Tag: women

If you happen to be a woman who genuinely thinks life as a middle-aged divorcee with kids is a worthwhile trade for not getting flowers and a card on a Hallmark holiday, I’d say your ex-husband-to-be is getting an even better deal:

Momlogic has exclusively learned that 31,427 women signed up for AshleyMadison.com yesterday — which is over ten times the average number of women who typically sign up on any given Monday. Ashley Madison took a sample survey of the women who signed up yesterday, and found that:

* 67 percent identified themselves as stay-at-home moms.
* The average age was 36.
* Over two-thirds had been considering an affair before Mother’s Day.

Roissy, meanwhile, correctly ascertains what are the first and third biggest signup days for Cheater Central. The days after Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Day. I wouldn’t put too much significance on the high percentage of stay-at-home moms, though. Women who work at an office don’t need the help of a web site if they are inclined to seek a surreptitious ride or two on the carousel.

All that being said, let me note that this all sounds rather like a calculated PR stunt to me.

Veronica: Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch?
Heather #1: Because I can be.

Most men understand it when the most attractive women consider themselves too good for the average joe. Because, in short, they are, and few men have much of a problem with that. Where men get confused and irritated is when a woman who is manifestly NOT too good for them by any reasonable objective metric acts as if she genuinely believes that she is. The reason is exactly as Occam’s Razor suggests. She does. And here’s why.

Women have a strong preference to date and mate up. Men, on the other hand, are much more inclined to date broad-spectrum and mate down. And while most men understand that the definition of “up” varies according to sex – men placing extra value on looks and sexual history, women placing emphasis on social status and wealth – they don’t understand the logical consequences of women dating up and men dating down. And these consequences are further exacerbated by men generally being the pursuers and women the pursued.

Look at it this way. A woman who manages to attract the passing attention of a higher-status man, even if she does so through taking the role of the pursuer, is quite reasonably, if incorrectly, inclined to consider herself worthy of the attentions of higher status men in the future despite the declining marginal utility of her youth and sexual history. This is why a woman will always identify her status by the football star, the surgeon, or the singer in the band with whom she once spent a few hours rather than by the nondescript fellow who was her boyfriend for several years, regardless of how long ago it was. Roissy had an amusing post about a woman who had dated Anthony Kiedis a long time ago and actually carried around pictures of them in order to show them to people she had just met.

This creates an essentially Austrian problem of false signals leading to malinvestment. Because women do not distinguish between the quantity of male attention and the quality, the conflation encourages them to a) overrate their own attractiveness, and, b) invest their time and attention in men who are not likely to have any interest in them beyond the immediate term. So, the female 6 considers herself an 8 by virtue of the times that a male 9 decided that she was the best available at the moment, and quite logically feels insulted when she is approached by a male 5 or 6. Meanwhile, the male 6 is standing there in astonishment, staring at what he believes is quite clearly an appropriate counterpart and wondering who in the world she thinks she is.

What this means is that thanks to modern hook-up culture, the average woman now tends to consider herself a 7 or 8 rather than a 5, which is one of the many social factors that make it hard for her to eventually “settle”.

Dr. Helen asks if men care if women are overweight:

I don’t know about people who are married but it seems to me in the 20’s and younger set, the overweight (maybe not obese) women and girls in the US seem to do pretty well. Guys seem to hang all over the girl spilling out of her jeans with a few extra pounds.

I like women with a BMI between 16 and 20 best, but then, as those who have seen Spacebunny have probably ascertained, I possess a strong preference for slender women. But male preferences tend to vary; one of my good friends always went for short, curvy women that I considered to be quasi-trolls. (Reasonably pretty trolls, to be sure, but trolls all the same.) In fairness to him, he usually thought the girls I dated looked like anorexic heroin addicts. To each his own. However, individual inclinations aside, I do think something drastically changed on a grand scale sometime between 1990 and 1998, because I can distinctly remember some of my younger teammates on the Nike team for which I played in the States commenting favorably on a group of young female soccer players, all of whom I considered to be varying flavors of butterball.

When I expressed my surprise that they so appreciated these roly-poly puppies, one of the other strikers shrugged and said that all the girls had junk in the trunk these days. So, I expect that as society has gotten fatter, people’s perceptions of what is acceptably attractive has mutated accordingly, especially younger guys whose exposure to non-overweight young women is relatively limited. This doesn’t mean that the standards of absolute attraction has changed at all, although the advent of the reality TV / sex tape celebrity does seem to have uglified the celebrity set as well.

No doubt this patriarchal oppressor got what he deserved for preventing a bold woman warrior from wreaking righteous female fury on a fellow patriarch. Would-be white knights should keep in mind that they are not only risking serious personal injury for a strange woman, but there’s a very good chance she won’t even be grateful.

“I just simply say, ‘Dude, that’s enough,’ [thinking] maybe he’ll back off,” Skripka said. “He got in my face. I didn’t flinch. I said, ‘Dude, back off,’ pardon my French but that’s the words I used. Then I finally said, ‘Dude, what’s your problem?’ The next thing I know is I’m waking up on a gurney. I was knocked out cold.”

In addition to the cuts and bruises, he also suffered a concussion….

“I suppose I got more engaged than I should have,” said Skripka, who was released from the hospital Monday afternoon. “I just wanted to do the right thing. If it was my sister or my friend getting assaulted, I’m going to do what I can. All he had to do was stop, all he had to do was stop assaulting her,” said Skripka, who has had his own brushes with the law, the most recent a burglary charge in 2008 from Dakota County. “Just walk away from the situation, cool off. I don’t know why he had to continue and then turn on somebody else.”

Yes, and all you had to do was mind your own business and walk away from a situation that didn’t concern you in any way. The guy didn’t just turn on somebody else, Skripa chose to interfere with him. Now, Skripa may have wanted to do the right thing, but he nevertheless did the wrong thing. Now I agree, if it was my sister or female friend getting assaulted, I’m going to do what I can too. I would do the same for my brother or male friend. But a random woman on the street who is just as likely to be the instigator of the violence as the victim is neither my sister nor my friend. And more importantly, doing what one can is not limited to posturing and verbal bravado.

As I previously advised, you should never intervene in a violent domestic quarrel or even petty crime unless it is clear that potentially lethal violence is merited. A woman isn’t likely to be severely injured by getting pushed or slapped or punched, so you can’t justify stepping in unless and until there are obvious indications that the man actually intends to inflict serious and potentially fatal harm. As the foolish Mr. Skripka discovered, even men who get physical with women are usually holding quite a bit back; a man who is dumb enough to white knight in these situations is simply offering an already angry and violent man a target upon which he can fully unleash the force he is still partially controlling.

Basically, unless what you’re seeing definitely merits putting someone in the hospital or the morgue and would be considered justifiable in a court of law, let it pass. Based on the statistics, half the time the woman attacked first and deserves the beating anyhow.

Despite being a natural negger, Bill Simmons demonstrates that he’s not only a Delta, but he doesn’t actually understand the concept of Game:

Q: As a female, I usually have a hard time admitting that I read your articles. I have a harder time admitting that I think you’re hilarious. I feel like I should despise you on principle, because let’s be honest, you’re a pig. But I do like you. More than I care to admit. I find myself referencing you in everyday conversation. If I can use you to back up what I’m saying, I think it has more weight. And when guys find out I like you, they love it (thanks for that). So my question is, how do you do it? How have you managed to make a self-respecting woman eagerly await you next column, even though I’ve come to expect you to have at least one disrespectful comment in there?
— Amanda, Richmond

SG: Typical e-mail from a female reader: expresses her disgust, insults me, changes her mind three times and ultimately admits that she can’t live without me. I don’t blame Amanda because she’s been weaned on 20 years of chick flicks, and the one rule of chick flicks is this: “Find the one guy who either drives you crazy or you can’t have, then fall madly in love with him even though you know it’s completely wrong.”

Incorrect. Amanda doesn’t read the Sports Guy because of the chick flicks, the chick flicks are a hamster rationalization of the natural female tendency to be drawn to men who don’t put them on pedestals. Throw in the DHV aspect of fame – the woman wouldn’t find the column so irresistible if it wasn’t by a columnist who has rightly become famous by virtue of taking his talents to ESPN – and it’s quite natural that she would like it despite finding it despicable on principle.

I used to be puzzled when women would send me emails complaining about my columns… accompanied by their pictures. WTF? Now, in light of Game theory, it makes considerably more sense. Of course, it doesn’t happen as often now that my feminist critics of yore are all deathly afraid of provoking public responses to their criticism. It’s been rather interesting to see how the amount of public criticism has fallen dramatically while the daily blog readership has continued to steadily grow.

If it is rape for an Arab to pass for a Israeli, I imagine that Jews who are mistaken for Italians or Caucasians will have to be prosecuted as well. To say nothing of all those women who falsely claim to be single when they actually have boyfriends or husbands.

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew. Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

This ex post facto claim of rape is both logically and legally absurd, of course, but it does tend to suggest that Israel is as brutally ethnocentric as the European anti-Zionists claim contra the claims of its defenders. Given the apparent precedent set by this conviction, one is inclined to wonder if the American Jews who so eagerly descended upon the South during the Sixties on behalf of black rights will now take their guilt-ridden activism to Israel on behalf of the Arabs.

However, to be fair to the Israeli legal system, it should be kept in mind that this was the result of a plea-bargain, not a trial, so no precedent was, in fact, set. While the ethno-religious aspect of the case is what has attracted the media’s attention, I don’t think that the focus of the deception was actually on his married state is any less potentially problematic.

But apparently not everyone lies about sex. Or perhaps, as I tend to suspect, they are lying about not lying about it.

Research shows that, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a split between the genders when it comes to answering the potentially embarrassing question. Around a third of women give a false response – and 64 per cent of these reduce the number. Half lie because they ‘feel ashamed’ of the number, while a further 19 per cent don’t want to be seen as promiscuous. A fifth of women would be dishonest about their number of sexual partners if their new partner had slept with fewer people than them.

A higher proportion of men – 43 per cent – lie to their new partner. In these cases, around 60 per cent increase the amount.

I was very surprised by this, because on every occasion I have been privy to accurate information about a female friend’s history and then heard her mention a number, she has lied. But then, it occurred to me that because higher numbers tend to devalue a woman’s relationship appeal, many women have no reason to lie. Consider the CDC report on anonymously reported female sexual history:

15+ partners: 9.4 percent
7-14 partners: 21.3 percent
2-6 partners: 44.3 percent
0-1 partners: 25 percent

Can you find “around a third of women” who might have an incentive to “give a false response”? The majority of the false reporting is almost surely from the 30.7% of women who fall into the Slutty and Frisky categories but are dishonestly claiming to be Normal. The average college-educated woman is disposed to believe that claiming 4-5 previous lovers is going to sound credible and not too promiscuous, (one high school boyfriend plus one fling per year of college), whereas no one is going to believe a claim of near-chastity. This is why a man should call BS on a woman who claims that moderate level of experience while simultaneously providing evidence that it is actually more extensive.

Now, it’s pretty easy for a woman to tell if a man is exaggerating about his experience, since he probably won’t know what he is doing. But how can a man tell if a woman is clever enough to avoid claiming complete inexperience and doesn’t give it away by breaking out bedroom gymnastics worthy of Cirque du Soleil? It’s quite easy if you happen to have access to her clothing drawer. Women attempt to steal status-branded t-shirts and sweatshirts whenever they have a fling with a man. It’s a bizarre form of competitive female trophy-hunting; a Harvard Hockey t-shirt trumps a nice, but generic University of Oregon sweatshirt.* So, you can be sure that every t-shirt advertising a college she never attended, a sporting event she never saw, a military service** to which neither she nor any family member are connected, or, if she actually went to that college, a sport she never played, represents a notch on her bedpost that she doesn’t report as a boyfriend. If she keeps around a few worn-out favorites of the sort she’d never buy in a million years but somehow keep managing to survive periodic wardrobe purges, you can be sure that they once belonged to other men.

And if she has a drawer full of t-shirts representing the entire SEC plus half the Big Ten, Notre Dame, and two Ivies, you had better run, not walk, to the nearest medical clinic.

Male dishonesty makes similar sense, albeit coming from the opposite angle. Because women place a negative value on men without sexual experience, men who lack it have an incentive to make themselves look more attractive via false preselection. And if 17% of men are lying to REDUCE their numbers, that gives some support to the 80/20 rule. Only the Alphas in the most successful quintile can afford to reduce their reported numbers without reducing their appeal to a prospective partner.

UPDATE – It occurs to me that women can find some use in the t-shirt test too. If you’re with a high value man you suspect of being haut alpha, check his t-shirt and sweatshirt collection. If he’s a former college athlete or graduated from an elite school, he should have no shortage of commemorative event t-shirts and team sweatshirts. If he doesn’t have any, then you can probably guess how they managed to walk out the door, one by one. If you want to amuse yourself, try asking him where they are. Most guys are so completely clueless about female trophy-hunting that he probably isn’t even aware they’re missing.

*If you ever feel like upending a woman’s applecart, note the trophy shirt X that she’s proudly sporting. Then, the next time you see her, ask her if she’s ever hooked up with X. While she’s wide-eyed and stammering in confusion, just smile and say, “Yeah, I thought you looked like the type.”

**thanks to AmyJ for reminding us of this one.

Read this list of personal characteristics:

Witty, i.e. smart
Irreverent
Secure
Sadistic
Perceptive
Impulsive
Narcissistic
A natural at negging
Ridiculous in his peacocking
A terrible relationship prospect

Now, that list could have been compiled 15 years ago to describe me with the exception of the Peacocking and the Impulsive. Probably more smart than witty, more’s the pity, but there you go. Anyhow, based on how things turned out for Spacebunny and me, there just might be hope for Russell Brand maintaining a successful marriage. Or rather, there might have been were he not a Hollywood celebrity. I also think it’s interesting to note how his marital choice of Katy Perry, she of the execrable pop music and the evangelical Christian background, tends to underline the hierarchy of female attractiveness I explained a few days ago. Miss Perry’s expansive endowment notwithstanding, there is no way she is one-half as pretty as at least one-quarter of the girls to whom Mr. Brand has, in the immortal words of Lebronze, taken his talents.