Susan, while we await more from Alpha Game I’m going to offer my own response to your solipsism skepticism:
I assert that males and females process information and react to stimuli differently as a result of actual biological differences in the brain. I assert that at least one difference can be expressed as a dual-axis spectrum mapping against the extent to which “emotion” (roughly encompassing concepts like gut instinct, empathy, visceral reaction, intuition, etc) and “intellect” (roughly encompassing concepts like logic, analysis, computation, etc) factor into the aforementioned processing and reacting: on said spectrum, males will trend toward higher intellectual influence and lower emotional influence; females will trend toward lower intellectual influence and higher emotional influence.
This is not to say that, e.g., males are incapable of feeling the loss of a child as deeply as females or that females are incapable of performing calculus as correctly as males. But I do assert that average female thought is a function of internalizing information (experience, knowledge, data) which was processed to a greater extent (than males) with emotional factors and to a lesser extent (than males) with intellectual factors, and then synthesizing that stored information (again, with more contribution from emotional factors and less contribution from intellectual factors than males) to react to stimuli. I also assert that average male thought is a function of internalizing information which was processed to a greater extent (than females) with intellectual factors and to a lesser extent (than females) with emotional factors, and then synthesizing that stored information (again, with more contribution from intellectual factors and less contribution from emotional factors than females) to react to stimuli.
The union of those two assertions can be stated, roughly: males and females both internalize information that they process, and both synthesize that stored information when reacting to stimuli. Males and females have the same factors that impact the processing and synthesis of information; e.g. both are capable of intuition, cognition, computation, feeling and so on. Males and females differ in the extent to which each factor impacts the processing and synthesis.
I do not believe these assertions are controversial.
That is all very pedantic but it sets a foundation for addressing the topic:
I speculate that you may agree that people who perform an intellectual activity themselves, like historical research, generally “learn more” than if they only see that activity being performed – they process more information, the information they process is more accurate or complete and the information is more readily recallable. A person who researched medieval European economy will tend to react to matters concerning that topic primarily through synthesis of the data that they have collected, analyzed and/or presented themselves, and then secondarily with additional synthesis of a presentation they saw at a conference.
I speculate that you may agree that people who experience an emotional activity will likewise process more information about the activity than if they only empathize with someone else experiencing it. A person who experienced the death of a child will tend to react to matters concerning that topic primarily through synthesis of the grief they felt and the sense of regret they worked through themselves, and then secondarily with additional synthesis of the feelings they saw someone else who lost a child go through.
Drawing on the above assertions:
a) a female subject’s processing and synthesis of information is influenced by emotional factors more than a male subject, and
b) a subject’s processing and synthesis of information is weighted toward those activities and experiences the subject was a first hand participant in, therefore
c) we expect that a female subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand emotional experiences, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences and first hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand intellectual activities.
d) following the same pattern we would also expect that a male subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand intellectual activities, followed by first hand emotional experiences and second hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences.
We wouldn’t expect these outcomes in every case. But we would expect that over a large sampling, the predictions in c and d will be supported.
Susan, your reaction? Is this a reasonable explanation that is congruent with relevant studies and observations you favor, while at the same time explaining the perception of male observers that female responses are “self-centered”?
Does the crux of your skepticism boil down to an objection over the negative connotation of phrases like “egoistic self-absorption”, or words like “solipsism” that imply an *inability* to synthesize anything but first hand experience versus a predilection to *primarily* synthesize using first hand experience?
All I have to say is that the whole thing smacks of a shit test that Susan is (consciously or unconsciously) putting on the table. Asking an entire “sphere” of bloggers to go back to the drawing board on a concept that guys (myself included) have already seen up close on a regular basis, discussed, and established as something real years ago strikes me as pretty ridiculous.
That’s hilarious! If it was a shit test then all the alpha males failed it!
I did not ask anyone to go back to the drawing board. This was the exchange:
Vox Day: Because women tend to be solipsistic, it is trivially easy to redirect them by the simple mechanism asking them to talk about themselves.
Susan: I remember Ferdinand beating this drum quite frequently. Googling “solipsism,” dictionaries lead the results:
sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)
n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
No mention of solipsism as it relates to women is found until the 9th page of Google results, where a post by Private Man is listed.
However, when one Googles “female solipsism” the results on the first page are as follows:
1. Alphagame
2. Rational Male
3. Rational Male
4. Private Man
5. Alphagame
6. MGTOW forums
7. Alphagame
8. The Spearhead
9. Cane Caldo
What evidence can you offer that “female solipsism” is not just another manosphere circle jerk?
Note I did not question the existence of solipsism, but of a form of solipsism unique to females. When I researched the question on my own, I got the above results, which you must admit are very telling (and rather funny).
The concept (and the underlying justification for it) appears to have originated somewhere undetermined and been carried forward without question or analysis of any kind. That’s not legit. Sorry.
Where the real comedy comes in is how many of these bloggers are bending over backwards to reason with her, instead of going about their business discussing something any guy who’s dated women will immediately recognize.
For the record, Vox has told me he is delighted with the question, respects my inquiry, and is taking it very seriously. He does not need to bend over backwards to reason with me, as I am a very reasonable person. He has stated this many times. I do not kid myself that I will change Vox’s mind, but that was never my goal. My goal is to understand the basis for the concept of female solipsism as something that men do not participate in.
I can assure you that men are frequently solipsistic, and they also have big, healthy hamsters. This is perhaps most true right here in our corner of the net.
Recently I’ve been breaking, what I guess I’d call, my own rules in dealing with women — cause I’ve really been emphasizing the beta side. Usually beta is something I’d hold back with dear life, cause either because I’ve actually had bad results spoiling a otherwise successful alpha frame with a beta slip up, and I’ve also seen countless times the ‘more alpha’ guy get the girl. Needless to say, beta to me has always been like fast track to the door. (aka DLV)
So, for a change, I’ve started leading with beta, of course with a healthy, necessary dose of alpha. (and not being afraid to defend beta) And now quite a few girls I know have taken a second look at me, I can tell — almost a 360 head turn difference.
Btw, what I mean is I’m not bothering with the aloof attitude much, and focusing on expressing LTR interest.
With a couple, separate girls our the conversations have found themselves
about dating, hookup culture, and our displeasure with the SMP. (I usually avoid this topic, on person)
Anyways long-story short, most girls actuallyvreally like a guy who can be beta. In fact, some love it. Whether it will have any, one, of them tingling is TBD.
I’m so glad to hear this Cooper! Heads turning = tingling, so I think you are definitely onto something. It’s authenticity. Please keep us posted.
“I can assure you that men are frequently solipsistic, and they also have big, healthy hamsters. This is perhaps most true right here in our corner of the net.”
Hell yeah! I make mine walk 3 miles a day with me. When I’m done my hamster will have epic endurance. And with my charming personality, he will be unstoppable!
@cooper
“So, for a change, I’ve started leading with beta, ”
I assume by this you mean lack of eye contact (looking down), poor body language, supplication, inability to lead or make decisions and social reticence and discomfort, right?
Trick is: it seems that the type of woman that feels such overwhelming physical desire also tends to be more promiscuous. Seems that is part of my problem: I’m looking for a horny woman that hasn’t had a lot of sex. Lol
So, I think for the average women the idea that guys would actually socialize for the purpose of almost testing things like laboratory experiments, and do repeated trials, and then congregate online and dissect it and compare notes almost strikes them as surreally absurd.
But that is exactly what we do constantly with our girlfriends!
What boggles my mind is when you get a response like that exactly demonstrating what we are talking about which is the female presumption to assume that “whatever it is, it is about her” and then you get goofballs pedantically arguing definitions and semantics and missing the crystal clear examples perfectly illustrating what we are talking about.
This is the kind of smug and superior tone you’ve really been specializing in, Mike.
I have serious questions for you.
Do you believe that your sharing threads from other blogs and forums here is useful to my readership, especially when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority? You do this frequently in a way that is aggressive. I do not understand why you don’t simply have those conversations in those online venues you prefer. I told you I did not appreciate that last week and here you are doing it again, with a mocking comment from Vox’s thread. What do you hope to gain?
Do you believe that bringing these comments from Rollo and Vox’s blogs (or anywhere else for that matter) is likely to encourage thoughtful female commentary? Do you have any interest in speaking with females? Or just proving to yourself that we are as described elsewhere, which you implied in a recent comment?
Yesterday you misunderstood almost every comment I made, and I really cannot help but picture you screaming la la la with your fingers in your ears.
Re the forum, the missing search box and other technical difficulties.
I hired a Wordpress expert and now the site is messed up. I should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. I need to go out and find a new one. If I have time this weekend, I will try my hand at doing some fixes myself. Apologies for the inconvenience.
“when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority”
This is the heart of the matter, right here. Let’s strike through “inferiority” because no one here is arguing that. But flaws and shortcomings? Oh yes. To be attracted to dominance in a way that makes Dark Triad hyper-dominance attractive is, under any reasonable interpretation of the terms, a flaw and a shortcoming.
Men have our characteristic flaws and shortcomings and women have theirs (yours). It seems as though we men have a much easier time talking about ours than you do talking, or even hearing, about yours.
And hell yes, it’s important. You can’t reform the SMP or even help a single individual in it unless everyone is honest with themselves about the causes of the problem, which includes the extent to which their own personal and gender-endemic flaws contribute to it. That’s like trying to sober up a drunk while scrupulously avoiding the topic of thirst.
Susan, you will so often agree with us about specific instances of female flaws–and often you are the first to bring them up. But then you will turn from the particular to the general and make these blanket denials that contradict so much of what you have said before. It’s frustrating.
This is getting tiresome, Susan, especially since when we all take the trouble to go through 10 pages of back and forth–something you claim to deplore–you end up tacitly or explictly agreeing with much of what Devlin says.
The point is the source. The source must be credible to demostrate thatthe ideas are credible. Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not.
Secondly, if Devlin’s position is that women remain hypergamous after partnering (as a matter of hard-wiring) I still reject it emphatically. This is NOT an invitation to debate hypergamy. I believe your “tacit agreement” claim is overstated.
I welcome your pointing out flaws in studies. Have you made such a claim and found me dismissive? About one specific study or design? I don’t remember this.
Now you want to take it all back with “Female desire for assholes and hyper dominant men has likewise been demonstrated to be false.”
That’s a fair criticism. What I should have said was:
“Universal female desire for assholes and hyper dominant men has likewise been demonstrated to be false.”
Which is what the men around her claim. I just recently posted a study showing that women reject both hypermasculine faces and unrestricted faces. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look, and letting me know why its validity is questionable, we can discuss it.
“The PUA timetable is 7 hours in her company, then sex.”
To me this is a complete, utter, epic fail.
But, my goal isn’t to dip my wick in anything that will let me. This line of thinking is no better than the young college woman telling herself marriage will wait for her and she should be having fun now.
Neither approach has any lasting power at all.
Honestly, I can’t know a woman well enough to be comfortable getting naked in front of her in 7 hours. Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?
Don’t you have a degree in business? Technically that is NOT a credential that indicates you have any real knowledge of male/female relations.
Sorry, Ted, I already stated that three hours ago:
One needn’t be a university professor, or other professional expert, though obviously that helps. I am not one myself, which is why I rely on the testimony of credible experts. I would never write a hypothesis and put it out there as gospel, even if I knew that gullible followers would swallow it wholesale. That would be lazy and intellectually dishonest at best.
For INTJ to speak with authority on study design is even more preposterous. Ask questions? Sure. Expressing skepticism? Sure. Weighing in as judge and jury? No.
“Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not. ”
He launched the entire effing conversation with that one article. He revived the word “hypergamy” after more than a century of misuse. So, the fact that he “turns out to have been right” would be of decisive importance.
Devlin: accurate but not credible.
Yeah, OK.
Seriously, deal with the argument, not the person.
The entire history of human thought until the dawn of the scientific method centered on philosophers drawing conclusions from 1) observation and 2) history and then reasoning about examples through dialectic to form conclusions. So, if you want to rub Devlin out based on his not being trained in the methodology of modern social science, then you have to rule out everyone from Socrates to Nietzsche as well.
Oh, and Ted was right: what special standing does an MBA have to reason about mating? Personally, I think you have every right to and I prefer to focus on your arguments rather than your diploma, but by your standards you have the same standing as Devlin: none.
BTW, Susan, up-thread somewhere I wrote a post about how hypergamy functions AFTER marriage along a distribution curve. You claimed to co-sign that. Nothing I wrote was inconsistent with Devlin or with the general sphere understanding of hypergamy, though no doubt many to my “right” would find it too soft.
This is the heart of the matter, right here. Let’s strike through “inferiority” because no one here is arguing that.
The claim that men have the capacity for unconditional love while women do not is a clear case of claiming female inferiority. Mike C made that claim here last week.
Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. For all the talk of solipsism making great mamas, the term as used in the manosphere is pejorative towards women. I have no problem with people providing examples of solipsistic behavior, but the notion that the concept applies only to women is ludicrous, especially as its definition may be found as key descriptors in several disorders that are primarily male.
Men have our characteristic flaws and shortcomings and women have theirs (yours). It seems as though we men have a much easier time talking about ours than you do talking, or even hearing, about yours.
I acknowledge that women have many flaws, although I prefer to think of both sexes as having evolved to achieve complementarity and efficient reproduction. Morals play a role certainly – we abhor rape and cuckoldry. But to engage in finger jabbing over the way women or men are hard-wired seems dangerous to me. It’s an antagonistic approach that pits the sexes against one another and makes reforming the SMP impossible.
Do you see me writing posts about male flaws? Blaming men for characteristics endemic to the male gender? Have I mocked the uber logical male mind that presents as autism? The low EQ that many men exhibit?
I readily accept and do not judge the fact that men care mostly about looks, and want sexual variety. You don’t see me shaming men for their fantasies or their preference for skinny blondes with big boobs.
You’re applying a double standard. If I don’t write posts shaming men at a blog for young women, why should I welcome comments shaming women?
Susan – “Sorry, Ted, I already stated that three hours ago:”
Damn. I’m at a client site today and missed it.
“For INTJ to speak with authority on study design is even more preposterous. Ask questions? Sure. Expressing skepticism? Sure. Weighing in as judge and jury? No.”
You do realize that INTJ’s are called “system builders”, right? I would bet I am at least as competent at “research study design” as most social scientists. (which I still think is a funny assed title. Social and Science to me just don’t go together.) Would I be good at actually running a study? Not if it involved dealing with people. But designing one? Yeah, even in my uneducated state I’d try my hand at it without fear.
You can think it is preposterous all you want, it’s what I do! I can and do make hypothesis all the time, but put them “out there” as gospel? Me?! I’ve said MANY times that I expect everyone that reads my shit to THINK FOR THEMSELVES. I’m nobody, with no education to speak of on the subject we discuss. I don’t expect anyone to take my word as “gospel” any more than I would take yours, Mike’s, or even Buss. The only way I’ll take anything as “gospel” is if it is told to me directly by a burning bush.
And to be clear, I wasn’t taking a pot shot at you. I was just trying to point out that you really are no more “credentialed” to discuss the SMP than anyone else here. I have NO DOUBT that you are skilled enough at deductive reasoning to read data and come to a logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it is the correct logical conclusion. And, all things being equal, your ability to do so is no more or less credentialed than mine. After all, I have a degree in computer science!
It’s not shaming, Susan, it’s an attempt to understand. To reform the SMP, or even to guide two individuals into a healthy relationship, they need to know what particular problems their sex’s unique predelictions can get them into.
No, I don’t see you “shaming” the men, but you do talk openly about the flaws endemic to men that can get in the way of or ruin a good relationship. You SOMETIMES talk openly about the analagous flaws in women, but you also sometimes heatedly deny them and rule the topic out of bounds.
BTW, on the solipsism debate, which I am not really a part of, I don’t read the men as saying that it is unique to women, but that a certain kind of solipsism is characteristic of women and more widespread among them than among men. That is not a claim of inferiority but one of difference.
Ted D,
“I don’t know how to do that without shocking them, because as we discussed in this very thread, many/most young women seem to ONLY focus on what affects them directly. How do we get a woman going to Yale to understand the plight of a woman living in section 8 housing? ”
Section 8 has transitioned from urban “projects” to placing people in regular apartments and houses in the ‘burbs. Up in New York and New Jersey you still get the project model but elsewhere its either fully transitioned to, or the process of transitioning to, the new model.
My clients range from Wall Street execs all the way up to Section 8 baby mamas, and I can tell you that Section 8 women ain’t suffering in dangerous ‘hoods like they used to. They also ain’t dyin’ for a husband. Like Obsidian mentioned before, many women have o-o-w babies because they WANT the babies, but not necessarily a man. I know several who do not oblige the fathers to pay child support, legally or voluntarily, because they want nothing, not even a phone call, to do with them.
“I just recently posted a study showing that women reject both hypermasculine faces and unrestricted faces.”
But wasn’t there a study that found the opposite at or about the time of ovulation?
Also, looking at a generic picture and saying “I think this face is more attractive” is not the same as wanting to fuck him. It may be that his face is less threatening and more comforting, so, in the absence of personal interaction, his face is preferred. Who she would submit to and sleep with if approached may be another matter.
As to studies in general, when I actually take the time to look hard at them, I’m often struck by how simplistic they are in terms of what they are trying to test, and how unimaginative or reflexive the authors are in ascribing causes. For example, that study you once cited that “showed” that women in societies with better health care prefer less masculine faces and those in societies with poor health care prefer more masculine, or something like that. Because academics must lean to the “nurture over nature” view, they presume this shows that better health care tends to reduce womens’ attraction to men with strong “disease resistence” genes in favor of more reliable men, or something like that. It never even occurs to them that, perhaps, if a nation’s women are more genetically inclined to prefer more cooperative and less hypermasculine beta males, then in the long run such a society results in better male cooperation, more social stability, maybe even higher IQ, and, consequently, . . . . wait for it . . . BETTER HEALTH CARE!!! As that Japanese guy at psychology today says, it is required to apriori rule out certain causes or explanations. Or, more accurately, to pretend that one never even imagined the possiblity.
So, even in cases when the authors are honest and acting in good faith, we often see nonsense. To say nothing of studies in which results are cherry picked or mischaracterized in order to get a predetermined result.
And the other problem in assessing this is that so many of these studies cite a bunch of other studies as a basis for the study, so you’d have to go read all those too. It’s like a compounding effect.
So, what’s the answer? I dunno. The next time the shrieking fembots or some other group starts shouting about “bad science” when the outcome is not as it is supposed to be, I suppose we could shoot about 4 or 5 of them to set an example. But, the bottom line, is that we have to keep in mind that the studies tend to represent conventional wisdom on so many points, either deliberately or unintentionally.
As to manoshpere concepts being unsupported in the literature, I would say that the manosphere (like the old PUA sites) is a bunch of guys finding each other on the internet and discovering that, like themselves, other guys are finding that reality seems to conflict with the accepted conventional wisdom of academia and the media. Consequently, it should not be surprising to you that you won’t find many conclusions of the manosphere being supported in that same convential wisdom of academia and the media. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Having said all that, I agree that most instances of manospherians screaming “female solipsism” are just silly. We have many solipsistic men in the individual sense – we call them alpha males. In my experience, women have a greater ability to rationalize what’s in their best interest as being just (my ex wife comes to mind, and she had to concede that she was a master at it when I called her on it). But I don’t think that’s the same the total egoistic self-centeredness that would be solipsism.
However, I think it is pretty indisputable that, as a collective group, women are solipsistic in the sense of “gynocentrism” as desribed above. We don’t see men writing articles about how bad things happening to women should be a concern to us because, when you really think about it, this could indirectly impact men in a bad way. But you see that all time with women – Kay Hymowhateverhernameis; Hillary Clinton talking about the real victims of war are the women who have to carry on after their husbands or brothers or whatever are blown to pieces on the battlefield. Stuff like that. It’s ubiquitous. Most women struggle to view things from the general male prism in a way that men don’t struggle as to women. We also see this in their complete dismissal of culkoldry (in the real sense of false paternity). They try to reframe it as a gift to the man. You don’t see men reframing rape as a golden opportunity to get acquainted with a new guy and experience an orgasm, even though we personally would not be traumatized by being forced to fuck an average looking woman.
I once saw an article about horrible the lives of women were in some former soviet republic because they were all so fabulously educated, worked good jobs and dressed exquisitely, but they couldn’t find a suitable man because so many men of the country were alcoholic street bums. It never dawned on this broad to ask, “hmmm, what is it about this country that sends so many young men into such a desparate unhappy state?”
Susan – “The claim that men have the capacity for unconditional love while women do not is a clear case of claiming female inferiority. Mike C made that claim here last week.”
Sorry, not true in my case. I don’t see it as “inferiority”, but it IS an important distinction that I as a man should know.
“Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. “
Ummm, I don’t think anyone said it was “uniquely a female trait” other than we were talking about the female version OF it.
“Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. “
OK, this may be true. But, does that mean that *I* use it the same way? Just because the ‘sphere says the sky is red, and I come here and enquire about what you think on the color of the sky because I think it may be red, doesn’t mean I’m coming here to “bring the ‘sphere to your living room”. Maybe I actually want your opinion on it. Every man that posts isn’t trying to sabotage you willfully. I won’t say I haven’t done my fair share of derailment here, but it is never my intent.
“I acknowledge that women have many flaws, although I prefer to think of both sexes as having evolved to achieve complementarity and efficient reproduction.”
Fancy words for the same concept. I call it a flaw, you call it a “feature”. It really comes down to perception. It may be a feature for you because as a woman it makes sense and/or works FOR you. To me? It is a pain in the ass and therefore a bug. Perhaps that attitude may come through in my posts, but you don’t have to take it personally when that happens.
“But to engage in finger jabbing over the way women or men are hard-wired seems dangerous to me. It’s an antagonistic approach that pits the sexes against one another and makes reforming the SMP impossible.”
To the contrary, to someone like me it makes perfect sense. I want to know every flaw in a system I am expected to manage. I might not be able to fix them, but I damn well surely want to know about them so I can mitigate their effect.
As to reforming the SMP? See my posts from earlier. I truly don’t expect that to happen without some major shifts in political correctness and/or a total destruction of Western society. I’m more of the mind that I will do what I can to make life as happy as possible for now, and prepare for the worst as I expect it to come. If it doesn’t, I turn out to be a nut. If it does? God help us all.
“Do you see me writing posts about male flaws? Blaming men for characteristics endemic to the male gender? Have I mocked the uber logical male mind that presents as autism? The low EQ that many men exhibit?”
Not that I’ve seen, but I would welcome it if you did. In fact, there is nowhere to have such a discussion as most of the ‘sphere tends to give the impression that men are perfect once they lose the beta.
“I readily accept and do not judge the fact that men care mostly about looks, and want sexual variety. You don’t see me shaming men for their fantasies or their preference for skinny blondes with big boobs.”
Wait. Just a second here… Are you implying that a man talking about females flaws is “shaming” women? Really? Seems like that is taking the conversation a little too personally yet again. I’m more than able to look at the male condition in all its glory and horror, and admit where I and “we” are flawed, without taking it personally. So what if I’m a man and men tend to be horny pigs? Yeah, I’m a horny pig, and I’ve learned to channel that for positive purposes.
“You’re applying a double standard. If I don’t write posts shaming men at a blog for young women, why should I welcome comments shaming women?”
Again, talking about female flaws DOES NOT EQUAL shaming particular women.
He launched the entire effing conversation with that one article. He revived the word “hypergamy” after more than a century of misuse. So, the fact that he “turns out to have been right” would be of decisive importance.
He redefined the word hypergamy after centuries of a still-accepted definition. That article caught the eye of Roissy, who brought it front and center, and the conversation occurred primarily at Roissy’s blog, and spread from there.
Oh, and Ted was right: what special standing does an MBA have to reason about mating? Personally, I think you have every right to and I prefer to focus on your arguments rather than your diploma, but by your standards you have the same standing as Devlin: none.
I have not posited an original hypothesis without testing it or offering supporting arguments. Devlin did. He does not pass the standard for academic credibility.
The entire history of human thought until the dawn of the scientific method centered on philosophers drawing conclusions from 1) observation and 2) history and then reasoning about examples through dialectic to form conclusions
The entire conversation has been rhetoric rather than dialectic. That’s a big part of the problem.
From the blog Faith & Heritage:
The most practical theory to explain the success of PUA’s is Roissy’s elucidation of the phenomenon of postmodern female hypergamy, as elucidated in the work of F. Roger Devlin (warning: Devlin describes important facts about postmodern mating but is prone to sweeping generalizations about all women that I think are needlessly offensive to the remnant of women who are on our side).
Here is the Devlin excerpt Roissy published:
It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. [...]
Hypergamy is not monogamy in the human sense. Although there may be only one “alpha male” at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime
There’s a reason the MSM has totally blacked out his writings. Another gem:
I believe Shalit is by no means unusually narcissistic, as women go. Most do take for granted men’s obligation to put women’s needs and desires before their own, and thus to feel no particular gratitude when men do so. Many women have no idea, for example, how intense a young man’s sexual urges can be, and are not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect.
Are you fricking kidding me? Seriously, Escoffier, if this is your cup of tea, take is elsewhere. I find this man deeply offensive and full of shit.
Susan on the Blue Valentine character played by Ryan Gosling;
“It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but I would have kicked that guy to the curb long before. He was a lazy drunk, waking up every morning in his EZ chair with a hangover, and popping open his first beer at 8 a.m. All this while he was in charge of child care. ”
That qualifies as child abuse and such people are lucky if they don’t get CPS called on their asses by a neighbor, but the children are not lucky to have such abusive parents.
See, this is the type of thing my South Asian family will see and then rant about how uncivilized “Amreekans” are and how they hate their own children. I’m done spending countless hours explaining to them that NAAALT.
It would be better for international PR if American media professionals started showing their people and culture in a better light.
I did like your distribution curve, but Devlin does not allow for it. He states “the human female is fickle” and “not naturally loyal.” In Devlin’s scheme there are no women who are not fickle, or who find it very natural to be loyal to their husbands. In Devlin’s view, Susan Walsh does not exist. (cough cough solipsism)
There’s a reason he’s famous and widely discredited in the MSM for making sweeping generalizations about women. Because he does.
This is the kind of smug and superior tone you’ve really been specializing in, Mike.
I have serious questions for you.
OK…I am going to try and answer these questions minus any smugness and superior tone. In all fairness, with some of your comments you’ve been trying to kind of bait me and escalate the intensity of the dialogue. Someone has to stand down first. Unfortunately, I suspect you are probably as stubborn as I am
Do you believe that your sharing threads from other blogs and forums here is useful to my readership, especially when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority?
No, it is not useful to your readership insofar as some of the more introspective types recognize some tendencies such as solipsism and are proactive about managing it in their real lives.
Now let’s take a step back, and I’ll do my best not to be smug, but I would ask you that if and when you respond, please answer my points directly. Don’t bring in anything tangential that I am not talking about in this comment.
I believe in “human nature”. These would be characteristics endemic to the human condition. Greed might be one example. Both men and women feel greed and it probably exists on a spectrum for different people. There is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing aspects of human nature are “flawed” and that we might want to recognize them to better manage them.
I believe there is “male nature” and “female nature”. For example, I don’t think it would be too controversial to suggest that propensity to violence is more male. I can tell you from time to time I feel urges for violence that would probably shock you. But I have rarely committed violent actions. I recognize the tendency and manage and supress the desire to act out.
Now I believe there is “female nature” as well. For example, hypergamy and solipsism. Escoffier has often remarked that you seem unwilling or unable to really confront, explore aspects of female nature. I don’t want to psychoanalyze you, but you gave a glimpse I think why this is. Yesterday, in a reply to me you mentioned that accepting the concepts means justifying certain tactics in an “ends justify the means”. I think you think that if you accept and agree with what many guys are saying about hypergamy and solipsism, that is giving the blank check to engage in bad behavior.
Now you challenged the solipsism concept. You asked for proof and evidence. The men answered your call and responded with ample anecdotal evidence. I cut and paste the Vox excerpts because it was further support for the female solipsism concept. Now forget calling it female solipsism. We can call it whatever you wish, but clearly there is something different going on in the female brain versus the male brain that has a woman answer a question about a roadtrip and seeing fat women with a direct question about her being fat. A generalized statement was interpreted by her to be about her. That is exactly what I first said the phenonemon was way back when this started. I really don’t care if you want to call it solipsism or not.
You do this frequently in a way that is aggressive. I do not understand why you don’t simply have those conversations in those online venues you prefer.
Do you want me to stop commenting here? Please tell me directly if that is the case, and I will never comment here again. But I cannot be who I am not. Believe it or not, I exercise a large amount of discretion here. I suspect I’m like Ted, in that we both hold back quite a bit. There have been a couple of threads where you really ruffled my feathers admittedly. I’m not entirely sure why, but you rarely if ever concede anything. I think you think it is a sign of weakness especially if you concede to a group of guys. If you observe men, you’ll see we frequently concede to each other, and usually it gets a gracious response. Not sure if you’ve responded as I type this to post, but I replied with a “I stand corrected”. Men acknowledge another man when they do that. Speaking generally, to ignore a man’s response of “My bad” is typically seen as disrespectful.
I told you I did not appreciate that last week and here you are doing it again, with a mocking comment from Vox’s thread. What do you hope to gain?
In this case, it was not a mocking comment….it was a literal description of the verbal exchange. The only thing I hope to gain there was providing evidence for the solipsism concept.
Yesterday you misunderstood almost every comment I made, and I really cannot help but picture you screaming la la la with your fingers in your ears.
I got a bit worked up yesterday, I’ll admit. The one response about partner was definitely a gaffe on my part. Now, honestly, you bear some responsibility as well. Look at Escoffier’s comment. He obviously shares some of my frustration with your discussion style although he is obviously 10x the gentleman I am, and is more diplomatic. I probably need to be less confrontational and aggressive, but you need to be more internally consistent. You seem to deviate often from comment to comment on what your exact view is and in responding to comments you have a tendency to include a lot of extraneous verbiage that is not directly related to the point you are responding to. I mention that not to be nasty or aggressive but as constructive criticism.
And really, if you want me to leave permanently I will. I do appreciate some of the past personal advice you gave me. Ya know, sometimes people just can’t discuss certain subjects. I think if we were at a dinner party, we’d have to make SMP topics off-limits Ya know, I love my fiancee to death, but I don’t like to talk politics with her. There are some views she holds that I think are ignorant, and I can’t help but respond to them in an aggressive manner. The easiest solution is not to discuss it.
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
You cite Helen Fisher a lot and she is at pains to stress that monogamy, however advantageous it is to happiness, is NOT biologically natural.
And you find this offensive?
“not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect”
On a blog about hook up culture, a wholly new phenomenon in the history of the human race, a rolling Greek bachanalia on a mass scale now going into its second generation. Even if it is only 20% of the population, this is something totally unprecedented. What’s driving it? The notion that part of the driver is the hitherto underappreciated power of female sexual desire?
Seriously, THAT’S offensive?
We’re once again going back to square one, Susan, where you get indignant and insist that women are totally pure and that the Blue Pill was right after all.
” I really, truly dislike the awkward early stages of relationships. Those flutters woman crave? Mostly make me anxious and slightly sick to the stomach. I’m really not biologically setup to enjoy all that crazy dopamine stuff it seems…”
Flutters are only fun if they person you’re fluttering over flutters over you too. Otherwise, it sucks.
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
You cite Helen Fisher a lot and she is at pains to stress that monogamy, however advantageous it is to happiness, is NOT biologically natural.
And you find this offensive?
—–
It is natural to be attracted to other physically attractive people besides one’s own spouse, but the desire to f*ck them based on that attraction may not come naturally to some. I believe there are people for whom monogamy is not a struggle at all on any level – physical, mental, moral – and who are naturally monogamous.
Sorry, not true in my case. I don’t see it as “inferiority”, but it IS an important distinction that I as a man should know.
With ADR, Ted, if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s. That is precisely what Rollo stated. You can dance around the semantics, but the meaning is very clear. “I can do something and you can’t. I am more capable than you are.”
OK, this may be true. But, does that mean that *I* use it the same way? Just because the ‘sphere says the sky is red, and I come here and enquire about what you think on the color of the sky because I think it may be red, doesn’t mean I’m coming here to “bring the ‘sphere to your living room”. Maybe I actually want your opinion on it. Every man that posts isn’t trying to sabotage you willfully. I won’t say I haven’t done my fair share of derailment here, but it is never my intent.
I understand that and I appreciate it. But the fact is, that manosphere definition is widely accepted and represented by the first 9 google hits I provided originally. Solipsism is never discussed in the ‘sphere as something men experience. I have never seen it once.
To the contrary, to someone like me it makes perfect sense. I want to know every flaw in a system I am expected to manage. I might not be able to fix them, but I damn well surely want to know about them so I can mitigate their effect.
If you’re the manager, that system works well. It does not work well in fixing society’s ills because we cannot agree on flaws. I’m telling you that the list of female flaws per the ‘sphere is daunting and unmatched by anything I have ever said here. The women who stoop that low are the radfems, who are equally deluded and partisan.
Wait. Just a second here… Are you implying that a man talking about females flaws is “shaming” women? Really? Seems like that is taking the conversation a little too personally yet again. I’m more than able to look at the male condition in all its glory and horror, and admit where I and “we” are flawed, without taking it personally
I am not writing a blog looking at the female condition in all its glory and horror, and as most of the male commentary focuses on the horror with little of the glory, I have no appetite for it beyond intellectual inquiry. That has been and will continue to be my approach.
Let me be clear.
HUS is not a place for you to figure out what women are bad at. Do you get that? I do not know how many times I have to say that I am not Alka Seltzer for the Red Pill.
I’m happy to engage on these issues when they affect both sexes, but you are focused primarily on figuring out what’s wrong with women.
A female sophomore in college comes to read a post on why women like bad boys, and she’s clobbered with a crew of males screaming in all caps that women like bad boys. Do you think she comments? No, she says WTF and closes her window.
I have NO DOUBT that you are skilled enough at deductive reasoning to read data and come to a logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it is the correct logical conclusion. And, all things being equal, your ability to do so is no more or less credentialed than mine. After all, I have a degree in computer science!
I agree, and that is why I write a blog and invite people to debate and disagree with me. I solicit a variety of opinions, and I am happy to have dissent here. I often learn from it. But I do not appreciate the dismissive tone of a reader who says, “Gee I’m finding these studies tedious. I used to like HUS better.” Fine, bye.
Susan, “With ADR, Ted, if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s. ”
OK wait. The traditional understanding is that woman’s emotional capacity is larger than man’s, and the Manosphere is claiming the opposite?!?!?
How about human emotional capacity runs on a spectrum and varies from individual to individual? Anyone ever consider that?
” I suspect I’m like Ted, in that we both hold back quite a bit. ”
If I truly wrote without consideration for the audience here, I promise you J would NOT think I was a sweet guy. Yes, I am more than capable of BEING a sweet guy, but it really isn’t a natural thing. I’m a verbal brute. I’m opinionated and stubborn. I’m dogged and determined, and rarely let go of something until I’m satisfied. I truly and honestly intimidate people into submission when debating in person. I wish you all could hear just how loud I get when I’m worked up…
I override ALL of that often here, and I don’t feel imposed upon BY that fact. However, I can’t help but occasionally get the impression that sometimes you think I’m getting out of hand, and it makes me chuckle. I don’t mean to sound condescending at all, but I really do tread lightly here. I do that out of respect, but its hard to maintain that respect when things start getting personal, because *I* do NOT escalate here the way I would in person. I still keep those kid gloves on, and it is why I tend to simply knuckle under when tempers start rising. Rest assured if it was in person, I’d keep on pushing until someone popped. Hint, it is rarely me that loses their temper. I’ll simply keep pushing buttons until it happens. And honestly, I get a bit of pleasure from doing so. Once a discussion gets out of the realm of true debate and goes personal, I’m more than happy to keep feeding the bear until it’s stomach explodes.
BTW, on the solipsism debate, which I am not really a part of, I don’t read the men as saying that it is unique to women, but that a certain kind of solipsism is characteristic of women and more widespread among them than among men. That is not a claim of inferiority but one of difference.
I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males. Once you fail to do that, I challenge you to find one mansophere reference to solipsism that is not restricted to women. As always, I’ll be happy to eat my words and tip my hat if I’m wrong.
No, I don’t see you “shaming” the men, but you do talk openly about the flaws endemic to men that can get in the way of or ruin a good relationship. You SOMETIMES talk openly about the analagous flaws in women, but you also sometimes heatedly deny them and rule the topic out of bounds.
Can you give me some examples where I have described male flaws that ruin relationships that are not also shared by women? I talk about promiscuity, infidelity, inciting jealousy, and many other problematic behaviors, but I can’t think offhand of zeroing in on a male trait in a judgmental way.
@Susan
“He was very interesting in a thread about Game’s compatibility with Christianity not long ago (not here).”
Wait, what? How? (and the ‘rents looked at me funny when I said I thought God was anti-woman)
@Ted D
“Honestly, I can’t know a woman well enough to be comfortable getting naked in front of her in 7 hours. Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?”
No you can’t.
I once had a co-worker ask me if I’d met any guys the previous weekend (he asked me about that pretty frequently, I guess he was thinking about the age stuff I just learned here). I said no, it had only been two days, he said that shouldn’t matter much. I said that’s not enough time for me to learn about a person, and asked if he watched Criminal Minds.
There was a guy behind us taking out the trash and he started laughing. Ironically he had about six months of a prison sentence left.
@ted
“I’m opinionated and stubborn. I’m dogged and determined, and rarely let go of something until I’m satisfied. I truly and honestly intimidate people into submission when debating in person.”
Sounds pretty solipsistic to me!
“I override ALL of that often here, and I don’t feel imposed upon BY that fact. However, I can’t help but occasionally get the impression that sometimes you think I’m getting out of hand, and it makes me chuckle. I don’t mean to sound condescending at all, but I really do tread lightly here. I do that out of respect, but its hard to maintain that respect when things start getting personal, because *I* do NOT escalate here the way I would in person. I still keep those kid gloves on, and it is why I tend to simply knuckle under when tempers start rising. Rest assured if it was in person, I’d keep on pushing until someone popped. Hint, it is rarely me that loses their temper. I’ll simply keep pushing buttons until it happens. And honestly, I get a bit of pleasure from doing so. Once a discussion gets out of the realm of true debate and goes personal, I’m more than happy to keep feeding the bear until it’s stomach explodes. I keep saying I’m an asshole at heart.”
Waiting for Vox or someone to point out all the occurences of “I” and “me” in that paragraph.
P.S. I know it wasn’t you that was harrassing Charm or whoever about saying “I, . . . I . .” – I’m just being a dick.
The point is the source. The source must be credible for the ideas to be credible. Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not.
This is wrong. Just because someone is a nutcase doesn’t mean they are wrong that the world is round or that the sun rises in the east or sets in the west. Ideas need to be evaluated on their OWN merit based on their own internal logic and/or how well they describe observable reality, NOT on who bring the idea to the table first. With all due respect, overemphasis on the source of an idea to which either the idea is either automatically embraced or rejected is a substantial logical fallacy.
Escoff, Ted, and Mike C,
So I know I don’t comment much, but I lurk and I’ve watched you guys have the same discussion with Susan perhaps 5 times in a row now. If you’ll remember, I once had a similar point of contention (not just with Susan, others were involved), and it turned out that I really needed a nice long break. We can’t ask Susan to take a break from her own blog, but to be honest none of you have made much headway and maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
But wasn’t there a study that found the opposite at or about the time of ovulation?
The study found that single women’s tastes in male faces move to a higher level of masculinity during ovulation. An example might be from Zac Ephron to Ryan Gosling. Hypermasculine faces generally are not preferred.
(I would like to point out that this study was conducted showing women photos of male faces, btw.)
For married women, interest in males outside the relationship did not occur unless the women dissatisfied specifically wrt dominance in her mate.
Because academics must lean to the “nurture over nature” view, they presume this shows that better health care tends to reduce womens’ attraction to men with strong “disease resistence” genes in favor of more reliable men, or something like that.
Most of the studies come out of evo psych and bio, which strongly lean toward nature. IIRC, that study suggested that women seek more macho men for physical protection in dangerous societies with high violence. In societies where order is maintained, females select more feminine male faces.
We don’t see men writing articles about how bad things happening to women should be a concern to us because, when you really think about it, this could indirectly impact men in a bad way.
True. I am reaching the conclusion that the most egregious examples of female solipsism are from feminists, and that the manosphere concept was originally meant to do battle with them. It has broadened and morphed over time into a generalization about hardwired female nature. Interestingly, many of the examples have focused on feminism.
I think a secondary, and related issue, is the perceived lack of female empathy for men. This is real, I’ve written about it here and I see it in my dealings with women all the time. Again, this is real and worth discussing, but the whole idea of FS alienates even the women who do empathize with men, because men have identified them as the enemy.
I once saw an article about horrible the lives of women were in some former soviet republic because they were all so fabulously educated, worked good jobs and dressed exquisitely, but they couldn’t find a suitable man because so many men of the country were alcoholic street bums. It never dawned on this broad to ask, “hmmm, what is it about this country that sends so many young men into such a desparate unhappy state?”
Susan – “if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s.”
Nope, if I say that it means I believe that men and women love differently. Unless I say it is an inferior method of love, don’t assume I’m claiming superiority. Perhaps you don’t know me well enough, but I really and truly do try to be fair about everything. If I think something is bad, I say it straight up.
““I can do something and you can’t. I am more capable than you are.””
Oh Susan. Do you realize just how “school yard” that sounds? Have I really made you think I’m a misogynist?
“I understand that and I appreciate it. But the fact is, that manosphere definition is widely accepted and represented by the first 9 google hits I provided originally. Solipsism is never discussed in the ‘sphere as something men experience. I have never seen it once.”
Fine. But *I* am not the ‘sphere. Neither is Mike, Escoffier, or most of the regulars. Hell VD has his own blog and I still wouldn’t say he represents the ‘sphere. I get that you view the ‘sphere at large as the enemy, and I’m sure it is unsettling to know that some men you see as reasonable can read it and agree from time to time. But honestly that does NOT make us your enemy.
“If you’re the manager, that system works well. It does not work well in fixing society’s ills because we cannot agree on flaws. “
I agree. But how can we ever come to an agreement if we can’t even TALK about it without someone getting their panties in a bunch?
“HUS is not a place for you to figure out what women are bad at. Do you get that? I do not know how many times I have to say that I am not Alka Seltzer for the Red Pill.”
Then to me you do not truly intend to help these young women. If you are not willing to show them clearly where they are going wrong, and why, then you cannot help them. At best you are providing a band-aid and hoping they figure out the why of it on their own.
You want to know how to fix bad behavior? Identify its roots and fix those. Trying to convince young college women to pick the good guy over the cad is pointless if you don’t tell them explicitly WHY they find the cad attractive in the first place.
Do you know why I want to know more about women’s nature? Because I love one, and I want to be able to help her be happy. I have daughters, and I want to be able to explain to them why they can’t help but be attracted to that douchebag with a motorcycle. If I can’t explain it to them, how can I convince them to look beyond the excitement and think long term? Yes, the short term fix is to make them “feel” like the right choice is to pass, but what about the next bad boy? What happens when they “feel” like sexing up another asshat? If they don’t know WHY they feel it, they won’t know it’s wrong to trust in that feeling.
It’s Friday. I’m going to do my best to be scarce over the weekend as usual. Please do your best to step away and unwind a bit yourself. And if you can, think about what I said above. I’m being completely earnest when I tell you that trying to fix this without getting to the root of the problem is IMO pointless, even when you are working at the margins. Women deserve to know why they “feel” the way they do, even if perhaps they don’t consciously want to know. Its about being responsible for yourself and your actions, and you can’t do that unless you know WHY you act the way you do.
Susan, first I want to note that every time we go down this rabbit hole it’s not because the men bring it up. It’s because YOU say something like “the idea that women like dominance has been proved false” or “hypergamy is about marrying up and nothing else”. Then we feel compelled to respond because we believe that’s wrong and counter to your mission.
RE: the latter. Your mission is to help young people, particularly young women, navigate this SMP and get into relationships. What’s stopping them? The twisted nature of this SMP.
OK, so what’s the remedy? To help them understand this SMP so they can avoid its pitfalls and land what they want (for those who want them): relationships.
Understanding requires understanding male and female nature, including male and female sexual desire, and how they are different. You spend a lot of time explaining to girls the habits and psychology of players and cads so they will know them when they see them, understand that they are bad bets for relationships, and (hopefully) avoid them.
But what they also need to understand is what, in their OWN nature, makes players and cads attractive—and often MORE attractive, at least initially or superficially, than nice, good, solid guys.
Sometimes you address this with candor. But sometimes you vehemently deny that there is any problem. And sometimes you positively state that female nature is fine: it’s naturally monogamous, its hypergamy is all about finding a good mate once and then shuts off, women find beta traits attractive, and so on.
So, you can be contradictory. But more to the point, the latter advice is unhelpful TO WOMEN. You seem to think it’s best that women not hear the unflattering things about female nature when the reverse is true: that’s PRECISELY what they need to hear so that they can understand it and learn to control it.
The more you shield women from that—or worse, mislead them into thinking that their natural attraction triggers will lead them straight into the arms of a virtuous beta—the more mistakes they will make, including (but not limited to) hooking up and chasing players.
What is game? In a nutshell, game is a massive arbitrage scheme developed by (some) men to take advantage of the fact that (most) women do not understand their own attraction triggers. When you perpetuate blue pill myth, you do your target audience a disservice by making game more effective. And you undermine your core goal of promoting lasting, stable relationships.
PB – “P.S. I know it wasn’t you that was harrassing Charm or whoever about saying “I, . . . I . .” – I’m just being a dick.”
Its all good. I’m probably borderline narcissistic or some such nonsense anyway. Besides, I was raised by a single mother. If indeed solipsism IS a female trait (which I personally never stated) then it may be little surprise that I inherited it from my upbringing. *shrug*
I’ll add it to my list of cross-wired shit like wanting a woman with options that doesn’t use them, and the desire for my woman to lust after my ass.
For whatever reason, I keep reminding myself of this, and it’s really allowed me to appreciate my beta side a hell of a lot more.
I’d written you off as lost in the wilderness. But it’s good to hear things are improving for you. I eschew these silly alpha/beta labels anyway. Your personality is just as much a part of you as your gender is. There’s absolutely nothing inconsistent with being a man and being yourself at the same time. And I’m certain there’s a special woman somewhere who’ll agree. Good luck!
I believe that women can be attracted to other men and naturally loyal to their husbands.
Loyalty to a loved one is natural for both men and women.
It is a character trait. Some men are not loyal and some women are not loyal. There is zero evidence that women are less loyal to their mates than men are.
Furthermore, speaking of loyalty, you said yesterday that a man considering dumping his unattractive wife for a newer model was not hypergamy because he doesn’t seek status in his new mate. That is true, it is not hypergamy. It is analogous to hypergamy, though, the male desire for sexual variety. You have acknowledged this. IOW, unhappily married people may well be tempted to trade up either to a wealthier guy or a hotter girl. It’s the same thing at work for both sexes.
I don’t thing happily married people are tempted to make a change, or find it difficult to remain loyal.
“not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect”
I don’t understand your comment here. This was Devlin saying that young women need to treat the powerful force of young male sexuality with respect, implying that they should not expect men to wait for sex.
The notion that part of the driver is the hitherto underappreciated power of female sexual desire?
Of course, but we don’t have the same desire for variety. Our needs can be met with a favored male. If this were not true, the cuckoldry rate would be higher than 2% and the female infidelity rate would be higher than it is. Also, the differential in divorce rates by SES groups indicates that few women actually do seek a higher status mate.
We’re once again going back to square one, Susan, where you get indignant and insist that women are totally pure and that the Blue Pill was right after all.
You’re being a drama queen, I didn’t say that.
I believe that males and females employ a wide range of mating strategies, based on genetics and environment. Some of those mating strategies are moral, some are immoral. Neither sex is more or less immoral than the other, IMO.
We can identify “flaws” for both sexes, but in my view a woman’s inability to love, inability to converse without being egoistic, and inability to be dedicated and loyal to her husband rather than fickle are not among ours.
I’ll say again that I have never suggested any corollary flaws unique to males either.
No, that line of Devlin was not about male sexuality, it was about female. Read it again. It’s clear to me from the quote but if it’s still not to you, get the original piece and read it in context.
Once a discussion gets out of the realm of true debate and goes personal, I’m more than happy to keep feeding the bear until it’s stomach explodes.
Funny you should say that, because when that happens here my stomach hurts. I have feelings of acute discomfort, anxiety and dread. The frank, often brutal comments that men leave evoke a strong emotional response in me. I speak for no one else, but at times like this I consider shutting down the blog.
Ideas need to be evaluated on their OWN merit based on their own internal logic and/or how well they describe observable reality, NOT on who bring the idea to the table first. With all due respect, overemphasis on the source of an idea to which either the idea is either automatically embraced or rejected is a substantial logical fallacy.
You’re right. I should amend that to say that if a source is not credible, I will retain a very healthy dose of skepticism until I see sufficient evidence that the ideas are correct. Loony people have made very important contributions to civilization.
For example, if Todd Akin came online to lecture us about female nature, I would be extremely skeptical.
Susan, I’m not the one making the clam that women can’t love or any of the rest. I’m objected to the way that you, when you argue against those claims, start to regress into blue pill delusions about the purity of female nature.
No, I don’t think loyalty is natural any more than monogamy is. Loyalty is a character trait that arises from a combination of reason and sentiment. The latter two are natural characteristics of human beings but have to be properly cultivated and educated to function as they should or at their best.
This all comes down to the status of “gratitude” as the foundation of morality, which is one of the great topics of philosophy and finds its fullest expression in Machiavelli.
Re: hypergamy, no it’s not the same for both sexes, it operates differently. I believe that most studies until very recently showed that men cheat more than women, which makes sense given that the desire for variety characterizes base male sexuality but not female. Men will cheat with no thought of leaving their wives, indeed in the hope that they never get caught and can stay married unto death. Women by and large don’t do that. If they cheat, they’ve checked out no hubby for good.
BTW, the fact that cheating rates are now more or less tied for both sexes suggests to me a loosening of the restraints on female hypergamy that used to be effective in checking much of what cheating might otherwise have occurred.
So I know I don’t comment much, but I lurk and I’ve watched you guys have the same discussion with Susan perhaps 5 times in a row now. If you’ll remember, I once had a similar point of contention (not just with Susan, others were involved), and it turned out that I really needed a nice long break. We can’t ask Susan to take a break from her own blog, but to be honest none of you have made much headway and maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Just a well-meant thought from an old HUS buddy.
Olive,
You may be right.
Let me share more of my personal history. I first starting dating my ex-wife in April 1996. From April 1996 to Dec 31 1997, we “broke up” about 3-4 times. They were usually about a 1-2 week breakup and then we would get back together. We actually broke up for a longer period of time New Year’s Eve 1997, but even in 98-00 we would periodically hang out and fuck. I’d actually have dates and then get together with her just to have sex. I WAS ALWAYS INEXPLICABLY DRAWN BACK TO HER. I was in grad school in 99-00 enjoying the single life but for the 2nd year 00-01 she persuaded me to get back together as a couple. We broke up again in 2002 and then some months later got back together again. Something just kept pulling me back in. We married in May 2004, and she left me in October 2004. About a month later, she wanted to come back. I took her back and we were back together in November and December. In late December 2004, there was the mother of all battles. It was literally insane. Both sets of parents were there. She was literally going berserk. Tons of stuff was being thrown and destroyed. It was sheer insanity. She left and the divorce stuff got rolling. My birthday is actually in early March, and she showed up at my apartment door unannounced on my birthday. My best friend and I were there playing a video game. She had a cake and wanted to talk about stopping the divorce proceedings. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of “I don’t think so…not this time”. Whatever hold she had on me for the previous 8-9 years was gone. I saw her once a few years later, and had a conversation with her. I was actually somewhat surprised at how little emotion I felt for someone I once thought I couldn’t live without.
I have been pondering that whatever value I once brought here no longer exists, and that whatever value I received is gone as well……I guess I’m not really sure what has continually drawn me back as the blog changed directions…..well, I kinda do. Perhaps I should and need to follow the path of Jesus Mahoney.
Men will cheat with no thought of leaving their wives, indeed in the hope that they never get caught and can stay married unto death. Women by and large don’t do that. If they cheat, they’ve checked out no hubby for good.
Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting that females are more “flawed” than males in this way? I’ve been hearing that more and more, that female cheating is “worse” and a greater wrong. Do you agree?
No, I don’t think loyalty is natural any more than monogamy is. Loyalty is a character trait that arises from a combination of reason and sentiment. The latter two are natural characteristics of human beings but have to be properly cultivated and educated to function as they should or at their best.
I disagree. I think that for some people, loyalty undo death comes naturally, while others may never feel it for anyone. I believe it’s tied up with empathy, the ability to demonstrate love and attachment, the desire to reap and preserve the benefits of emotional intimacy, the ability to honor a promise, and the expectation of reciprocal dedication.
I agree that loyalty should be cultivated in children as they are raised. I knew when I married that I would be loyal. I don’t have it in me, I don’t think, to be disloyal in a major way. That would be far more challenging than just doing what comes naturally.
I have not said anything about “better” and “worse” forms of cheating. I have said that for the various male predelictions that are well understood, there are corresponding female predelictions which are not well understood nor openly acknowledged. I have also detected you going back and forth on whether there are any dangers endemic to female sexual desire that are not generally found among men. I am trying to establish that there are.
I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males.
Admitting its length, my stated position does in fact call for a similar trait in males and females, which is the tendency for a person to synthesize information they processed through first hand (intellectual) activity or (emotional) experience in priority over information they acquired as a second hand (observed) activity or (empathized) emotion.
Because females also tend to process and synthesize using emotional factors more than intellectual factors, first hand emotional experience tends to play a dominant role in how they respond. Female responses influenced by an emotion or intuition they have felt may be perceived as egoistic to an outside observer .
But males are processing and synthesizing in a similar way – the difference being that first hand intellectual activity tends to play the dominant role. Ask a large sampling of male turkey hunters what gun you should purchase for turkey hunting. I predict that the responses will trend toward being influenced by guns that the subject is using or has used.
In other words – the responses from male and female subjects will show similarly dominant influence from information acquired in a more direct, personal, and first hand manner. A response like “I really enjoyed using a .223 Remington, and I had a great time when we last hunted” may be perceived as self centered while a response like “The .223 Remington aims better than other guns I’ve used, and I bagged two birds with it when we last hunted” isn’t.
No, that line of Devlin was not about male sexuality, it was about female.
I had difficult finding the passage in the piece, so I had to read the damn thing again. It was uncanny – every Game or MRA blog I can think of is lifted straight from Devlin. I had no idea the discipleship was so clear.
There’s a reason Tyler Cowen calls him evil and most others call him a flaming misogynist. Here’s the passage:
I believe Shalit is by no means unusually narcissistic, as women go. Most do take for granted men’s obligation to put women’s needs and desires before their own, and thus to feel no particular gratitude when men do so. Many women have no idea, for example, how intense a young man’s sexual urges can be, and are not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect. Shalit never seems aware that men feel “pressured” by their own sexual urges, or that a normal, healthy young man who has dated a girl for eight months before making these urges known has already demonstrated a fair amount of self-control.
I’m reading that as women being ignorant of how much men want sex, and show disrespect when they don’t appreciate a man’s self-control. How do you interpret it differently?
As to your quote from Devlin about treating male sexuality with the proper respect, although think Escoffier has misread it, I think it’s entirely unfair to take the quote out of context. He was not implying that women should not expect men to wait for sex. He was discussing Shalit’s inability to view anything from a male perspective and what a male might reasonably want out of a relationship (there is that “solipsism” concept). In other words, her writing viewed men as simply beings that should provide women what they want from relationships without any regard to the possiblity that men have male-specific needs. Consequently, she concludes that a guy who started pressuring for sex after 8 months of courtship simply didn’t love the woman. That’s silly. She is not grasping how powerful a young man’s sexual urges are, and how much he restrained by waiting 8 months. In fact, absent strong religious reasons, I (and Devlin) would suggest that her making him wait more than that really suggests that she doesn’t love him and doesn’t give a shit about this “powerful force force of nature” that consumes him almost constantly.
So, Devlin’s full quote:
“Second, let us consider the more important matter of sexual intimacy. Shalit is, of course, emphatic on a man’s lack of all sexual rights before the wedding. Referring to a girl whose boyfriend began “pressuring” her for sex after eight months of courtship, her assessment is: “If he’s pressuring you for sex, he probably doesn’t love you.” (GGM, p. 29) Now, courtship is typically an interaction in which the man seeks sexual surrender from the woman and the woman seeks assurance of commitment from the man. Would the author sympathize with a man who reasoned: “If a woman is pressuring me for commitment, she probably doesn’t love me”? It does not sound like it: elsewhere, she approvingly quotes a woman who is “mortified” that when girls “hint to their boyfriends about marriage [they] find themselves dumped like garbage.” (RM, p. 227) She even refers to the authority of another of her old etiquette books to show that “a young woman could assume that a man wanted to marry her if he simply spent a good chunk of time with her.” (GGM, 28) (I’m guessing eight months would count as “a good chunk of time.”) In other words, women have the right to expect commitment from men, but men are bad when they seek sexual surrender from women; women’s instincts are morally valid, but men’s are not. (Moreover, Shalit never says a word about the legitimate male fear of divorce, which may well be why the young man in her anecdote was “pressuring” his girlfriend about sex rather than simply proposing marriage.)
An old-fashioned fellow might agree with the author’s disapproval of premarital sex, but probably on the assumption that she would at least acknowledge the husband’s claims after the ceremony. This assumption would be mistaken, however. Once the couple is married, the wife’s sexual desires and the duty of the husband to satisfy them become her exclusive concern. (RM, p. 114-15) When she comes across a case of a couple where the man was the party less eager for physical intimacy, her sympathy is once again with the woman; she asks: “If he has no interest in a mutually satisfying relationship, why not just leave?” (GGM, p. 177)
I believe Shalit is by no means unusually narcissistic, as women go. Most do take for granted men’s obligation to put women’s needs and desires before their own, and thus to feel no particular gratitude when men do so. Many women have no idea, for example, how intense a young man’s sexual urges can be, and are not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect. Shalit never seems aware that men feel “pressured” by their own sexual urges, or that a normal, healthy young man who has dated a girl for eight months before making these urges known has already demonstrated a fair amount of self-control.”
I guess I’m not really sure what has continually drawn me back as the blog changed directions.
It’s not that surprising… you’ve been coming around here for several years, no? I’ve always loved HUS because of the community, and it was interesting and fun to get to “know” certain commenters (and Susan!) over time. Plus, I think the debate is of a quality that I’ve never seen in a classroom.
Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize when you’re drawn to something that is no longer useful for you. Furthermore, it’s important to consider WHY.
Recently I’ve been breaking, what I guess I’d call, my own rules in dealing with women – cause I’ve really been emphasizing the beta side. Usually beta is something I’d hold back with dear life, cause either because I’ve actually had bad results spoiling a otherwise successful alpha frame with a beta slip up, and I’ve also seen countless times the ‘more alpha’ guy get the girl. Needless to say, beta to me has always been like fast track to the door. (aka DLV)
So, for a change, I’ve started leading with beta, of course with a healthy, necessary dose of alpha. (and not being afraid to defend beta) And now quite a few girls I know have taken a second look at me, I can tell – almost a 360 head turn difference.
Btw, what I mean is I’m not bothering with the aloof attitude much, and focusing on expressing LTR interest.
With a couple, separate girls our the conversations have found themselves
about dating, hookup culture, and our displeasure with the SMP. (I usually avoid this topic, on person)
Anyways long-story short, most girls actuallyvreally like a guy who can be beta. In fact, some love it. Whether it will have any, one, of them tingling is TBD.
That’s great to hear. Perhaps verbalizing our dislike for the casual SMP will prevent the girl from assuming we’re desperate when we are willing to have commitment before physical intimacy.
I have also detected you going back and forth on whether there are any dangers endemic to female sexual desire that are not generally found among men.
I do not appreciate the constant references to going back and forth, admitting one thing, then taking it back, etc. I am attempting to get at the facts. I can agree with part of what you say, i.e. there is a distribution curve for hypergamy, without agreeing that Devlin is right, i.e. women are fickle and not naturally loyal. Do you really claim these are the same statements? I did not endorse Devlin and then retract it. That is your erroneous understanding. That’s one example, but your claims of tacit agreement and my meeting you more than halfway lead me to believe you misunderstood my position.
whether there are any dangers endemic to female sexual desire that are not generally found among men. I am trying to establish that there are.
So a woman’s infidelity is more likely to end the marriage than a man’s. OK, let’s figure out what this means.
What happens when men cheat and don’t want to end the marriage? Do their wives leave them? IOW, do women view infidelity differently than men do regardless of which party commits it? It seems to me that if a woman’s cheating means the relationship is dead to her emotionally, then wouldn’t she project that same motive onto her husband if he cheated? It may be that for women, cheating by either party means the marriage ends.
If a woman cheats, is a man more likely to keep her around than she would in his situation? Given that men value sexual faithfulness as the most important trait in a female (out of 67 as defined by Buss), it’s hard to imagine that men would wish to reconcile after female infidelity. How do they put aside their having been displaced sexually?
Another danger endemic to female sexual desire is that if a woman’s husband becomes unattractive, either physically, or by appearing weak, or by significantly lowering his status, she may seek a sexually attractive male elsewhere. Again, I believe the male is prone to do the same if his wife becomes unattractive to him in some way. Of course, the male may cheat for no other reason than sexual variety, as you say, so the female risks that diversion of love and resources from her own family if her husband should cheat.
Female sexual desire is lower than men’s in general, so I suppose you could call this dangerous from a male POV. Bed death in marriage is probably attributable to lower female desire more often than not, especially if she is raising children. Husbands are not infrequently jealous of their own children for this reason.
Female sexual desire is generally directed toward a favored male, and they attach fairly quickly to sexual partners in most cases. That is a danger for a man who wishes to remain single, I guess, as it signals drama ahead.
And finally, the biggie: Female sexual desire is very selective. Most women will truly desire only a handful of men in their lives. Desire and attraction are not simultaneous (the tingle myth). Many men may spark initial attraction, but will not make it through the gates to sexual desire and union. I disagree with Devlin’s assertion that women find 99% of men unattractive:
“What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead”
I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males. Once you fail to do that, I challenge you to find one mansophere reference to solipsism that is not restricted to women. As always, I’ll be happy to eat my words and tip my hat if I’m wrong.
In the AG thread of my original response to your challenging the concept:
Anonymous said… Are you saying that men are never solipsistic?
September 18, 2012 10:12 AM
VD said… No, I am not saying that. But it appears to be significantly less common in men.
September 18, 2012 12:14 PM
Now, granted, this is not in the thread at HUS. But I have clearly recognized that men are capable of solipsism. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the subsequent post, I noted that I expected three in four women to test out as solipsistic, versus one in five men. I could certainly be wrong about that, it is merely an estimate. But it does prove that at least one man has admitted that solipsism exists in men as well as women.
Now, granted, this is not in the thread at HUS. But I have clearly recognized that men are capable of solipsism. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the subsequent post, I noted that I expected three in four women to test out as solipsistic, versus one in five men. I could certainly be wrong about that, it is merely an estimate. But it does prove that at least one man has admitted that solipsism exists in men as well as women.
Fair enough. You are the third male to meet the challenge. I am happy to be proved wrong. Now I know who the open-minded males are.
I would be circumspect about saying any modern writer has “disproved” Plato on anything.
(raises hand) Actually, I may have, Escoffier. At least, I have conclusively shown that Socrates knowingly cheated in constructing the second horn of his dilemma in the Euthyphro dialogue, and demonstrated how his logical construction cannot possibly apply to monotheistic religions and/or moralities despite the way Euthyphro is often cited by people who wish to criticize Christianity and have not read the dialogue closely enough. Whether that counts as a “disproof”, I will leave up to you to decide.
He was discussing Shalit’s inability to view anything from a male perspective and what a male might reasonably want out of a relationship (there is that “solipsism” concept). In other words, her writing viewed men as simply beings that should provide women what they want from relationships without any regard to the possiblity that men have male-specific needs.
In reading the whole thing through, I did understand that. However, I think it’s important to understand that Devlin is (I hope) being hyperbolic in the way that Roissy often is. The statement that many women are not inclined to regard male sexuality with the “necessary” respect is clearly opinion rather than fact. If anything, more women than ever, especially feminists, are inclined to treat male sexuality with enough respect that waiting one month is highly unusual.
This is an anti-feminist rant, essentially. It may have valid points, indeed I see that it does, but he has written a piece for men to read and discuss, meant to exhort them to action by saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Indeed, this is the ostensible purpose of the manosphere. Naturally, Devlin does not invite women to the conversation, he is setting himself up in direct opposition to this feminist and to feminist thinking, which he extrapolates to be representative of all women. For that reason alone, Devlin is not really a good subject for a female blog.
I believe Shalit is by no means unusually narcissistic, as women go. Most do take for granted men’s obligation to put women’s needs and desires before their own, and thus to feel no particular gratitude when men do so.
Again, most women take men for granted and feel no gratitude. What is the basis for this claim about most women? This is meant to be incendiary.
Full disclosure: I have never read Shalit’s book, I was not the least bit tempted by the “modesty” angle.
Which man is more attractive has nothing to do with emotion or hypothetical action. Rank these men. Simple. That’s the way we operate in real life all the time. If someone asks you if you think Scarlett Johanssen is hot, do you not know your own mind well enough to respond reliably?
I know she’s somewhat hot. But the real question is wether I would seek a sexual relationship with her. The answer to that question depends on a lot more than just my reaction when I see a picture of her.
Well we can see what women were attracted to when they had sex, and who they had relationships with. We can also learn to what extent peer pressure, alcohol, friend groups, male status and other factors are correlated to sexual experiences.
Which of the studies of this type have determined who women had relationships with? I only remember studies of women’s N and the correlation with other factors. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any studies which objectively measure the types of men that women had relationships with.
Understanding requires understanding male and female nature, including male and female sexual desire, and how they are different. You spend a lot of time explaining to girls the habits and psychology of players and cads so they will know them when they see them, understand that they are bad bets for relationships, and (hopefully) avoid them.
But what they also need to understand is what, in their OWN nature, makes players and cads attractive—and often MORE attractive, at least initially or superficially, than nice, good, solid guys.
Sometimes you address this with candor. But sometimes you vehemently deny that there is any problem. And sometimes you positively state that female nature is fine: it’s naturally monogamous, its hypergamy is all about finding a good mate once and then shuts off, women find beta traits attractive, and so on.
I have never stated that female nature is fine or not fine. Nor have I said that about male nature. You and I have argued about morality before, as you have urged me to take a moral position on casual sex. I am inclined to look at the whole set of male and female traits as close to “perfect” as they’ve been in history, with lots of room for improvement. To the extent that either sex exhibits traits that disfavor monogamy, but the truth is that mother nature does not prefer monogamy. Civilized people do.
At the same time, there are several ideas in the ‘sphere that are just wrong, IMO. The notion that females are fickle and not naturally loyal as a categorical statement is both false and misogynist. I could easily claim that men want nothing but sex, and are incapable of emotional intimacy during sex. Many women have said that before. I do not, because I believe it’s an exaggerated view designed to pit women and men against one another.
I understand how onerous the task of being informed can be, but honestly, it’s extremely irritating when a longtime reader wants to talk about the notorious “lie detector study”, which is another manosphere fraud (as is was found to be statistically insignificant by its authors). I have covered that in detail only recently, and it’s a time suck to be constantly providing the same information repeatedly for people who don’t even bother to read posts.
Actually, the results for self-reporting of masturbation and porn-viewing were statistically significant in that study. The results for partner count were not statistically significant, but were in line with what would be expected based on the results for masturbation and porn-viewing.
I know she’s somewhat hot. But the real question is wether I would seek a sexual relationship with her. The answer to that question depends on a lot more than just my reaction when I see a picture of her.
But that’s not the purpose of the study, nor was it claimed to be. In fact, it was interesting when researchers asked participants why they did not like the hypermasculine faces. Both men and women said those men looked like they would cheat and be poor parents. Why do they think so? Because men with high T cheat and divorce more, and they’re 2/3 less likely to even have kids. It turns out that women and men both are capable of detecting this. It is of course possible that women will go on to have sexual relationships with men they claim to find unattractive, once they get a whiff of his BO or observe his dominance. But no study can measure or predict that. That is indeed a limitation of studies.
Which of the studies of this type have determined who women had relationships with? I only remember studies of women’s N and the correlation with other factors. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any studies which objectively measure the types of men that women had relationships with.
Some of the studies asked people why they hooked up, whether their hookups turned into relationships, how long they dated those people, etc. There have also been studies examining the phenomenon of “college marrieds,” usually freshmen couples who get together almost immediately and are inseparable for four years. FWB relationships have been studied as well.
I agree that portions of what he writes are hyperbolic, similar to Roissy, and unnecessarily incendiary. I wasn’t attempting to introduce him to the blog. I was simply pointing out that his point was not the one you assumed and, boiled to essence (absent invective), his point there was reasonable. He was attacking what was essentially shaming language by Shalit in which she flippantly declared that a guy who had quietly waited 8 months was just a selfish SOB who didn’t love her. This is another version of the whole “a real man would . . .” type of approach. Eff that.
As to the “most women take men for granted and feel no gratitude”, that is obviously over the top. My problem with Devlin is not his underlying observations – which I think tend to be sound at some level when not overstated. My problem with his writing is that he seems to go waaay out of his way to piss off any woman who might be reading it. Flicking ears can be ok, but there are limits. Men wouldn’t enjoy being spoken about like that either. But, at the risk of losing my HUS beta orbiter card, I think he is pretty funny a lot of times.
my attitude about surveys wasn’t directed at your source material in particular. I believe that any survey can be set up with a particular agenda;eight out of ten cat owners said their cats preferred kitekat
well that’s just peachy, but what question was asked?
does your cat prefer kitekat to it’s normal food?
does your cat prefer kitekat to week dead skunk?
the question directs the result.
Suspicion over government related surveys can be well founded. Indeed there is an industry term for cooking up support via surveys;
government X wants to do something unpopular; raise tax on alcohol (for example). But they know it’ll be a tough sell on the grounds of balancing the budget, there is no grass roots level support for the tax hike.
So what they do is called astroturfing (faking grass root support). They set up a charity using a govenment grant, this is the majority of the money that the charity ever gets (public doesn’t donate) – a fake charity.
Said fake charity concocts survey to say that drinking is out of control “would you prefer action on alcohol prices, or have an axe in your head?” – teh public wants action on prices. Or sponsors well paid reports from friendly ‘experts’.
Government ‘reluctantly’ raises taxes ue to pressure from its own charity.
Fair enough. You are the third male to meet the challenge. I am happy to be proved wrong. Now I know who the open-minded males are.
I’ll dig up my comment if I have to but I said earlier that I believe both men and women can be solipsistic, but because of the effects of feminism, today’s women are much more solipsistic.
But that’s not the purpose of the study, nor was it claimed to be. In fact, it was interesting when researchers asked participants why they did not like the hypermasculine faces. Both men and women said those men looked like they would cheat and be poor parents. Why do they think so? Because men with high T cheat and divorce more, and they’re 2/3 less likely to even have kids. It turns out that women and men both are capable of detecting this. It is of course possible that women will go on to have sexual relationships with men they claim to find unattractive, once they get a whiff of his BO or observe his dominance. But no study can measure or predict that. That is indeed a limitation of studies.
Thanks. After all this argument, you admit what we’ve been saying all along.
For INTJ to speak with authority on study design is even more preposterous. Ask questions? Sure. Expressing skepticism? Sure. Weighing in as judge and jury? No.
I apologize. I wasn’t aware that one needs to have a PHD in Sociology to know that what people’s statements don’t always accurately reflect their actions. Thanks for enlightening me.
“A highly successful women’s magazine editor has written a book of advice for young wives stating: “Giving, devoting, sacrificing … these are the actions of a good wife, no? No. These are the actions of a drudge, a sucker, a sap.” Instead, women are urged to emulate a wife who threw her husband’s clothes into the garden to teach him not to leave socks on the floor: “He understood I meant it.” Or another who wanted her husband to help with the laundry, and hollered at him: “Are you a f***ing retard that you don’t see me running up and down stairs? Listen to me and stop your bulls**t.” Or another who discovered this interpersonal skill: “Just stand there and start screaming. If you stand there and scream long enough, someone is going to realize that you’re standing in the middle of the room screaming [and ask] ‘Why are you screaming?’” (pp. 245-47)
What could be wrong with men these days that they refuse to commit?”
C’mon, that’s funny stuff!
And more:
“It is remarkable that a woman with such traditional ideas about marriage, modesty, and feminine decorum never condemns feminism per se. Instead, Shalit claims to have perceived a “fourth wave” of the movement characterized by the rejection of pornography and casual sex. This reviewer is not sanguine about the possibility of an eventual Nth feminist wave coming along to solve all the problems created by waves 1 through (N – 1). ”
Susan, sorry, but I do detect you going back and forth. You will sometimes acknowledge problems with female nature and at other times make preposterous blanket denials, eg “women are not attracted to dominance.”
Leave Devlin out of it. You’re the one who always brings him up and you brought him up this time. It seems to me that you bring him in so that you can tag certain ideas with his name and then dismiss them. Well, forget him. You’re talking to me, not him. These are my thoughts I’m presenting. If you want to dismiss my thoughts in the basis of credentialism I can’t stop you but note that I don’t do the same as you.
So, do I believe that women are fickle? “La Donna Mobile” wrote Verdi. So the idea is hardly a new one. Nor do I believe it is that outrageous. When I was having trouble with my first HS girlfriend, my feminist 1.0 career-woman working mom, from hippie-lib Santa Cruz, California no less, told me “women are fickle”. Her exact words. (She’s stuck with my father for decades in case you’re wondering. She wasn’t trying to slag her whole sex, she was explaining a tendency that, if not checked results in bad things and is particularly out of control in youth.
I don’t believe either sex is naturally loyal, as I said before. But the blue pill myth is that men are not whereas women are. Since that is false, I think it needs to be corrected.
Note that I specifically said above that I am not arguing that one sex’s endemic problematic desires are “worse” than the others. We can have the better/worse debate later if you like. First we have to establish whether or not there in fact ARE any problematic desires that are endemic to women but not to men. (We have already established that there such desired for men not endemic to women.) You sometimes indicate that you think there are, and sometimes indicate that you do not.
Vox, no, that is not disproof of Plato. You cannot take at face value any single Socratic argument from a Platonic dialogue and assume it is the final view of Plato himself. The dialogues are all dramas, with settings, characters, etc. All the speeches have a particular context, spoken to (and in front of) particular people, for a particular purpose. Plato leaves it to the reader to figure out how to interpret Socrates’ statements in light of the context. Then all such statements have to be compared to one another, and analyzed in light of the progression of the argument, etc.
Susan, re: fine v. not fine. You always fall back on this appeal to amoral “objectivity” but in the final analysis it can’t work. However, we can also leave that debate for another time. For the present let’s try to remain “value neutral” as the social scientists say.
The question is whether there are endemic elements to female (but not male) nature that, if not understood or checked, get in the way of your stated goal of fostering healthy, lasting relationships. The question is whether you always sketch female nature accurately.
My contention is that sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. When you say things like “women are naturally attracted to beta traits” and “woman are naturally loyal” and “hypergamy shuts down after marriage” you are summarizing female nature in a way that is inaccurate.
It is also unhelpful because to the extent that young women readers believe this account, they are essentially internalizing what many of them want to hear. This is why morality cannot be ruled out of the conversation. The fact is, most people believe alpha chasing and getting P&Ded is bad. They believe that being naturally attracted to stability and virtue is good. When told that’s what they naturally are, they tend to feel proud of themselves. They take on a false sense of their own innate goodness. They lose sight of those lower parts of their nature that they need to learn to control if they are ever to enjoy true lasting happiness.
When you write things like that you are essentially flattering young women. And in a way that can lead them into trouble. I explained how in my post at 941.
You cannot take at face value any single Socratic argument from a Platonic dialogue and assume it is the final view of Plato himself.
Yes, I thought that might be your take on it. That’s precisely why I wrote it as a critique of Socrates, not Plato. Of course, the impossibility of assuming Plato’s final views does tend to render both attempted proofs and disproofs of Plato meaningless, which may have been your original point. Out of curiosity, what is your opinion of Karl Popper’s take on Plato, aside from what you’ve already mentioned.
@susan
“It is a character trait. Some men are not loyal and some women are not loyal. There is zero evidence that women are less loyal to their mates than men are. ”
If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to be totally faithful, I would say men are less loyal. If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to stay attached to (and an unwavering desire for), I would say men are more loyal. For most men, a desire to bang the young hottie in Marketing has nothing to do with a desire to kick his wife to curb and leave her in the street or even to stop being intimate with her, assuming she has not been a royal bitch. For most women, a serious desire to be taken by the rising hotshot executive VP does reflect some desire to excise her husband from her life, even if he’s been quite kind and caring. I’m not ascribing a greater or lesser morality to either – just pointing out that disloyalty takes different forms.
Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize when you’re drawn to something that is no longer useful for you. Furthermore, it’s important to consider WHY.
Thanks Olive. You’ve given me some homework for the weekend
I’m posting an extract from a blog. If this is not a valid description of a Dark Triad Male, I don’t know. Are all men like this ? No. The tragedy is that one must use some of this guy’s tactics to get a girl. I wish it wasn’t so.
I cannot deny that Cedro may have been one of the most interesting men I have ever dated, but he was also one of the worst. It started last July. We had met two months prior when I started working in the same restaurant as him. He was a back-waiter, I was a hostess. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl literally can’t even remember boys name. It’s true. I was constantly confusing him with a different back-waiter (who happened to be Cedro’s best friend’s girlfriend’s little brother, just to confuse you a bit) and could not for the life of me remember which one he was. After about two months of work, it finally clicked one day when he struck up conversation with me at the end of his shift. I was immediately fascinated. He told me all about his studies at Hamilton College, a small yet competitive college in upstate New York. He told me that he majored in three subjects, Economics, French, and Chinese. He told me he speaks six languages. He told me that he once worked in marketing, but really hated it and was working at the restaurant as he was in between jobs. He told me that he was in ROTC and jumped out of helicopters from time to time. At this point in my mind he had gained a good amount of credibility because, to be honest, the shallow part of me would not have looked at him twice if he was just a restaurant back-waiter in his mid twenties with no other plan. And the helicopters and ROTC screamed alpha male. Perfect.
But this wasn’t enough. Not right away. I still only considered him a friend, but as time went on I began to realize how excited I would get whenever I would see him and then I knew – I had a crush.
Cedro was good at sweet talk and no matter how cheesy the things he would say were – I loved it. It began with a Facebook message “you have this certain je ne sais quoi that makes me smile when I think of you” followed with his number and a note saying, “text me sometime if you’re bored at work.” Of course I texted him right away, and flirting ensued. I couldn’t have been more giddy those first couple months, he seemed so perfect.
At this point in time I was excited, I thought I had finally found someone different. Cedro was not my type by any means. The guys of my past were typically goofy skinny college aged white boys, Cedro was everything but. Cedro was Colombian with a hint of an accent. Cedro was nearly five years older than me and had already graduated from college. Cedro was jacked with a tattoo, pierced ears, and a nipple piercing. I never imagined dating a guy like him – yet I was.
I was impressed with his planning on our first date. He picked me up from work and had options for things we could do. He had even gone as far as looking up movie times. This was a big deal for me and I thought – this guy’s different.
Now maybe I should have known right away when I smelled weed on his clothes that he wasn’t all that great. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against smoking, but a nice guy probably wouldn’t get high before a first date – would he? Nonetheless this fling went on for a good 6 months up until he left to go home to Colombia for the Christmas holidays and I left for my semester abroad in Barcelona.
Throughout the six months while we were dating there were about one hundred red flags that I chose to ignore.
Cedro was a liar. He would call out of work, lying saying he was sick. He would turn off his phone, lying saying it had died. His number one thing was always to say “I’ve been puking all night” except I knew it wasn’t true because one day he actually did puke and was left shocked telling me “I haven’t thrown up in years.”
Cedro always flaked on plans. He would tell me he was going to come over when he got out of work, but would go for drinks with his buddies instead. He would tell me he was going to call me later, and never would. He would tell me he was going to “take me on a nice date”. We never went on a nice date. Not once.
Cedro was a commitment phobe. He would tell me that he was committed to me, but refused to call me his girlfriend. He would tell me he had a “hard life” causing him to be closed off, but continually used that as an excuse when he would be a flake. He would hang out with his ex-fiance, but only let me find out when she tagged him in a Facebook post. Or when they Facebook chatted while he was laying in my bed.
Cedro was a man-whore. Like actually a man-whore. When he told me how many girls he had been with (let’s just say its many more than there are states in the United States of America) I should have run then and there. But I didn’t. I never ran. I always stayed. I always made excuses. I thought I was different.
My friends did not like him. They would only admit to liking him when he would hang out with them and make them laugh. He was funny. But that’s really not enough.
Cedro made me cry at least ever other week. Cedro was a constant let down. But I was obsessed with him and the last thing I wanted was to leave him and be heart broken. So for three months, I did just that. But finally it got to me. We broke up for a week after he had finally pissed me off enough by flaking on plans yet again without a single apology and a million excuses. And if you asked him about the break up he’d tell you it was his idea. He’d also tell you it wasn’t a break up, because technically we were never together. He told me that too. I still got back with him.
In that week I had a horrible time adjusting and the first day I could hardly manage to sit in my cubicle for 20 minutes without bursting into tears. I hated everything and I hated not being with him. But at the same time, I knew it was right. I knew he treated me like shit. And everyone was glad it was over. Ladies, listen to your friends. They know better.
I’m reposting Passer By’s comment here for you in case you missed my comment to you asking about the situation your Indian grandmom (or was it mom?) was talking to you about those women who’s hubbies ran off with “tarts”. I had asked you if they ran off first or if, after finding out about the affairs, their wives ran them off. Please see the comment below as it may relate…..
“If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to be totally faithful, I would say men are less loyal. If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to stay attached to (and an unwavering desire for), I would say men are more loyal. For most men, a desire to bang the young hottie in Marketing has nothing to do with a desire to kick his wife to curb and leave her in the street or even to stop being intimate with her, assuming she has not been a royal bitch. “
Now I believe there is “female nature” as well. For example, hypergamy and solipsism. Escoffier has often remarked that you seem unwilling or unable to really confront, explore aspects of female nature. I don’t want to psychoanalyze you, but you gave a glimpse I think why this is. Yesterday, in a reply to me you mentioned that accepting the concepts means justifying certain tactics in an “ends justify the means”. I think you think that if you accept and agree with what many guys are saying about hypergamy and solipsism, that is giving the blank check to engage in bad behavior.
I agree that there are features that are unique to both sexes. Hypergamy is uniquely female, I accept that, though I do believe there is an analogous male experience of trading up to a hotter mate.
There is no doubt that status and dominance are hugely important in female attraction. I also acknowledge that human beings, including females, are solipsistic. I think feminists are especially solipsistic. But I also believe that “egotistic self-absorption” is a condition also found in many males.
The bottom line is that we’re all so incredibly imperfect. I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender. Honestly, I want people to get along and for men and women to bridge the gap. I hope we are not too far gone for that.
We can call it whatever you wish, but clearly there is something different going on in the female brain versus the male brain that has a woman answer a question about a roadtrip and seeing fat women with a direct question about her being fat.
I’m sure you’re right. We know that the male and female brains have many differences. I am willing to accept those differences without judgment. Are you?
Do you want me to stop commenting here? Please tell me directly if that is the case, and I will never comment here again. But I cannot be who I am not. Believe it or not, I exercise a large amount of discretion here
No, I think you know that I am fond of you and feel loyal to you. I also value your input. To be frank, I expect some loyalty in return. Either you believe I am empathic and fair to men or you do not. I am happy to be grilled about female nature – that’s fair. But I do not wish to constantly defend women against accusations like the ones leveled at blogs you frequent. It’s exhausting and it detracts from my mission here. You need to decide whether HUS’ mission works for you or not. I am all about reaching across the gender divide. If you prefer gender war, we can’t work together.
You seem to deviate often from comment to comment on what your exact view is and in responding to comments you have a tendency to include a lot of extraneous verbiage that is not directly related to the point you are responding to. I mention that not to be nasty or aggressive but as constructive criticism.
Fair enough, I will take it as constructive criticism. I do not mean to appear inconsistent – in my own mind my views are very consistent. I will try to do a better job of communicating them.
Susan, I think your reply to Mike C. at 983 is quite magnanimous and level-headed, really admirable. You’re leading by example here, in how to reach across the divide.
I’ll dig up my comment if I have to but I said earlier that I believe both men and women can be solipsistic, but because of the effects of feminism, today’s women are much more solipsistic.
Okay, INTJ, you’re the 4th. FWIW, this is the conclusion I have reached as well.
Note that I specifically said above that I am not arguing that one sex’s endemic problematic desires are “worse” than the others. We can have the better/worse debate later if you like. First we have to establish whether or not there in fact ARE any problematic desires that are endemic to women but not to men. (We have already established that there such desired for men not endemic to women.) You sometimes indicate that you think there are, and sometimes indicate that you do not.
Let’s hear it. A list of problematic desires for each sex.
Thank you for your earnest reply. and I absolutely agree with Esau’s follow-up comment.
The bottom line is that we’re all so incredibly imperfect.
Very true. I know one flaw I have is I can be short-tempered….it is probably a high T thing. Looking back over my life, many of my bigger mistakes can be found in the heat of anger.
I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender.
I hear you…let me throw this out there simply for food for thought consideration. Assume some weakness A exists, not even just a gender issue, but say a business. Is it ultimately better to simply pretend the weakness does not exist, or is it likely to bettter to recognize the weakness and then be able to take proactive steps to avoid negative consequences of that weakness.
I’ll use myself as an example. My best guess is I am naturally unrestricted and high T. That is a weakness from the perspective of being monogamous. But I am self-aware of this so I do not put myself into situations where this weakness could lead me into actions that I will regret and could be potentially very destructive.
Have a very enjoyable weekend! I know for my part I plan to make some gender love tomorrow (I’ve been tired the last several days) not gender war.
P.S. – I think there are solipsistic men as well….I think my co-worker is probably one.
If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to be totally faithful, I would say men are less loyal. If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to stay attached to (and an unwavering desire for), I would say men are more loyal. For most men, a desire to bang the young hottie in Marketing has nothing to do with a desire to kick his wife to curb and leave her in the street or even to stop being intimate with her, assuming she has not been a royal bitch. For most women, a serious desire to be taken by the rising hotshot executive VP does reflect some desire to excise her husband from her life, even if he’s been quite kind and caring. I’m not ascribing a greater or lesser morality to either — just pointing out that disloyalty takes different forms.
Yeah, I get it. I can only say that as the wife, the idea of my husband banging the young hottie in Marketing is devastating. So devastating I don’t know if I can go on. He either wants me or her. He must choose. I will not look the other way.
“I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender.”
OK, then, let me put this in terms that you might find more palatable.
You like to quote Helen Fisher saying, in effect, “Our genes did not evolve to make us happy, the evolved to drive us to reproduce.”
When I read that I think of Aristotle and the distinction between high and low nature. Low nature is pure biological impulse. High nature is logos, reason, potential, teleology. High nature does not seem natural because it is not automatic, not ubiquitous, not “always on.” But it is natural. The animals can’t talk, can’t reason, can’t love, can’t ask, can’t wonder, can’t philosophize. Only we have that potential. The potential is natural but it has to be developed, cultivated, educated.
So, to be happy AS HUMAN BEINGS we have to develop it. Following low nature, all we can be sure of is that we will reproduce. We may live lives like the beasts but we will have offspring. They may be wretched but they will exist.
But to be happy AS HUMAN BEINGS we have to develop high nature, which requires some effort, which includes controlling many of the desires of low nature.
You want people to be happy, not as animals, but as people. You want them in healthy, lasting relationships. Or, if I may be square, let us call them “marriages.” Well, then you have to teach them how to control low nature and cultivate high nature. That in turn requires understanding that low nature–the imperatives of biological reproduction, divorced from all moral considerations or the demands of lasting human happiness–is only geared toward reproduction, not happiness. So if people want to be happy (and good) they have to learn what their low nature is and how to control it.
This applies to both men and women but the impulses they need to learn to control are different.
Most of those sources are of a similar broad statistical nature and thus all of them are likely to have a similar bias.
Why ones by chance, and what is the bias,specifically? You do realize that many of those sources Susan’s cited are collections of case studies? Your fundamental problem seems to be with how large-scale, randomly sampled data is gathered, though I suspect that’s just a pretense.
Quantity does not always substitute for quality.
I actually agree with you here. Unfortunately, you haven’t cited any case studies at all that could be evaluated for quality. This also suggests that the sources Susan’s cited are lacking in quality. Which ones are, specifically?
Are you suggesting that those who share anecdotes on HUS are liars?
Absolutely not. However, I’d never extrapolate from anonymous narratives to the entire population without question. Clearly, happily married men are in the extreme minority @ HUS. Their anecdotes aren’t worth a damn around here. But I’d never use my own limited personal experiences to make any kind of generalizations about society. In a way, by claiming that the statistical studies Susan’s cited are biased and unreliable just by their statistical nature, you’ve basically said that either the researchers and/or participants are dishonest, or stupid perhaps.
I often read the actual articles, including their methodology and statistical conclusions.
If you believe that the research methods are biased and unreliable, why waste your time? Again, I think this is just a red herring. It’s the conclusions and evidence that you don’t particularly like. This is the Backfire Effect IMO, par excellence: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
Reports of what people do are inherently more reliable than reports of what people feel or especially reports of what people would do. Statistical studies usually measure the latter, while anecdotes measure the former.
Actually, quite a bit of the data Susan’s cited involve definitive and straightforward questions, like: “Are you currently married?”, “How many people have your had vaginal sex with”?, “Have you ever had sex with a stranger?”, etc. If you don’t believe the answers people give in those random surveys, whoop-de-do. But I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of this. An anecdote is a reliable report of what actually happened? Really? By definition, an anecdote is a short account of a particular incident or event. It’s a testimonial, what someone says happened, and in the context of the Internet usually one-sided. Rarely do the anecdotes include both parties’ statements of what actually happened. Anecdotes are hearsay, because there’s no burden of proof whatsoever. No 3rd party is fact-checking anything. These aren’t case studies where people are being observed. I’m not saying they’re necessarily false. But I see no compelling reason to believe they’re necessarily better than other sources of information.
Susan,
“I agree that there are features that are unique to both sexes. Hypergamy is uniquely female, I accept that, though I do believe there is an analogous male experience of trading up to a hotter mate. ”
Men are socio-economically hypo-gamous and physically hyper-gamous.
Women are socio-economically hyper-gamous and physically hypo-gamous.
“Yeah, I get it. I can only say that as the wife, the idea of my husband banging the young hottie in Marketing is devastating. So devastating I don’t know if I can go on. He either wants me or her. He must choose. I will not look the other way.”
What if he let you watch? I keed I keed.
I’m not suggesting otherwise, but if you give me his email address, I’ll let him know, in case he’s unclear on that point.
“Let’s hear it. A list of problematic desires for each sex.”
Those broads are always leaving the toilet seat down and suddenly wanting to talk about something right at the most important moment of the sporting event on TV!!!
Seems like you’re discussing a heck of a lot of HBD-related stuff wrt IQ and its attendant tradeoffs
I wasn’t looking at it from that perspective, but I do see an overlap.
and I think you would agree with me, there are indeed tradeoffs (for the high-IQ, I mean).
Yes and no. There are plenty of high IQ, low EQ people, but there are also many high IQ, high EQ people. I think people like to indulge in some negative stereotyping of the gifted–spergy geniuses, psychotic geniuses, scawny, nerdy geniuses. In both my professional experience with gifted kids, it appears to me that brighter kids are on average not just smarter, but also healthier, funnier, more personable and more even somewhat better looking than less bright kids. On the other hand, when things so wrong, they go wrong in the ways that people stereotype. Out of, let’s say, 1000 gifted kids, the vast majority will grow up to be happy, well adjusted successful people who are significantly better off than their peers. However, a smaller percentage of them may be on the spectrum or neurotic. A few may be psychotic or have a significant mental illness, but not in numbers that greatly differ from the general population. Fewer will go to jail, but more will end up in some sort of treatment. It would be a great exaggeration though to say that most high IQ types are defective in some way. IME, the opposite is true.
It is also possible to be lowish or average IQ, high EQ or lowish or average IQ, low EQ. The jails are filled with the latter because that group is more likely to act out violently.
OTOH, too much time spent on the net would definitely give you the idea that high IQ, low EQ types are extremely common. I think that’s because the net aggregates INTXs.
I think this is what is at the center of the “Riddle of the 80%”
Now, I’m of the belief that a dictatorship can be an incredibly awesome regime to live under, IF the dictator is benevolent and actually cares about the people.
Oh Ted you are wishing what you don’t know about we have had “benevolent” dictators in my country, it was a nightmare.
In my view, the categorical dismissal of all that is just as ludicrous as categorical dismissal of any broad-based sociological study.
I didn’t dismissed the experiences of the PUA’s but I had belonged to many social groups and is easy to find thousands of people sharing the experience specially in the Internet, you are not taking in account many things:
a)Human bias is powerful if you have 10 people reading the same book you are going to find 10 different interpretations and all of them are truth from their perspective the Rashomon effect.
b) The rule of one in a million if 20% of women respond opening their legs to the extreme asshole you naturally are going to end up with thousands of positive reports.
c) Science work with complete description Do the PUA’s actually follow up the girls that didn’t felt into their laps? Do they find out how their lives developed? Did they got married? Stayed faithful? Did they preferred Betas? The problem is that PUA’s are not looking for a neutral response but to get laid. So they concentrate and calibrate into finding that goal and the failures are not registered and studied or quantified. Don’t you think that is a huge flaw in the system?
One of the reasons I did my little play with VD is to show another instance that good girls don’t matter to the men interested on the manosphere, Deti has a similar experience as Zach wouldn’t look twice a girl that is not into partying no matter how much he craves intellect, didn’t you admitted that given the choice of fapping to a 8 and trying to date a 5 a man will pick the fapping? What make you think that PUA’s are any different, they could totally be measuring the effect in the hottest more promiscuous women, do you know for sure that is not the case?
See those are variables that should admit some level of skepticism IMO, on this thousands of reports, specially when there is an specific goal behind the data collection and not simply just scientific curiosity, YMMV.
So when the data collection from thousands of guys who have been out in field have consistently observed X while some survey says Y, now we’ve got a dilemma.
See above it is a dilemma but we should find out a way to resolve the dilemma not dismiss one or another but find the holes in it, YMMV.
Secondly, and I can’t find the link now, but there is the information that women lie…for example about their number….even if the survey is anonymous.
The same study also list that men lie to inflate their numbers and sexual experience so…
It doesn’t come across as a substantive disagreement, just personal and petty IMO. Interesting that “solipsism” came up back then, too.
I was struck by the unprovoked it was.
I clipped this quote from Susan sometime back, not sure from which discussion, but it seems to go to the heart of the matter: The women who choose to comment here are made of strong stuff, and many of them go away after being shouted down by men here. She’s damn right about that. Hence the irony.
Yes, indeed. I’m not every one of those women is “run off” because of over-sensitivity as much as too much of that stuff makes HUS a less enjoyable, more adversarial place to be. One thing that strikes me out of our current conflict ia a difference in communication styles. I think some of us truly are here seeking to understand some phenomena and each other and are interested in honest dialogue. Others are interested in listening just enough to win an argument and be declared AMOG. Some of us want to communicate. Others want to shut others up and make them submit.
The strength and popularity of HUS has to do with this blog being a place where people can communicate and explore. I think when that doesn’t happen, even the toughest of the women stop banging their heads against the wall and walk away in frustration.
I told her we had just driven 4200 miles across America and I was amazed at how fat the young women are these days….She asked “Do you think I’m fat?”
I understand your point about solipsism, but I think this is insecurity and a desire to please and is in part cultural.
I do agree though that some self-involvement is adaptive. I recall having a cold when I was pg with my oldest after having a number of miscarriages. I began to obsess until my husband accused me of being self-absorbed. I turned to him and “Damn skippy, I’m self-absorbed. I’m your kid’s current address.”
@ Ted
“Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?”
That’s why I make it a point never to spend the night; I don’t even like another person in the room when I’m sleep.
@ Plain Jane
“My clients range from Wall Street execs all the way up to Section 8 baby mamas, and I can tell you that Section 8 women ain’t suffering in dangerous ‘hoods like they used to.”
And that is why people hate section 8; people should suffer for their mistakes. I once brought some seaside condos; I renovated the building and started to lease them out. The market was a bit sluggish, so after a year half the building was still empty. I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.
@Anacaona
“Oh Ted you are wishing what you don’t know about we have had “benevolent” dictators in my country, it was a nightmare.”
A List of Great Dictators:
Oliver Cromwell: Commonwealth of England
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: Turkey
Park Chung Hee: South Korea
Lee Kuan Yew: Singapore
Chang Kai Sheik: Taiwan
Augusto Pinochet: Chile
Nursultan Nazarbayev: Kazakhstan
What’s fascinating is that when the topic of BM/WW couples comes up, someone will invariably attempt to make it out as though only the dregs of White female society are going for the Brothas, LOL. Of course, we would have to ask – if that’s true, when they are you guys so riled up about it?
I guess it depends on where you stand. If you’re at Walmart, it’s like being in the middle of a Chris Rock monologue. Ever hear his joke about fat WW offering “more white to love”? I’ve seen some reasonably high SMV BMs with low SMV WWs in lower SES areas.
OTOH, as we move up the SES ladder, interracial couples seem to have similar SMVs. I’ve never seen a black professional man with a white cigstache. In fact, I’ve never seen a professional man of any color with a white cigstache.
BTW, I was in an area over the summer with a large Afro-Carib population. I saw a lot of the women being accompanied by white, Asian, and East Indian men. I found myself wondering what you’d think.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was about a friendly man who taught his audience about… various things. I can remember a friendly mailman, segments on how we get/make things, a song about how you’ll never go down the bathtub drain, and the magic trolley that went to the Land of Make-Believe. That place had royalty, talking animals, a museum, and about once a year they’d have a musical episode where a family of elephants sang about being elephants.
Sounds a lot better than the The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure who give me the creeps everytime I see the poster *shrugs*
So true! I’ve mentioned before that Roissy loves studies almost as much as I do. He gets no grief from his readers because he showcases examples that confirm their preexisting beliefs. I could run the same study here and get a skeptical response from the same readers.
Yeah I mentioned that this was what pissed me off about Jezebel every single study that matched their feminist experience was accepted with no investigation but if a bigger study showed they were flaws they started to poke a hole on them.
I know I promised that I will never leave you Susan but frankly I can’t keep that promise anymore if this is going to became “The only good science is the one that agrees with my observation…” kind of place I really don’t think I will stick around for much, I left the church because of this, I left Jezebel because of this, nothing personal I just like places that strive to make sense of things not the ones that dismiss and obscure them for the sake of some goal, YMMV.
@Marellus
I never liked Fujimori; he was quite corrupt and was never able to develop Peru; not that I think he tried. Cincinnatus was a good man, much like Emperor St. Kaleb of Ethiopia. Dictatorships are as varied as the dictators themselves; however, there are those time when only a dictatorship can provide the leadership the nation requires; when that happens, work to ensure a competent and effective man becomes dictator.
So how many years did you lived under a dictatorship? And how did you survived it?
Trick is: it seems that the type of woman that feels such overwhelming physical desire also tends to be more promiscuous. Seems that is part of my problem: I’m looking for a horny woman that hasn’t had a lot of sex. Lol
Isn’t one of the manosphere commandments that a woman that wants to have sex all she needs to do is say it? She doesn’t need to game a man or anything like it so of course a woman with a high desire has more chances to satisfy it why would she not do it? There lie’s your answer.
They exist, Sassy is proof!
Sassy is proof, but Good girls that like Beta guys are Outliers?
Yep good girls are chopped liver, heck chopped duodenum…
So how many years did you lived under a dictatorship? And how did you survived it?
I am currently living in a one-party democracy. Yes, they exist … believe me. As to how I survive them ? … weeellll, I create the most fiendish and elaborate plots, so as to make famously beautiful and award winning writers from the Dominican Republic … employ online grammar like that of George W Bush’s speechwriter …
There’s a reason he’s famous and widely discredited in the MSM for making sweeping generalizations about women. Because he does.
No. The only reason he’s attacked is because he opposes feminism. You know that very well. He could work months as an unpaid scientist to do research for every publication of his and he’d get attacked in the same fashion. Look at all the feminist ad hominem attacks and snark directed at Charles Murray for his extensively researched latest book, even though he has done everything he could to avoid any criticism of feminist ideals, to resort to misandry and blame men for all social ills. It’s simply impossible to appease feminists, to break bread with them. They have even attacked Hugo Schwyzer and Jon Stewart.
Besides, I don’t know what “discrediting” you’re writing about. The MSM doesn’t even dare to discuss Devlin. The only mainstream exposure he has ever got that I know of was that “The New Mating Game” column in the Weekly Standard and even there he wasn’t discredited, he was merely subjected to ad hominem attacks. Feminists never discuss or debate, they just attack. They’re locusts.
I am currently living in a one-party democracy. Yes, they exist … believe me. As to how I survive them ? … weeellll, I create the most fiendish and elaborate plots, so as to make famously beautiful and award winning writers from the Dominican Republic … employ online grammar like that of George W Bush’s speechwriter …
Desiderius…”Susan’s about (re)creating a high-trust environment, from here to the SMP. That’s ESFP (traditionally the feminine) stuff – analogous to the brainstorming step in the ideation process. Once that environment is established, then INTJ work (traditionally male) can be done. Note that this is where judgement happens. The latter can aid the former, but the former is the first priority.”
A very interesting comment, which points out the importance of having a mix of personality types in a workgroup.
Not sure that the trust-building role needs to be performed by an ESFP…for example, I knew a woman who was an extremely good small-group trust-builder and charismatic leader; she was an ENFP (as measured by the test.) She was much better at ensuring the group stayed focused on something worthwhile (from the standpoint of making us money) than are many ESFPs, who often descend into content-free rah-rah activities that are involving & exciting but lead nowhere.
The management consultant Ichak Adizes has written a couple of interesting books on personality mix within organizations. He doesn’t use the M-B model, but rather 4 types which he calls Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, and Integrators.
“My suggestion is that the solipsism concept helps explains the impotence of the dialectic for most women and their strong preference for the rhetoric. And, given the current state of hostilities on the part of various parties, I should underline that this is not a criticism of Susan, but rather a defense of an articulated concept. One need not always agree with someone to respect and be on good terms with them.”
Note that he also welcomed Susan’s challenge. That is the INTJ work done well.
The Ian Ironwood description of solipsism is a must read. That has been my exact problem (I got it from my grandmother via my mother, so the feminine may in fact be more susceptible to it, but there are a lot of gender-bent men out there). It has wreaked havoc in my career and love life. It’s why I’ve appeared uncomfortable in my skin and not ultimately been entrusted with responsibility professionally or (usually) romantically.
The anti-game I adopted was a patch intended to ameliorate these problems, but removing the anti-game (with help from Roissy) didn’t produce the results I had hoped because the root cause had not yet been addressed.
“Not sure that the trust-building role needs to be performed by an ESFP”
Yes, skills not people – running late for planning meeting for a young men’s group we’re getting off the ground at my church. Guidance from these quarters will be helpful.
I’ll leave you with this:
“I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable–the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. “
Thank you for your clear and insightful comment re the differences between men and women. As I read through it I found myself nodding with conviction. I am 100% on board with your view, which I have actually written about myself here on several occasions when discussing biological sex differences.
Susan, your reaction? Is this a reasonable explanation that is congruent with relevant studies and observations you favor, while at the same time explaining the perception of male observers that female responses are “self-centered”?
Does the crux of your skepticism boil down to an objection over the negative connotation of phrases like “egoistic self-absorption”, or words like “solipsism” that imply an *inability* to synthesize anything but first hand experience versus a predilection to *primarily* synthesize using first hand experience?
The negative connotation is the crux of the matter, and I believe it reflects the view of some male observers and indeed some male bloggers that women are incapable of clear and logical thought, hampered by necessarily poor judgment, dishonest, manipulative, hypocritical, and truly incapable of empathizing with men. The end result is that the term is used as a weapon of sorts. It is dismissive, usually intended to negate the validity of the female point of view.
In fact, this assertion:
We expect that a female subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand emotional experiences, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences and first hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand intellectual activities.
…speaks directly to the complementarity of the sexes’ unique roles, as it comprises the empathy and nurturing that characterize femininity, or femaleness. Were this not true about females, relationships would peter out and offspring would not thrive. To the extent that women today are less empathic and nurturing in general (and I believe they are), we can already see this happening in American society.
Thanks. After all this argument, you admit what we’ve been saying all along.
I never said that studies had no limitations. I have repeatedly stated that they give us limited information. In my view, that is better than no information, and a study with a large sample that explores one small aspect of what women find attractive is worth a great deal more than one anecdote from a nightclub where no factors can be controlled for.
I concur with this description of anecdotal evidence:
The expression anecdotal evidence refers to evidence from anecdotes. Because of the small sample, there is a larger chance that it may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases. Anecdotal evidence is considered dubious support of a claim; it is accepted only in lieu of more solid evidence. This is true regardless of the veracity of individual claims.
The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, such as evidence-based medicine, which are types of formal accounts. Some anecdotal evidence does not qualify as scientific evidence because its nature prevents it from being investigated using the scientific method. Misuse of anecdotal evidence is a logical fallacy and is sometimes informally referred to as the “person who” fallacy (“I know a person who…”; “I know of a case where…” etc. Compare with hasty generalization). Anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative of a “typical” experience; in fact, human cognitive biases such as confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered. Accurate determination of whether an anecdote is “typical” requires statistical evidence.
For example, here is anecdotal evidence presented as proof of a desired conclusion:
There’s abundant proof that drinking water cures cancer. Just last week I read about a girl who was dying of cancer. After drinking water she was cured.
Anecdotes like this do not prove anything. In any case where some factor affects the probability of an outcome, rather than uniquely determining it, selected individual cases prove nothing; e.g. “my grandfather smoked 40 a day until he died at 90″ and “my sister never went near anyone who smoked but died of lung cancer”. Anecdotes often refer to the exception, rather than the rule: “Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses.” Even when many anecdotes are collected to prove a point, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” (Roger Brinner)
It is not worthless, and it is often entertaining, but it is very easy to draw incorrect conclusions based on anecdotal evidence, and the confirmation bias is generally large. I find this especially true in online discussions about mating.
You want people to be happy, not as animals, but as people. You want them in healthy, lasting relationships. Or, if I may be square, let us call them “marriages.” Well, then you have to teach them how to control low nature and cultivate high nature. That in turn requires understanding that low nature–the imperatives of biological reproduction, divorced from all moral considerations or the demands of lasting human happiness–is only geared toward reproduction, not happiness. So if people want to be happy (and good) they have to learn what their low nature is and how to control it.
This applies to both men and women but the impulses they need to learn to control are different.
I agree with your statement. I believe we differ on what comprises low nature, probably for both sexes, though you focus primarily on women. I will say this. If Devlin is your standard – if you relate to his descriptions of low female nature, then Heartiste is the blog for you. I do not accept his views or believe that embracing them will bring any good thing to individuals or the SMP as a whole. I do not intend to spend any more time debating them, or the views of any blogger who seeks to instigate hostilities between the sexes. I can help the greatest number of people by addressing a mainstream audience. I have a large readership that extends well beyond the manosphere, and it’s bad strategy for me to entertain the views of someone who is widely regarded as extreme, even by many males.
I’m going to take the advice of a trusted colleague and take a couple of days off from the blog. While HUS continues to be intellectually challenging and I appreciate the time and energy of the commenters, I no longer look forward to spending time here as I once did. The constant contentious debate, my continued frustration and inability to make myself understood, and the constant pressure from some to alter my mission, my strategy and my views has sucked much of the joy out of the experience, frankly. HUS is my baby, and I’m not going to kill it, but something’s gotta give.
Not sure about Lee Kuan Yew or Nursultan Nazarbayev. Cromwell, Park Chung Hee, and Ataturk were fine. But Chang Kai Shek was terrible, and even more-so Augusto Pinochet. Certainly not on my list of “good” benevolent dictators.
Why ones by chance, and what is the bias,specifically? You do realize that many of those sources Susan’s cited are collections of case studies? Your fundamental problem seems to be with how large-scale, randomly sampled data is gathered, though I suspect that’s just a pretense.
Also, I don’t recall any of Susan’s sources using case studies. I recently looked at a few studies used in the 16 things about promiscuity post for example, and all of them were statistical in nature.
I actually agree with you here. Unfortunately, you haven’t cited any case studies at all that could be evaluated for quality. This also suggests that the sources Susan’s cited are lacking in quality. Which ones are, specifically?
See above. Most of the ones I’ve looked at are lacking in quality. That’s not to say they aren’t all useful, and that conclusions can’t be drawn from them. For example, Susan’s disproving of the 80/20 myth was very useful.
Absolutely not. However, I’d never extrapolate from anonymous narratives to the entire population without question. Clearly, happily married men are in the extreme minority @ HUS. Their anecdotes aren’t worth a damn around here. But I’d never use my own limited personal experiences to make any kind of generalizations about society. In a way, by claiming that the statistical studies Susan’s cited are biased and unreliable just by their statistical nature, you’ve basically said that either the researchers and/or participants are dishonest, or stupid perhaps.
The goal of HUS is to improve the personal experiences of people in the SMP. From that perspective, don’t you think the personal experiences of these people are very relevant? And personally many of my own “anecdotes” are really what I’ve witnessed as a neutral observer of those around me.
If you believe that the research methods are biased and unreliable, why waste your time? Again, I think this is just a red herring. It’s the conclusions and evidence that you don’t particularly like. This is the Backfire Effect IMO, par excellence: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
Great. So if I don’t read the studies, then I’m not allowed to judge them. But if I do read the studies to see if they’re valuable, then they’re automatically valid because I took the time to read through them. This pigeon-holing is getting out of hand.
Actually, quite a bit of the data Susan’s cited involve definitive and straightforward questions, like: “Are you currently married?”, “How many people have your had vaginal sex with”?, “Have you ever had sex with a stranger?”, etc. If you don’t believe the answers people give in those random surveys, whoop-de-do.
And we can only draw certain conclusions from this. For example, these answers have little bearing on what women are attracted to.
But I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of this. An anecdote is a reliable report of what actually happened? Really? By definition, an anecdote is a short account of a particular incident or event. It’s a testimonial, what someone says happened, and in the context of the Internet usually one-sided. Rarely do the anecdotes include both parties’ statements of what actually happened. Anecdotes are hearsay, because there’s no burden of proof whatsoever. No 3rd party is fact-checking anything. These aren’t case studies where people are being observed. I’m not saying they’re necessarily false. But I see no compelling reason to believe they’re necessarily better than other sources of information.
They aren’t better. But I would put equal importance to them as I would to statistical surveys. Instead, Susan uses credentialism to outright dismiss the value of anecdotes in drawing conclusions about the SMP.
Susan, please stop with the Devlin. Forget about Devlin. I am not Devlin. I may like Devlin more than you do, but I am still not him nor am I trying to be a spokesman for him. FWIW, while I found much of use in his review of Shalit, I also found it acerbic, snarky and nasty, very similar to the way the manosphere treats anyone they perceive to be one millimeter to their “left.” I posted this analogy at lackrod’s a while back, they really are like the New Left: obsessed with crushing those who agree with them 99% of the time, obsessed, like doctrinaire Bolsheviks, with hounding and humiliating not their true enemies but their nominal and potential allies.
You said that you agreed with my point about hypergamy being on a distribution curve. Well, OK. So what’s the issue? Whether that’s consistent with Devlin or not? I happen to think it is, but I can’t know that. Maybe he would read that paragraph and say I am all wet. Fine, I still would believe it because it comports with observation and common sense. So it’s me and you against Devlin.
The idea that I am promoting “hostility between the sexes” is preposterous. What hostility? I’m trying to get to the truth. I am doing so PRECISELY on the terms of your core mission. You want to help people, especially young women, find relationships. Well, OK, what are the obstacles to that?
Surely, one obstacle is that a great many young women are attracted to guys who are not interested in relationships and who would make lousy relationship bets. OK, why is that?
Another obstacle is that women have to, or think they have to, behave a certain way to get a relationship (go to bars, hook up, put out by the 3rd date, etc.). And then they don’t get the relationship after all. OK, how is this happening? What is driving it and who benefits?
You say I want to focus on women’s flaws or problems but not men’s. No, not so. I am happy to talk about men’s but there seems to be no need because we all basically understand men’s problems and agree on them. Where we get stuck is on the women’s issues. And I believe we get stuck because sometimes (not all the time) when you read one of the men say something “negative” about female nature, you feel your core readership and even your whole sex is coming under attack and you get defensive.
But I’m not trying to attack anybody. Come back to Fisher, whom you respect and do not believe is an enemy: her point is that our biological urges impel us to reproduce, not to mate monogamously for life or to find happiness. OK, each sex has a different biological imperative, which is a primary cause of various problems for civilization when they are widely indulged. The male biological imperative is to spread seed widely. The female imperative is to get the best possible genes for her offspring. NEITHER of these imperatives is conducive to monogamy or happiness. The female imperative might at first glance seem more geared toward lifelong monogamy but Fisher herself says that, biologically, “pair bonds” in women are evolved to last around four years.
So, is Fisher “attacking women” for saying that? Of course not.
To further your mission, you have to address ALL the causes, and one of those causes is an aspect of female nature that, if left unchecked and untutored, leads to EXACTLY the problems you are trying to overcome.
I will repeat something I wrote above because I think it’s important.
What is game? In a nutshell, game is a massive arbitrage scheme developed by (some) men to take advantage of the fact that (lots of) women do not understand their own attraction triggers. Helping them to understand MUST be part of the conversation here if your mission is to succeed. Otherwise the SMP will just go on as it is, in all its dismal glory, and the girls you want to help will keep hooking up, getting P&Ded, and feeling miserable about it.
Ana – “She doesn’t need to game a man or anything like it so of course a woman with a high desire has more chances to satisfy it why would she not do it? There lie’s your answer.”
Because she is a person with good morals, good impulse control, and is long-term oriented? Problem is, most of those qualities come from the nurture side, and in the Western world the broken family model most predominant in mid to low SES brackets isn’t very good at quality nurturing.
I know the answer. And what gets me angry is even IF I manage to raise my children with those traits, the rest of the world will chew them up and spit them out, broken and mangled. I have to consider turning my children into cynical adults because other people can’t be bothered to instill basic morality in thier own kids. Their failure becomes my burden by default.
One other thing I mean to say. In my brief tenure at Lackrod’s, one of the pile-ons agaist me was “Why are you here complaining about men?” To which I replied: I’m not complaining about men, I’m correcting some of the bias here which leads many of you to absolve men of all blame for everything and even results in the absurdity of self-proclaimed devout Christians refusing to say that the PUA lifestyle is immoral, and indeed attacking ME for saying that the PUA lifestyle is immoral. To which they said, “Go away asshole, this is a place where we complain about women.”
You are a lot nicer and more reasonable than they are of course, but you are sort of giving it to me from the other side: “Why are you here complaining about women?”
As I’ve made clear, I’m in full agreement with where you, personally, are coming from, but you’re not the only one here.
“And I believe we get stuck because sometimes (not all the time) when you read one of the men say something “negative” about female nature, you feel your core readership and even your whole sex is coming under attack and you get defensive.”
“Defensive” carries a negative connotation, and Susan is human, so sometimes that is accurate, especially in your case. But most of the time Susan is in fact defending that which merits, and desperately needs, a strong defense. As you’ve noted, much of the manosphere rhetoric boils down to little more than a mirror image of feminist attacks upon men, with the result being the same damage to trust that hurts us all that those feminist attacks produce.
You acknowledge this truth in your comments, but some more active measures to shore up that defense as it pertains to this comment section (i.e. comment limits from men; a focus on trust building prior to, and in priority over judgment; a healthy reticence regarding and reflection prior to challenges to Susan, a commitment to challenge other men who are attacking Susan or women in general) will be necessary going forward to create an environment conducive to Susan’s mission.
Besides, I’ve never seen a female commentator who was ever discredited for making sweeping generalizations about men. Funny how that works.
FWIW, I recently took another woman who was upset about having to pick up after her husband to task for referring to her husband as an extra child and saying all men are like kids. Her husband is a really good guy, so I said, “Aw c’mon, your just frustrated. He’s a responsible adult who’s out in the world being responsible all day. Being a bit of a slob at home doesn’t make him a child.” We were in a group of women who agreed with me.
“FWIW, I recently took another woman who was upset about having to pick up after her husband to task for referring to her husband as an extra child and saying all men are like kids.”
*having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
Re comments about “benevolent dictators,” a few questions:
–Do people with a high degree of altruism usually pursue the dictator role, or is it more people with unbridled power-lust?
–When people who *do* have a high degree of altruism gain unconstrained power, is the result generally any more positive than when non-altruistic people obtain such power? The Spanish Inquisitors (for the most part) surely sincerely believed they were burning heretics for the greater good of all. As C S Lewis said:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
–When a genuinely altruistic and benignly effective dictator dies, or becomes seriously ill, or is politically crippled, is it likely that those seeking to replace him will be doing so from noble motives?
I once saw an article about horrible the lives of women were in some former soviet republic because they were all so fabulously educated, worked good jobs and dressed exquisitely, but they couldn’t find a suitable man because so many men of the country were alcoholic street bums. It never dawned on this broad to ask, “hmmm, what is it about this country that sends so many young men into such a desparate unhappy state?”
Alcohlism has been rampant in Eastern Europe for generations. There is probably a genetic component. If feminism has had any effect on the situation, it’s most likely in decreasing female tolerance or living with an alcoholic.
“And that is why people hate section 8; people should suffer for their mistakes. I once brought some seaside condos; I renovated the building and started to lease them out. The market was a bit sluggish, so after a year half the building was still empty. I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.”
Well, I don’t have any Section 8 clients in upper middle class neighborhoods, they are all in lower-middle class neighborhoods which are still nice looking and crime free.
I disagree that Section 8ers should have to live in dangerous gang-ridden ghettos for the “mistake” of being poor. It just recycles the problem as their children are likely to join gangs or get killed by them one day.
There are plenty of empty houses and buildings. Its more efficient to have the already existing ones filled than waste tax payers money go to building new ones.
” There are plenty of high IQ, low EQ people, but there are also many high IQ, high EQ people. I think people like to indulge in some negative stereotyping of the gifted–spergy geniuses, psychotic geniuses, scawny, nerdy geniuses. In both my professional experience with gifted kids, it appears to me that brighter kids are on average not just smarter, but also healthier, funnier, more personable and more even somewhat better looking than less bright kids. On the other hand, when things so wrong, they go wrong in the ways that people stereotype. Out of, let’s say, 1000 gifted kids, the vast majority will grow up to be happy, well adjusted successful people who are significantly better off than their peers. ”
J, this corroborates with my experience as well. I think where much of the problem might lie is when you get into the extremely high IQ range, which is rare anyway.
I read an article about an extremely high IQ person who quit university, I think he may have been a STEM professor for a short time or maybe he didn’t even make it that far, got a job as a janitor so he could be left alone, and then committed suicide. Can’t find the link right now.
having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
So we told her.
—–
That’s the thing. When guys in the M-sphere complain about “nags” and “nagging” what they don’t realize is that the only women who nag are the women who are overly concerned with keeping house – exactly the type of women they claim to want.
I don’t know too many women of my age or younger who are overly concerned with that. When we come home from work we don’t start cleaning, we get online.
I’ve noticed women who nag a lot about the state of the house are my grandma’s age. But the Spherians claim to want young women so they’ll have to make a choice between aging nags and young women who don’t nag, because, well, blogging is more important than housekeeping.
Not to say we’re complete slobs either. We clean up – after ourselves. But we’re not going to clean up after other grown-ass adults and we probably won’t even notice your socks thrown about the floor or your dirty dishes. I mean, who the hell cares? You don’t, and neither do we.
“sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)
n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.”
I believe it reflects the view of some male observers and indeed some male bloggers that women are incapable of clear and logical thought, hampered by necessarily poor judgment, dishonest, manipulative, hypocritical, and truly incapable of empathizing with men. The end result is that the term is used as a weapon of sorts. It is dismissive, usually intended to negate the validity of the female point of view.
I would say that in saying women are incapable of clear and logical thought, 98 percent of the time they are correct. Of course, if they went on to say that men are incapable of clear and logical thought, they would be correct at least 90 percent of the time. My observation is that only a small fraction of the population are even capable of clear and logical thought, and that of the small fraction that are capable of it, only a fraction actually manage to actually utilize it on a consistent basis. And of that fraction of a fraction, all of them allow momentary emotions to override their clear and logical thought the majority of the time.
Man is not a rational creature. He is a rationalizing one.
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
LOL. I had this argument at Dalrock’s. He was offended and found it “telling” that I don’t believe monogamy is natural for every woman. However, if we accept that personality traits are even in part genetically determined, then we have to accept that sluttiness and caddishness are adaptive in some circumstances and have persisted over the ages because they do aid survival. From an evolutionary point of view, they have value because they help continue the species when R-selection furthers the survival of a greater number of offspring. Similarly, monogamy has value when K-selection furthers the survival of a greater number of offspring. Because circumstances change, genes for both monogamy and multiple mating continue to exist. It is “natural” to be monogamous for those who carry those genes. For those who carry “screw around” genes, not so much…
This of course is independent of morality. From a moral perspective, I favor monogamy.
The management consultant Ichak Adizes has written a couple of interesting books on personality mix within organizations. He doesn’t use the M-B model, but rather 4 types which he calls Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, and Integrators.
More books to read…I’m so going to end up broke.
Because she is a person with good morals, good impulse control, and is long-term oriented? Problem is, most of those qualities come from the nurture side, and in the Western world the broken family model most predominant in mid to low SES brackets isn’t very good at quality nurturing.
Do you realize this is the same wish Alpha chasers have? A man with options that only wants to be with them? Sorry to break it to you but you cannot have it all in a mate. You must choose or at least be aware of the consequences and not blame it on others for not doing the job of creating the unicorn you want.
“I would say that in saying women are incapable of clear and logical thought, 98 percent of the time they are correct. Of course, if they went on to say that men are incapable of clear and logical thought, they would be correct at least 90 percent of the time. My observation is that only a small fraction of the population are even capable of clear and logical thought, and that of the small fraction that are capable of it, only a fraction actually manage to actually utilize it on a consistent basis. And of that fraction of a fraction, all of them allow momentary emotions to override their clear and logical thought the majority of the time.
Man is not a rational creature. He is a rationalizing one.”
The mainstream Western approach to religion is a primary example of this, or perhaps the cause.
” I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.”
I would have welcomed the Section 8ers. Your people must’ve been under the illusion that Section 8ers are ghetto gang-banging crack dealers. Not the case at all.
J, funny, I bet if you had said “Women are naturally monogamous,” D would have attacked you for being a hamsterbating female supremacist peddling the blue pill myth that women are naturally morally superior to men.
Espresso Coffee,
“really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.”
J(ava),
“LOL. I had this argument at Dullcock’s. He was offended and found it “telling” that I don’t believe monogamy is natural for every woman.”
—
Monogamy is not natural for all women and men, but it is natural for some. For the rest, the institution of monogamous marriage was created for the sake of their offspring.
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Susan, while we await more from Alpha Game I’m going to offer my own response to your solipsism skepticism:
I assert that males and females process information and react to stimuli differently as a result of actual biological differences in the brain. I assert that at least one difference can be expressed as a dual-axis spectrum mapping against the extent to which “emotion” (roughly encompassing concepts like gut instinct, empathy, visceral reaction, intuition, etc) and “intellect” (roughly encompassing concepts like logic, analysis, computation, etc) factor into the aforementioned processing and reacting: on said spectrum, males will trend toward higher intellectual influence and lower emotional influence; females will trend toward lower intellectual influence and higher emotional influence.
This is not to say that, e.g., males are incapable of feeling the loss of a child as deeply as females or that females are incapable of performing calculus as correctly as males. But I do assert that average female thought is a function of internalizing information (experience, knowledge, data) which was processed to a greater extent (than males) with emotional factors and to a lesser extent (than males) with intellectual factors, and then synthesizing that stored information (again, with more contribution from emotional factors and less contribution from intellectual factors than males) to react to stimuli. I also assert that average male thought is a function of internalizing information which was processed to a greater extent (than females) with intellectual factors and to a lesser extent (than females) with emotional factors, and then synthesizing that stored information (again, with more contribution from intellectual factors and less contribution from emotional factors than females) to react to stimuli.
The union of those two assertions can be stated, roughly: males and females both internalize information that they process, and both synthesize that stored information when reacting to stimuli. Males and females have the same factors that impact the processing and synthesis of information; e.g. both are capable of intuition, cognition, computation, feeling and so on. Males and females differ in the extent to which each factor impacts the processing and synthesis.
I do not believe these assertions are controversial.
That is all very pedantic but it sets a foundation for addressing the topic:
I speculate that you may agree that people who perform an intellectual activity themselves, like historical research, generally “learn more” than if they only see that activity being performed – they process more information, the information they process is more accurate or complete and the information is more readily recallable. A person who researched medieval European economy will tend to react to matters concerning that topic primarily through synthesis of the data that they have collected, analyzed and/or presented themselves, and then secondarily with additional synthesis of a presentation they saw at a conference.
I speculate that you may agree that people who experience an emotional activity will likewise process more information about the activity than if they only empathize with someone else experiencing it. A person who experienced the death of a child will tend to react to matters concerning that topic primarily through synthesis of the grief they felt and the sense of regret they worked through themselves, and then secondarily with additional synthesis of the feelings they saw someone else who lost a child go through.
Drawing on the above assertions:
a) a female subject’s processing and synthesis of information is influenced by emotional factors more than a male subject, and
b) a subject’s processing and synthesis of information is weighted toward those activities and experiences the subject was a first hand participant in, therefore
c) we expect that a female subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand emotional experiences, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences and first hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand intellectual activities.
d) following the same pattern we would also expect that a male subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand intellectual activities, followed by first hand emotional experiences and second hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences.
We wouldn’t expect these outcomes in every case. But we would expect that over a large sampling, the predictions in c and d will be supported.
Susan, your reaction? Is this a reasonable explanation that is congruent with relevant studies and observations you favor, while at the same time explaining the perception of male observers that female responses are “self-centered”?
Does the crux of your skepticism boil down to an objection over the negative connotation of phrases like “egoistic self-absorption”, or words like “solipsism” that imply an *inability* to synthesize anything but first hand experience versus a predilection to *primarily* synthesize using first hand experience?
@BroHamlet
That’s hilarious! If it was a shit test then all the alpha males failed it!
I did not ask anyone to go back to the drawing board. This was the exchange:
Vox Day: Because women tend to be solipsistic, it is trivially easy to redirect them by the simple mechanism asking them to talk about themselves.
Susan: I remember Ferdinand beating this drum quite frequently. Googling “solipsism,” dictionaries lead the results:
sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)
n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
No mention of solipsism as it relates to women is found until the 9th page of Google results, where a post by Private Man is listed.
However, when one Googles “female solipsism” the results on the first page are as follows:
1. Alphagame
2. Rational Male
3. Rational Male
4. Private Man
5. Alphagame
6. MGTOW forums
7. Alphagame
8. The Spearhead
9. Cane Caldo
What evidence can you offer that “female solipsism” is not just another manosphere circle jerk?
Note I did not question the existence of solipsism, but of a form of solipsism unique to females. When I researched the question on my own, I got the above results, which you must admit are very telling (and rather funny).
The concept (and the underlying justification for it) appears to have originated somewhere undetermined and been carried forward without question or analysis of any kind. That’s not legit. Sorry.
For the record, Vox has told me he is delighted with the question, respects my inquiry, and is taking it very seriously. He does not need to bend over backwards to reason with me, as I am a very reasonable person. He has stated this many times. I do not kid myself that I will change Vox’s mind, but that was never my goal. My goal is to understand the basis for the concept of female solipsism as something that men do not participate in.
I can assure you that men are frequently solipsistic, and they also have big, healthy hamsters. This is perhaps most true right here in our corner of the net.
@Cooper
I’m so glad to hear this Cooper! Heads turning = tingling, so I think you are definitely onto something. It’s authenticity. Please keep us posted.
I hope this anecdote won’t be ignored.
“I can assure you that men are frequently solipsistic, and they also have big, healthy hamsters. This is perhaps most true right here in our corner of the net.”
Hell yeah! I make mine walk 3 miles a day with me. When I’m done my hamster will have epic endurance. And with my charming personality, he will be unstoppable!
@cooper
“So, for a change, I’ve started leading with beta, ”
I assume by this you mean lack of eye contact (looking down), poor body language, supplication, inability to lead or make decisions and social reticence and discomfort, right?
@ Ted D
I do what I can, man. I do what I can.
But that is exactly what we do constantly with our girlfriends!
This is the kind of smug and superior tone you’ve really been specializing in, Mike.
I have serious questions for you.
Do you believe that your sharing threads from other blogs and forums here is useful to my readership, especially when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority? You do this frequently in a way that is aggressive. I do not understand why you don’t simply have those conversations in those online venues you prefer. I told you I did not appreciate that last week and here you are doing it again, with a mocking comment from Vox’s thread. What do you hope to gain?
Do you believe that bringing these comments from Rollo and Vox’s blogs (or anywhere else for that matter) is likely to encourage thoughtful female commentary? Do you have any interest in speaking with females? Or just proving to yourself that we are as described elsewhere, which you implied in a recent comment?
Yesterday you misunderstood almost every comment I made, and I really cannot help but picture you screaming la la la with your fingers in your ears.
Sassy and Emily,
Re the forum, the missing search box and other technical difficulties.
I hired a Wordpress expert and now the site is messed up. I should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. I need to go out and find a new one. If I have time this weekend, I will try my hand at doing some fixes myself. Apologies for the inconvenience.
The PUA timetable is 7 hours in her company, then sex.
“when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority”
This is the heart of the matter, right here. Let’s strike through “inferiority” because no one here is arguing that. But flaws and shortcomings? Oh yes. To be attracted to dominance in a way that makes Dark Triad hyper-dominance attractive is, under any reasonable interpretation of the terms, a flaw and a shortcoming.
Men have our characteristic flaws and shortcomings and women have theirs (yours). It seems as though we men have a much easier time talking about ours than you do talking, or even hearing, about yours.
And hell yes, it’s important. You can’t reform the SMP or even help a single individual in it unless everyone is honest with themselves about the causes of the problem, which includes the extent to which their own personal and gender-endemic flaws contribute to it. That’s like trying to sober up a drunk while scrupulously avoiding the topic of thirst.
Susan, you will so often agree with us about specific instances of female flaws–and often you are the first to bring them up. But then you will turn from the particular to the general and make these blanket denials that contradict so much of what you have said before. It’s frustrating.
@Escoffier
The point is the source. The source must be credible to demostrate thatthe ideas are credible. Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not.
Secondly, if Devlin’s position is that women remain hypergamous after partnering (as a matter of hard-wiring) I still reject it emphatically. This is NOT an invitation to debate hypergamy. I believe your “tacit agreement” claim is overstated.
I welcome your pointing out flaws in studies. Have you made such a claim and found me dismissive? About one specific study or design? I don’t remember this.
That’s a fair criticism. What I should have said was:
“Universal female desire for assholes and hyper dominant men has likewise been demonstrated to be false.”
Which is what the men around her claim. I just recently posted a study showing that women reject both hypermasculine faces and unrestricted faces. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look, and letting me know why its validity is questionable, we can discuss it.
“The PUA timetable is 7 hours in her company, then sex.”
To me this is a complete, utter, epic fail.
But, my goal isn’t to dip my wick in anything that will let me. This line of thinking is no better than the young college woman telling herself marriage will wait for her and she should be having fun now.
Neither approach has any lasting power at all.
Honestly, I can’t know a woman well enough to be comfortable getting naked in front of her in 7 hours. Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?
Sorry, Ted, I already stated that three hours ago:
One needn’t be a university professor, or other professional expert, though obviously that helps. I am not one myself, which is why I rely on the testimony of credible experts. I would never write a hypothesis and put it out there as gospel, even if I knew that gullible followers would swallow it wholesale. That would be lazy and intellectually dishonest at best.
For INTJ to speak with authority on study design is even more preposterous. Ask questions? Sure. Expressing skepticism? Sure. Weighing in as judge and jury? No.
OK, this is absurd:
“Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not. ”
He launched the entire effing conversation with that one article. He revived the word “hypergamy” after more than a century of misuse. So, the fact that he “turns out to have been right” would be of decisive importance.
Devlin: accurate but not credible.
Yeah, OK.
Seriously, deal with the argument, not the person.
The entire history of human thought until the dawn of the scientific method centered on philosophers drawing conclusions from 1) observation and 2) history and then reasoning about examples through dialectic to form conclusions. So, if you want to rub Devlin out based on his not being trained in the methodology of modern social science, then you have to rule out everyone from Socrates to Nietzsche as well.
Oh, and Ted was right: what special standing does an MBA have to reason about mating? Personally, I think you have every right to and I prefer to focus on your arguments rather than your diploma, but by your standards you have the same standing as Devlin: none.
BTW, Susan, up-thread somewhere I wrote a post about how hypergamy functions AFTER marriage along a distribution curve. You claimed to co-sign that. Nothing I wrote was inconsistent with Devlin or with the general sphere understanding of hypergamy, though no doubt many to my “right” would find it too soft.
@Escoffier
The claim that men have the capacity for unconditional love while women do not is a clear case of claiming female inferiority. Mike C made that claim here last week.
Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. For all the talk of solipsism making great mamas, the term as used in the manosphere is pejorative towards women. I have no problem with people providing examples of solipsistic behavior, but the notion that the concept applies only to women is ludicrous, especially as its definition may be found as key descriptors in several disorders that are primarily male.
I acknowledge that women have many flaws, although I prefer to think of both sexes as having evolved to achieve complementarity and efficient reproduction. Morals play a role certainly – we abhor rape and cuckoldry. But to engage in finger jabbing over the way women or men are hard-wired seems dangerous to me. It’s an antagonistic approach that pits the sexes against one another and makes reforming the SMP impossible.
Do you see me writing posts about male flaws? Blaming men for characteristics endemic to the male gender? Have I mocked the uber logical male mind that presents as autism? The low EQ that many men exhibit?
I readily accept and do not judge the fact that men care mostly about looks, and want sexual variety. You don’t see me shaming men for their fantasies or their preference for skinny blondes with big boobs.
You’re applying a double standard. If I don’t write posts shaming men at a blog for young women, why should I welcome comments shaming women?
Susan – “Sorry, Ted, I already stated that three hours ago:”
Damn. I’m at a client site today and missed it.
“For INTJ to speak with authority on study design is even more preposterous. Ask questions? Sure. Expressing skepticism? Sure. Weighing in as judge and jury? No.”
You do realize that INTJ’s are called “system builders”, right? I would bet I am at least as competent at “research study design” as most social scientists. (which I still think is a funny assed title. Social and Science to me just don’t go together.) Would I be good at actually running a study? Not if it involved dealing with people. But designing one? Yeah, even in my uneducated state I’d try my hand at it without fear.
You can think it is preposterous all you want, it’s what I do! I can and do make hypothesis all the time, but put them “out there” as gospel? Me?! I’ve said MANY times that I expect everyone that reads my shit to THINK FOR THEMSELVES. I’m nobody, with no education to speak of on the subject we discuss. I don’t expect anyone to take my word as “gospel” any more than I would take yours, Mike’s, or even Buss. The only way I’ll take anything as “gospel” is if it is told to me directly by a burning bush.
And to be clear, I wasn’t taking a pot shot at you. I was just trying to point out that you really are no more “credentialed” to discuss the SMP than anyone else here. I have NO DOUBT that you are skilled enough at deductive reasoning to read data and come to a logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it is the correct logical conclusion. And, all things being equal, your ability to do so is no more or less credentialed than mine. After all, I have a degree in computer science!
It’s not shaming, Susan, it’s an attempt to understand. To reform the SMP, or even to guide two individuals into a healthy relationship, they need to know what particular problems their sex’s unique predelictions can get them into.
No, I don’t see you “shaming” the men, but you do talk openly about the flaws endemic to men that can get in the way of or ruin a good relationship. You SOMETIMES talk openly about the analagous flaws in women, but you also sometimes heatedly deny them and rule the topic out of bounds.
BTW, on the solipsism debate, which I am not really a part of, I don’t read the men as saying that it is unique to women, but that a certain kind of solipsism is characteristic of women and more widespread among them than among men. That is not a claim of inferiority but one of difference.
Ted D,
“I don’t know how to do that without shocking them, because as we discussed in this very thread, many/most young women seem to ONLY focus on what affects them directly. How do we get a woman going to Yale to understand the plight of a woman living in section 8 housing? ”
Section 8 has transitioned from urban “projects” to placing people in regular apartments and houses in the ‘burbs. Up in New York and New Jersey you still get the project model but elsewhere its either fully transitioned to, or the process of transitioning to, the new model.
My clients range from Wall Street execs all the way up to Section 8 baby mamas, and I can tell you that Section 8 women ain’t suffering in dangerous ‘hoods like they used to. They also ain’t dyin’ for a husband. Like Obsidian mentioned before, many women have o-o-w babies because they WANT the babies, but not necessarily a man. I know several who do not oblige the fathers to pay child support, legally or voluntarily, because they want nothing, not even a phone call, to do with them.
@susan
“I just recently posted a study showing that women reject both hypermasculine faces and unrestricted faces.”
But wasn’t there a study that found the opposite at or about the time of ovulation?
Also, looking at a generic picture and saying “I think this face is more attractive” is not the same as wanting to fuck him. It may be that his face is less threatening and more comforting, so, in the absence of personal interaction, his face is preferred. Who she would submit to and sleep with if approached may be another matter.
As to studies in general, when I actually take the time to look hard at them, I’m often struck by how simplistic they are in terms of what they are trying to test, and how unimaginative or reflexive the authors are in ascribing causes. For example, that study you once cited that “showed” that women in societies with better health care prefer less masculine faces and those in societies with poor health care prefer more masculine, or something like that. Because academics must lean to the “nurture over nature” view, they presume this shows that better health care tends to reduce womens’ attraction to men with strong “disease resistence” genes in favor of more reliable men, or something like that. It never even occurs to them that, perhaps, if a nation’s women are more genetically inclined to prefer more cooperative and less hypermasculine beta males, then in the long run such a society results in better male cooperation, more social stability, maybe even higher IQ, and, consequently, . . . . wait for it . . . BETTER HEALTH CARE!!! As that Japanese guy at psychology today says, it is required to apriori rule out certain causes or explanations. Or, more accurately, to pretend that one never even imagined the possiblity.
So, even in cases when the authors are honest and acting in good faith, we often see nonsense. To say nothing of studies in which results are cherry picked or mischaracterized in order to get a predetermined result.
And the other problem in assessing this is that so many of these studies cite a bunch of other studies as a basis for the study, so you’d have to go read all those too. It’s like a compounding effect.
So, what’s the answer? I dunno. The next time the shrieking fembots or some other group starts shouting about “bad science” when the outcome is not as it is supposed to be, I suppose we could shoot about 4 or 5 of them to set an example. But, the bottom line, is that we have to keep in mind that the studies tend to represent conventional wisdom on so many points, either deliberately or unintentionally.
As to manoshpere concepts being unsupported in the literature, I would say that the manosphere (like the old PUA sites) is a bunch of guys finding each other on the internet and discovering that, like themselves, other guys are finding that reality seems to conflict with the accepted conventional wisdom of academia and the media. Consequently, it should not be surprising to you that you won’t find many conclusions of the manosphere being supported in that same convential wisdom of academia and the media. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Having said all that, I agree that most instances of manospherians screaming “female solipsism” are just silly. We have many solipsistic men in the individual sense – we call them alpha males. In my experience, women have a greater ability to rationalize what’s in their best interest as being just (my ex wife comes to mind, and she had to concede that she was a master at it when I called her on it). But I don’t think that’s the same the total egoistic self-centeredness that would be solipsism.
However, I think it is pretty indisputable that, as a collective group, women are solipsistic in the sense of “gynocentrism” as desribed above. We don’t see men writing articles about how bad things happening to women should be a concern to us because, when you really think about it, this could indirectly impact men in a bad way. But you see that all time with women – Kay Hymowhateverhernameis; Hillary Clinton talking about the real victims of war are the women who have to carry on after their husbands or brothers or whatever are blown to pieces on the battlefield. Stuff like that. It’s ubiquitous. Most women struggle to view things from the general male prism in a way that men don’t struggle as to women. We also see this in their complete dismissal of culkoldry (in the real sense of false paternity). They try to reframe it as a gift to the man. You don’t see men reframing rape as a golden opportunity to get acquainted with a new guy and experience an orgasm, even though we personally would not be traumatized by being forced to fuck an average looking woman.
I once saw an article about horrible the lives of women were in some former soviet republic because they were all so fabulously educated, worked good jobs and dressed exquisitely, but they couldn’t find a suitable man because so many men of the country were alcoholic street bums. It never dawned on this broad to ask, “hmmm, what is it about this country that sends so many young men into such a desparate unhappy state?”
Susan – “The claim that men have the capacity for unconditional love while women do not is a clear case of claiming female inferiority. Mike C made that claim here last week.”
Sorry, not true in my case. I don’t see it as “inferiority”, but it IS an important distinction that I as a man should know.
“Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. “
Ummm, I don’t think anyone said it was “uniquely a female trait” other than we were talking about the female version OF it.
“Citing solipsism as a uniquely female trait, when the manosphere defines is at “egoistic (limited to or caring only about yourself and your own needs) self-absorption” is also a claim of inferiority. “
OK, this may be true. But, does that mean that *I* use it the same way? Just because the ‘sphere says the sky is red, and I come here and enquire about what you think on the color of the sky because I think it may be red, doesn’t mean I’m coming here to “bring the ‘sphere to your living room”. Maybe I actually want your opinion on it. Every man that posts isn’t trying to sabotage you willfully. I won’t say I haven’t done my fair share of derailment here, but it is never my intent.
“I acknowledge that women have many flaws, although I prefer to think of both sexes as having evolved to achieve complementarity and efficient reproduction.”
Fancy words for the same concept. I call it a flaw, you call it a “feature”. It really comes down to perception. It may be a feature for you because as a woman it makes sense and/or works FOR you. To me? It is a pain in the ass and therefore a bug. Perhaps that attitude may come through in my posts, but you don’t have to take it personally when that happens.
“But to engage in finger jabbing over the way women or men are hard-wired seems dangerous to me. It’s an antagonistic approach that pits the sexes against one another and makes reforming the SMP impossible.”
To the contrary, to someone like me it makes perfect sense. I want to know every flaw in a system I am expected to manage. I might not be able to fix them, but I damn well surely want to know about them so I can mitigate their effect.
As to reforming the SMP? See my posts from earlier. I truly don’t expect that to happen without some major shifts in political correctness and/or a total destruction of Western society. I’m more of the mind that I will do what I can to make life as happy as possible for now, and prepare for the worst as I expect it to come. If it doesn’t, I turn out to be a nut. If it does? God help us all.
“Do you see me writing posts about male flaws? Blaming men for characteristics endemic to the male gender? Have I mocked the uber logical male mind that presents as autism? The low EQ that many men exhibit?”
Not that I’ve seen, but I would welcome it if you did. In fact, there is nowhere to have such a discussion as most of the ‘sphere tends to give the impression that men are perfect once they lose the beta.
“I readily accept and do not judge the fact that men care mostly about looks, and want sexual variety. You don’t see me shaming men for their fantasies or their preference for skinny blondes with big boobs.”
Wait. Just a second here… Are you implying that a man talking about females flaws is “shaming” women? Really? Seems like that is taking the conversation a little too personally yet again. I’m more than able to look at the male condition in all its glory and horror, and admit where I and “we” are flawed, without taking it personally. So what if I’m a man and men tend to be horny pigs? Yeah, I’m a horny pig, and I’ve learned to channel that for positive purposes.
“You’re applying a double standard. If I don’t write posts shaming men at a blog for young women, why should I welcome comments shaming women?”
Again, talking about female flaws DOES NOT EQUAL shaming particular women.
@Escoffier
He redefined the word hypergamy after centuries of a still-accepted definition. That article caught the eye of Roissy, who brought it front and center, and the conversation occurred primarily at Roissy’s blog, and spread from there.
I have not posited an original hypothesis without testing it or offering supporting arguments. Devlin did. He does not pass the standard for academic credibility.
The entire conversation has been rhetoric rather than dialectic. That’s a big part of the problem.
From the blog Faith & Heritage:
Here is the Devlin excerpt Roissy published:
There’s a reason the MSM has totally blacked out his writings. Another gem:
Are you fricking kidding me? Seriously, Escoffier, if this is your cup of tea, take is elsewhere. I find this man deeply offensive and full of shit.
Susan on the Blue Valentine character played by Ryan Gosling;
“It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but I would have kicked that guy to the curb long before. He was a lazy drunk, waking up every morning in his EZ chair with a hangover, and popping open his first beer at 8 a.m. All this while he was in charge of child care. ”
That qualifies as child abuse and such people are lucky if they don’t get CPS called on their asses by a neighbor, but the children are not lucky to have such abusive parents.
See, this is the type of thing my South Asian family will see and then rant about how uncivilized “Amreekans” are and how they hate their own children. I’m done spending countless hours explaining to them that NAAALT.
It would be better for international PR if American media professionals started showing their people and culture in a better light.
@EScoffier
I did like your distribution curve, but Devlin does not allow for it. He states “the human female is fickle” and “not naturally loyal.” In Devlin’s scheme there are no women who are not fickle, or who find it very natural to be loyal to their husbands. In Devlin’s view, Susan Walsh does not exist. (cough cough solipsism)
There’s a reason he’s famous and widely discredited in the MSM for making sweeping generalizations about women. Because he does.
This is the kind of smug and superior tone you’ve really been specializing in, Mike.
I have serious questions for you.
OK…I am going to try and answer these questions minus any smugness and superior tone. In all fairness, with some of your comments you’ve been trying to kind of bait me and escalate the intensity of the dialogue. Someone has to stand down first. Unfortunately, I suspect you are probably as stubborn as I am
Do you believe that your sharing threads from other blogs and forums here is useful to my readership, especially when they reference female shortcomings, flaws and inferiority?
No, it is not useful to your readership insofar as some of the more introspective types recognize some tendencies such as solipsism and are proactive about managing it in their real lives.
Now let’s take a step back, and I’ll do my best not to be smug, but I would ask you that if and when you respond, please answer my points directly. Don’t bring in anything tangential that I am not talking about in this comment.
I believe in “human nature”. These would be characteristics endemic to the human condition. Greed might be one example. Both men and women feel greed and it probably exists on a spectrum for different people. There is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing aspects of human nature are “flawed” and that we might want to recognize them to better manage them.
I believe there is “male nature” and “female nature”. For example, I don’t think it would be too controversial to suggest that propensity to violence is more male. I can tell you from time to time I feel urges for violence that would probably shock you. But I have rarely committed violent actions. I recognize the tendency and manage and supress the desire to act out.
Now I believe there is “female nature” as well. For example, hypergamy and solipsism. Escoffier has often remarked that you seem unwilling or unable to really confront, explore aspects of female nature. I don’t want to psychoanalyze you, but you gave a glimpse I think why this is. Yesterday, in a reply to me you mentioned that accepting the concepts means justifying certain tactics in an “ends justify the means”. I think you think that if you accept and agree with what many guys are saying about hypergamy and solipsism, that is giving the blank check to engage in bad behavior.
Now you challenged the solipsism concept. You asked for proof and evidence. The men answered your call and responded with ample anecdotal evidence. I cut and paste the Vox excerpts because it was further support for the female solipsism concept. Now forget calling it female solipsism. We can call it whatever you wish, but clearly there is something different going on in the female brain versus the male brain that has a woman answer a question about a roadtrip and seeing fat women with a direct question about her being fat. A generalized statement was interpreted by her to be about her. That is exactly what I first said the phenonemon was way back when this started. I really don’t care if you want to call it solipsism or not.
You do this frequently in a way that is aggressive. I do not understand why you don’t simply have those conversations in those online venues you prefer.
Do you want me to stop commenting here? Please tell me directly if that is the case, and I will never comment here again. But I cannot be who I am not. Believe it or not, I exercise a large amount of discretion here. I suspect I’m like Ted, in that we both hold back quite a bit. There have been a couple of threads where you really ruffled my feathers admittedly. I’m not entirely sure why, but you rarely if ever concede anything. I think you think it is a sign of weakness especially if you concede to a group of guys. If you observe men, you’ll see we frequently concede to each other, and usually it gets a gracious response. Not sure if you’ve responded as I type this to post, but I replied with a “I stand corrected”. Men acknowledge another man when they do that. Speaking generally, to ignore a man’s response of “My bad” is typically seen as disrespectful.
I told you I did not appreciate that last week and here you are doing it again, with a mocking comment from Vox’s thread. What do you hope to gain?
In this case, it was not a mocking comment….it was a literal description of the verbal exchange. The only thing I hope to gain there was providing evidence for the solipsism concept.
Yesterday you misunderstood almost every comment I made, and I really cannot help but picture you screaming la la la with your fingers in your ears.
I got a bit worked up yesterday, I’ll admit. The one response about partner was definitely a gaffe on my part. Now, honestly, you bear some responsibility as well. Look at Escoffier’s comment. He obviously shares some of my frustration with your discussion style although he is obviously 10x the gentleman I am, and is more diplomatic. I probably need to be less confrontational and aggressive, but you need to be more internally consistent. You seem to deviate often from comment to comment on what your exact view is and in responding to comments you have a tendency to include a lot of extraneous verbiage that is not directly related to the point you are responding to. I mention that not to be nasty or aggressive but as constructive criticism.
And really, if you want me to leave permanently I will. I do appreciate some of the past personal advice you gave me. Ya know, sometimes people just can’t discuss certain subjects. I think if we were at a dinner party, we’d have to make SMP topics off-limits
Ya know, I love my fiancee to death, but I don’t like to talk politics with her. There are some views she holds that I think are ignorant, and I can’t help but respond to them in an aggressive manner. The easiest solution is not to discuss it.
“Not naturally loyal to one husband.”
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
You cite Helen Fisher a lot and she is at pains to stress that monogamy, however advantageous it is to happiness, is NOT biologically natural.
And you find this offensive?
“not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect”
On a blog about hook up culture, a wholly new phenomenon in the history of the human race, a rolling Greek bachanalia on a mass scale now going into its second generation. Even if it is only 20% of the population, this is something totally unprecedented. What’s driving it? The notion that part of the driver is the hitherto underappreciated power of female sexual desire?
Seriously, THAT’S offensive?
We’re once again going back to square one, Susan, where you get indignant and insist that women are totally pure and that the Blue Pill was right after all.
” I really, truly dislike the awkward early stages of relationships. Those flutters woman crave? Mostly make me anxious and slightly sick to the stomach. I’m really not biologically setup to enjoy all that crazy dopamine stuff it seems…”
Flutters are only fun if they person you’re fluttering over flutters over you too. Otherwise, it sucks.
Escoffier September 21, 2012 at 4:12 pm
“Not naturally loyal to one husband.”
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
You cite Helen Fisher a lot and she is at pains to stress that monogamy, however advantageous it is to happiness, is NOT biologically natural.
And you find this offensive?
—–
It is natural to be attracted to other physically attractive people besides one’s own spouse, but the desire to f*ck them based on that attraction may not come naturally to some. I believe there are people for whom monogamy is not a struggle at all on any level – physical, mental, moral – and who are naturally monogamous.
They might be a minority.
@Ted D
With ADR, Ted, if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s. That is precisely what Rollo stated. You can dance around the semantics, but the meaning is very clear. “I can do something and you can’t. I am more capable than you are.”
I understand that and I appreciate it. But the fact is, that manosphere definition is widely accepted and represented by the first 9 google hits I provided originally. Solipsism is never discussed in the ‘sphere as something men experience. I have never seen it once.
If you’re the manager, that system works well. It does not work well in fixing society’s ills because we cannot agree on flaws. I’m telling you that the list of female flaws per the ‘sphere is daunting and unmatched by anything I have ever said here. The women who stoop that low are the radfems, who are equally deluded and partisan.
I am not writing a blog looking at the female condition in all its glory and horror, and as most of the male commentary focuses on the horror with little of the glory, I have no appetite for it beyond intellectual inquiry. That has been and will continue to be my approach.
Let me be clear.
HUS is not a place for you to figure out what women are bad at. Do you get that? I do not know how many times I have to say that I am not Alka Seltzer for the Red Pill.
I’m happy to engage on these issues when they affect both sexes, but you are focused primarily on figuring out what’s wrong with women.
A female sophomore in college comes to read a post on why women like bad boys, and she’s clobbered with a crew of males screaming in all caps that women like bad boys. Do you think she comments? No, she says WTF and closes her window.
That is not good for my blog.
@Ted
I agree, and that is why I write a blog and invite people to debate and disagree with me. I solicit a variety of opinions, and I am happy to have dissent here. I often learn from it. But I do not appreciate the dismissive tone of a reader who says, “Gee I’m finding these studies tedious. I used to like HUS better.” Fine, bye.
Susan, “With ADR, Ted, if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s. ”
OK wait. The traditional understanding is that woman’s emotional capacity is larger than man’s, and the Manosphere is claiming the opposite?!?!?
How about human emotional capacity runs on a spectrum and varies from individual to individual? Anyone ever consider that?
” I suspect I’m like Ted, in that we both hold back quite a bit. ”
If I truly wrote without consideration for the audience here, I promise you J would NOT think I was a sweet guy. Yes, I am more than capable of BEING a sweet guy, but it really isn’t a natural thing. I’m a verbal brute. I’m opinionated and stubborn. I’m dogged and determined, and rarely let go of something until I’m satisfied. I truly and honestly intimidate people into submission when debating in person. I wish you all could hear just how loud I get when I’m worked up…
I override ALL of that often here, and I don’t feel imposed upon BY that fact. However, I can’t help but occasionally get the impression that sometimes you think I’m getting out of hand, and it makes me chuckle. I don’t mean to sound condescending at all, but I really do tread lightly here. I do that out of respect, but its hard to maintain that respect when things start getting personal, because *I* do NOT escalate here the way I would in person. I still keep those kid gloves on, and it is why I tend to simply knuckle under when tempers start rising. Rest assured if it was in person, I’d keep on pushing until someone popped. Hint, it is rarely me that loses their temper. I’ll simply keep pushing buttons until it happens. And honestly, I get a bit of pleasure from doing so. Once a discussion gets out of the realm of true debate and goes personal, I’m more than happy to keep feeding the bear until it’s stomach explodes.
I keep saying I’m an asshole at heart.
@Escoffier
I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males. Once you fail to do that, I challenge you to find one mansophere reference to solipsism that is not restricted to women. As always, I’ll be happy to eat my words and tip my hat if I’m wrong.
Can you give me some examples where I have described male flaws that ruin relationships that are not also shared by women? I talk about promiscuity, infidelity, inciting jealousy, and many other problematic behaviors, but I can’t think offhand of zeroing in on a male trait in a judgmental way.
@Susan
“He was very interesting in a thread about Game’s compatibility with Christianity not long ago (not here).”
Wait, what? How? (and the ‘rents looked at me funny when I said I thought God was anti-woman)
@Ted D
“Honestly, I can’t know a woman well enough to be comfortable getting naked in front of her in 7 hours. Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?”
No you can’t.
I once had a co-worker ask me if I’d met any guys the previous weekend (he asked me about that pretty frequently, I guess he was thinking about the age stuff I just learned here). I said no, it had only been two days, he said that shouldn’t matter much. I said that’s not enough time for me to learn about a person, and asked if he watched Criminal Minds.
There was a guy behind us taking out the trash and he started laughing. Ironically he had about six months of a prison sentence left.
@ted
“I’m opinionated and stubborn. I’m dogged and determined, and rarely let go of something until I’m satisfied. I truly and honestly intimidate people into submission when debating in person.”
Sounds pretty solipsistic to me!
“I override ALL of that often here, and I don’t feel imposed upon BY that fact. However, I can’t help but occasionally get the impression that sometimes you think I’m getting out of hand, and it makes me chuckle. I don’t mean to sound condescending at all, but I really do tread lightly here. I do that out of respect, but its hard to maintain that respect when things start getting personal, because *I* do NOT escalate here the way I would in person. I still keep those kid gloves on, and it is why I tend to simply knuckle under when tempers start rising. Rest assured if it was in person, I’d keep on pushing until someone popped. Hint, it is rarely me that loses their temper. I’ll simply keep pushing buttons until it happens. And honestly, I get a bit of pleasure from doing so. Once a discussion gets out of the realm of true debate and goes personal, I’m more than happy to keep feeding the bear until it’s stomach explodes. I keep saying I’m an asshole at heart.”
Waiting for Vox or someone to point out all the occurences of “I” and “me” in that paragraph.
P.S. I know it wasn’t you that was harrassing Charm or whoever about saying “I, . . . I . .” – I’m just being a dick.
@susan
“I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males”
Hey, hey!!!! Do I not have a penis? I conced that I might not be John Holmes, but c’mon.
The point is the source. The source must be credible for the ideas to be credible. Devlin is not a credible source, whether he turns out to have been right or not.
This is wrong. Just because someone is a nutcase doesn’t mean they are wrong that the world is round or that the sun rises in the east or sets in the west. Ideas need to be evaluated on their OWN merit based on their own internal logic and/or how well they describe observable reality, NOT on who bring the idea to the table first. With all due respect, overemphasis on the source of an idea to which either the idea is either automatically embraced or rejected is a substantial logical fallacy.
Escoff, Ted, and Mike C,
So I know I don’t comment much, but I lurk and I’ve watched you guys have the same discussion with Susan perhaps 5 times in a row now. If you’ll remember, I once had a similar point of contention (not just with Susan, others were involved), and it turned out that I really needed a nice long break. We can’t ask Susan to take a break from her own blog, but to be honest none of you have made much headway and maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Just a well-meant thought from an old HUS buddy.
@Passer By
The study found that single women’s tastes in male faces move to a higher level of masculinity during ovulation. An example might be from Zac Ephron to Ryan Gosling. Hypermasculine faces generally are not preferred.
(I would like to point out that this study was conducted showing women photos of male faces, btw.)
For married women, interest in males outside the relationship did not occur unless the women dissatisfied specifically wrt dominance in her mate.
Most of the studies come out of evo psych and bio, which strongly lean toward nature. IIRC, that study suggested that women seek more macho men for physical protection in dangerous societies with high violence. In societies where order is maintained, females select more feminine male faces.
True. I am reaching the conclusion that the most egregious examples of female solipsism are from feminists, and that the manosphere concept was originally meant to do battle with them. It has broadened and morphed over time into a generalization about hardwired female nature. Interestingly, many of the examples have focused on feminism.
I think a secondary, and related issue, is the perceived lack of female empathy for men. This is real, I’ve written about it here and I see it in my dealings with women all the time. Again, this is real and worth discussing, but the whole idea of FS alienates even the women who do empathize with men, because men have identified them as the enemy.
I’m afraid we’re headed there.
Susan – “if you tell me that I am incapable of loving a man in the way he is capable of loving me, that states my range of emotional capacity is smaller, and therefore inferior, to a man’s.”
Nope, if I say that it means I believe that men and women love differently. Unless I say it is an inferior method of love, don’t assume I’m claiming superiority. Perhaps you don’t know me well enough, but I really and truly do try to be fair about everything. If I think something is bad, I say it straight up.
““I can do something and you can’t. I am more capable than you are.””
Oh Susan. Do you realize just how “school yard” that sounds? Have I really made you think I’m a misogynist?
“I understand that and I appreciate it. But the fact is, that manosphere definition is widely accepted and represented by the first 9 google hits I provided originally. Solipsism is never discussed in the ‘sphere as something men experience. I have never seen it once.”
Fine. But *I* am not the ‘sphere. Neither is Mike, Escoffier, or most of the regulars. Hell VD has his own blog and I still wouldn’t say he represents the ‘sphere. I get that you view the ‘sphere at large as the enemy, and I’m sure it is unsettling to know that some men you see as reasonable can read it and agree from time to time. But honestly that does NOT make us your enemy.
“If you’re the manager, that system works well. It does not work well in fixing society’s ills because we cannot agree on flaws. “
I agree. But how can we ever come to an agreement if we can’t even TALK about it without someone getting their panties in a bunch?
“HUS is not a place for you to figure out what women are bad at. Do you get that? I do not know how many times I have to say that I am not Alka Seltzer for the Red Pill.”
Then to me you do not truly intend to help these young women. If you are not willing to show them clearly where they are going wrong, and why, then you cannot help them. At best you are providing a band-aid and hoping they figure out the why of it on their own.
You want to know how to fix bad behavior? Identify its roots and fix those. Trying to convince young college women to pick the good guy over the cad is pointless if you don’t tell them explicitly WHY they find the cad attractive in the first place.
Do you know why I want to know more about women’s nature? Because I love one, and I want to be able to help her be happy. I have daughters, and I want to be able to explain to them why they can’t help but be attracted to that douchebag with a motorcycle. If I can’t explain it to them, how can I convince them to look beyond the excitement and think long term? Yes, the short term fix is to make them “feel” like the right choice is to pass, but what about the next bad boy? What happens when they “feel” like sexing up another asshat? If they don’t know WHY they feel it, they won’t know it’s wrong to trust in that feeling.
It’s Friday. I’m going to do my best to be scarce over the weekend as usual. Please do your best to step away and unwind a bit yourself. And if you can, think about what I said above. I’m being completely earnest when I tell you that trying to fix this without getting to the root of the problem is IMO pointless, even when you are working at the margins. Women deserve to know why they “feel” the way they do, even if perhaps they don’t consciously want to know. Its about being responsible for yourself and your actions, and you can’t do that unless you know WHY you act the way you do.
Susan, first I want to note that every time we go down this rabbit hole it’s not because the men bring it up. It’s because YOU say something like “the idea that women like dominance has been proved false” or “hypergamy is about marrying up and nothing else”. Then we feel compelled to respond because we believe that’s wrong and counter to your mission.
RE: the latter. Your mission is to help young people, particularly young women, navigate this SMP and get into relationships. What’s stopping them? The twisted nature of this SMP.
OK, so what’s the remedy? To help them understand this SMP so they can avoid its pitfalls and land what they want (for those who want them): relationships.
Understanding requires understanding male and female nature, including male and female sexual desire, and how they are different. You spend a lot of time explaining to girls the habits and psychology of players and cads so they will know them when they see them, understand that they are bad bets for relationships, and (hopefully) avoid them.
But what they also need to understand is what, in their OWN nature, makes players and cads attractive—and often MORE attractive, at least initially or superficially, than nice, good, solid guys.
Sometimes you address this with candor. But sometimes you vehemently deny that there is any problem. And sometimes you positively state that female nature is fine: it’s naturally monogamous, its hypergamy is all about finding a good mate once and then shuts off, women find beta traits attractive, and so on.
So, you can be contradictory. But more to the point, the latter advice is unhelpful TO WOMEN. You seem to think it’s best that women not hear the unflattering things about female nature when the reverse is true: that’s PRECISELY what they need to hear so that they can understand it and learn to control it.
The more you shield women from that—or worse, mislead them into thinking that their natural attraction triggers will lead them straight into the arms of a virtuous beta—the more mistakes they will make, including (but not limited to) hooking up and chasing players.
What is game? In a nutshell, game is a massive arbitrage scheme developed by (some) men to take advantage of the fact that (most) women do not understand their own attraction triggers. When you perpetuate blue pill myth, you do your target audience a disservice by making game more effective. And you undermine your core goal of promoting lasting, stable relationships.
PB – “P.S. I know it wasn’t you that was harrassing Charm or whoever about saying “I, . . . I . .” – I’m just being a dick.”
Its all good. I’m probably borderline narcissistic or some such nonsense anyway. Besides, I was raised by a single mother. If indeed solipsism IS a female trait (which I personally never stated) then it may be little surprise that I inherited it from my upbringing. *shrug*
I’ll add it to my list of cross-wired shit like wanting a woman with options that doesn’t use them, and the desire for my woman to lust after my ass.
@Coop
I’d written you off as lost in the wilderness. But it’s good to hear things are improving for you. I eschew these silly alpha/beta labels anyway. Your personality is just as much a part of you as your gender is. There’s absolutely nothing inconsistent with being a man and being yourself at the same time. And I’m certain there’s a special woman somewhere who’ll agree. Good luck!
@Escoffier
Monogamy /= Loyalty.
I believe that women can be attracted to other men and naturally loyal to their husbands.
Loyalty to a loved one is natural for both men and women.
It is a character trait. Some men are not loyal and some women are not loyal. There is zero evidence that women are less loyal to their mates than men are.
Furthermore, speaking of loyalty, you said yesterday that a man considering dumping his unattractive wife for a newer model was not hypergamy because he doesn’t seek status in his new mate. That is true, it is not hypergamy. It is analogous to hypergamy, though, the male desire for sexual variety. You have acknowledged this. IOW, unhappily married people may well be tempted to trade up either to a wealthier guy or a hotter girl. It’s the same thing at work for both sexes.
I don’t thing happily married people are tempted to make a change, or find it difficult to remain loyal.
I don’t understand your comment here. This was Devlin saying that young women need to treat the powerful force of young male sexuality with respect, implying that they should not expect men to wait for sex.
Of course, but we don’t have the same desire for variety. Our needs can be met with a favored male. If this were not true, the cuckoldry rate would be higher than 2% and the female infidelity rate would be higher than it is. Also, the differential in divorce rates by SES groups indicates that few women actually do seek a higher status mate.
You’re being a drama queen, I didn’t say that.
I believe that males and females employ a wide range of mating strategies, based on genetics and environment. Some of those mating strategies are moral, some are immoral. Neither sex is more or less immoral than the other, IMO.
We can identify “flaws” for both sexes, but in my view a woman’s inability to love, inability to converse without being egoistic, and inability to be dedicated and loyal to her husband rather than fickle are not among ours.
I’ll say again that I have never suggested any corollary flaws unique to males either.
No, that line of Devlin was not about male sexuality, it was about female. Read it again. It’s clear to me from the quote but if it’s still not to you, get the original piece and read it in context.
Funny you should say that, because when that happens here my stomach hurts. I have feelings of acute discomfort, anxiety and dread. The frank, often brutal comments that men leave evoke a strong emotional response in me. I speak for no one else, but at times like this I consider shutting down the blog.
@Passer By
Oops, thanks for speaking up. You did indeed. I’m sure there others as well, it just doesn’t feel like it.
You’re right. I should amend that to say that if a source is not credible, I will retain a very healthy dose of skepticism until I see sufficient evidence that the ideas are correct. Loony people have made very important contributions to civilization.
For example, if Todd Akin came online to lecture us about female nature, I would be extremely skeptical.
Susan, I’m not the one making the clam that women can’t love or any of the rest. I’m objected to the way that you, when you argue against those claims, start to regress into blue pill delusions about the purity of female nature.
No, I don’t think loyalty is natural any more than monogamy is. Loyalty is a character trait that arises from a combination of reason and sentiment. The latter two are natural characteristics of human beings but have to be properly cultivated and educated to function as they should or at their best.
This all comes down to the status of “gratitude” as the foundation of morality, which is one of the great topics of philosophy and finds its fullest expression in Machiavelli.
Re: hypergamy, no it’s not the same for both sexes, it operates differently. I believe that most studies until very recently showed that men cheat more than women, which makes sense given that the desire for variety characterizes base male sexuality but not female. Men will cheat with no thought of leaving their wives, indeed in the hope that they never get caught and can stay married unto death. Women by and large don’t do that. If they cheat, they’ve checked out no hubby for good.
BTW, the fact that cheating rates are now more or less tied for both sexes suggests to me a loosening of the restraints on female hypergamy that used to be effective in checking much of what cheating might otherwise have occurred.
Escoff, Ted, and Mike C,
So I know I don’t comment much, but I lurk and I’ve watched you guys have the same discussion with Susan perhaps 5 times in a row now. If you’ll remember, I once had a similar point of contention (not just with Susan, others were involved), and it turned out that I really needed a nice long break. We can’t ask Susan to take a break from her own blog, but to be honest none of you have made much headway and maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Just a well-meant thought from an old HUS buddy.
Olive,
You may be right.
Let me share more of my personal history. I first starting dating my ex-wife in April 1996. From April 1996 to Dec 31 1997, we “broke up” about 3-4 times. They were usually about a 1-2 week breakup and then we would get back together. We actually broke up for a longer period of time New Year’s Eve 1997, but even in 98-00 we would periodically hang out and fuck. I’d actually have dates and then get together with her just to have sex. I WAS ALWAYS INEXPLICABLY DRAWN BACK TO HER. I was in grad school in 99-00 enjoying the single life but for the 2nd year 00-01 she persuaded me to get back together as a couple. We broke up again in 2002 and then some months later got back together again. Something just kept pulling me back in. We married in May 2004, and she left me in October 2004. About a month later, she wanted to come back. I took her back and we were back together in November and December. In late December 2004, there was the mother of all battles. It was literally insane. Both sets of parents were there. She was literally going berserk. Tons of stuff was being thrown and destroyed. It was sheer insanity. She left and the divorce stuff got rolling. My birthday is actually in early March, and she showed up at my apartment door unannounced on my birthday. My best friend and I were there playing a video game. She had a cake and wanted to talk about stopping the divorce proceedings. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of “I don’t think so…not this time”. Whatever hold she had on me for the previous 8-9 years was gone. I saw her once a few years later, and had a conversation with her. I was actually somewhat surprised at how little emotion I felt for someone I once thought I couldn’t live without.
I have been pondering that whatever value I once brought here no longer exists, and that whatever value I received is gone as well……I guess I’m not really sure what has continually drawn me back as the blog changed directions…..well, I kinda do. Perhaps I should and need to follow the path of Jesus Mahoney.
@Escoffier
Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting that females are more “flawed” than males in this way? I’ve been hearing that more and more, that female cheating is “worse” and a greater wrong. Do you agree?
I disagree. I think that for some people, loyalty undo death comes naturally, while others may never feel it for anyone. I believe it’s tied up with empathy, the ability to demonstrate love and attachment, the desire to reap and preserve the benefits of emotional intimacy, the ability to honor a promise, and the expectation of reciprocal dedication.
I agree that loyalty should be cultivated in children as they are raised. I knew when I married that I would be loyal. I don’t have it in me, I don’t think, to be disloyal in a major way. That would be far more challenging than just doing what comes naturally.
I have not said anything about “better” and “worse” forms of cheating. I have said that for the various male predelictions that are well understood, there are corresponding female predelictions which are not well understood nor openly acknowledged. I have also detected you going back and forth on whether there are any dangers endemic to female sexual desire that are not generally found among men. I am trying to establish that there are.
@Susan
Admitting its length, my stated position does in fact call for a similar trait in males and females, which is the tendency for a person to synthesize information they processed through first hand (intellectual) activity or (emotional) experience in priority over information they acquired as a second hand (observed) activity or (empathized) emotion.
Because females also tend to process and synthesize using emotional factors more than intellectual factors, first hand emotional experience tends to play a dominant role in how they respond. Female responses influenced by an emotion or intuition they have felt may be perceived as egoistic to an outside observer .
But males are processing and synthesizing in a similar way – the difference being that first hand intellectual activity tends to play the dominant role. Ask a large sampling of male turkey hunters what gun you should purchase for turkey hunting. I predict that the responses will trend toward being influenced by guns that the subject is using or has used.
In other words – the responses from male and female subjects will show similarly dominant influence from information acquired in a more direct, personal, and first hand manner. A response like “I really enjoyed using a .223 Remington, and I had a great time when we last hunted” may be perceived as self centered while a response like “The .223 Remington aims better than other guns I’ve used, and I bagged two birds with it when we last hunted” isn’t.
@Escoffier
I had difficult finding the passage in the piece, so I had to read the damn thing again. It was uncanny – every Game or MRA blog I can think of is lifted straight from Devlin. I had no idea the discipleship was so clear.
There’s a reason Tyler Cowen calls him evil and most others call him a flaming misogynist. Here’s the passage:
I’m reading that as women being ignorant of how much men want sex, and show disrespect when they don’t appreciate a man’s self-control. How do you interpret it differently?
@susan
As to your quote from Devlin about treating male sexuality with the proper respect, although think Escoffier has misread it, I think it’s entirely unfair to take the quote out of context. He was not implying that women should not expect men to wait for sex. He was discussing Shalit’s inability to view anything from a male perspective and what a male might reasonably want out of a relationship (there is that “solipsism” concept). In other words, her writing viewed men as simply beings that should provide women what they want from relationships without any regard to the possiblity that men have male-specific needs. Consequently, she concludes that a guy who started pressuring for sex after 8 months of courtship simply didn’t love the woman. That’s silly. She is not grasping how powerful a young man’s sexual urges are, and how much he restrained by waiting 8 months. In fact, absent strong religious reasons, I (and Devlin) would suggest that her making him wait more than that really suggests that she doesn’t love him and doesn’t give a shit about this “powerful force force of nature” that consumes him almost constantly.
So, Devlin’s full quote:
“Second, let us consider the more important matter of sexual intimacy. Shalit is, of course, emphatic on a man’s lack of all sexual rights before the wedding. Referring to a girl whose boyfriend began “pressuring” her for sex after eight months of courtship, her assessment is: “If he’s pressuring you for sex, he probably doesn’t love you.” (GGM, p. 29) Now, courtship is typically an interaction in which the man seeks sexual surrender from the woman and the woman seeks assurance of commitment from the man. Would the author sympathize with a man who reasoned: “If a woman is pressuring me for commitment, she probably doesn’t love me”? It does not sound like it: elsewhere, she approvingly quotes a woman who is “mortified” that when girls “hint to their boyfriends about marriage [they] find themselves dumped like garbage.” (RM, p. 227) She even refers to the authority of another of her old etiquette books to show that “a young woman could assume that a man wanted to marry her if he simply spent a good chunk of time with her.” (GGM, 28) (I’m guessing eight months would count as “a good chunk of time.”) In other words, women have the right to expect commitment from men, but men are bad when they seek sexual surrender from women; women’s instincts are morally valid, but men’s are not. (Moreover, Shalit never says a word about the legitimate male fear of divorce, which may well be why the young man in her anecdote was “pressuring” his girlfriend about sex rather than simply proposing marriage.)
An old-fashioned fellow might agree with the author’s disapproval of premarital sex, but probably on the assumption that she would at least acknowledge the husband’s claims after the ceremony. This assumption would be mistaken, however. Once the couple is married, the wife’s sexual desires and the duty of the husband to satisfy them become her exclusive concern. (RM, p. 114-15) When she comes across a case of a couple where the man was the party less eager for physical intimacy, her sympathy is once again with the woman; she asks: “If he has no interest in a mutually satisfying relationship, why not just leave?” (GGM, p. 177)
I believe Shalit is by no means unusually narcissistic, as women go. Most do take for granted men’s obligation to put women’s needs and desires before their own, and thus to feel no particular gratitude when men do so. Many women have no idea, for example, how intense a young man’s sexual urges can be, and are not inclined to treat this powerful force of nature with the necessary respect. Shalit never seems aware that men feel “pressured” by their own sexual urges, or that a normal, healthy young man who has dated a girl for eight months before making these urges known has already demonstrated a fair amount of self-control.”
Mike C,
It’s not that surprising… you’ve been coming around here for several years, no? I’ve always loved HUS because of the community, and it was interesting and fun to get to “know” certain commenters (and Susan!) over time. Plus, I think the debate is of a quality that I’ve never seen in a classroom.
Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize when you’re drawn to something that is no longer useful for you. Furthermore, it’s important to consider WHY.
@ Cooper
That’s great to hear. Perhaps verbalizing our dislike for the casual SMP will prevent the girl from assuming we’re desperate when we are willing to have commitment before physical intimacy.
@Escoffier
I do not appreciate the constant references to going back and forth, admitting one thing, then taking it back, etc. I am attempting to get at the facts. I can agree with part of what you say, i.e. there is a distribution curve for hypergamy, without agreeing that Devlin is right, i.e. women are fickle and not naturally loyal. Do you really claim these are the same statements? I did not endorse Devlin and then retract it. That is your erroneous understanding. That’s one example, but your claims of tacit agreement and my meeting you more than halfway lead me to believe you misunderstood my position.
So a woman’s infidelity is more likely to end the marriage than a man’s. OK, let’s figure out what this means.
What happens when men cheat and don’t want to end the marriage? Do their wives leave them? IOW, do women view infidelity differently than men do regardless of which party commits it? It seems to me that if a woman’s cheating means the relationship is dead to her emotionally, then wouldn’t she project that same motive onto her husband if he cheated? It may be that for women, cheating by either party means the marriage ends.
If a woman cheats, is a man more likely to keep her around than she would in his situation? Given that men value sexual faithfulness as the most important trait in a female (out of 67 as defined by Buss), it’s hard to imagine that men would wish to reconcile after female infidelity. How do they put aside their having been displaced sexually?
Another danger endemic to female sexual desire is that if a woman’s husband becomes unattractive, either physically, or by appearing weak, or by significantly lowering his status, she may seek a sexually attractive male elsewhere. Again, I believe the male is prone to do the same if his wife becomes unattractive to him in some way. Of course, the male may cheat for no other reason than sexual variety, as you say, so the female risks that diversion of love and resources from her own family if her husband should cheat.
Female sexual desire is lower than men’s in general, so I suppose you could call this dangerous from a male POV. Bed death in marriage is probably attributable to lower female desire more often than not, especially if she is raising children. Husbands are not infrequently jealous of their own children for this reason.
Female sexual desire is generally directed toward a favored male, and they attach fairly quickly to sexual partners in most cases. That is a danger for a man who wishes to remain single, I guess, as it signals drama ahead.
And finally, the biggie: Female sexual desire is very selective. Most women will truly desire only a handful of men in their lives. Desire and attraction are not simultaneous (the tingle myth). Many men may spark initial attraction, but will not make it through the gates to sexual desire and union. I disagree with Devlin’s assertion that women find 99% of men unattractive:
“What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead”
What have I left out? What do you think?
I challenge you to find one admission by a male in the entire thread that admits solipsism in males. Once you fail to do that, I challenge you to find one mansophere reference to solipsism that is not restricted to women. As always, I’ll be happy to eat my words and tip my hat if I’m wrong.
In the AG thread of my original response to your challenging the concept:
Anonymous said… Are you saying that men are never solipsistic?
September 18, 2012 10:12 AM
VD said… No, I am not saying that. But it appears to be significantly less common in men.
September 18, 2012 12:14 PM
Now, granted, this is not in the thread at HUS. But I have clearly recognized that men are capable of solipsism. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the subsequent post, I noted that I expected three in four women to test out as solipsistic, versus one in five men. I could certainly be wrong about that, it is merely an estimate. But it does prove that at least one man has admitted that solipsism exists in men as well as women.
@VD
Fair enough. You are the third male to meet the challenge. I am happy to be proved wrong. Now I know who the open-minded males are.
I would be circumspect about saying any modern writer has “disproved” Plato on anything.
(raises hand) Actually, I may have, Escoffier. At least, I have conclusively shown that Socrates knowingly cheated in constructing the second horn of his dilemma in the Euthyphro dialogue, and demonstrated how his logical construction cannot possibly apply to monotheistic religions and/or moralities despite the way Euthyphro is often cited by people who wish to criticize Christianity and have not read the dialogue closely enough. Whether that counts as a “disproof”, I will leave up to you to decide.
@Passer By
In reading the whole thing through, I did understand that. However, I think it’s important to understand that Devlin is (I hope) being hyperbolic in the way that Roissy often is. The statement that many women are not inclined to regard male sexuality with the “necessary” respect is clearly opinion rather than fact. If anything, more women than ever, especially feminists, are inclined to treat male sexuality with enough respect that waiting one month is highly unusual.
This is an anti-feminist rant, essentially. It may have valid points, indeed I see that it does, but he has written a piece for men to read and discuss, meant to exhort them to action by saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Indeed, this is the ostensible purpose of the manosphere. Naturally, Devlin does not invite women to the conversation, he is setting himself up in direct opposition to this feminist and to feminist thinking, which he extrapolates to be representative of all women. For that reason alone, Devlin is not really a good subject for a female blog.
Again, most women take men for granted and feel no gratitude. What is the basis for this claim about most women? This is meant to be incendiary.
Full disclosure: I have never read Shalit’s book, I was not the least bit tempted by the “modesty” angle.
@ Susan
I know she’s somewhat hot. But the real question is wether I would seek a sexual relationship with her. The answer to that question depends on a lot more than just my reaction when I see a picture of her.
Which of the studies of this type have determined who women had relationships with? I only remember studies of women’s N and the correlation with other factors. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any studies which objectively measure the types of men that women had relationships with.
@Escoffier
I have never stated that female nature is fine or not fine. Nor have I said that about male nature. You and I have argued about morality before, as you have urged me to take a moral position on casual sex. I am inclined to look at the whole set of male and female traits as close to “perfect” as they’ve been in history, with lots of room for improvement. To the extent that either sex exhibits traits that disfavor monogamy, but the truth is that mother nature does not prefer monogamy. Civilized people do.
At the same time, there are several ideas in the ‘sphere that are just wrong, IMO. The notion that females are fickle and not naturally loyal as a categorical statement is both false and misogynist. I could easily claim that men want nothing but sex, and are incapable of emotional intimacy during sex. Many women have said that before. I do not, because I believe it’s an exaggerated view designed to pit women and men against one another.
@commentary
I’ve been saving the best for last.
I’ve got to run out but look forward to responding to your comments a bit later.
@ Susan
Actually, the results for self-reporting of masturbation and porn-viewing were statistically significant in that study. The results for partner count were not statistically significant, but were in line with what would be expected based on the results for masturbation and porn-viewing.
But that’s not the purpose of the study, nor was it claimed to be. In fact, it was interesting when researchers asked participants why they did not like the hypermasculine faces. Both men and women said those men looked like they would cheat and be poor parents. Why do they think so? Because men with high T cheat and divorce more, and they’re 2/3 less likely to even have kids. It turns out that women and men both are capable of detecting this. It is of course possible that women will go on to have sexual relationships with men they claim to find unattractive, once they get a whiff of his BO or observe his dominance. But no study can measure or predict that. That is indeed a limitation of studies.
Some of the studies asked people why they hooked up, whether their hookups turned into relationships, how long they dated those people, etc. There have also been studies examining the phenomenon of “college marrieds,” usually freshmen couples who get together almost immediately and are inseparable for four years. FWB relationships have been studied as well.
Again, the links are all there, have a ball.
@susan
I agree that portions of what he writes are hyperbolic, similar to Roissy, and unnecessarily incendiary. I wasn’t attempting to introduce him to the blog. I was simply pointing out that his point was not the one you assumed and, boiled to essence (absent invective), his point there was reasonable. He was attacking what was essentially shaming language by Shalit in which she flippantly declared that a guy who had quietly waited 8 months was just a selfish SOB who didn’t love her. This is another version of the whole “a real man would . . .” type of approach. Eff that.
As to the “most women take men for granted and feel no gratitude”, that is obviously over the top. My problem with Devlin is not his underlying observations – which I think tend to be sound at some level when not overstated. My problem with his writing is that he seems to go waaay out of his way to piss off any woman who might be reading it. Flicking ears can be ok, but there are limits. Men wouldn’t enjoy being spoken about like that either. But, at the risk of losing my HUS beta orbiter card, I think he is pretty funny a lot of times.
@Susan,
my attitude about surveys wasn’t directed at your source material in particular. I believe that any survey can be set up with a particular agenda;eight out of ten cat owners said their cats preferred kitekat
well that’s just peachy, but what question was asked?
does your cat prefer kitekat to it’s normal food?
does your cat prefer kitekat to week dead skunk?
the question directs the result.
Suspicion over government related surveys can be well founded. Indeed there is an industry term for cooking up support via surveys;
government X wants to do something unpopular; raise tax on alcohol (for example). But they know it’ll be a tough sell on the grounds of balancing the budget, there is no grass roots level support for the tax hike.
So what they do is called astroturfing (faking grass root support). They set up a charity using a govenment grant, this is the majority of the money that the charity ever gets (public doesn’t donate) – a fake charity.
Said fake charity concocts survey to say that drinking is out of control “would you prefer action on alcohol prices, or have an axe in your head?” – teh public wants action on prices. Or sponsors well paid reports from friendly ‘experts’.
Government ‘reluctantly’ raises taxes ue to pressure from its own charity.
@ Susan
I’ll dig up my comment if I have to but I said earlier that I believe both men and women can be solipsistic, but because of the effects of feminism, today’s women are much more solipsistic.
@ Susan
Thanks. After all this argument, you admit what we’ve been saying all along.
@ Susan
I apologize. I wasn’t aware that one needs to have a PHD in Sociology to know that what people’s statements don’t always accurately reflect their actions. Thanks for enlightening me.
Som funny stuff from that same Devlin article:
“A highly successful women’s magazine editor has written a book of advice for young wives stating: “Giving, devoting, sacrificing … these are the actions of a good wife, no? No. These are the actions of a drudge, a sucker, a sap.” Instead, women are urged to emulate a wife who threw her husband’s clothes into the garden to teach him not to leave socks on the floor: “He understood I meant it.” Or another who wanted her husband to help with the laundry, and hollered at him: “Are you a f***ing retard that you don’t see me running up and down stairs? Listen to me and stop your bulls**t.” Or another who discovered this interpersonal skill: “Just stand there and start screaming. If you stand there and scream long enough, someone is going to realize that you’re standing in the middle of the room screaming [and ask] ‘Why are you screaming?’” (pp. 245-47)
What could be wrong with men these days that they refuse to commit?”
C’mon, that’s funny stuff!
And more:
“It is remarkable that a woman with such traditional ideas about marriage, modesty, and feminine decorum never condemns feminism per se. Instead, Shalit claims to have perceived a “fourth wave” of the movement characterized by the rejection of pornography and casual sex. This reviewer is not sanguine about the possibility of an eventual Nth feminist wave coming along to solve all the problems created by waves 1 through (N – 1). ”
If you can’t laugh at that . . .
Susan, sorry, but I do detect you going back and forth. You will sometimes acknowledge problems with female nature and at other times make preposterous blanket denials, eg “women are not attracted to dominance.”
Leave Devlin out of it. You’re the one who always brings him up and you brought him up this time. It seems to me that you bring him in so that you can tag certain ideas with his name and then dismiss them. Well, forget him. You’re talking to me, not him. These are my thoughts I’m presenting. If you want to dismiss my thoughts in the basis of credentialism I can’t stop you but note that I don’t do the same as you.
So, do I believe that women are fickle? “La Donna Mobile” wrote Verdi. So the idea is hardly a new one. Nor do I believe it is that outrageous. When I was having trouble with my first HS girlfriend, my feminist 1.0 career-woman working mom, from hippie-lib Santa Cruz, California no less, told me “women are fickle”. Her exact words. (She’s stuck with my father for decades in case you’re wondering. She wasn’t trying to slag her whole sex, she was explaining a tendency that, if not checked results in bad things and is particularly out of control in youth.
I don’t believe either sex is naturally loyal, as I said before. But the blue pill myth is that men are not whereas women are. Since that is false, I think it needs to be corrected.
Note that I specifically said above that I am not arguing that one sex’s endemic problematic desires are “worse” than the others. We can have the better/worse debate later if you like. First we have to establish whether or not there in fact ARE any problematic desires that are endemic to women but not to men. (We have already established that there such desired for men not endemic to women.) You sometimes indicate that you think there are, and sometimes indicate that you do not.
Regarding quantitative vs. qualitative social science, this article is a very good read: http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/Publications2006/0604FIVEMISPUBL2006.pdf
Vox, no, that is not disproof of Plato. You cannot take at face value any single Socratic argument from a Platonic dialogue and assume it is the final view of Plato himself. The dialogues are all dramas, with settings, characters, etc. All the speeches have a particular context, spoken to (and in front of) particular people, for a particular purpose. Plato leaves it to the reader to figure out how to interpret Socrates’ statements in light of the context. Then all such statements have to be compared to one another, and analyzed in light of the progression of the argument, etc.
Susan, re: fine v. not fine. You always fall back on this appeal to amoral “objectivity” but in the final analysis it can’t work. However, we can also leave that debate for another time. For the present let’s try to remain “value neutral” as the social scientists say.
The question is whether there are endemic elements to female (but not male) nature that, if not understood or checked, get in the way of your stated goal of fostering healthy, lasting relationships. The question is whether you always sketch female nature accurately.
My contention is that sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. When you say things like “women are naturally attracted to beta traits” and “woman are naturally loyal” and “hypergamy shuts down after marriage” you are summarizing female nature in a way that is inaccurate.
It is also unhelpful because to the extent that young women readers believe this account, they are essentially internalizing what many of them want to hear. This is why morality cannot be ruled out of the conversation. The fact is, most people believe alpha chasing and getting P&Ded is bad. They believe that being naturally attracted to stability and virtue is good. When told that’s what they naturally are, they tend to feel proud of themselves. They take on a false sense of their own innate goodness. They lose sight of those lower parts of their nature that they need to learn to control if they are ever to enjoy true lasting happiness.
When you write things like that you are essentially flattering young women. And in a way that can lead them into trouble. I explained how in my post at 941.
You cannot take at face value any single Socratic argument from a Platonic dialogue and assume it is the final view of Plato himself.
Yes, I thought that might be your take on it. That’s precisely why I wrote it as a critique of Socrates, not Plato. Of course, the impossibility of assuming Plato’s final views does tend to render both attempted proofs and disproofs of Plato meaningless, which may have been your original point. Out of curiosity, what is your opinion of Karl Popper’s take on Plato, aside from what you’ve already mentioned.
@susan
“It is a character trait. Some men are not loyal and some women are not loyal. There is zero evidence that women are less loyal to their mates than men are. ”
If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to be totally faithful, I would say men are less loyal. If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to stay attached to (and an unwavering desire for), I would say men are more loyal. For most men, a desire to bang the young hottie in Marketing has nothing to do with a desire to kick his wife to curb and leave her in the street or even to stop being intimate with her, assuming she has not been a royal bitch. For most women, a serious desire to be taken by the rising hotshot executive VP does reflect some desire to excise her husband from her life, even if he’s been quite kind and caring. I’m not ascribing a greater or lesser morality to either – just pointing out that disloyalty takes different forms.
Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize when you’re drawn to something that is no longer useful for you. Furthermore, it’s important to consider WHY.
Thanks Olive. You’ve given me some homework for the weekend
I’m posting an extract from a blog. If this is not a valid description of a Dark Triad Male, I don’t know. Are all men like this ? No. The tragedy is that one must use some of this guy’s tactics to get a girl. I wish it wasn’t so.
I cannot deny that Cedro may have been one of the most interesting men I have ever dated, but he was also one of the worst. It started last July. We had met two months prior when I started working in the same restaurant as him. He was a back-waiter, I was a hostess. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl literally can’t even remember boys name. It’s true. I was constantly confusing him with a different back-waiter (who happened to be Cedro’s best friend’s girlfriend’s little brother, just to confuse you a bit) and could not for the life of me remember which one he was. After about two months of work, it finally clicked one day when he struck up conversation with me at the end of his shift. I was immediately fascinated. He told me all about his studies at Hamilton College, a small yet competitive college in upstate New York. He told me that he majored in three subjects, Economics, French, and Chinese. He told me he speaks six languages. He told me that he once worked in marketing, but really hated it and was working at the restaurant as he was in between jobs. He told me that he was in ROTC and jumped out of helicopters from time to time. At this point in my mind he had gained a good amount of credibility because, to be honest, the shallow part of me would not have looked at him twice if he was just a restaurant back-waiter in his mid twenties with no other plan. And the helicopters and ROTC screamed alpha male. Perfect.
But this wasn’t enough. Not right away. I still only considered him a friend, but as time went on I began to realize how excited I would get whenever I would see him and then I knew – I had a crush.
Cedro was good at sweet talk and no matter how cheesy the things he would say were – I loved it. It began with a Facebook message “you have this certain je ne sais quoi that makes me smile when I think of you” followed with his number and a note saying, “text me sometime if you’re bored at work.” Of course I texted him right away, and flirting ensued. I couldn’t have been more giddy those first couple months, he seemed so perfect.
At this point in time I was excited, I thought I had finally found someone different. Cedro was not my type by any means. The guys of my past were typically goofy skinny college aged white boys, Cedro was everything but. Cedro was Colombian with a hint of an accent. Cedro was nearly five years older than me and had already graduated from college. Cedro was jacked with a tattoo, pierced ears, and a nipple piercing. I never imagined dating a guy like him – yet I was.
I was impressed with his planning on our first date. He picked me up from work and had options for things we could do. He had even gone as far as looking up movie times. This was a big deal for me and I thought – this guy’s different.
Now maybe I should have known right away when I smelled weed on his clothes that he wasn’t all that great. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against smoking, but a nice guy probably wouldn’t get high before a first date – would he? Nonetheless this fling went on for a good 6 months up until he left to go home to Colombia for the Christmas holidays and I left for my semester abroad in Barcelona.
Throughout the six months while we were dating there were about one hundred red flags that I chose to ignore.
Cedro was a liar. He would call out of work, lying saying he was sick. He would turn off his phone, lying saying it had died. His number one thing was always to say “I’ve been puking all night” except I knew it wasn’t true because one day he actually did puke and was left shocked telling me “I haven’t thrown up in years.”
Cedro always flaked on plans. He would tell me he was going to come over when he got out of work, but would go for drinks with his buddies instead. He would tell me he was going to call me later, and never would. He would tell me he was going to “take me on a nice date”. We never went on a nice date. Not once.
Cedro was a commitment phobe. He would tell me that he was committed to me, but refused to call me his girlfriend. He would tell me he had a “hard life” causing him to be closed off, but continually used that as an excuse when he would be a flake. He would hang out with his ex-fiance, but only let me find out when she tagged him in a Facebook post. Or when they Facebook chatted while he was laying in my bed.
Cedro was a man-whore. Like actually a man-whore. When he told me how many girls he had been with (let’s just say its many more than there are states in the United States of America) I should have run then and there. But I didn’t. I never ran. I always stayed. I always made excuses. I thought I was different.
My friends did not like him. They would only admit to liking him when he would hang out with them and make them laugh. He was funny. But that’s really not enough.
Cedro made me cry at least ever other week. Cedro was a constant let down. But I was obsessed with him and the last thing I wanted was to leave him and be heart broken. So for three months, I did just that. But finally it got to me. We broke up for a week after he had finally pissed me off enough by flaking on plans yet again without a single apology and a million excuses. And if you asked him about the break up he’d tell you it was his idea. He’d also tell you it wasn’t a break up, because technically we were never together. He told me that too. I still got back with him.
In that week I had a horrible time adjusting and the first day I could hardly manage to sit in my cubicle for 20 minutes without bursting into tears. I hated everything and I hated not being with him. But at the same time, I knew it was right. I knew he treated me like shit. And everyone was glad it was over. Ladies, listen to your friends. They know better.
The rest of her story is here.
Attention SayWhaat!
I’m reposting Passer By’s comment here for you in case you missed my comment to you asking about the situation your Indian grandmom (or was it mom?) was talking to you about those women who’s hubbies ran off with “tarts”. I had asked you if they ran off first or if, after finding out about the affairs, their wives ran them off. Please see the comment below as it may relate…..
“If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to be totally faithful, I would say men are less loyal. If by “loyal” you mean a constant desire to stay attached to (and an unwavering desire for), I would say men are more loyal. For most men, a desire to bang the young hottie in Marketing has nothing to do with a desire to kick his wife to curb and leave her in the street or even to stop being intimate with her, assuming she has not been a royal bitch. “
@Mike C
I agree that there are features that are unique to both sexes. Hypergamy is uniquely female, I accept that, though I do believe there is an analogous male experience of trading up to a hotter mate.
There is no doubt that status and dominance are hugely important in female attraction. I also acknowledge that human beings, including females, are solipsistic. I think feminists are especially solipsistic. But I also believe that “egotistic self-absorption” is a condition also found in many males.
The bottom line is that we’re all so incredibly imperfect. I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender. Honestly, I want people to get along and for men and women to bridge the gap. I hope we are not too far gone for that.
I’m sure you’re right. We know that the male and female brains have many differences. I am willing to accept those differences without judgment. Are you?
No, I think you know that I am fond of you and feel loyal to you. I also value your input. To be frank, I expect some loyalty in return. Either you believe I am empathic and fair to men or you do not. I am happy to be grilled about female nature – that’s fair. But I do not wish to constantly defend women against accusations like the ones leveled at blogs you frequent. It’s exhausting and it detracts from my mission here. You need to decide whether HUS’ mission works for you or not. I am all about reaching across the gender divide. If you prefer gender war, we can’t work together.
Fair enough, I will take it as constructive criticism. I do not mean to appear inconsistent – in my own mind my views are very consistent. I will try to do a better job of communicating them.
Susan, I think your reply to Mike C. at 983 is quite magnanimous and level-headed, really admirable. You’re leading by example here, in how to reach across the divide.
Okay, INTJ, you’re the 4th. FWIW, this is the conclusion I have reached as well.
Let’s hear it. A list of problematic desires for each sex.
Susan, Jesus H., I’ve said it about 300 times in the past six months. Do you really want to hear it again?
Susan,
Thank you for your earnest reply. and I absolutely agree with Esau’s follow-up comment.
The bottom line is that we’re all so incredibly imperfect.
Very true. I know one flaw I have is I can be short-tempered….it is probably a high T thing. Looking back over my life, many of my bigger mistakes can be found in the heat of anger.
I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender.
I hear you…let me throw this out there simply for food for thought consideration. Assume some weakness A exists, not even just a gender issue, but say a business. Is it ultimately better to simply pretend the weakness does not exist, or is it likely to bettter to recognize the weakness and then be able to take proactive steps to avoid negative consequences of that weakness.
I’ll use myself as an example. My best guess is I am naturally unrestricted and high T. That is a weakness from the perspective of being monogamous. But I am self-aware of this so I do not put myself into situations where this weakness could lead me into actions that I will regret and could be potentially very destructive.
Have a very enjoyable weekend! I know for my part I plan to make some gender love tomorrow (I’ve been tired the last several days) not gender war.
P.S. – I think there are solipsistic men as well….I think my co-worker is probably one.
Yeah, I get it. I can only say that as the wife, the idea of my husband banging the young hottie in Marketing is devastating. So devastating I don’t know if I can go on. He either wants me or her. He must choose. I will not look the other way.
@Esau
Thank you.
“I am so reluctant to engage in a debate about the weaknesses of any gender.”
OK, then, let me put this in terms that you might find more palatable.
You like to quote Helen Fisher saying, in effect, “Our genes did not evolve to make us happy, the evolved to drive us to reproduce.”
When I read that I think of Aristotle and the distinction between high and low nature. Low nature is pure biological impulse. High nature is logos, reason, potential, teleology. High nature does not seem natural because it is not automatic, not ubiquitous, not “always on.” But it is natural. The animals can’t talk, can’t reason, can’t love, can’t ask, can’t wonder, can’t philosophize. Only we have that potential. The potential is natural but it has to be developed, cultivated, educated.
So, to be happy AS HUMAN BEINGS we have to develop it. Following low nature, all we can be sure of is that we will reproduce. We may live lives like the beasts but we will have offspring. They may be wretched but they will exist.
But to be happy AS HUMAN BEINGS we have to develop high nature, which requires some effort, which includes controlling many of the desires of low nature.
You want people to be happy, not as animals, but as people. You want them in healthy, lasting relationships. Or, if I may be square, let us call them “marriages.” Well, then you have to teach them how to control low nature and cultivate high nature. That in turn requires understanding that low nature–the imperatives of biological reproduction, divorced from all moral considerations or the demands of lasting human happiness–is only geared toward reproduction, not happiness. So if people want to be happy (and good) they have to learn what their low nature is and how to control it.
This applies to both men and women but the impulses they need to learn to control are different.
@INTJ
Thanks for the responses.
Why ones by chance, and what is the bias,specifically? You do realize that many of those sources Susan’s cited are collections of case studies? Your fundamental problem seems to be with how large-scale, randomly sampled data is gathered, though I suspect that’s just a pretense.
I actually agree with you here. Unfortunately, you haven’t cited any case studies at all that could be evaluated for quality. This also suggests that the sources Susan’s cited are lacking in quality. Which ones are, specifically?
Absolutely not. However, I’d never extrapolate from anonymous narratives to the entire population without question. Clearly, happily married men are in the extreme minority @ HUS. Their anecdotes aren’t worth a damn around here. But I’d never use my own limited personal experiences to make any kind of generalizations about society. In a way, by claiming that the statistical studies Susan’s cited are biased and unreliable just by their statistical nature, you’ve basically said that either the researchers and/or participants are dishonest, or stupid perhaps.
If you believe that the research methods are biased and unreliable, why waste your time? Again, I think this is just a red herring. It’s the conclusions and evidence that you don’t particularly like. This is the Backfire Effect IMO, par excellence:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
Actually, quite a bit of the data Susan’s cited involve definitive and straightforward questions, like: “Are you currently married?”, “How many people have your had vaginal sex with”?, “Have you ever had sex with a stranger?”, etc. If you don’t believe the answers people give in those random surveys, whoop-de-do. But I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of this. An anecdote is a reliable report of what actually happened? Really? By definition, an anecdote is a short account of a particular incident or event. It’s a testimonial, what someone says happened, and in the context of the Internet usually one-sided. Rarely do the anecdotes include both parties’ statements of what actually happened. Anecdotes are hearsay, because there’s no burden of proof whatsoever. No 3rd party is fact-checking anything. These aren’t case studies where people are being observed. I’m not saying they’re necessarily false. But I see no compelling reason to believe they’re necessarily better than other sources of information.
Susan,
“I agree that there are features that are unique to both sexes. Hypergamy is uniquely female, I accept that, though I do believe there is an analogous male experience of trading up to a hotter mate. ”
Men are socio-economically hypo-gamous and physically hyper-gamous.
Women are socio-economically hyper-gamous and physically hypo-gamous.
Regarding nurture vs nature, here’s an interesting article;
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/09/turns-out-where-you-live-really-does-shape-who-you-are/3353/
“Yeah, I get it. I can only say that as the wife, the idea of my husband banging the young hottie in Marketing is devastating. So devastating I don’t know if I can go on. He either wants me or her. He must choose. I will not look the other way.”
What if he let you watch? I keed I keed.
I’m not suggesting otherwise, but if you give me his email address, I’ll let him know, in case he’s unclear on that point.
“Let’s hear it. A list of problematic desires for each sex.”
Those broads are always leaving the toilet seat down and suddenly wanting to talk about something right at the most important moment of the sporting event on TV!!!
Seems like you’re discussing a heck of a lot of HBD-related stuff wrt IQ and its attendant tradeoffs
I wasn’t looking at it from that perspective, but I do see an overlap.
and I think you would agree with me, there are indeed tradeoffs (for the high-IQ, I mean).
Yes and no. There are plenty of high IQ, low EQ people, but there are also many high IQ, high EQ people. I think people like to indulge in some negative stereotyping of the gifted–spergy geniuses, psychotic geniuses, scawny, nerdy geniuses. In both my professional experience with gifted kids, it appears to me that brighter kids are on average not just smarter, but also healthier, funnier, more personable and more even somewhat better looking than less bright kids. On the other hand, when things so wrong, they go wrong in the ways that people stereotype. Out of, let’s say, 1000 gifted kids, the vast majority will grow up to be happy, well adjusted successful people who are significantly better off than their peers. However, a smaller percentage of them may be on the spectrum or neurotic. A few may be psychotic or have a significant mental illness, but not in numbers that greatly differ from the general population. Fewer will go to jail, but more will end up in some sort of treatment. It would be a great exaggeration though to say that most high IQ types are defective in some way. IME, the opposite is true.
It is also possible to be lowish or average IQ, high EQ or lowish or average IQ, low EQ. The jails are filled with the latter because that group is more likely to act out violently.
OTOH, too much time spent on the net would definitely give you the idea that high IQ, low EQ types are extremely common. I think that’s because the net aggregates INTXs.
I think this is what is at the center of the “Riddle of the 80%”
What is that?
Now, I’m of the belief that a dictatorship can be an incredibly awesome regime to live under, IF the dictator is benevolent and actually cares about the people.
Oh Ted you are wishing what you don’t know about we have had “benevolent” dictators in my country, it was a nightmare.
In my view, the categorical dismissal of all that is just as ludicrous as categorical dismissal of any broad-based sociological study.
I didn’t dismissed the experiences of the PUA’s but I had belonged to many social groups and is easy to find thousands of people sharing the experience specially in the Internet, you are not taking in account many things:
a)Human bias is powerful if you have 10 people reading the same book you are going to find 10 different interpretations and all of them are truth from their perspective the Rashomon effect.
b) The rule of one in a million if 20% of women respond opening their legs to the extreme asshole you naturally are going to end up with thousands of positive reports.
c) Science work with complete description Do the PUA’s actually follow up the girls that didn’t felt into their laps? Do they find out how their lives developed? Did they got married? Stayed faithful? Did they preferred Betas? The problem is that PUA’s are not looking for a neutral response but to get laid. So they concentrate and calibrate into finding that goal and the failures are not registered and studied or quantified. Don’t you think that is a huge flaw in the system?
One of the reasons I did my little play with VD is to show another instance that good girls don’t matter to the men interested on the manosphere, Deti has a similar experience as Zach wouldn’t look twice a girl that is not into partying no matter how much he craves intellect, didn’t you admitted that given the choice of fapping to a 8 and trying to date a 5 a man will pick the fapping? What make you think that PUA’s are any different, they could totally be measuring the effect in the hottest more promiscuous women, do you know for sure that is not the case?
See those are variables that should admit some level of skepticism IMO, on this thousands of reports, specially when there is an specific goal behind the data collection and not simply just scientific curiosity, YMMV.
So when the data collection from thousands of guys who have been out in field have consistently observed X while some survey says Y, now we’ve got a dilemma.
See above it is a dilemma but we should find out a way to resolve the dilemma not dismiss one or another but find the holes in it, YMMV.
Secondly, and I can’t find the link now, but there is the information that women lie…for example about their number….even if the survey is anonymous.
The same study also list that men lie to inflate their numbers and sexual experience so…
@Megaman
Thanks for posting that link.
It doesn’t come across as a substantive disagreement, just personal and petty IMO. Interesting that “solipsism” came up back then, too.
I was struck by the unprovoked it was.
I clipped this quote from Susan sometime back, not sure from which discussion, but it seems to go to the heart of the matter: The women who choose to comment here are made of strong stuff, and many of them go away after being shouted down by men here. She’s damn right about that. Hence the irony.
Yes, indeed. I’m not every one of those women is “run off” because of over-sensitivity as much as too much of that stuff makes HUS a less enjoyable, more adversarial place to be. One thing that strikes me out of our current conflict ia a difference in communication styles. I think some of us truly are here seeking to understand some phenomena and each other and are interested in honest dialogue. Others are interested in listening just enough to win an argument and be declared AMOG. Some of us want to communicate. Others want to shut others up and make them submit.
The strength and popularity of HUS has to do with this blog being a place where people can communicate and explore. I think when that doesn’t happen, even the toughest of the women stop banging their heads against the wall and walk away in frustration.
This isn’t true at all, at least as far as I’m concerned, and Ms. J and Ms. Hope are my witnesses.
True dat.
On many occasions I challenged what Roissy said – only for my comments to either disappear, or to never appear in the first place.
You too, huh? A whole post once disappeared after I commented. He was snappish with me for weeks afterward.
I told her we had just driven 4200 miles across America and I was amazed at how fat the young women are these days….She asked “Do you think I’m fat?”
I understand your point about solipsism, but I think this is insecurity and a desire to please and is in part cultural.
I do agree though that some self-involvement is adaptive. I recall having a cold when I was pg with my oldest after having a number of miscarriages. I began to obsess until my husband accused me of being self-absorbed. I turned to him and “Damn skippy, I’m self-absorbed. I’m your kid’s current address.”
Feel free to count the I’s in this post.
@ Ted
“Good Lord, can you even tell if someone is a serial killer in 7 hours?”
That’s why I make it a point never to spend the night; I don’t even like another person in the room when I’m sleep.
@ Plain Jane
“My clients range from Wall Street execs all the way up to Section 8 baby mamas, and I can tell you that Section 8 women ain’t suffering in dangerous ‘hoods like they used to.”
And that is why people hate section 8; people should suffer for their mistakes. I once brought some seaside condos; I renovated the building and started to lease them out. The market was a bit sluggish, so after a year half the building was still empty. I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.
@Anacaona
“Oh Ted you are wishing what you don’t know about we have had “benevolent” dictators in my country, it was a nightmare.”
A List of Great Dictators:
Oliver Cromwell: Commonwealth of England
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: Turkey
Park Chung Hee: South Korea
Lee Kuan Yew: Singapore
Chang Kai Sheik: Taiwan
Augusto Pinochet: Chile
Nursultan Nazarbayev: Kazakhstan
@Obs
What’s fascinating is that when the topic of BM/WW couples comes up, someone will invariably attempt to make it out as though only the dregs of White female society are going for the Brothas, LOL. Of course, we would have to ask – if that’s true, when they are you guys so riled up about it?
I guess it depends on where you stand. If you’re at Walmart, it’s like being in the middle of a Chris Rock monologue. Ever hear his joke about fat WW offering “more white to love”? I’ve seen some reasonably high SMV BMs with low SMV WWs in lower SES areas.
OTOH, as we move up the SES ladder, interracial couples seem to have similar SMVs. I’ve never seen a black professional man with a white cigstache. In fact, I’ve never seen a professional man of any color with a white cigstache.
BTW, I was in an area over the summer with a large Afro-Carib population. I saw a lot of the women being accompanied by white, Asian, and East Indian men. I found myself wondering what you’d think.
@HerrKaiser.
I’ve always thought that Alberto Fujimori of Peru was an effective (dictatorial) leader. What he did to destroy the Shining Path was admirable.
And then there is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus of Rome. I do believe that Cincinnati was named after him.
You do realize that list of yours can be countered by another list of ‘Bad Dictators’ ? So what to do then ?
Maybe the Roman Republic had that right with their Senatus Consultum de re Publica Defendenda
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was about a friendly man who taught his audience about… various things. I can remember a friendly mailman, segments on how we get/make things, a song about how you’ll never go down the bathtub drain, and the magic trolley that went to the Land of Make-Believe. That place had royalty, talking animals, a museum, and about once a year they’d have a musical episode where a family of elephants sang about being elephants.
Sounds a lot better than the The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure who give me the creeps everytime I see the poster *shrugs*
So true! I’ve mentioned before that Roissy loves studies almost as much as I do. He gets no grief from his readers because he showcases examples that confirm their preexisting beliefs. I could run the same study here and get a skeptical response from the same readers.
Yeah I mentioned that this was what pissed me off about Jezebel every single study that matched their feminist experience was accepted with no investigation but if a bigger study showed they were flaws they started to poke a hole on them.
I know I promised that I will never leave you Susan but frankly I can’t keep that promise anymore if this is going to became “The only good science is the one that agrees with my observation…” kind of place I really don’t think I will stick around for much, I left the church because of this, I left Jezebel because of this, nothing personal I just like places that strive to make sense of things not the ones that dismiss and obscure them for the sake of some goal, YMMV.
@Marellus
I never liked Fujimori; he was quite corrupt and was never able to develop Peru; not that I think he tried. Cincinnatus was a good man, much like Emperor St. Kaleb of Ethiopia. Dictatorships are as varied as the dictators themselves; however, there are those time when only a dictatorship can provide the leadership the nation requires; when that happens, work to ensure a competent and effective man becomes dictator.
@HerrKaiser @Marellus
So how many years did you lived under a dictatorship? And how did you survived it?
Trick is: it seems that the type of woman that feels such overwhelming physical desire also tends to be more promiscuous. Seems that is part of my problem: I’m looking for a horny woman that hasn’t had a lot of sex. Lol
Isn’t one of the manosphere commandments that a woman that wants to have sex all she needs to do is say it? She doesn’t need to game a man or anything like it so of course a woman with a high desire has more chances to satisfy it why would she not do it? There lie’s your answer.
They exist, Sassy is proof!
Sassy is proof, but Good girls that like Beta guys are Outliers?
Yep good girls are chopped liver, heck chopped duodenum…
@Anacaona.
I am currently living in a one-party democracy. Yes, they exist … believe me. As to how I survive them ? … weeellll, I create the most fiendish and elaborate plots, so as to make famously beautiful and award winning writers from the Dominican Republic … employ online grammar like that of George W Bush’s speechwriter …
No. The only reason he’s attacked is because he opposes feminism. You know that very well. He could work months as an unpaid scientist to do research for every publication of his and he’d get attacked in the same fashion. Look at all the feminist ad hominem attacks and snark directed at Charles Murray for his extensively researched latest book, even though he has done everything he could to avoid any criticism of feminist ideals, to resort to misandry and blame men for all social ills. It’s simply impossible to appease feminists, to break bread with them. They have even attacked Hugo Schwyzer and Jon Stewart.
Besides, I don’t know what “discrediting” you’re writing about. The MSM doesn’t even dare to discuss Devlin. The only mainstream exposure he has ever got that I know of was that “The New Mating Game” column in the Weekly Standard and even there he wasn’t discredited, he was merely subjected to ad hominem attacks. Feminists never discuss or debate, they just attack. They’re locusts.
Correction: it’s entitled “The New Dating Game”. Devlin is attacked here:
weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game?page=3
Besides, I’ve never seen a female commentator who was ever discredited for making sweeping generalizations about men. Funny how that works.
I am currently living in a one-party democracy. Yes, they exist … believe me. As to how I survive them ? … weeellll, I create the most fiendish and elaborate plots, so as to make famously beautiful and award winning writers from the Dominican Republic … employ online grammar like that of George W Bush’s speechwriter …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0
Susan’s about (re)creating a high-trust environment, from here to the SMP.
That’s ESFP (traditionally the feminine) stuff – analogous to the brainstorming step in the ideation process.
Once that environment is established, then INTJ work (traditionally male) can be done. Note that this is where judgement happens.
The latter can aid the former, but the former is the first priority.
HH,
“The only reason he’s attacked is because he opposes feminism.”
He is also now likely increasingly out of date. His observations have affected the observed.
Escoffier #941, 975, 978, 991 -> worth re-reading periodically
Susan’s hamster (yes, we all have one) is like the refiner’s fire for Escoffier’s arguments. Fascinating process to watch.
Desiderius…”Susan’s about (re)creating a high-trust environment, from here to the SMP. That’s ESFP (traditionally the feminine) stuff – analogous to the brainstorming step in the ideation process. Once that environment is established, then INTJ work (traditionally male) can be done. Note that this is where judgement happens. The latter can aid the former, but the former is the first priority.”
A very interesting comment, which points out the importance of having a mix of personality types in a workgroup.
Not sure that the trust-building role needs to be performed by an ESFP…for example, I knew a woman who was an extremely good small-group trust-builder and charismatic leader; she was an ENFP (as measured by the test.) She was much better at ensuring the group stayed focused on something worthwhile (from the standpoint of making us money) than are many ESFPs, who often descend into content-free rah-rah activities that are involving & exciting but lead nowhere.
The management consultant Ichak Adizes has written a couple of interesting books on personality mix within organizations. He doesn’t use the M-B model, but rather 4 types which he calls Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, and Integrators.
VD,
“My suggestion is that the solipsism concept helps explains the impotence of the dialectic for most women and their strong preference for the rhetoric. And, given the current state of hostilities on the part of various parties, I should underline that this is not a criticism of Susan, but rather a defense of an articulated concept. One need not always agree with someone to respect and be on good terms with them.”
Note that he also welcomed Susan’s challenge. That is the INTJ work done well.
The Ian Ironwood description of solipsism is a must read. That has been my exact problem (I got it from my grandmother via my mother, so the feminine may in fact be more susceptible to it, but there are a lot of gender-bent men out there). It has wreaked havoc in my career and love life. It’s why I’ve appeared uncomfortable in my skin and not ultimately been entrusted with responsibility professionally or (usually) romantically.
The anti-game I adopted was a patch intended to ameliorate these problems, but removing the anti-game (with help from Roissy) didn’t produce the results I had hoped because the root cause had not yet been addressed.
“Not sure that the trust-building role needs to be performed by an ESFP”
Yes, skills not people – running late for planning meeting for a young men’s group we’re getting off the ground at my church. Guidance from these quarters will be helpful.
I’ll leave you with this:
“I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable–the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. “
@commentary
Thank you for your clear and insightful comment re the differences between men and women. As I read through it I found myself nodding with conviction. I am 100% on board with your view, which I have actually written about myself here on several occasions when discussing biological sex differences.
The negative connotation is the crux of the matter, and I believe it reflects the view of some male observers and indeed some male bloggers that women are incapable of clear and logical thought, hampered by necessarily poor judgment, dishonest, manipulative, hypocritical, and truly incapable of empathizing with men. The end result is that the term is used as a weapon of sorts. It is dismissive, usually intended to negate the validity of the female point of view.
In fact, this assertion:
We expect that a female subject will trend toward synthesizing responses with first hand emotional experiences, followed by second hand (empathized) emotional experiences and first hand intellectual activities, followed by second hand intellectual activities.
…speaks directly to the complementarity of the sexes’ unique roles, as it comprises the empathy and nurturing that characterize femininity, or femaleness. Were this not true about females, relationships would peter out and offspring would not thrive. To the extent that women today are less empathic and nurturing in general (and I believe they are), we can already see this happening in American society.
I never said that studies had no limitations. I have repeatedly stated that they give us limited information. In my view, that is better than no information, and a study with a large sample that explores one small aspect of what women find attractive is worth a great deal more than one anecdote from a nightclub where no factors can be controlled for.
I concur with this description of anecdotal evidence:
It is not worthless, and it is often entertaining, but it is very easy to draw incorrect conclusions based on anecdotal evidence, and the confirmation bias is generally large. I find this especially true in online discussions about mating.
@Escoffier et al
I agree with your statement. I believe we differ on what comprises low nature, probably for both sexes, though you focus primarily on women. I will say this. If Devlin is your standard – if you relate to his descriptions of low female nature, then Heartiste is the blog for you. I do not accept his views or believe that embracing them will bring any good thing to individuals or the SMP as a whole. I do not intend to spend any more time debating them, or the views of any blogger who seeks to instigate hostilities between the sexes. I can help the greatest number of people by addressing a mainstream audience. I have a large readership that extends well beyond the manosphere, and it’s bad strategy for me to entertain the views of someone who is widely regarded as extreme, even by many males.
I’m going to take the advice of a trusted colleague and take a couple of days off from the blog. While HUS continues to be intellectually challenging and I appreciate the time and energy of the commenters, I no longer look forward to spending time here as I once did. The constant contentious debate, my continued frustration and inability to make myself understood, and the constant pressure from some to alter my mission, my strategy and my views has sucked much of the joy out of the experience, frankly. HUS is my baby, and I’m not going to kill it, but something’s gotta give.
@ HerrKaiser
Not sure about Lee Kuan Yew or Nursultan Nazarbayev. Cromwell, Park Chung Hee, and Ataturk were fine. But Chang Kai Shek was terrible, and even more-so Augusto Pinochet. Certainly not on my list of “good” benevolent dictators.
They suffer from social desirability bias. As I’ve been saying htis whole time, you need to look at what people do, not what they say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias
Also, I don’t recall any of Susan’s sources using case studies. I recently looked at a few studies used in the 16 things about promiscuity post for example, and all of them were statistical in nature.
See above. Most of the ones I’ve looked at are lacking in quality. That’s not to say they aren’t all useful, and that conclusions can’t be drawn from them. For example, Susan’s disproving of the 80/20 myth was very useful.
The goal of HUS is to improve the personal experiences of people in the SMP. From that perspective, don’t you think the personal experiences of these people are very relevant? And personally many of my own “anecdotes” are really what I’ve witnessed as a neutral observer of those around me.
Great. So if I don’t read the studies, then I’m not allowed to judge them. But if I do read the studies to see if they’re valuable, then they’re automatically valid because I took the time to read through them. This pigeon-holing is getting out of hand.
And we can only draw certain conclusions from this. For example, these answers have little bearing on what women are attracted to.
They aren’t better. But I would put equal importance to them as I would to statistical surveys. Instead, Susan uses credentialism to outright dismiss the value of anecdotes in drawing conclusions about the SMP.
Susan, please stop with the Devlin. Forget about Devlin. I am not Devlin. I may like Devlin more than you do, but I am still not him nor am I trying to be a spokesman for him. FWIW, while I found much of use in his review of Shalit, I also found it acerbic, snarky and nasty, very similar to the way the manosphere treats anyone they perceive to be one millimeter to their “left.” I posted this analogy at lackrod’s a while back, they really are like the New Left: obsessed with crushing those who agree with them 99% of the time, obsessed, like doctrinaire Bolsheviks, with hounding and humiliating not their true enemies but their nominal and potential allies.
You said that you agreed with my point about hypergamy being on a distribution curve. Well, OK. So what’s the issue? Whether that’s consistent with Devlin or not? I happen to think it is, but I can’t know that. Maybe he would read that paragraph and say I am all wet. Fine, I still would believe it because it comports with observation and common sense. So it’s me and you against Devlin.
The idea that I am promoting “hostility between the sexes” is preposterous. What hostility? I’m trying to get to the truth. I am doing so PRECISELY on the terms of your core mission. You want to help people, especially young women, find relationships. Well, OK, what are the obstacles to that?
Surely, one obstacle is that a great many young women are attracted to guys who are not interested in relationships and who would make lousy relationship bets. OK, why is that?
Another obstacle is that women have to, or think they have to, behave a certain way to get a relationship (go to bars, hook up, put out by the 3rd date, etc.). And then they don’t get the relationship after all. OK, how is this happening? What is driving it and who benefits?
You say I want to focus on women’s flaws or problems but not men’s. No, not so. I am happy to talk about men’s but there seems to be no need because we all basically understand men’s problems and agree on them. Where we get stuck is on the women’s issues. And I believe we get stuck because sometimes (not all the time) when you read one of the men say something “negative” about female nature, you feel your core readership and even your whole sex is coming under attack and you get defensive.
But I’m not trying to attack anybody. Come back to Fisher, whom you respect and do not believe is an enemy: her point is that our biological urges impel us to reproduce, not to mate monogamously for life or to find happiness. OK, each sex has a different biological imperative, which is a primary cause of various problems for civilization when they are widely indulged. The male biological imperative is to spread seed widely. The female imperative is to get the best possible genes for her offspring. NEITHER of these imperatives is conducive to monogamy or happiness. The female imperative might at first glance seem more geared toward lifelong monogamy but Fisher herself says that, biologically, “pair bonds” in women are evolved to last around four years.
So, is Fisher “attacking women” for saying that? Of course not.
To further your mission, you have to address ALL the causes, and one of those causes is an aspect of female nature that, if left unchecked and untutored, leads to EXACTLY the problems you are trying to overcome.
I will repeat something I wrote above because I think it’s important.
What is game? In a nutshell, game is a massive arbitrage scheme developed by (some) men to take advantage of the fact that (lots of) women do not understand their own attraction triggers. Helping them to understand MUST be part of the conversation here if your mission is to succeed. Otherwise the SMP will just go on as it is, in all its dismal glory, and the girls you want to help will keep hooking up, getting P&Ded, and feeling miserable about it.
Ana – “She doesn’t need to game a man or anything like it so of course a woman with a high desire has more chances to satisfy it why would she not do it? There lie’s your answer.”
Because she is a person with good morals, good impulse control, and is long-term oriented? Problem is, most of those qualities come from the nurture side, and in the Western world the broken family model most predominant in mid to low SES brackets isn’t very good at quality nurturing.
I know the answer. And what gets me angry is even IF I manage to raise my children with those traits, the rest of the world will chew them up and spit them out, broken and mangled. I have to consider turning my children into cynical adults because other people can’t be bothered to instill basic morality in thier own kids. Their failure becomes my burden by default.
One other thing I mean to say. In my brief tenure at Lackrod’s, one of the pile-ons agaist me was “Why are you here complaining about men?” To which I replied: I’m not complaining about men, I’m correcting some of the bias here which leads many of you to absolve men of all blame for everything and even results in the absurdity of self-proclaimed devout Christians refusing to say that the PUA lifestyle is immoral, and indeed attacking ME for saying that the PUA lifestyle is immoral. To which they said, “Go away asshole, this is a place where we complain about women.”
You are a lot nicer and more reasonable than they are of course, but you are sort of giving it to me from the other side: “Why are you here complaining about women?”
I’m out for the truth.
Escoffier,
As I’ve made clear, I’m in full agreement with where you, personally, are coming from, but you’re not the only one here.
“And I believe we get stuck because sometimes (not all the time) when you read one of the men say something “negative” about female nature, you feel your core readership and even your whole sex is coming under attack and you get defensive.”
“Defensive” carries a negative connotation, and Susan is human, so sometimes that is accurate, especially in your case. But most of the time Susan is in fact defending that which merits, and desperately needs, a strong defense. As you’ve noted, much of the manosphere rhetoric boils down to little more than a mirror image of feminist attacks upon men, with the result being the same damage to trust that hurts us all that those feminist attacks produce.
You acknowledge this truth in your comments, but some more active measures to shore up that defense as it pertains to this comment section (i.e. comment limits from men; a focus on trust building prior to, and in priority over judgment; a healthy reticence regarding and reflection prior to challenges to Susan, a commitment to challenge other men who are attacking Susan or women in general) will be necessary going forward to create an environment conducive to Susan’s mission.
“But I’m not trying to attack anybody.”
Solipsism.
Besides, I’ve never seen a female commentator who was ever discredited for making sweeping generalizations about men. Funny how that works.
FWIW, I recently took another woman who was upset about having to pick up after her husband to task for referring to her husband as an extra child and saying all men are like kids. Her husband is a really good guy, so I said, “Aw c’mon, your just frustrated. He’s a responsible adult who’s out in the world being responsible all day. Being a bit of a slob at home doesn’t make him a child.” We were in a group of women who agreed with me.
“FWIW, I recently took another woman who was upset about having to pick up after her husband to task for referring to her husband as an extra child and saying all men are like kids.”
*having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
“I am currently living in a one-party democracy. ”
Join the club.
“Yes, they exist … believe me.”
Oh we know. Our own s0-called *elections* are just ’round da corner.
Re comments about “benevolent dictators,” a few questions:
–Do people with a high degree of altruism usually pursue the dictator role, or is it more people with unbridled power-lust?
–When people who *do* have a high degree of altruism gain unconstrained power, is the result generally any more positive than when non-altruistic people obtain such power? The Spanish Inquisitors (for the most part) surely sincerely believed they were burning heretics for the greater good of all. As C S Lewis said:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
–When a genuinely altruistic and benignly effective dictator dies, or becomes seriously ill, or is politically crippled, is it likely that those seeking to replace him will be doing so from noble motives?
I once saw an article about horrible the lives of women were in some former soviet republic because they were all so fabulously educated, worked good jobs and dressed exquisitely, but they couldn’t find a suitable man because so many men of the country were alcoholic street bums. It never dawned on this broad to ask, “hmmm, what is it about this country that sends so many young men into such a desparate unhappy state?”
Alcohlism has been rampant in Eastern Europe for generations. There is probably a genetic component. If feminism has had any effect on the situation, it’s most likely in decreasing female tolerance or living with an alcoholic.
“And that is why people hate section 8; people should suffer for their mistakes. I once brought some seaside condos; I renovated the building and started to lease them out. The market was a bit sluggish, so after a year half the building was still empty. I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.”
Well, I don’t have any Section 8 clients in upper middle class neighborhoods, they are all in lower-middle class neighborhoods which are still nice looking and crime free.
I disagree that Section 8ers should have to live in dangerous gang-ridden ghettos for the “mistake” of being poor. It just recycles the problem as their children are likely to join gangs or get killed by them one day.
There are plenty of empty houses and buildings. Its more efficient to have the already existing ones filled than waste tax payers money go to building new ones.
” There are plenty of high IQ, low EQ people, but there are also many high IQ, high EQ people. I think people like to indulge in some negative stereotyping of the gifted–spergy geniuses, psychotic geniuses, scawny, nerdy geniuses. In both my professional experience with gifted kids, it appears to me that brighter kids are on average not just smarter, but also healthier, funnier, more personable and more even somewhat better looking than less bright kids. On the other hand, when things so wrong, they go wrong in the ways that people stereotype. Out of, let’s say, 1000 gifted kids, the vast majority will grow up to be happy, well adjusted successful people who are significantly better off than their peers. ”
J, this corroborates with my experience as well. I think where much of the problem might lie is when you get into the extremely high IQ range, which is rare anyway.
I read an article about an extremely high IQ person who quit university, I think he may have been a STEM professor for a short time or maybe he didn’t even make it that far, got a job as a janitor so he could be left alone, and then committed suicide. Can’t find the link right now.
Oh and….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2173808/Women-overtake-men-IQ-tests-time-100-years-multitasking.html
An example of a benevolent dictator is Indira Gandhi.
having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
So we told her.
@Anacaona. #1014
Hosh Tokkelosh.
J September 22, 2012 at 1:29 pm
having* to pick up after her husband? She doesn’t have to, she wants to, otherwise she would just leave his mess as is and he’ll get to it eventually. They all do.
So we told her.
—–
That’s the thing. When guys in the M-sphere complain about “nags” and “nagging” what they don’t realize is that the only women who nag are the women who are overly concerned with keeping house – exactly the type of women they claim to want.
I don’t know too many women of my age or younger who are overly concerned with that. When we come home from work we don’t start cleaning, we get online.
I’ve noticed women who nag a lot about the state of the house are my grandma’s age. But the Spherians claim to want young women so they’ll have to make a choice between aging nags and young women who don’t nag, because, well, blogging is more important than housekeeping.
Not to say we’re complete slobs either. We clean up – after ourselves. But we’re not going to clean up after other grown-ass adults and we probably won’t even notice your socks thrown about the floor or your dirty dishes. I mean, who the hell cares? You don’t, and neither do we.
“sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)
n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.”
Sounds pretty high brow and quantam physics-y.
I believe it reflects the view of some male observers and indeed some male bloggers that women are incapable of clear and logical thought, hampered by necessarily poor judgment, dishonest, manipulative, hypocritical, and truly incapable of empathizing with men. The end result is that the term is used as a weapon of sorts. It is dismissive, usually intended to negate the validity of the female point of view.
I would say that in saying women are incapable of clear and logical thought, 98 percent of the time they are correct. Of course, if they went on to say that men are incapable of clear and logical thought, they would be correct at least 90 percent of the time. My observation is that only a small fraction of the population are even capable of clear and logical thought, and that of the small fraction that are capable of it, only a fraction actually manage to actually utilize it on a consistent basis. And of that fraction of a fraction, all of them allow momentary emotions to override their clear and logical thought the majority of the time.
Man is not a rational creature. He is a rationalizing one.
really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.
LOL. I had this argument at Dalrock’s. He was offended and found it “telling” that I don’t believe monogamy is natural for every woman. However, if we accept that personality traits are even in part genetically determined, then we have to accept that sluttiness and caddishness are adaptive in some circumstances and have persisted over the ages because they do aid survival. From an evolutionary point of view, they have value because they help continue the species when R-selection furthers the survival of a greater number of offspring. Similarly, monogamy has value when K-selection furthers the survival of a greater number of offspring. Because circumstances change, genes for both monogamy and multiple mating continue to exist. It is “natural” to be monogamous for those who carry those genes. For those who carry “screw around” genes, not so much…
This of course is independent of morality. From a moral perspective, I favor monogamy.
@PlainJane #1032
… eish … I didn’t see that one coming … congratulations …
So here is your medal … and don’t click on the link … I mean it.
Now please behave yourself … I’ve got a fragile masculine ego, you know.
The management consultant Ichak Adizes has written a couple of interesting books on personality mix within organizations. He doesn’t use the M-B model, but rather 4 types which he calls Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, and Integrators.
More books to read…I’m so going to end up broke.
Because she is a person with good morals, good impulse control, and is long-term oriented? Problem is, most of those qualities come from the nurture side, and in the Western world the broken family model most predominant in mid to low SES brackets isn’t very good at quality nurturing.
Do you realize this is the same wish Alpha chasers have? A man with options that only wants to be with them? Sorry to break it to you but you cannot have it all in a mate. You must choose or at least be aware of the consequences and not blame it on others for not doing the job of creating the unicorn you want.
“I would say that in saying women are incapable of clear and logical thought, 98 percent of the time they are correct. Of course, if they went on to say that men are incapable of clear and logical thought, they would be correct at least 90 percent of the time. My observation is that only a small fraction of the population are even capable of clear and logical thought, and that of the small fraction that are capable of it, only a fraction actually manage to actually utilize it on a consistent basis. And of that fraction of a fraction, all of them allow momentary emotions to override their clear and logical thought the majority of the time.
Man is not a rational creature. He is a rationalizing one.”
The mainstream Western approach to religion is a primary example of this, or perhaps the cause.
Belief is not rational.
” I went back to all my tenants and told them I was not making any money so I needed them to agree to a doubling of their monthly rent. Obviously, they complained and said I had no right to do that as the lease agreement was already signed; which was true. However, I told them, if they didn’t agree to the rent increase I would section 8 out all the remaining units; every one of them agreed to the rent increase.”
I would have welcomed the Section 8ers. Your people must’ve been under the illusion that Section 8ers are ghetto gang-banging crack dealers. Not the case at all.
Some of my best clients are Section 8ers.
J, funny, I bet if you had said “Women are naturally monogamous,” D would have attacked you for being a hamsterbating female supremacist peddling the blue pill myth that women are naturally morally superior to men.
Espresso Coffee,
“really? You find that offensive? You think human beings are “naturally” monogamous? If so, you would be the only one.”
J(ava),
“LOL. I had this argument at Dullcock’s. He was offended and found it “telling” that I don’t believe monogamy is natural for every woman.”
—
Monogamy is not natural for all women and men, but it is natural for some. For the rest, the institution of monogamous marriage was created for the sake of their offspring.
@ Plain Jane
That’s another example of a bad dictator.
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