and service with a smile has infested like a toxic mold almost every tier of vertical and horizontal economic productivity. It is the kind of work, in substance and in psychological reward, that is soul-crushing to men but fulfilling to women. And it is the kind of work for which colleges, with their mile wide but inch deep liberal arts programs and their empty-headed women’s studies classes, are preparing with perfect precision their students for the female-majority workforce of the anticipated future.
The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male.
As I’ve written before, all that female-oriented yapping, organizing, and paper shuffling means nothing if you don’t have the male-dominated engineers and scientists to produce the products that yappers huddle about to sell.
Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination.
Unlike articles written by respected authors in respectable magazines with a national exposure read by millions, we here at this little internet outpost must abide the truth. And the truth is that little to none of the sex wage gap has to do with discrimination. It is instead a result of differences in occupational choice, (mediated by women’s natural biological proclivity to prefer pursuing careers in lower paying nurturing jobs), and by women’s decisions to take time off work for family reasons.
I’d say pwned, but I think Hanna RosinPlotzinDingleheimerSchmidt would enjoy that.
Yes, women still do most of the child care.
Because Rosin doesn’t confront the existence of female hypergamy and status whoring, she does not reflect on the fact that men who do play kitchen bitch and contribute half or more of the child care and domestic duties quickly betatize themselves straight into sexless purgatory. Women can bitch all they want about unhelpful men in the home, but when push comes to shove, those women stop pushing into the crotches of their enlightened domesticated partners. Smart men know this, so they learn to ignore the bitching in favor of getting their dicks wet.
It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.
One of the commenters absolutely schooled Rosin about some of her assumptions of a female-dominated economy. You can read that comment here.
The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits.
Stereotypes don’t materialize out of thin air. They usually have a very large kernel of truth.
Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt.
This is the new talking point you’re going to hear from feminists now. “Men are not adapting.” Funny, when men were 80%+ of the workforce 50 years ago those feminists weren’t sorrowfully noting that women weren’t adapting. They were banging the mutlicult, West-loathing, equalist drums of Zion against the eeeeeevils of discrimination.
Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success.
If a high rate of female participation puts men off from working in certain fields, then it stands to reason gay marriage will put men off from marrying, if we follow feminist logic down rich avenues of discussion. Damn logic… you scary!
There is probably some truth to that, but the bigger reason is likely biological; men don’t enjoy working in nurturing jobs because men don’t like nurturing people. It doesn’t give us a scrotal tingle. Now smashing shit up… that’s fun!
But even the way this issue is now framed reveals that men’s hold on power in elite circles may be loosening. In business circles, the lack of women at the top is described as a “brain drain” and a crisis of “talent retention.”
Serious question: how much of a free market economy is positive sum? Is it not inconceivable that adding twice as many workers to the job market would displace a bunch of men already working into unemployment or underemployment, instead of adding to overall growth? Why is “brain drain” the default assumption, instead of “brain rearrange”?
Even around the delicate question of working mothers, the terms of the conversation are shifting. Last year, in a story about breast-feeding, I complained about how the early years of child rearing keep women out of power positions.
Poor fembot! Suck it up.
For recent college graduates of both sexes, flexible arrangements are at the top of the list of workplace demands, according to a study published last year in the Harvard Business Review. And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding.
Single moms like to talk about how they do things on their own, and they “don’t need a man”. But in fact, flex time and related corporate incentives *are* a form of substitute husband and father. That money for flex time has to come from somewhere, usually in higher prices for the company’s products or in lowered salaries for its employees. It is private welfare, but welfare just the same. Now companies can choose to offer this to their heart’s content; after all, no one is forcing me to buy their products or work there and thus subsidize the lifestyles of a bunch of single moms and harried working moms. But my advice to men who want to maximize their earning potential — work for companies that don’t offer generous payoffs in an effort to recruit working moms. It is likely you will command a higher salary with more patriarchal companies.
Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
That same testosterone that causes men to make risky stock market decisions also causes them to risk building gleaming civilizations and all the creature comforts therein that you ingrate feminists couldn’t live without.
Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life.
Only about 1/5th to a quarter of Americans are genetically capable of succeeding at undergraduate college. So is Rosin here suggesting that 4/5ths of Americans are doomed to a long eternal struggle to make ends meet? And, in light of this, what is her opinion on the importation of millions of peasant class Mexicans?
In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”
There’s that word rational again. And that word adapt. Here’s a scary thought for the platitude spouters to chew on: Perhaps men *are* acting in a rational way. Perhaps they are adapting to the new culture, aka sexual market ver. 2.0. When in the past men could reliably attract women with a decent middle class job working in a dreary corporate office or along a clattering assembly line, they put in the effort needed to get those jobs and paychecks. But now, in a mating landscape where women work and earn almost as much as men and, consequently, have devalued the traditional currency of barter in the mating market and shrunk their dating pool, men are responding to this disincentive to bust their balls for diminished sexual reward by dropping out (omegas), doping out (video gaming and porn consuming betas), and cadding about (alphas and practitioners of game).
Maybe men see the matrix better than Rosin thinks. If the economic empowerment of women means men have to work three times harder just to get the same old, now rapidly fattening, pussy they got in the past for less effort, then maybe they’ve figured out that the system is rigged against them. Maybe they’ve made a very rational decision to get access to this pussy by other means. And let it be said that there is more than one way to stroke a kitty. Remember, women don’t get wet for a paycheck; they get wet for the alpha demeanor that a man who is good at collecting paychecks exudes. And as any reader of this site knows, that alpha demeanor can be learned and applied.
When financially self-sufficient women turn away from beta providers as a source of sexual arousal, they substitute other alpha male qualities in its place. That is why Rosin’s article would have been better titled “The End of Beta Providers”. It’s a brave new world, and the answer is more game, more players, more sexual healing. It’s win-win for everyone… except modern society.
Victoria is a biology major and wants to be a surgeon; soon she’ll apply to a bunch of medical schools. She doesn’t want kids for a while, because she knows she’ll “be at the hospital, like, 100 hours a week,”
Do you want a girl who talks like this operating on you?
…and when she does have kids, well, she’ll “be the hotshot surgeon, and he”—a nameless he—“will be at home playing with the kiddies.”
Translation: she’ll be the subpar surgeon, and he will be at home masturbating furiously to teen porn while she’s out getting creampied by the biker patient with the sleeve tattoo who knows how to press her submissiveness buttons.
And yet, for all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.
I’ve never seen such an obvious case of cunty projection. I’m here to report, Mizz RosinFluffinHack, that no marriage, no kids, lotsa sex is a bachelor party without end. Far from being over, it’s in full swing.
Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project.
Bad for men who don’t have game or other compensatory alpha traits to secure sex. Definitely bad for kids. Good for women? Questionable. While women may think they are getting what they want right now, in the long term those fatherless kids are more likely to grow up into sluts and juvenile delinquents. And then the pendulum will swing back with an unstoppable force slicing and dicing the illusion of material comfort and free choice into a million little gelatinous bits. Single moms are literally breeding their undoing.
At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear.
Fear and anxiety and intimidation, oh my! The classic femcunt squid ink to complicate the very simple truth that men don’t find afeminine, go-getting, ball-busting alpha tankgrrls sexually attractive. Well, unless they’re really hot, in which case refusing a pump and dump would be… uncivilized.
The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior.
For every cougar dating a younger man, there are 100 older men dating younger women.
A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else?
Yo, Hanna Montana, it’s a movie. You’re not making the point you think you’re making here. In real life, aging George Clooney smartly avoids marriage and boffs a steady stream of hot young babes.
In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why.
This is one of those claims that I’m just sure is being massaged into a teetering steaming shitpile, but I’m too lazy to go digging for the relevant studies confirming or denying.
Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.
Mrs., or is it Ms.?, Hanna Rosin had her kids named RosinPlotz, after her last name and her husband’s last name. I wonder what their wedding vows were?
“I, Hanna’s grateful half, take you, Hanna, to be my lawfully wedded spousal partner, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, and in joy as well as sorrow. I promise to love you unconditionally, to allow you to love whomever whenever and not complain when you are self-actualizing, to support you in your goals, sexual or otherwise, to honor and respect you and the man you will eventually shack up with when you tire of my honoring and respecting, to laugh with you at me and to cry with myself on the day you so choose to expand your horizons and capacity for love to others, and to cherish you for so long as you choose to let me keep my money, house, and quality time with our kids.”
“I, Hanna, accept your marital terms, and promise to append your surname to the ass end of my surname for our kids, so that they may always know who is in charge.”
Man’s last stand, indeed.
