16 years later

They finally notice. Feelings versus reality:

Women feel invisible to the opposite sex at the age of 51, it emerged yesterday. A detailed study of 2,000 women revealed a large percentage felt they no longer received the level of attention they once did after hitting 51.

Many even went as far as to admit they felt ‘ignored’.

The women claimed their confidence plummeted after hitting 50 and blamed greying hair, having to to wear glasses or even struggling to find fashionable clothes.

This is mildly amusing for two reasons. First, welcome to equality. No one notices 99 percent of the men of any age, unless they are less than three years old. Second, the idea that men pay attention to women who are 49, or 45, or even 40, is absurd. 35 is probably the maximum age at which men pay any noticeable attention to strange women in public.

There are the occasional outliers, of course, just as the most exceptional men will command female attention in public. But, for the most part, men don't pay attention to unknown women over 35. This doesn't mean that women cease to be attractive at that age, only that they're no longer on the radar of the average male stranger.

I don't understand why this should be either surprising or upsetting to women. Men don't expect to remain competitive athletes for long outside their twenties; I'm years away from 51 and I'm already the second-oldest player on my veteran's soccer team.

Alpha Mail: how to respond?

Rek asks: What would have been some good answers/attitudes to adopt [in the case of the hapless Gamma from the Ford Fiesta ad]? Silence is my default response. 

Silence is, in most circumstances, sub-optimal, but it is usually better than inept self-defense. Women tend to take silence as acquiescence if they are not trying to talk to you; if they are trying to talk to you they take it as a childish refusal to communicate.

However, the answer is predicated upon whether the man involved is actually responsible or not. One cannot respond to a legitimate criticism in the same manner one responds to an illegitimate one. If the complaint about the man being late all the time is more or less true, and he is the present cause of them being late, then he owes her an apology. He should simply say: "You're right. It was my fault we're late. I'm sorry. I hope your parents won't be too upset and I will apologize to them when we get there."

(In the commercial, the guy does indicate that it was indeed his fault. The woman is clearly steaming mad and the guy is already sheepish before either of them says anything. However, being a Gamma, he can't simply take responsibility, and in fact, their being late might well be the result of his passive-aggressive refusal to get ready on time because he doesn't want to go.)

Remember, he has put her in a bad position in a potentially stressful situation. She's going to get blamed by her mother - her father may not notice but her mother surely will - and he owes it to her to ensure that she isn't criticized for his tardiness.

On the other hand, if their being late was not his fault, then she is simply using him as a punching bag in preparation for the well-merited criticism she knows she is going to receive. In that case, a very sharp response that goes to the heart of the matter is in order: "Don't try to put this off on me. You're the one who decided we had to go to their house and you know perfectly well that I was ready to go on time. If your mother is on the warpath again, that's your problem. You can deal with her while I have a drink with your Dad outside on the porch. One can hardly blame the poor guy."

One key distinction between high status and low status is the attitude towards responsibility. The high status man is comfortable taking responsibility. He is accustomed to it. The low status man is uncomfortable with any responsibility and runs from it in most circumstances, particularly when it involves conflict.

Alpha: Yeah, I did it. So what?
Beta: Yeah, I did it.
Delta: Yeah, I did it. Is that a problem?
Gamma: I didn't do it! It's not my fault!
Omega: (frightened deer-in-the-headlights stare)
Sigma: I think you really have to look at society's role in all of this.

The international Gamma

We've been seeing this ad in both the UK and Italy. I didn't find an English version, however, so here is the Italian. The dialogue:

Woman: We're always late and it's always your fault!
Gamma: Your father won't even notice. (whistles)
Woman: (icy glare)
Gamma: (realizes he's gone too far, supplicates) No, darling-
Woman: Forget it!
Gamma: (sends text) Forgive him, he's an idiot.
Both: (she is amused by his self-deprecation and relents, he leans in and laughs in a wheedling and self-deprecatory manner.)

Notice the following Game-related points:

1. She's a dominant bitch, she's driving.
2. He attempts to deflect rather than risk conflict by directly addressing her accusation, but only makes matters worse.
3. She indicates her displeasure by withholding communication.
4. His initial attempt at supplication is unsuccessful.
5. He can't bear her displeasure and escalates his supplication.
6. She finally consents to permit him to return to the familiar comfort of his inferior position.

If your reaction to relationship conflict is similar to this, you are exhibiting Gamma behavior patterns and it is unlikely that you have a secure relationship with the woman in your life.

Delta face

No one who saw this picture and understands Game was even remotely surprised by the way the Mozilla debacle played out over the last week. Human socio-sexuality is visible to the naked eye; just look at the soft features, the large, teddy-bearish frame, and most important, the uncertain, ready-to-please smile.

This is the very image of a white knight, of a pedestalizer, of a man who would rather surrender than fight. It is the very image of the Delta Male

This is not to say that Brandon Eich is a bad man, an idiot, a failure, or a man to be despised. Quite to the contrary, he is a good man, a highly intelligent man, a massive success, and a man to be admired for his many good qualities. Which, therefore, make him an object lesson in how socio-sexuality is orthogonal to many of those qualities.

Eich responded to his critics in a classic Delta manner. He attempted to assuage and to reason with them. And that is why he failed. He did not snipe back passive-aggressively and appeal to the crowd like a Gamma, he did not enlist superior allies like a Beta, and he did not wreak vengeance upon his challengers like an Alpha. Given his position as Mozilla CEO, the Alpha response was the correct one, indeed, it was the only one that would have ensured his status.

But, here we see how a man's contextual socio-sexual status always gives way to the man's true rank. Given sufficient time, Eich's rank might have eventually grown to reach his contextual status, but he met with the challenge much too soon into his new position, responded inappropriately, and unsurprisingly, met with complete failure.

Losing sans competition

The reason women who can do STEM don't do STEM:

Apparently, a key reason that young women aren't choosing careers in STEM is dating. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, found concern that their 'geeky' male classmates will present poor social prospects is genuinely one of three key barriers to young women entering STEM (along with concerns that it would be boring, and that they wouldn't be any good at it). This information depressed me for the rest of the day.

Klawe reported her intriguing finding at the Future Tense Women in STEM event in Washington DC last week. She is a role model for college leaders who seek to attract young women to study STEM subjects -- by which I mean science, technology, engineering and mathematics, subjects where men still outnumber women by three to one. Harvey Mudd College has impressively redesigned their teaching methods to even out the gender ratio in their STEM programs. But the main message of the day was that attracting women into STEM is just the first step

Nobel prize winner Carol Greider explained that the issue is not just a deficit of women entering the STEM pipeline; rather, the key challenge is that the pipe is leaky.

Note that Ms Klawe is the woman who has successfully dumbed down the Computer Science program at Harvey Mudd. Perhaps if they paid some dumb, but good-looking jocks to sit in the STEM classes, more smart girls would be inclined to take them.

This further confirms the truth of Game. Even in a predominantly male environment, the women can't find anyone to date because there are so few Alphas in STEM. These young women would literally rather date no one than the STEM students and prefer reduced employment prospects to accepting the reduction in their socio-sexual status involved in having sex with gamma nerds.

The maturation delta

This is why women can't count on their age peers being willing to marry them when they are done having fun and ready to settle down:

I am 23 years old, male, and have had sex with only three women. Most people would agree this is very few, especially considering I have only been in two relationships. I have not had sex for more than a year. I recently got to know someone close to my age, and we got on well. I found out, however, that she had slept with more than 50 men and was unable to put this out of my head. I find myself feeling disgusted and jealous towards women who have slept with many more people than me. But, at my age, it seems all attractive women are well into double figures. I feel trapped and that the older I get, the more extreme the issue will become.

It's fine for women to declare that young men should simply man up and marry the sluts, but the reality is that the men simply aren't enthusiastic about this. The matter is usually settled by the woman dropping her standards a little and paying for her extensive experience by accepting a lower status man than she had hitherto enjoyed. Cue "alpha widow" syndrome, mutual disappointment, and so forth.

Unfortunately, there isn't any optimal solution. But it's on the men too; if you want a less experienced woman and you're not already presented with a smorgasborg of options, then you probably have to go younger or uglier than you are currently considering, and the latter is much easier than the former.

A feminist rationale for young motherhood

It's interesting to see how this woman's solipsism actually leads her to the correct conclusion for all the wrong reasons:

I couldn’t think of a dignified way to explain to the doctors that my boyfriend of three years had pulled out of the sessions we were about to start.

We had been for all the tests and I had psyched myself up to start injecting myself with a cocktail of hormones. I was just about to go to the pharmacy to pick up the drugs that would kick off our quest for a baby when my boyfriend, a successful broker, phoned me.

His voice was emotionless as he told me he didn’t want to go through with it. “It’s all too much,” he told me. “Maybe next year…”

Maybe next year? The sad truth was I didn’t have many years left. I was 37 and increasingly desperate to start a family. But despite my ticking clock, I had heard those three words many times before, from him and a previous partner to whom I had been engaged several years earlier.

Indeed, the truth is that I have experienced nothing but trouble whenever I have attempted to persuade a man to have children with me.

To suggest, as some experts do, that somehow the age at which women conceive is within their control, is naive and misleading.

There are still some stubborn taboos about conception, and one of them involves the myth that deciding to have children is something women and men do together in an open and honest manner.

For some lucky couples it may be like that. But that is not my experience, nor the experience of many of my girlfriends.

I’m sorry if I offend any male readers by suggesting that they do not always play fair in matters of fertility. But in my experience men increasingly behave with terrible selfishness when it comes to giving up their bachelor lifestyles.

Yes, perhaps women should try to have babies early — but not because that is the best time to have children, but because it might be the only time to have them. For if, like me, you have spent your thirties being involved with a series of men who enjoy their freedom, you will know it is simply a statement of fact that today’s young males really aren’t keen to become fathers.

She is still blaming men for her own failure to start trying to have children sooner, of course, but at least she is telling young women to learn from the consequences of her mistakes. It probably hasn't occurred to most women who are putting off child-bearing until the deadline to realize that if men do the exact same thing, they will be waiting until they are in their fifties or sixties to have children.

Why should men not spend their 30s and 40s having fun, after all. They have plenty of time in which they can still have children, right?