Post-equalitarian parasitic culture

Rollo features an intriguing post by Mark Minter on the ongoing system failure presently pervading Western civilization:

You all need to understand in no uncertain terms, women despise you, they think little of you. They believe you brutish and violent, bull headed, and fundamentally stupid. They see you as big children that must be controlled and disciplined in order make you useful to them. And if you are not useful to them, if you do not provide those things that they wish from you, actually, more correct to say, those things they need from you, then you will not be a part of their lives.  And they are earnest and driven in structuring society and the law in such a manner that you are no longer needed.

They are now avoiding marriage in droves, deferring pregnancy and motherhood, and using men, more and more, as forms of recreation and, less and less, as a necessary partner in the scheme of life as they are defining it. Their job and their female friends are more important to them than you are. They are celebrating and defining single motherhood as the form of child rearing preferrable to a two parent household.

And you should expect the bad behavior of women in relationships and in social situations to only get worse. There is a massive demographic shift that has been occuring since the end of the birth control. Compare the dearth of child bearing age women against the number of men from 19-55 that chase those women, men that throw deals and enticements at the feet of those women, with the rise in social media mechanisms available today that permit women to be approached and have those deals thrown at their feet, and you have a recipe for more trouble ahead for men. 

One needs to allow for a certain amount of rhetorical drama here, of course, but what Minter is saying is entirely observable from a societal perspective.  The relevant point isn't about whether each individual woman despises men, which is simply not true, it is whether the society that the majority of women support and with which they are attempting to replace traditional Western civilization does so in a structural manner.  The irony is that for all it despises men, such a society is no less dependent upon men as the civilizational structure it is replacing because it is a society of parasites that tends to remind one of Douglas Adams's B-Ark Economy.

It will be interesting to see how long a society full of women's study majors, lawyers, and social workers will be able to survive on the wealth produced by men who are players, thugs, and videogame junkies.

Aristophanes wrote fiction

It is simply incredible how often women refer to Lysistrata as if it is actual Greek history, rather than something more akin to the Wonder Woman comic from Marvel.  It's as if men were to seriously argue that the legal system should be modified according to criminal justice in Star Trek:

Most of the women I spoke to have resigned themselves to the fact that the hook-up culture is here to stay. They don't see the social and cultural landscape of college campuses changing anytime soon.

One friend tells me that the girls on campus would prefer a culture of dating to one of hooking up, but they would never admit it or ask for it. If girls demanded dating before hooking up, guys would be unmoved, she explained. "There are always going to be other girls for them to hook up with so we'll just get left behind."

These women are looking at the problem the wrong way, I think. They need to realize that, in spite of campus sex ratios and prevailing cultural trends, they hold the power when it comes to the hook up culture. They hold the power when it comes to sex.

This was the insight of Lysistrata, the shrewd heroine of Aristophanes' marvelous play by the same name. Lysistrata was able to diagnose a problem in her society and to take actions and overcome obstacles to solve it.

In the heat of the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata gathered the women of various Greek city-states at a meeting and proposed that they withhold sex from their husbands until these men end the war. The women, though reluctant at first, agree. Throughout the play, though they desire sex just like the men do, they resist the temptation to break their oath with Lysistrata. The Athenian and Spartan men eventually become so desperate for sex that they begin peace talks. The women's strategy works.

Lysistrata, a tough and independent woman, understood how the sexual marketplace works, and harnessed that knowledge to get what she wanted. Many men want sex with women. As Lysistrata knew, women have the power to say yes—or no (assuming men respect their wishes, of course. There are far too many examples of times men disregard women's "no"s). They set and execute the terms to which the men surrender.

Just to be clear, the Peloponnesian War didn't end with peace talks between Athenian and Spartan men brought about by a sex strike.  One would have to be astonishingly ignorant of Greek culture to imagine that a sex strike by women could have brought the ephebophiles of either Athens or Sparta to its knees.  The war actually ended following a long siege of Athens by Sparta, which ended with Athens having its walls torn down, its navy destroyed, and its empire dismantled.

Ironically, Lysistrata was published only two years after the loss of thirty thousand sailors and ten thousand hoplites at Syracuse, which was the real cause of the Athenian defeat.

As for the hookup culture, feminists are entirely to blame.  The excess supply of women on college campuses and the corresponding increase in male value is a direct and obvious consequence of the decades-long campaign to encourage more women to pursue academic credentials.  Game theory, economics, and cartel history all suffice to explain that although women collectively hold the power when it comes to sex, individual women will never refrain from making themselves sexually available to men in female-majority scenarios.

Solitude and the City

A one-time Sex in the City woman writes about her lonely middle-aged life:

For me, the single girl lifestyle that I embraced and celebrated with so much enthusiasm in the Eighties and Nineties has lost much of its gloss, and is starting to look a little hollow.  I was part of the Sex And The City generation — successful, feisty women who made their own money, answered to no one and lived life to the full....

What none of us spent too long thinking about in our 20s and 30s was how our lifestyles would impact on us once we reached middle-age, when we didn’t want to go out and get sozzled on cocktails and had replaced our stilettos and skinny jeans with flat shoes and elasticated waists.  When I look around at all my single friends — and there are a lot of them — not one of them is truly happy being on her own. Suddenly, all those women we pitied for giving up their freedom for marriage and children are the ones feeling sorry for us....

Any man who didn’t conform was to be kicked to the curb until the next poor sap came along.  What I never considered, though, was that one day they’d stop coming along altogether. I really wish I’d known that once you’re in your late 30s, men are pretty thin on the ground. And once you’re in your 40s, it’s as though they’ve been wiped off the face of the Earth.

When one is young, it is very, very hard to imagine that things will not always be, more or less, as they are now.  But being more involved in athletics, men tend to be far more aware of the fact that one day, things will change and they will not be able to run and jump as they can now.  They know the price of age.  Every guy who plays any sports, even casually, knows the old guy who can't drive to the hoop or defend anyone anymore, but can still hit from three, and realizes that one day, if he's lucky, that will be him.  I remember being in my twenties, talking to the guys in their forties at the gym, and marveling at how they were still pretty strong despite never seeming to do very much in the weight room anymore.

They just laughed and assured me that one day, I'd understand.  In your twenties, you're at your peak and you don't need any recovery time.  In your thirties, you lose your speed and your ups, and it takes a day to recover.  In your forties, you lose your peak strength and it takes you two days to recover.  You can still do 90 percent of what you used to do, but you have to listen closely to your body at all times or it's going to break down.  You have to take it easy or you'll do nothing at all.  And now, twenty years later, it is so clear that they were telling nothing but the truth.  Fortunately, because I listened to them, I can still work out, I can still play soccer at a fairly high level, and I can still score goals with a strike rate of around .33 per game.  Not bad for one of the oldest guys on the veteran's team.

I don't know if older women have been responsible about telling younger women that their youth, beauty, and fertility are not going to survive their twenties.  It seems, from this article, that they have not been.  In fact, the younger women still appear to be receiving precisely the opposite message from the media and the older generation alike.  Ours is one of the first female generations in human history to actively spurn marriage and children in favor of education and careers, so it is very important for younger women to seek out middle-aged single women and find out if they are genuinely content with their solitary status in middle age and beyond, or if they regret their youthful priorities.

There are, of course, real societal issues that have arisen as a result of this demographic transformation, and they are important, but on the individual level, what will transform the mentality of the younger generation is the personal regrets of those who took the path that they were socially pressured to take.

When the pedestal collapses

Although we are repeatedly assured by women that a man does not and should not care about his prospective wife's sexual history, it is not terribly hard to find evidence suggesting that some men will care a great deal about it regardless of female opinion on the matter:

When I met my husband 40 years ago I knew he was ‘the one.’ He had firm opinions on sex before marriage (outdated even then) and was a virgin.  As I got to know him, it became clear that he’d never consider marrying somebody with ‘history.’ He thought sex special and wouldn’t want to imagine his wife having it with others.  But, by 22, I’d been having sex for four years. Madly in love and wanting him to marry me, I lied....

We had two children and a very happy and successful marriage. But a few weeks ago, an old friend contacted me over the internet, and I invited her round.  My husband left us to talk and went off to the garden. Inevitably we talked of the past.  After she left, I found my husband looking devastated. He said he’d gone into the conservatory to read and heard everything.

He said he felt utterly betrayed, as he had a right to expect honesty, but our entire marriage had been based on a fundamental lie.  I said we’d had a wonderful 40 years, so what could it matter what I did before I met him?  He moved in to the spare room and avoided me. A week later he moved to a bedsit and told me he wanted a divorce. 

This is one of the problems with men prone to pedestalization; it can be ugly indeed when the pedestal finally comes crashing down.  It is not surprising that the advice columnist's instinct is to be irritated at the man's principled position, to find it "stupid", and to declare the very concept of virgin marriage to be outdated.  But it is a little surprising that she nevertheless sees a modicum of substance to his position, as she writes: "I know no one who would discover that they had been lied to for 40 years, and think it didn’t matter."

And it's not so much the fact that the woman lied about her sexual history - I'm hardly the first man to observe that most, if not all, non-virgin women reflexively lie about N - but the fact that she knew perfectly well that this was a major matter of principle to him and she proceeded to purposefully deceive him about it anyhow.  It was more than a deception meant to be justified by the eventual ends, it was also a total lack of respect for the man, for his principles, and a shameless manipulation meant to prevent him from being permitted to make a very important decision about his own life.  Notice that even now, she still fails to respect his principles.

Does that deception, manipulation, and lack of respect justify walking away from four decades of marriage?  I couldn't possibly say.  Perhaps the marriage was considerably less happy than the wife imagines and the man is simply taking a convenient way out.  Perhaps he is so disgusted by her past that he truly wants nothing to do with her.  It's not for me to say, it's really not for any of us to say.  I am confident that I would not react that way, but then, I was considerably less principled on the matter than this man.  As Mises asserts, only acting man can assign motivations to his actions.  On the other hand, I also know that any contract based on fraud is intrinsically invalid, and there is a perfectly reasonable case to be made that the marriage was never legitimate in the first place.  The woman cannot appeal to forty years of something that did not, properly speaking, ever exist, especially in light of the Marriage 2.0 principle that unhappiness is an acceptable reason for unilaterally ending a marriage at any time.

However, I'm not really interested in hashing out what the ideal response to this situation is, my purpose is merely to point to this example in underlining the fact that one cannot assume that the passage of time will necessarily erase past deceptions and betrayals.  It is hard, but it is always better to be honest and risk the possibility that the disclosure of one's health, one's debt, one's family, or one's sexual history will cause the other person to walk away than to attempt to deceive them into a long term relationship in the hopes that the deception will never come to light or will be overlooked in the future.

The cost of credentials

Western women are obtaining more educational credentials, albeit increasingly at the cost of motherhood and healthy children:

The average age at which a woman in the UK starts a family has hit 30 – an increase of almost two years since 1995.  But experts warned last night that the growing trend for late motherhood could be putting the health of babies at risk. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said that women who waited longer to give birth needed to be informed of the potential problems, such as the risk of Down's syndrome and complications during delivery.

The figures, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, show that the UK and Germany are tied at the top of a league table of average maternal age.  They also reveal that British women tend to wait an extra five years to have their first child compared with those in the United States, where the average age is 25. The latest figures show that almost 350,000 children are born every year to women above the age of 30 in the UK. Of these, almost 28,000 mothers are above the age of 40. In 2010, some 141 babies were born to women above the age of 50.

It has been suggested that the increasing tendency for women to delay motherhood is because they are more likely go to university and pursue a career.

What is the point of encouraging more women to obtain academic credentials if that means they are going to be producing a smaller number of unhealthier, less cognitively capable children in the next generation?  Even if more female credentials were materially beneficial to society, (and Roissy's post on the latest Baumeister paper casts a great deal of doubt upon that idea), the benefit would be short-term and last only a single generation.  Are the much smaller number of women in the next generation, a statistically significant minority of whom are retarded, born out of wedlock, and otherwise handicapped, going to be able to maintain and continue the societal benefits established by their mothers?

That is highly improbable.  Once more, we see that the structural inconsistences of a feminist society are even more powerful than those that caused the Communist societies to collapse.

Alpha Mail: Game and female development

A woman named KT presents a rather ironic request:

What the hell is Game?  You are so dead spot on regarding a variety of subjects, I can't help but think you might know something about relationships as well, but I simply fail to understand how the information at the Game blog promotes marriage.  Granted, the blog is not geared towards women and our unique set of problems, but I still don't think I understand men or the male/female dynamic any more today than I did 6 months ago.  As a recovering feminist, vegan, radical environmentalist, Dead Head, I feel like I missed a MAJOR part of my development as a woman, and hence my personal life has been tweaked slightly as a result, but I still don't know how exactly. 

Again, I know the blog is geared towards men, but if ever you or Spacebunny feel the urge to address what you perceive as some of the consequences of modernity on the female psyche, and how that makes us deficient as a spouse, the information might be useful to more than just me.  The area I (and probably other females as well) still struggle with is how these nutty ideologies have warped our ability to relate to men in a meaningful and fulfilling way.  I should be the one perhaps to give the advice, having lived through such lunacy, but I never really had a normal model to begin with, so I don't know what I should be returning to.

Gotta thank you for the time you take to educate us.  Cyberspace has been a TOTAL BLESSING for those of us brainwashed by establishment schools.  Between the Bible and the Internet, there may be hope for this generation after all.  

To paraphrase my previous definition, Game is the conscious and synthetic adoption of the attitudes, behaviors, perspectives, strategies, and tactics of men with high socio-sexual rank by men of lower socio-sexual rank with the objective of raising their socio-sexual status and increasing their success with women.  This is not the definition that most Game bloggers would utilize, but it is one they would recognize as being closely related to their definitions.  Since I take a more abstract and analytical approach to the subject, it should not surprise anyone that my definition is less focused and practical than most.

My purpose is not to promote marriage.  My purpose is to understand and expose the truth of intersexual relations, to oppose the equalitarian and feminist ideologies, and to defend traditional American society and Western civilization.  While marriage has historically been a major pillar of both American society and Western civilization, the perversion of the institution by Western governments has actually rendered it a force for societal and civilizational decline, if not collapse, in many aspects.  This is why I cannot unilaterally endorse marriage for all men in all cases, but rather, insist that under the present regime, it can only be risked by Christian men marrying genuinely Christian women, since this group at least has the potential for placing the traditional spiritual element of the sacrament above the legal element of the government-licensed relationship.

I find the request for more information on female deficiencies from a woman to be both encouraging and a little ironic.  I've tried to be circumspect about not always hammering on that particular subject; some would probably say that I haven't been circumspect enough.  But I'll think about it, particularly the way in which feminist ideology has rendered women less capable of marrying or sustaining happy, successful marriages, and post on the subject in the coming weeks.  And perhaps I can better explain the male perspective in a manner that women can readily grasp; there is somewhat of a fish-water problem for which I will have to consciously correct.

However, I  can assure KT that even if she feels she doesn't understand men yet, she has taken a massive intellectual step forward in identifying what she does not know.  This is the first and foremost step towards knowledge. It's rather like learning a language.  You learn a few words here and there, and you're very pleased with how well you "speak" French or whatever simply because you can say a few words and exchange a few pleasantries.  But as your ability increases, you suddenly hit the point where you stop paying attention to what you have learned and recognize how much more you don't know.  That's the point at which you truly begin to learn the language.  And that is the point at which KT is with regards to men and the reality of intersexual relations.

A year in Alpha

I launched Alpha Game just over one year ago because I felt the topic of intersexual relations and their consequences for society and Western civilization merited its own focused blog.  Here's what has happened since:

Oct 2011: 26,916 visits and 42,573 pageviews
Oct 2012: 103,524 visits and 144,870 pageviews

Special thanks to Glenn Reynolds, Dr. Helen, Keoni Galt the Hawaiian Libertarian, Susan Walsh, Athol Kay, Rollo Tomassi, Dalrock, Badger, Roissy, and Roosh.  Most of the growth of AG's readership is due to those 10 individuals and the links to posts here that they have graciously provided to their own readers.

Already we're seeing ideas from the androsphere circulate out into the mainstream, both in the news and on television.  It's seldom credited, or Roissy would be a household name already, but the more important thing is that the ideas are gradually begin to transform society.  It's probably too late to save the West from fracture and collapse, as decades of equalitarianism and feminism have done irreparable damage to society and civilization alike.  But the seeds of societal revival have not only been planted, they are sprouting.

And sometimes, things have to get worse before they can begin to improve.