Sharing is caring?

Heartiste from a few years ago:

The verdict is in: Women want men to cheat on them. Oh sure, they don’t *consciously* want their men to cheat, but unbeknownst to all but the most self aware women, their ginas tingle uncontrollably for men who can — and do — score some poon on the side.

In the vast majority (though likely not all, female sexual variation being what it is) of cases, there's no question that the first part of the assertion--that women tend to be attracted to men who other women are attracted to--is indisputable. Women want you to be capable of cheating. Then again, men want the women they are banging--at least the ones who arouse them more than their own pillows do--to be able to cheat, too, but if they've signed up for the relationship thing, virtually none of them actually want the women to go through with it (if you're not a regular reader here, yes, I'm quite aware that men and women are anatomically, biologically, psychologically, politically, sexually, emotionally, cognitively, etc etc different from one another).

What about the latter part, though? Do they actually want you to dip your pen in another woman's ink? It's difficult to make sense of why, from an evolutionary perspective, females would want their mates to sire offspring with (and presumably provide resources to) other women. The hindbrain isn't going to make distinctions between copulation and procreation when it comes to their men getting with other women, so this is not a straw man argument, it's the logical extension of what Heartiste claims.

The following table shows the percentages of men who were (still) married at the time of their participation in the survey by whether or not they had ever cheated on their spouses and the percentages of men who were divorced or separated when given the survey by whether or not they had ever cheated on their spouses while they were married. For contemporary relevance and racial confounding, all responses are from 2000 onward and only non-Hispanic whites are included, respectively. The relevant questions are posed in such a way that those who have never married are necessarily excluded (N = 3,218):

White men	Still Married	Sep/Divorced
Cheaters	16.0	37.2
Faithful	84.0	62.8

Men from failed marriages are more than twice as likely to have cheated before those marriages officially came apart than are men from marriages that are still in tact.

No, this does not obviously constitute a refutation of Heartiste's assertion. The limitations of a broad based survey like the GSS preclude digging as deeply as would be required for us to take a shot at evaluating that.

For one, we don't have data on who initiated the divorces and separations--how frequently do the men who are cheating leave the marriage because they're ready to trade in the old ride for a new model or simply go back to leasing altogether? How frequently do the women who find out about the cheating break off the marriage as a consequence? We also lack data on if the women who have been cheated on--whether the men who did the cheating are still married or since separated or divorced--were aware of the cheating when it took place, subsequently became aware of it, or remained in the dark up to the point when the responses were given. Finally, we don't know if the married men who have cheated on a spouse were, at the time they partook in the survey, still married to the women they cheated on or if they'd divorced and then remarried someone new (though knowledge on that front would probably just accentuate the relationship between cheating and divorce rather than attenuating or inverting it).

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY(1-2), MARITAL(1)(3-4), RACECEN1(1), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1)

Liberty and equality, stoics and epicureans

Just as there is an enormous amount of tension between the consular ideals of liberty and equality, so too is there in aspiring to provide the best health care available while simultaneously striving to make health care ubiquitous and universally accessible. Anti-Gnostic does a great job succinctly articulating as much, with the following excerpt of demonstrating particular perspicacity:

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let's take those evil capitalists out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. ... 

We are in the realm of social justice. Sounds so nice, until we answer the question: how much of your children's money do you want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others? 

Because you can spend ALL of your money on futile care [or, by extension, the government can spend it for you]. Literally every last penny.

Worth reading in full.

Abstractly, the strong appeal of liberty--potentially even stronger than that of equality in the much of the public's mind--is why, despite actual policy disagreements on crucial issues like immigration, I'm still excited by the rise of guys like Rand Paul.

Anyway, Heartiste first brought the above to my attention. Speaking of the galactic overlord, he gently censured his occasionally inimical dux for insinuating that the Game approach to classifying males has it backwards due to the tendency of betas to outbreed alphas (which should mean even more cleaning up by the remaining alphas!). At the risk of getting lost in semantic weeds, I'm fine granting the Manosphere its preferred terms and consequent definitions and then making empirical observations free of normative judgments from within this framework. Hopefully it's illuminating or at least interesting. All the better if it keeps our hero's skills at their sharpest.

To the extent that I'm grated at all by Heartiste, it's in his seeming celebration of what amounts to an ennui-inducing mix of realized hedonism and nihilism. His meaning is often as nuanced as his tongue is silver, and I suspect that beneath all the veils lies a volition more inclined towards using sexual conquest as a means to an end rather than an end to indulge in for it's own sake, despite protestations to the contrary. Oh yes he doth protest, but I don't buy it, which is why I'm compelled to play the role of affectionate gadfly rather than whiny hater.

This isn't all merely a philosophical rehashing of Stoic vs. Epicurean, either. You might not care about propagation, but propagation cares about you. It's plausible to imagine that in the not-so-distant future pleasure surpassing that coming to a "Super Alpha" on an A-game night will be made available to all on demand without any real life human interaction being required at all. Just as the reproductive edge has shifted away from alphas and towards betas over at least the last half century, so another seismic shifting in fecundity may be just around the bend. I want kindred souls to be ready for it.

Finally, a post like this wouldn't be complete without an added wrinkle or two. The data are a couple of decades old, but the GSS queried respondents in 1994 on whether or not they'd watched any pornography in the preceding year. Cross-referencing this with reported sex frequency, we find that men who had sex less than once a month over the same period of time were considerably less likely to have viewed pornographic material than men who had sex more frequently than that were to have viewed any (18.2% and 38.1%, respectively, N = 183). For more contemporary, if proxied, relevance, using male respondent data from 2000 onward, we find that men who report not having sex at all in the last year are more than twice as likely as men who enjoy it 4+ times per week to support an outright ban on pornographic material (36.9% and 16.5%, respectively, with a sizeable chunk of that 16.5% of 4+ times per week group presumably being comprised of social and religious conservatives). Pornography, at least from this angle, appears to be more of a supplement to real life carnality than a substitute for it.

Undoubtedly there are a lot of frustrated betas out there who would love to possess an alpha prowess with women, but there are also a lot of them who just aren't that interested in recreational sex (and I suspect the latter has been and continues to increase as a proportion of the total male population). This probably goes some way in explaining why the unending comment threads Heartiste generates are mostly populated by alphas echoing the taunts and diminutions of the beta no shows, who, while constituting a majority of the population, are far less likely to be found than sheer numbers would suggest. How much attention is this Silent Majority paying?

GSS variables used: XMOVIE1, SEXFREQ(0-2)(3-6)(0)(6), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1), PORNLAW(1)(2-3)

Let's talk about self reported sex baby

Without fear or apology, as is his wont, Roissy/Heartiste has really stuck his neck out there as of late. If he is able to parlay his vast reach into the spread and absorption of HBD realism, then it is with hesitation and angst that I risk appearing as an adversary here. The man is fighting hard and gaining ground in Cisalpine Gaul, not piffling away in the swamps of Ravenna.

That paean sung, a couple of points of contention. Heartiste quotes one of his commenters at length, the remarkable portion being excerpted below. The commenter is referring to male-to-male competition in the field:

Sometimes if he’s frustrated enough he’ll try to tool me on my looks or money etc, something he puts value on so he thinks I’ll put value on, but 1) he’s just reacting to me at that point so he sabotages himself further in the girls’ eyes because the higher value person is the one who reacts less to the other person, and 2) I don’t build my self-worth around those external things so I’m not phased by it and will join in making fun of myself and be self-depreciating because I know my worth internally and know it has nothing to do with whatever he’s making fun of [emphasis mine]…the end result is if he does this, he takes himself from Check with the girls and puts himself in Check-mate and it’s over.

It is this sort of mentality that so frequently irks me in Game discussions. A lot of it is great--eat better, lift heavy things, be bold (even audacious!), have confidence, don't put up with tripe, celebrate your virility, know that there is no question that women love, love, love high status so get off your X-Box and go attain it--but the hoodwinking and deception undermines all of that (as well as the notion of female sexual selection being calibrated in any serious way that can't be fooled with a bit of scripting, and thus too the notion that female detection mechanisms are biologically serious). Put value on that stuff that he's tooling you on, too, because it's good for you, for women, and for society as a whole.

A cad isn't a flattering thing to be (high notch count, yes, but not necessarily high quality, and also disproportionately childless, leftist, black, unmarried, irreligious, and uneducated). Dominate them just like you dominate everything else in life. That's the alpha worth aspiring to.

Switching gears, Heartiste has ribbed quant bloggers like myself in the past on multiple occasions, specifically about our reliance on the questionable reliability of self-reported data on sexual behavior (although in fairness to Heartiste, he is more concerned about female misrepresentation than his is about male fabrication).

When the results are on his side, though, he's quick to toss that caution to the wind, as he did the other day in reporting on and analyzing a study showing that perceived male dominance trumps perceived male physical attractiveness when it comes to predicting the number of bangs a guy has. Dominance was measured by male raters assessing a man's perceived "fighting ability" while attractiveness was measured by female raters assessing a man's perceived "short-term attractiveness". These results were then cross-referenced with each evaluated man's self-reported number of lifetime sexual partners.

A cynic might wonder if there's a tendency for aggressive, high-testosterone types who missed humanity's gracility boat to inflate their numbers more than stencil-necked pretty boys who get mistaken for Justin Bieber do.

Parenthetically, while a little skepticism is always healthy, I put a fair amount of confidence responses. They don't often get us to the unadulterated truth, but they're something, and unless there are systematic rather than across-the-board skews, they are almost always useful for, if not obtaining absolute delineations, then at least for comparative purposes.

With regards to the study in question, I suspect that the researchers' (and Heartiste's) readings into the results get us part of the way there, and that the tendency for aggressive, pugilistic guys to engage in both more puffery and more intense and frequent sex seeking than slimmer, more laid back men do gets us down the rest of the road.

In any case, more researched is surely required!

Game and moral foundations

Roissy enjoys taking pot shots at yours truly and I'm happy to take them since they double the blog's web traffic whenever they land. Game isn't about male-to-male dominance, so what he'd have the cajones to say in person is immaterial. Most recently, he ribbed me for insinuating that the ultimate arbiter of alpha status among men is procreation.

The alpha/beta dichotomy (or alpha/beta/omega trichotomy, to complicate things a bit) strikes me as oversimplified, but the inherent simplicity is in many ways a feature rather than a bug. It facilitates the perception of a state of ceteris paribus in the reader that allows him to evaluate behaviors in a vacuum, the prescribed ones being characteristic of alphas, the proscribed ones being of betas, and the absence of any behavior at all being of omegas. Casanovas can still make bad moves and Aguecheeks are capable of making good ones. Making said good moves and avoiding bad ones is the primary pedagogical purpose of Game blogs, Roissy's being, in my estimation, the creme de la creme.

Digressing aside, beyond the difficulty in treating the terms as nouns given that they function better as adjectives, that's not exactly an accurate characterization. To the contrary, I've merely pointed out, while granting and subsequently employing Game terminology, that betas appear to do a better job passing along their genes than alphas do. Game philosophy is essentially existentialist and nihilistic, so the thought of avoiding ungrateful spawn to tend to and pay for shouldn't upset guys like Roissy, who would rather sit poolside than change diapers. Hard to deny that there's a lot of appeal to aspiring to such a lifestyle. While you may not care about reproduction, though, reproduction cares about you.

Conservatives, broadly defined, however, tend to operate on different premises. Bringing Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory into the mix, they put a lot more emphasis on the loyalty/betrayal aspect of morality than do PUAs, who tend towards liberalism (for a fuller profiling of alpha demographic characteristics, see here), and what could demonstrate more of a disregard for loyalty to one's own family (or nation, which is was more-or-less a very extended family) than blithely allowing the bloodline to be severed? The concept of duty has beta written all over it. Parenthetically, I've taken Haidt's self-identifying morality questionnaire and scored highest on the loyalty dimension.

Another dimension of morality that is close to the hearts of conservatives but held in lower esteem on the left is that of authority (the absence or undermining of which is subversion). Game operates on the premise that men should insinuate higher status than they are due, obfuscating the social order and creating a free rider problem, the societal costs for which betas must bear. Fake it until you make it. Maybe. Or more realistically, just fake it, period. Game is a way for guys who aren't where they'd like to be in terms of "money/looks/fame" to be (optimistically) or to convince themselves (cynically) that they are at least on par with, if not superior to, those who have more money, better looks, and greater fame than they do.

Beyond differences in moral perspectives, the prescription that every man can be king (which, in fairness, Roissy has tempered on multiple occasions, though it's often lost on his legions of commenters) seems to be at odds with biological realities (link via Ray Sawhill).

Game is founded on the premise that female detection mechanisms that have been honed by selection (natural and sexual) throughout human evolutionary history do a pretty crummy job at what they're commissioned to do. The degree to which they fail is open to debate--and as aforementioned, Roissy's assessment is more attuned to reality (they do an okay job, but they're far from precise) than those made by some of his more zealous minions (they basically don't exist)--but it's axiomatic that they are significantly flawed. 

This is in contrast to the detection mechanisms of men, which are far more perspicacious than those possessed by women are. Science has thrown a few wrenches into man's well-oiled machine with plastic surgery, breast enhancement, and the like, but prior to World War I, women were almost powerless to do much of anything to influence male detection mechanisms.

Finally, it's unclear to me why alphas should despise betas, since more betas means easier pickings and less competition for alphas (not to mention the fruits of civilization more generally), yet they seem to, quite viscerally. On the other hand, it's easy to see why betas should despise alphas.

Tangentially, Roissy should survey his readers on their political leanings. He's commissioned interactive polls on multiple occasions in the past, and while he's part of the dark enlightenment and presumably wouldn't self-describe as a leftist in any way, I'd suspect that he's to the right of most of his readership.

Better than one in a million, anyway

Why do those who write about Game tend to overestimate the prevalence of cuckoldry over the course of human history? Fairly recently, Roissy did just this without seemingly even realizing it. Commenting on a study showing a misattribution rate for putative biological fathers of around 1% in Germany, he deftly claimed that he wasn't surprised they were so low (!), and in fact would've estimated contemporary rates to be even lower:

I’m not here to argue that the 1% figure is wrong. In fact, the 1% figure is higher than I assumed. Look at it this way: That recorded 1% cuckoldry rate is more than 30 TIMES the US recorded rape rate of 0.03%. ... 

A flaw in assuming present-day cuckoldry rates align with historical cuckoldry rates is the fairly recent widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion. How many women who sleep with interloper males are using birth control? Probably most, and more so if those women are higher SES.

Mentioned in the comments of the post he linked to is research from geneticist Bryan Sykes showing an estimated non-paternity rate of 1.3% per generation in England extending all the way back to 1300 AD, and one of our national treasures, Gregory Cochran, mentions that similar historical results have been found in the Irish and among the Boers. While Roissy reasonably presumes that women of higher socio-economic status do a better job of keeping extramarital dalliances from producing living evidence of their cheating than prole women do, Steve Sailer asserts that it's likely those with surnames that survived over several generations (including Sykes, the surname the eponymous Bryan Sykes used on the way to concluding an estimated 1.3% cuckoldry rate) were more put together and orderly--that is, of higher SES--than those that did not survive the test of time.

So if today's upper class women are better at avoiding procreation from affairs than lower class women are when, prior to modern contraception, non-paternity occurred in fewer than 1-in-50 births, well, it has been--for at least a millenia, anyway--a marginal phenomenon, and it continues to be so today, perhaps even more fringe now than it was in the past.

Another prospective reason PUAs overestimate cuckolding rates may be due to selection bias, with susceptibility to Game tactics and class being inversely correlated to some extent. That old bugaboo the GSS shows that among married or formerly married women, those on the lower half of the class structure are more likely to cheat on their husbands than those on the upper half are (14.7% of those in the lower/working classes to 11.1% of those in the middle/upper classes, n = 10,778). And of course marriage rates are lower in the lower/working classes than they are in the middle/upper classes. Infidelity rates are presumably higher among those in unmarried relationships than they are among those in married relationships, so the overall class gap in cheating rates is likely wider still.

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY, CLASS(1-2)(3-4), SEX(2)

Infield annihilation of PUAs?

Speaking of me, I have an idea to serve as a sort of dark complement to videos of PUAs in action. It came to me the other night at a Christmas party. My girlfriend showed me a text her ex-boyfriend sent her, the fourth or fifth she's showed me over the last month or so. Without going into too much detail, he's a good looking guy with an interest in and pretty natural grasp of game, but I know she's thoroughly committed, not least because of what hacking someone's facebook can tell you.

That they were unprovoked aside, the texts don't betray that. Up to this point, I'd scoffed and said something to the effect of "you actually had anything to do a joker that desperate, heh," whenever she got one. This time, though, I took her phone and responded:

This is AE. Your lame attempts are pathetic. She's moved WAY up. Stop wasting our time. Don't make me tell you again.

To which he wrote:

It doesn't look like she's moved WAY up from where I'm standing, haha. I'm in a great relationship now ... [lots of blah blah blah] ... I keep in touch with my exes. If she doesn't want me to, she can tell me.

Wrote my girlfriend:

Please stop texting me. I don't know why you keep doing it. I don't have anything to say to you.

She pleaded with me to just drop it, but I'm not one to turn down a little mano-a-mano. I shot back:

You're a janitor who lives with his mom in the ghetto. I could buy and sell your sorry ass ten times over. Or if you'd prefer I could just beat the living shit out of you. If you're ever unfortunate enough to see me in person, you'll wish you had never been born.

A bit of a calculated risk because I suppose he could have reported it to the police as a physical threat, but what the hell, life's short and when you have arms like I do, the only thing you have to worry about in throwing down the gauntlet is the long arm of the law. Or someone who's packing, or who spots you from the behind the wheel while you're walking down the street, or... okay, okay, enough. The point is that as long as the other guy doesn't cheat, I can say whatever I want to just about whoever I want to. Anyway, he's seen me via facebook so, unsurprisingly, he stopped at that point and hasn't said anything since.

This little incident served as the catalyst for the idea of making videos that have fun toying with alphas in action. The formula is simple--look for guys who are peacocking, shadow them from a distance until they go to work, and then disrupt them. Hell, it could be made beneficial for PUAs in the form of tutorials on how to deal with AMOG interlocutors while still--if the video maker is the less magnanimous type--allowing the bullies to have fun. That is, he engages the PUAs for pedagogical purposes, but knows that eventually victory is almost assuredly his because he has the potential nuclear option of escalating to physical confrontation, one in which he possesses nukes and the PUA being persecuted doesn't. There are prerequisites, of course, the primary one being the body and body language required to be able to start and finish stuff with unknown men.

Philosophically, it wouldn't be the most benign undertaking imaginable, but pickup artistry is hardly good for civilizational stability* and there are certainly worse outlets for some guys' sadistic proclivities. I could have some fun with this. Seed planted.

* It's important to separate the PUA subset from general game techniques, which are inherently neutral, contingent upon application. They're tools that can be employed for a whole host of purposes, some good, others evil.

Unyoked alphas and bountiful betas

The GSS has a great question that, according to the Game narrative, gets right at a crucial distinction between alphas and betas: Alphas do not put the objects of their affection before themselves, while betas do.

The question asks the respondent if he agrees with the statement that he would rather suffer himself than have a woman he is in a relationship with suffer. Being openly willing to suffer for a lover is clearly the mark of a beta. If you're engaged in pumping-and-dumping, the girl is in the process of suffering for your pleasure even as the GSS question is being considered. Your answer is obvious.

Responses are on a five point scale, from strongly agreeing to strongly disagreeing. Not surprisingly, a majority of men strongly agree--chivalrous ideals are not dead, and by definition betas outnumber alphas. Where the alpha-beta dividing line among the four other responses is placed is contingent upon what percentage of the total male population is alpha and what percentage is beta. Of course the Game narrative does not maintain that an absolute dichotomy exists, but for empirical purposes distinctions have to be made somewhere.

In his definitive post on what constitutes an alpha, Heartiste puts the low end ("lesser") alpha at 7 on the 0-10 point scale, while Adonis ("greater alpha") is obviously at 10. Since it's actually an 11 point scale, the 0-6 beta and omega range comprises 64% of the population while the 7-10 alpha range comprises the remaining 36%. Separating the "strongly agree" beta response from the other four yields a 69.3%/30.7% split, corresponding very well to the chart included in Heartiste's post.

As Heartiste is one of the Game narrative's intellectual giants, this is how I'll define the alpha/beta split for the purposes of considering differences in fecundity between alphas and betas. The following table shows the mean number of children for alpha and beta males. To avoid racial confounding, only non-Hispanic whites are included. To allow adequate time for procreation to occur, men aged 40-65 are considered. As the question was posed in 2004, it has contemporary relevance:

Status	Kids
Alphas	1.68
Betas	2.08

Betas make more babies than alphas do. This should be warmly received by everyone! From the beta perspective, their chivalrous instincts are out propagating the caddish tendencies of alpha males, which presumably indicates a virtuous cycle of increasing chivalry in the future. From the alpha perspective, this portends a future where the jungle is increasingly populated by inept beta hunters, allowing alphas to poach kittens and cougars with ever greater ease.

Parenthetically, why is so much scorn heaped upon betas by alphas? The basic concept of supply and demand suggests that the relatively fewer alphas there are, the easier their pickings become. Every man may need a harem, but the math doesn't work out for every man to have one!

Also, see here for a detailed look at the profile of today's alpha male.

GSS variables used: AGAPE1(1)(2-5), RACECEN1(1), AGE(40-65), SEX(1), CHILDS

Which way to Happy Happy Village?

Oh, so you say all you want is to just be happy? By way of ordinary least squares, here are the multiple regression coefficients for nine variables that are, in the conventional wisdom, arguably putative predictors of happiness, with the obligatory qualifier that some component of sunniness, of yet undefined magnitude, is innate. For contemporary relevance and to avoid racial confounding, responses are from 2000 onward and only non-Hispanic whites are included. Asterisks indicate statistical significance at 95% confidence.

First, for men:

Age -- .27* (youth = happiness)
Marital status -- .24* (marriage = happiness)
Class -- .24* (higher status = happiness)
Church attendance -- .11* (worship = happiness)
Education -- .06 (more education = happiness)
Political orientation -- .04 (conservatism = happiness)
Children -- .04 (procreation = happiness)
Number of female partners -- .00 (no relationship at all)
IQ (wordsum) -- .00 (no relationship at all)

The parenthetical stuff is there to clarify which direction the correlation runs in and shouldn't be interpreted as anything close to an absolute statement on causation.

Being young, married, blue-blooded, and active in church are predictors of higher levels of self-reported happiness (I bet Mitt Romney is and has always been a really happy guy). Lisa didn't quite get it right with her graph showing a vigorous inverse correlation between happiness and intelligence, but what one focuses his cognitive horsepower on probably matters more than the number of stallions he has in the reigns.

This more-or-less meshes with the Game perspective--youthfulness and high socio-economic status are definite pluses, and marriage, while scorned as an emasculating deathtrap, does indicate some level of attraction to other women, which can potentially be used to a philander's advantage. While notches in the belt don't obviously bring happiness, they don't push it away, either.

And for women:

Marital status -- .26* (marriage = happiness)
Class -- .24* (higher status = happiness)
Education -- .23* (more education = happiness)
Age -- .18* (youth = happiness)
Church attendance -- .09* (worship = happiness)
Children -- .05 (procreation = happiness)
Political orientation -- (.03) (liberalism = happiness)
Number of male partners -- .03 (fewer partners = happiness)
IQ (wordsum) -- .00 (no relationship at all)

Not much in the way of substantive differences between the sexes, except that educational attainment is a relatively stronger predictor of happiness among women than it is among men (perhaps because social status is tied relatively more strongly to educational attainment among women while tied relatively more strongly to wealth among men), and youth is a stronger predictor of happiness among men than it is among women (or, more precisely, old age is a better predictor of unhappiness among men than it is among women).

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), SEX, RACECEN1(1), HAPPY(1)(3), WORDSUM, EDUC, MARITAL, CLASS, AGE, ATTEND, NUMMEN, NUMWOMEN, POLVIEWS, CHILDS

Let's be butt buddies until we get to know each other better

Roissy calls me out, and because I'm always game, I'll pick the gauntlet up and gently tap him with it. In a post where he ruminates on the reasons why educated women are far more likely to remain virgins than uneducated women are, he writes:

How do girls rationalize their lying about their sex lives? By inventing false truths. Anal and oral sex among young women are way up, but hey, it’s not the vagina, so STILL A VIRGIN. The hamster is happy. Perhaps this explains better why educated women have higher “virginity” rates — they are using a very loose definition of virginity. And wouldn’t it be just like a smartie to wordplay her way out of an uncomfortable self-assessment? I suspect the Audacious One would be interested in GSSing his way through this byline to the sexual behavior annals. Annals. Heh.

The GSS doesn't penetrate the subject deeply enough to address the issue at hand, though in newer questions regarding sexual activity, it does specify "by 'sex' we mean vaginal, oral, or anal sex". The variable I've previously employed (and see Jason Malloy presaging Charles Murray's Coming Apart a couple of years before it was written in the comments) extends back into the late eighties, however, and the GSS has left the question unaltered since it's introduction, which is good for consistency but bad for satisfying our chateau owner.

In the link offered, Roissy provides a hypothetical example:

Well, there was Tommy, but he only did me in the ass, so that doesn’t count. Then there was Trent, but I only gave him blowjobs. I told him that I wanted to save myself for marriage. Then the asshole left me! And there was Brian, but except for a few BJs and a tug job behind the 7-11, I never gave it up to him. And…. let’s see, who else… oh yeah, Joe, Chris, some guy who called himself the Dude, Adam, Hoight, Anfernee… mostly anal, some mouth love. But I didn’t give my virginity to any of them. Yay me! So… I didn’t have sex with any men.

This appears to be the exception, not the rule. Roissy will recall excerpting William Saletan later on at said link:

Only 6 percent of women who had anal sex in their last encounter did so in isolation. Eighty-six percent also had vaginal sex. Seventy-two percent also received oral sex. Thirty-one percent also had partnered masturbation.

I'm stringing together different chains of Roissy's thought here and presenting them as if they're meant to be sequiturs, which, if my purpose was polemical (it's not), would be unfair.

Anyway, a handy table from a comprehensive sexual survey out of the Indiana University shows that past the age of 15, vaginal intercourse is the most commonly engaged in sexual activity (besides solo masturbation) for men and women of all subsequent age groups, ahead of oral and anal. So, at least according to self-reported survey data, there aren't many women out there giving head and being buggered who aren't also having their villages pillaged (and thus presumably not being counted as virgins).

More of the 'experimental' stuff, but mostly confined to the people who are already doing the traditional stuff, too. It's complementary more than it's substitutional. As social stigmas on various forms of foreplay crumble away--and this seems particularly descriptive in the case of anal sex (if this can be considered foreplay), which until as recently as 2003 was illegal in fourteen states--it's not surprising that "front or back?" is joining "missionary or rider?" in the list of questions lovers pose to one another ahead of getting busy.

Roissy, Randall, and Charles

Reacting to Roissy's chastising of Charles Murray, Randall Parker makes an assertion I've seen repeated in various forms and in various places:

Females basically playing out of their league have brought upon us the decline of marriage for the lower class and many social pathologies that have come as a result.

I wonder where the actual evidence for this is. Women who end up as single mothers tend to congregate at the bottom of society, as do the men who impregnate them and then don't stick around. It's not like Ryan Gosling is going around the trailer park knocking up prole women left and right.

Seems to me that erasing the social stigmas that used to be attached to the debased behaviors of the lower classes, men and women alike, as well as the dire financial problems that used to almost inevitability arise as a consequence of such debased behaviors, is the biggest reason we find America's lower classes in the state that they're in today.

Roissy accuses Murray of dereliction in his failure to assign more blame for the decline in marriage rates on women who go cock carouseling with alpha they can't convince to stick around. But the putative alphas who are tagging these women are low status men from the bottom of society, just as are said women being tagged.

That, indeed, is exactly Murray's point--the shaming strategies Roissy suggests employing apply mostly to low status women. SWPL women pretty much behave exactly as they did two generations ago. Parenthetically, Roissy highlights the abstract of one study by two University of Michigan feminists that appears to contradict the data marshaled by Murray in Coming Apart. Roissy proceeds to imprudently claim that "in one fell swoop, a cherished feminist and beta male shibboleth gets crushed into dust and blown away", not least because far from crushing a foundation of modern feminism, it endorses it. The opening vignette might as well include this feminist favorite.

Roissy's female shaming complements Murray's male shaming. Ideally, Murray would've included some variation of them in the WSJ article Roissy points to, in outlining his desire for a broader cultural shift among those in the upper-middle- and middle-upper classes away from haughty non-judgmentalism and towards censuring the degenerate behaviors of the working- and underclasses.

Why it's okay to screech at the Manosphere

Writes OneSTDV:

The $PLC did recently profile the so-called "Manosphere" as a community rife with "guttural hatred" ...

The race realist blogosphere, loosely defined as the sites on my blogroll, does not have a similar profile on $PLC. $PLC only has one article about Steve Sailer on their site, so one presumes the rest of the HBD-osphere has not caught their attention yet (or maybe this week we'll be in for a surprise!). One wonders though why exactly the HBD-osphere doesn't have its own section on the site as does the Manosphere.

One excerpts the $PLC's condemnation, from which at least part of the answer is contained within:

Some of the sites make an attempt ... to back their arguments with facts.

That's actually quite a generous concession for the $PLC to make, and I suspect it's lacking in sincerity. That the manosphere and game blogs are virtually fact-free zones is a big reason why the $PLC and associates don't fear them as much as they do HBDers, who they putatively ignore, though I know Steve Sailer in particular is monitored very heavily by a lot of different people and organizations. One observes:

It is indeed very perplexing that there is exactly one article on SPLC about Sailer and it's just excoriating CNN for citing him awhile back.

Similarly, Media Matters has gone after him, too, but in a similarly indirect way, for example, hammering MSNBC for providing him a forum on cable television and censuring the Washington Times for excerpting him. Not only do they not want HBD ideas entertained, they don't even want anyone to be aware that they exist.

A Roissy by any other name

Today Roissy (look, if I start writing "Heartiste, the artist formerly known as Roissy", the next time I step onto the field I'll have to expect the divine justice I receive when someone inevitably drubs my faggy ass!) wrote on the comparability of benefits received from marriage and long-term cohabitation, pointing to a previous post here as evidence of what happens when that comparability is ignored. My response follows.

---

My man,

I realize you’re making a rhetorical point, and I even appreciate a little condescension because it points a lot of your readers my way, but I’m certainly aware of your concerns re: the GSS. Here’s the brief post preceding the one you linked to, in response to the assertion that marriage means, as you so eloquently phrase it, “crossed arms and clamped pussies”:

In aggregate, of course, married men get more sex than unmarried men do. But that’s because the latter category is dragged down by men who are unattractive or uninterested in women.

What about those guys who are able to successfully play the field? In addition to variety, do they also enjoy greater frequency? Among those aged 22-36, sexual frequency for married men (4.15) is marginally higher than it is for unmarried men who have racked up double-digit counts (4.10).

Getting married will tend to net you about the same amount of snatch time as a go getter gets. The treasure chest won’t be clamped shut, though your prize won’t glitter as much.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), AGE(22-36), SEX(1), MARITAL(1)(2-5), NUMWOMEN(10-250)

I don’t have a dog in the fight, I just like rummaging through the data. But if, instead of writing primarily for and to the benefit of silver-tongued alphas as you do, we think of the above as being relevant to a broader and presumably majority-beta audience, the point that marriage (or long-term commitment, if you prefer–marriage just happens to be the only reliably way to track it in broad-based social surveys of which the GSS is the best of the best) does generally offer men who aren’t adept at playing the field a tolerable sexual lifestyle is at least worth considering.

Your filter, and your subsequent reactions to the things that come in through it, aren’t universally productive upon reception, even if they are perfectly valid for your target audience. By way of analogy, you’re like the entrepreneur who offers tips for the self-employed to make them more successful in their ventures while simultaneously belittling the poor suckers who go work for someone else. But a lot of those corporate cogs don’t have what it takes to run their own businesses and, despite your best advice, are staring down economic ruin if they go the route you prescribe. Many of them will be better off working for someone else. As someone who is grounded in the realities of HBD, it’s difficult for me to conceive it being otherwise.

Profile of an alpha

Game, as it currently exists, is a qualitative subject rather than a quantitative one. That qualitative narrative bumps up uncomfortably against the hard data available, so the latter is either minimized or dismissed outright. While this is not the primary reason I find that Game and human biodiversity make strange bedfellows (the primary reason being that the utility of Game is inversely related to the importance of HBD), I'm inherently skeptical of anything that lives by anecdote alone.

Consequently, I seek to interject empirical information into the subject of Game whenever I am able to. We've previously seen that in the US sexual activity has remained steady or declined gently over the last couple of decades, that men of all races with fewer partners have more children than men with many partners do, and that men who cheat have more kids than men who don't but women who cheat have fewer kids than women who do not.

Now, we'll try and add some insights into the demographic characteristics of alphas and betas. Propitiously, the GSS has a great question that, according to the Game narrative, gets right at a crucial distinction between alphas and betas: Alphas do not put the objects of their affection before themselves, while betas do.

The question asks the respondent if he agrees with the statement that he would rather suffer himself than have a woman he is in a relationship with suffer. Being openly willing to suffer for a lover is clearly the mark of a beta. If you're engaged in pumping-and-dumping, the girl is in the process of suffering for your pleasure even as the GSS question is being considered. Your answer is obvious.

Responses are on a five point scale, from strongly agreeing to strongly disagreeing. Not surprisingly, a majority of men strongly agree--chivalrous ideals are not dead, and by definition betas outnumber alphas. Where the alpha-beta dividing line among the four other responses is placed is contingent upon what percentage of the total male population is alpha and what percentage is beta. Of course the Game narrative does not maintain that an absolute dichotomy exists, but for empirical purposes distinctions have to be made somewhere.

In his definitive post on what constitutes an alpha, Roissy puts the low end ("lesser") alpha at 7 on the 0-10 point scale, while Adonis ("greater alpha") is obviously at 10. Since it's actually an 11 point scale, the 0-6 beta and omega range comprises 64% of the population while the 7-10 alpha range comprises the remaining 36%. Separating the "strongly agree" beta response from the other four yields a 69.3%/30.7% split, corresponding very well to the chart included in Roissy's post. As Roissy is one of the Game narrative's intellectual giants, this is how the alpha/beta split is defined in what proceeds.

The following tables show what percentage of men in each of the respective demographic categories are alphas and what percentage are betas. As the question was only posed in 2004 (622 men answered the question), Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans are combined--much to the President's relief--into the "other" category:

Party	Alpha	Beta
Republican	24.7%	75.3%
Independent	27.6%	72.4%
Democrat	37.2%	62.8%

Philosophy	Alpha	Beta
Conservative	25.4%	74.6%
Moderate	30.1%	69.9%
Liberal	40.7%	59.3%

Race	Alpha	Beta
White	27.9%	72.1%
Black	42.9%	57.1%
Other	39.5%	60.5%

Kids?	Alpha	Beta
Yes	25.0%	75.0%
No	41.1%	58.9%

Married?	Alpha	Beta
Yes	22.6%	77.4%
No	42.5%	57.5%

Go to bar	Alpha	Beta
At least once a month	36.1%	63.9%
Less than monthly	26.7%	73.3%

Go to church	Alpha	Beta
Never	42.5%	57.5%
Less than monthly	30.3%	69.7%
Less than weekly	34.4%	65.6%
Weekly+	18.9%	81.1%

Education	Alpha	Beta
Less than high school	36.5%	63.5%
High school	29.4%	70.6%
Some college	28.7%	71.3%
Bachelor's degree	33.4%	66.6%
Post-graduate	28.0%	72.0%

Lifetime partners	Alpha	Beta
1	20.3%	79.7%
2-5	29.3%	70.7%
6-10	26.7%	73.3%
11-20	29.6%	70.4%
21+	34.6%	65.4%

Unfortunately, belief in God and wordsum scores were not cross-referenced with the question, so church attendance and educational attainment are about the closest proxies available. Speaking of, betas are slightly more educated than alphas are, but the differences are minor.

Excepting that, they are fairly pronounced. Alphas are disproportionately non-white (especially black), non-religious, unmarried, liberal, Democratic, childless, bar-goers who have been with a lot of women--in short, the glue that holds Western Civilization together! The good news for the ladies is that demographic trends portend more alphas and fewer betas in the future. Tingle tingle!

GSS variables used: AGAPE1, RACECEN(1)(2)(3-16), SEX(1), PARTYID(0-2)(3)(4-6), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), CHILDS(0)(1-8), EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), MARITAL(1)(2-5), NUMWOMEN(1)(2-5)(6-10)(11-20)(21-800), SOCBAR(1-4)(5-7), ATTEND(0)(1-3)(4-6)(7-8)

Women have a little less sex and a couple more partners than they did 20 years ago

A year ago, I looked at the number of sexual partners American men have had over the last couple of decades to see whether or not a trend towards greater sexual promiscuity and general activity, as the Game narrative contends is the case, would be empirically detectable. The data, however, reveal that it has been steady state over that period of time.

This came in the wake of having found it to be clear that men with fewer partners (but at least one, obviously) are the most procreatively successful. I'm skeptical of the conceptualized alpha-beta dichotomy, but when it comes to reproduction, the betas are coming out on top. I've also attempted to measure alpha traits by race, finding a far higher percentage of alpha traits among black men than among white or Hispanic men, and have shown that men who say they would suffer in the place of their lovers (surely a beta move) have more children than men who say they would not (why suffer for a girl when I can just as easily find another one?)

I'm certain I'd planned on doing the same for women, but as I was entering my late-twenties at the time, senility must have kicked in and kicked it off my mental to-do list. Through the miracle of fish oil tablets and yoga*, it found its way back on that list, slated for completion rather than misplacement this time around.

The following graph shows the percentage of all women aged 21-45 by the number of different partners they've had through the course of their adult lives. It's a bit difficult to decipher at first blush, but the ranges are mutually exclusive so that in each year the total percentage of all women falling into one of the six categories based on number of partners comes to 100:


There is an evident decline in the number of women sticking with a single partner over time, corresponding to increases in the percentages of women reporting no and 6-10 partners. Excepting a seemingly random spike in 1996, the trends are pretty continuous. The decline in the number of women with a single partner is presumably a result of the decline in marriage rates over the same period of time, with women who would've married in the past engaging instead in a series of monogamous relationships, or forgoing sex entirely.

The next graph shows the frequency with which women aged 21-45 have had sex over time:


There has been a gentle decrease in the percentage of women having sex at least once a week, as indicated by the light blue and red lines, and a corresponding increase in the percentage getting freaky less often than that. As women have more sex when they're married or in a relationship than when they're not, the decline in marriage rates predictably seems to correspond with a decrease in overall female sexual activity.

In summation, the story over the last couple of decades for women in the US is a slight increase in variety and a slight decrease in frequency.

For objections about the reliability of the data, see here. The consistent discrepancy between male and female self-reported numbers indicates that at least one sex persistently fudges the figures. Veracity may be couched somewhere in between, or simply come out of the mouths of men. Unless the argument is that there has been a change in the degree to which women low-ball and/or men overstate the numbers over time, though, that question is irrelevant to what is reported here.

If anything, I'd guess the female tendency towards understatement is declining, as the social stigmas (especially those of a religious bent) surrounding more active and wide-ranging sexual behaviors of all kinds have been relentlessly whittled away.

GSS variables used: SEXFREQ(1)(2)(3-4)(5)(6-7), NUMMEN(0)(1)(2-5)(6-10)(11-19)(20-250), AGE(21-45), SEX(2), YEAR

* Okay, I'll confess to having only done a yoga routine once in my life (albeit in the last year!), finding it far too slow and light for my tastes. Resistance? Hell yes. Isometrics? Sure. But let's confine stretching to the first three minutes, please!

Women lie more about sexual activity now than they did in the past?

Roissy recently referred to a study conducted nearly a decade ago finding that the male-female discrepancies in self-reported numbers of sexual partners are not equally the fault of each sex, but instead primarily the result of female understatement:

A lot of bloggers like to use GSS (General Social Survey) data to track changes in society’s sexual behavior. Many of these bloggers have found in this data evidence that American women are becoming less slutty in the past ten or twenty years. This does not jibe with my personal experience, so I knew something was amiss. I mused that perhaps American society is bifurcating into two female camps, with the urban blue state camp waving the banner of Team Slut and the religious red state camp hoisting the flag of Team Prude. Since there are more red state godly girls than there are blue state heretic hos, I figured that would account for the overall trend toward less sluttiness.

But studies like the above point out a real problem with sex survey data like that found in the GSS — women just aren’t going to tell you the truth about their sex lives under most normal circumstances, even when anonymity is guaranteed. And that may be the real reason why the GSS gurus are finding chimeras of chasteness that don’t really exist — the data are corrupt.

I'm not sure if this is specifically directed at me or not--Roissy has noted some of my empirically-backed skepticism of the Game narrative in the past, and as far as I'm aware, there aren't many other bloggers tracking sexual activity over time via the GSS. Assuming it is, it doesn't address what I pointed out the data suggest--namely, that sexual promiscuity has essentially been steady state for at least the last 20 years. Unless the insinuation is that women dishonestly understate more today than they understated in the past--a counterintuitive assumption given the perpetual media push towards an ever greater mainstreaming acceptance of female promiscuity--if anything, the finding that women are the less noble sex when it comes to answering anonymous survey questions honestly suggests that female sexual activity might actually be declining slightly, as a recent survey of young adults found.

Roissy might counter that the whole survey business is irredeemably corrupt. That's a difficult charge to positively disprove, but there's no compelling reason to believe it, either. Perhaps there is a steady modal number of sexual partners men have felt compelled to report having had that has no bearing on reality for at least the last few decades, and similarly a steady modal number of sexual partners women feel compelled to report having had that bears no relationship with their actual behavior, but where's the evidence for this? And it's not just self-reported survey data that reveal steady or reduced levels of sexual promiscuity--data collected by the CDC indicate the same thing.

I think Roissy is making the good the enemy of the perfect--of course self-reported data are not going to be entirely accurate. But in the case of sexual behavior, contemporary self-reports are probably, if anything, more accurate than self-reports in the past were, as the social stigmas surrounding sexual behaviors of all kinds have been relentlessly whittled away. Correspondingly, the shame women feel for past sexual behaviors has likely been, if anything, similarly whittled away.

Girls more virginal than they've been in at least a generation

Randall Parker points to coverage in the Washington Post of the CDC's "gold standard" study of sexual behavior among young adults shows that promiscuity continued its decline through the 2000s. The trend has been one of consistent decline for more than two decades now. RP suggests some potential reasons for the steady descent:

• Sucked into virtual worlds. Teens spend less time physically with others.
• Pressure to study.
• More structured time. Less time free.
• Less physically attractive kids due to rising obesity.
• Lower male sex drive due to rising obesity's effect of lowering testosterone.

The first three seem plausible enough, at least on the margins, though anyone who has spent anytime in the virtual world knows that the teenage guys there certainly talk the BAMF player talk. Claims of fellatio while gaming, ubiquitous use of the verbs "raping" and "raped" as synonyms for "winning" and "lost", etc dispel any notion that the contemporary generation of pubescent boys aren't constantly thinking about sex.

The latter two also seem true, but while that may be a limiting factor on the boys' side of the equation, even at a young age girls have primarily control access, and chubbier girls put out more easily and often (the GSS reveals the same). So I'd expect to controlling access to be moving a bit closer to parity (though with major dimorphic differences still remaining), but wouldn't assume the net effect is less overall sexual desire.

This strikes me as yet more empirical evidence refuting the Game narrative that in today's man-hating world, women are looser than they've ever been before. Time and time again, the data contradict that narrative. It's worth considering others that are more empirically grounded.

As someone who actually spends a significant amount of time with girls in their late teens and early twenties due to personal preference, this meshes with my own personal experiences. It always takes me several months of contact to really get intimate with a hot girl at that age. Part of it may be the inherent caution in getting involved with someone nearly ten years older than themselves, but even reflecting back on when I was a teenager, it feels like there is more resistance now than there was then (and my game has definitely improved since then!).

TwoSTDVs on height and sex

OneSTDV (who I'm a huge fan of) believes he has identified an indisputable fact of gender realism, that women rarely date men who are shorter than they are.

The problem with this assertion is that in the US, the average height is 5'10" for men and 5'4" for women'. Contemporary measures of standard deviations for American height vary a bit, from about 2.5 inches to 3 inches. For the sake of argument, we'll error on the high end and call it 3 full inches. If we take a sample with an equal number of American men and women and match them randomly with someone of the opposite sex (presuming the height distributions for both men and women are Gaussian, which is a pretty safe assumption), in only about 8% of couplings will we find a man paired with a woman who is taller than he is.

Consequently, the fact (and it is as much) is sub-optimal for use as a starting block in engaging in HBD-related conversations with those of a PC mindset because even if height was a neutral rather than a desirable trait in men, the vast majority of men would be taller than the women they are with.

Further, tying Game to HBD-realism is inherently flawed, since Game relies on men being able to train themselves to negate the realities of HBD. This is why Game most appeals to (and benefits) men who traditionally, due to the realities of HBD, have difficulty attracting women. Game gives them ways to appear to have higher levels of status than they actually do, by making themselves out to be more popular than they actually are, more self-assured than they actually are, commanding more resources than they actually do, etc. To the extent that Game is effective, it is because human biodiversity does not imply genetic determinism, only predispositions and general patterns that, to varying degrees, can be 'overcome'.

Game functions not on dwelling on biological realities and their inherently limiting factors like HBD does. To the contrary, it relies on the same optimism that OneSTDV describes political liberalism relying on:

Liberalism feels good because anyone can succeed. And this underpins its success; realist ideologies advocate fatalism and no one likes that.

The most alpha occupations

The proceeding list shows the number of different women men in various occupations have been with in the course of their lives. To avoid skewing the numbers with youngsters just riding out into the morning sun, only those 35 and older at the time of participation in the GSS are considered. Each grouping (separated by semi-colons) has a minimum of 25 respondents, although most have numbers far higher than that and are grouped as they are for convenience or because that is how ISCO 88 categorizes them.

Occupations for which the median number of sexual partners in life is 10:

Authors, writers, and journalists; lawyers; sculptors, painters, and actors; waiters and bartenders.

Those with a partner count of 8:

Real estate agents and appraisers; sales reps.

Seven:

Painters; plumbers; human resources people; store stockers.

Six:

Military personnel; truck drivers; policemen and firefighters; mail carriers and sorters; social workers; housekeepers; operations department managers.

Five:

Welders; construction workers and carpenters; government workers; college and university professors and lecturers; architects and engineers; technicians; machine operators; retail and wholesale managers; cooks; retail sales workers.

Four:

Computing professionals; accountants; doctors, veterinarians, dentists, and pharmacists.

Three:

Bookkeepers; building maintenance workers; teachers.

One:

Pastors, priests, and other religious practitioners.

With the glaring exception of spiritual shepherds, who appear to largely adhere to the behavior proscribed by their religions and abstain from premarital sex or, in the case of Catholic priests, avoid it altogether, men who make their money by communicating with others are the most sexually prolific. Lust loves loquacity.

The idea that military life is one of leaving base each weekend to bang exotic girls is, at the least, oversold.

The core of respectable bourgeoisie careers--doctors, accountants, and network administrators--are on the lower end, in large part because these guys are among the most likely to be married.

One might think that being in an environment devoid of competition and flooded with women would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but male teachers (K-12) tend to have a modest number of notches in their belts. The desire to be responsible for herds of children (or even just the ability to tolerate so being) probably selects for a type of man who is not exactly bursting at the seams with testosterone.

GSS variables used: SEX(1), AGE(35-89), ISCO88, NUMWOMEN

Roissy on HBD and Game

I've been critical of the assertion that the Game movement is an ideal vehicle for HBD to hitch a ride in on its way to popular acceptance. Roissy just posted on the subject. This excerpt gets at the most important part of that post:

So HBD nerds need to get over the obvious “money/looks/fame” box within which they argue and constrict themselves, and begin to see that, like human differences in general, there is room to remake ourselves into better versions of who we are. To deny this is to deny there is any reason to put forth effort into anything of note after birth. There is more than one way to pierce a pussy. Women love game-spitting charming assholes as much as they love resource-providing stoic captains of industry. There is no contradiction in this observation.

As I point out below, the condescending attitude directed at those who aren't sold on the narrative isn't something to get caught up on. It's part of the game, er, Game. I suppose I could seriously argue that Game is a way for guys who aren't where they'd like to be in terms of "money/looks/fame" to convince themselves that they are at least on par with, if not superior to, those who have more money, better looks, and greater fame than they do, but who tend to excuse themselves to use the restroom in casual conversation rather than just leaving mid-sentence to heed nature's call like PUAs do. Yet even though it's said that status is everything, there is no concrete evidence that this is the case, and even if it were, it does not speak to the veracity of the narrative. Ideas, not the people who promote them, is what we're after, right?

I left the following comment:

Great post. The errant idea that Game somehow epitomizes the realities of HBD needed to be tempered. That Game takes down the feminist myth about gender being a social construction by illustrating that there are differences in what men and women are attracted to (the primary point of difference being how on the guy's pie chart physical attractiveness also covers all the space that is devoted to social status on the girl's chart) is, from an HBD evangelist's perspective, solid gold.

However, the fact remains that Game is founded on the premise that all the female detection mechanisms that have been honed by selection (natural and sexual) throughout human evolutionary history do a pretty crummy job at what they're commissioned to do. The degree to which they fail is open to debate--and your assessment is more attuned to reality (they do an okay job, but they're far from precise) than those made by some of your most zealous minions (they basically don't exist) are--but it's axiomatic that they are significantly flawed.

This is in contrast to the detection mechanisms of men, which are far more perspicacious than those possessed by women are. Science has thrown a few wrenches into man's well-oiled machine with plastic surgery, breast enhancement, and the like, but prior to World War I, women were almost powerless to do anything at all to influence male detection mechanisms.

HBDers like OneSTDV and Randall Parker (both of whom I have great respect for) would be wise to acknowledge this. That by no means implies that either HBD or Game is bunk--genetics and ancestry aren't everything--but they aren't natural bedfellows. Using one to push the other is akin to using geology to sell people on the wonders of chemical engineering--there's a bit of overlap, but we're not talking accounting and finance here.

I don't take any offense at the slights directed my way, either. The atmosphere is such that to question any aspect of Game is to tacitly admit to being unsuccessful with women, much like questioning the idea that discrimination is the reason for the black-white achievement gap is to tacitly admit to being a racist. Conveniently enough, my recent tangling of tongues and limbs with a voluptuous black girl serves as a refutation two-fer, but I don't get bent out of shape when my anonymous pseudonym is disparaged as being piloted by a 40 year-old virgin who leads Klan cross-burnings on the weekends!

Miller commercial, like the men it targets, shuns cougars

The forces of feminization and multiculturalism are said to have deballed white men. We are now popularly portrayed now as lumbering buffoons, far removed from the more traditional images of hard-working, self reliant pillars of modern civilization. But we're still the ones who earn the money that fuels the the consumer economy, and marketers target us.

Beer companies are certainly among those who aim specifically at young and middle-aged working and middle class white guys. This Miller ad demonstrates how, despite the nonsense about the ability of professional women to easily hold off into their thirties and forties before settling down with their choice of man, youth is hot and termagents are not:



The bartender's (age ~24) social status is lower than the cougar's (age ~36), who is presumably a professional corporate type of some kind. But the average joe is more desired by the cougar because her options are more limited than the bartender's are. The bartender is self-evidently smoking, but the cougar is not ugly. In fact, 12 or so years ago, she was probably near the bartender's level of physical attractiveness. Now, though, it's not even close, as the rest of the kitty cat guy's friends illustrate by showing disgust for the cougar.

That physical attractiveness is the most important attribute a woman has in attracting male attention is obvious to virtually all heterosexual men (though not all will admit as much), but there is an endless supply of delusional women who still act surprised whenever evidence of it hits them in their faces.