A request is not a test

Athol outlines the difference:

If I’m doing the morning routine with the kids, I bring Jennifer a cup of tea. I’m already making me coffee, we have a Keurig thingy so it only takes me a minute to make her something while I’m making my own. She always says thank you and actively enjoys the Act of Service. She also knows that all she needs to do once is say, “Where’s my tea?” in a snarky tone and she’ll get a whithering look and a big cup of make-your-own-fucking-tea.

Something to watch is whether or not small acts of service are also returned to you. I do nice things for Jennifer, but she also does many nice things back to me. For which I also say thank you.

If it’s all a one way flow of your energy into your partner… even if they are being nice and appreciative about it… that just means you’re doing everything they want for nothing but praise. Which is simply talk and not action. If they are performing actions for other people though… hmmm.

The fiery fervor of the convert often leads to overreaction, in Game as in religion or the conquest of an addiction.  For many men, the discovery of Game causes them to start seeing negative female behavior in everything, sometimes when it isn't even there.  For example, when Spacebunny is comfortably ensconced in front of the television and asks me if I'll pour her a glass of wine when I'm in the kitchen making myself a late night coffee, I don't react as if she's angrily demanding that I throw myself down into a puddle so she can walk over my back without getting her shoes wet.  Her request is a perfectly reasonable one and I am perfectly happy to grant it.

A reasonable rule of thumb is this:  If a woman is making a request of a man and it is the sort of request that you would normally grant if one of your close male friends was making it, it is not a test and should not be treated like one.  On the other hand, if a woman makes an uncivil demand of you, it may or may not be a test, but in either case, it is best treated with contempt and ignored.

The fact is that most women know, from a very early age, how to make themselves difficult to resist when they want something.  They flutter their eyelashes, make their eyes big, raise their voices, and say PLEEEEESE.  So, if a woman can't even bother to be civil, if she can't even bother to ask for something, she wants, that is a pretty reliable sign that something has gone awry in the relationship.

Intersexual friendship

Susan argues that it's not possible:

The reason: pure projection by both sexes. Guys want to have sex with their girl friends, and assume girls feel the same way. Girls do not want to have sex with their guy friends, and assume guys feel the same way.

This is largely true, but the logic obviously permits one exception, and it is an exception that I have personally observed.  Men of higher SMV can be friends with women of lower SMV unless they convert the female friend into a harem member.

I've had a few genuine female friends with whom I've never had any romantic involvement, three of whom were even attractive.  But in all three cases, my interest in them was either totally nonexistent or very limited.  In the one instance of the latter case, friendship was possible because her interest in me was equally limited, my being at least 100 pounds too light for her.  She was so predictable in this regard that if she was cheerful about a new prospect, I would quite literally ask her at which major football program he had played.  She would get mad, then, when pressed, reluctantly admit "Nebraska" or "USC".  She very much liked those big, corn-fed linemen.

The reality is that most men aren't truly friends with women, nor can they hope to maintain their friendships once their friend pairs off with another man.  Unless the man's SMV is much higher than the male friend's SMV, he simply can't afford to tolerate the friend lurking about and waiting for his opportunity to make a move.

Regardless, the reality is that even when male-female friendships are possible, they tend to be transient and situation-based.  I don't know a single man or woman who has maintained a lifelong friendship with a member of the opposite sex that is even remotely comparable to their lifelong same-sex friendships.

Shame and the single man

Dr. Helen is more than a little dubious that women will be successful in attempting to shame single men into marriage:

So now that so many men don’t get married, the society will spend it’s time trying to shame them and discriminate to keep those guys in line. I imagine this will backfire. I was talking to a shoe salesman in his thirties the other day where I am visiting in Santa Monica and he asked me about my work and I told him about my forthcoming book. Without any prompting, he said, “I don’t want to get married.” When I asked “Why?” he said, “The risk is too great and there is no benefit. Even if you get a pre-nup, it doesn’t work. There is no incentive to me.” Apparently, he is smart to stay single according to one of the commenters at the article I mentioned who had this to say about marriage:

Was single, had ample money and plenty of very open minded young ladies to spend my time with. Was having the time of my life, met a wonderful woman then got married and we had a couple of kids. Now I’m in a perpetual state of worry financially, rarely see my nearest/dearests for fun, and get a bj on Christmas and my birthday. Stay single boys, keep living the dream!!!!!!!

So just maybe there are rational reasons other than weirdness and “fussiness” that keep men from tying the knot. But then, that would mean a columnist like the one writing the piece mentioned would have to understand more about where men are coming from and less about how she and society want men to fall in line with what women and society expect.

She is correct to be dubious because what we're seeing here are examples of both marginal utility and female solipsism.  The solipsism can be seen in how women frequently attempt to direct shaming tactics towards men because they find shaming tactics to be so effective with women and cannot imagine that men would respond differently.  The marginal utility of the tactic can be seen in how American men have, over the last 40 years, become increasingly indifferent, indeed, in some cases even openly hostile, to female demands and female expectations of them.

The problems Western societies in general, and American society in particular, are already beginning to face were no less predictable than the problems facing Chinese and Indian societies as a result of their massive slaughter of the unborn female population.  These problems are significantly different, of course.  Contra the feminist assumptions, (and by now it should be no surprise to observe that events have proven them to be wrong yet again), just as the slaughter of girls has raised the relative MMV of the surviving women in Chinese and Indian society by reducing their supply, the legal degradation and economic deterioration of men has raised the relative MMV of the smaller number of men still deemed marriageable by women.

It is simple economic supply and demand at work, on both sides.  The female demand for more education and financial success increases, thus raising the price of the desirable men.  However, the male demand for women has significantly declined due to the increased legal risks and increasing age of women at first marriage, among other things, further reducing their supply.  Anyone who has taken Econ 101 should be able to correctly calculate what the interaction of the moving supply and demand curves necessarily implies: women will find it harder and harder to find desirable men willing to marry them.  In September, I pointed out that already, the math dictates "only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are."  And that ratio is only going to continue falling as time goes on, barring massive social, economic, or political changes.

This change in marriage-related demographics is not the only, nor the primary, reason the West is in decline.  But it is most definitely a powerful factor in speeding up the process of decline and fall... and trying to shame single men responding rationally to the changes in society into modifying their behavior is simply not a credible solution.

The easy marital health test

A small scientific study indicates a potentially reliable test for the health of a marriage, as well as a man's marital ALPHA/BETA status:

[T]he participants' commitment to and satisfaction with their relationships did not seem to change with fertility, the researchers found. But women with less sexually attractive partners seemed to feel less close to their beaus as they moved from their least fertile to most fertile period. Meanwhile, women matched with the most sexually attractive men seemed to experience the opposite effect.

"Women with the really good, stable guy felt more distant at high-fertility periods than low-fertility periods," Haselton explained in a statement. "That isn't the case with women who were mated to particularly sexually attractive men. The closeness of their relationships got a boost just prior to ovulation."

The researchers found the same trends when they repeated the experiment with 67 new participants. In this phase of the study, the researchers added a new questionnaire that had the women rate their partners' flaws, such as thoughtlessness, moodiness and childishness. Women paired with less sexually attractive guys were significantly more likely to find fault with their partners during the high-fertility period than the low-fertility period.

 In other words, if your wife is particularly sexually responsive in between her periods and gets irritable when she's getting them, she probably finds you to be sexually attractive to her and your marriage is likely in pretty good shape.  On the other hand, if your wife is at her most irritable when she isn't about to have her period, and around that time, she has an inexplicable, but dependable impulse to put on a short skirt and go out dancing with her friends on her monthly girls night out, well, there is a good chance she doesn't find you to be particularly hot stuff.

But don't worry, the researchers are careful to assure BETA married men.  The fact that she is regularly drawn to have sex with other men she finds more attractive doesn't mean that she wants to forgo the benefits of a long-term relationship with you.  It's just a pity that these mysterious urges tend to strike at her most fertile time of the month.  Perhaps, if you're lucky, the baby will even look somewhat like you.

Reasons to marry

Dr. Helen asks if any man can name five of them:

This is the question I have been asking men around California that I meet at various blogger and pundit meet-ups for dinner. One dinner guest I sat next to the other night told me he had gotten married last week. We were discussing marriage at the table and I turned to him and asked why he had gotten married. “Can you name one reason a man should get married?” I asked, trying somehow to be polite, but probably failing miserably.

He thought about it for a minute and said “because the woman wants to and he will lose her if he doesn’t.” That sounds more like blackmail to me than a reason. Last night, at another event, I asked other men if they could name five reasons a man should get married. There was silence and then a discussion about the war against men and if that was true or not.

 I am happy to oblige.  In fact, I can even provide five reasons that start with the letter C.

1. Christianity: extramarital sex is sinful and it is better to marry than burn.
2. Children: children require a marital structure for a healthy and stable upbringing and men who want to continue their line are well-advised to marry.  The future belongs to those who show up for it.
3. Civilization: we have an obligation to those who founded and built our civilization to continue it.  Marriage is a vital foundation of civilization.
4. Contentment: a happily-married man is more content, more healthy, and likely to live longer than a never-married man, a divorced man or a widower.  And even an unhappily-married man has the benefit of viewing death as a sweet release.
5. Courage: marriage is a real risk, both emotionally and financially.  It is stupid and dishonest to pretend otherwise.  Men are not women, to live life in a risk-averse manner, and shunning even the possibility of marriage due to the risks it poses is a cowardly, even unmanly, stance.  This is not to say that all marital risks justify the taking, of course, that would be ludicrous.

I don't blame men who are marriage-averse due to the evil family court regime and the way the legal system is stacked against them.  Not at all.  On the other hand, living in fear is no way for a self-respecting man to live his life.  Men need to keep in mind that they do not have to passively submit to the meat-grinding system once their ex-wives-to-be enter into it.  Rather than live as an emasculated half-man in court-imposed serfdom, leave and live as a free man elsewhere.  Join the French Foreign Legion.  Become a pirate.  Become a missionary.  Start a new life in Brazil or Bangladesh or Bangkok.

And remember, marriages do turn out well, and not infrequently.  You may find your wife to be your Biblical helpmeet or your life-partner in crime.  Women may blow up most failed marriages, but they end 80 percent of 40 percent of all first marriages.  That means your marriage has a 2 in 3 chance of avoiding even the possibility of the androsphere's horror stories.

Spaghetti arms and sour grapes

Susan Walsh provides what would appear to be a counter-intuitive perspective on the appeal of male muscles:

I think men get muscled for one another, kind of the way women dress up for one another when they go out. Women like a fit body, but I will take a runner over a bodybuilder anyday. And I am grossed out by male pecs that are like boobs – something Jason was talking about recently. Blech!  I may be an extreme case – for example, I think Nathan Harden’s skinny arm on the CD cover is sexy. I think his jutting hipbones would be sexy. But I’ve always liked the hipster look. I’m not alone – my guess is that skinny, brooding types, who are often called “bad boys” even when they are not, as in Nathan’s case – outperform PUA types by a mile.

Solipsism alert! First, straight men most certainly do not get muscled for one another. That is pure female projection. We muscle up because it feels good to be powerful rather than weak, because we tend to seek improvement and get competitive with ourselves whenever we focus on something, and because we observe that women gravitate towards the stronger, more well-developed men.  It feels great when women eye your muscles with interest and grab at your pecs, your biceps and your triceps.

I never cared about being able to bench more than my best friends.  My high-school tennis partner was the state powerlifting champion, I was never, ever, going to be able to compete with him.  But I cared a great deal about being able to bench 135, then 225, then 315.  Now, I have a naturally delicate build, but managed to put on nearly 50 pounds over the years through hitting the weights. So I have a direct basis for comparison and I can say that women, on the average, react much more strongly and much more positively to men with well-developed musculatures. Furthermore, it tends to be the hottest, fittest women who prefer the hardest men. After all, who is going to pound her harder and throw her around the bed more easily, limp-wristed Emo Boy or strong, fit, Ripped Guy.

It's not that I had any problem attracting girls when I was a slender soccer player. I’m a writer, after all, and I could probably brood for England. But then, I never once had pretty strangers in the street look me over and say “yum” either.  That being said, do some guys overdo the weight training?  Yes, absolutely. But there is a huge gap between a scrawny runner and a waddling musclehead who looks like a stuffed sausage in a suit.  Daniel Craig as James Bond on the beach is much more the norm than Arnold as Mr. Universe posing onstage.

I thought Susan's comment about finding skinny arms to be sexy to be particularly interesting, since I have heard other women declare that they find "spaghetti arms" and "sunken chests" on men to be vomit-inducing.  I have also noticed that adult women who prefer hipster men are either still attracted to the same type of juveniles that first attracted them in their early teens or fall in the 5-6 SMV category.

My hypothesis is that the human mind has an unconscious means of limiting its attraction triggers to the members of the opposite sex within an attainable SMV range. It was always astounding to me when a relatively plain woman would confess that she found one of my average male friends to be hot while genuinely exhibiting no interest whatsoever in any of my much better-looking friends. It’s a very healthy and positive spin on the sour grapes fable.

As for PUAs, no.  Hipsters do not outperform them.  If nothing else, logic would suggest that by the time a skinny brooding hipster has emo’d his way into a girl’s boudoir, the PUA will have plowed his way through six or seven women already. After all, it takes a lot more time to strike poses, simper, and wait to be noticed than damn the torpedoes and proceed full speed ahead.

"Kate Beckett" on Castle may have said it best, grammatical infelicities notwithstanding, upon realizing how many moderately attractive women had been seduced by a dead PUA whose death she was investigating.  "I weep for my gender."

Anyhow, if Susan finds skinny arms to be sexy, no doubt she'll be absolutely enraptured by this video from my old Wax Trax! labelmates, particularly by the lead singer, Milan Fras.  JA!  JA!  JA!  JAWOHL!  I don't know about the sexiness, but Milan is at least 1,000x more totally awesome than Nathan Harden.  I doubt Harden has giant pink caribous... by which I actually mean GIANT PINK CARIBOUS.

How is that better?

A metastudy asserts that PMS doesn't affect women's mood:

Researchers working under the direction of Dr. Sarah Romans of the University of Otago in New Zealand asserted that the correlation between an impending menstrual cycle and symptoms such as mood swings is far more tenuous than previously stated, according to Time Health & Family.

“The human menstrual cycle … has historically been the focus of myth and misinformation, leading to ideas that constrain women’s activities,” authors of the study wrote. “We wished to examine one pervasive idea, that the [menstrual cycle] is a cause of negative mood, by studying the scientific literature as a whole. We briefly reviewed the history of the idea of premenstrual syndrome and undertook a systematic review of quality studies.”

In short, 85 percent of the studies did not observe what is classically known as PMS, and just over half off the studies found menstruation and mood to be related at all.... “Taken together, these studies failed to provide clear evidence in support of the existence of a specific premenstrual negative mood syndrome in the general population,” the study concluded, according to its abstract summary in Gender Medicine. “This puzzlingly widespread belief needs challenging, as it perpetuates negative concepts linking female reproduction with negative emotionality.”

So, what is everyone supposed to conclude, that women behave like irritable grizzly bears whose cubs have been stolen simply because they get off on it?  I understand that Ms Romans would like to unconstrain women's activities, which is a reasonable goal, but this would appear to be a ludicrously counterproductive means of going about it.  I mean, surely a scientist is capable of understanding that failing to find evidence of the explanatory cause does not eliminate the observed behavior.

Given the expressed motivations of the researchers, color me very dubious on this one.  Especially since a relationship found in over half the studies would tend to be evidence in support of the existence of such a relationship.

The etymology of "slut"

I've noticed that in addition to attempting to reclaim the word "slut" and provide it with a positive spin, some female commenters are still attempting to apply it to sexually successful men.  These latter efforts are both linguistically incorrect and etymologically ignorant.

First, there is the logic.  Numerous male bloggers have demonstrated why the male equivalent of "slut" is "stud".  It is relatively difficult for a man to be sexually successful with women.  It is relatively easy for women to be sexually successful with men.  It is all about the degree of difficulty involved, which is precisely why promiscuous homosexual men are not begrudgingly respected the same way promiscuous normal men are.  As the apt analogy has it, the key that can open a thousand different locks is a master key, whereas the lock that can be opened by a thousand different keys is a defective lock.  There is no double standard, there are two different standards, distinguished by the varying degrees of difficulty.

Of course, logic is dialectic and the female attempt to attack "male sluts" and "manwhores" is observably pure rhetoric.  So we know, per Aristotle, that the logic will be insufficient in addressing the issue and it is necessary to find another, more rhetorical means of convincing those who have adopted such terminology in a futile attempt to shame men out of sexual desire that their efforts are as misguided as they are ignorant.

Therefore, let's look at the definition of the word:

1.  an immoral or dissolute woman; prostitute.
2. Obsolete . a dirty, slovenly woman.
Origin:  1375–1425; late Middle English slutte;  compare dial. slut  mud, Norwegian  (dial.) slutr  sleet, impure liquid

Word Story: Slut  first appeared in the written language in 1402, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , that great repository of language information. At that time, slut  meant roughly what one sense of slattern  means today: a slovenly, untidy woman or girl. It also apparently meant “kitchen maid” (”She is a cheerful slut who keeps the pots scrubbed and the fires hot.”). By the end of the 15th century the sense “a woman given to immoral or improper conduct” had come into use, and it is the only meaning in use today. Interestingly, the same second meaning, a promiscuous woman, developed for the term slattern.

The man reason that one cannot reasonably use the term "slut" for a man is that its primary meaning is not related to its immoral or promiscuous aspect, but rather its intrinsically female aspect.  To call a man a slut is not to label him promiscuous, but rather, to label him a specific type of woman.  Hence Chaucer's choice of the term "sluttish" to refer to a man in the 14th century rather than "slut".  This has been the case for more than 600 years, which is very nearly the time in which the English language has existed.  While it is true that languages change over time, no amount of defiantly declaring that black is white or war is peace will actually change the RGB values or cause the armies to vanish.

A slut is, and has always been, a woman.  It can mean an untidy woman or it can mean a promiscuous woman.  But the one thing it cannot mean is a man; at most a man can be described as "sluttish", which is a more specific adjective than the similar, but more general term, "effeminate".  To attempt to argue otherwise is not only ignorant and illogical, but uneducated.  One might as reasonably attempt to claim that the words "mother" and "girlfriend" can be applied to a man.

Accountability and adulthood

I have observed that few criticisms irritate women more than the idea that many of them are not fully adults due to their refusal to accept responsibility for their actions and decisions.  And yet, regardless of whether we look at the law, the legal system, reactions to criminal behavior, sports, or even debate moderation during a presidential election, we observe the same lack of accountability played out over and over again.  Keep in mind this article was published BEFORE the second presidential debate, during which Candy Crowley attempted to insert herself into the proceedings as a judge as well as a moderator:

[B]y late Sunday night, the campaigns of both presidential candidates and the debate commission shot back, insisting that Crowley would be expected to remain mostly silent as the candidates fielded queries from the audience of undecided voters.

At the center of the controversy is a “memorandum of understanding” — agreed to by the commission and both campaigns — regarding Crowley’s severely limited role.

“The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period,” reads the memo....

For her part, Crowley appeared on CNN Monday afternoon and declared that she would flout the debate commission’s rules anyway.

What can we conclude from this, except that Crowley isn't a genuine adult individual, who can be expected to abide by the agreed-upon ground rules, who understands that she is only incidental to the presidential election process, and realizes that she will be held responsible for any failure to perform as expected?  Why did Crowley know that she could get away with flouting the rules so egregiously, why was she so confident that she could announce her intention to do so ahead of time without suffering any consequences for it before or after the debate?

Most importantly, if adulthood is indicative that an individual has reached the age of accountability, what must we logically conclude of an individual who cannot held accountable to the same degree as adults are?

Too much joy

Just because it is helpful to be reminded that not all is doom and gloom, and that life continues and happiness abounds even in the darkest historical epochs, I think this is worth viewing.  I may be cynical about Man and skeptical about the pink cotton candy joys that are in store for us in the Small World of equalitarian dreams, but I really do think the world is a better place for this woman having had the chance to encounter a particular member of the animal kingdom.

Nous sommes le déluge

Sarah Hoyt contemplates The Myth That Kills:

What I see is women who were freed by tech advances and who THINK they were freed by marching shoulder to shoulder and taking permanent offense.  These women live in a state of paranoia, dreaming up male privilege that is invisible to anyone but them, and taking offense at ever more ridiculous things – even things that have nothing to do with gender – because they’re so terrified of men taking the upper hand again.

I look at them going to war with spelling: Womyn, Herstory.  I look at them dancing around dressed as vaginas (!) because apparently the most important thing in these women’s lives is their sexual organs. I look at them acting as a pack and attacking whoever they’re told to attack because “so and so is anti-woman” and I think… these are humans?  These are civilized people?  Don’t they see they’re being tools of the Marxist divide-and-conquer strategy?  Don’t they see the end of this is either societal destruction or TRUE backlash for the sake of saving civilization?

Apparently not.  So… carry on.  Dance around in your little fabric vaginas.  Think that all men are out to get you.  Refuse to have children, because some of them might be male.  And scream, scream, scream about made-up outrage.
That’s the way to bring civilization down and destroy the technological advances that brought us equality.  If that’s what you want, DO carry on.

Apres nous, le deluge.

Many people wrongly consider Game bloggers like Roissy and me, pessimistic observers who see through an increasingly dark and bloody glass, to be reactionaries.  This only means that they don't understand the historical patterns in play now.  We are the post-feminists.  We are the coming civilization.  We are the flood.

Feminism and the fall of the West

Dalrock presents an excellent post describing the forces and mechanisms that dictate societal collapse in the West as a logical consequence of feminist equalitarianism:

Feminism has become a central organizing force for western culture.  Nearly every decision public and private must consider feminism first, and everything else second.  This is true for everything from our last ditch nuclear deterrent to men’s entertainment.  Even the Word of God must kneel before the word of feminists.  The reason this doesn’t come to mind for most people is it is everywhere.  It seems normal, if not natural.

What is too easy to forget is that this is artificial, and therefore requires constant effort to maintain.  Feminism didn’t demolish a barrier between two seas and let the water levels adjust;  it is a massive pumping operation.  Turn off the pumps even for a little bit and reality will come flooding back.

The longer we keep the pumps running, the more the true cost of the operation becomes evident.  Most of what feminism gained it did on credit of one sort or another, and these bills are coming due....

The fatal flaws of all three of these models, including their use in blended form, are the same:

• There is insufficient incentive to keep the mass of men producing at the levels needed to transfer enough wealth to women.
• Women who spend their early adulthood focusing on education and career before becoming mothers lead to an enormously expensive mis-allocation of investment in human capital.  This exists across all industries but is most easily identified in the case of medical doctors, as The Social Pathologist has witnessed.
• Children don’t just need financial resources, they need a real father.  Fathers who aren’t head of the household are a very poor substitute for those who are.
• By prioritizing women’s careers over becoming mothers, the birthrate greatly declines.

While the first two bullets reduce production by existing men below their potential, the last two reduce the number of productive men in future generations.  Taken together we end up with reduced numbers of productive men, and less production by those few who exist.  These problems aren’t visible at first with feminism however because there is a delay in experiencing the loss of production by men.  This gives the initial appearance of a free lunch, where the only result is the increased production associated with women prioritizing paid work.  However, this apparent free lunch is simply the inertia of the system;  the flaws become progressively more evident from generation to generation.

Dalrock is explicating something I have been pointing out for years.  A feminist society must collapse because it is an unsustainable societal model.  In fact, I expect it to collapse in fewer than the 70 years it took the Soviet Union to go from start to finish because the economic and societal contradictions inherent to the feminist model are actually greater than were intrinsic to the Communist model.

Alpha Mail: Game and the election

GK asks why women are suddenly and "inexplicably" turning away from Obama:

We all know that women didn't turn away from Romney because of his position on abortion or contraception. That was liberal Democrats interpreting the poll data through their own prejudices and had nothing to do with what women were actually thinking. The poll data itself showed that, but now it's even more obvious, since women's support for Romney has increased and he has not changed his position on any of the so-called "war on women" topics.  So what's really going on? Why are women now supporting Romney? Is it simply because now he looks like a winner?

One of the keys to understanding female behavior is that it is often aversion-based.  Men find this difficult to understand because their behavior tends to be positive, in the sense of "I want X, therefore I will do Y."  The aversion-based female pattern tends to be more oriented towards "I don't want X, therefore I will do Y".  The increased female support for Romney has little to do with Romney himself, much with less his policies or Obama's policies, but rather the collective socio-sexual fury of a group of women duped. 

Remember, only four years ago, Obama was widely advertised throughout the media as the half-breed Alpha, the Fresh Prince of Punahou, the suave dark lover extraordinaire with the mellifluous voice who featured in the turgid, illicit sex fantasies of SWPL-women from coast to coast.  He was supposed to be the older, political version of the hip black man with the halfro who always has a white girlfriend in the TV commercials when he isn't occupied spending his days as the fifth wheel in every group of otherwise white male friends.

Instead, he turned out to be a cowardly Urkel with jug ears who can't talk without a teleprompter and is bossed around by a pair of African amazons.  The new SWPL socio-sexual distaste for him - note that conservative women, as well as the working class women who disdain those they consider "mudsharks", never saw any appeal in Obama in the first place - has finally reached the point that they don't even care that they're going to be criticized for their failure to adhere to the policy dictates of the Sisterhood, they simply can't stand the man now.

So, my conclusion is that now that the line has observably been crossed, the SWPL vote will stampede away from Obama almost as rapidly as it stampeded away from Hillary Clinton and towards Obama during the Democratic primaries in 2008.

Review request

As those of you who also read VP know, yesterday I published a novella and announced a forthcoming novel.  Since I know that not everyone here follows economics, religion, and politics, and because I'd like to see a few more reviews posted at Amazon, I am offering a free review copy of the novella to the first 15 AG readers who are interested in reading it and meet the following criteria:

1. You are a regular reader of fantasy fiction
2. You have the time to read a 50-page novella this week
3. You are willing and able to commit to posting a review on Amazon by the end of the day on Friday.

If this happens to describe you, please an email to vday(AT)wnd(DOT)com and I'll send a copy of the epub to the first 15 respondents.  I'm afraid there is little in the way of Game per se in the novella, on the other hand, she does look beautiful in chains....

Crimson Arts and the Scarlet Manifesto

Dr. Peggy boasts of the wonderful results of a liberated and increasingly adulterous female population:

After years of raising boys to think more like women and women to think more like men, we are now witnessing a generation of adults who fall less into traditional gender roles than ever before. Today's young men, as a whole, are more sensitive than their fathers were. The women are more independent than their mothers. There's been a trickle-up effect: The older generations are witnessing these changes, these freedoms, as they show up in their children and grandchildren, causing a culture-wide shift that transcends age.

Research supports this: According to a study conducted earlier this year by biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher for the dating site Match.com, women are getting less traditional about relationships. Men, interestingly, are getting more so. Men want marriage, babies, and stability; women want personal space and regular nights out with friends. More poignantly, women view their sexuality based on notions of what they want to do, versus what they're told they should do.

In my work and in my life, I had been hearing more from women who were both having extramarital affairs and actively seeking them out. While they weren't necessarily proud of their actions, neither were they ashamed. Unlike men, whose cheating often follows an impulse, these women had considered their affairs. They had reasons for them.

I'm not interested in wagging my finger or responding to the obvious.  What I find interesting here is to note the way other women are repeatedly confirming what Roissy and other Game bloggers, including me, have been saying for years, despite the denials of the NAWALT crowd.

Now no one, except perhaps for the most bitter red pill Gammas, are claiming that all women are adulterous sluts prone to cheating at the drop of a hat.  But what Roissy has been repeatedly driving home is that the observably negative female behavior is increasingly driven by perverse societal structures and incentives that have unleashed the raw, chaotic power of female sexuality to the detriment of men, women, and society.

The fact that Dr. Peggy, the Jezebelles, and the assorted hairy-armed manjaws of the world are celebrating these societal changes indicates that they are real, they are destructive, and that they have to be unmade if society is to return to a stable and sustainable path.  There is no room for the moderates, both male and female, who want to protect the structural changes while decrying the negative consequences; the latter are the product of the former.

The logic is harsh, but inescapable.  As Instapundit likes to say, that which can't continue won't.  If women who are free to do what they want collectively choose to behave in a way that destroys their societies, either those societies will collapse or women will not be permitted such freedom in the future. Women may be, as Dr. Peggy says, more confident about making choices, but what use is confidence when the choices are so often self-destructive ones that lead to empty minds and barren wombs?

Alpha Mail: decisions, decisions

LL sends us an example of the decision-making ability of the pre-Shadow of the Wall modern young woman in action from Texts From Last Night:

I just realized that I have to choose between a future orthopedic surgeon and a dude currently in jail. My life is so fucked.

This is, of course, a humblebrag, in which the woman feigns to be dismayed by the fact that she has two, count them TWO, men of relatively high socio-sexual rank who are not only attracted to her sexually, but think she is so wonderfully fabulous that they are attempting to pursue a future with her.  One is a quintessential Bad Boy, being "currently in jail", and the other is presumably a societal high flyer, being "a future orthopedic surgeon".(1)  Or at least that's what we're supposed to think, as it is much more likely, the guy in jail is only there for two days on a DUI, the future surgeon is actually in nursing school, and neither of them has actually proposed marriage to her

And what any of this has to do with "last night" is a complete mystery.  It seems unlikely that she just realized that she can't marry more than one man, or that last night was the first time that either the prisoner or the medical student expressed interest in her.

But what is more interesting is if we take the posturing at face value and contemplate how bad one's decision-making ability has to be if one is seriously torn between "jailbird" and "med student".  As one commenter on the text succinctly put it: <i>You're fucked for turning a no-brainer into a "decision".</i>

What we can learn from this is that many women love drama, particularly drama into which they can cast themselves as the central figure.  If the drama doesn't actually exist, as I presume in this case, they will manufacture it, then portray even the most obvious choices as difficult dilemmas requiring the wisdom of a Solomon to resolve.  Of course, if the conundrum is legitimate, this only underlines Roissy's oft-made point about pre-Shadow women having no long term perspective.


(1) The intrinsic female focus on male professional status is revealed by the fact that ever since Galen gave his first lecture, no woman has ever dated a "med student" or a "law student", merely "future surgeons", "doctors-to-be", and "going to be a lawyers".   This is why the average cube jockey should always describe himself as a "future CEO".  

Accountability, agency, and acceptance

SarahsDaughter demonstrates why the maxim of never taking advice on intersexual relations from a woman is a rule that has exceptions.  She explains how solipsism is the root cause of the often-observed tendency of women to repeat their sexual and relationship mistakes over and over again:

Women, through a solipsistic perspective, falsely assume that indicators of attraction from men can somehow contribute to a positive self image or are reflective of who she is when it's really no more than a sexual urge that is in no way unique for just her. This all becomes readily apparent after she wrongly chooses to have sex with him and it displays itself in regret, self loathing and embarrassment. So why would she do it again? Because the regret is not associated with the solipsistic euphoria. The regret is tied to the specific guy she had sex with. That is why she would never talk to THAT guy again.

Guys, you will never shame solipsism out of women. I think that has been well established. Women can learn how to pause and think outside of themselves but it is not what her brain first does. Information is received through an "all about me" lens and is usually not filtered past that.

There are two important lessons in there, one for women and one for men.  The first is for women to stop looking at their feelings as the result of actions by another party rather than the consequence of their own actions and decisions.  In other words, accepting accountability is the necessary step in acquiring conscious agency and the elusive empowerment that so many women seek.

The second is for men to stop thinking that speaking negatively about solipsism to women will somehow affect the degree to which a woman is solipsistic.  Solipsism is a female attribute but it is a male issue!  Complaining about a woman's solipsism is like a woman complaining about a man's height.  You cannot expect her to do anything about it, you can only learn how to deal with it.  Whether you do so in a manipulative manner that makes it useful to you or a sacrificial manner that permits you to endure its vagaries with complete equanimity is irrelevant.  The only point is that you have to accept the fact that it is what it is and it is never going to change.

Yes, a woman can learn to control her expression of it just as a man can learn to wear high heels.  But such superficial actions aren't going to actually change what is occurring underneath.

Feminist sex is false advertising

Susan Walsh tracks a remarkable trajectory of supposedly "sex-positive feminism" in a female advocate of casual sex that provides solid support for Roissy's theory of the Slut Cycle, in which the alpha chaser just happens to decide to slide off the carousel and start considering relationships with lower rank men as she ages and The Wall looms:

Age 24: I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships....  I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer — and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness…Perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard.

Age 26: As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar – and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups…We can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.

Age 27:  I wanted company, warmth and no danger of attachment.... Except that in reality there was. I actually liked him, quite a bit, as a human being…At some point I realized that, despite my insistence otherwise, I actually wanted those sorts of intimacies, only with an actual commitment. 

Age 28: I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship. It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice….I’ve often had no one but myself to blame — especially when going after boys literally wearing warning signs in the form of tattoos reading things like, “I am what I am” or “forgive me.”  Sometimes, tearing off your clothes is just a pathetic attempt at taking control of the uncontrollable: love. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t always getting what I wanted from hookups.

She's right on schedule.  In three more years she'll be declaring that there are no good men left, followed seven years later by loud and unconvincing declarations of how much she loves being single at 40.  The punchline?  The woman who wanted us to hear her roar that she had fully proved her ability to have one-night stands belatedly confesses that she almost never climaxed in any of the casual encounters she was so enthusiastically championing.  " I didn’t mention that I’d faked it during nearly all of my dalliances."  Now, how much can she possibly have learned about what turns her on if she didn't even manage to learn enough to get off?

Susan is absolutely correct to conclude that this seller of casual sex was a fraud.  Now, I would not go so far as to conclude that no woman genuinely enjoys casual sex or one-night stands, as there are without question true sluts at heart whose cravings for physical activity are very similar to those of highly-sexed men.  But it is simply not true to claim that all, most, or even a significant minority of women are wired that way, or it would not be so common for women involved in hookups, one-night stands, or friends with benefits situations to destroy the casual relationship by attempting to turn it into a committed one.

The primary lesson here for women is that they need to apply the same skeptical lens to female advice that Game-savvy men habitually do and realize that the media figures do not define the norm.  Their task, however, is even more difficult, as they need to not only watch what the other women do instead of what they say, but also attempt to distinguish between what those women feel and what they say they feel.  That's a task that would be well beyond the vast majority of men, but perhaps would be possible given the more developed sense of female intuition.

Marriage as rape protection

This anti-rape logic seems totally nonsensical from the Western perspective:

Caste councils, known as Khap Panchayats, called for children to be allowed to marry lawfully as soon as they reach puberty and said they believe it would halt the increase in rape cases which has caused alarm throughout Northern India.  Their call came following an outcry over the gang-rape and subsequent suicide of a 16 year old girl, Sharmila, in Sacchakhera village, Haryana, close to the capital New Delhi.

The fact that we Westerners can't figure out how this could possibly make sense only goes to show how far removed from the historical human reality our society is.  Marriage was historically a form of protection for women.  By becoming the property of a man, a woman was protected by her husband, who could be expected to use lethal force against anyone who would offend him by bothering her.

Secular faith in the law gradually replaced this concept of the husband-as-protector, to such an extent that husbands are now considered intrinsically dangerous by many women.  But under the thin veil of society, the old human reality remains; a man in Florida recently cut the throat of a Chicago man who made the mistake of approaching and talking to the Florida man's wife, while Richard Gere was kicked out of a restaurant by a diner after he attempted to chat up the man's wife during dinner.

But the deterrent effect of the law requires an amount of long-term thinking that is noticeably lacking in the cultures that are making up an increasing percentage of the populations of the West.  I suspect that the decrease of the deterrent effect, combined with the decreasing ability of the legal authorities to maintain civil order, will likely serve to bring about a partial return to the very thinking that we currently find nonsensical, and which many men and women probably find offensive.

Wife or $200 whore?

I found this comparison to be a fascinating one:

I wouldn’t judge the man who balks when his fiance demands a guarantee for two weeklong trips to Paris every year and diamond jewelry on birthdays, or the woman who balks when her fiance demands a guarantee for sex twice a week, at least not without without more details.

This is truly astonishing.  Apparently sex, a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of the marital relationship, without which no marriage is considered to have been consummated, can somehow be equated with a weeklong trip to Paris, plus diamond jewelry.  This strikes me as somewhat of an overvaluation of the female service provided, especially in light of the readily available economic data on the average cost of sexual transactions.  If we assume $7k per trip, plus another $5k per diamond jewelry, that works out to $182 per sexual encounter with no volume discount.  Actually, that would be cheaper than a mortgage... although one suspects this is envisioned as being in addition to rather than instead of the household expenses.

Anyhow, if a woman is unwilling to commit to having sex on some sort of regular basis, then how on Earth can any man be reasonably expected to commit to never having sex with anyone else?  If 104 times per year is too much and justifies a refusal to commit to it, then how much is a reasonable average expectation? 12x per year? 1x per year?  Never?  Dalrock recently posted on the ways that marriage and men's reasonable marital expectations have been debased, but are we really supposed to believe that marriage, with all of its responsibilities, sexual and otherwise, now provides absolutely no sexual rights to the husband?

Update: Marriage isn't the only form of false female advertising.

A question of character

Contra the assumption of many Americans, European-style maternity leave simply isn't the answer to the challenge presented by working mothers-to-be:

"Family-friendly" has become a cliché for a direction of political travel, which politicians have accustomed the voters to expect. So it would be a brave politician who questioned the most well-established plank of family-friendly policy - maternity leave.

Under present UK law, women who give birth can take up to a year’s maternity leave, for six weeks of which they are paid 90pc of their usual salary, though after that the rules vary and it’s around £135 a week or less.

However, maternity leave is creating a great burden on many women and businesses. The legislation puts employers off employing women. Companies are reluctant to give jobs to women of childbearing age.

The problem is actually more serious than the article makes it appear.  The UK has created a perverse incentive system where the woman is provided significant incentive to lie about her intention to return to the workforce after the year's leave, thus forcing the company to pay for the entire year when everyone knows she isn't coming back.  This not only forces the company to spend around £6000 in addition to her six-week 90 percent leave, but prevents them from making any plans to replace her until one year after she has left the job.

Not only that, but as long as she can get a simple note from her doctor, a woman can stop showing up to work once she's pregnant and still get paid her regular salary before she goes on maternity leave.  Now, while it's understandable that women will be tempted to take advantage of this legalized theft, what sort of message does it send about the woman's character to her co-workers and employers?  It's not merely men who resent the fact that one of their co-workers can take advantage of up to 15 months paid vacation. And how does it benefit women to create such a strong disincentive to hire women who are of an age and situation where pregnancy is a reasonable possibility?

Society needs women to bear children; without them doing so, it will eventually cease to exist.  But how can anyone look at the situation and credibly insist that the material gains of doubling the size of the female workforce - remember, one-third of women always worked - have been worth the material costs?

She's probably had better

Many unmarried young women with an N count greater than one or two will argue vociferously that their N doesn't matter and should not be taken into account by men who are considering them as potential wives.  But the reality is that the known male distaste for seconds, or twentieths, as the case may be, is well-justified in terms of an increased probability of future infidelity as well as the fact that his wife will likely compare him unfavorably to one or more of her previous lovers:

Many women are looking back with longing on past relationships, admitting sex was better with their ex than their current partner.  A total of 38 per cent of women confessed in a recent survey that they had the best sex of lives in a previous relationship. Meanwhile just 29 per cent of men said their best sex was with an ex....

 'They don't regret not choosing them as long-term mates, but they do miss the great sex they had. Women don't tend to marry the guy they had great sex with. They marry for more 'sensible' attributes - like whether he'll be loyal and a good father. I get lots of emails from women saying they love their husbands but fantasise about sex with their exes.'

What is particularly troublesome about the 38 percent figure is that it does not appear to leave out the 29 percent of women who are still virgins by the time they reach marital age, and who as married women could never prefer sex with a nonexistent previous lover.  It's not a precise match here since some of those virgins will not marry, but the statistic is still close enough to make the point that this report actually indicates that 53 percent of all married women with previous sexual experience had the best sex of their lives in a previous relationship.  And obviously, the higher her N, the greater the possibility that this is the case.

So, if you've married a woman who wasn't a virgin, there is a one-in-two chance that she considers you to be sexually inferior to one of her previous lovers.  And the more experience she's had, the more likely that is the case.

This widespread sexual preference for previous lovers may also explain why the men least troubled by their wives' previous sexual experience are the high Alphas.  Given the tendency of Alphas to be obtuse, is not only likely to assume that he is not only his wife's best, but to believe he is the man that other men's wives are pining after.  And then, it might be hard to be too worried about not being number one or number two when she's not even in his own top ten.

A maternal right to kidnap?

Somehow, I don't seem to recall any of the cases of fathers abducting their children and taking them across international borders being portrayed quite as favorably as this maternal kidnapper, who is quite clearly supposed to be the victim of the story:

Disturbing scenes showing four girls being dragged kicking and screaming on to a plane in Brisbane to be sent back to their Italian father caused outrage across Australia today.  The sisters, aged between nine and 15, were ordered by a judge in Australia to be returned to their father in Italy, despite the children’s wishes to stay in Queensland with their mother.

The girls’ mother, who was married to an Italian, had taken them to Australia from Italy for a holiday two years ago – and then kept them in the country. The Courier Mail newspaper reported that it had learned the mother of the girls clung in desperation to the rear of an Australian Federal Police car as it drove away with three of the sisters from a house where they had been staying.

She collapsed in the road sobbing at the end of what was described as a day of unfathomable anxiety and stress.

A bitter international fight ensued between the parents, resulting in an Australian judge ruling the sisters must be returned to their father.  For weeks the girls, who have joint Australian and Italian citizenship, had remained in hiding with their great-grandmother after a court ordered they should be returned to their father in Italy.

If you're a parent of either sex who claims to be concerned about the well-being of your children, you cannot kidnap them and attempt to forcibly keep them from their mother or their father.  The family courts are, for the most part, complete travesties with no regard for the rule of law, but it shouldn't take a law or a court to make it clear to everyone that children must not be removed from the geographic proximity of a parent by the state or the other parent without the first parent's permission.

The heavily emotional angle of this story strongly suggests mothers have some sort of implicit right to abduct and abscond with their children that somehow trumps the legal system.  How, one wonders, can that be rationally justified in a nominally equalitarian legal system?

Business Game

Game has broader utility than most of its advocates imagine.  But regardless of the application, it always unwise to pay excessive attention to women telling you what they want, regardless of whether the subject is business or inter-sexual relations:

A leading German women’s magazine praised for dropping skinny models in favour of 'real people' has reversed its decision after two years - because sales dropped as the lbs piled on. This month's e-edition of Brigitte features slimline pro-models again.

This is code for the 'real people' experiment being a failure. During the two year trial over 1,000 women aged between 18 and 68 had been used in fashion and beauty features - 'to give beauty its naturalness back and show that attractiveness has many faces'.

Think about this.  The German magazine, Brigitte, sells almost exclusively to women.  The publishers were no doubt assured that eliminating those offensively slender models from the magazine's pages would increase sales, and probably found themselves subject the usual point-and-shame pressure of the sort that women have directed at a wide range of organizations and institutions for the last forty years as well.

The publishers almost surely believed that by giving women what they were actively demanding, they would benefit from in the form of more positive press and increased sales.  They got the more positive press they were expecting, as the media around the world covered their action favorably.  But they didn't get the sales; the best-selling magazine that once sold 700,000 copies per month saw that its subscriptions "dropped by nearly 22 per cent while 35 per cent fewer copies were sold in shops".

The magazine would have been in much better shape had its publishers kept this basic principle in mind: women cannot tell you what they want because they do not consciously know what they want.  Their desires can only be ascertained by their actions, not their assertions.