That Weekly Standard Article, Part 2

In Part 1, we got halfway through this article that was written by Charlotte Allen and published in the Weekly Standard. We left off with the speculation that by evolutionary psychologists that monogamy is not natural for men or women.

All of this is obviously pure speculation, if imaginatively rendered and bolstered by anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies today.

Pick-up artist gurus tend to view things as evolutionary psychologists do, but their interest is in using what works. Actual evolutionary psychologists do a bit more than speculate.

…evolutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don’t get sexier as they get older, at least not in the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility.

Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children’s schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male

I think the fact that his truth is universally denied causes a great deal of suffering, mostly in men. When a wife stops finding her husbands sexually attractive, the common reaction for the husband is to become even less attractive by attempting to satisfy the increasing demands of his wife. In a futile attempt to make her happy, he attempts to do what she says would actually make her happy, allowing her to completely dominate him. The wife need not understand what’s happening at all. She may well fixate on issues that really don’t matter unaware of what truly motivates her to feel as she does, or she may be highly aware that the real problem is that her husband’s a pussy.

This is probably good marketing, but submissive husbands need to understand that a car will not solve their problem.

It’s increasingly common for women to air their husbands’ perceived faults to both their friends and the general public. There is now an entire blog, My Husband Is Annoying, in which an anonymous wife and her guests post pictures of the schlubs they married and freely criticize their beards, sleeping habits, irritating questions, and dopey poses in photos. Slate’s Hanna Rosin called her husband a “kitchen bitch” because he had dared to cook dinner from a recipe that she wanted to try herself. The Atlantic’s Sandra Tsing Loh, going through a divorce because she found her husband less romantic than her adulterous lover, detailed the personal and sexual failings of her friends’ spouses—in print.

Wives who look down at their husbands are going to leave them for men who “make them feel like women” or some such language that their victims won’t be able to make sense of. Decades ago, the social and material costs of divorce were much greater, and simple dissatisfaction was not a legally sufficient cause for divorce. Unsatisfied women were much less likely to leave, but with men being men and all, they were probably less likely to be unsatisfied.

Wives have historically reported less satisfaction from their marriages than husbands, but according to the National Marriage Project’s latest report, their discontent is growing: fewer than 60 percent of wives report that they are “very happy” in their marriages, in contrast to more than 66 percent in 1973. “Women initiate two-thirds of divorces,” W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, told me.

That doesn’t seem a huge difference, although I’d like to see what that number would’ve been in 1957. She briefly mentions the reduced costs of divorce and how the percentage of children growing up in fatherless households has increased from 9 to 26 percent since 1960. Then, she explains her article’s title:

In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:

Our ancestors probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted no more than a few days. .  .  . Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. .  .  . Males may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended them from other men, but .  .  . anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as courtship effort than paternal investment.

That’s a pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is us.

There are some fairly important differences in terms of economics, but I tend to agree with this. This is important because monogamy, an invention of man, seems to have played a major role in the development of Western civilization. It’s not exactly Lord of the Flies yet, but the social order is in a mild-to-moderate state of chaos.

Living in the New Paleolithic can be hard on women, many of whom party on merrily until they reach age 30 and then panic. “They’re at the peak of their beauty in their early 20s—they’re luscious—but the guys their age don’t look as good, so they say to themselves: ‘Why do I want to get married?,’ ” notes Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, who is writing a book about the singles crisis. “Then they get to age 28, 29, and their fertility goes down and they’re not quite so luscious. But the guys their age are starting to make money, they look better, they’ve got self-assurance, and they’ve also got the pick of the 23-year-olds.”

This is something I think the 23-year-olds need to realize. Go ahead, do what you want now, but know that your actions will have consequences.

Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas. That is the underlying message of what is undoubtedly the most deftly written and also the darkest of the seduction-community websites, the blog Roissy in DC…

Do I have any readers who don’t like Roissy? I would expect so; though he writes well, the pictures he paints are uglier than what many people care to see. He has a tendency to exaggerate, generalize, and keep things simple. It’s an effective style that appeals at least as much to emotion as it does to reason.

His blog combines Darwinian analysis, harshly hilarious commentary about the current erotic landscape…, and a sense of impending social meltdown as the family crumbles and beta men are increasingly denied access to women.

Yes, there is a sense I’m getting from multiple sources that more violence is forthcoming from the undersexed and overtaxed.

Roissy’s blog is an unflinching look at female nature at its very worst: the acquisitiveness, the narcissism, the self-absorption, the selfishness, the superficiality, the brainlessness, the wayward lust as powerful as any man’s.

He holds women, especially young attractive women, accountable, something few others dare to do. For that, he’s been called “worse than Tucker Max.”

If Roissy has anything resembling a mentor, it is F. Roger Devlin. …Devlin deftly uses theories of evolutionary psychology to argue that the sexual revolution was essentially aimed at restoring primate-style hypergamy to human females and freeing women to try to capture the attention of and mate with the alpha males of their choosing instead of remaining chaste until their early marriage to a decent and hard-working beta.

And then she ties it all together:

…“Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. The aim of Mystery-style game is to give those betas better odds.

It could also be argued that the growth of the pick-up community, particularly where “natural game” is concerned, is an attempt defeminize men, a rebellion against the new social order, a far more effective rebellion than a black Dodge with a great-sounding exhaust.

Devlin may be spot-on when he writes, “The female sexual revolution, as typified by Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmo, amounted to a program of getting women to follow all their worst instincts” or “Part of the folk wisdom of all ages and peoples has been that sexual attraction is an inadequate basis for matrimony.”

I think that’s a good rule. After this she touches on how underneath all this “misogyny” lies a significant amount of possibly justifiable of anger and resentment toward heartless ex-wives, absent and pussified fathers, irresponsible  mothers, and the new social order.

Roissy often writes of a coming “apocalypse,” a thorough collapse of civilization thanks to the stalling of its reproductive matrix. Right now marriage as an institution is still reasonably intact—but mostly for the demographically shrinking educated classes. The decision to halt the advance of the New Paleolithic ultimately lies with women, the mate-choosing sex, just as it lay with women to bring the hypergamous sexual revolution into being. What are the chances of that? “Women have been told for so long that it doesn’t matter what they do [sexually],” one of Roissy’s regular commenters, an Ottawa historian who goes by the online name of Alias Clio, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think [the female sexual free-for-all] has been good for women, but it’s what they’ve chosen. And it’s always hard for women to see beyond the personal level.”

I don’t entirely agree that the choice is up to women. Men who see the new way as a problem in need of fixing can do more than just sit around waiting to see what women decide. We can choose to hold women accountable. Men played a role in the sexual revolution. They went along with it because free sex sounded like a good idea. What we can do today is hold women accountable for their actions. We can tell them what to do (like Cosmo does now). Fathers can be present in their daughters’ lives and lock them up when they’re not in school. We can quit believing and quit telling them that we’re fine with whatever they choose to do. Expectant grandparents can refuse to financially support irresponsible single daughters who insist on poorly raising their own sex-trophies. Men can also refrain from sexually abusing young girls. I suppose most men already know not to do that and those who do aren’t going to stop because I said so, but as a long time follower of Dr. Drew Pinsky, I think few appreciate the abundance and significance of early childhood trauma.

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

The double-standard existed for a reason, and because it is rooted in our differing genetic traits, it can only be modified and shifted around. I’ve mentioned before that there is a corollary to the slut/stud double-standard is the virgin double-standard. Virginity, while an attractive trait in women, is not an attractive trait in men. In modern times (now and prior to the sexual revolution), men of high status who get caught cheating on their wives are not heroes.

That’s about it for the article. I went through it all, but there’s a lot of detail I didn’t include here. One thought I have is that Ms. Allen may have tied everything together a bit too well. Social upheaval may well be on the horizon, but sexual frustration is not the only cause. We didn’t get to where we are today from feminism alone. We’ve had several generations partially raised by state-run schools, with each subsequent generation less prepared to raise their own children than the one prior. A significant portion of population also relies on the state for material support, negating the need for fathers. With more and more children in single-parent homes, I strongly suspect that child abuse, particularly of the sexual nature, has increased. Early childhood trauma changes the way the brain develops and leads to pathological behavior latter in life. Also, she never mentioned anything about mens’ rights activism or the MGTOW movement.