Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

As you probably know, I've been fascinated by the postings, comments, and general carrying-on over at Roissy's. Lordy, what a spectacle.

Yet I've also been puzzled by what underlies it. For a long time I assumed that what was being expressed was a simple matter: Young guys who grew up in a pussyfied -- er, feminized -- world were (once out in the real world) discovering that they'd been lied-to and brainwashed, and were discovering what it feels like to walk around as the fond and proud possessor of a pair of balls.

But, over the months, it has also occurred to dim me that there seems to be more going on than just a lot of young lions giving each other permission to roar. A lot is being assumed by these young guys. There's some experience they share, or think they share.

But I couldn't discern what it was. I felt like someone looking down from an airplane on a cloudy day and trying to make out what the landscape beneath is like. Finally, on this posting, I found the sense to just plain ask for guidance.

MBlowhard:

Can anyone clear up some confusion I have? I love following this blog, but I’m often baffled by it. It’s like reading about life on a planet that’s quite different than the one I know. Alphas? Betas? Cockblocking? It’s all news to me.

So I try to make sense of what I’m encountering. Let me see if I’ve got it right. A lot of young guys commenting here seem to feel that, although they’re plausible provider material, they’re being prevented by contempo circumstances from winning girls and starting families.

Do I have this right? Is this the basic complaint that underlies most of the other complaints and the carrying-on?

Commenter Dougjnn (who has occasionally visited 2Blowhards) stepped up with a lot of helpful guidance. He spread it out over two comments; for the sake of clarity I've slightly rearranged a few of his paragraphs.

Alphas? Betas? Cockblocking? It’s all news to me.

Those are terms from the world of Game - broadly shared among its now many different gurus and teachers. But they do have real meaning behind them, and it’s not all common sense. There’s a lot of mainstream cultural misinformation (for ideology-driven molding purposes) about these things — what makes men and women most attractive in the “dating market”. They aren’t at all the same for each sex, and they aren’t what you’ve been told, or only partly are, and knowing what you haven’t been told is a key advantage.

I do think there’s been a big change since the 70’s and 80’s which is I think the “back in the day” you’re talking about.

Mostly: 1) A lot higher percentage of young women now earn comparably to similarly situated men, and what’s more, this has seeped into deep cultural awareness amongst them, such that they feel they can afford to delay marriage longer (and should also for status/feminist reasons) and be choosier, with that choice now emphasizing more than ever, esp. for upper half or third girls, sexiness in men rather than only or primarily high and stable income.

2) Again amongst upper half and third girls a number of cultural forces, including feminism but also ever more sexualized media and of course net porn have made the choice of quite promiscuous sexual behavior for girls especially at this stratum to be a valid choice, though perhaps problematic when marriage time comes around. Though this idea is much suppressed by feminists who insist that if guys are studs for sleeping around why aren’t girls — which has it exactly backwards. Girls who give it up real without necessarily having testing out a relationship in mind are going to go for the sexiest guy they can get (alpha), not the reliable or even high earning beta provider.

3) Although both are choosy though mostly about different things esp. in the casual or pretty casual sex market, attractive women are considerably choosier than attractive men (on average). This leads to a relatively small number of alpha (pretty much why they’re alpha) males getting most approaching all of the high frequency, casual sex outside of a long term relationship or damn good bet at one. Also remember that these 20’s girls feel free to spend that whole decade looking for the "perfect" match (who’s alpha) — so lots of try-and-discard is fine and expected. All with alphas, or almost — among the arguably hot girls.

So a small percentage of guys (10-15%?) who are NOT arrayed entirely by money or education are getting the great majority of the action from the hot and attractive girls (25%?). With other males (betas) getting little, and the rest of the girls (who are often pretty fat these days) also getting little.

4) Feminism has now indoctrinated a whole generation of males from school age and younger (moms, media) to be less masculine and more metrosexual or emo (and certainly not bad boy assholes). This still doesn’t work too well among really high testosterone types (alphas) and might not make much difference at the bottom of the male sexual attraction heap, but it makes a big difference in the vast middle.

Feminist and the much larger group of sorta feminist women (most all who’ve gone or are clearly going to grad school) may APPROVE OF and appreciate this toning down and feminizing of their classmates, work colleagues, LJBF male friends and so on, but they don’t feel burning in their loins for them. Another reason for the rather steep pyramid of who’s getting action these days: small number of alpha males (and attractive female sluts) getting the most, then alpha females not from strict and sexually puritan religious backgrounds — and then the vast pool of betas male and female who aren’t getting so much.

Anyway that’s the core view expounded by Roissy relative to your question, I think. I think it’s exaggerated, but also rather true.

Peter chimed in with some wry perspective:

So a small percentage of guys (10-15%?) who are NOT arrayed entirely by money or education are getting the great majority of the action from the hot and attractive girls (25%?). With other males (betas) getting little, and the rest of the girls (who are often pretty fat these days) also getting little.

That of course seems to be the conventional wisdom expounded across the blogosphere. On the other hand, the percentage of people who marry or enter long-term relationships hasn’t dropped to much of an extent if at all. Makes you wonder if the conventional wisdom may be off the mark.

Dougjnn and Peter got me thinking. As bloghost, I'm treating myself to the last word:

Thanks, very enlightening. Life has moved on since my own dating and catting-around years, that’s for sure. The sexes (a few wild-eyed feminists aside) didn’t used to be at quite such open war. Most people used to pair up without too, too much trouble. Status-seeking could be a big deal but didn’t have to be. Rigid ranking-systems (1s, 10s, etc) didn’t really exist — there were a few flaming beauties and studs, sure, but for the rest of us a girl or guy could be appealing for any number of reasons.

It all does leave me wondering why more guys don’t ditch the big cities, the coastal areas, and leave the high-strung status-seeing girls behind. The country is full of sweet, cute girls who have almost nothing on their minds but having families. Between you and me: A challenge in its own right, no? Borrrrrinnnngggg. But there they are, ripe for the picking.

Why do you suppose more guys don’t do this? My own small hunch: 1) They’ve been hurt by the alpha girls, so they obsess about them and can’t let them go. 2) Their brains and tastes have been affected by porn, and they aren’t as open to different kinds of beauty and prettiness as men used to be.

Further enlightenment is always appreciated.

Thanks to Dougjnn and Peter.

Best,

Michael

>>Why do you suppose more guys don’t do this? My own small hunch: 1) They’ve been hurt by the alpha girls, so they obsess about them and can’t let them go. 2) Their brains and tastes have been affected by porn, and they aren’t as open to different kinds of beauty and prettiness as men used to be.

I think you're dead on about both, especially the second reason. For evidence, tune into the Howard Stern Show. I listen every day and whenever they get around to talking about women -- which is a lot -- the girls they obsess over have the same pornified look. The Pamela Anderson type is held out as the ideal.

Posted by: Bryan on September 6, 2008 2:26 PM

"Why do you suppose more guys don’t do this?"

Because it's dumb. Taking your question on good faith, you are saying move to a small town PRIMARILY to put yourself in a position to meet and marry a good small town family-oriented girl. Ok. As a close-on secondary consideration, after I just hated the city, or I got a decent job offer nearby, or I like the country or this part of the country, or it's close to home and family, or I'm interested in owning land or SOMETHING other than finding a wife, sure, it's cool. But it's rather unmanly I'd say, if it's one's primary reason. It's wimpy. Needy.

In terms of geographical-mating arbitrage, the easy obvious move is one for the women to make: move to Alaska. Needy is good for them. A plus. Wow, men will think, she moved here to find a husband, and she's honest about it; I'd better scoop this catch up.

Posted by: CMC on September 6, 2008 2:26 PM

Very interesting. That whole world is not just foreign, but absolutely alien to me, so your posts have been educational in a very enlightening way.
That leads me to what I suspect is the undiscussed issue in these relationships, and that is intimacy. The discussion seemed to be about a business exchange where try to buy it is the norm. What I've found is that the core dilemma in the relationships between the sexes is that of intimacy. If I choose a spouse for her demographic benefits, then where does intimacy fit into that picture. And if intimacy doesn't, then where does commitment.
What the sexual liberation movement has done is not elevate sex to a more powerful level, but lowered it to a more common one. All because it isn't about intimacy any longer.

Posted by: Ed Brenegar on September 6, 2008 2:31 PM

Numbers. We need numbers. What evidence is there that there has been any substantial change in sexual behaviour among the young since 30-40 years ago (our "back in the day")?

I'm not claiming there hasn't been, but until hard numbers are put on these things I don't see the "wars" you're talking about, or even the dynamic that dougjnn described as being anything new since the era of Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Case in point: are more women being f*cked by fewer young men? This would have to be true if the alphas' monopoly / betas in the cold scenario is truer now than it was twenty thirty years ago.

Well, those numbers should be fairly easy to find. I'm going to see if I can. I can tell you right now my own feeling is that we just have more people writing more openly about the same old same old and giving it new names.

"Plus ca change...: is more true in sex (including the part hidden in the ellipsis) than most other areas of life. People are LESS capable of change in something as heavily wired as sexual behaviours, motivations, cues and triggers. My guess is anyone who says things are much different today is full of it.

But I shall endeavour to prove my point, not just rant it out.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 6, 2008 2:36 PM

Yeah, I'm in this same general age group -- late 20s -- and though I didn't get treated to too much random nookie with shapely young things in earlier years, I didn't go too much out of my way to get it either, and yet here I am, along with most of the people I know who aren't too busy or self-absorved, paired off pretty much Right On Schedule. Amazing how that happens, no?

I do believe that there is such a phenomenon as they are describing on the Roissy blog -- which I also greatly enjoy -- but I really suspect it's mostly a hothouse coastal metropolitan thing, maybe a semi-elite to elite college thing, as well. I've been in that world enough to recognize the truth in these descriptions. A lot of it, though, I think is just entitled nerd rage: I'm so smart (I think) and am going to be so rich (I think), why won't all the ladies drop their panties for me without any effort on my part? Well...to the extent that "The Game" is about teaching these nerds to actually make an effort at being appealing to women, I think it's a splendid thing, but the quasi-religious fervor is a little weird. I guess if you try this stuff out, and soon lay an nubile lovely who would never have looked at you before, you're really made a true believer. But all this dogma about alphas and betas is a little arid and secular/decadent Thomist for my taste. Still, good reading....

Posted by: ERM on September 6, 2008 2:55 PM

Guys who couldn't get girls used to just bitch about it. Now they have the internet to find each other, try to learn how to change, and, perhaps most of all, blame women for all of it. I don't think relations between the sexes have changed that much -- it's just that this new group of nerds have the internet to talk about it.

Posted by: JewishAtheist on September 6, 2008 3:17 PM

On the other hand, the percentage of people who marry or enter long-term relationships hasn’t dropped to much of an extent if at all.

MB, I was really surprise to hear you, or anyone, say that. Simply check any statistical record of marriages per 1000 people over the last 50 years and you will see a huge decline. The decline really started in the late 60's and began a big fall in the mid-70's.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 6, 2008 3:50 PM

Usually L, that's my sense (still not backed by any hard data), that is, that things changed somewhat post-Pill, economic changes for women, with divorce, adultery, pre-marital boffing, all rising to considerably higher levels than, say, the '50s, then levelling off. Then fluctuating around a steady sort of rate. Nothing new post 1975 say.

Analogy in lieu of facts: drug use became more than a tiny fringe activity in the '60s, became much more of a mass movement in the '70s, and hasn't changed much since (talking mainstream US here). I entered Narcotics Anonymous back in the mid 80s, which was when an entire generation of kids had beome adults after experimenting with drugs in their teens. Some developed problems (me!), some got help (me!) through NA (me!...and others in all three areas).

NA is not substantially larger now in Ottawa than it was in the late 80s. The number of kids experimenting with drugs is not much different than it was in the late 70s. The proportion who develop drug problems is not much higher, the proportion of those problem users who seek help isn't much higher, the ones who make it are about the same in number. And so the net result is NA grew rapidly in the 80s as the first mass gen drug addicts hit bottom and sought help. Since then, all the stats at every point in the process of addiction have stabilized. Big change 60s to 70s, consequences begin to work out in the 80s, compensation and learning kicks in from then on...and its now the same kind of problem, same scale, year in year out.

Take drugs out, put in sex, very similar story. Same kabuki dance, same moves, same casualties. But as JA put it, now we've got the internet, and we can talk about like it's all brand new.

It isn't. It's about thirty years old, and it's running on spin cycle. We're settling into a post-pill urbanized post-porn economically independent women era, superimposed on 40,000 year old brain structures. We're not doing too badly, all things considered. No war between the sexes, just a settling into a new, still-not-quite-used-to-it modus vivendi.

Hothouse coastal pickup bars were just the same in 1978 as they are in 2008. Just more insistence on condoms, that's all.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 6, 2008 4:20 PM

This is true, but only for a slice of the population. I don't think there's a lot "game" being played in trailer parks for example.

Posted by: Todd Fletcher on September 6, 2008 4:44 PM

I read Roissy... and I've got to say I find it horrifying. Not the sex, but the viciousness and hatred.

Vengeance is the overwhelming theme of the blog. So, you've got to ask yourself... vengeance for what?

To me, it's pretty obvious. The anger and hatred is over the destruction of a comprehensible moral system that has been replaced by chaos. For those who have not noticed, Roissy's theme has turned to anger that women are not making themselves marriage-able and fit to have babies. And, he wants revenge.

As men will, Roissy and his readers are searching for a new, solid system to replace the destroyed moral traditions of the past. They've discovered it in the Law of the Jungle. All things are explained by dividing the world into Alphas and Betas. It's an all encompassing moral system that explains everything. Here, I'm reminded of Devlin's comments that feminism has turned human society into a caricature of baboon society.

Roissy's personnae has turned ever more bitter and hateful with every passing week. He's fucking the hell out of the bitches to teach them a lesson. As often happens, he's out to teach the feminist witches a lesson by becoming their worst nightmare. He spends his days plotting to become the demonic avenger of men.

Roissy is a creation of feminism. He is enraged by the breakdown of tradition and social roles. He is correct that this can lead only to all out war. And, his solution is: "Bring it on bitches!"

And, Michael, what do the cities have to offer? I've spent my life there. The hip life of the cities is boring. Raising a family is far more interesting and exciting. What the cities have to offer is really only jobs and money. If you get rich and can afford to also raise a family in the city, you've hit the jackpot. Few do. I didn't. I'd trade my 35 years in the city for half a dozen more kids in an instant.

My sister, who stayed home, enjoys her weekends in a house full of a dozen grandchildren. She did far better in life than I did precisely because she stayed in the small towns. She lives in a 2,000 square foot house, instead of squeezing herself into a tiny apartment. I made three times as much money and have half as much to show for it. Read Sailer's theories on Affordable Family Formation.

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on September 6, 2008 5:32 PM

I'll allow that there are almost certainly some "revenge of the nerds" dynamics at work. You can see some ugly or just plain stupid posts on any of these popular "Game" or sexual dynamics sites.

But from more intelligent (or perhaps just more secure) posters, like Roissy and a good portion of his commenters, you also get the notion that the alpha-ization of modern men is good for women, too. Sometimes it comes across as just more alpha cockiness, but it's true nevertheless.

Sex is better when people are highly attracted to each other. A great many women are more attracted (sexually, at least), to men who aren't afraid to act manly (confident, secure, and strong). And people who have great sex are happier. It's a gift men give themselves AND their women to shake off their post-modern, feminized window-dressing.

I'm somewhat of a natural alpha myself, in terms of natural sex appeal, but I grew up super sensitive and liberal, with an odd aversion to my own masculinity (a weak father figure and too much time in the theater didn't help). I got laid by dozens of different women in my early 20s, but always ended up clingy and needy nevertheless. Now, at age 30, I'm still a killer, but having internalized the lessons of the modern men's movement (of the Roissy variety, not the tribal ritual variety), I see the women I sleep with are far happier. They sense my masculinity, which opens up their own femininity, which opens up their true soul, which makes them happy. It makes me much happier too. I can be educated and witty, not a caveman in the slightest, but also strong and in-control and confident. To those of you older men who find it surprising that something so basic could be a revelation to someone like me, I submit that I'm from a radically-feminized generation and that some things really HAVE changed (at least in some parts of the country).

In fact, anecdotally, the girl I'm seeing tonight is an ex- professional-dominatrix who now works for a huge entertainment conglomerate in Manhattan. She's 26, Korean American, and cute as a kitten. She absolutely loves it when I "act the man" and she's very submissive to me. I asked her about this one time, about how it seems so at odds with being a dominatrix and a corporate ass-kicker. She said it's for exactly that reason she craves a guy like me... her feminine core is left untouched by modern life, and she rarely feels truly alive. She has no trouble finding a willing partner, but real difficulty finding a naturally masculine man somewhere in her age range.

Of course, it takes intelligence and not just brute masculinity to operate this way. But intelligence without masculinity also fails here.

Posted by: nuclearD on September 6, 2008 6:00 PM

Another thing I want to add is that this discussion is not really that helpful until these factors are considered:
1.) What percentage of young men can afford a home in NYC, Chicago, LA, Miami, Seattle, Boston, Philly, etc. (Call this Affordable Family Formation a la Sailer if you want. Hell, MB, just look at the amazing property taxes in NY State alone for evidence.)
2.) The fact that men are not as likely to be bread winners anymore. I know that this is not supposed to matter, but it does.
3.) How fat girls have gotten. Yes, I know that guys have gotten equally fat, but we all know that it hurts girls more to be overweight than it does guys. Although, Obesity seems to affect both equally.
4.) So, so many girls are pretty slutty nowadays. Spring Break in Cancun, a vacation in Rome, and those guys that she never tells you about, but you find out about them anyway...it all adds up. Again, apparently guys are not supposed to care about such things, but we tend to invest more (i.e. marry) in good girls than sluts.

BTW, I just did a quick check on Google and the current marriage rate is about 1/2 of what it was in 1970. In England and Wales it is about 1/4 of what it was in 1970.

Things are very, very different.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 6, 2008 6:32 PM

I don't think the characterization of the Roissy crowd as "nerds" is fair. I was definitely not a nerd in high school and I suspect many of the others weren't -- and aren't -- either.

What's happened is that the average guy has now been redefined as a nerd. Because educated women now have higher standards, that's now created a situation in which the average, marrigable dude has been dumped into the "loser" category because he's not a CEO type.

This is the problem. Sly Stone's assertion aside, everyone ISN'T be a star.

Anyway, I see the Roissy crowd as more "revenge of the average guys who wondered wtf happened."

Posted by: Days of Broken Arrows on September 6, 2008 7:30 PM

The Roissy/Men's Rights crowd seems to be doing what alarmists of all stripes tend to do: create a model which factors out the bits they don't like, run the model, then react to the consequences of the model rather than to the actual situation in front of them. Every declinist vision from global warming to the vanishing middle class is "proven" by this route. (Occasionally it's gussied up with anecdotal evidence - drowning polar bears and the like - but that's mere illustration; it's the artfully truncated model that's always the driving force.)

The things factored out by the Roissy model are subjectivity and heterogeneity. Women in the model don't choose men based on subjective criteria like does he share my particular values, does he fit in with my unique plans, and the like. Instead they choose based on objective criteria like status, height, facial symmetry et cetera. And furthermore they all pursue the same objective values. From bookworm to harlot, from INFP to ENTJ, from Sinead O'Connor to Simone Weil, they all want status, height, facial symmetry, et cetera. Run the model on those premises and we get the result of alpha monopoly/beta drought, which replaces (in the mind of the zealot) the familiar everyday reality of someone-for-everybody, whatever-did-she-see-in-him, no-accounting-for-taste, eye-of-the-beholder, and other clichés.

By the way, I suspect that their choice of objectivity über alles is an aesthetic as well as methodological one. Objectivity is considered masculine and subjectivity feminine, and we all know what a great store they put in masculinity over there. And the dismal and pessimistic vision yielded thereby shows the macho courage of the person who can steel himself to believe in it.

(I should admit that the above is based on analytical criticism rather than personal experience because, not being in any way a sentimentalist, I've always associated dating and relationships with the Francis Macomber type - post-Yoko John Lennon, for instance, or my parents; that kind of person; all the ginger taken right out of 'em - and consequently I've never felt the urge to get overmuch involved.)

Posted by: Brian on September 6, 2008 7:41 PM

Move to the towns? Not if your in Australia, the major of Mt Isa created a little storm suggesting the exact opposite. Looks like the truth about single women flocking to inner city living and searching for 'Mr. Big' is more than a mere anecdote.

Link

http://www.theage.com.au/news/relationships/mayor-persists-with-ugly-duckling-advice/2008/08/19/1219262389434.html

Posted by: Niko on September 6, 2008 8:08 PM

There is a lot of good commentary above, but way too much over-analysis of a very simple, very easily observable change in how the sexes relate. It's easy to dismiss Roissy as cynical but only because we've been trained by birth to put women's feelings into cultural context while men's feelings are either correct or incorrect.

Which just goes to show where the power lies.

If we showed the same concern for gender inequality and oppresive social conditions affecting European-American men, we find a generation in crisis: dropping out of high school at a rate many times that of girls, failing to obtain college degrees at almost the same high rate, the disappearance of the solid blue-collar job, the cultural mocking of male virtue, the disappearance of the concept of the gentleman, etc.

It's all quite obvious and really doesn't require much analysis.

These guys have been lied to their entire lives by women, the same women who now dominate their social lives, the same women who have decided that they are second-rate and not worthy of female attention, despite the fact that these men have done exactly what they were told to do by women.

They're pissed. So, they're checking out. And turning the tables.

And now the women are starting to piss and moan about it.

The whole thing reminds me of the story of the old Englishman on a crowded tube train, sitting while a bunch of standing young women loomed over him and stared at him with disapproval.

"You lot wanted equality! Now, stand their and fucking enjoy it."

It's nothing more than that.

Posted by: KevinV on September 6, 2008 8:20 PM

One thing dougjnn and others leave out is the choosiness of men. I guarantee you that pretty much every guy posting at the Roissy blog could have married a nice, loving but rather plain girl by now if they wanted to. But that's not enough. They are perma-bitter about what they claim is women following their genetic programming of seeking high-status "alpha" male. But some of that is projection...many guys are trapped in following their own genetic programming of seeking endless sexual variety with young women who have high-status or "trophy" forms of beauty (men pursue beauty, but what is beautiful is partially socially defined).

One thing that links both these forms of choosiness is an individualist consumerist model of romance. Instead of romance as a socially embedded community attempt to build new mini-communities (families) among the young, or romance as the pursuit of intimacy between unique individuals, we have romance as each individual's pursuit of the best thing for sale in the shopping mall.

Of course, another thing here is birth control --by lowering the rate of unplanned pregnancy and "shotgun marriages" it allows people to be choosier in who they marry. Nature used to force lots of marriages.

Also, as many point out above, this is a phenomenon that is most important in a limited subculture. The web allows each subculture to narrowcast small worlds where their particular extreme tastes are completely normative and set the terms of the discussion.

The comments from Shouting Thomas and (especially) Brian above are very perceptive. I particularly liked this comment from Brian:

Objectivity is considered masculine and subjectivity feminine, and we all know what a great store they put in masculinity over there. And the dismal and pessimistic vision yielded thereby shows the macho courage of the person who can steel himself to believe in it.

Roissy does this kind of posturing all the time.

Posted by: MQ on September 7, 2008 12:36 AM

Guys who don't have trouble getting laid don't have time to write and read blogs all day.

Guys who can't get laid, plot and whine about it online.

love, Sister Wolf

Posted by: Sister Wolf on September 7, 2008 2:13 AM

First of all Michael, a few helpful stats:

Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) women: 9.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) men: 20.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) women in NYC: 15.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) men in NYC: 30.

However, many women report up to 60 in NYC. The Sex and the City lifestyle is not uncommon. Considering that the STD rate nationally for adults is 19%, but among NYC adults is 25%.

The Census Bureau just last month released it's new figures: illegitimate births are now 41% (including women living with unmarried "partner" -- who statistically speaking is unlikely to marry her much less stick around and help raise the kid).

What you don't account for is that the Pill and Condom, urban anonymity and rapid personal mobility (Roissy's key insight) allow women to basically "have it all" -- as much high-testosterone high-status sex with powerful men as they want, and in the end single motherhood with no compromises with a single baby at their thirties.

Women don't WANT to marry. Around the globe, including many places feminism never appeared (Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, Japan, and Russia) women DO NOT WANT TO MARRY.

Women are CHOOSING not to marry. They'd rather spend about twenty years of "mindblowing sex" with various hunky guys, and then have the single designer yuppie baby -- and this pattern is replicated around the globe wherever you have these factors (including Algeria, Iran, and Tunisia -- check the CIA WorldFactbook fertility rates all below 1.7):

*Urbanization allowing multiple sex partners for women without disapproval socially.
*Large urban centers and physical mobility allowing a women to not see a discarded partner.
*Women having equal or greater income to most men, allowing freedom economically to pursue single motherhood.
*Availability of the Pill, Condom, allowing women to control easily and reliably their own fertility.

Why do men stay in the cities? Because that is where both the jobs and women are. Michael there is a map on Coyote Blog somewhere, sorry no link, showing the geographical distribution of men and women. Women just are not in small towns and definitely not in the West. Any halfway attractive and intelligent woman can move to the city and dramatically improve her income and sex life and abilities to have "good genes" offspring without having "boring" regular guys. [Dalrymple in "Life at the Bottom" notes even his nurses who know better choose violent and dangerous men who abuse them because they are "exciting" and decent guys "boring."]

Women will generally "share" high-status, high testosterone men unless constrained. Now they do, because they can AFFORD TO. It's a soft polygamy and like all systems has it's flipside -- a lot of unconnected to women young men. Who are the losers alongside the Alpha winners.

This is basically the Black Community writ small and softer (selecting on BASE jumping and Whitewater kayaking instead of gangsterism). Google "Lauren London Thugs" to see what I'm talking about. But it is the same effect. With the same predictable negative reaction: Compare/contrast your standard romantic R&B ballad from 1965 to your average Gangsta Rapper from 2005 and the views of women and romance.

If there is "revenge of the nerds" at work, two things stand out: one, these nerds will not be reproducing and High testosterone lawyers are not very good at curing cancer or fixing failed power grids, and two a bunch of smart guys angry and unconnected to women is even worse. Since being smart they can if they want cause more damage.

There is a definite distaste in women for intelligence in men. Understandable, since intelligence in men correlates with higher testosterone and women prefer that unconstrained (as they are now). Women famously HATE anything "nerdy" or requiring high intelligence, narrow and sustained focus, for any length of time, and particularly men who engage in those hobbies or "nerdy" occupations: engineers, software developers, mathematicians, etc.

Oh and in the UK and Scandi nations? Births are over 50% illegitimate.

MQ -- most men have a floor of attractiveness that after it's met, doesn't matter. Mary Ann is more desireable than Ginger, because Mary Ann is the "girl next door." The "Nerd Girls" who can meet this type do well: Alyson Hannigan, Kari Ann Byron (Mythbusters), Michelle Trachtenberg, etc.

HBO's "True Blood" has the archetypal woman's fantasy of the ideal man -- the hunky violent vampire the woman "controls" with her sexuality. In low rent version, that is what plays out with Dalrymples' educated and professional nurses. Except those guys haul off and beat their girlfriends in the workplace. With I might add, impunity given the feminized/pc response to law enforcement in the UK.

Posted by: whiskey on September 7, 2008 2:30 AM

Incidentally, I'd like to add that the 26-year-old Korean ex-dominatrix kitten canceled on me tonight (since I was, after all, kinda bragging on that point, and a typical and fully-predictable flaky post-modern woman move that was on her part). So instead I went out with the 28-year-old artist girl from Hong Kong (yes, I have an Asian thing, deal with it), who basically professed her love for me tonight even as I was confessing to her my involvement with girl A (Korean kitten cutie) not to mention girls B and C, which I referred to only obliquely.

My point is, these willing girls are NEVERENDING, if you live on the coasts. I often notice, on these blogs and in American politics in general, a tendency to assert that the one (my experience as a native Seattlite living in Brooklyn) is somehow lesser or at least less "American" than the other (living in a small town or a depressed urban region). A ridiculous dichotomy. Both are obviously equally American.

So then, relinquishing all claims to being "more American" than any other posters here, I will say that it is my experience and the experience of, trust me, literally MILLIONS of other young American men, that these women are dime-a-dozen whores if you want to get your dick wet (beta men, my condolences), but goddamn singular angels if they are marriageable material.

I fully acknowledge that my own dick-get-wet behavior contributes to this overall dilemma. But I also submit that mine is only a retrograde reaction to the state of affairs. Should it really be a soul death-sentence for a young man to live in a large metropolis where all the most exciting cultural, political, and social action is, just because the women there are untameable harridans? Should we all retreat to the WalMarts of America, and be happy with the women we find working the doors? Or should we try somehow to act as classic men and hope that our actions will elicit from the environment some classic women?

Should our young men of action and drive be driven to act in small ways in small towns? If you want a simple life, granted, you should live in a simple place. But from classical Athens and Rome, to Medieval Cordoba and Byzantium, to Renaissance Brussels and Venice, to modern Paris and London, Western history has been driven by strong men (and women) living in the cultural centers of the day. The poles of the 21st century may be shifting to Bangalore and Beijing over time. But for now, Los Angeles and New York remain fucking incredible centers of human ingenuity. Are we really willing to say that any strong, intelligent, resourceful, ingenuous young man should relocate to Billings if he wishes to find a fulfilling home life??

On the other hand, considering Achilles' choice, I'm willing to entertain the notion that the answer to my hypothetical is essentially "yes."

I have no problem with a smart woman. I LOVE smart women and, in fact, they tend to make my dick hard. But surrendering the coasts to the betas hardly seems to be either an equitable, or a wise, solution.

Posted by: nuclearD on September 7, 2008 4:16 AM

"Guys who don't have trouble getting laid don't have time to write and read blogs all day."

Once again, this is the cliche feminist argument technique being trotted out: any man who opines or shows feelings "can't get laid." This is a way of shutting down thought, much in the same manner as calling someone "racist" or "sexist." It's attacking the person, not the idea.

Sorry to be mean, but this is one reason a lot of men will not pursue intellectual ideas with women. Once women disagree, they simply shout insults and it gets like trying to reason with a child who is into namecalling.

Rather than address the (lack of) substance of this comment, I'll mention that it's ideas like this that cause Roissy's blog. It's a place where guys can confer outside the emotional straightjacket some women place us in.

Also, you left something out: What if some of us don't want to get laid because we're repulsed by women we do meet, or because we're gay? Not every man cares about "getting laid" (especially married ones over 40). But it's telling that it's you that brought this sleaziness into the argument. Methinks it's not the men here that aren't getting laid...

Posted by: Days of Broken Arrows on September 7, 2008 8:02 AM

Michael:

Isn't the migration of the young from the towns to the cities precisely the cause of the homogenization of society that you so often decry?

What is created is a hipster SWPL society that is virtually indistinguishable whether you reside in Chicago, New Orleans or New York City.

The emptying out of the small towns is, of course, an economic phenomenon. The death of the factory economy and the mechanization of farming purged the small towns of decent employment.

I think that these factors go a lot farther in explaining the death of the business district in the small towns and the overwhelming triumph of the standardized, McDonalized environment than the choices of architects and urban planners.

The young are flocking to the cities by choice, but the choices are pretty limited. In the era of the union factory, a small town guy could make the same income as a professional man, and stay home.

You write so often about the gutted regional cultures and the blanded out cities. Isn't the cause of this the homogenous cultures created by all those young hipsters who flee the boondocks for the cities?

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on September 7, 2008 8:16 AM

Most of the things said here I pretty much agree with. Yes, this was created by the breakdown of traditional mores. Yes, angry nerds such as myself can now use the Internet to bitch.

The only funny thing is my own perspective; I really wasn't that interested in women and satisfied myself in, ah, a solitary manner, until I realized not having a girlfriend was hurting my career. But I still don't really enjoy their company. And oddly enough, I'm discovering at a very old age that sex really isn't that much better than lefty and righty. It's odd; I always thought sex was supposed to be the most pleasurable thing in life. But there you have it. I mean, they're all into romance and long walks on the beach and long, boring movies... nothing wrong with those things but they don't do anything for me.

Now, Mike: I know about the mystery and the romance of seeking a woman. But you gotta remember, people are different, and what for you is mysterious and romantic for guys like me simply means rejection out of hand, because we don't have that artistic sensibility.

I don't really want kids either; I simply don't like people enough. It's sort of too bad the monastic alternative has vanished with knights and bubonic plague.

Posted by: SFG on September 7, 2008 8:31 AM

I thought I'd chime in with my 2 cents.

With regard to male anger and hate, puh..lease. Anyone been to any of the more moderate feminist sites? The vitriol the misandrogeny that gets bandied about at those sites puts Roissy's misogyny to shame. A bit of perspective people.

Sure a lot of men are angry, but its because they feel like they've been had.

Look, until very recently, our society taught a man that a way to a woman's heart--and therefore her pants--was through being kind, agreeable and romantic. The movies are full of the goofy guy who gets the beautiful girl in the end. Women even to this day, continue to enthusiastically purport this traditional view.

How often have you heard, "I'd love to find myself a nice, funny guy"? Only to see the same girl later, with some thug, his hand up her skirt.

Sister Wolf is right, the men getting laid don't have time to write blogs. Most of the the guys that do the blogging are probably normal quite introspective guys with nerdy interests. In other words such men are sexually unattractive.

One of Roissy's most brilliant pieces was on the following paraphrased thought experiment. Which guy at a bar is least likely to get laid:

A) Murderer.
b) Drug addict.
C) Hell's angel.
d) Computer nerd.

The question is, which one of these is likely to be the nice guy?

However, when not getting laid, most of these nerdy nice guys are usually solving problems for a living. And it's not surprising that may of these guys thing that not getting laid is a "problem", so its not surprising that that they have put their intellectual talents to the task.

The result is of course, the study of what women find attractive: Game.

Now consider this from the point of view of the detached observer; woman says that she likes x, but does y. Now when a politician says he likes x but does y, what do we call him? Or how about if we purchase x but get y, are we happy? Generally not, and there is frequently a bit of anger and contempt directed to a person making such claims. Indeed, the anger is proportional to degree in which we were deprived of x.

And nothing hurts like spurned love.

Why then the surprise, at the contempt of the subject material?

Posted by: slumlord on September 7, 2008 10:18 AM

I really liked ST's first comment above, which as an unusual thing, and I am always greatly interested in reading what Whiskey has to say. I should clarify my suggestion about the "revenge of the nerds" aspect that others have mentioned also. I really do think that to the extent that a lot of men have suffered tremendous loss to their status in pomo society and that "The Game" or whatever allows them to build their status back up to meet the evident contemporary female demand, and thus land women for the traditional purposes of matrimony and reproduction, it's absolutely super. Never needed it myself, happy to say, but I like to see everybody happy. To the extent that it's being used to justify years on end of meaningless "hook ups" in interchangeable nightclubs or that it's becoming a rigid ideology of Alphas vs. Betas, Madonnas (foreign usually) vs. Whores (domestic), well...I'll pass. A war of the sexes is the last war I wan to fight, thank you very much. Wake me up for the class war or when the Chinese spill into the next valley.

By the way, I have to specifically second the notion mentioned above that porn has a lot to do with some hyper unrealistic expectations from young men about what constitutes an acceptable lay. MQ may be right that there's a floor here but I think it's moved up a storey or two in the last 20 years for a lot of dudes. I never would have believed this until recently, lumping worries about pornification in with absurd worries that video games are turning our pudgy, pasty youth into serial murderers, but I've recently started to wonder. Any one here familiar with David Alexander of Roissy's comment section and many others? Here's a dude -- unless he is the brilliant satirical creation of some crusading feminist anti-porn group -- who seems to have had his natural male ability to respond to the closeness and corporality of normal, lovely girls totally fried by porn. When I hear a lot of men discussing girls today, I'm really hearing a lot of less-extreme echos of the same. Not doing yourself any favours, my friends.

Posted by: ERM on September 7, 2008 10:48 AM

Women's "dominance" in university degrees is irrelevant. No men are agitating to get into female-dominated areas like sociology because we men, with our status-dar, know those degrees are worthless. If women are so dominating and our culture so feminized, then why aren't men agitating anywhere to get admitted into these various invisible but decisive female power circles? Why are women still going on and on about getting admitted into areas dominated by men? Why is there a movement to apply Title IX anti-discrimination to science math and engineering to get women into these fields? Because women know, and we know, that where you find men dominant, as in science, math and engineering, there is the status and power in our society. Nothing has changed.

Women are not blazing any kind of sexual swathes through American alpha males, leaving them smug and semen-depleted and beta males blue-balled and seething. Are there huge numbers of virgins out there that weren't there twenty years ago? If the numbers of male virgins hasn't risen, if the number of sex partners per male hasn't dropped, then how could it be possible for women to be doing anything of the sort? Oh wait, are young men now suddenly lying in numbers unprecedented? If so, what evidence do you have for the lying? The beta male drought as all of these supposedly ultra-empowered women ride roughshod over their prostrate bleeding asexual bodies on their way to yet another hump session with some alpha dude, simply does not exist, any more than it ever has. All a crock, a fantasy.

How you get, whiskey, from a vampire TV show, a traditional female sex/romance fantasy (Twilight? Buffy? Dracula in one of its many subtexts?) to guys hauling off and hitting their gfs in the workplace with impunity (!) and then from there to all of that being a sign of some kind of female dominated sexualized gynocracy escapes me entirely.

As for the idea that single motherhood is some kind of sought after state pursued by the most politically and economically empowered of women...well, I just don't know what to say. And the idea that single mothers are that way because they've chosen to be...inner city deadbeat daddies anybody? How many of these single moms are on welfare, stuck in dead-end jobs, with fathers who have abandoned them and their children?

Good call by DoBA. My love for Sister W is well known here, and I suspect she's doing fine in the getting laid department. But...women do not want men thinking about sex and romance. They don't want us studying it, analyzing it, or talking about it at all. Why? Because women are fragile, their manoeuvres are transparent, their "selflessness" and "caring" a smokescreen. All of which is discovered by men with even a modicum of thought and time. Roissy's thing was described by someone as the real Men's Movement...and that's exactly right.

And second MQ's praise for Brian's comment: one of the few genuinely insightful and novel comments I've seen here on this subject. Oddly, it connects a bit to ST's point: take away the moral underpinnings of male/female relationships, and all you have left is power, dominance or submission, exploitation mutual or otherwise. The "war" Michael has talked about.

You cannot, however, take that moral underpinning away. It will not disappear...it can't. The longer it's held off, denied, ignored, the harder it's going to be when it rears its head and says, "The Gods of the Sexual Copybook Headings" are back.

What good does Game do when that happens?

Posted by: PatrickH on September 7, 2008 11:01 AM

slumlord, I didn't say that the vitriol and hatred was unjustified. It's entirely justified and understandable.

The attempt to divvy the world up into predictable groups who get laid or don't get laid is nonsense. Not all computer nerds are non-athletic geeks. It seems to surprise people that intelligence and athletic ability are often combined in the same individual.

Yes, the feminists are horrifying. The dilemma of the past 50 years is this: Integrating women into the public life of work has produced enormous economic gains at the cost of a social disaster.

If you're going to a bar to get laid, that's your first mistake. The reality is that your best bet is to find somebody at the workplace. The feminists have complicated this by attempting to make it a crime to connect at work. Everything about feminism seems designed to make sex and love as barbaric and vicious as possible.

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on September 7, 2008 11:21 AM

Patrick - You are party right, especially about sociology degrees, but you must keep in mind that you are well above average in intelligence.

In my work, I deal with vast numbers of normal guys. In the past, these guys would be getting jobs at GM or Corning or some other heavy manufacturer (or their support industries) and would have been blue-collar middle class.

The choice facing these below-to-average intelligence young men now is: retail, services or try a shot at college and see if you can do something that pays a lot better.

They're not on blogs and they're not introspective. What they see before them is a female-dominated academic world (indeed, females have dominated that world for them since elementary school, the male teacher having been hounded out of existence), a culture which has already long-since labelled them losers and the pretty girls going to either their cousins who went to the shady side or high-flying Alphas.

Imagine having a sense of honor, having been taught somewhat what a man is by a father, only to find that the successful in life are criminals and douchebags?

Anger? Frustration?

That ain't the half of it. I've pointed a few to Colombia, and they've come back transformed. Spring in their step, pride back, hag-ridden no more.

Posted by: KevinV on September 7, 2008 12:41 PM

I guarantee you that pretty much every guy posting at the Roissy blog could have married a nice, loving but rather plain girl by now if they wanted to.

There has been a steady online presence, ever since the first days of BBs and Usenet, of guys who are wildly deluded about what they're entitled to in a mate, complaining about women being wildly deluded about what they're entitled to in a mate. And if you point this out to them, regardless of decade, they will immediately insist that, as men, they just can't be expected to take a mate who doesn't meet certain (out of their league) standards of physical attractiveness, while at the same time decrying the bottomless evility of women who reject men who can't pass the "doesn't make my flesh crawl" test.

It's nice to see that the classics endure. (To be fair, there is a female equivalent, see: "men only like them because they're sluts/men are so shaaaallow for wanting prettier girls in preference to our splendid qualities/men are intimidated by my intelligence, etc. - but I haven't seen much of them since my dorm-room days; I assume they are filtered out by my online reading preferences.)

Sister Wolf: Guys who don't have trouble getting laid don't have time to write and read blogs all day.

Guys who can't get laid, plot and whine about it online.

No, that's not really what's going on. There is nothing peculiar, or necessarily reflective of a character flaw or personal repulsiveness, in the fact of having trouble getting laid. 90% of guys are going to have trouble getting laid, and the majority of them aren't sitting around whining about it online. It isn't guys "who can't get laid", it's guys who think that having trouble getting laid is some sort of anomaly, some heinous violation of their civil rights, instead of what it is - the human condition. Having trouble getting laid is normal. Having even more trouble getting beyond just getting laid is even more to be expected. (And yes, the same situation prevails for women - mutatis mutandis. It's remarkable the people who claim to know that men and women are different, yet who will still hold that pretty young women have these great evil satanic powers over men, "because they can get laid whenever they want". Remarkable how alleged acolytes of ev-psych blank out on its basic principles, when whining time rolls 'round.)

When did the silly notion that "if I want it I should get it" become embedded in people's sexual attitudes? Who tells these people that sex is always supposed to be a bowl full of cherries, and who forgot to tell them that the effort to find a mate (or even a lay) is most likely to be fraught, along the way, with rejection, heartache, and general misery and angst, because ya know, that's the way life is (you Disneyfied, infantilized twerps and twerpettes). How one responds to these inevitable difficulties really defines one's character, doesn't it? E.g:

slumlord: And nothing hurts like spurned love.

Why yes - it's terribly painful. What percentage of people do you think get to the grave without having experienced that particular form of suffering? I don't think I even know anyone past early adulthood who hasn't been there, done that - spurned, lied to, rejected, all the usual stuff. Are your sufferings in these matters so special?

Why then the surprise, at the contempt of the subject material?

There's no surprise, slumlord. People react well, or more often badly, to the blows of fate, depending on their character. There's everything predictable, and nothing admirable, at dealing with the hurt and anger caused by sexual rejection by lashing out in nastiness. Adopting a posturing charade of "contempt" for the opposite sex, as a reaction to hurt, is itself contemptible. I've known people (male and female) who've been a hell of lot more than just spurned in love - sliced, diced, fricaseed, drawn, quartered, disemboweled, and their entrails burnt before them - who yet conducted themselves through the whole torture session with grace and dignity, refused to allow themselves to be mastered and corrupted by hate and rage, never gave generalized bitterness an inch of territory. I don't claim that I would be capable of exhibiting such Roman virtue if I'd had to face what they'd been dealt. But I sure as hell would be ashamed, not puffed up with self-justification, if I couldn't meet those standards.

ST: slumlord, I didn't say that the vitriol and hatred was unjustified. It's entirely justified and understandable.

Understandable, but not justified. It's a failure of character. And where I come from, vindictiveness was not counted among the manly virtues. (Not something a lady permitted herself to indulge in, either.) Persons who claim to detest feminized society should stop being so damned womanish.

Posted by: Moira Breen on September 7, 2008 1:39 PM

I'm not reading the comments, since they're pretty long by now. Promiscuity has been on the decline for the past 18 years, so that observation was wrong.

As for the war between the sexes, I just put up a post "Rational and irrational rape hysterias" (or something like that) on GNXP.com -- I think that's the cause, or part of a larger picture.

Starting around 1989, peaking around 1991, and ending around 1993, there was a spike in hysteria about all kinds of rape, and most of it seems completely irrational -- aside from concern about general rape. I'm talking about date rape, campus rape, etc. -- mostly fake rape.

If guys have it pounded into them that they're rapists, how could they harm their poor college coed peers, etc., when nothing is going wrong, it makes you a little more combative once you realize it was all horseshit.

Doing the generational math, those most affected by this phony moral panic were born between 1965 and 1978, with ground zero born around 1972.

Posted by: agnostic on September 7, 2008 1:44 PM

...could have married a nice, loving but rather plain girl by now if they wanted to...

MQ, you forgot to mention that the girl would be fat, and therefore, unattractive. The average girl, is now fat. I do not think that this can be underestimated.

Sister Wolf, when you are not married, you have all sorts of time to do all sorts of things.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 7, 2008 3:05 PM

Some interesting comments here. My take on the whole Roissy/Game thing is that it's average guys (intelligence, looks, income) whining about not having unfettered and entitled access to above-average women (mostly just in the looks category).

As a few have said, there are boatloads of nice, pleasant looking girls who are just looking for someone to be with, but these girls don't have the social capital the Game guys seek. Sounds like a big case of "you made your bed..."

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 3:59 PM

[Bloghost marveling here at what a lot of brains, passion, interest, insight, etc, topics like this can bring out in people. Some great tales too -- gotta love that Korean dominatrix who wants to be treated like a woman ... Anyway: Responses like these are a sign of a good, timely, hot topic. Should anyone wonder or be in doubt about this ...]

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 7, 2008 4:46 PM

Moira Breen, I stand corrected and defer to your brilliant and clear-headed comment here.

Usually lurking - I like your fat-ism. Do you have one of those 'No Fat Chicks" bumper stickers? The ladies love that.

Who was the one who thinks I can't get laid? Please, I am famously HOT and my husband is a Mexican. Do the math.

Posted by: Sister Wolf on September 7, 2008 5:18 PM

Shouting Thomas:

As men will, Roissy and his readers are searching for a new, solid system to replace the destroyed moral traditions of the past. They've discovered it in the Law of the Jungle. All things are explained by dividing the world into Alphas and Betas. It's an all encompassing moral system that explains everything. Here, I'm reminded of Devlin's comments that feminism has turned human society into a caricature of baboon society.

Feminism has done no such thing. The "Law of the Jungle" has *always* been with us, regardless of humanity's capacity to create ideas and fictions that serve as a smokescreen against what was always there.

What you are witnessing is the result of the "man behind the curtain" being revealed for all to see. As you have pointed out elsewhere, this can and does have unpleasant consequences. So the only question left is whether you will:

-- crusade for further fictions, i.e., untruths

or

-- evolve a new breed of character and consciousness that can absorb and withstand The Truth.

I am well aware of your choice in this regard, and while I am not completely averse to it, I am not hopeful that much can be done. Pandora's Box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, etc., and I don't see Humpty Dumpty being put back together again.

As a Tool song puts it:

Credulous, at best, your desire to believe in
angels in the hearts of men
Pull your head on out your hippy haze and give a listen
I shouldn't have to say it all again:
The universe is hostile, so impersonal
Devour to survive
So it is, so it's always been

The question I have is: will it always be--?

Moira Breen:

When did the silly notion that "if I want it I should get it" become embedded in people's sexual attitudes? Who tells these people that sex is always supposed to be a bowl full of cherries...

When one looks over one's shoulder or into one's neighbors homes and a sizable percentage of them are doing just that.

It's all about the bell curve, baby.

Posted by: Tupac Chopra on September 7, 2008 6:02 PM

KevinV: Yes. You are right that the issue is how average guys (betas in R's terminology) are getting treated by the system of the world today. Not well, as you point out, also correctly. I think you've removed most of my reasons for disagreement with what you've been saying. It's not whether men dominate society...it's how society treats its average men. Good points.

And Moira, everything you said is so true it hurts. I'm right to be crazy about you. Sigh.

JV: [paraphrase] "whining is about average guys wanting to get above average women". How true. This isn't war between the sexes...it's part of the whole entitlement mentality that Moira so aptly described, as it appears in the area of sex, from the point of view of men. Gimme. And if I don't getme, then somebody bad is responsible.

There is in these comment threads on 2Bs over the last few months, a sense of some common ground emerging between "left" (MQ, JV, others) and "right" (Moira, Clio, even ST at rare moments of sanity) on issues of sex and romance. What form would the rapprochement take should it continue to grow (or if even exists, more like)? Dunno. But I do sense something happening.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 7, 2008 6:22 PM

FWIW, when I eyeball "Game" and listen to the youngdudez carry on, what I sometimes find myself thinking is, "Oh, they've been raised completely ignorant of what older generations used to think of as 'what it is to be a man' and 'what it is to be a woman,' and they're doing their best to figure it all out in their own way. Too bad they were left to re-invent the wheel! Can't be easy."

I also find myself thinking that "Game" is the youngfolks version of what used to be thought of as "courtship."

But it stands to trad courtship as hiphop stands to music, or young hiphop black men stand to the stylish jazzy black men of the 1930s or 1950s. It's crude, cartoonish, antagonistic, overblown. It's what seems to happen when there aren't enough real fathers around. Boys will be boys (as girls will be girls). Perhaps it's better to skip the "denial" approach to this fact and get comfy with it instead, and then offer a little helpful societal guidance and modeling.

Hmm, is any such thing possible any longer?

This is all reminding me of New Urbanism ... An idea behind (and an argument for) the New Urbanism this: 1) we used to know how (instinctively, via experience, in our bones) to build rewarding houses, neighborhoods, towns, and cities, 2) this knowledge was blown to smithereens via modernism and technology (ie., via mid-20th century "progress"), thus 3) we're now stuck needing to re-acquire and reassemble that knowledge. Which means that our first attempts will probably be a bit "conscious" and stiff. But what else are we gonna do? Resign ourselves to a kind of "progress" that many people find inhuman, and even horrifying?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 7, 2008 7:16 PM

I think a lot of the reason Michael doesn't remember men being as hostile back in the day, is that during the prime of the sexual revolution, there were a lot more women to go around and that made it easier for men to get laid. Throughout the sixties and the seventies, the sex ratio was skewed in favour of men, so men who wanted sex really didn't have to work as hard to get it. That male advantage is gone.

Also, society wasn't so outrageously affluent as it has now become and there was the lingering influence of traditional values which made it easier for beta providers to find mates.

The things factored out by the Roissy model are subjectivity and heterogeneity. Women in the model don't choose men based on subjective criteria like does he share my particular values, does he fit in with my unique plans, and the like. Instead they choose based on objective criteria like status, height, facial symmetry et cetera. And furthermore they all pursue the same objective values. From bookworm to harlot, from INFP to ENTJ, from Sinead O'Connor to Simone Weil, they all want status, height, facial symmetry, et cetera.

Yes, individual tastes and standards are a factor in who women choose, but that doesn't mean there aren't strong general patterns. Girls on average _are_ attracted to confidence, status, height etc.

For the record, there _are_ girls who prefer introverted guys. There _are_ girls who are almost wholly resistant to gaming. There _are_ girls who choose mates primarily on their religious and moral qualities.

But these tend to be the exceptions.

Guys who don't have trouble getting laid don't have time to write and read blogs all day.

Shaming bullshit.

Though, come to think about it, I haven't posted on my blog in a long while, even with 2 months of summer holidays.

Once again, this is the cliche feminist argument technique being trotted out: any man who opines or shows feelings "can't get laid." This is a way of shutting down thought, much in the same manner as calling someone "racist" or "sexist." It's attacking the person, not the idea.

[T]his is one reason a lot of men will not pursue intellectual ideas with women. Once women disagree, they simply shout insults and it gets like trying to reason with a child who is into namecalling.

In one exchange over at Roissy's, when I made a comment that cut particularly close to the bone of one female commenter, I was told that my comments reeked of sexual resentment, presumably because of my implied inability to succeed with women. I thought this rather funny as I now regularly go out with 8s and 9s, with 9s now being almost the norm. The absolute disconnect with my actual reality was bizarre. (My remarks were also called the most mysogynist comments ever written at Roissy's, despite competition from the likes of Kick a Bitch.)

I've also noticed a lot of female commenters inability to understand Roissy's rage at the injustices often done to men in the name of feminism. After all he is getting all he wants from women and more.

Let's deep six the idea that the men who speak their mind about women on blogs or elsewher are the ones who can't succeed with them. In fact, the relationship tends to be the reverse. It's more often the "betas" who are the most ardent defenders of women.

My take on the whole Roissy/Game thing is that it's average guys (intelligence, looks, income) whining about not having unfettered and entitled access to above-average women (mostly just in the looks category).

More shaming bullshit.

A lot of these guys are angry because of the gap between what they have been told will attract women and what actually does attract women. They feel abused and lied to because they have been. That doesn't excuse the nastiness and hate that a lot of these guys express towards women, but it isn't just whining.

For the record, I am a quite good looking, very smart, funny guy, who used to have a lot of female friends, but had incredible trouble getting dates with more attractive women (7+), mostly because I was a rather sensitive, naturally introverted guy who had absorbed all too well the propaganda about how to treat women. Did I feel entitled to something better than a 6? I guess I did, but given my looks, intelligence, wit etc., I don't think I was being horribly unreasonable. I would have been content with a lot less success than I am currently getting. I would still be content to end up with a 7 who was a really great person.

The one thing I do have to say in defense of women is that being a nice, sensitive guy really can be a trememdous advantage in the dating market. But only if coming from a position of strength and confidence. Women, on average, aren't really the nice, selfless, caring people they are sometimes said to be, but they aren't the completely depraved, lusting after bad boy creatures you would think they are from reading Roissy either.

Last comment. Once you start to internalize this "game" stuff and start to see it work, it feels like you are living in a bizarro world. I don't think I have changed all that much. I certainly don't feel all that different, and yet there are all these really attractive women in my life acting like it is perfectly normal to be there.

Posted by: Thursday on September 7, 2008 7:37 PM

I should also add that I believe the whole Game thing is a direct result of the large number of divorces during the 70s and 80s. These boys were raised by single mothers. This is not an indictment of single mothers, they are women and can't be expected to model proper male behavior any more than a man can model proper female behavior. It's an indictment of the cavalier manner in which many of the baby boom generation treated marriage, and more importantly, parenthood.

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 8:04 PM

"For the record, there _are_ girls who prefer introverted guys. There _are_ girls who are almost wholly resistant to gaming. There _are_ girls who choose mates primarily on their religious and moral qualities"

I think this is wrong. There are PLENTY of these girls, most likely far more than those who play the Game, but these girls don't posses the qualities that bring the social capital that Game dudes crave. Not just looks (God knows there are plenty of HOT nerdy chicks), but also the attitude and the personality that responds to Game bullshit.

I tend to run with the nerdy/punk/techie crowd, so this Game crap is absolutely foreign to me. Not that those of us in this crowd don't play emotional games, we just don't fall for "The Game." Anecdotally, I never had trouble getting laid, and I'm far from a traditionally good-looking dude. I'm tall, skinny and dorky, yet I can make women laugh. Other guys I know are good at building shit (nothing, and I mean nothing turns on most women more than a guy who can fix and/or build shit). That stuff is a game, but it's a real game. The Game is crap.

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 8:11 PM

responds to Game bullshit.

I think some people see Game too narrowly, like it's some brand new invention or trend. I see Game similar to how I think Michael sees it, as the art of being a man.

Maybe the fact that the PUA subculture has its own literature and jargon that throws people off. As far as I see it at Roissy's blog, Game is a resurrection and a contemporary repackaging of the lost art of carrying yourself like a man, making girls laugh, and relating to them at a sexual level.

I'm guessing that the Angry Nerd is a somewhat new phenomenon, at least on such a scale. A hundred years ago, a nerd would probably still have at least tried to act like a man.... in other words, practice Game.

Posted by: PA on September 7, 2008 8:25 PM

I wish I'd seen this posting before it attracted so many comments. The quote you attributed to me was actually something I had quoted myself, they're not my words. I was actually expressing skepticism toward the point being made. While it's conventional wisdom (at least in the blogosphere) that most men aren't Alpha enough to get any women, the fact of the matter remains that the percentage of men who are married or in steady relationships hasn't dropped to any precipitous extent. As logical as the conventional wisdom may seem, and I was certainly among its believers until recently, it's probably, well, wrong.

Posted by: Peter on September 7, 2008 8:28 PM

I'm sure part of that post was directed at me, Thursday. I was deeply exasperated that day, as I said later, but I also thought that you just weren't grasping my point at all, and kept repeating yours (about female narcissism) like a mantra. That's when I called you a misogynist. I'm sorry I did that, but you can hardly say it's typical behaviour for me to resort to name-calling; I think that was the first time on roissy's site that I had ever done so. Incidentally, might I point out that many of roissy's "dudez" (as Michael calls them) resort to that trick themselves when a woman shows up online to discuss something in a way they find unsympathetic? Cries of "you're ugly"; "you're bitter"; "you're a frustrated spinster" resound. I've been threatened (in a jocular fashion, no doubt) with anal rape while doing no more than politely standing my ground. So it's nonsensical to suggest that resorting to insults is a peculiarly female phenomenon at roissy's site - or anywhere else, for that matter.

Have you never noticed the way "liberal" men respond to Michelle Malkin? Kathy Shaidle is always getting emails from men calling her ugly; it's their favourite fallback insult. Luckily for her, she's impervious to that kind of thing.

Clio

Posted by: alias clio on September 7, 2008 8:38 PM

Crap, meant to include this from Thursday's comment:

"But these tend to be the exceptions."

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 8:41 PM

Sorry for the multiple posts.

I said The Game is crap, but I don't mean it doesn't work. It does, apparently, but it's emotionally empty.

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 8:46 PM

I said The Game is crap, but I don't mean it doesn't work. It does, apparently, but it's emotionally empty

Again, I think we're talking about two different things. To me, broadly speaking, Game is the contemporary term for the timeless practice of using a combination of innate and learned techniques of presenting yourself attractively to women.

To you, if I'm reading you right, Game is a snazzy new form of cynical manipulation, in which case you're probably right about it being emotionally empty.

Posted by: PA on September 7, 2008 9:17 PM

I'm guessing that the Angry Nerd is a somewhat new phenomenon, at least on such a scale. A hundred years ago, a nerd would probably still have at least tried to act like a man.... in other words, practice Game.
Hmmm...what about all the repressed priests who convinced us sexuality was evil? You're right on much else, but I tend to believe there is nothing new under the sun. ;)

Posted by: SFG on September 7, 2008 9:20 PM

Moira, you're really not with the program.

Look, most of the guys at blogs such as Roissy's recognise that there is not such a thing as a "right to sex", I've never seen what your purport on those blogs. Frankly, your assertion is rubbish. Rather, most guys recoginise that some men are getting heaps of action and they want to know how they do it. Quite a few of the guys aren't even interested in multiple partners, rather their strategy at women has failed and they want to know where they have gone wrong. So they're going to blokes like Roissy for advice, since the advice from women has been bad. Not everyone is after banging as many women as they can, some want to improve their technique so that they can settle down with a long term single partner.

The inability to get sex results in frustration, being deceived by the rules of the game generates the anger and contempt. Once again what women say they want and what they do are generally two different things. One doesn't need a scientific study to verify this, it is patently observed by everyone in real life. The anger lays in the apparent deception.

Now I don't think women deliberately set out to deceive , rather our society has held romantic love as an ideal and "utilitarian love" as base. No woman wants to paint herself as a gold digger or someone who is calculating, she has her reputation to think of. So what happens in real life is that a fiction is preached in variance to the practice. Even in this day and age of sexual liberation, the word slut is still a pejorative. Why so, if we're all completely relaxed about sex? Reality is different from what is preached.

Look, life would be a lot simpler for guys if women stated openly what they wanted. For a middle class girl, I imagine the ideal would be a reasonably fit and muscular guy, who is articulate intelligent and dresses well. Virtue, fits in there somewhere, though it's not really a priority. Having social status is highly desired and a six figure income. Given the clearly defined goals, men can work to achieve them. It makes everyone happy.

BTW, the men "whining" at these sites are at least trying to learn the skill of how to pick up, in other words they are "adapting" to their environment, a highly successful evolutionary strategy. The whining feministas on the other hand don't want to adapt at all, they're headed for extinction.

Game is popular because game works: it's based on realistic assessment of the average female's psychology. Women may stamp and get all hot and bothered but the proof is in the results.

ST: I don't think Roissy hates women. I've always thought that the women he meets are so psychologically beneath him, that he is contemptuous of their character, not their sex. I actually think that he is a romantic, and it's quite possible that he could be smitten by the appropriate girl. The problem is though, that the type of girl our modern society produces, is psychologically pretty ugly. That's not saying that all girls are like this, rather through the changes in society, the mean has been shifted in the wrong direction. Roissy's going to have a hard time finding an angel in a brothel.

The dilemma of the past 50 years is this: Integrating women into the public life of work has produced enormous economic gains at the cost of a social disaster.

I think you're wrong there. A lot of women are not temperamentally suited to domesticity and child rearing. Catherine Hakim, a British sociologist, has published a lot of work on this. A lot of the post-natal depression that I see is treated very effectively by child care and getting the woman into some part time of work. The problem is however, that the Traditionalist mothers are castigating their working sisters as heartless and selfish, while the Feminists are hurling abuse at the stay at home mothers as being failures to the cause, leading dull and meaningless lives. The sisters are making each others lives miserable. I like women in the workforce, they're frequently far easier to work with than men; if you know how to play them :)

Thursday: Three cheers!!!

Posted by: slumlord on September 7, 2008 9:56 PM

Peter: While it's conventional wisdom (at least in the blogosphere) that most men aren't Alpha enough to get any women, the fact of the matter remains that the percentage of men who are married or in steady relationships hasn't dropped to any precipitous extent.

This point strikes me as so obviously decisive to the whole question, it ought not need to be said. But it doesn't seem to have sunk in to so many discussing the issue. Thank you Peter.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 7, 2008 9:57 PM

"Again, I think we're talking about two different things. To me, broadly speaking, Game is the contemporary term for the timeless practice of using a combination of innate and learned techniques of presenting yourself attractively to women."

I might be reading too much into the Game thing. If it's as you say, then yeah, no problem. But from what I've seen on Roissy's blog and from the original Game dude a few years back, it's an incredibly cynical and empty philosophy that denigrates any woman who isn't model perfect, and harbors resentment against any hot chick who won't put out. It's the whimpering sense of entitlement that puts me off. Nobody "deserves" anything.

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 9:58 PM

I also thought that you just weren't grasping my point at all, and kept repeating yours (about female narcissism) like a mantra. That's when I called you a misogynist.

This is incorrect. The relevent comment is here:
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/quote-of-the-hour/#comment-21119
Clio's reaction is at #63. Several follow up comments from us both follow. The most telling of Clio's follow ups is, I think, #77.

Readers may judge for themselves whether my comment was misogynist. I have nothing further to say.

Posted by: Thursday on September 7, 2008 10:26 PM

I tend to run with the nerdy/punk/techie crowd

Self selection at work. For the record, I think female engineers are the hardest girls to game.

Posted by: Thursday on September 7, 2008 10:49 PM

Slumlord writes "what women say they want and what they do are generally two different things."

Darned right. But it has always been so. When did the fact that women are often-contradictory creatures stop being "mystery" and "fun" (if often exasperating) and start being a trigger for outrage and indignation? I mean, really: You're supposed to start life with an awareness that women are contradictory, many-layered, elusive creatures. Cats, not dogs. That should be a given in life, not a late moment of rude, enraging discovery.

That seems to me to be a key question here. Did women stop being charming when they got to be in charge of things? And why and when did youngdudez start believing what women said about themselves?

I believe it that the new urban young women aren't very appealing, btw. They're often fit and physically attractive, which is great. But they swagger, they're bossy, they're rude, they're completely disrespectful of what manhood and masculinity are ... Check out the blog Jezebel for what a horror show they can be. They're like unlikable guys, only snarkier, more aggressive, and with smoother hair and tits. Getting involved with them seems like it'd be mega-unrewarding, aside from the toned bodies. Why not content yourself with magazine images instead?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 7, 2008 11:00 PM

"Self selection at work.

That's in response to my comment about me running with a techie/nerdy/punk crowd. I wouldn't call it self-selection, I'd call it knowing who I am and who I'm comfortable with. That's a big issue with the Game crowd, I think. They don't like themselves and so strive to be players.

"For the record, I think female engineers are the hardest girls to game."

Most likely. They tend to be pretty self-aware and no-bullshit. I like that. And for the record, an ex-girlfriend of mine was a software engineer. I didn't find it hard to get her because I was just being myself and for whatever reason, she liked who that was.

Posted by: JV on September 7, 2008 11:17 PM

This is the most overblown & overthought bunch of BS about getting laid ever assembled in one place. This should get an award of some kind, but I don't know from whom.

Michael, my hat is off to you, amigo.

Posted by: Scott on September 7, 2008 11:45 PM

Nuclear D--

"I'm somewhat of a natural alpha myself, in terms of natural sex appeal, but I grew up super sensitive and liberal, with an odd aversion to my own masculinity (a weak father figure and too much time in the theater didn't help). I got laid by dozens of different women in my early 20s, but always ended up clingy and needy nevertheless. Now, at age 30, I'm still a killer, but having internalized the lessons of the modern men's movement (of the Roissy variety, not the tribal ritual variety), I see the women I sleep with are far happier. They sense my masculinity, which opens up their own femininity, which opens up their true soul, which makes them happy. It makes me much happier too. I can be educated and witty, not a caveman in the slightest, but also strong and in-control and confident. To those of you older men who find it surprising that something so basic could be a revelation to someone like me, I submit that I'm from a radically-feminized generation and that some things really HAVE changed (at least in some parts of the country)."

EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

Myself I'm an aging alpha by Roissy's scale

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/defining-the-alpha-male/

though not by any means a highest alpha. Actually quite a few of Roissy's commenters are alphas, mostly fellow game afficionados many of whom know him, and also some older alphas, who tend to write longer comments. E.g. Patrick Bateman is a physics grad student intending to head to wall street, and an insightful anti-feminist. (Not anti basic feminism, just like me anti cultural-marxist feminism, which is most of it hatched since 1970.) Virgil Kent is an amusing smart black guy alpha and Roissy wing man (and vice versa). Most commenters however are betas in varying degrees of p*ssy desertification, but with lots of commonality on the lies of feminism relevant to what works with girls.

I too had things to overcome though it was a proto feminist mother (though I argued a lot with her) and a shared "english gentleman" home ethic that found no place for macho, even civilized macho. I never agreed, but still had a fair bit of conditioning. (My dad was high earning and resolutely strong, and high professional status kind of status, but always rather excessively the gentleman. Worked for him though - women were definitely drawn to him -- but may have made my mother bitchier. His ethic was entirely gentling her and rarely "shit testing" her or freezing her out. How he was raised rather than a lack of balls.)

Anyway I somehow managed to score a few times in middle school and high school due to good physical attributes and high (but not super high levels of testosterone-like Roissy's I think), and in my circles high IQ. Very tall, strong but not built, good looking but not really handsome. Rebel leader sort of guy. But I had bad programming, no natural game at all, anti game at least a little bit in fact. I could SEE what other guys were who were doing better with no more were doing sortof and slowly started to learn, but i didn't really put it together. In college I really learned. Yeah the environment was a lot easier but I also got WAY better. For starters, nothing like have two girls actively want you and playing with them while trying to (not so fast) decide to teach yourself game by trial and error. And on to others. Some stuff was girl specific but lots wasn't. The more I went the more I realized how much wasn't really girl specific, rather required a bit of adjustment, or took a little longer, and so on. Mind you no game book read; to my knowledge there weren't any at that time.

Anyway in this and a couple of posts below you illustrate very well how extremely different, night and day different, the dating fates of alpha and beta males in the metropoles are today.

Note boys and girls that someone with the exact same job and income and even very similar physical appearance (leaving aside subtleties like "edgyness" or "hot vibe" or "rugged") can be either alpha or beta and be experiencing this huge chasm. Beta biglaw associates can yeah get dates and yeah get in "when are we gonna get married" relationships with usually 27yo and older girls, usually only 6's or 7's but hey they're smart so that makes up for it right?, but he ain't gonna get much pickup success. His alpha projecting dopelganger will clean up and sometimes get true 8 and 9 hotties-- as will the alpha bartender and waiter.

Nobody's too surprised when an average looking 7/11 clerk who isn't ripped and doesn't drive a Harley can't hook up with anything other than real fat girls and THEY put him through all kinds of loops if he'll bite, but it's another matter when a lawyer has a young lot of trouble, and sure ain't getting big. The media explantion is "looks" (which is broadly true on the flip side for smart but not even arguably hot girls), but isn't really for guys. Substitute sexual charisma. That sounds super alpha. Even a little bit goes a long way.

To some extent this was always true, but it's way more true today, for the reasons I think which I gave on Roissy's blog which MBlowhard posted. Further they have opened the gap between the top haves and the masses way more than ever before. Well forget the top 1 or 2 percent of men who could always get as much as they wanted or could afford career etc. wise to be seen (even the tip of the iceberg) as having.

To sum up, feminism progams and demands nice guy female deferring behavior that men born without really high levels of testosterone or strong macho / male charisma father or other early and intimate role models suffer greatly from in the sexual competition game. Game can deprogram and help all men and smart upper betas enormously in getting the good times rollin.

Posted by: dougjnn on September 7, 2008 11:55 PM

PatrickH on September 7, 2008 11:01 AM—

“Why are women still going on and on about getting admitted into areas dominated by men?”

Perhaps because feminist women usually care little about equal fairness for men and women, although they pretend the opposite citing slogans and “foundational principles”, but rather focus entirely on achieving every iota of equal (or better for women) results, regardless of what non discriminatory reason there may be for that disparity. See e.g. what Larry Summers actually said as opposed to what the media reported, and the feminist reaction in academe and almost universally in the mainstream media. See the lack of any widespread feminist alarm at the significantly declining academic performance of men (well below par) in high school or the much high matriculation of women in universities and graduate schools, including e.g. making up about 60% law students. Is it possible that the academic environment has been radically skewed towards women’s achievement and away from men’s, rather than seeking to maximize both? Is it possible that admissions standards to e.g. law schools regards grades in gut course in fields designed to accommodate women, or feminist ones anyway, such as womyn’s studies or pomo English Lit, are valued equally with history or poly sci or economics, not to mention the harder sciences?

Why is American divorce theft no matter what the circumstances of the divorce of so little read zero concern to feminists, who we all know are massively organized while men are pathetically organized so far these feminist days. There are also deep reasons why men have emotional difficulty organizing against organized women. Women esp. feminists know this and utilize this for their entirely one sided agenda “because the patriarchy remains so heinous and all powerful”. Yeah right.

Elite women have been waging gender war for at least thirty years under the smokescreen or fairness and equality, with lots of support from feminist beta boy suckups who have been hoodwinked to think it will help them get good p*ssy, if not now, down the road. All men have let them do it, thinking it really isn't doing that much harm, and there were clear earlier inequities.

Well the harm it has and is doing is beginning to become much clearer to a lot more men, though still a small number.

Posted by: dougjnn on September 8, 2008 12:57 AM

Whiskey on September 7, 2008 2:30 AM

“However, many women report up to 60 in NYC.”

Thanks for rounding up the stats but I simply don’t believe them.

I personally know or have known a substantial number of women in NYC whose numbers are substantially above 60. The most anyone has been willing to admit to is yeah, probably above 100. Note, this took much joking, reassuring, coaxing – and most importantly, their knowledge that my numbers were at or above the estimates I was coaxing out of them. My guess is to how that 60 number cropped up is that it appeared a few times in their pop. Sample because those respondents were in an urban cultural sub tribe when that was publicly considered by guys “yeah kinda a lot for a girl but not wildly outrageous.” How bout they were actresses? Not sayin’ some proto exec. Level marketing girl might not have had bigger numbers, but the guys in her clique might not be down with hearing about it – and sticking around.

“Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) women: 9.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) men: 20.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) women in NYC: 15.
Average # of sexual partners (lifetime) men in NYC: 30.”

Even if this was a thoroughly up to snuff questionnaire and population sampling, I simply don’t believe these numbers. There is MUCH reason to believe that men lie up substantially, and women lie down, substantially. This is NOT the usual case of not everyone telling the truth on anonymous questionnaires (though that in fact varies depending upon a number of things including how morally weighted the answers are thought to be). In each sex’s case here it’s because their core sexual reputations at stake but pulling strongly in opposite directions. This stuff is deeply ingrained, esp. for girls. What might not matter for them so much in some circles while in a casual dating mode does matter when in a try out for marriage mode, particularly if they have to settle esp. in the sexual hotness dimension when shifting to serious mode, as nearly all attractive but less than super hot women do. In particular, nearly all the girls with really big numbers are going to lie, and lie big.

In fact I suspect the true numbers for women today exceed those of men, both in NYC and around the country. The youngish women who now even admit cheating in marriage today is after all very nearly equal to that of men. That means it’s much higher. For one thing, women get away with it far, far better.

Posted by: dougjnn on September 8, 2008 1:20 AM

Hahaha! I love how Thursday boasts that he's been "getting 8's and 9's!"

Jesus, if women were this pathetic I'd have to find another planet.

And don't go screaming "Shaming bullshit" like those are the magic words that make you right. Sometimes, shame is the correct response.

Posted by: Sister Wolf on September 8, 2008 1:33 AM

I've never understood how men and women can have different numbers of heterosexual partners on average. Maybe if there is a radical difference in proportions of the sexes in the population, but if the numbers are fairly equal in general how can there be major differences between the sexes? I've always assumed men are lying up and women down, but at least one sex is lying; they can't both be right.

So when dougjnn, you say, "In fact I suspect the true numbers for women today exceed those of men, both in NYC and around the country", I just don't get how that could be possible. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I admit I don't see how the numbers could be different on average.

Help me someone. What am I missing here? I'm prepared to be embarrassed on this one. What am I not seeing? Is there a median/mean thing happening? Would that matter? What am I not getting?

Posted by: PatrickH on September 8, 2008 3:11 AM

Jesus, if women were this pathetic I'd have to find another planet.

Yay, it's more namecalling!

Posted by: Thursday on September 8, 2008 3:12 AM

First, I think Moira nailed it.

The only thing I can add is I can't figure out how you could respect anyone that you could "game" into wanting you, and how you could want anyone you didn't respect.

Posted by: Tom West on September 8, 2008 6:25 AM

the fact of the matter remains that the percentage of men who are married or in steady relationships hasn't dropped to any precipitous extent.

This point strikes me as so obviously decisive to the whole question, it ought not need to be said. But it doesn't seem to have sunk in to so many discussing the issue. Thank you Peter.

I am not sure why this has been repeated. The marriage rate is significantly different than what it was in 1970. We, Americans, marry at about half the 1970 rate. For England and Wales, they now marry at 1/4 the rate that they did in 1970. Things are very, very different today.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 8, 2008 10:32 AM

Darned right. But it has always been so. When did the fact that women are often-contradictory creatures stop being "mystery" and "fun" (if often exasperating) and start being a trigger for outrage and indignation?

When? When the divorce rate skyrocketed and men had to beg judges for the privilege of "visiting" their children on weekends with the little money they had left over from Alimony and unreasonable Child Support payments.

MB, things have changed. Young women are mcu, much more likely to be able to drink heavily (and brag about it) then display some type of traditional feminine grace.

Their mercurial nature is no longer enticing, but revolting. OK, I am being a little harsh here, but, my point is that things are very different today.

Many girls are still able to be cute and graceful and feminine, but their numbers have really dwindled. And, again, I hate to nail this point over and over again, but more than half all women are overweight today and over 1/3 are OBESE. Back in 1970 that number was something like 5%, IIRC.

Let's not act like "the more things change, the more they stay the same". The Western World is a very different place.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 8, 2008 10:39 AM

I've never understood how men and women can have different numbers of heterosexual partners on average.

Patrick, imagine you had a town with 10 girls and only 2 guys. And each girl has had sex with each guy, well, the averages would be

Girls: 2 partners
Guys: 10 partners

This is obviously not that realistic, but it help explains how you get different numbers. Also, as has been noted before, getting honest answers can be difficult.

I remember reading one study where men were asked how many partners they had had. Each man was given only an ID number and their name was never written down.

Group 1 answered the survey with the poll-taker in the room and handed the survey to that poll-taker.

Group 2 answered the survey with the poll-taker in the room (standing near them as they wrote down their answers) and put the survey on a pile of other anonymous surveys.

Group 3 answered the survey with the poll-taker NOT in the room and put the survey on a pile of other anonymous surveys.

Group 1 reported the most partners.
Group 2 reported fewer partners.
Group 3 reported the least number of partners.

The results were the exact opposite for women. (i.e. their numbers went up as they became more secure in their anonymity)

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 8, 2008 11:29 AM

Usually L: I love you man. But you're cherrypicking your baseline year to make your point. 1970 is just when things had begun to change...Pill had only been available for a few years, feminism barely existed, porn had only begun (and even then just barely) to appear outside of 8mm loops run in basement "stag parties", the divorce rate had only just begun to rise, no fault divorce itself barely existed...etc etc etc. You are precisely picking that year because none of the things you claim to be unique about today had become mass phenomena by then. That's why 1970 is Your Favorite Year.

Even though it's almost 40 years ago. 40 years. Now, how about looking at 1980? That still almost 30 years ago. Roissy wasn't even in puberty, AFAIK. Oldsters like Michael and I were young adults. What are the divorce rates like compared to then? How about average age at loss of virginity? Number of sex partners? All that stuff. What were the figures in 1980? That's a better baseline year. Give that a try, see what numbers pop out.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 8, 2008 12:59 PM

And UL, don't mean to pile on here--I really do think you're a great guy with lots to say--but I was questioning dougjnn's statement that the numbers of sex partners for women across the country were higher than for men. Since there are about the same number of women as men in the US as a whole, your skewed ratio example won't work. And I stated that of course men and women lie about their partner numbers...but dougjnn was claiming there are real differences in numbers of heterosex partners between men and women, something I just don't think is possible.

As far as I can see, the question remains.

Posted by: PatrickH on September 8, 2008 1:04 PM

slumlord: Moira, you're really not with the program.

Quite so. I was running Conversation 1.0 - no wait, that would have unrealistically optimistic - I was running the Discussion program. You know, the one where #1 says "A", and #2 notes "A" and counters "B", and #1 digests "B" and counters "C", etc. I completely failed to notice that you were running the Solipsism program, where #1 says "A", #2 notes "A" and counters "B", and then #1 usually just repeats "A" but sometimes may in addition to repeating "A", throw in a lot of off-the-shelf stuff that has little or no bearing on "B". I really should know by now that a significant minority of people run Solipsism as their default. My mistake - glad we cleared that up.

Posted by: Moira Breen on September 8, 2008 1:39 PM

My guess is that there is just more relationship turnover in recent times compared to the past. The go-go lifestyle and self-gratifying culture we live in leads to boredom and relationship churn.

Naturally, males are left in the dust and bitter since it is harder for them to find new mates compared to women.

Posted by: Chuck on September 8, 2008 1:44 PM

Patrick: So when dougjnn, you say, "In fact I suspect the true numbers for women today exceed those of men, both in NYC and around the country", I just don't get how that could be possible. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I admit I don't see how the numbers could be different on average.

The women of NYC are also sleeping around a lot with the Alien Overlords. (Very alpha in relation to earthmen, so the chicks really dig 'em.) The women include the Overlords in their "number of sex partners" count, but the Overlords themselves are excluded from the survey. Very poor polling technique, true, but it does explain the implausible averages.

Posted by: Moira Breen on September 8, 2008 1:46 PM

I think Chuck's "relationship churn" is a keeper.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on September 8, 2008 2:15 PM

I love you man. But you're cherrypicking your baseline year to make your point. 1970 is just when things had begun to change

My point was not to cherry pick, but to choose the last year of stability. That is, post WWII numbers (especially after 1950) were pretty stable up until 1970 for, basically, all of the West. Then, things began to change. And when it concerns things like Marriage, Divorce and Attractiveness (i.e. how fat everyone has gotten), I am still not sure if we have found a stable spot yet. Especially with things like Obesity.

but I was questioning dougjnn's statement that the numbers of sex partners for women across the country were higher than for men.

Yeah, I don't really have any reference point for that.

Since there are about the same number of women as men in the US as a whole, your skewed ratio example won't work.

You were asking how the averages can be different. I picked an extreme example to illustrate it. But, it is not completely unreasonable. What I mean is, when you think about how many 15 year old girls will get with 15 and 16 and 17 year old guys (for example), but 15 year old guys can not get with 17 year old girls, well, you can see how things, at some stages, can get out of wack. Or, to put it another way...think about girls who have slept with guys who are no longer alive (i.e. war)...or girls who get the survey in the 'hood but the guys don't (because they are i jail, or dead). All of these examples are extreme, they are not representative. But you only need so many extreme cases to make the averages a little off.

Let me just finish with this: I have taken many courses in Statistics and, not only is it possible for the averages to be off, but very likely that they will not be perfectly in line with each other.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 8, 2008 3:28 PM

Sorry, Usual. It is just not possible for men and women to have substantially different numbers of het partners in a population where their overall numbers are about equal. Just can't be.

Sorry. Still, no point in harping on this. Where's dougjnn? He started this! :-)

And if things had changed by 1980 to something a lot like today's sex scene, then there's no point in talking about how things are new today. They're not. They're thirty years old. It's the same cycle now chewing up its third or fourth generation of the young, except now it's being talked about on the Net. That's all. And the gist of my point.

Still, no point in going on...

Posted by: PatrickH on September 8, 2008 4:28 PM

It is just not possible for men and women to have substantially different numbers of het partners in a population where their overall numbers are about equal. Just can't be.

Patrick, I cannot say whether some statistic being quoted by someone is actually accurate. But, from a purely statistical POV, it is not only possibly, but, for a large population, likely.

It would actually be less likely for some small populations.

And if things had changed by 1980 to something a lot like today's sex scene, then there's no point in talking about how things are new today. They're not.

The Marriage Rate continued to plummet after 1980. And, IIRC, it has continued to decline up until 2006, which was the last year I saw data for.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 8, 2008 4:41 PM

Moira Breen: Oh My delightful sweet pea, does it really have to come this?

Proposition (1):

(MB): Men feel that they have a right to sex.
(slum): That proposition is false. Verifiable by common experience.

Proposition (2):

(MB):The anger directed to women is a result of infantile male behaviour.
(Slum): The anger is rational and is a result of multiple factors including frustration (normal human emotion when needs are not met)and perceived deception (verifiable by scientific study and common experience).

Proposition (3):

(MB) : Are your sufferings so special?
(slum): No reply as:
(1) They are not.
(2) My non/sufferings are irrelevant.
(3) Apparently incorrect assumption about the nature of my character.

Proposition (4):
(MB): Vindictiveness is of bad character.
(slum): Implicitly agreed, though the vindictiveness occurs in a forum for self improvement.

What's your problem?

Hugs and kisses.

Posted by: slumlord on September 8, 2008 7:08 PM

Something has been bothering me about Roissy for a time now and I've just figured it out. He reminded me of someone and I just couldn't but my finger on it. Then, I remembered: Camus' sketch of the absurdist Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus.

It's Roissy, alright.

Here is a summary of this passage:

The absurd man is amoral (which is not to say that he is immoral). Either morality comes from God or it is invented by humans in order to justify certain kinds of behavior. The absurd man cannot believe in God, and he has no need of justification. He is guided only by his own integrity, and integrity does not need to be guided by a moral code. Because he is free from morality, and thus from the concepts of guilt or wrong-doing, Camus describes the absurd man as "innocent."

His first example of the absurd man is the famous seducer, Don Juan. He moves from woman to woman, seducing each one in turn with the same tactics—the same maneuvers—with which he seduced his previous lovers. He never stays with one woman too long before moving on to his next conquest.

Camus dismisses all accusations that Don Juan is desperately seeking true love, or that he is melancholy, or that he is unimaginatively repetitive, or that he is callously selfish, or that he will be a miserable old man. All these accusations seem to assume that Don Juan is ultimately hoping to achieve transcendence, to find something that will take him beyond his day-to-day seductions, and that he is totally incapable of finding that transcendence.

On the contrary, Camus portrays Don Juan as a man who lives for the passions of the present moment. He lives without hope of finding any transcendent significance in his life, and he recognizes the meaninglessness of his seductions. He is not looking for true love; he wants only to experience the continual repetition of his conquests. He is not melancholy; that would suppose that he hopes for something more or that he doesn't know all that he needs to know. He is not unimaginatively repetitive in his seductions; he is interested in quantity, not quality, and so if the same techniques always get him the desired result there is no reason to alter them. He is not callously selfish; he may be selfish in his own way, but he does not seek to possess or control those whom he seduces. He will not suffer the consequences of his actions; he lives in full awareness of who he is and of where he is going. Therefore, old age and impotence can hardly catch him off-guard.

The difference between the absurd man and the rest of mankind is not so much a matter of outward actions but of the inward attitude he takes toward his actions. The difference, it seems, between Don Juan and an ordinary seducer, is not so much a difference in behavior as a difference in their attitude toward their behavior. One might lay on a run-of-the-mill seducer all the accusations that Camus defends Don Juan against. The significant difference, it would seem, is that for Don Juan there is nothing beyond the seduction. Don Juan does not seduce women in the hope of finding love or of easing his melancholy: he seduces for the joy of seducing. Don Juan is an absurd man in that he acknowledges that his life is meaningless and that his actions have no significance beyond their consequences in this life.

Posted by: KevinV on September 8, 2008 7:53 PM

Michael B:
I mean, really: You're supposed to start life with an awareness that women are contradictory, many-layered, elusive creatures. Cats, not dogs. That should be a given in life, not a late moment of rude, enraging discovery.

The problem is though, that for the last 30 years or so, our society has been teaching our children that men and women are not different, and this claim has most enthusiastically pushed by feminists. Sure, they cannot deny the physical differences, but according to the feministas, gender is a psychosocial construct used for oppression. This teaching is started in kindergarten and continually preached through the formative years of adolescence. It's affirmed by the mainstream media, supported by polite society and enforced by the legislatures.It's no surprise that when the mating game begins in earnest, boys discover that girls are not like them. Reality is different to what is preached.

I think porn paradoxically affirms feminist thinking. Porn caters to the male fantasy of women who are eagerly willing to engage in immediate sexual gratification at the drop of a hat. It paints women as sexual in the same way that men are, further reinforcing the view that men and women are not different. A steady diet of porn is no doubt going to affirm that impression, especially during the adolescent years. Furthermore with the mainstreaming of porn--and let's admit that its pretty mainstream now--girls, who are more socially conscious than men, are going to feel pressured that they have to perform in such a way. Let me illustrate my point: I do a lot of gynecological examinations. Prior to Sex in the City, the Brazillian was extremely rare, now it's common. I wouldn't underestimate the power of the media in influencing our culture and altering our mindsets. Most people are sheep.

Kevin V:
Don Juan is an absurd man
No he is not, he is rational man. If there is nothing beyond the grave--i.e no transcendent--then the only options for the intelligent man are hedonism or suicide. Roissy's out for all the fun he can get, no matter what form it takes, what God thinks of this though, is another matter.

Posted by: slumlord on September 8, 2008 8:21 PM

I imagine these seventy plus comments contain deep insites that are surely wonderful and intelligent.

However, really, all the post was, while admitting those things that it would be pathologically stupid to lie about, was a blame-the-young-guy speech combined with "Son, she's waiting for you!".

I heard this also from a Finland liar. He told me about how all those Finish girls are just looking a good steady man to settle down with. I knew anyone talking like this cares not at all for the truth, so I looked up Finish divorce rates.

Link

It is the ninth highest in the world.

America's is, of course, the highest.

But usefull advice to young people, like don't marry Americans, any other english speaking country, or Russians, would be helping young men, not making use of a valuable resource.

And that's really what this post is about, isn't it?

Posted by: Comment_Thats_Nice on September 8, 2008 10:17 PM

Slumlord, honestly, you should start your own blog. Great work.

Posted by: Usually Lurking on September 9, 2008 8:57 AM

slumlord - The use of the term "absurd" in my post above is not the everyday use of the term. The term is one Camus applied for a certain type of awareness. The Wikipedia entry has a good definition of the term as Camus used it:

"Although the notion of the 'absurd' is pervasive in all of the literature of Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus is his chief work on the subject. In it, Camus considers absurdity as a confrontation, an opposition, a conflict, or a "divorce" between two ideals. Specifically, he defines the human condition as absurd, as the confrontation between man's desire for significance/meaning/clarity and the silent, cold universe. He continues that there are specific human experiences that evoke notions of absurdity. Such a realization or encounter with the absurd leaves the individual with a choice: suicide, a leap of faith, or acceptance. He concludes that acceptance is the only defensible option."

Of course, this absurd man is highly rational.

Posted by: KevinV on September 9, 2008 12:20 PM

Thanks Kevin V,

The use of the term "absurd" in my post above is not the everyday use of the term.

No I didn't think it was. I interpreted it as the label one gives to the existential situation faced by the average atheist. I've not read Camus--French intellectuals are sophists more than thinkers--but I've had a bit of a browse with regard to his work on the internet and after consideration, feel that Roissy just doesn't fall under his schema.

Roissy's type live for fun, when the fun stops, then the "right" to euthanasia is demanded. Camus's reason to live was unconditional; a hedonist's isn't. When the party stops it's time to switch off the lights.

Usually Lurking.

Thanks. I have a little blog here . It's mainly about religion, politics, etc. I find I'm too lazy to post regularly and my work is quite variable. Still you're welcome to drop in. I tend to be more combative here.

Posted by: slumlord on September 9, 2008 6:20 PM

Sister Wolf, why is it ok to shame men who cannot get laid, but it is not ok to shame women who are "sluts?"

Of course, I am sure that to you merely asking this question means I cannot get laid.

I'll have my girlfriend get back to you on that.

Posted by: Mike on September 10, 2008 5:28 PM

What is going on at Roissy's blog is a lovely performance of Don Giovanni.

Posted by: Pupu on September 19, 2008 2:45 PM






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