Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Game and sex

There are some popular websites which advocate men learning game to be more successful with women. I've read some of these sites with mixed feelings. There's some good advice about typical female testing behaviours and how to respond to them. But the gamists themselves don't seem all that content, despite claiming success with many attractive women.

I think it's because game isn't enough - it doesn't change the dispiriting conditions in which modern dating takes place.

Back in the 1930s an Australian feminist and communist named Jean Devanny wrote a short story about a male communist who believed in absolute sexual liberty. Both men and women were to have sex with whomever they pleased. All went well until our male communist found his wife in bed with another man. In principle he had to accept her actions. She for her part tried to persuade him that sex itself was just a meaningless physical act that he shouldn't be too fussed about:

... she was right; her attitude was the only one if they were to continue living together. He must conquer himself. What was she saying? - "Make too much of this silly sex act. It doesn't mean anything, really. It is the smallest thing in life. It takes up only a moment or two out of millions of moments. The things that matter are comradeship, congeniality, friendship and kindness ...


This is a purely materialistic view of sex, in which sex expresses nothing beyond itself as a physical act. And the logic too is that for sex to be made wholly free it must be made meaningless.

Jump forward to 2007. Laura Sessions Stepp published in this year a book about the attitudes to sex of young upper middle class women. What she found is that these women had decoupled love from sex. They hadn't given up on love, but had deferred it. They were too busy with their "projects" for serious relationships. They treated sex as just sex:

Stepp follows three high school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, chronicling their sexual behavior. These girls and women don't date, don't develop long-term relationships or even short, serious ones -- instead, they "hook up" ...

Why hook up? According to Stepp, college women, obsessed with academic and career success, say they don't have time for a real relationship; high school girls say lovey-dovey relationships give them the "yucks."


Laura Sessions Stepp herself is concerned by the situation:

Stepp is troubled: How will these girls learn how to be loving couples in this hook-up culture? Where will they practice the behavior needed to sustain deep and long-term relationships? If they commit to a lack of commitment, how will they ever learn to be intimate?


But the woman reviewing the book, Kathy Dobie, wants to set Laura Sessions Stepp straight:

The author is conflating what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality.


In other words, Kathy Dobie thinks it wrong to think that love and sex should go together. Sex is ... just sex. It's Devanny's communists all over again, but this time writing in The Washington Post.

Laura Sessions Stepp really does try to hold the line. She advises young women:

He will seek to win you over only if he thinks you're a prize.


She also opposes the reduction of relationships to the physical aspect alone:

Stepp is most thought-provoking when she considers the culture at large: All the females she interviews come from reasonably well-off families, we're told, and all are ambitious. "Hooking up enables a young woman to practice a piece of a relationship, the physical, while devoting most of her energy to staying on the honor roll . . . playing lacrosse . . . and applying to graduate programs in engineering."


Kathy Dobie again disagrees. She thinks it a worthy experiment to make sex a less meaningful part of relationships:

In a culture that values money and fame above all, that eschews failure, bad luck, trouble and pain, none of us speaks the language of love and forbearance. But it is not hooking up that has created this atmosphere. Hooking up is either a faithful reflection of the culture, a Darwinian response to a world where half the marriages end in divorce, or it is an attempt at something new. Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex ...

And perhaps as this generation grows up, they will come to relish other sides of an intimate relationship more than we have: the friendship, the shared humor, the familiar and loved body next to you in bed at night. This is the most hopeful outcome of the culture Stepp describes, but no less possible than the outcome she fears -- a generation unable to commit, unable to weather storms or to stomach second place or really to love at all.


Love and sex have been decoupled and both have been relegated in significance and priority.

It's worth noting that Kathy Dobie is the modern girl par excellence. She has written a book about her own early sexual experiences. She came from a good family, but at the age of 14 she began to chase boys for sex and, as a sexually liberated modern girl, she went for "the confident, aggressive, dirty-minded ones."

Why did she do it? She explains in the book that she wanted to feel "as alive, as bold, as free" as the bad boys around her (which makes her sound like a vitalist - as someone who responds to a nihilistic culture by seeking out sensation and excitement).

So let's say you're a young man and you are confronted with modern girl culture. You meet women who choose to have sex with the "confident, aggressive, dirty-minded" boys and who aren't psychologically oriented to love or to attracting love or to the entanglements of something serious.

Even if you learnt techniques to make you fit better into the confident, aggressive category of man, would this really satisfy? Wouldn't it be dispiriting to exist within a culture in which sex is both decoupled from love and from any meaning larger than itself? In which women aren't oriented to love? Would you really see the women produced by such a culture as a prize worth fighting for?

I should say at this point that not every woman has taken on the modern girl ethos. There do still exist women who put love, marriage and family first. If game techniques help some men attract these women, then it could have some benefit.

But it often seems to be the case that gamists have accepted the modernist conditions, and then I don't wonder that they seem discontented even when they get more of what's on offer.

Because it isn't enough. It's not that men are incapable of casual sex. But a man's nature can't be reduced to this. We do want to connect in a deeper way with a woman, and this requires a culture in which women are oriented to love and in which sex expresses something of ourselves. We are bound to feel alienated when this is not on offer.

31 comments:

  1. "Free love" was debated and rejected by the Soviet Union. Of course it would be, it's the one thing that would have made omegas and betas get on board with communism; men would have been too happy.

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  2. "Even if you learnt techniques to make you fit better into the confident, aggressive category of man, would this really satisfy? Wouldn't it be dispiriting to exist within a culture in which sex is both decoupled from love and from any meaning larger than itself? In which women aren't oriented to love? Would you really see the women produced by such a culture as a prize worth fighting for?"

    I think you are wrong about this. Men can easily dissasociate sex and love.

    Just because we dissassociate the two wouldn't mean we wouldn't have loving relationships, just not with the women we are having sex with.

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  3. For better or worse, game is a natural consequence of unrestrained female sexuality.

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  4. A number of observations:

    1. Disassociating love with sex is an excuse. In a society with total freedom, no one is putting guns to the heads of young women to make them do this -- and the excuse that they are too busy for love does not meet the laugh test. It's easier in a loving, supportive relationship to have high goals expectations.

    Women simply have freedom, and want for the most part to be hook-ups.

    2. In such a society, even a woman who "now" wants love, has been trained to hook-up, has no skills in relationship building, and probably has substantial numbers more of partners than most average men. As in order of magnitude larger.

    This is a recipe for built-in relationship failure.

    3. In such a society, transient hook-ups and "spread your seed" behaviors are the "best" most men can do. Love and marriage being for people rich enough to make it stick (breaking up means no more Summer house in the Hamptons and penthouse in the Upper East Side of NYC). But not so rich that each can have their own yacht after divorce.

    For everyone else, it's just hook-ups.

    While this is depressing, it's reality. Women have near absolute freedom in society. Mostly, they want hookups with exciting, dominant guys. As much as they can for as long as they can. This is what women want, and men either adapt to this or be alone.

    Better to have transient hook-ups than no sex at all.

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  5. All this talk about "relationships" is depressingly modern, if what is meant is someone one cohabits or has sex with exclusively. Sex needs to be reassociated with *marriage,” and not anything else.

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  6. "Women simply have freedom, and want for the most part to be hook-ups."

    Not true. I was once there. They are miserable but believe if they do not put out easily they will lose the guy. They are told they have issues or are uptight if they feel hurt and used after fleeting encounters so they try again and again to dull their feelings.

    "Mostly, they want hookups with exciting, dominant guys. "

    No, most of them desperately want marriage but have no clue how to be a desirable wife. They the collateral damage of the shredding of courtship rituals, collective morals and shaming culture that used to help young women find suitable men for the long term.

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  7. Dating is not much fun for many women either, Mark. I took myself out of the dating game from age 19 to 27 because I couldn't withstand the constant pressure to have sex; I was very shy and did not have the verbal/social skills to defend myself from the constant and relentless push for sex. I did, however, get to "enjoy" being hit on/sexually harassed by "alphas" while just going about my daily business, because they believed my shyness and social awkwardness made me an "easy mark".

    When I finally got married, one of the best things about it was realizing, "Thank God I don't have to go out on dates anymore."

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  8. Whiskey, I agree that the "too busy for love" line isn't convincing.

    It's possible though that self-disciplined upper middle class young women have been trained from an early age to believe that the meaning of life consists in the pursuit of a certain kind of freedom (autonomy) via independence and careers and that they are in a competition with men to achieve high status and high income.

    These women, for some years at least, might be psychologically primed to devote themselves to career success at the expense of serious relationships.

    Remember, if women have in mind the options of exciting/dramatic relationships with bad boy players or settling for security with family guys, the first option fits much better with the pursuit of individual autonomy - with staying your own separate autonomous self - as a supposedly meaningful life aim.

    Whiskey, I recognise the cold hard truth of what you write, but even so it seems too passive.

    Mightn't we influence some women by pointing to the many examples of women who waste their 20s and then suffer badly in their 30s (I personally know women at this age who want to give up living because they are now entirely alone without any prospect of a family of their own).

    Can't at least some women override their more destructive behaviours if the reality of what is facing them is made more clear to them? The human intellect has at least some influence over what we choose to do.

    And what if, politically, we began to chip away at the idea that a meaningful life is one in which we maximise autonomy? What if other goods, including love, family and motherhood, were once again held to be valid and presented in a more positive way in our culture to young women?

    These are medium term projects, so they don't help men right now. But they could shift things at least a bit for the next generation.

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  9. Mightn't we influence some women by pointing to the many examples of women who waste their 20s and then suffer badly in their 30s (I personally know women at this age who want to give up living because they are now entirely alone without any prospect of a family of their own).
    -----------------------------------
    They are plenty of men willing to marry an "old" woman in her 30s. I did not marry until I was 35 and I have a successful life and family. Point your friends in the direction of single men in high-IQ professions such as engineering, science research, IT, etc. Such men tend to value intellectual companionship and maturity over "access to youth and beauty."

    Or is it that you want your friends to suffer so you can use them as "examples" to frighten younger women?

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  10. Anon -- I agree that women in their thirties and mid thirties can find love and happiness -- but with OLDER men. Significantly older, in their late forties to fifties.

    Men their age peers after long droughts themselves are going to want, to be brutally honest, more attractive and fertile women who don't have as much baggage and can actually bond. This is if the guy is at all presentable and decent. Most guys do well in College (favorable sex ratio, booze) and then enter long dry spells post-College where they don't have much going on. While some beautiful/lucky outliers may pull same-age peers, most women in their thirties report significantly worse kinds of guys (as in, not even basic social skills) as they age more into their thirties. Most of the women talking or blogging about their dating generally settle for older guys. This is true even of Chelsea Handler.
    ---------------
    Novaseeker here notes that women DO seek the excitement, there's links to the Newsweek Sarah Ball piece about cad "Don Draper" from Mad Men, and of course Loh and Ehrenreich and Christina Nehring's "pursuit of passion." Point being that the deck is stacked against any pushback to convince women it's in their best interest to find a nice rather than series of exciting guys.

    1. Women always overestimate power and duration of their beauty, helped along by the beauty industry.
    2. Women find cads irresistable anyway.
    3. Women generally are more risk-seeking than men ... in relationships. Hence the Cad preference.
    4. Women over-estimate the supply of "marriageable men" when they reach their thirties -- as above men their age peers prefer younger women.

    I don't think this log-jam is something that can be broken, at most chipped away. IMHO, with ridicule. Laughing at women pursuing Alphas, and particularly at those who come a cropper, IS cruel, but it's also effective. Women like cats hate to be laughed at.

    Hillary Clinton is a good example. Marginalized, alone, a joke, Bill more important than her. Or without humor but with sadness, the stupidity of Elizabeth Edwards choosing a man who will replace her with bimbo Rielle Edwards the moment she's dead, to be the bimbo-step-Mom of her kids, and install her daughter as the favored one.

    THAT is a powerful lesson on Cads. John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. It's a searing gut wound to every woman looking for a cad.

    The most powerful message, IMHO, is not logical but emotional. Rielle Hunter being the best.

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  11. I really have no idea who these women are that you're talking about, Mark. Most women I know have had very few sexual partners prior to marriage (if any).

    But then again, most women I know are religious and have a healthy view of love, marriage, sex and procreation.

    No, most of them desperately want marriage but have no clue how to be a desirable wife. They the collateral damage of the shredding of courtship rituals, collective morals and shaming culture that used to help young women find suitable men for the long term.

    I agree with this statement, I think.

    Bear in mind that the recent shifts in attitude did not really materialise out of the blue. There has been a steady and increasing attack on marriage and the family now for well over 100 years.

    The plain fact is that even now, most women do in fact marry and have babies. I think that shows what most of them want. And most women do not work full time after they've had babies. Which shows that mothering is still pretty high on the agenda.

    Most women do really want to marry and have babies but are told by The Ideologues that they must do X,Y and Z first. It takes a very stubborn and self-assured woman to resist such brainwashing.

    If a man wants a woman who will be a good wife and mother, then let him choose a young, religious woman and be generous in his fatherhood.

    A man who wants a traditionally minded woman ought to be a traditionally minded man with a greater concern for becoming a good father of a larger than average family than career advancement etc. He had better be truly traditional in his mind-set. If he loves God above all other things, so much the better.

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  12. Or is it that you want your friends to suffer so you can use them as "examples" to frighten younger women?

    But they are suffering already because of the choice they made to delay serious relationships.

    The friend I wrote about chose to spend her 20s with a guy who she knew wasn't husband material (who in fact had serious mental health issues). She stayed because, in her own words, he was "fun to be with".

    She found, though, in her mid-30s that she could no longer attract a high quality male. She was absolutely crushed when a man she accepted in desperation dumped her for not being up to standard. She now talks about not wanting to live anymore, about wanting to quit her job, about attaching herself in some way to someone else's family.

    Her friends are urging her to find a sperm donor and become a single mother.

    Yet she is intelligent and good-looking. She could have done really well when younger if she hadn't delayed so long.

    This isn't my fault. I have tried my best to give her sympathy and encouragement. But nor would I push a man in his prime in her direction. It doesn't make sense for such a man to take a huge gamble on a woman in her last gasp of fertility. I want men to have children and this means marrying younger than mid-30s.

    Of course I'm glad to hear that you personally were able to marry well and have children at that stage in life. But it is civilisational suicide to consider this in any way normal.

    And it's just going to create another generation of grieving women if we do treat it as normal.

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  13. Anon -- I agree that women in their thirties and mid thirties can find love and happiness -- but with OLDER men. Significantly older, in their late forties to fifties.

    Men their age peers after long droughts themselves are going to want, to be brutally honest, more attractive and fertile women who don't have as much baggage and can actually bond.
    ----------------------------------
    Whiskey, you are an idiot. My husband is six years YOUNGER than I am and have one child. And we've been together for 16 years. My husband's best friend (Phd in physics from MIT) is married to a woman 7 years OLDER than he is, they have been together for 17 years, and have two children. I know of many such cases. In fact my experience is that it is the older men married to the young hotties who can't "bond" properly.

    Your bio-reductionism is an internet fantasy, nothing more. And please, what is all this idiocy about wanting more "fertile" women? None of you "Game players" strike me as decent fatherhood material. Auster is correct: you've created a bio-reductionist view of the world and you won't listen to any fact that contradicts it.

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  14. She found, though, in her mid-30s that she could no longer attract a high quality male.
    -----------------------------------
    This is nonsense. It doesn't gel with my personal experience at all, or that of many couples I know where the women married in their 30s.
    -----------------------------------
    This isn't my fault. I have tried my best to give her sympathy and encouragement. But nor would I push a man in his prime in her direction. It doesn't make sense for such a man to take a huge gamble on a woman in her last gasp of fertility. I want men to have children and this means marrying younger than mid-30s.
    -----------------------------------
    This is nonsense as well. All 30-something women I know who married somewhat later have children, myself included. I never had fertility issues; my husband and I only had one child for financial reasons, not biological ones.

    If you don't want to really help your friend, then send her email address to me and I will tell her exactly how to get what she wants.

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  15. Furthermore, let me explain something about very High-IQ men involved in the hard sciences: they don't typically WANT young hotties, and young hotties don't want THEM. What they tend to crave above all is intellectual companionship and maturity, which young hotties usually can't provide. They want someone to talk to, because let's face it, if you've got an IQ around 140-150 or above there are not that many folks around with which you have much in common. And they want someone who will leave them alone when they need to go off and think their great thoughts, read, or do whatever they need to do to service their brainwork (again, young hotties typically can't provide that). They are very, very lonely. I dated a string of these types before I met my wonderful husband; I could have married any of them, but I clicked best with my husband. If they marry at all, it's likely these guys are going to marry "old" women. (One extremely High IQ guy I know married a woman who is 15 years older than he is -- they have been together for 15 years and she is now nearly 60.) So your friend might as well be one of them, and pop out a very Hi IQ baby or two for the cause of the West. If your friend is indeed "intelligent and good-looking," and able to provide mature intellectual companionship, she will appeal to them, probably even one snag one who is 5-6 years younger than she is, and one with high earnings capacity to boot. I know what I'm talking about; I've seen it happen again and again.

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  16. very interesting debate here, I must really visit this site more often.

    Some really good points and counter points are mbeing made, as someone who does not know as much about these topics as I would like to I can only ask everyone here to keep it up!

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  17. Anonymous, I couldn't disagree more with what you are arguing. It goes against science, it goes against statistical evidence, it goes against mounting anecdotal evidence, it goes against logic, it goes against the recommendations of the medical profession and it goes against my own personal experience.

    To leave family formation till your mid-30s is a tremendously risky business for many reasons.

    The most obvious reason is fertility. A woman's fertility declines gradually during her 20s and sharply from the age of 35. Yes, some women might get away with having children in their mid to late 30s but many won't - hence the desperate measure of IVF.

    From a medical research paper:

    "In summary, age and infertility is an increasing problem due to general societal trends for women to delay childbearing until later ages.

    "The author hopes that readers will be more aggressive in the counseling of women who are in the early to mid thirty and beyond age group who consider delaying childbearing.

    "For unknown reasons, many couples
    today are under the false impression that normal pregnancy rates extend well into the late thirties and early forties."

    But it's not just fertility. Rates of miscarriage and of bearing handicapped children are much higher for older women.

    Think too of what would happen if women rountinely left childbearing till their mid 30s. A woman would only become a grandmother after she turned 70. By the time the child was old enough to remember her she would be mid-70s. Women would not, in other words, have such an active, involved role as grandmothers.

    If women leave family formation till their mid-30s they will treat the average family man very badly in their youth, therefore leading many men to commit to lives of bacherlood - as has happened today.

    Women who leave marriage and motherhood till their mid-30s have had decades to get used to a single girl lifestlye and so the life changes can hit very hard at this age.

    The delay in family formation has been catastrophic for the West. It has helped poison relations between men and women. It has contributed to below replacement fertility levels. It has more than doubled the rate of life-long bachelorhood and spinsterhood. It has led many Westerners to look to non-Western countries for spouses. It has led to the grief of infertility and childlessness for many women. It has led some intelligent, politically active men to call for a marriage strike or to devote their talents toward honing casual sex techniques rather than committing to marriage and fatherhood.

    One of the foremost goals we must have is to reverse the trend toward ever later marriages amongst middle class Westerners.

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  18. Mark, I'm a new reader of your blog. I mostly agree with this post and when I read this article I thought it was relevent to your argument.

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25959154-5006784,00.html

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  19. a.g.i.a welcome to the blog.

    The news item you link to illustrates the stress placed on women by delayed motherhood. Here was a woman with no history of mental illness or drug abuse who was driven to extreme measures.

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  20. The long-winded Anon is just another angry feminist ideologue.

    Like the typical internet fool, they think that one or two counterexamples disprove someone else's assertion of a trend.


    In doing so, they think that they are superior, in that they "refuse to generalize".

    Essentially, LongWindedAnon and others of similar mind have purposed in themselves to know nothing at all, ever.

    In their sophistry, they become willfully ignorant.

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  21. The long-winded Anon is just another angry feminist ideologue.

    --I am not an angry feminist ideologue. I agree that feminism has provided men with a raw deal and I don't support affirmative action either. I make it a habit to stick up for men whenever they are attacked in the workplace by feminists etc. I particularly despise the hypocrisy of Western feminists who scream that Western men are the worst men on the planet when in fact, Western women have the best deal going and have for centuries. None of them would choose to live in a non-Western country. There were some good things about feminism in the beginning but the hysterical, irrational man-bashing has just gone too far.

    However, one doesn't have to be a "feminist" to be appalled by women being reduced to commodities by the bio-reductionists. For one thing, I have a young daughter, and I'm not looking forward to her being used as the "commodity" that Whiskey thinks he's entitled to "enjoy" when he hits 40 just because he can't get laid when he's 25.

    I am correct in that upper-middle class educated Western people have children in their 30s and early 40s. I live in an upper-middle class enclave and this is simply the way it's done. And these usually do not have any fewer children than people in their 20s. Everybody usually just wants two, one of each, and that's the way it is, whether 20s or 30s or early 40s. If it were cheaper to raise children in a First World economy, people might want more than 2.

    As to your point about grandchildren, 70 isn't "old" in an era when life expectancy is growing by leaps and bounds. It is already at around 80 for most Western nations and will be 90 soon enough. Throughout history most children have not had grandparents anyways because the life expectancy was 40-45.

    BTW, Mark-- I know that fertility declines after 35 but women still have a 75 percent chance of getting pregnant naturally in their mid-thirties over a year's time. Those are US statistics I just looked up BTW. For those who have trouble there is IVF. It's not desperate, it's very common. You get your IVF twins and they are all over the place.

    "If women leave family formation till their mid-30s they will treat the average family man very badly in their youth, therefore leading many men to commit to lives of bacherlood - as has happened today."

    --I never advocated leaving family-formation into the mid-30s for everyone, or even most people; I merely said that it is not a disaster if one does not find someone in their 20s, and that such women can have happy families if they do so, and pointed to myself and many acquaintances as evidence. Then the bio-reductionists got hysterical because they were provided with a data point that doesn't fit their pre-conceived pet theories (I found Whiskey's comments about single 30-something women being only able to find happiness by marrying guys in their 50s particularly hilarious. Outside of the Hollywood super-rich where does this happen? I don't know of a single case like that, but I do know of many cases where a 36-year-old professional woman marries a guy a few years younger than she.)

    It's not evidentially supported that women are "treating family men very badly" either. By whose testimony? I see no evidence of it around me.

    "Women who leave marriage and motherhood till their mid-30s have had decades to get used to a single girl lifestlye and so the life changes can hit very hard at this age."

    --This is an unsupported opinion. My experience and that of many people I know has been quite the opposite. I personally hated "the single girl lifestyle," and tried as best as I could to escape it.

    The bio-reductionists have definitely reduced my sympathies for traditionalism.

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  22. Anonymous, the bio-reductionists are not traditionalists.

    I look on your views as dangerous. People want to be told that they can do whatever they like without any negative consequences. They are reluctant to accept that there might be limitations and that they need to think prudently about what they do.

    You are like a female siren, lulling people into a false confidence until they are finally faced with destructive consequences.

    Nearly every assertion you make fails to connect with reality. You dismiss the problem of older grandparenting by stating that people are living longer. As if this closed the difference between having a 55-year-old grandparent and a 75-year-old.

    You claim that women haven't treated family men badly. Really? How do you think family men experience things when the women in their social milieu defer family formation to some indeterminate time in their 30s?

    What are these men supposed to do in the meantime? Join the players who just want casual sex? Wait like good little fellows while the women have casual affairs with the players and then pick up the pieces a decade or more later?

    Do you really think a woman who is not oriented to marriage will treat family men as respectfully as was once the case?

    And do you really believe that women who are not looking for love or marriage, but merely for occasional sex or affairs, are going to cultivate the qualities that family men will find attractive and worth working and competing for?

    As for your claim that middle class women are happily all popping out the number of children they can afford, this doesn't correlate at all to what the statistics are telling us.

    In America, for instance, 40% of women aged 41 to 55 in the upper professions are unmarried. 33% are childless. For those women working in corporate America and in academia, the childless figure rises to 43%, i.e. nearly half of these middle-class women will never have children.

    As for older woman easily being able to snare a husband their own age or even younger, consider articles like the following: "Is there even ONE straight, kind, solvent single man in his 40s left in Britain?"

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  23. --I really have no idea who these women are that you're talking about, Mark. Most women I know have had very few sexual partners prior to marriage (if any).--

    I have to give a thumbs up to this. Women pursuing sex like men does not give them any sort of evolutionary benefit. Every casual sex encounter is a psychological dent to woman's psyche.

    A girl chasing sex like men is a creation of media and dumber journalists.

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  24. Bhanu,

    People don't always act according to evolutionary advantage. If they did, then women would early on marry the best-looking, most intelligent, most invested man they could and have many children.

    But they don't. Women are brought up to believe that motherhood is an inferior life meaning and that they have to do something that is autonomous and not biologically predetermined. They are also brought up to believe that justice means dedicating their lives to a competition with men for career status, money and power.

    These are powerful influences, particularly on a certain type of middle class, private schoolgirl, namely those who are most conscientious, intellectual, hard-working, eager to please and impressionable.

    But if career is what counts, and motherhood is inferior, then what do these women do in their 20s?

    They no longer have to look for husband material in their 20s. Nor do they have to look to men for material security as they are fanatically devoted to their own career success.

    So sometimes they settle for a relationship with an unsuitable guy they have no intention of spending their lives with or having children with. Sometimes they compete for the attention of an "alpha" male. They might stay single for periods of time. Or they might out of loneliness or lust have sex with a number of men during their 20s. There do exist women with high libidos who will have sex with a large number of men.

    What they won't do is send the right signals to family men.

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  25. There's a Melbourne woman called Kasey Edwards who wrote a book recently about her discontent with what she was brought up to believe.

    In school it was thought ridiculous that a woman, even in her late twenties or early 30s, might dedicate herself to motherhood:

    "On the last day of high school my teacher asked everyone in the class what we saw ourselves doing in ten to fifteen years' time. When she came around to me I said, "Married with kids and a stay-at-home mother." The teacher and the class burst into laughter and so did I. It was obvious to everyone I was just being a smartarse ...

    Later, a classmate confessed to me that she did actually want to be 'just' a mother. She looked ashamed and I looked indignant."


    Such is the power of ideas. In typical fashion, it took Kasey till her 30s to have a rethink. But as she notes in her book, this was dangerously late:

    "We are told all our lives that we need to do everything else first - get an education, establish ourselves professionally, buy property - but by the time we've done all that, our biological clocks have ticked. The older I get, the more I witness the heartbreak of women around me who are unable to get pregnant. And the harsh reality in many cases is that they just left it too late.

    I've lost count of how many women I know who are undergoing IVF, or have tried it without success."

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  26. Mark,

    You have a good point. But that is evolution as well. The ideal picture for a woman is a Long term relationship with a alpha. This picture is inclusive of your assertion as well.

    Women, by evolution, have been built to be attracted(short term and long term) to the most dominant, successful and wealthy guy.By instinct, these men are high on list of long term as well as short term relationships for women.

    Unfortunately, such men are very rare to find. So these women compete to grab such men. In fact women compete with their own resources. And the best resource women have for men is sex. So on seeing an "alpha", these girls jump into his bed, in a futile hope that this offered "resource" will keep the alpha hooked to them.
    This rarely happens and our beloved alpha gladly moves onto the next woman.

    This is the whole reason behind "promiscuous" women. They are merely opening their legs to hatch on to alphas.

    In a way these women deserve such treatment. They reject 80% of men in favor of being shag-partners to pump and dump alphas.

    On a related note,in my country, there is no sexual market place as your's. In the system of arranged marriages, men with the most "Nice hard working guy" profile are rewarded with the most beautiful of women.

    Interestingly young women have minimal influence in selecting their mate. It is largely decided by the extended family :).

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  27. Mark, regarding the link to the Daily Mail article, I notice that according to the writer it's pretty much men's fault that they don't want to settle with fabulous 40-something women.

    It's not men's fault, it's not women's fault.

    It's pretty much everyone's fault in this day and age.

    There are more than enough data out there to show that the hook-up culture that's been common for the past couple of decades has damaged us as a society.

    With the prevalence and acceptance of single-parenthood (yes, I mean motherhood mostly), why would men want to make a lasting commitment to a wife and family?

    There are very few incentives for men to want those. Particularly with the way women behave.

    MySpace is a great eye-opener for what young women are like.

    The Daily Mail article is a view of how life will be for a lot of young women in the future.

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  28. A girl chasing sex like men is a creation of media and dumber journalists.

    Sadly, Bhanu, she is very real. Just because you don't know anyone like that, it doesn't mean she doesn't exist.

    I can tell you of 16 year old girls with multiple partners who aggressively pursue boys their own age and older men because they like to have sex.

    I know of 17year olds who go clubbing and out to see bands and hook up with the band members.

    There are girls in their 20s who stick with a bad boy for who knows what reason even when he dumps on her regularly to go play the field.

    A lot of young women in our culture are making incredibly poor choices that will come back and bite them on the backside in a few years time.

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  29. ---Just because you don't know anyone like that, it doesn't mean she doesn't exist. ---

    You are right, I live in a conservative culture. My conclusion was not based solely on this. Female promiscuity(not serial monogamy) diminishes her mate value in the eyes of alpha men. And such behavior should be a minute minority, if it exists.

    Such women are starkly in contrast to principles of evolutionary psychology.

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  30. "let me explain something about very High-IQ men involved in the hard sciences: they don't typically WANT young hotties,"

    WRONG.

    They want young hotties like every other man does, but high-IQ science types are mostly too beta to get them.

    "What they tend to crave above all is intellectual companionship and maturity,"

    WRONG.

    They may say that but they'd ditch the "intellectual companion" for a young hottie in a second if the young hottie were actually attainable.

    ReplyDelete