Warning: hamster at work

This is what it looks like when a woman’s rationalization hamster is actively at work:

I’m 23 years old and have been dating my boyfriend for just over two years. I love him, and I love spending time with him. He’s everything I’ve always wanted in a long-term partner: caring, intelligent, thoughtful and hardworking.

But lately, I can’t seem to shake this “antsy” feeling…. I’ve been thinking maybe it would be good for us to take a break so I could clear my head and figure out what I really want. Is that a disastrous idea?

This is precisely why men should pay very little attention when women, particularly young unmarried women, tell them what they think they want. What they want is very often mutually contradictory; shockingly few women fully grasp the basic concept of opportunity cost: IF you do X, THEN you cannot do Y.

Consider the “advice-seeker”, who isn’t actually seeking advice but rather permission/rational cover to do what she intends to do regardless of what anyone says. She is at the peak of her attractiveness to men, she has already landed a man who provides “everything she wanted in a long-term partner“, but she is unable to shake an “antsy” feeling. No doubt those familiar with Game theory were laughing when they read that, instantly recognizing what is quite clearly the usual desire to spend a few years riding the Alpha carousel.

Gammas and Deltas, note that it doesn’t matter in the least how perfect you are as a potential husband, gentleman, and provider. In most cases, a woman’s decision about pursuing a long-term relationship has very little do with your own behavior within that relationship and everything to do with what holds the tie-breaking vote in her individual case, reason or the rationalization hamster. Whereas reason will vote for a happy married life with the “caring, intelligent, thoughtful and hardworking” delta, the rationalization hamster is furiously throwing out one irrational “reason” after another to justify allowing herself to be mounted by a series of passing Alphas. (Note: women seldom come right out and phrase it this clearly, they usually describe it as “being young”, “having fun”, “enjoying myself”, and occasionally “taking a break”.)

What the woman really wants is to spend the next four years riding the Alpha carousel, then to come back to her current boyfriend, who will of course have spent that time loyally pining away after her and will happily marry her when she is no longer sufficiently attractive to command the level of Alpha interest to which she has become accustomed. It’s not an impossible dream, but it is a highly improbable one. On an anecdotal note, I have NEVER seen any woman of my acquaintance over the age of 27 end up with a higher-quality, higher-status man than the highest-quality, highest-status man with whom she was seriously involved prior to that age.

Is “taking a break” a disastrous idea? It all comes down to a woman’s time-preferences. If peak short term pleasure is her absolute priority, then obviously the carousel is the way to go. If greater long-term satisfaction is her objective, then yes, throwing away everything she’s always wanted in a long-term partner is almost criminally stupid. (The complete uselessness of the female advice columnist goes without saying, which is why there is no need to comment upon what passes for her “advice”.) And while it is certainly possible that marriage to her ideal delta may not work out as well as she imagines, it is also true that the carousel rides on offer may not turn out to be of the status/quality that she hopes for either.

This leads me to contemplating a related email in which GK asked about my acceptance of evolutionary psychology:

My impression from what I’ve read of your writings is that you don’t believe in evolution but agree with some things that could fall under the umbrella of evolutionary psychology. E.g., the whole “game” thing — if I’m understanding you correctly — sounds very much like the kind of stuff you hear from the EP folk.

EP has a mechanism for explaining why a character trait that provides a selective advantage (e.g., women wanting to mate with the alpha male) would be passed on and come to dominate the population. Do you accept that general notion? Of course it’s entirely possible to believe in evolutionary psychology and reject macro evolution. Is that your position?

No, my belief in the utility of Game theory has absolutely nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, which I completely reject. In fact, I outright reject evolutionary psychology whereas I am merely skeptical about evolution by (probably) natural selection. The key phrase is “mechanism for explaining”, which means that evolutionary psychology is nothing more than creative fiction. It has a scientific basis no stronger than the Biblical “Curse of Eve” and represents the confusion of “could” with “is”. Is any one scenario posited by an evolutionary psychologist correct? Perhaps. But the total inability to provide any metric to determine the probability of the correctness of any given scenario renders it no more scientific or useful than 17th century Basque poetry. The history of science is littered with many commonly accepted “coulds” that weren’t; for example the idea that tribes of European hunter-gathers adopted agriculture from the Middle East rather than being supplanted by Middle Eastern immigrants is now being called into question. Plus ça change….

This isn’t to say that it is worthless to attempt to discover the whys and wherefores behind the operation of Game. But accepting the idea that something works is not tantamount to accepting every idea attempting to explain why it works. It’s important to recall that the operative theory of Game preceded the attempts of amateur evolutionary psychologists to retroactively explain it. At times, it appears that no few male scientists have little white rationalization lab rats of their own.


Mailvox: Game and the Christian man

AG asks for advice on dealing with the cold equations:

I’m a 22 years old Christian male. I’m by no means a natural alpha, but I’m a pretty bright guy and it is quite easy for me to make myself attractive to women. Social reticence becomes “aloofness”, not knowing what to say (and not saying anything) becomes “mysteriousness” — you get the idea. Maybe it’s not that simple, but from experience I know that attracting women is not tough for me. My dilemma is this: every Christian male I know seems to either be a reformed badboy (like you) or very beta. With the court system completed stacked against men, a failed marriage can completely destroy a guy. What’s a guy like me to do? Let out my inner badboy for the next 8 years and then beg God for mercy or just be the nice Christian beta and hope everything works out? Neither option seems appealing at all. You’re one of the few people I can think of that is a Christian and views women and modern America in a realistic way. I can’t figure out what to do and I would really love to hear your thoughts.

Paul is quite clear on sinning that grace might abound and it is no wiser to indulge in rampant sex for a few years with the idea that you’ll eventually set it aside than it is to decide to spend the next eight years in a coked-up state before getting clean. I remember one evening at the Digital Ghetto when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly, Horn, and Micron were all happily ensconced around Bongzilla. (I stayed very far away from the herb after an unpleasant experience with a PCP-laced joint at DV8.) Micron had cracked a joke about how they were all killing brain cells, but Horn protested that he had read a study reporting that it took ten years of regular marijuana usage to have a negative impact on one’s brain.

At which point, Big Chilly smiled – he had gone to high school with Horn – and said: “And how long have you been smoking?” At that point, he had three years left, but that was more than 15 years ago and he certainly hasn’t quit. So, the point is that you’re kidding yourself if you think you can simply dive into the corruption of the world and expect to come out clean on the other side according to your schedule.

But no one said you have to be the nice Christian beta either. Alpha isn’t the notches on the bedpost; they are merely the consequence of the attitude. If you are a leader, a woman will follow you anywhere, including to church. I have seen it happen. And a Christian man shouldn’t consider himself bound to act like a beta, let alone gamma, around women, in fact, he should be totally indifferent to the opinion of the scarlet women of the world, which is a fundamentally alpha quality.

I think you are confusing Churchianity for Christianity in equating betatude with faith. If you’re afraid to correct someone because it might hurt their feelings, if you can’t open your mouth without deprecating yourself, if you are more afraid to tell a woman not to gossip or stuff her face than tell an adulterer that his behavior is wrong, you are a Churchian using Christianity as an excuse for your inner gamma. You’ve already learned that you don’t have to be an arrogant bastard in order to get the girls’ hamsters spinning madly, trying to figure you out. Now you just need to take the next step and learn how to open your mouth without taking three steps back.

The reason Game works is that it is a pale, corrupted reflection of the truth. But what is its most central message? It sounds like one of Paul’s most important themes! For neither God nor Game have given you a spirit of fear. The Christian man should approach a woman to whom he is attracted with the same total lack of fear as the most hardened master of Game; if she’s not the one, then what do you care if she rejects you? The sooner she does, the better!


The limits of human attraction

In response to Retha’s attempt to protest that sin is not attactive to Christian women:

Are you trying to say you know me better than I know myself? Vox, when you make comments about women in general, you speak a lot of truth. But do not assume to know how any one particular women you never met will react or have reacted to something. I know from experience that this was not how I reacted to a serial fornicator who tried dating me.

Retha’s response reveals some interesting aspects of the differences between the male and female minds here. First, this is a spectacular example of female solipsism; she is attempting to rebut the concept that Christian women are not immune to female hypergamy by citing a single example of her own failure to be attracted by a sexually successful suitor. Second, it is an blatant theological error to claim that Christian women are not attracted to sin, indeed, the fact that the Bible bans women from positions of leadership within the Church and household make it rather clear that they are to considered more spiritually susceptible to sin, and therefore presumably more attracted to it, than men. Given that all men and women alike are fallen, it is absurd for her to claim that she, or any other Christian woman, is immune to the appeal of the world. As Billy Graham is once supposed to have said: “if you don’t think sin is fun, you’re not doing it right.”

With regards to the question of whether I know her better than she knows herself, I can only answer that because her response is a very conventionally female one, there is little reason to believe that she is a behavioral outlier beyond her creditable commitment to her faith. In other words, given a reasonable portion of the information that she possesses regarding any situation involving male-female interaction, I believe that not only me, but many men of sufficient knowledge of Game would be able to predict her future actions better than she can because they have no rationalization hamster nor hormonal cycle clouding their perceptions.

Women are not static creatures. They are extraordinarily dynamic, which is one of the things that makes them so fascinating and so unpredictable to those who do not recognize the primary motivational factors involved. As economists are gradually coming to accept, human behavior is seldom rational by any exterior metric. And the interior metrics of women tend to vacillate greatly, and more to the point, often without them consciously realizing they have changed. Some of these vacillations are predictable, which is why male predators are able to anticipate and take advantage of female dynamism with such reliable success.

The fact that Retha found one serial fornicator unattractive doesn’t indicate that it was his success with women alone that turned her off unless he was significantly higher status than her. Hence the “a little bit of beta” that is advised for alphas who are slumming. (In such cases, the woman’s rationalization hamster can’t spin its wheel fast enough to convince her that she’ll be able to hold his interest over time, so she rejects him first in proactive self-defense.) Given that Retha has, according to her, rejected literally every man that has ever expressed interest in her throughout the course of her life, it should not at all surprising that she rejected the serial fornicator too. Was the unattractiveness of sin the sole reason for that particular rejection? It’s doubtful, especially since he is neither the first nor the last male sinner she will encounter.

But Retha is not wrong in stating the completely obvious. There are always statistical outliers and when you play the probabilities, you will certainly lose from time to time. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Retha is one of the few women to whom the bad boys genuinely hold negative appeal and that she would be more sexually attracted to a meek and virginal omega than an arrogant and experienced alpha. I don’t buy it for a second, but it is at least possible. Thanks to the Internet, we know the limits of human attraction are disturbingly wide, perhaps even boundless. (You know that somewhere out there, there is a site for people who are deeply attracted to molluscs. With pictures.)

In summary, the answer is yes, unless you happen to be a statistical freak of some sort. One should always assume that a woman is going to behave like a normal woman unless one is in possession of reliable information indicating otherwise, just as one should always assume that a man is going to behave like a normal man. Now, we are not mere animals. We have the capacity to rationally control our behavior. But the very fact that we need to exert that control over our irrational instincts indicates that they a) exist, and b) influence our feelings, thoughts, and behavior in a potentially predictable manner.


In which the verdict is announced

Roissy deigns to issue a bull on the Duke Powerpoint and does not disappoint:

I wasn’t interested at first, having scanned the notorious Powerpoint and concluded that it was just another story of a whore riding the (alpha) cock carousel who happened to forego discretion and publicize her sluttery, nothing to see here move along dystopia down the hall and to your left. But a closer inspection of Owen’s tell-all reveals a river of scorned subconsciousness that the mainstream feminist bloggers have predictably failed to notice – this chick was rejected by each and every one of these high status men she banged.

“But how can that be?”, some of the duller among you will ask. “None of the men turned her down for sex.”

Don’t you know it’s different for women? Failing to get laid is not how women are rejected; they are rejected when they don’t receive romance, love, and long term commitment….

Bottom line: a male Karen Owen would actually see his sexual market value *rise*, while Owen’s value as a girlfriend and potential wife has undoubtedly fallen. This — plus the raw hypergamy on display by her choice of sexual partners and her ability to effortlessly fulfill that limbic impulse — is the underlying message of Owen’s cutesy confessional. And it’s the message that the legacy media, the middle-aged vicars of vicariousness, and the feminists are trying hard to miss.

I didn’t bother reading the Powerpoint myself, having reached that season of life where Cicero and game design documents are vastly more interesting than yet another vicarious rehash of the college years. But this is exactly the same conclusion I reached based on what I saw in the Deadspin and Jezebel articles; a plain, but sufficiently slender 6 with the usual hypergamous instincts fornicating over her socio-sexual value with higher status young men who would never consider dating her, let alone marrying her. Roissy nailed it, right down to the expected manface.

Madonna/Whore is more than a male psychological complex, it is also a significant life choice that women have to make regardless of whether they are consciously aware of making it or not. There are exceptions, of course, as there must be in applying a binary principle to a population of 150 million, but in general, if a young woman has reason to believe she has a reasonable shot at attracting an alpha with whom to settle down, she has to forgo the short-term option of spending four to twelve years riding the alpha carousel if she wants to marry one. And she can’t be tempted into imitating the behavior of the lower-ranking young women who can never hope to do more than take the occasional carousel spin because in doing so she lowers her own rank.

Because all questions of value are intrinsically economic in nature, the vital Austrian question of time preferences – spend now or save and spend later – therefore applies. And it should not be surprising that so few young women grasp this fairly obvious fact, since they are natural and instinctive Keynesians who tend to believe that spending their resources magically creates more demand for them. But one shouldn’t have to study economics to understand that it is scarcity that drives high-priced value.


Feminists discover economics

Or at least, the basic concept of supply, although they remain innocent about the consequences of its intersection with demand. It’s rather like watching monkeys figure out that the bright sparkly stuff dancing on top of the wood is hot:

“There is this notion of slut shaming in the media and it happens on a more personal level among people who shame one another. There is also something that is discussed on other websites but never in the wider media – something called slut rejection. The latter is what heterosexual men who seek a life partner supposedly engage in. I have personal experience with this. My ex did not try to shame me but upon knowing more about me, he just sort of faded away. Its so wrong that women may have to lie or not say anything and either strategy is prone to backfire. I believe that if men had less alternatives, that is if most or many women had a fruitful sexual history, then that would become the norm and therefore acceptable.”

That’s quite a remarkable statement, don’t you think? The feminist solution to slut shaming is to recruit so many women to sluthood that the supply of sexually inexperienced women will disappear. Men will have their fun in college, and when it comes time to marry, their only choice will be from among “fruitful” women. It’s interesting because it’s an acknowledgement that men can’t be rehabbed into the feminist way of thinking. The Women’s Movement tore down many walls, but the male brain is the last frontier, and the feminist siege cannot succeed in eradicating this last double standard.

As we have learned to expect, the feminist reaction to unforeseen and undesirable consequences is an intrinsically fascistic one of removing options from others rather than rethinking her assumptions. Susan Walsh’s observations of this breakthrough moment in feminist intellectual history are correct. The constant attacks by anchor-jawed, furry-armed Pandagonian warpigs on what they call “slut-shaming” is little more than an attempt to reduce the supply of sexually inexperienced competitors for long-term relationship status. Seeing that forty years of constant K-BA propaganda has barely altered the male preference for female sexual inexperience in a life-long mate, they have begun to give up on the idea of haranguing men in favor of focusing on what has been a much more successful strategy of converting young women into easily accessible sex toys.

This may sound insane given what 6,000 years of written history about civilizations and their fate, and in fact it is both insane as well as societally destructive. But one must never forget that women are not only hypergamous, they are also solipsistic. In other words, most women assume that what they believe is good for them is therefore good for society, to the extent that they even recognize the existence of any society outside of their own selves. The feminist slogan “The personal is political”, which dates back to a 1969 essay in the Feminist Revolution collection does not quite do the concept justice; “the self is society” would be a more accurate description.

This is the primary difference between a nihilistic practitioner of the crimson arts like Roissy and the feminists. The male predators recognize and accept the societal destructiveness of their attitudes and behavior. The feminists not only do not recognize their societal destructiveness, they stubbornly deny it. This is the difference between selfishness and solipsism.

Needless to say, the feminist strategy of supply restriction is doomed to failure just like every other totalitarian attack on the supply of anything that Man particularly desires. As we have seen in 30 years of war on drugs, it would not work even if it were encoded into law and utilized government force. American men are already turning to foreign women who have not been rendered less attractive to them by feminist attitudes and bestial behavior; the more successful feminists are in ruining those they consider to be their competitors, the fewer American women will find American men willing to marry them or American men they want to marry. Those who still seek to marry and are deemed marriageable by women will not come to accept hard-ridden Alpha leavings any more than they do already. Instead they will either seek out non-American women who are increasingly available to them via the Internet and immigration or they will not marry at all; there is no need to commit to a woman who has been riding the copulatory carousel when one can simply insert a quarter instead.

Mrs. Walsh’s reader is to be commended, however, for recognizing a reality that so many women still fail to recognize. Every new sexual partner taken by a woman renders her marginally less attractive to men interested in permanent commitments and reduces her potential marital value.


The consequence of female choices

I have frequently written on the way that some women choosing to work has a negative impact on the ability of other women to choose to stay home and raise their children. Despite the fact that the economic logic behind this statement is impeccable and the reality of these consequences are inescapable, many critics, especially women, have nevertheless scoffed at this and insisted that the decision of one woman to work cannot possibly have any effect on subsequent choices available to other women.

Their economically illiterate doubts make the following comments by the author of a new feminist book blaming the lack of female executive achievement on a “culture that undervalues an entire gender” all the more ironic:

The New York Times asks about the impact of women choosing to “flee” the workforce (a loaded question), Feldt explains:

They make it harder for the rest of us to remedy the inequities that remain. We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women. It should be acceptable criticism to point out that, although everyone has the right to make their own life decisions, choosing to “opt out” reinforces stereotypes about women’s priorities that we’ve been working for decades to shatter, so just cut it out. And, the “individual choice” women have to become stay-at-home moms becomes precarious when they try to return to the workplace and find their earning power and options reduced. If we could see child-rearing as a necessary task and not an identity, and if we could collectively recognize that facilitating it benefits us all, we would go much further in guaranteeing women’s choices than we do when we are expected to uncritically celebrate every individual’s decisions.

The amusing thing is that while Gloria Feldt asserts “We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women”, she is talking about the immaterial and imaginary effect of “reinforcing stereotypes” whereas I am pointing to a material decline in real wages as well as a reduced chance to marry a man who is capable of supporting a wife and children, much less is more successful than the woman interested in him.


The magic number matters

At least, it does insofar as a man is interested in lowering his probability of not getting divorced and asset-raped when marrying:

“The results presented in this article replicate findings from previous research: Women who cohabit prior to marriage or who have premarital sex have an increased likelihood of marital disruption. Considering the joint effects of premarital cohabitation and premarital sex, as well as histories of premarital relationships, extends previous research. The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption. This effect is strongest for women who have multiple premarital coresidental unions. These findings are consistent with the notion that premarital sex and cohabitation have become part of the normal courtship pattern in the United States. They do not indicate selectivity on characteristics linked to the risk of divorce and do not provide couples with experiences that lessen the stability of marriage.”

Players and traditionalists, take a close look at that graph. When a woman has had 16 or more past lovers, the odds that a marriage to her will end in divorce rise to over 80%! Even “average” women with “only” five past lovers — women that few men would admit in public qualify as sluts — see an increase in odds of divorce to 70%.

I have to admit, that’s a more significant factor than I’d ever imagined. No wonder men value Chaste Janes more than Slutty Barbies! While numerous female writers advocate evasion, if not outright deception, it would appear that men would do well to make sure they have an accurate numerical history in order to determine which category a woman to whom they are attracted happens to fall, high divorce risk or low divorce risk. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the former, just dont be surprised with the results when not only the odds, but the statistical evidence is stacked against you.


Eat, pray, die

Best stick to the cats, ladies

A British grandmother was strangled and beaten to death by her Tunisian boyfriend, an inquest heard today. Pauline Richardson, 64, had travelled with a friend to the resort of Port El Kantaoui in Tunisia in June 2008. She was due to fly back on June 29 and on that day visited Qabeel Jabir Al-Wardani, who was then in his 20s. Mrs Richardson missed her flight home and her body was discovered the next day.

There is a tremendous black comedy waiting to be written regarding the growing practice of post-menopausal women desperately chasing sex in the third world. The absurd thing is that they’re uniformly convinced the young con artists who prey upon them have fallen in love with them and genuinely wish to pursue a committed romantic relationship with them, presumably because of their superior if wrinkled white skins. Between the instaslut behavior of the 15-19 year-old on an airplane crowd – only a recent divorcee in her thirties is easier – and this geriatric imperial cougarism, one wonders if it is women’s suffrage or women’s travel that is the worse idea. It is customary to scoff at the Victorians who insisted that women travel with a guardian of some sort, but this sort of thing reminds one that such societal customs usually arise from necessity.


Never be nice

I’m totally serious, men.  Never, ever be nice to a woman to whom you are not related by blood or are not married.  Be polite, gracious, and civil, by all means, just as you would to but don’t ever be nice in search of female approval or make the mistake of thinking that they have a mindset that is anything but completely alien to your own.  They can not only rationalize anything that they perceive to be in their own interest, but will quite readily resort to the use of third party force to do so.  Roissy provides an informative example of this.
 


There is no equality

The easily observable fact is that equality does not exist. It is a myth. It simply does not exist in any material or legal sense.

Judges have been told to treat female criminals more leniently than men when deciding sentences. New guidelines declare that women suffer disadvantages and courts should ‘bear these matters in mind. The rules say women criminals often have poor mental health or are poorly educated, have not committed violence and have children to look after.

I think it’s particularly interesting that these UK rules declare that women criminals have not committed violence, especially if the reason that they are criminals is because they have committed violent crimes. It’s not hard to understand that Londonistan is going to look more and more attractive as it is compared with the lunatic secular alternative on offer.