Alpha Mail: the collective is the personal

MM finds it hard to grasp why women take offense on behalf of others:

Why the hell do women get offended on BEHALF of other women? I seriously just DO NOT "get it".  If you can possibly explain this nonsense to me, I would very much appreciate it.  But I'm drawing a serious blank on my end.  It is so non-nonsensical.  I want to be enraged, but I know females typically make no sense whatsoever.  So I'm not THAT mad... just confused.

This is precisely what is meant by female solipsism.  Perhaps you've heard the song "I'm Every Woman".  To a certain extent, it genuinely represents the way women think.  It's mostly subconscious, insofar as I can tell, but most men have observed that a comment made about women in general is usually interpreted by a woman who hears it as applying to her.

For example, I once commented about the mistake that had been made in hiring a young woman who was leaving the company because she was getting married and intended to have children as soon as possible.  My comment enraged a middle-aged woman who happened to be an HR director.  The woman was furious at the thought that the single young woman should not have been hired for that job even though it was her own personal policy to not hire single young women for that very reason.  In fact, the only reason I made the comment was to observe that what had happened tended to justify her policy.

The HR director's solipsism led her to react to my comment from the perspective of being the hypothetical young woman being rejected for a job herself, not the middle-aged HR director who would be held responsible by the executives for multiple failed hires.

Basically, you have to understand that any time you make a comment about any woman, you are believed to have made a comment about the specific women in the conversation.  If you wish to avoid provoking solipsistic reactions, it is very easy, all you need to do is make sure that all of your comments which can be related to women in any way are made in precisely the same way you would talk about a child in front of its mother.

Remember that women are seldom any more interested in knowing what men actually think about anything than men are in keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip and Hollywood fashions.  They mostly just want to hear that you think all women are smart, pretty, and wonderful.  So, if your objective is to avoid triggering solipsistic responses, just tell them what they want to hear and keep your thoughts to yourself.

Macrosocio-sexuality

Dr. Helen draws our attention to changes in the rental market:

[A] shift in demographic trends will likely favor the rental apartment market for the foreseeable future. It is all about women….

“What drives demand for single family homes is, ‘Oh honey, I’m pregnant,” says Buck Horne, a housing analyst at Raymond James. But those words are being uttered less and less. Horne claims the shift in female education, marriage and fertility rates will drive rental apartment demand going forward. He points to a growing educational imbalance, that is, 3.1 million more women enrolled in college than men and 4 million more college-educated women in the workforce than men.

Now, if one is able to understand how women's cumulative socio-sexual preferences affect the housing market and the economy, how is it possible that one is not able to understand that those preferences will also affect the governance of a nation as well as the scope of human liberty deemed legally permissible?

And if one is capable of understanding that those effects on the housing market and the economy may not be beneficial, how is it difficult to grasp that the effects on government, human liberty, and civilization itself may also be negative?

The Lolita dilemma

There has been quite the discussion raging at Susan's place, and I find I tend to disagree with her position regarding the observed "unnatural" behavior that some teenage girls exhibit towards much older men.  She quoted one of her readers and added the following:

"Also, as a former teenage girl, it seems to me that there is a lot of wishful thinking going on here. Teen girls generally aren’t attracted to balding 40 yo guys. I recall thinking 30, much less 40, was old when I was a teenager."

They sure aren’t. The claim that adolescent girls like to “try out” their sexuality with older men is both repulsive and completely false. It goes against nature in every way. 

First, middle-aged men are perfectly capable of discerning when a teenage girl is attempting to attract his attention.  Most men don't make asses of themselves in this way without at least a little encouragement.  Second,  consider one of the funnier moments of Two-and-a-Half Men. Charlie, clearly in his forties, approaches a young woman in her early twenties. He tries to chat her up, when she smiles and says: “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have Daddy issues.”

She didn't, but the obvious implication is that many women do. Which is, in fact, true.  But the fact that teen girls are quite reasonably disgusted by unwanted advances from older men in no way negates the experience of men seeing girls practically assuming the position like a baboon in heat in order to try to attract their attention. It’s not “wishful thinking” to notice when a 17 year-old walks in the gym and makes a beeline for a particular older man, especially not when that is immediately followed by unmerciful ragging from everyone else who saw it once she is no longer around.

It is not even necessarily a matter of attraction per se.  In my experience, it is primarily about attention and bragging rights. A teen girl may be grossed out by the thought of actual sex with the middle-aged married man or the rich silver fox, but she is absolutely going to want to be the one who is capable of drawing his high status attention to herself, thereby granting her status among her peers.

As for Susan's focus group shouting OMG! and EWW! at the idea of Colin Firth or Hugh Grant, I tend to suspect that if those post-college women were to encounter the two older men at a bar, they’d be fawning all over them and trying to get their pictures taken with them to post on Facebook.  After all, Hugh Grant has appeared in the British newspapers with much younger women hanging all over him on a regular basis.  As has Bono and any number of well-known, middle-aged men.

None of this means that older men don’t behave inappropriately. They do. But teenage girls are not exactly famous for always behaving in an appropriate manner themselves.  As for the correct way to respond to a teenage girl acting inappropriately, the wisest thing to do is to simply deny them the reaction and the attention they are seeking.

The hamster quit running

Danny has an amusing post on providing a woman with a useful wakeup call:

I asked her what made her think I’d be interested in being with her. Her hamster replied-
 
“Well, you’ve always had a thing for me.”

I told her I don’t recall ever having a thing for her, and if I did it was back in 2004 (it was 2010 at the time). She seemed dumbfounded. The hamster quit running and went and took a shit in the corner. 

This woman is a CLASSIC example of a woman hitting the wall. She spent her early years in the navy, got out and focused on her career then found out they don’t hand out husbands, and her hypergamous ass wasn’t attractive to the men in her dating pool that were pulling 22 year olds.

She was invisible to men.  She was simply a “co-worker”, the competition. She was no longer the “hot girl” in the office. Men quit flirting with her lest they suffer a sexual harassment suit. She called me out of the blue. She gave me the standard, “why can’t I find a BF. “I have a great job, make great money, I’m well-educated, I’ve travelled. What’s wrong with me.” 

My answer was simply: “The problem is you need to find a GF. Men don’t give a fuck about any of the crap you listed. I’m more attracted to the chick serving me fries at my burger place than a 30-year old business women.”

That's the fact.  Looking back, it never occurred to me that I ought to keep dating the daughter of one of America's most famous Fortune 500 CEOs at the time because it would be of material advantage to me.  I dumped her for a stripper who didn't graduate from high school and was living on her own at 17.  It never even crossed my mind that I should be attracted to the daughter of an even more famous CEO simply because her daddy was wealthy and on the cover of Forbes and Fortune.

I'm not saying there aren't mercenaries and male gold diggers out there, but the point is that they are not SEXUALLY ATTRACTED to the female trappings of what is more properly considered male success.  It's rather like men wondering why women aren't attracted to how nice they look in a dress and makeup.  It doesn't matter how pretty he looks, it's not going to do anything for the average woman, in fact, it's probably going to turn her off.

Women sexually respond to money and status.  They don't just find them to be signals, they will literally get wet at the sight of sufficiently impressive cars and houses.  I've seen it happen.  There is nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that very few of them understand that men do not do so.

Not all men understand the score either, but some do.  Back in the early 90's, there was a guy who drove a Ferrari around Minneapolis with the license plate GOTUWET.  (No, that wasn't me, I drove a Porsche with 2GQ4U.)*  And the thing is, for all the eye-rolling and protestations it inspired, there is absolutely no question that it did exactly what it promised.  Not on every woman who saw it, but certainly more than were required.

I should also point out that "I'm well-traveled" is an extraordinarily unwise point for a woman to use to market herself.  The average American man tends to hear that as "I've been sexually penetrated in various European capitals by swarthy, effete foreigners.  Fake a French accent, buy me an expensive glass of wine and I'll be on my back within an hour."  Think about it; any man to whom that might theoretically appeal has probably been abroad himself and knows perfectly well how the girls in his study program were spending their evenings.

* Just kidding.  About the license plate.

Athol and his magic MAP

Athol came up with his MAP program to help men restore their attractiveness to their wives and save their marriages.  However, it comes with a built-in backup plan, which he is pleased to see is functioning precisely as conceived:

I think the combination of Christmas parties and New Year’s Eve parties is almost like a “resolve the relationship” trigger. If there’s another man in the picture, she’s going to try to get to him on those special events. There’s alcohol and opportunity… and all those Emotional Affairs turn into Physical ones.

I’ve had some super salvaging of relationships in December. The husbands that have won have won big, but not everyone has won.

In January, it seems the December failures have all the shit hit the fan. In those cases wives are all leaving my guys that have been running the MAP faithfully.

But… the husbands are all starting to crack up laughing.

Let me explain that.

I’m 5 for 5 with the following pattern of guys who have been running the MAP and have had wives leave them in January.

At some point in 2012 the husband figured out all was not well in the marriage and sought out MMSL. They all started running the MAP and self-improving. They all had varying degrees of positive response from the wives. They started digging into the problems and sorting them out. But for one reason or another, the wife wasn’t interested in staying, and when the ultimatums came down… actually more often than not the ultimatum was triggered by the wife rather than the husband… she left the marriage.

So let’s be clear here – ALL of the husbands were very much trying to save the marriage. I’m talking 5 for 5 husbands have endlessly emailed me or been on the forum, actively trying to save the marriage and fix things with their wife.  But despite best efforts, each one have been dumped and left.

But…

I am 5 for 5 for having those husbands get hit on by other women as soon as the wife is out of the picture. As in attractive other women. As in younger attractive women. As in… “Athol, I don’t understand why I was trying to save things with X anymore. I know I’m going to miss her, but being completely honest, I don’t think I want her back anymore.”

This isn't surprising.  Most married women significantly overestimate their sexual appeal to men because they fail to recognize that it stems, in part, from the fact that they hold a monopoly.  They don't realize their charms simply aren't what they once were when they actually had to compete with other women on the open market.

The advantage that the married woman has, in addition to her monopoly, is the Love Goggles, that flattering Photoshop filter that causes a man to see his wife as an amalgam of what she was, what she is, and her Platonic Form.  Of course, walking out on a man not only throws away a woman's sexual monopoly, it tends to put a crack or two in the goggles as well.

What Athol's inadvertent experiment indicates is that the theory of Game is empirically sound and is a powerful predictive model of human behavior.  It also shows that we, as men and women, often not only get what we deserve, we get what we demanded.

Addressing the unintended consequences

It's remarkable that it has taken this long for women to figure out that large companies aren't going to continue blithely hiring women of child-bearing age when women keep getting pregnant and then quitting on them:

Companies should be able to ask their employees about whether they hope to have children, Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most senior women in Silicon Valley, said Ms Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, said that women are held back at work by stereotypes firms are unwilling to talk about. She said employees faced non-overt discrimination as well as overt discrimination and a lack of flexibility.

The 43-year-old mother-of-two called for a much more open dialogue about gender, which included discussing with female employees whether they plan to have children, The Telegraph reported her as saying.

The UK law is particularly bad, as it not only creates incentive to discriminate against all young women, but is shamelessly abused by women who have an incentive to lie to their employers, assure them they are coming back, and then let them know at the last possible moment that they will not be doing so.  It would actually be better for employers if they were permitted to pay women to leave as soon as they got pregnant, otherwise they can find themselves in limbo for more than a year, not knowing if the woman is going to come back to her job or not.

The irony, of course, is that the individual not being hired to replace the new mother is usually another woman.

I am a strong advocate of policies that help women put children ahead of careers.  But I don't believe that most maternity-related laws do so.

The marital perils of fat acceptance

Roissy beats on the blubbery with all the horror of a single woman flailing at an unusually large and hairy spider:

“Fatness is genetic. Fat chicks can’t do anything about it.”

Bullshit on stilts. See above graph. There’s no way fat crappery can increase that much in a population of hundreds of millions in the span of 25 years by genetic selection alone. The best the “fat gene” crowd can argue is that most humans are wired to put on excess weight in an environment of plentiful sugar-rich, high glycemic index carb food and sedentary lifestyles. That isn’t the same as saying fat people have fat genes rendering them immune to efforts at long-term weight loss.

What it means is that fatsos have to stop eating pastries and pasta, and start getting off their double wide asses and moving their limbs more than they do when reaching like an obese infant for a cookie on the kitchen countertop. The worst of them could begin their training by discarding the Walmart scooters for walking.
No fat gene hypothesis is needed to explain the growing army of lardbuckets and the shitty marriages they leave in their battle cruiser wakes. The answer is staring everyone in the face. The reason there are so many fat chicks in the world, and particularly in America, is because THEY CHOOSE THE PLEASURES OF FOOD AND IDLENESS OVER THE PLEASURES OF PLEASING MEN.

That’s it, fatties. You choose… poorly. 

I've seen far too many women in the forties, with between three and five children, who are MORE SLENDER than most of the college girls waddling about to believe that fatness is either genetic or uncontrollable.

Sure, it's difficult not to eat that second helping, to turn down that midnight snack, or to resist opening a new bag of cookies.  It wouldn't be called temptation if it wasn't tempting.  But even if resistance isn't easy, it is possible.