Recently a woman reader asked about the oft-repeated claim that women hate beta males, something she’s encountered several times online. I too have heard this but have never understood the rationale. If you don’t want to mate with someone, fine, but hatred? That implies a threat of some sort from beta males, something I can’t really imagine.
The only person I’ve ever seen express fear, loathing and contempt for beta males is Amanda Marcotte, who regularly sneers at “Nice Guys ®.” She dismisses them as losers who can’t get laid, and has offered such sage advice as “Be more attractive.” (I don’t think Marcotte’s got the makings of a boot camp product there.)
In any case, I have always been at a loss to discern the source of her hostility. Yesterday the mystery was solved as she weighed in on the New York Post article about sexual economics and the plummeting price of sex, which I wrote about earlier this week. She expressed reluctance to even acknowledge the piece, but noted that its widespread distribution online forced her hand. She then proceeded to rail and rant, not about the Post article, but about Nice Guys ®!
There are a lot of dudes out there not getting laid as much as they think they deserve, and this theory of sexual markets is so appealing to them that they’re willing to shove aside all critical thinking to believe that “science” has explained their problems. See, the eternal complaint of the Nice Guy® is that a) women give it away to guys who don’t deserve it but b) women’s affections aren’t loose enough to be applied to them.
(Not all Nice Guys® are obsessed with “sluts” even as they work hard the idea that if a woman would guy X, she’s required to date guy Y, and if she finds Y unattractive, she’s “shallow”. As long as they’re not raving about sluts, I think there’s potential for redemption for Nice Guys®.)
The problem with the theory of Nice Guys® is that it’s internally contradictory: they both believe women’s standards to sleep with a guy are too low (which is why she sleeps with him) and too high (she’s shallow for not sleeping with me). There’s mental tricks they play to ease the cognitive dissonance—for instance, by suggesting that if a guy’s hotness impresses you that makes your standards too low, but if you don’t like someone who spends 40 hours a week playing table games, you’re shallow…
Despite Marcotte’s having made a pet project of dissing nice guys, aka beta males, for some time, she remains clueless as to the nature of the SMP she inhabits. This is nothing more than willful ignorance, as the real reason for the plummeting price of sex and dearth of relationships can be directly traced to the Sexual Revolution and the Pill, which fully unleashed female sexuality. Regardless of whether one considers this liberation or havoc, the effect on the sexual landscape is undeniable. Only its value is debatable.
Recently I demonstrated the effect with this fun chart depicting who’s getting sexual attention from women:
In short, promiscuous women are aiming high, preferring one random hookup with a top male to love and commitment from someone only as attractive as they themselves are. (For an excellent real life example of this, see Karen Owen.)
The men Marcotte calls Nice Guys® are actually just guys who have lost out big time on the mating front, as women looking to trade up (which is a natural enough biological imperative) employ this short-term mating strategy. Whether they are nice or not so nice has nothing to do with it. In general, we can only say that they do not possess as many of the qualities that women seek.
Why is that? What makes a man irresistible to women? It turns out this has been studied extremely thoroughly. Building on the work of UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Donald Symons, who pioneered the study of the evolution of human sexuality, Ogi Ogas’ book A Billion Wicked Thoughts provides an excellent summary. Ogas searched through a billion web searches, including half a million personal search histories, to learn what sexual content people actually look for and purchase online.
It turns out that men and women have dramatically different sexualities. Here are some of the highlights about female sexuality:
1. Culture influences female sexuality, but not male sexuality.
Female porn sites market themselves very differently than male sites do.
Especially common are female-targeted adult sites promoting “empowerment” and “positivity,” concepts men do not associate with erotica.
Roy Baumeister suggests that women’s greater sensitivity to cultural influences is rooted in brain mechanisms.
Women’s sexuality appears to be more plastic than men’s, relying on social framing and cultural conditions when making decisions regarding relationships. Men’s sexuality seems far more driven by simple physiological mechanisms.
This means that women are influenced by depictions of sex in culture, e.g. films, magazines, Sex and the City, Girls Gone Wild, etc. Growing up in the era of feminism, many women have been taught that sex is empowering, a dangerous and unhealthy notion.
2. Females are attracted to socially dominant males.
Study after study has demonstrated the erotic appeal of male dominance. Women prefer the voices of dominant men, the scent of dominant men, the movement and gait of dominant men, and the facial features of dominant men…Scientists believe that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may be responsible for processing cues indicating social status or dominance, and it appears that almost all female brains are susceptible to dominance cues.
Aha! How is dominance displayed? Ogas explains:
There’s a very important fact to understand about male social dominance. No man is born dominant. He must strive for it – and he may fail. The male brain is designed to go through life shifting between dominant and submissive states. Though a man might be born with physical and personality traits that facilitate an easy rise to dominance – height, vigorous upper-body strength, a deep voice ,an aggressive temperament, an indomitable will – dominance must still be attained through social interactions with other males. In other words, social dominance is fluid and flexible, not hard-wired into the male brain.
In other words, men achieve social dominance by competing with other males. Women do not confer this upon men, they reward it.
3. Female desire is essentially different from male desire.
Men are visual. They respond to a gender cue that is fundamental and fixed. They respond to visual cues that are flexible during adolescence, then very fixed…Any cue triggers an immediate, powerful reaction directed toward seduction and orgasm.
Women are more focused on emotional and psychological cues, which generate erotic stories suited for satisfying female appetites. Women respond to a truly astonishing range of cues across many domains. The physical appearance of a man, his social status, personality, commitment, the authenticity of his emotions, his confidence, family, attitude toward children, kindness, height and smell are all important to women.
Unlike men, who become aroused after being exposed to a single cue, women need to experience enough simultaneous cues to cross an ever-varying threshold. Sometimes, just a few overwhelming cues can take a woman there. Other times, it takes a very large number of moderate cutes. For a man, a single cue is often sufficient, and sometimes necessary. For women, no single cue is either necessary or sufficient.
Female sexuality is far more complex than male sexuality. It’s no wonder that research demonstrates that frequently women report one set of cues as arousing, then experience a completely different and measurable physiological response than they expected.
4. Women have unique psychological cues related to self-esteem.
Irresistibility and adorability are feelings a woman has about herself that influence her self-esteem. One of the most fundamental and influential psychological cues for women is irresistibility: the feeling that you are sexually desirable. Being desired is very arousing to women.
This is why we often hear and directly observe that the most promiscuous women seek male validation from sex. It is a form of intrasexual competition, whereby they are able to experience a fleeting sense of irresistibility.
When Karen Owen wrote her F*ck List thesis, she gave her highest ratings to the men who let her stay over, cuddled with her, or told her how hot she was. She also ranked very highly the man who left her covered with bruises, which she found very exciting. She gave her lowest rating to the young man who refused to let her enter when she tried to return for a pair of earrings. He left them at the door instead.
When Marcotte suggests that men failing to pull no-strings sex become more attractive, she’s being rude and snide, because she doesn’t believe that is possible. Yet she is essentially correct. When female judges give a man an overall ranking of six or less, he can either complain bitterly or take action to bump himself up to a seven. While this may sound like an impossible task, and certainly Marcotte would say it is, social dominance plays such an important role in female attraction that manipulating this variable alone can produce dramatic improvements in a man’s life.
How can a man become more dominant if he requires male competition to achieve that? Ah, but he doesn’t. He may acquire dominant traits by practicing dominant behaviors, and indeed his testosterone level will rise, completing the shift at the biological level. Ogas:
Testosterone is correlated with dominance. It’s the “male competition’ hormone, and it fluctuates. Fans of a losing sports team experience a test drop after the game, while the winning fans get a testosterone rush…The more dominant a human male becomes, the more testosterone he produces, which in turn increases his sex drive. Men with high levels of testosterone lose their virginity earliest, have the most sexual partners, and convince women to have sex the fastest.
Clearly, a man can become more attractive to women by becoming more dominant, which raises his T level, which makes him more attractive, which makes him more dominant, which raises his T level and so on.
The male seduction community (PUAs) has developed a set of techniques its practitioners use to seduce women. The techniques are designed to activate women’s psychological cues in the same way that botox, collagen and implants are designed to artificially trigger men’s visual cues.
That set of techniques is called Game, and it’s every bit as legit as the techniques that women use to draw male attention.
Marcotte concludes:
For men who, whether it’s because they’re married or they aren’t high performers with the ladies, don’t get to be in the game and seriously resent it, these theories might have a lot of emotional power that is clogging up their ability to be rational.
Those men are getting into the game in increasing numbers, and they’re doing it via entirely rational means. If they’re smart they’ll focus on the 80% of women who don’t enjoy or seek casual sex.
{ 931 comments… read them below or add one }
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Susan: “Women are more focused on emotional and psychological cues, which generate erotic stories suited for satisfying female appetites.”
Nerdy, literary guys can use this to their advantage. Write an erotic story for your girlfriend, then send it in the post (NOT email). She will want to touch herself when she reads it.
Let the circlejerking begin.
Good stuff.
I just thought to drop in and mention that I highly enjoy reading this blog, but can’t really comprehend why a woman would be writing this stuff. Part of me wants to rationalize it away as wanting male attention and approval, putting serious blemish on the intellectual honesty. Less cynical part of me thinks it’s because the author wanting to build a better society for everyone, which I can certainly empathize with, but then again, it’s so hard to believe this these days, when everyone is hardlining on ego, dishonesty and selfishness.
Thanks for keeping the spark of faith alive. World is so much less without it. Spending too much time on the webs certainly takes a toll on my view of humanity as a whole. I just wish it’s the case of idiots, the power-hungry and other balls of self-absorbed hurt shouting the loudest and drowning out the reasonable folks.
Based on her writing, I assumed that Susan Walsh has lived through this life, and may be as old as having a daughter about to go to college. This is a profound shift in a woman’s life that will tend to make her think more rationally. The other possibility is that Susan has a naturally high tolerance for beta and is therefore able to see these men in much greater detail than most women.
Male bloggers say that women hate betas because of the actions of the women, not what the women themselves say they want. For example: men who are high beta stand a higher chance of being cheated on or divorced and are less likely to be picked for relationships. They just don’t have the acute dopamine producing allure of the natural alpha. From a societal perspective, the rules JUST changed to require this.
Anon, don’t worry, Susan is not into intellectual dishonesty or huge male egos at ALL. She is into men being their natural male selves without fear and therefore getting more success in life on all fronts. I’ve had fears about how some advise this be done, but Susan’s a good one. Boy, do I know what you mean about the Net; better to avoid more than spend hours on it. Feminists and as*hole men to tend to be the loudest.
Susan, gold again; you always nail it.
“The physical appearance of a man, his social status, personality, commitment, the authenticity of his emotions, his confidence, family, attitude toward children, kindness, height and smell are all important to women.”
YES.
These women are very hateful. Yes, just being nice doesn’t get anyone anywhere, but they’re grinding on many simply decent men. Boy, has the term beta been stretched and nearly snapped.
the trouble is Jennifer, betas are small and negative whereas alphas are always bigger and much more positive…
Actually the ugly alphas have quite a few negative things to say. I generally hate those terms for men, they’re so simplifying.
Some nice guys are learning game, others are going MGTOW. The former is likely to still be (foolishly) open to marriage. The latter is getting smart and eschewing the whole scam.
Speaking personally, I went Nice Guy lonely man > Nice Guy with Game and girlfriends > MGTOW
Love the chart btw.
Its very hard to be masculine and decent anymore. The archetypes in western culture have become very exaggerated. Everyone wants to be a hero or a villain, and ironically it’s much harder to be a hero. Women have become trash too, whether driven by popular culture or some innate degerative reflex, what difference does it make. Nowadays life begins when women get ugly, when fantasies can’t be acted out anymore and you have to make do with what you have, I.e. at 30.
I read Amanda Marcotte’s article, and I’m pissed. The tone can be summed up as “you’re mad you can’t get no casual sex, so quit yer whinin’.” So women can go and have casual sex with the same group of elite guys, and this is somehow liberation? It comes off like the writing of someone who was never the top girl in a guy’s harem, so they get their esteem off being with all of these wonnderful men. It’s more of a kept woman’s mindset than a liberated one.
@GudEnuf
I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would not be seriously turned on by this.
@Anonymous
I’m a 54 year old mother of a son and daughter. My husband of 27 years is a self-acknowledged beta male. We have a good life, a fine marriage. Our family is close knit. I started blogging to meet the needs of my then 19 y o daughter and her friends, who were dismayed to find that the boys who paid them attention expected sexual favors in return. Through blogging and attracting readers of both sexes, I’ve learned a great deal about the male experience as well. It sounds corny and trite, but I want people to find a way to love one another. It’s been an interesting journey, and is its own reward.
@Jess
Wow. And you wonder why I feel hostility toward you. What a horrible thing to say. Please tell me this was some sort of perverse attempt at humor or sarcasm.
Women don’t hate betas normally, but they hate hate hate them when those betas step out of line, when they refuse to do their duties to women, when they have the nerves to hit on their female masters.
@modernguy
Good to see you, it’s been a while!
@Todd
Did you happen to read the comments? There is some serious misandry there…
A woman ignoring the complaints of Nice Guys seems to be like a man ignoring the complaints of Fat Chicks. There is one difference though — women routinely sleep with jerks but say they really want Nice Guys, whereas I’ve never heard of a man who slept with thin girls but said he really wanted Fat Chicks. I think this mixed message from women is a large part of what drives the resentment that Nice Guys have.
@Susan
I’m seriously wondering how many of these women have been abused. The mindset seems to be that they need to be in control in order not to be hurt. That’s not a place of intimacy. You can’t be that intimate if you’re that scared.
Ever read the book “Pimp” by Iceberg Slim? These women sound like what he would have sounded like if he was female and graduated college. Yikes! They just want to milk all they can from a dude, damn any sense of connection.
Todd, very astute. Modernguy, I feel your frusteration.
“Speaking personally, I went Nice Guy lonely man > Nice Guy with Game and girlfriends > MGTOW”
Nothing better than a nice guy with game
With all the actual games we play, though, I can’t blame your final transition one bit.
Todd: I’m seriously wondering how many of these women have been abused. The mindset seems to be that they need to be in control in order not to be hurt.
I was reading the comments one time when the discussion suddenly devolved into a moan-fest about how gross semen is. These “straight” women preferred using condoms because the feeling of a man ejaculating inside them was too disgusting.
Wear does that come from?
Sue,
I think your conclusion about Marcotte is brilliant. I would add that highlighting the failures of Nice Guys gives her a perverse sense of empowerment.
My guess would be that sex pozzie feminists are, for the most part, lazy and unimaginative children grasping at the most expedient path to empowerment. Women are the gatekeepers. Their power is in their ability to turn guys away. Railing against Nice Guys is just her way of lording her power over men. Empowerment on the cheap….
I just realized how hilarious the title of this thread is, Susan. Good one!
Susan Walsh September 30, 2011 at 10:49 pm
@Jess
Wow. And you wonder why I feel hostility toward you. What a horrible thing to say. Please tell me this was some sort of perverse attempt at humor or sarcasm.
Susan, I thought you said you knew people at CERN?
I think the first thing to be remember is where the term “nice guy” came from. It came from women who were pumped and dumped by an alpha, then cried on the shoulder of her beta orbiter, telling him that she wished she could find a “nice guy” like him. Then he’s wondering, “WTF, *I* am a nice guy like me?” The term originally came from women.
Game has the solution to this paradox: The standards that she says she has (which the nice guy actually fulfills) are not the ones she says she has (going for the bad boy). It’s not so much an issue of standards being too high or too low but just different.
Marcotte’s approach her is to make it personal — YOU think there’s something wrong with women’s standards because women don’t sleep with YOU. But give me a break. We can be objective and look at cases that don’t involve us personally. Was Bristol Palin attracted to Levi Johnson because he was nicer to her than anyone else? Was Sandra Bullock attracted to Jessie James because he was nicer to her than anyone else? I don’t think that last pairing makes any sense at all unless you look at it through the lens of Game.
Women hate betas when they do unsolicited love and attention, and then when they whine and demand something in exchange for all the stuff they have been giving. Women hate reactive men who whine. And Betas whine. It doesnt matter if there are enough and reasonable stuff to whine about. Whining = cringes.
Hey… not just nerdy guys (I am desperately trying to de-nerd myself)
Actually men can learn quite a lot about the nuances of writing by studying gender psychology. I find it interesting that most of the Game literature to date has been verbal or body language. There is very little good material on how to turn on a woman via the written word (hmmm…. there might be a market niche to fill). I know of a few books I recommend to my friends, well some I wouldn’t want to give them all of my secrets.
For example, writing for a female audience you have to learn to appreciate how the feminine brain processes things differently from males. In writing usually short concise sentences trump complex ones. (e.g Hemingway) Now compare it to say Susie Bright. I find that just as in dance or other arts, leading is imperative. The ability to suggest to them the outlines of an scene and allow them to fill it in with their own emotional crayons. When writing for a woman, the tone has to be different than writing for a man, the structure at times more poetic, with a greater attention paid to the tempo & voice. At times it should move like water, at others (especially closer to an emotional build-up) the sentences should mirror your staccato breath.
Yohami,
Not all betas whine. I did for a while. You probably did, too. But Sue’s husband is beta and he doesn’t sound like a whiner.
People whine when they’re TOTALLY powerless to effect change. Or at least FEEL totally powerless. But things aren’t so black and white. There are degrees of dominance and subservience. Some beta guys are getting enough to be happy and have enough dominance to maintain attraction in a relationship.
Also, some nice guys really ARE just nice. They’re not nice because they lack options, they’re nice because the choose to be nice. They’re decent people. They want something meaningful in their lives.
This is where things begin to break down for me. When most guys here use the word “beta,” they mean a man without options, a man who settles for what he can get. In this sense, it’s synonymous with what Marcotte calls “nice guys.” And yet, when Sue talks about betas, or with Athol Kay uses the term beta, I think they mean something very different. I think they mean a man with a desire to nurture a woman, provide a stable and comfortable environment for her, etc…
Here’s the thing: you can be “beta” in Athol’s sense from a position of strength instead of weakness.
I guess ultimately my point is that saying “beta’s whine,” is too simplistic.
@Jesus Mahoney: I get your point and agree it’s a simplistic way to classify men, but it’s done that way precisely for that reason, to keep things simple in order to explain how things work and avoid getting overly complex, especially to new comers.
This is fine with the basic theories and concepts but when discussions get deeper (as it usually happens here) it’s when the basic classification becomes too limited or inadequate. In a way it’s a necessary evil.
Perhaps we should start using Vox’s classification system (and link it more often) and say Gamma’s whine?
Blues,
Thanks for the link. I like his classification system. It clears up a lot of the confusion that I was addressing.
Hellhath,
The terseness of Hemingway’s prose reflects one aspect of the male experience… or at least the experience of males of his generation. Men of that generation were generally out of touch with their emotions. They dealt head-on with the brute facts of life. Hemingway’s intent was to reflect that through his writing. He did an awesome job at it, too.
This is a bit bogus. Cormac McCarthy, for example, writes for what I’d guess is a mostly male audience, and yet his descriptions of the landscape of the Southwest are lush and gorgeous and so f*cking poetic it’s sublime. He has men riding horses, shooting guns, being inarticulate and emotionally stunted, but it all takes place against this immense backdrop that dwarfs the actions of the characters and ironically lends those actions a poignancy they wouldn’t otherwise have. In short, that mofo writes some poetic shit.
Also, any writer worth his (or her) salt pays a great deal of attention to tempo. This is true of Hemingway, McCarthy, Austen, Roth, Woolf, Rushdie, Atwood, Ellison, the Brontes, Vonnegut, Proulx, Ondaatje, Munro, Wells Tower, Danielle Evans, Stephen King, Karen Russell, Rick Bass, etc… There is no good story-telling without a focus on tempo.
“it’s done that way precisely for that reason, to keep things simple in order to explain how things work and avoid getting overly complex, especially to new comers”
Problem is, when complexities arise, newcomers get confuuuused..
Great post, Jesus.
Jesus,
I´d rather avoid talking about Susan´s marriage!
I doubt Susan´s husband claims women hate him. So he is not in the target group. Better to ask the hated betas whats the hate about, and the women that are doing the hating, what is it about. But I think its not so much about the betaness and more about some obvious things. Unsolicited attention, unsolicited sexual advances, unsolicited beta orbiting + pedestalization, and whining.
Women are very visceral about unwanted male attention, and very visceral about non-grown ups. What do you think. Can it be about anything else?
Yohami,
I agree with your premise; whining is not a good strategy for hooking up with women. It was more the use of the term “beta” that I had the issue with.
The only reason I brought it up is that I think that someone like Marcotte would like to group decent guys in with the whiners, all under the blanket term “nice guy.” Her line of reasoning seems to be, “if you have a problem with a woman having NSA sex, then it must be because you’re a loser who can’t get laid as much as you’d like.”
I think the same sort of thing occurs when we define as “beta” every guy who is NOT the AMOG. A confusion occurs between genuinely decent guys and guys who don’t go around fucking women casually because they couldn’t if they wanted to.
Marcotte, like most members of special interest groups (and feminists in particular), has identified several parts of her life that aren’t perfect, and has declared that her problems and the problems of her special interest group are worserer and more awfuler than those of any other group. And, since whining and moaning are a zero-sum game, any whining and moaning about problems that aren’t hers amount to a blatant attempt to steal care, attention, and RAINN funds from her and her group.
When a beta isn’t getting enough sex, and complains about it, she gets upset that her complaining time is being shared with some loser nice guy. Of course, when the nice guy learns game, it contributes to her problems… somehow, I’m sure her hamster will cough up a lovely reason.
A while back she actually responded to the continuing, legitimate complaints that feminists did not offer any functional advice for men looking to have more dating success. Her efforts were… less than stellar. But then, it’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s that she’s actively opposed to any guy wanting to get some, because their problems are clearly not as important and awful as hers, and because eewwww icky betas.
It’s attitudes like that that turn actual nice guys into the caricatures she is whining about – although she apparently wants us to believe that any nice guy is secretly evil long before he realizes women in general don’t care about his problems and never will. She offers no solution other than “sit down, shut up, and accept it.” If I were forced to give her credit for thinking it through, rather than lashing out from the anti-tingle, I’d say she was justifying it by assuming that’s how women lived before second-wave feminism (which is, of course, nonsense).
She fails to grasp that the complaint of these poor betas is that they have been misled, that the things they were told to do just don’t yield any romantic success. On the plus side, since she has explicitly rejected the social attentions of nice guys the world over, I don’t need to concern myself with being nice to her or her ilk – I think only positivity can create more positivity, but if that brand of feminism rejects that, I can get plenty of entertainment out of mocking them.
@Jesus Mahoney
“Women are the gatekeepers. Their power is in their ability to turn guys away. Railing against Nice Guys is just her way of lording her [Marcotte's] power over men. Empowerment on the cheap….”
Not just Marcotte though; I think women in general hate betas and treat them like sh!t as an ego trip. I’m surprised Ms. Walsh doesn’t seem realize/agree with this. Between all the pyrotechnic rejections, paternity fraud, shameless friend-zoning, false rape accusations, divorce theft industry, etc., it is painfully obvious to me.
Marcotte, IMHO, has to reject nice guys generally in writing because (take a good look at her) she probably gets very few chances to reject guys (nice or not) in person.
Ironic how Marcotte so closely resembles what she despises: An unattractive male
Amanda Marcotte hates “Game”, which is really just applied evolutionary and social psychology, because it attacks the foundational premises of her ideology. Its also why she, and most feminists, hate evolutionary psychology.
Loathe to agree with her but the “be (more) attractive” thing is somewhat correct. It’s a lie that women are barely visual creatures. Don’t know who made it up but it’s still a fib. So now you have all these out of shape guys with good characters and morals thinking that alone will suffice and get a foot in the door for them. Dude no. Go to the gym and learn Game; you already have a pretty cool foundation to build on. The irony is that Marcotte would probably hate them even more then for conforming to societal perceptions of male beauty (oppresion!!!!) and learning Game (inherently misogynistic obv). Can’t really win with her.
If beta means a guy who is generally against liaising with bottomfeeder sluts and commitment minded, the only people that will hate on him are the sluts that he excludes and their cad buddies. Those are the *only* people that I hear repeatedly referring to betas as sociopathic or genetically inferior. Besides, it’s 2011. Beta boy is better adapted to his environment than either of them.
Beta + alpha hybrid > alpha.
On a side note Sue – how come you and Marcotte have so much beef? Do you know each other in real life? O_o
@Dogsquat
Don’t you mean whining and dining?
Now I know what people mean when they say they’re glad they weren’t drinking something when they came across something funny on the computer . . .
Heh. Jess, I think your joke just blew by everyone’s head here. XD
Also, Susan, I think part of the problem here is that what Marcotte is referring to, a Nice Guy, is not an actually man who is nice. She is referring to a particular archetype of person who only thinks he’s nice. This is the orginal diatribe on the matter: http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/niceguys/nice2.shtml
And, honestly, this world of sexual economics you support makes me so sad. It’s so cold and dehumanizing. I don’t understand it. I feel bad for all of you! I really do! I feel bad for anyone who has sex for any other reason then they unabashedly and enthusiastically want it! And using sex as a tool to get a man to commit to me is ridiculous! Why would I want a man to commit to me if he’s only doing it for sexual access?
I mean, sex and love can be so beautiful! Difficult, yes, but beautiful! Glorious! Why make it a competition? Shouldn’t we be encouraging people to have sex when it feels right, and to fall in love when it feels right? And shouldn’t we be encouraging women to have have sex, or not have sex if they want to? Hook-up culture be damned! And if a man is holding a relationship hostage based on her fucking him, then clearly he’s not really into her enough. And so it dosen’t matter weather or not she sleeps with him. Well, only in so much as it effects her. So if she likes sex for sex’s sake she might as well, and then move on and find someone else who will lover her for her. And if she dosen’t, then just move on.
Bah. And I think that pretty much summarizes my entire problem with you, Susan Walsh.
And, in conclusion, everything can be fixed by loving and accepting yourself and the world. =D
Ugh. And now I’ve finished reading Marcotte’s article, and you’ve ignored most of the substance and nuance of it. This is another reason I don’t like you, Susan. You’re intellectually dishonest, but you pretend really hard to take criticism and “research” oh so seriously.
Isabel,
THANK YOU. I’ve started to think that my type was rare, the woman who notices a guy’s appearance first and foremost. I consider myself a very visual person.
Beta + alpha hybrid > alpha: I agree
You know what’s funny though, Roissy/Heartiste/whoeverheisnow has a post up titled Game Trumps Looks lol.
Sarah October 1, 2011 at 8:29 am
Heh. Jess, I think your joke just blew by everyone’s head here. XD
Thanks Sarah, nice to see someone on the ball there…Jx
they get their esteem off being with all of these wonnderful men. It’s more of a kept woman’s mindset than a liberated one
The sex pozzies are in a shit storm of denial about this fact. Yet, these women actually DEMAND approval! As if anyone actually gives a rats ass. They need this approval because they feel like shit about what they have gotten themselves into. They’ve caved to the patriarchy by sucking on its cock; by being enslaved by their biology rather than empowered by their deeds. Birth control pills, so-called “liburation” and sucking up to the media have trapped these gullible fools in a cycle with no exit.
<i>You know what’s funny though, Roissy/Heartiste/whoeverheisnow has a post up titled Game Trumps Looks lol.</i>
I don’t think there are very many guys who really believe in the old saw “looks don’t matter for a guy”. Most guys will have been disabused by that fairly early-on in life, really. But it nevertheless remains the case that looks are not really sufficient for a guy. We’ve all known above average looking guys who didn’t do more than average or slightly below average with women — it’s because they lacked Game (by contrast there aren’t very many above average attractiveness women who have difficulty attracting men). At the same time we’ve all known guys who were average looking at best but who were quite dominant and punched well above their weight in terms of success with women (relative to their looks). Now they probably wouldn’t have done well with Renee or Isabel, but there seem to be plenty of women out there who do stress persona/dominance/Game over pure looks. That doesn’t mean “looks don’t matter for a guy”. The guy who is socially dominant/persona/Game who is also above average looking has the best position of all, of course. But for guys it’s a part of the bag of tricks — it enhances the overall position, but isn’t sufficient in itself (for most women at least) to generate sustained attraction.
Of course, one may ask “well, why aren’t more men hitting the gym and learning Game if they know this”? The answer varies, but a lot of guys just aren’t that motivated. A fairy large number of guys in their early and mid 20s has de facto dropped out of the market altogether in favor of other pursuits (hanging with bros, hobbies, career, video games, etc.) due to having experienced a good deal of failure in the early years (HS and college) when the market is at its most raw brutality, I think. A lot of these guys step back into the market in their later 20s — most do, really.
There is NO “crushing weight of equality” but these Marcotte Minions have a gleeful fantasy that its true and are happy to know that men are somehow struggling with it. What a bunch of fringe cult narcissists. These bitches really do want to take away all the good feelings men have when women present a certain way….the way these feminists abhor.
IMO excluding radfems and entitled princesses i believe this is something deeply ingrained into women by 40 years of pro-feminism education and is present in all women in a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual. Sadly the only way to deal with it is to just ignore it and go your own way and let the woman (or women) decide if she (they) stick with you or not, talking them out of it will not work at all 99% of the time even if they are aware of red pill knowledge, it’s just that ingrained into them, even for well meaning ones it’s really hard to see things from a man’s perspective.
Then stick around and ask others, from my time at HUS someone will always step in and try to provide clarification or at least a link to help.
*IMO excluding radfems and entitled princesses (where it’s found in intolerable levels)
Visual plus scent for me. All other attributes are just as important, of course, but there is a time and place for everything. It just so happens that that is the most prominent attribute in the beginning… at least before you get to know each other. As for Roissy’s post, that advice comes across as little more than covert sabotage in my eyes. Just being in good shape improves your odds threefold, especially in our (increasingly) overweight society. Meh, I just made that figure up but I’m pretty sure it has some statistical relevance somewhere. In any case, it’s incredibly hypocritical for PUAs to complain about the state of the modern American woman in comparison to , say, Colombian women when they can’t even be arsed to look after themselves.
I mean, come on. Why ever not? No one is talking in binary absolutes. It matters some to most. Saying it doesn’t matter at all to all is just arrogant.
Men don’t even have to worry about losing their boobs for Pete’s sake. And being athletic makes their faces look infinitely more masculine! Masculine = attractive according to most Gamesters. Aaaaand not to mention the overall health benefits + rise in testosterone and confidence levels. So what gives? If I was a guy, I’d sooner pay £30 a month for a gym membership than pay in excess of £500 for e-books, summits, bootcamps, seminars and the like. And *then* try my luck with other aspects of Game. Though I read that is referred to as inner game? Dunno. ¬_¬
@ Sarah
Derp. That’s the whole point of this blog.
“Isabel,
THANK YOU. I’ve started to think that my type was rare, the woman who notices a guy’s appearance first and foremost. I consider myself a very visual person.
You know what’s funny though, Roissy/Heartiste/whoeverheisnow has a post up titled Game Trumps Looks lol.”
Game does trump looks, i can totally believe you are far more attracted to a fairly athletic man than to a chubby one, but if the jock in question acts like a supplicant gamma/delta after getting that initial attraction, in 90% of the cases he will lose it or get dumped if he had managed to get into a relationship, at best he will devolve into a relationship were he constantly has the losing position.
Shoddy logic. Just because I’d be turned be off by Dude A’s chronic desperation doesn’t mean I’ll start liking Dude B with Game in the future. If I had to choose between the two, I’d forfeit the opportunity simply because there is a lack of attraction to BOTH. Why is that so alien?
I don’t think it’s alien — it just reflects Susan’s picture in the main post, really.
Feel free to elaborate. That would only be accurately reflective if you knew anything about me beyond my name being Isabel.
As someone that tried just about every crazy diet out there i can say the problem it’s not trying stuff (diets, going to the gym, yada yada), the problem is finding stuff that works beyond the short term AND can be sustained through time.
Only until recently i found the right info (thanks to Johnny Milfquest, Dogsquat and Yohami for pointing me in the right direction) and managed to get results, but it took me reading 3 books and coming up with plan from that info and organizing it to fit it into my life to do that. Now think about the people doing the same but with the wrong info or even half truths, i know exactly what that is because i went through that with all sorts of plans and diets and the ones that worked the best took a lot of time or drastic measures and couldn’t keep up with them and ended up losing 90% of results.
In the age of information the problem is not finding info, the problem is finding the right info.
@Isabel: I think you’re missing things from a guy perspective, you assume you’ll see things clearly before getting in a relationship with guy A (athletic) or B(chubby), in reality what happens from an average man’s perspective is that he gets the relationship for unwittingly acting/displaying alpha behavior but once in the relationship he feels happy and coupled with the same 40 year pro-women education he starts acting beta in order to please her and show he isn’t a jerk and values what he’s got just as he’s been taught, the irony is that doing that is precisely what kills the relationship and leaves him dumbfounded as to what went wrong.
See the problem? women avoid guy B because they’re not attracted to him, but even if they get with guy A due to his looks it’s just a matter of time before things result into what i described in the earlier post, unless of course the man in question is full alpha/player/cad/asshole but then that’s when we hear women complain about jerk boyfriends.
I still don’t understand the Valenti hate. She’s moderate as far as feminists go, and she no longer holds her prestigious position at Feministing.
No problem, just for you and your little group of patriarchy-cock addicts. Should we also get over being 11th, 24th, 38th? Of course. Because you NEED us. If not, none of this bullshit from feminists would be stated at all. This is so obvious. The greatest fear these idiots have is men walking, and not on ManWalks.
@ Blues
Why would you try a “crazy” diet, though? I don’t get why people make this into some super complicated science. Eat a clean diet, exercise regularly and tailor for gains. AND KEEP AT THIS FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIVE DAMN IT. That’s like a girl saying she flopped on Atkins once and therefore surmised that taking an interest in your diet just ain’t all that productive. The best info, in this case, is the simplest info and the one that’s been drummed into our heads by the medical community since day one.
If the point of Game is to be as attractive to women as possible as well as being the best version of yourself, then it follows that looking after your body is the best course of action, no? If not to slay ladies then at least for your own wellbeing. The time excuse is not very convincing either tbh. At most you would be spending 6-7 hours a week in the gym if you split effectively seeing as rest and diet are the most crucial elements. That’s what, two novels worth? Three films and half an episode of Family Guy? Most of us spend more than that browsing the internet. Good things take time and effort anyway. =/
What’s the guy perspective then?
Not all beta traits were created equal. That’s the issue. Some qualities are hot, some are meh and some are bloody annoying. Women fawn over men who are masculine and assured but still have a (hidden) gooey soft core and generally pro-commitment. There’s obviously a reason why 99% chick flicks and romance novels end in the same achingly predictable way with the tough guy becoming all lovey dovey. Women do not, however, fawn over men who are highly insecure, supplicating and desperate sycophants. Who would? But both are still beta traits.
Just as guys will like a girl who is playful but not super competitive, feisty but not a genocidal ballbuster and emotionally expressive but not a histrionic mess. Etc etc. All in moderation imo. That’s why I dislike silly labels like beta and alpha because people can’t even decide on a universal, static definition.
DISCLAIMER: NiceGuy(TM) is a registered trademark of Amanda Marcotte and Feminism Inc. Brand names are the trademarks of their respective owners. No infringement is intended, either express or implied. Reference to NiceGuy (TM) is used to avoid confusion with other potentially similar terms.
NOTE: Keep in mind that Marcotte was the erstwhile blogger and/or internet coordinator for the 2008 John Edwards presidential campaign. Marcotte was fired from that position for referring online to the Immaculate Conception as the Virgin Mary being impregnated with the “hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit.” Marcotte resigned from the campaign after public outcries from Roman Catholic groups, but did not issue any public apologies. The interwebs should never, ever let Marcotte live that down. Vulgar and profane in the extreme, whether or not you are Christian.
Marcotte wasn’t fired from the Edwards campaign. She quit amid the public pressure and controversy following her profane and vulgar “hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit” online comment.
Dear Jess and Sarah, let me put this as simply as I can. Let’s say I’m dating Jimmy, James likes me a lot, he thinks I’m pretty, fun to hang around, likes when I bake him cookies and play with his hair. He also loves that I dress and behave in a very femenine way. Now, James knows that I’ve never been with another guy before, and so he would have to settle for a couple of months with making out and/or other things that do not include actual P in V sex.
Now let’s say that James happens to meet Jess or Sarah, who happen to flirt with him and signal that they’re the kind of type that would put out by the third date. James may like me a lot, but depending on his age (if he’s 19 just like me this is probably a sure one) or his previous sexual experience or his sex drive, he will probably dump me because he wants sex.
Now, you may go on and say, good for you, he didn’t like you that much anyway, is a win win situation… No it’s not, on other times it would have been much more harder for him to get sex out of a monogamous relationship, but nowadays, it doesn’t really matter how good of a catch you are because you require his effort in some way for him to get something he could get for minimal input somewhere else.
Am I making myself clear? Or wil promiscuous women keep using the “it’s not my fault because he didn’t really like you anyways” defense?
It’s fairly simple: women generally want men who are higher than they are on the scale, rather than their peers, and the market reflects that. It’s therefore to be understood that guys profit when they set themselves up to be perceived to be in that higher rung — which involves a combination of Game and appearance, to be certain (that is always the “ideal mix”). The point is that these guys who get better looking physically and learn Game then become the male equivalent of 7-8+, while before they did that they were, maybe a 5-6. A woman who is a 6 herself, however, isn’t generally attracted to a male 6 (because he’s got some flawed combination of not enough alpha/too much beta/appearance problems) that rank him down the pole –> she’s attracted to the male 8s who have the total package. If the guy who is a 6 works out and learns Game and so on, he then is no longer a 6 –> he is not an “improved 6″, he simply moves up the scale. The woman who was his peer, however, when he was a 6 (she is not an HB8, but a 6) was not attracted to him because of the flaws that made him a 6, and her answer for him is “you should be more like an 8″ (i.e., “be more attractive”) because those are the men (i.e., higher than her own SMV rank) whom she finds attractive.
Now, again, that is good advice, as a practical matter for a guy, because it is the way the current market works — a guy *does* profit from making himself as close to a male 8+ as he can, using the gym and diet and Game and what have you, because a lot of women who themselves are female 6s nevertheless want a man who is a male 8.
Now, mind you, this isn’t addressing you personally and specifically. As you point out, I have no idea about you beyond what you have revealed here. You very well may be an HB8 who of course would not have a peer SMV rank with a male 6. But if a woman who is more like a female 6 wants her SMV peer 6s to be more like male 8s (“be more attractive”), that’s quite amply illustrated by Susan’s chart in the top post.
Haven’t read all the comments yet, so, pardons if someone’s already said this.
@Yohami:
Someone once told me that the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. I suspect what betas are doing is reacting to the indifference they see women have about them. They’re reacting to being invisible, not to being “hated”. Marcotte doesn’t think she’s “hating” betas, and probably isn’t. She doesn’t realize that what she is doing is worse.
I still don’t understand the Valenti hate. She’s moderate as far as feminists go, and she no longer holds her prestigious position at Feministing.
Prestigious? Yeah ok. Here is just some of her moderate spewing:
http://jessicavalenti.com/2010/08/03/slut-shaming-and-misogyny-as-traffic-bait/
Here is some angry feminist commentary:
Awww, but that photo actually makes you look, well, sort of…ok. Here, put this one in your pipe and smoke it! She is the perfect voice and look of feminism.
Am I making myself clear? Or wil promiscuous women keep using the “it’s not my fault because he didn’t really like you anyways” defense?
You’re clear. But promiscuous women have a constantly growing pile of excuses to draw from and there is always the excuse du jour. The two-faced self serving inconsistencies are astounding and all the fun is in calling them out on the whole charade. A promiscuous woman has a weapon for a vagina.
Because no diet ever worked, or if it did it couldn’t be sustained in the long term which lead to weight rebounds. I also tried eating healthy and exercising (45 minutes of jogging 3 times a week) but even if it did give me some health benefits i lost little to no weight. As for time, the best i did once was to jog 7 days a week 45 minutes twice a day while reducing carbs drastically, it worked well (lost 45 pounds) but i couldn’t sustain it for long (because i did it over 3 months over a vacation period), yes 90 minutes a day may not seem like much to you but try doing it AND keeping it through time and then come back and talk to me.
What i’ve learned from one of the books i read is that everyone is different, there is no one size fits all for fitness but there is a starting baseline for all and then you have tweak to see what works for you and from experience make discover your own fat loss formula, but for that you need at least some guidelines which is what is hard to get because there is so much info out there.
And the info most doctors/training specialist tout is that you should not skip meals, yet fasting is one of the things i’m doing that’s giving me results. I go back to my point the problem is not finding info, the problem is finding the right info, one tailored to your needs and resources and not a “one size fits all” that most experts or average people give. Also just because it works for people with natural tendency to stay lean but on a bad diet doesn’t mean it will work on people that tend to gain fat even if they are on a good diet.
The paragraph you quoted is the average guy perspective. He loses no matter what, unless he becomes an asshole or discovers game and gets how women’s minds really work (and even then he needs to be skilled to apply it).
What beta traits a man has is irrelevant, as even a guy with 10% alpha beats a guy with 100% of the best beta traits, even to pro-commitment women. Even if that is not the case those are the exceptions not the rule.
Yes, because it’s easier to sell a pretty lie than a harsh truth, deny it all you want, reality still proves how things really work despite how much women say about the opposite.
A lot of women need to moderate their cad intake then.
Maybe, yet it’s once men get those “silly labels” that they can actually start improving themselves.
guavaberry
of course the point you make is vey easy to understand.
but the extrapolations have problems:
1. do we have a rule saying all girls can only put out out at date 7- to even up the playing field?
what if some girls wanna wait longer- what if girls wanna put out on the 1st date?
are they not free to do as they wish?
2. the ‘he didn’t like you enough” has validity. If he did he could have waited. In theses situations people weigh up the pros and cons and make their choice. there are guys that will wait and those who won’t. same for girls.
personally, once I dispensed with my catholic guilt baloney, I didn’t mess around. If I was physically attracted to somebody I didn’t delay physical intimacy- I really didn’t see the point- I always felt life was too short and that the best things in life were free. I never two timed anyone though or led anyone on. I was always very straight with people and like to be treated that way myself. I always felt playing tactics or games was tiresome and silly. And I was always fastidious about safe sex- I was one of those girls that carried condoms (as prescribe by government adverts at the time).
Marcotte’s rant and Susan’s takedown of it bring several things to mind. I feel like a broken record, making some of the same points over and over, but here goes.
1. Let me riff a little more on Susan’s point that Marcotte and her followers disdain the idea of the sexual marketplace and sexual economics. The fact is that there were rules and conventions in place before the Pill, automation and feminism. Those rules have been discarded. Marcotte argues there should be no rules; that men and women should just have sex when, where and how they want. What the Marcottians fail to acknowledge is that if one system is abolished, another one arises to fill the void and take its place. New systems arise whether it was intended or desired.
2. It’s denying reality not to apply economic models to human behavior. Economics and political theories always apply where (mostly) rational actors work for, against or in concert with or in competition with one another to allocate resources. Whether we like it or not, or realize it or not, male-female relationships and the things that go with them (companionship, money, sexual congress and satisfaction, support of spouse and children) are resources which are exchanged for things individuals want, or value. Individuals offer what they have to others in the hopes of gaining something in return.
Just as in pure monetary economics, there is competition (alpha dominance vs. beta “comfort”; hot women vs. less good looking women). There are market controls (fear of pregnancy, fear of STDs, MGTOW. women’s aging/hitting the Wall, individuals delaying marriage.) There are market stimuli (the Pill, Game) There are resources, and everyone implicitly recognizes those resources are finite. Some have more to work with than others. Some have more resources, some fewer. Some do better in the market. Some do worse. Some use timing to their advantage. Some sell too soon, some wait too long to sell. Some don’t even understand what resources they have.
3. It’s pretty clear by now that feminists and feminism intended this system to operate exactly the way it operates now: It’s a free for all feeding frenzy smorgasbord for the women who want to sleep around. They can sex up top dog alphas. Women who want to sleep with top dog men can do so if they put out early and often. Unattractive betas lose out but women did not want to sleep with them anyway. When it was discovered that women who divorced their unattractive beta husbands could not get enough money to live on, they demanded and got a new legal framework that allows women to sleep with the alphas and coopt betas to support. them.
The new system feminists erected was put in place quietly and secretly. Women were in the know. I suspect the natural dominant alpha types who were swimming in women figured it out first, followed by men left to their own devices as boys and young men. Next to decipher the system were disaffected male victims of divorce, stripped of their assets and struggling to figure out what went wrong.
The last in the know, and most of whom still don’t know, are the longsuffering betas. They still believe the old rules of “be nice, be yourself” apply because it’s been pounded into their heads for decades. But these betas are starting to ask questions, and are slowly getting with the program. This is why Marcottians are getting increasingly shrill about attacking betas. Feminists worst nightmares are coming true as betas are slowing unraveling all this.
Ultimately, this is all about power for Marcotte. The Marcottians fret over this because it means loss of power. Men are already not marrying and are instead entering sexual relationships without marriage. Many men have LTRs or a series of STRs. More and more are withholding the pinnacle of investment and commitment — marriage — because feminism removed all of its advantages for men. Men are reclaiming their power in the SMP, and the Marcottians hate this. So they concoct false arguments such as ”NiceGuy(TM)” and “NiceGuys (TM) are really evil alpha wannabes who fake being nice so they can try to get laid”. They shriek “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” by saying ”you can’t apply economic models to intimate relationships” and “there is no sexual marketplace”.
The facade is crashing down all around Marcotte and her followers, and they stand around fiddling while Rome burns. Well, no, actually, some of her followers are probably dropping their panties for the latest cad flavor of the month while honestly being completely unable to figure out why this 14th cad they’ve bedded won’t put rings on their fingers.
Problem is women have unreal expectations, never define their own and go by what other women think. Yet they not only are losing quality men to women who have a lick of common sense, they’re losing out to online porn. Once men get over others shaming them from watching porn or buying sex, your status as women goes down so many notches and you don’t even know it.
I do wonder how much of this is projected self hate. What would be female equivalent of an Alpha man? A hot, feminine, modest and chaste woman. Does Amanda or the Typical feminist fits that description?
I consider myself a nerd lover and a nerd myself likes loves likes if they hate beta males they hate themselves too,YMMV.
Jim you hit the nail on the head twice. This whole equality crap has lead to two effects women never asked for and hate like hell:
1 – Men have realised equality was just about killing the female role and its all demands while maintaining the male role and its demands: and men opted to just stop giving women attention rather put up with the bullshit.
2 – Alternatives in terms of just living and enjoying your life as a male have increased alot and has diminished the value of a woman in your life. Placating us with shitty meaningsless sex? Fuck it, why bother. Friend-zone us? Fuck it, why bother.
So in the end I don’t really get what the “threat” is from people (male and female alike) that discuss their behaviour and self-harming effect on their SMP. Unless of course you realise they do want your attention just so they can shit on it and don’t want to lose that wonderfully privilegied position as a gender.
@ Brendan
Never said I’m against assortative mating. What’s worth pointing out is though, in the seconds before he approaches, an overweight 5 with super tight game still LOOKS like a 5 to everyone in the vicinity until he opens his mouth. Depending on the girl in question and how well he talks, he can stay a 5 or rise up to an 8. Possibly. There is still a chance he’ll got shot down. If this guy then decides to up his mentality and start working out, he becomes idk, a 7 and his chances of being rejected decrease. Wasn’t it Mystery with only a 10% success rate? Most guys aren’t even anywhere near that dude in terms of ability so telling them to forgo appearance is RIDICULOUS in the extreme.
Well, OF COURSE it would lead to rebounds because you quit and went back to your previous bad diet. Man alive, listen to yourself… O_o
Cardio is ineffective on its own for definition. Especially something as mild as jogging and *especially* doing 90 mins a day every day. You could have done a far more intensive workout (i.e. HIIT) coupled with freeweights to get far better progress in less time. A cabbage soup diet will eventually fail obviously but cutting out fatty rubbish and eating regular protein-rich meals is within the reach of every Joe Public. And by fasting, I hope you mean not eating anything for days at a time and not the expected calorie deficit that would come about as a result of not eating for half a day and doing exercise. If the latter, then no wonder you lost progress. Anyway, let’s drop the diet thing and get back to bickering about betas. This is waaaaay OT and I don’t want to be near Susan’s warpath after she reads Sarah’s comment. =O
Clearly. Too bad a guy with 70% alpha traits and 30% attractive beta traits cleans up every damn bint in the house. Extremes aren’t attractive to anyone.
You have no leg to stand on if you have ever taken part in casual sex, support P&D or Dark Game or wish to have casual sex in the future. Also, considering what I said, this quip is astoundingly irrelevant and random.
PS: What does the HB stand for in ‘HB6′?
HB=hot babe, though it doesn’t really apply if the woman is a 6.
She dismisses them as losers who can’t get laid, and has offered such sage advice as “Be more attractive.”
Based on pictures I’ve seen of her, perhaps she should take her own advice.
I don’t disagree with that, as I said. However, it’s also true that looks are not sufficient. Overall, working on his appearance is very good advice in today’s competitive market, no question — it will improve results in an absolute sense. But it isn’t enough. Due to the nature of female attraction, men need to work on several things at once in order to really improve their chances.
But the point is that assortative mating isn’t really possible, in the SMV sense, in today’s market. Men need to be +2 or so in SMV rank to be attractive — not really assortative mating (like with like), but hypergamy.
Hot Babe. Generally only applied to women who are ~8+ as in “HB8″ and so on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it applied to a 6, because a 6 is in the mid-pack, and not at the HB level.
Here’s the thing, for a woman jogging may not be a big deal, now for a guy that was over 200 pounds? mild is not how i’d describe it. You’re right about mixing weights but again, i did not have that info until recently. As for fasting it’s a small 24 hour periods of fasting once a week.
Clearly you have not seen how many women chase over and over guys with 95% alpha traits (cads, assholes, players, yada yada). Also good luck extracting commitment from a guy with 70% alpha traits as someone like that has enough options.
Well then i do have a leg to stand on as i’m not looking for casual sex, P&D and Dark Game
Agreed.
I’ve noticed that out in the Real world, most people, whatever their social or political leanings, are uncomfortable discussing male sexual frustration. The possible exception being those frustrated guys themselves, and I’d say it’s only the anonymity of the internet which allows them to discuss it.
In Real Life mixed gender groups seldom if ever discuss the various frustrations with the other gender that both men and women experience, No one wants to poison the well, so to speak. On the web, people feel ‘protected’ by their anonymity, and spill their guts.
For whatever reason, Marcotte and her ilk want to discourage frustrated men from voicing and articulating their frustrations. The whole NiceGuy(TM) thing is just an attempt by Marcotte et al to shout down guys who voice the frustration that she doesn’t want expressed.
Come to think of it, maybe i should give casual sex a second look, the more i see out there the more i see it’s few the women that give a damn about commitment without being pressured by getting close to the The Wall/baby rabies. Going out of my way to find them has been terribly unproductive so far, hell now that i think of it might even be a better strategy to make them come to me simply by having higher pre-selection. Gonna have to think about that some more.
Btw, Susan, one of the things that I’ve always found funny about the sex pozzies like Marcotte is that while they may bash Nice Guys, they’re also horrified and enraged by anyone pointing out that they’re turned on by dominance. They want to keep throwing themselves at alphas, of course, but they don’t want anyone to point out that their so-called “empowerment” actually consists of sexually submitting to jerky dominant guys. Marcotte may tell guys to “be more attractive”, but she’d never admit that “more attractive” = “more dominant”. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Btw, this leads me to a related point, which is that the first two highlights of female sexuality you provided (1. Culture influences female sexuality, but not male sexuality. and 2. Females are attracted to socially dominant males.) are in fact related. The reason that female sexuality is more influenced by culture is precisely that females are intrinsically more submissive and attracted to dominance and leadership then men, and hence their behavior and beliefs are more malleable than men’s!
So all these women who buy into the culture’s messages about “empowerment” and so forth, and change their behavior for the sluttier accordingly, are merely demonstrating the female propensity for suggestibility, submission, and deferral to the more dominant. Women, as a group, generally seek to be led and to take their cues from others, even when those others feed them messages about empowerment to make them believe they’re doing the opposite.
For whatever reason, Marcotte and her ilk want to discourage frustrated men from voicing and articulating their frustrations. The whole NiceGuy(TM) thing is just an attempt by Marcotte et al to shout down guys who voice the frustration that she doesn’t want expressed.
Well, what are the negative results for Marcotte and her ilk if the majority of men voiced their frustrations in the mainstream media, not limited to the NY Post? For one, it may come across as an attack on the feminists influence of women. Lucky, very lucky, for feminists that men have never organized on a large scale against feminism. But over matters of taking away sex AND women worthy for marriage, that day may come and soon. Its now become personal and there’s gonna be a score to settle with these assholes.
one of the things that I’ve always found funny about the sex pozzies like Marcotte is that while they may bash Nice Guys, they’re also horrified and enraged by anyone pointing out that they’re turned on by dominance. They want to keep throwing themselves at alphas, of course, but they don’t want anyone to point out that their so-called “empowerment” actually consists of sexually submitting to jerky dominant guys. Marcotte may tell guys to “be more attractive”, but she’d never admit that “more attractive” = “more dominant”. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
This is precisely why anyone claiming to be sex pozzy is an ignorant self serving fool or just an obtuse asshole. The entire foundation is suspect and the public will see that more and more. Its entirely about a bunch of spoiled entitled pleasure seekers who dont want any infringement on their current cock hopping party or future marriage prospects. This has now become so transparent its laughable and even the balance redressers here are stifled for loss of words that even make sense to themselves. The ship is sinking fast and the bailers are pretty much done.
@jess
Whew, I’m so relieved. You got me!
@deti
Excellent summary. I fully agree, but would like to add some important detail:
They can sex up top dog alphas. Women who want to sleep with top dog men can do so if they put out early and often.
No, they can`t. That’s where the reports of nuclear rejections stem from. The great evil genius of people like Roissy lies not in converting real betas intos alphas (referring to vox’s scale), betas are in fact the most resistant to the whole idea of game, but deltas and omegas. Those deltas and omegas are what Marcotte refers to when she says:
“NiceGuys (TM) are really evil alpha wannabes who fake being nice so they can try to get laid”
She’s basically confirming that game works, the silly twat.
Thanks Brendan and Jesus.
@ Blues
Attractive beta traits are generally things like being family oriented, bookish, pro-commitment etc. I already said that particular archetype has those traits so of course he is going to want to commit *eventually*. The catch is that he’ll only commit to the cream of the crop by virtue of having so many options. Therein lies the problem for many a sex positive and Bridget Jones obsessive.
Ah well. In that case 45 lbs lost from 200 is incredibly impressive. I’d recommend BB.com if I may. It’s teeming with braindead gym dolts but they are very efficient at demolishing nutrition myths and assorted MSM lies. May as well go all the way with the red pill!
Haha whoops. My bad.
Feminism skewed, maximized and “equalized” women’s limited resources to permit more the greatest return on their one monopoly resource: Sex. Feminism does so by
1. controlling terms of the debate through political correctness, shaming language, invention of terms like “date rape” and “sex-positivism”
2. permitting women to move much farther upmarket for alphas than under assortative mating
3. removing constraints on and consequences for negative and destructive female behavior and shaming the whole of society into going along with the free for all
Admittedly, hotter women had more power in the assortative mating market. They got the best, sexiest men who outearned and outranked beta. The lower ranked women were “stuck” with the lower ranked, unsexy betas. Feminism sought to give the lower ranked women, the Marcottes and Valentis of the world, more power and more access to the sexy men, the money, and the resources.
In truth this is all about power. Marcotte knows that as the manosphere gains traction and people like Susan keep writing, her side loses power and influence.
Marcotte and her ilk are terrified of Game. Their biggest fear is to wake up with a hangover and a beta man in their beds.
http://theprivateman.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/amanda-marcotte-urges-men-to-learn-game/
@Jesus, @Yohami
The debate around the terminology for beta is ongoing. Vox’s scheme is quite helpful, but it’s not useful if too few use it. I think what is relevant here, though, is that Marcotte is not complaining that beta males don’t do it for her sexually. Her angle is political, clearly. She’s targeting men with Game, specifically, and regularly refers to them as losers sitting in a dark basement playing WOW. I’m sure she was squarely on the side of Alyssa B. when she dissed her date for being awesome at Magic. Her beef, or what I perceive as her fear, has to be about more that what women find attractive. I believe that she fears the rise of the beta male, the leveling of the playing field, because those men will judge promiscuity more harshly on average, and will cause a retrenchment of the Sexual Revolution. I don’t believe that if all guys got Game they’d all be players. Most of them would be content to be in relationships, be in love, etc. Their increasing ability to be choosy does not bode well for feminism.
You’re right! This is exactly right! If she buys into the evolution of sexuality as we currently understand it, then women and men are such different creatures her justification for her whole life’s work falls apart. Well then, she’s got her finger in the dyke (OMG that is the best double entendre I’ve ever seen) because the flood of scientific research cannot be stopped for very long by feminists. She regularly talks about pseudoscience, junk science, etc., but that now means she’s laughing at researchers from the world’s best universities.
Their increasing ability to be choosy does not bode well for [the hidden power dynamics of] feminism.
If it were about equality, wouldn’t feminist have to be welcoming of this male emancipation? Rhetorical question.
Susan, you hit the nail squarely on the head. That’s what’s really going on. It’s not about the greek alphabet, it’s about the fear of the rise of male power. Because, as we all know, this:
Feminism sought to give the lower ranked women, the Marcottes and Valentis of the world, more power and more access to the sexy men, the money, and the resources.
hasn’t really worked out. (yet, as Marcotte undoubtedly thinks).
@Isabel
No, not at all. I pissed off the feminist establishment a while back with some posts, especially one about the sluthood of Jaclyn Friedman. They took to tweeting all about it, coming here and having fits, etc. As HUS has gained awareness and a certain notoriety among feminists, their commenters mention me (in a negative light) so like it or not, Amanda M. finds me up in her grille, haha. I know she is particularly sensitive about being called masculine or unattractive, she has complained about it to me. Hence, the title of this post. I couldn’t resist.
@Sarah
That archetype was created by feminists. It’s incredibly harsh and rude. I have never met a single man who meets that description. It’s inflammatory, a bogeyman created by man-haters. That’s all.
Have everyone seen this comic yet?
The left (rightfully) mocks the right for refusing the accept the scientific truth of evolution, global warming, and vaccines. But liberals are just as prone to defy science in areas like evolution psychology, genetically modified crops, and nuclear power.
The three bogeymen of feminism: Nice Guys®, “white dudes”, and MRA’s.
@Sarah
Awww, aren’t you sweet. You needn’t worry though, you know why? Because you’re the one having sex without emotional intimacy. Even bonobos have more emotional intimacy during sex than you do. The sex you prefer is literally de-human-izing.
Those who view sex as a bonding, emotional, joyous act, even a sacred act, have something you do not.
All human behavior may be examined through the lens of science. You just don’t like what the science says about women and sex, because you don’t recognize yourself in the description of female sexuality. You are in possession of a sexuality much more male in its characteristics. That unnerves you, and I can understand why.
Your thinking is such a tangled skein of nonsense, but I’ll spell it out for you:
There is so much competition inherent in the sexual act. Sperm compete to reach the egg. Women compete for desirable men. Men compete with one another for beautiful women. The mating dance, itself, which is so exciting, has an element of conflict inherent in it. Conflict produces sexual tension.
Casual sex with a stranger is no better, and not much different, than you at home with your Rabbit and your anonymous hookup partner at home with his Fleshlight.
For the overhwhelming majority of women – probably 90% or more, casual sex does not feel right. I’m encouraging women to have sex that feels right, and avoid sex that does not feel right. Falling in love does not require encouragement or instruction. It’s a complicated process borne of many factors. The women most likely to fall in love with the wrong men are women having casual sex. They catch feelings that have no chance of being reciprocated.
Should we encourage women to eat a chocolate cake in one sitting if they want to? Or eat at McDonald’s three times a day if it tastes good? Or drink heavily during pregnancy if they want to? Or abandon their children and husband because they are bored and want to?
Doing something just because you want to, without consideration of its effect on your own health and the health of others, is pure selfish hedonism.
You’ve just described what many of you and your sisters in sluthood are experiencing and will continue to experience. The sexual double standard has not been weakened one iota by feminism or the Sexual Revolution. You cannot shove your dogma down the throats of men. They do not want to marry sluts, they do not wants sluts as the mother of their children. Sluts make very, very risky long-term partners for many reasons.
This calls to mind another “archetype” – the aging spinster with many cats.
Susan Walsh October 1, 2011 at 2:17 pm
@jess
Whew, I’m so relieved. You got me!
Well at least 2 people got the joke…. I’m actually chuffed my science teachers did actually make something stick in my head
How so? What did I miss? I believe that I have reflected her views perfectly. For the record, she has spoken out many times about nice guys, at the Good Men Project, in her interview with National Review, and at Slate in responding to the Kay Hymowitz article in the WSJ about the decline of men. It’s obvious you don’t even know what Marcotte believes.
Let’s have it then. What’s your beef? You are stomping and sulking because feminism is being exposed for its incredible misandry. What do you believe the substance of Marcotte’s article says? (As for nuance, there isn’t any, she isn’t intelligent enough or a good enough writer for that).
Jess,
I got the joke, but nobody called on me to explain it. I had my hand raised over here and everything.
@deti
Marcotte also had a scandal when she wrote a book and used racist illustrations. Even her fellow feminists took cover and some attacked:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/04/25/i-guess-its-a-jungle-in-here-too-huh/
I remember I used to think that Marcotte was a good writer. Then one day I read an opinion piece on the Catholic Church and I thought to myself “Who wrote this piece of shit?”. Then I saw the byline at the very bottom of the article.
@Abbot
The funniest thing about that photo was that it was Friedman’s current pic on Twitter. It was literally the first pic I saw of her so I just grabbed it. I thought it was hilarious that everyone, including her, seemed unaware of that. She obviously liked it, so I have no idea why she was complaining.
The one you posted is obviously distorted by being pulled wide – that’s not fair.
Susan: “Casual sex with a stranger is no better, and not much different, than you at home with your Rabbit and your anonymous hookup partner at home with his Fleshlight.”
If that were true, no one would bother with casual sex. I suppose you think sitting at home listening to your MP3′s is no different than going to see a live band.
Marcotte and her ilk like to say that the concept of “slut” has little meaning if there is no consensus as to the exact number of bangs needed to cross the line.
She would not like my answer but here goes: A lot depends on a womans looks. A true hottie is going to have constant offers from even the most desirable guys. As the years go by, things might happen. Girls have needs. Most guys understand this on some level. The kind of bonding that happens with lower numbers is nice but it is just one factor among many. if the woman is otherwise a keeper. IMHO, a bigger issue is the unreality that creeps into the psyches of fuglies who succeed in taking higher level cock. It is not just that their bonding hormones are diluted and drained away but they simply cannot appreciate where they really are in mens estimation. They end up expressing contempt for the only type of guys who might actually commit to their fat asses. Maybe it is for the best that they do not try to hide how they feel – no guys wants to get tricked like that.
If slut = only a fool would commit ,then there is definitely a sliding scale as to threshold number. A solid 9 who takes care of herself is much more likely to be in touch with reality. And that is one thing that definitely makes a woman worth a look as a LTR.
Jesus,
Yeah I saw you, but you werent sat up straight my boy.
but at least thats 3.
@GudEnuf
Astute observation. May I point out, though, that the red-headed lefty winds up looking like a complete fool at the end?
(deti removes professor’s tweed jacket and glasses)
I’m getting weary of people like Sarah complaining about so-called NiceGuys and criticisms of sex positivism. First, the website Sarah refers to actually supports the notion that Game works, and hence supports the work Susan does here. The complaints at that site are about men displaying classic beta supplicant behaviors and driving down their attractiveness. HUS and many other sites like it encourage study and application of Game. Sarah, you should be applauding this place, not deriding it. We’re doing our best to give you what you want: confident, dominant, sexy men.
Second,.let’s drive a spike through the heart of this multfaceted bullshit NiceGuys(TM) meme. It seems to have two parts:
1. that men who haven’t learned Game are really just evil alpha wannabes who fake being “nice” so they can try to get laid
2. that unattractive men are “creepy”, “perverts”, or “losers”.
What the Marcottians are really afraid of is that the men they call NiceGuys(TM) will figure it out. They will attain confidence and social dominance, become attractive, and become more successful with women. They will have beaten the Marcottians at their own game.
I have been particularly struck by the poor quality of her writing. I might even call it torturous.
@GudEnuf
Well I’ve often said it’s masturbation with a warm body in the room. I can’t speak for men, so I should retract that. But I can speak for women, and what women get from casual sex is way fewer orgasms but that reward of feeling sexually desirable, even irresistible. The Rabbit can’t give you that.
Sarah:
In other words: Shouldn’t we be encouraging people to be led around entirely by their emotions of the moment, with no consideration of long-term consequences?
Marcotte – fears the rise of the beta male, the leveling of the playing field, because those men will judge promiscuity more harshly on average, and will cause a retrenchment of the Sexual Revolution.
Leading to the REAL fear: women will gravitate back to reality and seek to marry at a younger age thus foregoing their all-so-precious “careers” and independence from men
<blockquote>…important role in female attraction that manipulating this variable alone can produce dramatic improvements in a man’s life.</blockquote>
See, that was the whole problem with all us Nice Guys, all this time we were operating on incorrect information, which leaves one stuck at home, uh, “manipulating the variable”, in a different sense of the word…
-jack
deti (74) wrote:<blockquote>.. this is all about power for Marcotte.</blockquote>
I think he has something there.
I observed in school that there are two parallel, interrelated but not congruent dominance hierarchies. One for females, one for males.
The infighting in the female hierarchy can be nasty but until recently did not get physical. It illustrates the observation that “academic infighting is so nasty because the stakes are so low.” Sayres Law.
Girls group into cliques of varying status. The relative status between the cliques stays the same, but a girl’s status within her particular clique can change. She can even get herself thrown out of it. It’s difficult to change to a higher status clique.
The infighting in the male hierarchy is less overtly nasty because the possibility of physical violence is always there. The top dogs want to avoid violence if possible because even the victor can get badly hurt. In what Athol calls the time before writing it was just plain stupid to goad a 160 lb man into a killing rage when you would sooner or later have to turn your back on him. The fact that fights may have real-world repercussions may also play a small part.
A girl can gain status in the female hierarchy by associating with a high status male. Nowadays we call that “validation”. A girl frantic to increase her status doesn’t want to be caught dead with a low status male for obvious reasons. The nuclear rejection is an attempt to head off any status problems associated with an approach by a lower status male plus bleed-over from the way she deals with other females. It’s safe for her to do this because a civilized boy doesn’t haul off and smack her one. He’s also probably not adept enough to retaliate in some other way.
A higher status female can afford to be more polite. She may even get mate-guarding behavior from her higher status boyfriend.
Sluts derail all this. They cheat. They associate (if briefly) with higher status males and diminish the high status males’ value to the higher status females.
In the real world a high status male usually has more resources. A woman who can get his commitment can get those resources for her children. Women are attracted to status.
There’s a disconnect between high status in a civilized setting and status in the time before writing. A civilized high status male may not behave like a proved warrior; one who has counted coup in battle. He doesn’t give her the tingle. Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind.
Make no mistake, the tingle is instinctive. Just as long glossy hair catches a man’s eye from a distance and a fat woman’s “power cleavage” can be an annoying distraction in a meeting, the tingle is an involuntary reaction. The very idea that women have instincts is Politically Incorrect. The idea that a man could fake it and drag them around by their hindbrains is abhorrent.
We men have always known we are animals.
@ GudEnuf
“The three bogeymen of feminism: Nice Guys®, “white dudes”, and MRA’s.”
What do you mean by ‘white dude’ in this context ?
For the overhwhelming majority of women – probably 90% or more, casual sex does not feel right. I’m encouraging women to have sex that feels right, and avoid sex that does not feel right.
You are probably correct on this, and would know best given the amount of interaction you have had with young women.
Reading through many of the comments on the previous 2 threads led me to this observation. I think most men but *NOT ALL* are wired to enjoy and not really have any negative feelings about casual sex. But there are a minority of guys (Jesus, Ted, Dogsquat are examples) where it doesn’t “feel right”. The flipside to this is it leads me to think there is some small minority of women who really enjoy casual sex and have no qualms about it whatsoever. I can certainly understand why they would want to pushback on any perceived attempts to restrain them. That said, I still wouldn’t want to commit to marriage with a woman for whom casual sex is “no big deal” as it doesn’t take Einstein to figure out that minority of women has probably orders of magnitude higher probablility to cheat, cuckold, or divorce and ass-rape you if they are sexually disatisfied.
Deti, your 30,000 foot analysis above nailed it.
@AlphaRising:
Feminists just love using the term “white dude” to refer to any white male who disagrees with them. For them, it’s a derisive term.
Amanda Marcotte hates “Game”, which is really just applied evolutionary and social psychology, because it attacks the foundational premises of her ideology.
response from pandagon -
And, honestly, this world of sexual economics you support makes me so sad. It’s so cold and dehumanizing.
It isn’t a question of supporting or not supporting it. It is a template…a model…for understanding behavior. We know that TODAY women are behaving dramatically different sexually (such as willingness to be part of soft harems) and dating wise from 50-60 years ago. We know that in just the recent 10-20 years men are behaving dramatically different (such as the reluctance to marry and pushing for sex earlier and earlier).
The “sexual economic model” provides a logical, rational basis for understanding the “WHY” behind what we are observing empirically. Your side (I assume you are part of the feminist ideology) really doesn’t have any sensible explanation beyond handwaving and talking about female “empowerment” and “liberation”
Everyone should read this piece or otherwise I fail you
:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/09/on-rhetoric-and-the-art-of-persuasion/
There is the difference between pathos and logos. Almost all feminist writing and argumentation (Jess is a perfect example and Anacaona called her out on it perfectly) relies on pathos….stirring emotions but completely devoid of logic and rationality.
The sexual economics model is an attempt to address the issue of male-female sexuality from the perspective of logos. How do we rationallly/logically explain the behavior we observe. Evolutionary psychology steps in to provide the foundation. This is why the feminists take the pathos angle and refer to all of it as “junk science”. To evoke emotion to discredit something they do not a logical counterargument towards.
And yeah, that Marcotte piece was an absolute tortured mess of jibberish. It bounced from thought to thought with no overall coherent point.
Women are revolted by betas as men are revolted by fatties. That’s really it.
Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe women think of betas as men think of plain girls. I dunno.
There is the difference between pathos and logos. Almost all feminist writing and argumentation relies on pathos….stirring emotions but completely devoid of logic and rationality.
Abbott,
How did my verbage get posted over there? Please tell me you didn’t cut and paste it over there. I don’t like to discuss things with morons which is why I don’t read or post at sites like Pandagon, Jezebel, etc. There is an old expression, don’t wrestle with a pig in mud, you get dirly and the pig enjoys it.
I’ll say that anyone who opens up a comment with BWHAHAHA is pretty much telling you off the bat they aren’t playing with much upstairs. Anyways, whoever, please don’t take something I’ve posted here and post it elsewhere. Thank you.
Mike C
Thanks for that, I needed it.
As for the comments about the “science”, this is some ridiculous stuff I see from people who seem to have lost the ability to think independently. Do we need to look up a paper in a peer refereed journal to know the sky is blue? Maybe to know the exact spectrum as a function of position in the sky and time of day. To basically know it’s blue? No, we can do a simple experiment ourselves, called going outside and opening our eyes.
Likewise, do we need to go to a peer refereed journal to know Game works? Actually, this is a preposterous thing to suggest at all, because an experiment that finds what’s the best way to to get to p in v sex (the only way to be scientifically sure would be to actually go to that extreme) would not pass an ethical review. But an individual can test it by simply giving it a try, seeing if it works, and then (optional) report on whether it works. Most people who have tried Game have reported that it has helped them (either get women, or strengthen pre-existing relationships). It’s not like Game does not get criticism, but most of it centers on whether it’s ethical to use at all, not complaints from men who tried it and got zero results.
There might be room for experiments like, “How many men can be helped by game?” (Maybe it’s not a full 100%, men with severe disfigurements might be beyond hope, but it’s obviously far above 0%), or “How much does it help?” But in comparison to the sky is blue question, this is like asking for the exact spectrum as a function of position in the sky. As for the basic question, “Does Game work?,” the answer is obviously, “yes”.
Oh God this! I was so disappointing when I watched the first Bridget Jones movie, and then the second. The idiot who wrote the book claims that it was based in Pride and Prejudice but she didn’t wrote a modern Lizzy but a modern Lidya. Lizzy was strong, smart, sure of herself and LOYAL not an ignorant slut full of insecurities, prone to public embarrassment and vices that keeps falling for the crappy man just because he is whatever hot…Talking about entirely missing the point there.
Expanding this the dream of the Marcotte’s of the world is for the unattractive men not to have agency or standards. The dream is to gamble away with the attractive ones in the hopes of snagging one, but still winning “experience” by banging them while they can attract them with their youth and once they are done with them or banging the next generation of sluts, they can go shop for men in Beta aisle and use them for the next 10 to 15 years to fulfill the required status of having a partner/children/wedding and dispose of them when they are done while keeping their resources. If the Nice Guy TM gets shamed into having any drop of agency or standards they will accept a slut and marry them and love them unconditionally while she is piling away all the reasons he is not “good enough” so when she fills her cup of “unhappiness” she can just walk away with not an inch of guilt (hence feminist love for no fault divorce).
I mean had you ever cried because your tool doesn’t work anymore and you need a new one? I don’t think all women are like that but all the feminists seem to follow this pattern and given that feminists have status in our society the female herd seems prone to follow them in absence of any decent status alternative, YMMV.
Heh I love this. You should had dedicated to the femininity one to her. I mean when smart people don’t get the results they want they try another strategy right? Being more attractive is not that hard if you really set yourself to it, IMO.
Well its not like we have let you forget it.
Thanks Mike C. Sadly I’m thinking that maybe rationality comes from ration instead of reason meaning that only a few people were lucky enough to have it.
“Recently a woman reader asked about the oft-repeated claim that women hate beta males, something she’s encountered several times online. I too have heard this but have never understood the rationale. If you don’t want to mate with someone, fine, but hatred? That implies a threat of some sort from beta males, something I can’t really imagine. ”
Women hate beta males when beta males present sexually or escalate sexually. They feel visceral disgust, because there IS a threat – the threat of being seduced and impregnated by a lesser set of male gametes.
GudEnuf-
I look forward to the day when <i>real</i> scientific research exposes the obvious political pseudoscience that is global warming. I’m going to go ahead and gloat my “I-told-you-so” right now.
Nice blog format, Susan.
Yes, I’ve been away about 2 weeks reading only sporadically. This is a good post, unlike the normal case, I can’t think of anything to add.
I thumbed through Marcotte’s post. It’s just all over the place. Its hard to disagree or agree with a damn windstorm..
Anyway, she said that it was a flaw/fallace. to assume that Men want sex more than Women. I don’t know how to prove this exactly, but I’m pretty confident about my experience in life, and this isn’t a fallacy.
It seems like Marcotte and others dont want to admit they don’t like beta-ish guys, (or maybe men in general), so they rationalize them to be bitter losers, and thats why they hate them.. This is some sort of named logical conundrum. Post hoc? Don’t know.
Anyway, as a nice guy, I’ll avoid Marcotte types.
Anything I’ve wanted to say about this post has pretty much already been said. I’m just going to lurk for now and read the comments until something prods me into action.
Great post again Susan.
@ Badger
But, one could argue that if Beta-ness is determined by sexual success then it shouldn’t be possible for her to mate with a Beta. Thus, if she ends up with a Beta then he’s not really a Beta.
@ A.
Scientific analysis would be important if there were disagreements regarding the colour of the sky. I don’t think the consensus on game is nearly as unified as that with the sky. Here’s the problem with Game:
I think the best analogy to “game” is snake oil. Even if it works we don’t know why it works and whether the observed outcome as anything to do with Game.
@David X.
As an amateur scientist I often say that I would love for someone to do an actual test of (not matter how small the sample) of game. It would be easy to set. Guy X goes to a randomly chosen location where there is a chance of meeting a decent amount of of women, establish a way to pick girls in a random matter (flipping a coin or using a randomnizer from the internets) to avoid self selecting bias and apply the game tecniques. Same guy using a similar outfit (to avoid lookism bias), does the same activity in again same place using feminist approved method (being polite respectful and so on) report on both encounters,
I now I’m skipping a lot of steps but I think a tiny bit of science would help and is not like feminist don’t love to endorse studies with small self selected samples anyway to get funds from the government anyway, as long as the show feminists friendly results.
That being said I do believe that game works I’m mostly curious about level of effectiveness more than anything.
@ Badger
What David said. If women are genetically disinclined to mate with betas, why do they still exist and make up the majority of all males to boot? Why are alphas so rare? Why aren’t most women beautiful if our base evolutionary function is to mate with an alpha? The whole point of natural selection is for the least advantageous trait to eventually die out and for the most to be passed onto fertile offspring, increasing its overall presence until it saturates the population. Women have existed for hundreds of thousands years by now; if we were genetically programmed against betas we wouldn’t be able to mate with them in the first place.
Most women must clearly have genetic defects then as they seem to be happily having sex and getting married to these fearsome beta creatures.
What are “lesser genes” anyway? You’d think most betas were visibly deformed 3”11 lepers judging by your description.
@ Brendan
Oh, good. So I hope we’re in agreement then that Roissy telling clueless men not to improve their appearance is at best counterproductive and at worst a set up. Nobody ever said it was sufficient on its own merit! -_-
Don’t you find it bizarre how red pill salesmen can smetimes spout the biggest blue pill myths about appearance? Change a few words and it suddenly becomes the kind of advice that wouldn’t look out of place on an adipositivity anti-fat shaming Tumblr.
It kinda is though. Most people end up getting with their equivalent even if it takes a little time. It’s just delayed assortative mating because marriage has been postponed by a decade and being single is not as stigmatised as it used to be. And what do these average looking women actually gain from attempting to snare desirable men? They lower their end-value, sully their rep,and get their self-esteem battered on the process. Meh. All those drunk late nights frying their skin in Tenerife have to take their toll one day so I don’t see the injustice. Eventually most will get the face and status they’ve earned.
- Alphas become jaded pessimists and don’t commit until very late if at all.
- Notoriously promiscuous women usually get with a guy way below their previous rank as punishment for all those years of aiming above their station.
(The somewhat promiscuous-ish crowd will still get offers from kinda cool guys with options. I’ve seen this a lot tbh. It’s a bragging point t now to have a highly sexually experienced ‘kooky’ GF/wife to an increasing amount of guys. )
- Decent people (i.e the majority) have fun and get together quietly in the background.
That’s about it in my eyes.
Ok, but then you also have to tell the gamer that on the second time, he needs to abandon all the nonverbal/subverbal parts of game that he’s learned. For example, most guys have no clue that by doing things like leaning in, talking fast, etc, they betray their low value.
This may sound untoward but ‘fear’ is an unspoken aspect of the ‘nice guy’ (the lack thereof), even evo psych doesn’t seem to equate it with attraction.
Women are adapted to supplicate to whoever controls the medium that instils fear and this fear is multi faceted not just physical violence, it can be monetary fear, social stigmatization, poverty, fear of not reproducing, status, abandonment, existential etc.
When there was no social safety net, wealth transfer and times were economically harder, the Beta alleviated poverty, his disapproval instilled fear in women. Just go to a poverty stricken country and see how much respect a western Beta gets.
Today, social transfer payments, legislated make work jobs, moral relativism, social atomization and artificial insemination has removed fear from the equation. All that is left today is social status and physical violence, if a man doesn’t fulfil any of those he might as well just go and suck lemons.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-attraction-doctor
Badger at 10.29
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Interesting anthropology theory…
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Could be something in it. A Few days ago we were debating why some women angrily reject a guys advances and this may be part of it.
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Even when some of my friends, have been polite and nice in rejection I can see they are, I dunno, a little disgusted when logically they could have felt flattered.
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Maybe it’s gut and instinct taking over their polite mode.?
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Ps it’s still crappy conduct tho…
Isabel:
Most women must clearly have genetic defects then as they seem to be happily having sex and getting married to these fearsome beta creatures.
What are “lesser genes” anyway? You’d think most betas were visibly deformed 3”11 lepers…
My reply:
Exactly! This “nice guy” business must mean some other type of lower-status male. I have spent the most time living not in big cities but in college towns, small cities and wealthy suburban environments surrounding big cities, and the men seem to be betas all the way. They don’t have the flash and dash of the socially dominant alpha, but they have the self-confidence of a seriously competent beta who can hold his own professionally and this carries over socially, ie., he can find a young woman to go out with. And because they are serious-minded, they are off market fairly early, and if you see them socially, they are usually with their girlfriends/fiancees/wives.
I can think of different types at different ages–I have known betas in all these categories. Young 20-something in graduate school, professional types, they are marrying their high school/college/graduate school girlfriends/first serious girlfriend after college by the time they are 28–I know a fair number of men who fit into this category, it is ridiculous. They put their player alpha brothers to shame–beautiful wives, lovely houses at a fairly young age. The 30-something betas I see are the dads at the YMCA on Saturday mornings, watching the three year-olds learn how to play soccer as they chat with their wives and network with the other dads. The 40-to 50-something betas have been married for years; they are raising teenagers or enjoying their empty-nest years…
Nice Guys (r) are not the same as betas, or guys who happen to be nice. Women hate Nice Guys (r) because Nice Guys (r) hate us.
A Nice Guy (r) acts nice and friendly to a point, but then gets immediately pissy when the woman he is after doesn’t want to date or sleep with him. A Nice Guy (r) idealizes a particular woman but then becomes spiteful when her personality and behaviors don’t match with whatever projected onto her. A Nice Guy (r) often becomes protective and proprietary towards the women to whom he is attracted, regardless of her consent.
Susan claims she has never encountered a man who acts the way Amanda describes these Nice Guys (r), but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I encountered plenty in my teens and twenties; they tended to create very unpleasant situations from which it was difficult to extricate oneself.
why do you think that cultures/civilizations where women’s hypergamous instincts where not in check are not present today? Why do you think marriage 1.0 existed from the begging of civilization until about 50 years ago? Do you really think that the situation and economical malaise has no relation at all with the way things have devolved in the last 40 years of feminism where the beta males that helped build a good bit of today’s civilization are getting nothing but the finger 95% of the time?
Laurie I agree with you, they do exist and cause major headaches for both sexes.
However here’s the hilarious part: the women complaining about nice guys more often than not project their own nice girl fallacies onto every single man that shows even the slightest of a beta trait regardless wether they’re a nice guy or not.
You see all you’re doing is creating an excuse for behaving like shit towards any man that doesn’t behave like you want. See the irony here? Your attitude is exactly what you criticise in the nice guy since if anyone is projecting it’s your type.
Just because you’re right about nice guys doesn’t grant you a license to behave like shit and that is really what every true beta complains about. No it doesn’t have to be a nuclear rejection: but when you radiate you want to vomit at the sight of a beta because you feel like he’s not behaving like the undemanding alpha you so desire and might be a nice guy? Well: then you’re sending out a memo to every beta that there is no point in even looking your way. Why? Because you’re a nice girl: you put your oh so valuable sensibilities above acting with a little respect.
That is why we don’t approach you because as you say we don’t have confidence (yes, I am a beta). But here’s the twist your type of gal doesn’t acknowledge: we don’t have confidence in you. You exhibit the same pissy attitude that you don’t from the despicable nice guy.
In the end you’re not doing yourself any favours, even from a selfish viewpoint your attitude ultimately isn’t good for you since you basically disqualify the “bottom” 90% of available men because you don’t feel like “putting up” with the traits you don’t like.
I also want to apologise:this method of quick comments doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. Above rant is more about a type of young woman that today is often encountered and I don’t mean to presume that you absolutely are one: you do however exhibit a similar attitude in your short and rather offended blurb.
In conclusion please understand that rants like above are not designed to make you behave in a certain way: it’s designed to try and encourage you to not behave in a certain way. If you wish certain young men would not behave like nice guys then live as you teach because otherwise you’re just a selfish hypocrite.
@PVW
That is my experience as well. Having raised two children who did all the normal stuff, made many friends with other parents, being active in the schools, etc. I can say with confidence that more than 80% of the men are beta males. They’re the dads, not cads. The marriages are stable and appear to be mutually gratifying. They are the bedrock of the community – earnest, professional people of good character doing their best to raise a family.
While it is true that women initiate 2/3 of divorces, and boredom is a frequently cited reason, I think it’s important that we remember that among the college educated the divorce rate in the US in 17%. The vast majority of successful marriages are with beta guys. I would describe my own husband this way, with no intention to offend (he will also describe himself this way very matter-of-factly). He has many wonderful qualities, all of which I appreciate. He is not weak, but strong. He is confident, but not arrogant and does not have swagger.
I think young men looking to improve their lot with women should not be aiming for a complete transformation, throwing aside all their winning traits. By adding some dominant behaviors many will attract compatibile women. I would also add that I don’t see these marriages as being between formerly promiscuous women and beta providers. I suspect that both parties come from that 80% of the population that never was promiscuous. For the record, the marriages that I have seen blow up in a nasty way have involved cheating by an alpha male type. My evidence is anecdotal, but does include hundreds of couples.
Now, wrt Marcotte – it’s not clear just who she is talking about when she talks about Nice Guys. When Kay Hymowitz wrote about the decline of men in the WSJ a few months ago, Marcotte’s response was to say those guys are just a bunch of losers playing video games in their parents’ basements. The most troubling thing about that disimissal is that she is not curious about why men are retreating in increasing numbers. Could the Women’s Movement have played a part in leaving men confused about their role in society? How have great increases in opportunities for women affected men? These are fair and reasonable questions, but Marcotte finds them threatening so she’s adopted the position that the guys are inferior, and feminism has nothing to do with it.
I think another reader was also correct – men looking to seduce women are learning about female psychology and sexuality through the lens of evolutionary bio/psych. This is very threatening to a position that gender is an entirely social construct. It justifies a sexual double standard because it acknowledges that men and women pursue conflicting mating strategies, something that seems patently obvious to me.
Feminists cannot continue to claim that evo psych is junk science or pseudo science as the field continues to attract competent, rational academics from top universities. There’s a “the world is flat” element to this.
@Laurie
How about saying you are not interested? What percentage of men will harrass a woman, getting pissy, proprietary and protective after she has offered a clear rejection? A very, very small percentage, such as men who are on the spectrum for autism. Writing about Nice Guys the way that Marcotte does clearly implies she’s talking about the whole 80% of males who don’t have access to casual sex.
Most women don’t have genetic defects, they simply not naturally inclined to mate with betas, through history there was controls to curb those natural inclinations and it resulted in civilization.
Are you talking about lesser genes for progress or for survival in the wild?
(This is random post, which probably does not make sense.)
Odds wrote:
Nice theory. ☺
I like it.
Yes, that make sense. (So perhaps then special interest group, which upsets Marcotte most, is masculists.)
But yes, it clearly upsets more that if her complaining time is being shared with something, which is not even a special interest group.
Of course. ☺
†
@ Blues
Beta males have built nothing. They are the majority group and the vast majority of guys are not Nobel prize winning geniuses. It’s an almost imperceptible minority of wildly brilliant men that have invented everything we know and love. By extension, would you also shoulder just as eagerly the blame for all the terrorism, violent crime, war, rape, serial homicides, drug cartels etc just because most of the perpetrators are male? What is stopping you from declaring solidarity there too? Ridiculous. You are an individual who just so happens to have a penis. That’s it. Aristotle has no more relation to you than Osama Bin Laden does.
Like you guys are so fond of reminding us womenfolk: nobody owes anyone anything. A little introspection please?!
Nothing you’ve said has actually answered my question btw.
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