The Man Who is Thursday has Roissy’s insight, but without the swagger. Read Thursday on who won the sex revolution, how to find a virgin, how social conservatives got it wrong, and why church guys do fine
You're missing the reality, that women don't so much want multiple partners, they want the alphas and they're happy to share them. So you'd still miss out.
As a lobby, the Men's Rights Movement is a complete failure and I don't think that's gonna change. However it's been moderately successful spreading all over the internet a realistic insight into how the law is unfair to man in matters like divorce or sex crimes and how women and relationships really work. I think that activism in the classic sense is a waste of time. The only option for men is direct action; don't marry; don't cohabitate; if you want to have kids adopt or hire a surrogate mother; boycott as much as possible business that are subservient to feminists; live frugally and avoid as much as possible paying taxes; don't vote for politicians who don't actively oppose anti-male legislation...the system will eventually collapse if enough men don't support it; ironically feminism NEEDS men to survive.
Eric: Of course people differ in attractiveness. The problem with ratings scales and simple categories like [alpha|beta|omega] is that they implicitly assume important characteristics of the space and distribution that are not generally well understood, and for which there is at least some informal evidence against.
Many different things about different people are attractive or unattractive. One person is smart, but physically weak, another is smart and strong, but unusually cruel and disloyal, another is a very good singer, another is a very good cook, another understands emotional/sexual dynamics. So how are these all weighted to determine who is more attractive than who? Using a one-dimensional scale implicitly assumes that there is a very strong correlation between what one man or woman finds attractive and what another does. Is this accurate? There's been some research that suggests certain features are highly correlated with attractiveness across all people and cultures, but does this capture everything about attractiveness? Are we sure that people who score high on these particular confirmed measures (waist/hip ratio for women, facial symmettry, ocular distance, etc.) are *always* individually more attractive to nearly all people than someone else who scores lower on those matters -- no mattter what else is true?
In determining whether, say, facial symettry is attractive, all we have to show is that people find those with greater facial symettry attractive most of the time, all else being equal. To show that attractiveness is one-dimensional, we have to describe a set of traits and a particular weighting of those traits that accurately models attractiveness to nearly all people, even when all else is radically unequal.
Further, using terms such as alpha and beta implies not only that attractiveness or dominance is one-dimensional, but that either the distribution is strongly n-modal, or that particular division points on the scale are far more socially significant than others. Where is the research on that? Anywhere?
My experience suggests that attractiveness is not strongly one-dimensional, nor n-modally distributed. People fall widely distributed over a many dimensional space, and different people put very different weights on many of the dimensions. I often find a person hideous that someone else finds attractive and vice versa.
Although there is clearly substantial agreement on strong weight for certain features, it's not enough for me to say, find my wife any less attractive than a typical pageant contestant even though she is quite fat -- fat is at worst a mild negative for me, and she is very attractive in ways that don't appear to be captured by the pageant norm, but that I value highly. You could say I am simply signaling loyalty and blinded by the relationship when I talk about my wife, but there are strangers I don't know that I consider beautiful who it's clear many other people do not find particularly attractive.
My intuitions are all based on small non-random samples of course, but where is the science with better evidence to which I should bow on which to base these very strong implicit claims? It just doesn't exist. The field is in its infancy with very few strongly supported conclusions.
"Suppose that most men really wanted lots of one night stands with male celebrities, but that most men simply couldn’t get that. Then it is likely that when questioned, they would say that what they really wanted “serious relationships” with women, for three reasons:"
You see how this reeks of Perfectly General Counterargument? The fact that most men do want to marry (at least in the States) and that, for thousands of years, human men appear to have been either harem-keepers or pair-bonders puts the burden of evidence on you. If your theory is that what men really want is a series of unconnected one-night stands, or a series of friends-with-benefits relationships in the long run, it needs supporting evidence, other than, "That's what I want at my current age," or "that's what a fitness-maximizer operating in a complete cultural vacuum would want in our best current theoretical understanding of evolution, with its own cultural biases."
Thanks TDTD. One thing is for certain: signing the marriage contract will convert even the most alpha of males into a beta. No man can match the full power of the State arrayed against him.
That's a good article, Puma. I like how it explains that the current unjust alimony laws (I fully agree with the men's rights movement here) are not the feminists' ideal; rather, they are a feature of a transitional phase between the pre-sexual revolution social order, and the kind of matriarchal socialism that radical feminists talk about, where marriage as we know it would be obsolete. I think it's interesting that the author favors monogamy and capitalism, but appears fairly resigned about the likelihood of this brave new world coming about; to me he sounds like he's saying, "At least we won't have the status quo."
Basically, I think that I would be all right with the way the mating game would work in such a society (as well as other aspects of life), although (or perhaps because) I am very much a low-beta male. From where I'm standing, "each woman has many partners = good." I'd be more optimistic about my prospects under matriarchy than I would be about traditional polygynous patirarchy. And as for comparing the amount I get laid under the status quo vs. a society dominate by free-love women--well, I couldn't very well have a success rate lower than my current one.
After all, the talk about "sympathy for deprived beta males" misses the point that sympathy isn't the only reason for helping the deprived. There's also the idea that helping the deprived can make the society stabler and more efficient, and thus be a benefit to everyone. It's pretty well agreed that the sex-deprived men in polygynous societies are a force for chaos, and so the matriarchy would have every reason to want as many men as possible to have access to some kind of birth-controlled sex. Growing opportunities for beta males would include homosexuality (we're starting to see this already), some form of prostitution, older women, and non-reproductive sex acts like oral sex.
Robin - I just discovered your site by searching on "men's rights" with Google's blog-search function and landing on this article. I must say, you have a fascinating array of topics and interest areas here. I hope to dive into the material in more depth, especially regarding futurism, in the days ahead.
Regarding this particular article/thread, I agree with some of the commenters above that Men's Rights a la Legal Equality and the Men's Mating Game are different but intertwined topics. They do intersect at certain junctions both at the personal and policy level.
At the personal level, many men now have to compete in the open mating free market, as they no longer have the option, willingly or unwillingly, to go down the lifelong monogamous Marriage path. At the policy level the implications for the changing fault-lines of where men's rights, women's rights, equality, and marriage/divorce laws intersect are going to have profound impact on how humans live as socities in the near future.
Here is a good essay, written by Noveseeker a fellow DC-resident of yours, that explores the latter topic. It is titled A General Theory of Human Mating - Past, Present, and Future:
Novaseeker is also one of the contributing writers over at the new Men's Awareness eZine called The Spearhead. You may also want to check out that site when you get a chance.
"It is people like you who believe there are only madonnas"
how so?
see, the difference here - and were i more clever i'd turn this into a seminar, dress like a pirate, and milk some crowds - is that in my particular worldview, women are people first and women second. and so i act accordingly.
not sure how to package that for optimal sheep shearing, however.
Do you consider it a pseudoscientific charade to simply state that people differ in attractiveness? I can't begin to understand that view. This fact is overwhelmingly obvious from personal experience, and indeed there are published studies showing that standards of physical beauty tally worldwide.
I can certainly understand someone's being annoyed about the claims that alphas are monopolizing all the women, claims which might be exaggerated or just false. That makes perfect sense. Those things need to be looked at empirically. As for the degree of anti-womanism, I too find it in bad taste. I'm all for making fun of women as such (or men), even quite scathingly, but I dislike the shrill or coarse invective.
Ah, that makes sense if wolves are basically a monogamous kinship group. As a post below implies, it is broadly seen that when you have groups of unrelated (or loosely related) individuals you see status hierarchies. That also applies to chimps and bonobos. See 'Our Inner Ape' by primatologist Frans de Waal.
Dude, the point is that all the talk from PUAs making up their own scales and definitions is pseudoscientific. It isn't based in any hard science at all, yet these same numbskulls will pick and choose which evidence they want to support their theories, without testing and falsifying the overall structure itself.
Roissy and his commentators are basically PUA's version of communists or christians: hardcore believers that think they have the entire world figured out, and will persecute anyone that disagrees.
I have said it for ten years. The original PUA movement was filled with smart, introspective guys that were artists and didn't think of their movement as a political or social phenomenon (in fact they wanted to keep it secret, for good reason). The PUA movement is now filled with bitter women-hating idiots, gurus with feet of clay, pseudo-scientific jackasses, and the drooling snarling mob.
He treats as exceptional packs containing anything but the breeding pair and their offspring, but he doesn't give numbers - kind of annoying since he is making a slightly polemical point. Numbers would beat the heck out of adjectives.
At any rate, when an animal forms a social group with its offspring it's no surprise that there won't be intense physical struggle for dominance. But when animals group with non-relatives, there quite often is such a struggle and it can be quite physical, from Polistes wasps all the way to chimps and man. Here's a refereed bit on Polistes:
Many Polistes fuscatus colonies are founded by multiple queens (foundresses) in early spring. During colony foundation, foundresses on the same nest (co-foundresses) are extremely aggressive as they fight to establish relative dominance rank (West-Eberhard 1969).
Here's a very good episode of the show Nature (which once was always good). It shows a little bit of complex social stuff - this is one of the large packs Mech considers unusual, and which his paper suggests are likely to contain some unrelated members.
Since this stuff does happen in the wild, even if unusually, it would seem that the stuff seen in captivity is "true" behavior even though most wild individuals do not have the occasion to behave that way in their lifetime.
For the record, this post seems to imply that Will Wilkinson is wrong. The alpha male distinction doesn't exist in natural wolf groupings because these tend to be divided along family lines. But, under the unnatural conditions of the original experiments, it seems that the alpha male distinction does apply.
Interestingly, the opposite seems to be true. These men have realized that individual women are not all good or all bad, but human beings which corresponding weaknesses.
There's more diversity of attitude among PUAs than you seem willing to acknowledge. Consider this popular guru, for example. His default opinion of any girl he meets is “worthless dirty whore until proven otherwise,” and if he does manage to have sex with her, it just confirms his opinion.
It is people like you who believe there are only madonnas, who never cheat, and whores, who do.
Ah, the "I know you are but what am I?" rejoinder. It's not as effective as you may have been led to believe.
You're missing the reality, that women don't so much want multiple partners, they want the alphas and they're happy to share them. So you'd still miss out.
As a lobby, the Men's Rights Movement is a complete failure and I don't think that's gonna change. However it's been moderately successful spreading all over the internet a realistic insight into how the law is unfair to man in matters like divorce or sex crimes and how women and relationships really work. I think that activism in the classic sense is a waste of time. The only option for men is direct action; don't marry; don't cohabitate; if you want to have kids adopt or hire a surrogate mother; boycott as much as possible business that are subservient to feminists; live frugally and avoid as much as possible paying taxes; don't vote for politicians who don't actively oppose anti-male legislation...the system will eventually collapse if enough men don't support it; ironically feminism NEEDS men to survive.
Eric: Of course people differ in attractiveness. The problem with ratings scales and simple categories like [alpha|beta|omega] is that they implicitly assume important characteristics of the space and distribution that are not generally well understood, and for which there is at least some informal evidence against.
Many different things about different people are attractive or unattractive. One person is smart, but physically weak, another is smart and strong, but unusually cruel and disloyal, another is a very good singer, another is a very good cook, another understands emotional/sexual dynamics. So how are these all weighted to determine who is more attractive than who? Using a one-dimensional scale implicitly assumes that there is a very strong correlation between what one man or woman finds attractive and what another does. Is this accurate? There's been some research that suggests certain features are highly correlated with attractiveness across all people and cultures, but does this capture everything about attractiveness? Are we sure that people who score high on these particular confirmed measures (waist/hip ratio for women, facial symmettry, ocular distance, etc.) are *always* individually more attractive to nearly all people than someone else who scores lower on those matters -- no mattter what else is true?
In determining whether, say, facial symettry is attractive, all we have to show is that people find those with greater facial symettry attractive most of the time, all else being equal. To show that attractiveness is one-dimensional, we have to describe a set of traits and a particular weighting of those traits that accurately models attractiveness to nearly all people, even when all else is radically unequal.
Further, using terms such as alpha and beta implies not only that attractiveness or dominance is one-dimensional, but that either the distribution is strongly n-modal, or that particular division points on the scale are far more socially significant than others. Where is the research on that? Anywhere?
My experience suggests that attractiveness is not strongly one-dimensional, nor n-modally distributed. People fall widely distributed over a many dimensional space, and different people put very different weights on many of the dimensions. I often find a person hideous that someone else finds attractive and vice versa.
Although there is clearly substantial agreement on strong weight for certain features, it's not enough for me to say, find my wife any less attractive than a typical pageant contestant even though she is quite fat -- fat is at worst a mild negative for me, and she is very attractive in ways that don't appear to be captured by the pageant norm, but that I value highly. You could say I am simply signaling loyalty and blinded by the relationship when I talk about my wife, but there are strangers I don't know that I consider beautiful who it's clear many other people do not find particularly attractive.
My intuitions are all based on small non-random samples of course, but where is the science with better evidence to which I should bow on which to base these very strong implicit claims? It just doesn't exist. The field is in its infancy with very few strongly supported conclusions.
If somebody wants more money, s/he usually has the ability to get more money. So why do we have that much taxation and social security?
S/he will even get the kind of money s/he wants. That can not be said of sex. So inequality in sex is a far bigger problem than monetary inequality.
"Suppose that most men really wanted lots of one night stands with male celebrities, but that most men simply couldn’t get that. Then it is likely that when questioned, they would say that what they really wanted “serious relationships” with women, for three reasons:"
You see how this reeks of Perfectly General Counterargument? The fact that most men do want to marry (at least in the States) and that, for thousands of years, human men appear to have been either harem-keepers or pair-bonders puts the burden of evidence on you. If your theory is that what men really want is a series of unconnected one-night stands, or a series of friends-with-benefits relationships in the long run, it needs supporting evidence, other than, "That's what I want at my current age," or "that's what a fitness-maximizer operating in a complete cultural vacuum would want in our best current theoretical understanding of evolution, with its own cultural biases."
Thanks TDTD. One thing is for certain: signing the marriage contract will convert even the most alpha of males into a beta. No man can match the full power of the State arrayed against him.
That's a good article, Puma. I like how it explains that the current unjust alimony laws (I fully agree with the men's rights movement here) are not the feminists' ideal; rather, they are a feature of a transitional phase between the pre-sexual revolution social order, and the kind of matriarchal socialism that radical feminists talk about, where marriage as we know it would be obsolete. I think it's interesting that the author favors monogamy and capitalism, but appears fairly resigned about the likelihood of this brave new world coming about; to me he sounds like he's saying, "At least we won't have the status quo."
Basically, I think that I would be all right with the way the mating game would work in such a society (as well as other aspects of life), although (or perhaps because) I am very much a low-beta male. From where I'm standing, "each woman has many partners = good." I'd be more optimistic about my prospects under matriarchy than I would be about traditional polygynous patirarchy. And as for comparing the amount I get laid under the status quo vs. a society dominate by free-love women--well, I couldn't very well have a success rate lower than my current one.
After all, the talk about "sympathy for deprived beta males" misses the point that sympathy isn't the only reason for helping the deprived. There's also the idea that helping the deprived can make the society stabler and more efficient, and thus be a benefit to everyone. It's pretty well agreed that the sex-deprived men in polygynous societies are a force for chaos, and so the matriarchy would have every reason to want as many men as possible to have access to some kind of birth-controlled sex. Growing opportunities for beta males would include homosexuality (we're starting to see this already), some form of prostitution, older women, and non-reproductive sex acts like oral sex.
Robin - I just discovered your site by searching on "men's rights" with Google's blog-search function and landing on this article. I must say, you have a fascinating array of topics and interest areas here. I hope to dive into the material in more depth, especially regarding futurism, in the days ahead.
Regarding this particular article/thread, I agree with some of the commenters above that Men's Rights a la Legal Equality and the Men's Mating Game are different but intertwined topics. They do intersect at certain junctions both at the personal and policy level.
At the personal level, many men now have to compete in the open mating free market, as they no longer have the option, willingly or unwillingly, to go down the lifelong monogamous Marriage path. At the policy level the implications for the changing fault-lines of where men's rights, women's rights, equality, and marriage/divorce laws intersect are going to have profound impact on how humans live as socities in the near future.
Here is a good essay, written by Noveseeker a fellow DC-resident of yours, that explores the latter topic. It is titled A General Theory of Human Mating - Past, Present, and Future:
http://novaresources.blogsp...
Novaseeker is also one of the contributing writers over at the new Men's Awareness eZine called The Spearhead. You may also want to check out that site when you get a chance.
Cheers,Puma
"It is people like you who believe there are only madonnas"
how so?
see, the difference here - and were i more clever i'd turn this into a seminar, dress like a pirate, and milk some crowds - is that in my particular worldview, women are people first and women second. and so i act accordingly.
not sure how to package that for optimal sheep shearing, however.
Do you consider it a pseudoscientific charade to simply state that people differ in attractiveness? I can't begin to understand that view. This fact is overwhelmingly obvious from personal experience, and indeed there are published studies showing that standards of physical beauty tally worldwide.
I can certainly understand someone's being annoyed about the claims that alphas are monopolizing all the women, claims which might be exaggerated or just false. That makes perfect sense. Those things need to be looked at empirically. As for the degree of anti-womanism, I too find it in bad taste. I'm all for making fun of women as such (or men), even quite scathingly, but I dislike the shrill or coarse invective.
Ah, that makes sense if wolves are basically a monogamous kinship group. As a post below implies, it is broadly seen that when you have groups of unrelated (or loosely related) individuals you see status hierarchies. That also applies to chimps and bonobos. See 'Our Inner Ape' by primatologist Frans de Waal.
Dude, the point is that all the talk from PUAs making up their own scales and definitions is pseudoscientific. It isn't based in any hard science at all, yet these same numbskulls will pick and choose which evidence they want to support their theories, without testing and falsifying the overall structure itself.
Roissy and his commentators are basically PUA's version of communists or christians: hardcore believers that think they have the entire world figured out, and will persecute anyone that disagrees.
I have said it for ten years. The original PUA movement was filled with smart, introspective guys that were artists and didn't think of their movement as a political or social phenomenon (in fact they wanted to keep it secret, for good reason). The PUA movement is now filled with bitter women-hating idiots, gurus with feet of clay, pseudo-scientific jackasses, and the drooling snarling mob.
The commentary on this post, which was mislabeled to begin with, is some of the most infantile I have ever seen anywhere. Gag. Grow up, guys.
Here's the refereed gospel from the pen of Mech:
http://article.pubs.nrc-cnr...
He treats as exceptional packs containing anything but the breeding pair and their offspring, but he doesn't give numbers - kind of annoying since he is making a slightly polemical point. Numbers would beat the heck out of adjectives.
At any rate, when an animal forms a social group with its offspring it's no surprise that there won't be intense physical struggle for dominance. But when animals group with non-relatives, there quite often is such a struggle and it can be quite physical, from Polistes wasps all the way to chimps and man. Here's a refereed bit on Polistes:
Many Polistes fuscatus colonies are founded by multiple queens (foundresses) in early spring. During colony foundation, foundresses on the same nest (co-foundresses) are extremely aggressive as they fight to establish relative dominance rank (West-Eberhard 1969).
Here's a very good episode of the show Nature (which once was always good). It shows a little bit of complex social stuff - this is one of the large packs Mech considers unusual, and which his paper suggests are likely to contain some unrelated members.
www.pbs.org%2Fwnet%2Fnature%2Fepisodes%2Fin-the-valley-of-the-wolves%2Fvideo-full-episode%2F4678%2F
Since this stuff does happen in the wild, even if unusually, it would seem that the stuff seen in captivity is "true" behavior even though most wild individuals do not have the occasion to behave that way in their lifetime.
Here's a link to a post about this:
http://scienceblogs.com/clo...
For the record, this post seems to imply that Will Wilkinson is wrong. The alpha male distinction doesn't exist in natural wolf groupings because these tend to be divided along family lines. But, under the unnatural conditions of the original experiments, it seems that the alpha male distinction does apply.
Interestingly, the opposite seems to be true. These men have realized that individual women are not all good or all bad, but human beings which corresponding weaknesses.
There's more diversity of attitude among PUAs than you seem willing to acknowledge. Consider this popular guru, for example. His default opinion of any girl he meets is “worthless dirty whore until proven otherwise,” and if he does manage to have sex with her, it just confirms his opinion.
It is people like you who believe there are only madonnas, who never cheat, and whores, who do.
Ah, the "I know you are but what am I?" rejoinder. It's not as effective as you may have been led to believe.