Tag: Alpha Game

PZ wrestles with SMV, loses

There are few things more amusing than watching a Gamma attempt to criticize some aspect of Game. In this case, PZ provides a fascinating critique of Rollo’s SMV graphic:

The whole concept of “Sexual Market Value”. What does that even mean? It’s dimensionless. He doesn’t have a way to look at any person and say, “Your market value is X”. It doesn’t even make sense to put this into a chart; my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else. Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero, and not only is it offensive to propose that her sex is purchasable for some imaginary sum of a million quatloos or whatever, it probably isn’t even a real commodity.

Read the whole thing, including my response, at Alpha Game. But the concept of Sexual Market Value is not a difficult one. The two women on the left are prime examples of women with very high SMVs. They are paid literally millions of dollars every year simply because they happen to represent what most people who are attracted to women find extraordinarily attractive. TL;DR: Brazilian supermodel = high SMV.

What I found most interesting about PZ’s post is an aspect into which I will delve into here rather than at AG since it is more relevant to economics than Game, is the way in which his post reveals that he genuinely does not grasp even basic principles of economics. Let’s take a look at his example of Scarlett Johansson.

Even if we take him at his word and accept that he finds her so totally unappealing that she holds no more attraction for him than an infant or an 85 year-old woman, that does not mean everyone else feels the same way. Hence the use of the term “Market”; SMV intrinsically describes the average of everyone’s subjective perspective concerning an individual. It’s not a literal market complete with prices because prostitution is illegal, but that doesn’t change the fact that the same rules of supply and demand that apply to literal markets measured in prices apply to the sexual market.

So, even though PZ’s sexual appeal to his wife is reportedly huge, because it is negligible to everyone else, his SMV is low. On the other hand, Ms Johansson’s SMV is high despite PZ’s deprecation of her because so many people find her to be exceptionally attractive. I am not one of them myself, but because I no more dictate global SMV than PZ or anyone else, I can recognize her high SMV despite the fact that I, personally, would rate her considerably lower.

These are simple principles of supply and demand. I place a much higher value, monetary and otherwise, on an Intellivision PAL system, than the vast majority of people on the planet. Many people place no value on console games, many people with an interest in console games place no value on long-outdated consoles, and most people who place value on long-outdated consoles live where NTSC is the standard.

So I will obtain a PAL Intellivision console for much less than I would be willing to pay for it because so few others value it as highly. In like manner, PZ is fortunate that he has apparently found a woman who happens to overrate his negligible sexual appeal in the converse of the way that PZ underrates Ms Johansson’s. So, it should be readily apparent that the fact value is subjective in no way means that objective observations and determinations cannot be made about the collective average of those individually subjective values, even when they are relative rather than numerically quantified.

Age and declining sexual value

Susan Walsh attempted to disprove what she describes as “The Myth of Plummeting Female Sexual Market Value“:

A reader shared this bit of male wishful thinking about female sexual market value. It was apparently cooked up by a typically disgruntled and sexually frustrated older male licking his mating wounds.

It’s easy to see why this appeals to the 30-something guy who feels like a mating failure. The female’s sexual attractiveness peaks at the ripe old age of 16.5, and by 20, her sexual market value is plummeting. By the age of 33, she’s flunking miserably with only 25% of her mojo left!

Oddly, her sexual value decreases slowly after that, with little decrease at all after age 55 – whoo hoo. Of course, there’s not much room left for decline – she’s at a measly 3% by then. A dried up and withered old crone.

However, her critique had a few holes in it, in much the same way that the nuclear power plant in Fukushima has had a few problems. I addressed them in two parts at Alpha Game, the first part dealing with the logical elements, to the extent they can be reasonably described that way, and the second part analyzing what was presented rather optimistically as “the math”.

Of course, it would have been faster to simply post the link to the video Heartiste describes as The Wall, In Fast Forward.

The cost of educating women

Not only have the proposed benefits manifestly failed to manifest themselves, but the opportunity cost of future generations has begun to become readily apparent everywhere from Europe to Asia. One wonders how low birth rates have to fall in civilized countries before the elites begin to realize that the Taliban may not, in fact, be the stupid ones with regards to this particular matter.

I address a recent article on the correlation between female education, the declining Japanese fertility rate, and the reported collapse of the collective Japanese interest in sex at Alpha Game:

Throughout this period Japan experienced a sharp decline in the total rate of fertility. After a sudden downswing in the early 1950s, the birthrate continuously declined until the mid-1980s, when it began to drop rapidly, and by 1997 it fell to 1.39. In light of these findings, it is plausible to suggest that there is a relationship between the increase in women’s access to a higher education and the decrease in the fertility rate.

As one commenter there noted, if Nicholas Kristof read the post, his head would probably explode. But there is no empirical evidence indicating that female education is societally beneficial, and there is an increasing amount of evidence that correlates it with a broad range of societal ills. The Japanese birthrate has continued to fall, hitting a historical low at 1.26 per woman in 2005. In 2012 the number of deaths exceeded births for a sixth straight year.

Far from being the 21st century superpower that my university professors taught that it was certain to become, it is a literally dying society.

No society that wishes to survive should convert all of its prospective mothers into worker drones any more than it should convert all of its prospective farmers into doctors or telephone sanitizers. Sure, it takes longer for a society to die out demographically than starve, but the end result is the same.

Just ask the Shakers, another equalitarian society that believed in the importance of educating women.

What not to do when a girl hits you

One Marine provides a very good example of where sweet reason and physical passivity in the face of female force will lead a man:

She
kicked my head into the solid wood base. I blacked out, came to, stood
up, bleeding. My daughter was screaming, “Stop hurting daddy!”

It
was over. We were over. I headed out the door to the police and then
the hospital. My daughter stopped me. “Daddy, you need to go to a
doctor, here take this,” she handed me a bandage. “I love you” was the
last thing I said to her. It’s been almost a month….

An hour later I was handcuffed to a hospital bed waiting for CAT scan
results to know if my head was bleeding.

I’ve shared my thoughts on a more effective strategy at Alpha Game. When faced with repeated and abject failure, apply The Theory of Game. What do the naturals do? And in cases such as these, exactly who are the naturals?

Shameless eksoudenogyny

I could hardly refrain from commenting on THE MOST IMPORTANT CHALLENGE FACING YOUNG WOMEN TODAY, could I?

Women used to argue that if men would have only stopped oppressing
them, they would have totally written great books and advanced science
and cured cancer and in general improved the world in every possible
way. After all, if Man has achieved so much by utilizing only 50 percent
of the population, imagine if 100 percent of the population was able to
achieve its full potential!

Learn what amazing challenge the young women of today are courageously facing at Alpha Game.

Discernment and sexual perspectives

This is really an Alpha Game subject and I generally prefer to keep such things separate, but the concept has sufficiently broad implications that I thought it might be worth mentioning over here:

Think about the amount of discernment that is required for work in a
caring or nurturing capacity. Discernment is actually a negative; the
good doctor is not influenced by the personal merits of the person he is
treating. The good mother does not shower love and attention upon the
duly obedient child and withhold it from the unruly and disobedient one.
The feminine perspective, insofar as it is formed by maternal
responsibilities and nurturing instincts, is therefore intrinsically
anti-discernment.

 Read the rest at Alpha Game.

A bi-blogular landmark

In March 2011, I created Alpha Game in order to provide a separate space to discuss intersexual relations, a subject that was of great interest to part of the readership here, and virtually no interest to a larger part of it.  At the time, the monthly VP traffic, measured in Google pageviews, was 387,043.  Things didn’t go quite as I planned; Alpha Game was originally conceived as a group blog, but as often happens, the other bloggers stopped posting in a matter of weeks. After two months of very sporadic posting and wondering whether to simply let it die out or not, I ended up deciding that there was sufficient interest in it to keep it going.

And, in retrospect, I’m glad I did.  In August, Google reported AG’s monthly traffic to be 387,707 pageviews.  VP’s monthly traffic is now considerably more than that; how much more can be roughly estimated by comparing the open Sitemeter statistics.  (Unlike some bloggers who lock down their stats and repeatedly claim to have considerably more readers than they actually do, I have never seen any point in attempting to pretend I am the prettiest and most popular girl in the room.)  I find it rather encouraging to observe that Alpha Game has not only developed its own community, but is already as well-trafficked as Vox Popoli was at the time of AG’s founding.

And I find it even more encouraging to see that AG still has considerable ground to cover before it catches up with VP in either regard.  I appreciate the fact that through your visits and your comments here, you have made that possible.  By every statistical standard, there is a remarkable level of engagement here and that is your doing, not mine.

Of course, it probably helps that Bane isn’t around to scare everyone away anymore.

From the beginning, I expected that AG would eventually surpass VP, because the human interest in intersexual relations generally exceeds the human interest in nearly everything else combined.  Especially because, in VP terms, everything else quite often happens to be esoteric, controversial, or occasionally, both. The inevitable ascendancy of AG will probably take place when, one of these days, I finally do as some readers have long demanded and finally “write the book”.  And I’m contemplating doing precisely that, although not necessarily in the way anyone would likely imagine.

But that is for the future, as for now I find myself sufficiently occupied with a certain game, a certain book two in a certain epic fantasy series, and a certain little something called Quantum Mortis that I will explain in due time.

Who wore it better?

On the left, we have Hugo Schwyzer, recently disgraced professor and self-described adulterer.  On the right, we have John Scalzi, award-winning science fiction author and self-described rapist. I think those who still doubt the intellectual legitimacy of Game should find it informative to observe that public figures who so confidently present themselves as pro-feminist critics of masculinity are so inclined to display themselves in a sexually creepy manner.  It does tend to underline the concept of the Gamma male as a female-oriented mind in a male body.

And it is certainly more than a little ironic to observe that both men also often claim that they represent models for superior male behavior and offer advice accordingly.  I leave it to the reader to decide for himself how justified those claims are, as well as the wisdom of taking their advice.

UPDATE: Speaking of female-oriented minds, one of these two paragons of mental stability pretended to attempt suicide last week.

Hugo Schwyzer, the social sciences academic at Pasadena City College
best known as the “porn professor,” tried to commit suicide last night,
he told the Weekly today. He was visiting his mother in the Monterey area, where he grew up,
when it happened about 10 p.m., he said. He was placed on a 72-hour
psychiatric hold at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the
professor said: “I took an entire bottle of Klonapin,” he said. That’s a muscle relaxant and anti-anxiety drug.

One can only assume that by “took an entire bottle of Klonapin” he actually meant “washed down a pair of Advil with a wine cooler”.  Gammas are prone to striking false poses, particularly self-harming ones.  Hugo Danger has no more intention of harming himself over his most recent round of public humiliation than I do over ATOB finishing third in the 2013 Clive Staples voting.

Not so much alpha

A few folks asked me where I figured Carlos Danger ranked on the socio-sexual hierarchy.  For various reasons, I concluded that despite his ambition, fame, and political power, he was most likely a gamma male .  Now we have definitive photographic proof confirming my initial diagnosis, as to the left can be seen a picture of the “beautiful young lady” with whom Mr. Danger was texting risque images.

I, for one, had no idea that Lena Dunham was so interested in politics.  Or that Carlos Danger was so passionate about marine biology.

Courage as cowardice

If you’re going to redefine cowardice as a willingness to engage in conflict, and portray a refusal to engage in it as manhood, you might as well start wearing a pink Gamma Rabbit shirt.  A commenter at Dr. Helen’s objects to my post yesterday at Alpha Game:

Your post highlights a big problem with the “manosphere”: It’s quite
misogynistic and not very manly. A man does what is right regardless of
the consequences, and he does it as a function of his own sense of self.
The “manosphere”, in contrast, is all about men shaping themselves in
their profoundly negative view of women. Vox Day is characteristically
defining manhood downwards by his approval of men using physical
violence against women, even if it is in self-defense.

A warrior
would never define himself by the number of children and old ladies he
had defeated in combat, any more than a real man would pride himself on
the number of women he’s beaten. An alpha takes the blows and walks away
with his self-respect intact. But for Vox Day and his sleazy ilk, men
exist only as responses to women. If women are horrible, then men must
be as well. What an awful world that makes for.

First of all, there is nothing more intrinsically wrong about using physical violence against women than against men. This white-knighting gamma knows nothing about the genuine warrior ethic; by his reckoning, the greatest warriors of history were not warriors at all because they slaughtered men, women, and children with equal abandon.  Warrior’s codes teach respect for all, which in martial terms means taking even the most seemingly overmatched opponent seriously and dispatching her without needless humiliation.

The outmoded code of the gentleman to which Funktacular is implicitly referring is European and is based on a post-martial chivalric ideal that primarily relates to the transition of the medieval aristocracy from a warrior elite to a post-warrior social elite.  As such, it is the exact opposite of a warrior ethic.  Joseph Schumpeter addresses this in some detail in Imperialism and Social Classes. The warrior ethic is focused on the defeat of the enemy, and the defeat of the enemy requires the destruction of his women from whom the future enemy combatants will come in as the destruction of the current generation of combatants.

Were the Romans less than manly because they destroyed Carthage?  Was Genghis Khan a coward because he spared neither women nor children, neither dog or rat, when he stacked skulls outside the shattered walls of the city where one of his sons died?  Was Shalmeneser III defining manhood downwards when, on his annual summer vacation, he crossed the Euphrates, threw down the walls of one city or another, and burned it with fire?

As for misogyny, one need not hate women to refuse to subject oneself to physical assaults by women.  Shall we similarly conclude that the man who defends himself against attacks by men is a misanthrope? The logic is wholly specious.

Funktacular’s comment isn’t merely anti-equality, it is also anti-male, because he attempts to deny men one of their most basic and fundamental rights, the right to self-defense.  He attempts to create a virtue out of cowardice, and in doing so, lends support to the environment where sniping and running away is considered brave, while standing one’s ground is falsely accused of defining manhood downward.  And in doing so, he provides a useful example of how the gamma delusion bubble distorts a man’s view of reality.

Finally, I note that one cannot “turn the other cheek” unless one is first willing to assert the right to strike back.  He who claims there is no right to strike back cannot also claim to be purposefully declining to exert his nonexistent right.