Nightmare at Central Perk

And the menace of Chandler Bing. It's no wonder the Social Justice Warriors are always so on edge. For them, the clock is always ticking on when their attitudes and actions will abruptly transform from heroic to villainesque:

Chandler, identified in Season 1 as having a “quality” of gayness about him, is endlessly paranoid about being perceived as insufficiently masculine. He’s freaked out by hugs, and by Joey having a pink pillow on his couch. (“If you let this go, you’re going to be sitting around with your fingers soaking in stuff!”)

In retrospect, the entire show’s treatment of LGBTQ issues is awful, a fault pointedly illustrated by the exhaustive clip-compilation “Homophobic Friends.” But Chandler’s treatment of his gay father, a Vegas drag queen played by Kathleen Turner, is especially appalling, and it’s not clear the show knows it. It’s one thing for Chandler to recall being embarrassed as a kid, but he is actively resentful and mocking of his loving, involved father right up until his own wedding (to which his father is initially not invited!). Even a line like “Hi, Dad” is delivered with vicious sarcasm. Monica eventually cajoles him into a grudging reconciliation, which the show treats as an acceptably warm conclusion. But his continuing discomfort now reads as jarringly out-of-place for a supposedly hip New York thirtysomething—let alone a supposedly good person, period.

When it comes to women, Chandler turns out to be just as retrograde as Joey, but his lust comes with an undercurrent of the kind of bitter desperation that I now recognize as not only gross, but potentially menacing.

Yes, I know that when I am in the mood for a scary horror movie, my first thought is to dial up an episode of Friends. It's somehow appropriate that Chandler Bing, of all people, should turn out to be the Freddy Krueger for the Millennial generation.

The best that one can say of these people is that they are differently sane.

Banning breasts

Under pressure from feminists, the Sun gets rid of a 44-year tradition, the Page Three Girl:

The Sun, Britain’s top-selling newspaper, has scrapped Page 3’s topless women after 44 years, delighting the legion of critics who have branded the photos of bare-breasted models sexist, offensive and anachronistic. Insiders said the decision has been taken to kill off the controversial feature quietly but that the feature would continue online.

“This comes from high up, from New York,” said one senior executive in a reference to the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch.
The Sun refused to respond to any calls, emails or texts from the Guardian throughout Monday but told the Times, which is also owned by Murdoch: “Page 3 of The Sun is where it’s always been, between pages 2 and 4, and you can find Lucy from Warwick at Page3.com.” The paper reported that last Friday’s edition of the paper will be the last that would “carry an image of a glamour model with bare breasts on that page”.

A spokeswoman for the campaign group No More Page 3: “This could be truly historic news and a great day for people power.” adding it “could be a huge step for challenging media sexism”.

The change may be reversed, it is understood, if it results in a noticeable Sun sales decline.

When I was in England, I found Page Three to be cheesy and vulgar, and the girls tended to be on the plain side, but nevertheless, I think it's a huge mistake for the Sun to back down in this way. Feminists are never content with a victory; next they'll soon move on to campaign against lingerie and bikini pictures.

16, Pregnant, and Doomed

An observer shares an observation:

The other day some 16 and Pregnant show followup was on for about 15 minutes while I was finishing something in that room and it was two things: 1. Literally a case study in Game. Each girl had gotten pregnant by an Alpha, and then each one had a Gamma who was their friend and they really didn't like but it was the best they could do, but they didn't sleep with them. 2. A study in the future of America as the girl's "families" were all women helping them (mom's, aunts, etc.) No men around except Gammas, I didn't even see a single Delta.

Given the increase in single motherhood across all demographic lines, this is a much scarier trend than even FED fiscal policy to me. A country with strong families can bounce back from most anything, but a country run by single momss, checked-out deltas, and alphas having an easier time than in the last 200 years is a total disaster waiting to happen.

The bigger problem than the small number of individuals featured is the way that this is being marketed to an entire generation. The number of pregnant teenagers is actually on the decline; one can no more trust the media's portrayal of society in this regard than in the apparent fact that all American couples now consist of attractive, slender white women married to faithful, considerate black men with college degrees.

But if it is not a worrisome indication of what society is, it is a troubling indication of what the media wants society to become.

PJ O'Rourke on the Dunham Horror

PJ watches Girls so you don't have to:

Ms. Dunham is 28. I was under the impression that “girls” is a demeaning term for adult women. The title must have something to do with this hipster “Irony” thing, which I confess I don’t understand. The root of the word irony is in the Greek eironeia, “liar.”

I had my 14-year-old daughter, Poppet, instruct me in how to watch an episode of Girls on my computer. (Turns out “content” is not completely “free.”)

Two seconds into the opening credits I was trying to get my daughter out of the room by any means possible. “Poppet! Look in the yard! The puppy’s on fire! Quick! Quick! Run outside and roll him in the snow!”

It turns out Girls is a serialized horror movie—more gruesome, frightening, grim, dark, and disturbing than anything that’s ever occurred to Stephen King.

I have two daughters, Poppet and her 17-year-old sister Muffin. “Girls” is about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters. These young people, portrayed as being representative of typical young people, reside in a dumpy, grubby, woeful part of New York called Brooklyn, where Ms. Dunham should put her clothes back on.

I lived in New York for fifteen years. No one had been to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left in 1957.

The young people in Girls are miserable, peevish, depressed, hate their bodies, themselves, their life, and each other. They occupy apartments with the size and charm of the janitor’s closet, shared by The Abominable Roommate. They dress in clothing from the flophouse lost-and-found and are groomed with a hacksaw and gravel rake. They are tattooed all over with things that don’t even look like things the way a anchor or a mermaid or a heart inscribed “Mom” does, and they’re only a few years older than my daughters.

The characters in Girls take drugs. They “hook up” in a manner that makes the casual sex of the 1960s seem like an arranged marriage in Oman. And they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit.

It’s every parent’s nightmare.

Correction: it's the nightmare of every father who actually gives a damn about his daughter. The Dunham Horror's parents obviously couldn't have cared less about her.

The fake rape factory

UVA appears to be ground zero for fake rape:

In an April 29, 2014 essay for the Huffington Post, Emily Renda writes that her story (of her own supposed rape during her freshman year) is “ordinary, normal, average, not unusual and practically commonplace” – all that in just the first paragraph; if Renda is to be believed then, getting raped at U.Va. (or perhaps at any institution of “higher learning”) is hardly different in occurrence or frequency than getting a morning cup of coffee.

Just about the entire rest of her post talks about the importance of fellow victims and their caregivers/advocates hugging it out, giving comfort and burning candles, except where she nonchalantly mentions how all this extraordinary support from others allowed her to feel safe again, “so that it didn’t matter that I saw my assailant on Grounds”.

Though Renda’s claims of the ubiquity of rape seem a bit exaggerated, her credibility doesn’t really begin to come into question until one considers her Huffington piece in its entirety, and then comes across some of her other claims, found elsewhere.

Let's face it, at this point it is obvious that claims of rape in college are nothing more than female attention-seeking. The majority of real college rapes are those that no college wants to admit, which is those involving black scholarship athletes.

And it's no wonder that there are so many of these fake rape stories:

“Do you ever kind of really want to expose a situation or topic and then kind of like shop around for a more concrete story that would be better for you to write?” a student asked.

“Yes, I absolutely do. I’m working on one right now where that’s the case,” Erdley replied. “That’s something I’ve done a lot when I’ve written for women’s magazines where I’ve written a lot about women’s health and women’s rights.”

It's not news or investigative reporting. It's pure fictional propaganda.

The UVA rape hoax

People are beginning to question the narrative:

Journalists who contemplate such matters are now wondering whether the incredible Rolling Stone story about the gang rape of a University of Virginia student is just that: not credible.

Last week, I wrote that the breathtaking story was an indictment of the university's feeble attempts to address the so-called campus sexual assault crisis. For me, the lesson is clear: Rape is a serious crime, not an academic infraction. The police—and only the police—are equipped to deal with it. "The best way to confront campus rape is to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves and make violent crime the business of the normal criminal justice system," I wrote.

I didn't question the incident itself, because my point stands regardless. Making universities investigate and adjudicate rape—something that both federal and state governments are pushing—is the wrong approach, and what happened at UVA is just one example of why that's the case.

Unless, of course, it didn't happen. Then it would be an example of something else, entirely.

I can tell you right now that it is a hoax, it never happened, and no one is going to end up being charged with a crime over this unless it is the woman who falsely cried rape. One of the advantages of being an fiction editor is that you see a wide range of fiction, from the very good to the very bad. And most people write very bad fiction, the chief hallmark of which is that it is heavily reliant upon things they have seen on television or in the movies.

It's something you can usually recognize too, when they write people saying things in precisely the same way you see the dialogue on a TV show. It rings false, because no one actually talks like that. Even in the brief description provided in the excerpt from the Rolling Stone article, it is readily apparent that the dialogue being reported is fake, and not only fake, but incompetently faked.

The systematic demolition of a feminist

In which Nero fact-rapes Anita Sarkeesian, then metaphorically eviscerates her, puts her intestines through a woodchopper, pours gasoline over her corpse, and sets it on fire:

Feminists say they want to help women, but it's always someone else—in the gaming world, usually a man—who gets their wallet out to do it.

In reality, it's not women that some gamers have a problem with: it's people like Sarkeesian and McIntosh. They have claimed hatred of them and people like them is tantamount to hatred of women. But it isn't. People don't hate Anita Sarkeesian because she's a woman: they hate her because they see her as a disingenuous, divisive, sociopathic opportunist.

Prominent feminists and feminist journalists have offered compelling critiques of Sarkeesian's work. Much of what is erroneously characterised as "abuse" is in fact merely robust criticism of Sarkeesian's ideas—ideas she refuses to debate. Sarkeesian, uniquely in the sphere of public intellectuals, refuses to subject her pontifications to critique. She censors comments not because they are insulting or distasteful but because they reveal structural weaknesses in her arguments. This is not the manner of an academic, aspirant or otherwise, worth listening to.

It is in this respect that her professorial aspirations, and those of her writer and producer, reach dizzying heights of absurdity, beyond even those of her laugh-a-minute Master's thesis. Universities are places of learning and debate, but Sarkeesian is a broadcaster, not an interlocutor. So radically anxious is she about the substance of her arguments and so vulnerable is she to accusations of sensational cherry-picking, she has not accepted a single invitation to debate her theories.

Note: Nero has not actually committed any violence against the woman, it's just that after reading the entire piece in its ruthless entirety, it rather feels like he has.

Dr. Helen hits USA Today

With her rhetorical six-guns blazing:

Imagine that your 14-year-old daughter engaged in sex with the 20-year-old man down the street. Anger would hardly begin to describe your feelings, but then imagine how you and your daughter would feel if she became pregnant and the man who abused her got custody of the child and your daughter had to pay him child support for the next 18 years.

This would not only be unthinkable in our society but most people would say that it bordered on abuse or worse. Yet, as reported in a recent Arizona Republic news story, this is what happened to Nick Olivas, who happened to be 14 at the time he had sex with a 20-year-old woman. The difference, of course, is he's not a girl.

At the age of 21, Olivas found out he had a child and that he owed over $15,000 in back child support plus interest. He was rightfully upset, stating: "It was a shock. I was living my life and enjoying being young. To find out you have a 6-year-old? It's unexplainable. It freaked me out."

When a state government finds out a 14-year-old girl is a statutory rape victim of a 20-year-old man, the common reaction would be to file criminal charges to put the predator in jail. But for male victims, child support laws turn state governments into the allies of abusers instead of advocates for the victims.

Why the double standard when the victim is male?

Now that is a lovely rhetorical start designed to punch right through the female imperative before the reader realizes it, then adeptly making the twist to appeal to the legal equality that feminists supposedly stand for.

She's right, of course. The law holding male statutory rape victims responsible for their children is absurd. That being said, female rape victims who bear their rapist's children do assume responsibility for them, so the correct thing to do would be to give a male victim the right to claim paternal responsibility and/or custody without either being imposed upon him.

Men are more abused

On Twitter, anyhow. The freaky little people upset about the Hugo awards aside, I actually take a good deal less stick on Twitter than I would have expected based on the amount of hate mail I used to get. But won't someone think of the poor men?

According to an analysis of more than 2million messages sent to celebrities, politicians and journalists - one in every 20 sent to prominent male figures was abusive compared to only one in 70 for females. 

This should have been obvious. After all, were the numbers were reversed, we'd be seeing prime time ads for STOPPING TWITTER ABUSE. And frankly, the abuse directed at Piers Morgan really shouldn't be counted. I mean, is it really abuse when it is eminently merited?

How you know they're important

Both Roissy and I observed, years ago, that we would know Game and men's issues were entering the mainstream, not when the media began paying attention to the actual opinion leaders, but when they began appointing women as official spokeswomen for it. Apparently the same is true for the MRAs.

The Men's Rights Movement and the Women Who Love It. Who are these women men's rights activists? And why do they embrace a movement that some see as blatantly misogynistic? Below is a rundown of key players. A few of them, including Janet Bloomfield, who was the focus of a recent in Vice News article, have been in the spotlight recently. Others are virtually unknown to the mainstream, but within the movement they're seen as luminaries.Some of movement's fiercest activists aren't men.

Now, I very much encourage what these women are trying to do. It's not even remotely their fault that they find themselves being given a platform denied to the men they are trying to support. Dr. Helen, in particular, is always very good about rejecting the idea that she speaks for men or that she even can speak for men. She understands that we are perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves and points that out with regularity. But it is still a bit ironic, if entirely predictable (and it was, in fact, predicted), that the aspect deemed most newsworthy about the Mens' Rights movement is that there are women who support it. Real live women and everything!

It is great that Dr. Helen and other women are getting the word out there; exposing people to the ideas is far more important than establishing any cults of personality, and let's face it, some of our sites can be a bit much for the neophyte. But it is still amusing to see an article with pictures and glossy illustrations of Janey-come-latelies who have been addressing the subject since the early days of 2011.

If we were women, there would already be a Time Magazine cover with Roosh, Roissy, and me dressed in all black, arms folded, cast in dramatic lighting. Based on our respective numbers, I would estimate that a man's site requires about 20x more traffic to receive the same amount of media attention as a woman's. But it doesn't matter anyhow. Roosh is far too busy doing unspeakable things to the local women in Tanzania or wherever he is now and Roissy is even more reclusive than I am. We'd probably just send Rollo, Dalrock, and Yohami in our stead.

How feminism is "ruining" A Game of Thrones

I wouldn't go quite so far as that myself. While there are a number of suboptimal decisions that have been made, such as the invention of a romance between Grey Worm and the child-in-the-book Missandrei, A GAME OF THRONES is still one of the best book-to-film adaptations I have ever seen, second only to THE GODFATHER. No one who has read and loved THE DARK IS RISING and knows what monstrosities were inflicted upon it in the process of adaptation could possibly view HBO's A GAME OF THRONES as ruined. But there is no question that the HBO series has modified a number of the female characters in a feminist manner, and that these decisions have tended to weaken an otherwise strong cinematic story:

It’s cliché to complain about how a movie or television show is ruining the source material by departing from the books.  There’s nothing new about bitching that HBO is sabotaging A Song of Ice and Fire, the literary source for its program Game of Thrones, but what’s not being pointed out is why they are doing it.

The answer is feminism.  Television needs to constantly reinforce the egalitarian narrative.  The point of feminism is to absolve women from all responsibility for their actions.  The show does this by creating simplistic explanations for the female characters’ actions and promoting  Mary Sue style “strong women.”

Women in the books have complicated rationalizations for their actions, often deriving from deep seated insecurities and fears.  Like real life women, they rationalize things to themselves based on deluded self-images, rather than reality.  The show does its best to strip these away, the easier to blame everything on men.

Cersei, in particular, has been sold short. As the writer notes: "In the book, Cercei Lannister is plagued by a mix of insecurity and self-delusion—Tyrion notes that his sister thinks she is “Tywin Lannister with teats.”  Indeed, she looks up to her father partially because it enhances her own self-image as his equal.  She also uses her sexuality as a weapon, betraying her brother (and lover) Jamie, who remains loyal. The show’s Cercei is portrayed as reacting to her oppressed status as a woman forced to marry men she doesn’t love."

It's not that the HBO Cersei is uninteresting; Lena Headey has presented an impressive character and been more than effective with the dialogue she's been given. But it's a little ironic that modifications made in order to make her character more palatable to feminists means that the HBO Cersei is neither as strong nor as ruthless as the book Cersei.

Never satisfied

This article on the deficiencies of rom-coms, which are movies made expressly for women and which no man would give the time of day were it not for the money to be made in them, illustrates the total pointlessness of ever attempting to please feminists by giving them what they demand:

Rom-com women promote the myth that even the most successful and self-actualized among the female gender require sex in order to be bearable human beings. Before they get the guy, they’re self-involved, anxious, jealous, unfulfilled, and, at times, neurotic. After they get laid they morph into modern day Donna Stones, pleasant and perfectly confident in their ability to face the world.

It could be argued that the stereotypical rom-com woman is so popular because, out of the top 200 grossing comedies from the past decade, women have directed only nine of them. Then again, seven out of those nine female-directed films happened to have been rom-coms that fit the stereotypical bill, leaving audiences to question when, exactly, feminism will begin “leaning in” to the silver screen.

Give them X, they'll demand Y. Give them Y, they'll demand Z. It's considerably less trouble to refuse to give any ground in the first place. Such women are seldom satisfied until they have complete control and have completely driven out every last vestige of male influence and involvement. Don't give them the initial inch and thereby prevent the eventual mile.

Ever the optimist

Glenn Reynolds attends the First International Conference on Men's Issues and comes away considerably more optimistic about the present state of intersexual relations than I am:

The thing that struck me most about the gathering was the palpable lack of gender tension. Men and women at this conference seemed to be on the same page, and the same team, in a way that seems almost surprising in these gender-divided times. Maybe that's because gender-talk, long a female domain, is also now about men. As another speaker at the conference, Warren Farrell, said, women can't hear what men don't say. So it's good that men are speaking up. As Farrell concluded in a Friday night dinner speech, the goal is "not a men's movement, not a women's movement, but a gender liberation movement."

With men and women both talking and listening, it gave me some hope that perhaps we'll see something new, and better, in the politics of gender. Will this spirit be able to overcome the politicized divisiveness that marks today's gender discussion? If enough men and women of good will come together, it just might.

The problem is that the sort of men and women who have combined to construct the current anti-male legal regime are exactly the sort of men and women who were not at the conference. And it remains to be seen how many of the women who publicly portray themselves as pro-male are genuinely pro-male as opposed to attempting to coopt any pro-male movement into the service of the Female Imperative.

A portrait in professional responsibility

Roosh rightly takes Tuthmosis to task for his poorly conceived and insufficiently researched article concerning his assertion that short-haired women are damaged:

After prolonged and vigorous deep thought, I have come to the following conclusion: Tuthmosis has understated how utterly damaged short-haired women are. Run, run far away from them.

Don’t believe me? Look at the live Twitter response feed. Tuthmosis may have been too nice. To make yourself ugly, and then try to convince the world that you’re in fact beautiful, or that you don’t need a man to find you attractive at all, is so delusional that the ROK executive team is currently reaching out to the best mental health professionals in Moldova so that these women can get the help that they desperately need. (At the same time, I have since held a private meeting in the ROK office with Tuthmosis to encourage him to not write with such a polite filter that makes him hesitant to offend the female sex.)

I, for one, certainly hope that Tuthmosis will henceforth cease to affect such a shy and nonconfrontational style. The lad has promise, but he simply has to learn how to come right out and say what he truly thinks.

Female sexism

Imagine if this ad was recreated, but the man was repeatedly disappointed because all the women he kept meeting had small breasts. Then, at the end, he sees a woman from behind who has a slim build and a small butt, and he sighs, but then she turns around to reveal a spectacular pair of DDs!

That would be considered sexist despite the fact that women have considerably more control over their breast size than men do over their height. But this VW ad is not, because Female Imperative.

Hunting for anger

Rollo observes that the androsphere is keeping its collective cool:

If the “postponement” of the ABC 20/20 manosphere “exposé” has taught us anything it’s that the writers seeking to cast light on the manosphere are looking for crazy. They need crazy because it’s the only thing they know how, or have the patience, to confront in as minimal an effort as it takes to type a few paragraphs dismissing it as misogyny.

Writers (vichy male writers) like R. Tod Kelly are also lazy. They see an opportunity for outrage and that sells advertising. They wanted Stormfront and what they got was a global consortium of rational, well reasoned men with jobs, families and intelligence, men from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds expressing ideas that don’t fit into an acculturation of feminine primacy.

If you read Matt Forney’s 20/20 interview post you’ll see the desperation for crazy in their producer’s attempts to provoke him to become what they think he should be – a frothing, angry, hate-fueled misogynist. That would make it easy for them, they know how to sell crazy. The copy gets approved, the crazies get marginalized and we move on to the next Mabeline commercial.

He's absolutely correct. The media has neither the ability nor the time to engage in rational dialectic, so cheap appeals to rhetoric are all they can manage. And one of the easiest ways to disqualify an opponent in a rhetorical manner is to portray them as out-group.

This is why the writers and producers he mentions were trying to find some wild-eyed angry men they could hold up as examples of the androsphere's craziness, and if they couldn't find them, they were perfectly willing to try manufacturing them.

However, we're fortunate that from Roosh and Roissy down to the smallest blog, the androsphere consists of men who are much practiced in maintaining their frame. In fact, one could argue that there is not a worse group to attempt to rhetorically dismantle, because by definition, the Game bloggers are adept at dealing with the grand rhetorical arsenal wielded by women.

And it's not as if maintaining frame gets any harder when dealing with someone with whom you have absolutely no desire to have sex. All the same, be cautious whenever dealing with the media. They ALWAYS try to sound like your best friends during the phase they call "the get". And once you're on the hook and the recording devices are started, they switch into full prosecutorial mode.

It's not a problem so long as you are prepared for it. Just remember, no one, NO ONE, interesting in covering these subjects in the media is on your side. Be cool, be prepared, and above all, maintain frame.

This doesn't mean that a man's anger is not legitimate or justified. It only means that it is unwise and counterproductive to display it for the public, because it is a rhetorical weakness.

Top 10 Game blogs Q3-13

Here is the quarterly report on the Top 10 Game blogs for the third quarter of 2013. What is most interesting about it is the way it shows considerable growth across the board, in line with the widespread expectations that the Androsphere would begin garnering more mainstream attention this year.

1. Return of Kings: 19,257 (+23,568)
2. Roissy: 35,799 (+19,649)
3. Roosh:  40,281 (+22,711)
4. Rollo:   156,390 (+6,244), 230,395
5. Alpha Game: 183,840 (+23,086), 349,623 (+8.2%) 
6. Dalrock:  190,532 (+60,558)
7. Just4Guys: 221,248 (+486,446)
8. MMSL:    286,495 (+57,471)
9. Keoni Galt: 468,052 (175,049)

The first number is the current Alexa ranking, the number in parentheses is the change in that ranking since the posting of the previous list. The bold number is the three-month average in actual traffic over the quarter, as measured in Google Pageviews. Although my previous estimates were fairly accurate, I am no longer going to calculate them, so if you are a blogger on this list, please send me your three-month average for July, August, and September and I will add it here.

I have removed Hooking Up Smart from the list as a result of Susan Walsh's explicit realignment of her blog. If there are any other Game-related blogs anyone feels merits inclusion on this list, please let me know.

Perhaps because the problem of feminism is most acute in the USA, Game blogs are disproportionately popular there. The top-ranking Game blog, RoK, is 6,323 in the USA. By way of comparison, two outspoken gamma males who consistently attempt to assert that Game bloggers are outliers and outcasts, Manboobz and John Scalzi, come in at 37,268 and 46,650, respectively.

The Buyer's Market

Game continues to break into the mainstream, as evidenced by this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled Why women lose the dating game. It even features citations from Dalrock as well as Susan Walsh:

He barely had a date through much of his 20s and gave up on women. But then he spent time overseas, gained more confidence, learnt how to dress well and hit his early 30s. ''I suddenly started to get asked out by women, aged 19 through to 40. The floodgates burst open for me. I actually dated five women at once, amazing my flatmates by often bedding three to four of my casual dates each week. It is a great time as a male in your 30s, when you start getting more female attention and sex than you could ever have dreamt of in your 20s.''

That's when some men start behaving very badly - as the manosphere clearly shows. These internet sites are not for the faint-hearted. The voices are often crude and misogynist. But they tell it as they see it. There is Greenlander, an apparently successful engineer in his late 30s. In his early adult life, he was unable to ''get the time of day from women''. Now he's interested only in women under 27.

''The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,'' he says. ''I sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them so well. It's just too easy. They're tired of the cock carousel and they see a guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop taking their calls … It doesn't really hurt them that much: at this point they're used to pump & dump!''

It's easy to dismiss such bile but Greenlander's analysis is echoed by many Australian singles, both male and female.

''It's wall-to-wall arseholes out there,'' reports Penny, a 31-year-old lawyer. She is stunned by how hard it is to meet suitable men willing to commit. ''I'm horrified by the number of gorgeous, independent and successful women my age who can't meet a decent man.''

Penny acknowledges part of the problem is her own expectations - that her generation of women was brought up wanting too much. ''We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster.'' And having spent her 20s dating alpha males, she expected them to be still around when she finally decided to get serious.

But these men go fast, many fishing outside their pond. The most attractive, successful men can take their pick from women their own age or from the Naomis, the younger women who are happy to settle early. Almost one in three degree-educated 35-year-old men marries or lives with women aged 30 or under, according to income, housing and marriage surveys by the Bureau of Statistics.

''I can't believe how many men my age are only interested in younger women,'' wails Gail, a 34-year-old advertising executive as she describes her first search through men's profiles on the RSVP internet dating site. She is shocked to find many mid-30s men have set up their profiles to refuse mail from women their own age.

Talking to many women like her, it's intriguing how many look back on past relationships where they let good men get away because they weren't ready. American journalist Kate Bolick wrote recently in The Atlantic about breaking off her three-year relationship with a man she described as ''intelligent, good-looking, loyal and kind''. She acknowledged ''there was no good reason to end things'', yet, at the time, she was convinced something was missing in the relationship. That was 11 years ago. She's is now 39 and facing grim choices.

''We arrived at the top of the staircase,'' Bolick wrote, ''finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up - and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with.''

So, many women are missing out on their fairytale ending - their assumption that when the time was right the dream man would be waiting. The 30s are worrying years for high-achieving women who long for marriage and children - of course, not all do - as they face their rapidly closing reproductive window surrounded by men who see no rush to settle down.

One thing that tends to confuse those looking superficially at the matter is that most women, even in their late 30s, are able to find partners. But what tends to escape the attention of those superficial observers is that the men for whom the women are settling in their 30s and 40s tend to be of distinctly lower quality than the men that were pursuing them in their middle and late 20s. If you see a high caliber married man in his 40s or 50s who is married to a woman within a few years of his age, in most cases you will learn that they married when he was in his 20s. One seldom sees a high caliber married man that age who is engaged to a woman who is within five years of his age, as the statistics increasingly demonstrate.

This is why divorced men tend to do well among women approaching the Beauty Wall. Since divorce downgrades their MMV, they still have many of the SMV characteristics that women find attractive, but they possess lower marital value due to the greater baggage and higher relationship risk they represent. So, the older women retain access to the men their age the younger women find less interesting from the relationship perspective.

Epic media fail

Judgybitch anticipates, presumably successfully, the failure of a 20/20 piece on the Androsphere:

Well, the 20/20 piece on the “Manosphere” is obviously gonna be a trainwreck.... Guys, she worked at Abercrombie & Fitch and she has a degree in Diplomacy!

Off to a promising start, no?

"Deep in the underbelly of the Internet is a hidden corner known as the “Manosphere”— a collection of websites, Facebook pages and chat rooms where men vent their rage and spew anti-women rhetoric."

Furthermore, as far as I know, the reporters didn't talk to Roosh, Roissy, Rollo, Dalrock, me, or any of the others who are more or less recognized as central figures in the Androsphere. (Correct me if I'm wrong, gentlemen.) I don't see anything wrong with talking to Paul Elam of A Voice For Men, but if you're not talking to Roosh and Heartiste, at a bare minimum, you cannot pretend to be seriously covering anything that anyone would recognize as "the Manosphere".

Of course, the real revolutionaries are scary to the journalists, because we are not only considerably more intelligent than they are, but we quite clearly don't give a damn about what the mainstream says, thinks, or feels about us.

The Androsphere continues to grow in influence. For example, I'm a little late getting around to my Q3 report, but Alpha Game's traffic increased to 349,623 in Q3, up from an average of 323,079 the previous quarter. That is 8.2 percent growth per quarter, and I suspect the other Game blogs are seeing similar growth, especially great new blogs like Just Four Guys.

The skills that men lack

Sorry, gentlemen, but in the surveyed opinion of women, it would appear they just don't need us for the important things anymore:

TOP 10 SKILLS MEN LACK

1.Buying clothes for partner 52 per cent
2. Remembering anniversary 41 per cent
3. Dancing 33 per cent
4. Ironing 31 per cent
5. Cooking 30 per cent
6. Domestic chores 30 per cent
7. Buying gifts 28 per cent
8. Multi-tasking 22 per cent
9. Keeping up with fashion 22 per cent
10. Picking furniture 21 per cent

1. Feature, not bug.  It means he's not latently homosexual.
2. Perhaps he's simply trying to forget.
3. The fact that all women think they can dance doesn't mean they can actually do so.  As it happens, with one exception, all the best dancers I know are men.
4. Fair enough.
5. Fair enough.
6. Being uninterested in doing them to the woman's standard does not indicate inability.
7. I would be willing to bet that men are much better at buying gifts for women than the other way around.  Raise your hand if a romantic interest ever spent more than $5,000 on you... I see a lot of hands, but not many belong to men.
8. True... but again, feature not bug.  It's called "ability to focus".
9. Seriously?  In the immortal words of Derrick Coleman, whoop-de-damn-do.
10. Again, the disinclination to select furniture that women like does not indicate inability.

Now, consider how many of these vital skills are necessary for building or even maintaining civilization in light of how  the article was reporting on "a survey finds women really don't rate men as much use at all."

But, upon further reflection, it's probably true.  Without men, women would probably find it very nearly as easy to keep up on fashion and pick out furniture for their grass huts as they do now.