Tag: women

Dr. Helen linked to one of Amy Alkon’s readers asking her about the observed phenomenon of the different approaches to paying for a group bill utilized by the opposite sexes:

I am writing to see if you have insight or an educated guess on one of these oh-so-true stereotypes. If a group of men comes in to have lunch and maybe a beer, odds are pretty good that one of those men will pick up the tab. But, (ask any ten servers and this will be confirmed) if a group of women comes in, they will almost always ask for separate checks. It’s always cause for comment among the waitstaff if a group of women doesn’t ask for separate checks.

This is a phenomenon I have often observed myself. I haven’t read the long string of comments yet, but based on past experience of this sort of discussion, I guarantee you will find the following. 1) Several commenters of both sexes challenging whether the observation is correct due to the way in which they personally claim to behave and their failure to understand that there are always exceptions to the norm. 2) Several female commenters accepting the observation but claiming that the male behavior, which is obviously perceived as preferable by the waiters, is only exhibited due to some negative male quality such as the desire to score the waitress. 3) Several nonsensical defenses of the female behavior by female commenters. 4) Several comments by male commenters expressing excessive disdain, bordering on hostility, for the female practice. 5) And finally, it wouldn’t be proper discussion of sex/race differences without at least one cretin arguing that the observation must be untrue because everyone is the same and always behaves in the same manner everywhere.

Now, I tend to think the practice of calculating shares of a group bill is cheap and petty myself, but it’s of zero concern to me how or why other people prefer to pay as they do. If it happens to take six women 30 minutes on a Cray supercomputer to work out who pays how much, that’s perfectly fine with me. What’s of much more interest to me is to consider if this approach to group payment might be indicative of a similar mentality at work on a political level and if that mentality can reasonably be connected to a shift in the political economy since women were granted the right to vote. We know that the female vote has shifted the politics of the USA and other countries leftward, but is it possible that the shift is as much based on non-ideological, instinctive factors as open ideological differences?

If one considers the group check division mentality writ large, it tends to look not terribly unlike the taxing and spending approach of a modern democratic government. There is virtually no attention paid to the national budget as a whole, but attention is focused instead upon each individual interest group area as if it has no connection to the others. Note that I’m not saying that there is anything there, and democratic lobbying groups precede women’s suffrage, (although not by as long as you might think), it’s just an interesting thought to contemplate.

It didn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn Marion Jones was on steroids when she was regularly breaking 11 with such ease in the 100. It was about as surprising as learning that Ben Johnson didn’t add what looked like about 50 pounds of muscle in three years naturally. Having trained with NCAA D1 female sprinters myself, I can say that it is usually obvious what is and is not possible without chemical enhancement. There is no special “intense weightlifting regimen” that provides magical results. And technique doesn’t shave off seconds; speed is something you either have or you don’t.

The New York Times article about her is a good one and one can’t help but wish her well in her quest to play in the WNBA. [Insert Sports Guy joke here.] But what I found most interesting about her cautionary tale was how she followed what has increasingly become the American woman’s path to delta.

As delicate as the past is, Jones reveals little outward bitterness. The pain seems to be largely walled off, at least from the public. But also, she is content with her family life, including her marriage to Thompson. Jones’s first husband, Hunter, was gruff, possessive and like a “bodyguard,” says Tiffany Weatherford-Jackson, one of Jones’s closest friends from U.N.C. Then there was Tim Montgomery, the biological father of Monty and a “party boy,” Weatherford-Jackson said. A former Olympic sprinter and an admitted doper, Montgomery is in prison for heading up a multimillion-dollar check-fraud scheme and for dealing heroin. Thompson, by contrast, is settled and devoted to his family. (“Marion says I’m predictable,” he told me one evening, referring to Jones’s teasing him about his taste in food and movies. “I tell her I’m stable.”) Thompson, a former sprinter who won a bronze medal for Barbados in the 2000 Olympics, is now finishing an advice book for student athletes. “We only wish we had met earlier in our lives,” Jones said one afternoon wistfully.

It’s not that women actively dislike the “beta providers”, or as I prefer to identify them, the deltas. It’s merely that they are not sexually drawn to them in the way they are attracted to the brooding control freaks and the unpredictable bad boys. It is the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights and the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron who are the archetypes of innumerable women’s fantasies, not the stable and upstanding Ward Cleaver.

What many men fail to understand, however, is that women know perfectly well that a stable and predictable man is much better for them and their children than sexually-charged submission or abandoned chaos, but to use the Freudian terms, their ids are at odds with their egos. Or, if you prefer the Roissyesque verbiage, it is thought versus tingle. This is why the gamma strategy of patiently waiting around for the woman of his dreams to “come to her senses” or as XKCD put it, “give in”, is actually a perfectly viable long-term strategy, so long as it is understood that it may come at the cost of raising another man’s children with a sadder, older version of the woman who first drew his attention.

Fortunately for the children, that’s a price some men are perfectly willing to pay. I think they should be commended – for the children’s sake – rather than scorned, even if the enabling aspect of their behavior is unfortunate. But that’s a tangential issue, the main thing to take away from this is that deltas should understand that sending out “beta provider” signals is almost as much as a turn-off to young excitement-seeking women as it is a turn-on to older resource-seeking women. Of course, depending upon your personal circumstances, the former may be far less of a problem than the latter.

This would be why. Dr. Helen linked to a woman who maintains a site called “How to Train Your Man”. Here’s her perspective on what women want:

You can’t blame guys for feeling exasperated. We expect them to be psychic and to know what we’re thinking. As in the Dodge commercial, many men think that if they “behave,” their woman will be happy. If they disappoint us, we are unreasonable, intolerant, unpredictable, moody, PMS-ing or nagging. Sometimes it seems that it’s never enough. It’s really not men’s fault for not knowing what women really want. So here it is, simply. Women want three things from men: someone who cares about them, someone who will listen and respond honestly, and someone they can share a laugh with. In other words, a good friend. Everything else falls under one of these categories.

Interesting. And hypothetically useful information, although it sounds an awful lot like what the patient deltas and whiteknighting gammas believe. For an alternative perspective, here’s what the Dark Lord of Intersexual Relations says women want:

The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest. When she grasps for a pillar to steady herself against the whipping winds or yearns for an authority figure to foil her worst instincts, it is you who has to be there… strong, solid, unshakable and immovable.

Now, based on everything you know about women, based on everything that has been discussed here about women, which perspective do you think is more reflective of observable reality? And don’t you find it just a little bit suspicious that the three things the self-appointed Man Trainer declares women want happen to be three things that can be just as easily provided by other women?

If you’re undecided, consider why Dr. Helen was linking to the Man Trainer in the first place. It was because of this statement to her husband:

Thank you for going shopping. However, you didn’t get the sausage in the casing because you resent having to go to the grocery store. It’s passive aggressive and uncool. And now, you will have to pay the price.

In just three sentences, the Man Trainer reveals four of the worst common female attributes. Ingratitude, logical incoherence, motive imputation, and assuming the simultaneous roles of plaintiff, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. Needless to say, if one was going to lay odds, they would heavily favor the probability that this woman will be bitter, angry and divorced while Roissy is still feeding on the attractive 20-something she-lawyers that pass through Washington DC.

In summary, the correct way for a man to respond to a Man Trainer is in much the same fashion that Montecore responded to Roy Horn.

Ex-NY makes me wonder when this place turned into Dear Vox:

Hi Vox,

Are you ready to dish-out some dating – rather than econ – advice? If yes, here’s the story: about three years ago I dated a very nice, Christian beta male. He was cute and fit and honorable and I really, really liked him. He really liked me too, but there was one big problem: I lived in NYC and didn’t have a car. He lived far away in my old hometown (a moderately-sized city) and it was really hard for us to see each other. After three months, I was frustrated about the distance, and I ended it with him. I know now that was stupid. My only excuse is that I was young and I wanted a boyfriend with whom I could do fun stuff whenever I wanted, like other girls. Also, I thought nice, stable, Christian, honorable beta-males were everywhere in NYC. More fool me! I soon regretted it, but was too embarrassed to call him.

Now it’s three years later, and a new job has brought me back to my old hometown. I was talking to a friend the other day and I heard my old beau is still in my old hometown and still single. I’d like to call him and tell him I have moved back and see if he’d like to get together. He may or may not be interested. But is making the call stupid and self-defeating on its face? Guys? How would you react?

Oh, sweet Darwin… all right, my opinion is that it can’t hurt to take a shot. Contacting him is neither stupid nor self-defeating. You have nothing to lose but your pride, and that’s simply not worth a lifetime of cat-collecting. To be young is to be stupid; we all make absurd decisions and do ridiculous things that we subsequently come to regret. Most men understand that. I think that if he is still as honorable as you say he was, he will be naturally inclined to at least hear you out. And besides, you say that he’s a beta so he’s probably not going to be overly put out by the assumption that you’ve been off chasing alphas in New York City for the past three years. (Whether you truly have or haven’t been is irrelevant. Most men correctly interpret “fun”, in female terms, to mean sex with alphas. Or at least marriage-inappropriate non-beta providers.)

So, once you’ve made the decision to contact him, what to say? I would simply recommend calling him up, apologizing for being too young and foolish to recognize his true value, and asking him if he’d be amenable to letting you take him out to dinner or meeting him for drinks by way of apology. If he seems open to the idea but reluctant, remind him that at worst, he’ll get free food and drinks for an evening. No harm no foul. Now, you don’t need to grovel – in fact you shouldn’t – but you will need to be open and apologetic about what you now regard as your regrettable stupidity and superficiality. And, of course, if he agrees, you will have to bring your A-game with regards to your dress and appearance. Stylish, sexy, and contrite is what you’re going for, not sackcloth, ashes, and “New York kicked my ass so I guess you losers in the sticks are my best option now”.

It may work. Or it may not. If he’s not embittered by the experience and your looks haven’t declined too drastically over the three years, I suspect your odds are pretty good. But whether it works or not, in the long run you will almost certainly feel much, much better for having made the effort. At least you will know; it is not our failures that we regret so much as our failures to even try.

Anyhow, that’s my take. Other opinions may vary. And on a tangential note: ladies, stop going to the Big City to pursue your big adventure before beginning your “real life”! I’ve seen it again and again. You are very unlikely to meet anyone interested in building a future with you there, you’re primarily going to encounter men who are in the Big City to have as many adventures as possible. So, if you’re interested in pursuing marriage and children some day, keep in mind that the Big City Adventure is nothing more than a total waste of your market peak.

There is something about the economics-inclined mind that can’t help considering what the reported numbers imply:

The average woman dates 24 men and spends more than £2,000 before finding “Mr Right”, research has shown.

Here’s what occurred to me upon seeing this article in the Telegraph. First, the average man probably dates fewer than 24 women before settling down, so once you have dated 12 women, you should have a pretty good idea of where you rate with the opposite sex. Don’t delude yourself, that’s where the market has valued you. So, if you want to get married and have children, you should strongly considering doing so with the next woman you meet who compares reasonably well with those previous 12 women and is largely compatible with your faith, personality, and finances.

Second, if you’re only interested in trophy hunting, you can also use this information. Since the average woman has also had sex with six men, this means that she will have sex with one in every four men with whom she goes out on a date. So, if you’re not having sex with at least one out of every four women you take out, you’re clearly doing something wrong and need to either adjust your approach or rethink what sort of women you are pursuing.

Third, it occurs to me that this sex/date ratio is probably as effective and objective a means of defining male sexual status as any, which is useful given the inability of many men to understand that this status has nothing to do with what a man thinks of himself, but is determined by the way women react to him. Alphas, being near-irresistible to women, would have a percentage of .850+ since even George Clooney and Brad Pitt strike out from time to time. Sigmas would be a bit less, around .750+, thanks to the strangeness and unpredictability factors. Betas would be between .250 and .400, Deltas between .100 and .300, Gammas between .050 and .200, and Omegas below .050. So, if you want to figure out to which classification you belong, just work out your historical sex/date ratio. Note that this isn’t a sex per date ratio, it is the percentage chance that a man will eventually have sex with a woman if he goes on a date with her. It would probably not be unreasonable to use this ratio as a probability proxy for the likelihood that a woman will accept a date request from the man as well.

This sex/date classification obviously doesn’t apply to women because they are the ones responsible for deciding whether a date ends in sex or not. This means that their status has to depend upon initiations rather than conclusions, but it should be possible to come up with a similar classification set based on the amount of date requests and propositions women receive from men of varying statuses. A date request from an Alpha would be worth 3x more than a proposition from an Alpha, which would be worth 5x more than a date request from a Gamma. Something more or less like that, anyway.

It’s a pity so many good, nice, upstanding men still haven’t been able to do likewise:

This nice guy backlash may sound unpleasant, but some men blame women who disregard the nice guy as an option. Some women interviewed say they equate a nice guy with being a boring guy. Others used words like “marshmallow,” “doormat” and even “creeper.”

Academic studies have reaffirmed that women prefer the bad boy archetype over the nice guy. A 2008 study at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces examined how college students perceived “dark” traits such as thrill-seeking behavior, deceitfulness and narcissism. The study found the female students preferred the males with these traits.

In her seven years of dating coach experience, Lisa Shield of Los Angeles, California, discovered that a majority of female clients prefer a man with edge who draws boundaries. Her clients reject nice guys as too malleable.

I think my favorite part was the bit where Neil Strauss figured it all out. I’m sure he was happily painting his dream girl’s walls, fantasizing about how she might be so grateful that she’d say or do something that would give him an obvious opening to make a move that would finally upgrade him from friend status, when she announced that she was off to sexually service another man. Okay, I doubt she put it that way, but the point is that if you’re in the friend box, she considers you beneath her physical attraction threshold.

Being an inherently cruel and arrogant individual, it will probably not surprise you to know that I’ve never suffered from nice guy syndrome. But I have friends who have for literal decades, and it is amazing how impossible it is for them to abandon the notion that being nice and helpful and attentive is the way to a woman’s heart. I think it would help those men to finally get it through their thick, romantic heads that while individuals are unique, everyone is more or less replaceable and that women can be much more coldly calculating than most men will ever believe. The reality is that there are very, very few Leonardos or Helens of Troy in our midst and there are always plenty of girls on the girl tree.

I’m sure Spacebunny would note that there is another element at work here, namely that of erroneously elevated standards. This suggests the Final Call Solution is in order; if all else fails, lower your standards. Or, as one of my college friends who definitely didn’t suffer from a surfeit of nice guyness would put it: “It’s piggin’ time, soooooooooey!” And yes, such hog calls actually worked for the guy since they were accompanied by the proper attitude of contemptuous masculine insouciance that is catnip to the average woman. Anyhow, the salient point is that a nice guy 7 will seldom have any problem attracting a 5 regardless of how much he does for her; she’ll probably be sufficiently attracted to his better looks and higher status that she won’t be overly turned off by his kind, thoughtful, and generous behavior.

So, get realistic, swallow your pride and lower your standards, nice guys. You may not think so, but I guarantee that you’ll be a great deal happier for it. A happy plain girl who feels lucky to be with you will beat a bored and bitchy pretty girl who has contempt for you every single time.

Men who seek to better understand the challenge posed by the dichotomy of female attraction could do far worse than to read the works of W. Somerset Maugham. Being of a certain orientation as well as an unusually ruthless observer of human behavior, he had the emotional distance necessary to note some of the unusual and contradictory aspects of female behavior that have confounded so many men over the centuries. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, is little more than a straightforward portrayal of the instinctive feminine preference for the Alpha; the most desirable young woman on the street, the protagonist Liza, rejects her solid and eminently suitable young suitor, Tom, in favor of a secretive affair with brutish, bearded married man whose children are as old as she is. Tom’s proper and hesitant advances don’t arouse Liza half as much as Jim’s rough, unsolicited kisses; Jim provokes the consumation of their adultery with a punch in the stomach. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for Liza, as she is physically beaten by Jim’s wife, gets pregnant, and dies of a miscarriage.

A similar, but more sophisticated theme is at work throughout Of Human Bondage, which is an excellent novel worth reading in any event. The unsavory object of Philip Carey’s unstinting devotion, the anemic waitress Mildred, throws him over in favor of a married German man before running off with his impoverished best friend at Carey’s expense. Whereas Tom is a beta by virtue of his youth, Carey is a downright gamma courtesy of his club foot and sensitive intelligence. Carey is a white knight who will not ‘take advantage’ of Mildred even after repeatedly rescuing her from starvation, ill health, and prostitution; she is openly contemptuous of him throughout their entire relationship before finally leaving him in a violent and destructive rage when, in his noble refusal to abuse his position as her rescuer, he resolutely refuses to take her to his bed. The story finally ends well for Carey, but only thanks to his class superiority providing him with sufficient perceived status to attract a handsome, loving, young quasi-peasant girl. And even with her, he comes very close to ruining his happy ending by his persistent gammaesque noblesse. To marry the girl in order to rescue her from social opprobation is a responsibility he willingly accepts, but he finds it very hard to accept the idea of marrying her simply because he wants to do so.

But Maugham’s prescient explication of Game is most explicit in The Magician, in which the beautiful fiance of a young and brilliant physician is seduced away from him by the grotesque figure of the Aleister Crowley character, Oliver Haddo.

Her contempt for him, her utter loathing, were alloyed with a feeling that aroused in her horror and dismay. She could not get the man out of her thoughts. All that he had said, all that she had seen, seemed, as though it possessed a power of material growth, unaccountably to absorb her. It was as if a rank weed were planted in her heart and slid long poisonous tentacles down every artery, so that each part of her body was enmeshed. Work could not distract her, conversation, exercise, art, left her listless; and between her and all the actions of life stood the flamboyant, bulky form of Oliver Haddo. She was terrified of him now as never before, but curiously had no longer the physical repulsion which hitherto had mastered all other feelings. Although she repeated to herself that she wanted never to see him again, Margaret could scarcely resist an overwhelming desire to go to him. Her will had been taken from her, and she was an automaton. She struggled, like a bird in the fowler’s net with useless beating of the wings; but at the bottom of her heart she was dimly conscious that she did not want to resist. If he had given her that address, it was because he knew she would use it. She did not know why she wanted to go to him; she had nothing to say to him; she knew only that it was necessary to go….

It seemed to her that a comparison was drawn for her attention between the narrow round which awaited her as Arthur’s wife and this fair, full existence. She shuddered to think of the dull house in Harley Street and the insignificance of its humdrum duties. But it was possible for her also to enjoy the wonder of the world. Her soul yearned for a beauty that the commonalty of men did not know. And what devil suggested, a warp as it were in the woof of Oliver’s speech, that her exquisite loveliness gave her the right to devote herself to the great art of living? She felt a sudden desire for perilous adventures. As though fire passed through her, she sprang to her feet and stood with panting bosom, her flashing eyes bright with the multi-coloured pictures that his magic presented. Oliver Haddo stood too, and they faced one another. Then, on a sudden, she knew what the passion was that consumed her. With a quick movement, his eyes more than ever strangely staring, he took her in his arms, and he kissed her lips. She surrendered herself to him voluptuously. Her whole body burned with the ecstasy of his embrace.

‘I think I love you,’ she said, hoarsely.

She looked at him. She did not feel ashamed.

Now, there are certainly women who master this primal urge for excitement, mystery and perception of male power, who exert their rational faculties and succeed in choosing their lovers utilizing at least some degree of reason rather than simply trusting to the vagaries of instinct. But that does not mean that the primal urge does not exist in them, or that it is not there to be appealed to by men who recognize it and knowingly manipulate it or by men whose natural behavior tends to stimulate it. Awareness of this dichotomy of female attraction is useful knowledge for men and women alike, since the woman who is aware of it is less likely to find herself being swept away unconsciously by it, and the man who is aware of it can either use it to avoid behaving in a manner that provokes instinctive disgust in women or to behave in a manner that permits manipulation of those instincts.

One thing I’m curious to know is how many women are fully cognizant of this call of the wild while simultaneously rejecting it. Do those who reject it tend to knowingly do so or is it more of an unconscious rejection that is the result of positive social conditioning? I’m really not interested in hearing what women who completely deny it exists and profess an instinctive preference for white knights and gammas have to say, since there isn’t much to be learned from the opinions of the self-deceptive.

Broadway is all but dead. Television ratings continue to decline. Fantasy literature is increasingly indistinguishable from camp parody. University degrees cost more and are worth less than ever before. But since I generally despise Hollywood and the trivial medium of film, I can only regard the news that women now make up the majority of moviegoers and ticket buyers as great news.

Yes, folks — women go to the movies more than men do…. Another line that I want to bury for good is that young men go to the movies more than anyone else. That’s just bullshit. Younger men don’t go to the movies more than younger women. Younger people in general go to the movies more, but based on the MPAA numbers of frequent moviegoers (ones who go more than once a month) in the coveted demographic of 18-24, women make up 3.4 million filmgoers while men make up 3.1 million. Suck on that Hollywood!

This development, even more than big high-definition flatscreens and digital piracy, will marginalize the film industry. From church pews to college lectures, once women become the majority and quite reasonably have their preferences catered to, men are driven away. And it’s a cautionary tale to game publishers who have been hearing the siren song of “the female gamer” for fifteen years now.

It’s really not that difficult. Women are more open to male entertainment than men are open to female entertainment. A woman might not go see Star Wars 20 times, but she won’t mind seeing it once or twice. A man, or at least a straight man, would rather slash his hand with 20 papercuts before rolling it in salt than go to see the Sex In The City movie even once. So, as incredible as it sounds, we can expect the movies to be further dumbed down from what is an already abysmal level.

Needless to say, this transition point suggests that fantasy sports, MMOs and games with episodic content are only going to get bigger. And it also may explain why the bottom dropped completely out of games with movie tie-ins last year.