Slippery soaps and slippery slopes

It was only a matter of time before those arguing that expanding the definition of marriage to include members of the same sex would merely be the first of many assaults on the institution's integrity rather than a one-time update would be proven correct. Despite the shrill cries of harpies and their eunuch hangers-on that such a faux argument was nothing more than a thin veil disguising the blatant homophobia of those holding traditional retrograde values, a district judge in Utah has struck down the state's law forbidding polygamy on exactly those grounds:

In a game-changer for the legal fight over same-sex marriage that gives credence to opponents’ “slippery slope” arguments, a federal judge has now ruled that the legal reasoning for same-sex marriage means that laws against polygamy are likewise unconstitutional.

Casting both the supercilious mendacity of the Cathedral and the usual arguments against polygamy aside, the chickadee has meticulously demonstrated another reason that the judge's ruling is an imprudent idea--polygamy leads to less genetic diversity since its application leads to fewer men contributing to the next generation without any corresponding increase in the number of women procreating. In this context, reduced genetic diversity means more clannishness, which is where the chickadee comes in. To pithily oversimplify years' worth of work on her part, a takeaway messages has been that inbred societies = bad; outbred societies = good.

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)

Expendables are more interesting

Genetically, men are more expendable than women are. Historically for our species around 40% of men and 80% of women reproduced. Alphas ruled the past. But the biological world isn't static and significant evolutionary changes can occur in the geological blink of an eye. Today in the US the gap has narrowed substantially. The GSS shows that 81% of men and 86% of women who've made it through their reproductive careers have procreated. Genetic continuance is a lot more egalitarian than it used to be, especially for men. Fecundity is now a beta trait. Still, while we're not the same people who lived during ancient Roman times, let alone the same people as the first neolithic agriculturalists, we're not an alien species to them, either. Grok is relevant to us, even if he isn't exactly us.

If men are more expendable than women are, a presumable corollary is that, from a woman's perspective, characteristics of sexual attraction in men are more varied, more numerous, and less ubiquitous than the characteristics of sexual attraction in women are from the perspective of men. It takes a lot of time and effort for women to reproduce, and we need just about all of them to do it if the species is going to survive and prosper. Consequently, men overwhelmingly focus on signs of maximum fertility: Waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, healthy and supple skin, perky breasts that appear to defy gravity, lack of current impregnation, etc. The rest is mostly marginal stuff.

We can afford to be less conservative when it comes to men's contributions, which works out well since male contributions are the stronger drivers of evolutionary changes. Women aren't primed to detect signs of fertility in men. They aren't any better at identifying said signs than (disinterested) men are, and it's presence is usually uncertain (though presumed to be there) unless the last stages of intimacy reveal otherwise. Yes, older and fatter guys are more likely to have issues, but even among these 'at risk' categories, most are capable. Pubescence is just about the only prerequisite--once that box is checked off, female attraction moves on to assess a whole host of other characteristics: Status (ie command of resources and of other people, not evincing a need of approval from other people whether they be male or female, etc), humor, height and general physical fitness, intelligence, kindness, self-confidence, etc, with different women putting varying amounts of emphases on different dimensions of a more variegated (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) suite of desirability markers. Men are more interesting, if not necessarily more infatuating.

Tell me if I'm missing something, merely stating the obvious, or being overly presumptive with an amateur's understanding of evolutionary psychology.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, SEX, AGE(40-65), YEAR(2000-2012)

Destiny is child

++Addition++Do read Matt's comment.

---

Heartiste points to the writeup of a study by the tenaciously dissident Satoshi Kanazawa claiming to show an inverse correlation between IQ and maternal urge in women. In so doing, the former references a finding from the GSS showing that while fertility trends among women in the US are dysgenic when IQ is used as a measure, men appear to be treading water:

Smart and over-educated lawyercunts are a dying breed. Literally. I believe it was the Audacity of Huge [link mine, though presumably intended by that wily devil] who once tabulated and correlated GSS data to find that smart men have more children than dumb men, while smart women have fewer children than dumb women. I call this the “Alpha Male-Cute Secretary Assortative Mating” theory. You may know it better by its street handle: Female hypergamy. And… wait for it… it will be the salvation of the white race in multicultural miasmas.

Here's the post he had in mind, and the relevant graph (apologies for the atrocious aesthetics, but blogger was having a hell of a time uploading graphics at the time):

We've seen, from several different angles, that educational attainment specifically--rather than the intelligence it tends to correlate with--is where the robust inverse correlation with fecundity makes its bed.

The takeaway message for sharp guys with pessimistic views of the future of our collective demography, and consequently the outlook for modern Western Civilization as we know it, is to not make the perfect the enemy of the good and refuse to join the melee because to follow the aquila would entail condescending to fight alongside allies they perceive to be beneath them.

That thinking is suicidal. Demography is destiny. Find an effeminate, trustworthy, fun, sweet, mildly submissive girl desiring children to start a family with. If she's as sharp as a tac, great. As long as she's not an utter dunce, though, you'll still be striking a direct blow against the Idiocracy.

Incidentally, that's the only way such a blow can be struck--those like Heartiste who are sparring in the Circus Maximus and those of more modest abilities who are doing so in a wooden arena in Illyria alike are merely intellectual auxiliaries in the war against the Idiocracy. They may spur others to action, but they cannot win the actual battles on their own. We need you!

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!

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

Momma's in the kitchen, daddy's in the field

Upon further inspection it has come to my attention that the GSS is even more oblivious to PC etiquette than I gave the survey credit for. In 2012, it queried respondents on what they conceived of as the most ideal situation for a family with a young child to organize their family and work lives (and even more controversially, the question is written with the assumption that a "family" consists of one man and one woman married to each other). Despite all the putatively egalitarian feminist-inspired blathering about how parenting roles are fungible across sexes (and orientations), contemporary Americans trust biological realities more than they rely on the harping of the harpies. The distribution of responses among the broader population (n = 1,004):

Arrangement, all responses	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	39.7
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.6
Both full-time	11.3
Both part-time	6.8
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.5

Perhaps it's skewed heavily by the patriarchal enforcers of patriarchy, the patriarchs themselves. The response results, this time considering women only (n = 527):

Arrangement, women only	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	33.6
Mother part-time, father full-time	45.7
Both full-time	11.7
Both part-time	8.5
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.3

The vast majority--we're talking 4 out of 5--of Americans conceive of the ideal family environment being one in which a man works full-time and a woman works either part-time or not at all. It's as though they recognize some sort of special bond between a mother and the child her body spent nine devoted months bringing into the world.

Maybe the patriarchs have brainwashed their own barefoot wives slaving away in the kitchen into falling for the breadwinner-homemaker ideal, but what about women who think for themselves? Liberal women only (n = 130):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	23.1
Mother part-time, father full-time	48.4
Both full-time	12.9
Both part-time	15.0
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.6

Okay, but many of these women went through their formative years before third-wave feminism really got going. Let's see what the Sandra Fluke generation thinks. ... Oh, she's in her thirties? I got the impression that she was a college student or something. Ah, she recently graduated and will be starting her career soon. After a decade establishing herself professionally, she might even procreate one unaborted, down-free kid of her own, provided she outraces menopause or has her eggs frozen--soon. Anyway, the preferences of women under the age of thirty (n = 118):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	26.3
Mother part-time, father full-time	47.7
Both full-time	7.7
Both part-time	18.2
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.0

Not a single woman surveyed thought it desirable for a mother to spend more time working than her husband does. Suck the marrow from the men, let work drain their souls, not ours! Good for them.

Given their illegitimacy rates, welfare utilization rates, and their positions on marijuana legalization, one may be forgiven for scoffing at the neocon assertion that Hispanics are "natural conservatives", but he should also be willing to give credit where credit is due. They are even more traditional than their white, black, or yellow brothers and sisters are (n = 73):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	45.4
Mother part-time, father full-time	36.3
Both full-time	2.3
Both part-time	14.9
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	1.1

I'm throwing in with the plurality on this one, since our conceptual approach is one in which I'll assume the role of primary breadwinner/secondary caregiver and she the role of secondary breadwinner/primary caregiver. This is as good a time as any to pass along the happy news that my fiance and I are expecting a child just a few days before Christmas. No, I'm not so audacious as to herald the coming of a savior, but I am thrilled by the thought of combining birthday and Christmas into a super day in which (s)he gets 150% of what (s)he'd separately get on either day if the two gift glut days were further apart from one another, ha!

GSS variables used: FAMWKBST(1-6), SEX(2), RACECEN1(15-16), AGE(18-29), POLVIEWS(1-3)

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.

Door's open, come on in

As ridiculed as the slippery slope argument against same-sex marriage (polygamous/incestuous/bestial marriages will be next) has been by its proponents, there aren't many serious reasons to maintain that the definition of legal marriage will then, having expanded to include those of the same sex, stay put forever after. And so the institution will reclinate back to its own past, the only ubiquitous purpose it represents becoming legal (and by extension political among the upper crust) in nature as was often the case in antiquity.

Divorce rates show that contemporary marriage isn't about lifelong commitment. Open marriages show that it isn't even about serial long-term commitment. Same-sex marriage shows that it isn't about procreation. Be prepared, as Jeremy Irons suggested, to be shown that marriage isn't about romantic love, as a father marries his son to hand junior the family fortune free from government confiscation. Polygamy will show that marriage isn't about a special devotion to one other person, as marriages of convenience already illustrate.

Better contact the financial planner to see whether or not we should get married, whatever our situation and whoever we may be. Perhaps the next step after that will be to annul any differentiation in legal or taxation status marriage confers and be rid of the whole mess forever.

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)

Shocker--married mothers smarter than single moms

Spurred by Parapundit's Randall Parker and the sight of low-hanging stereotype-validation fruit, the estimated IQ scores (converted from GSS wordsum results with the simplifying assumptions of a mean population IQ of 100 and that one standard deviation in wordsum results is the equivalent of 15 IQ points) of men and women who have procreated at least once, by marital status, follows. For utility, all data are from 2000 onward and the foreign-born and those aged 46 and older are excluded.

Reproductive men

Married -- 101.0
Divorced/separated -- 97.8
Unmarried -- 93.6

Reproductive women

Married -- 101.3
Divorced/separated -- 98.7
Unmarried women -- 93.6

Parenthetically, the mean IQ for those of the same age and time cohort who haven't had any kids is 101.2. To see dysgenic forces in action, look no further than single mothers and their unfortunate spawn, who have both the nature and nurture decks stacked against them.

GSS variables used: CHILDS(0)(1-8), BORN(1), WORDSUM, YEAR(2000-2012), SEX, MARITAL(1)(3-4)(5), AGE(18-45)

Opposition to premarital sex over time

A few years ago, I looked at trends in US public opinion on seven major social issues and came to the conclusion that, with the exception of same-sex marriage, traditionalists are doing a decent job of holding the line (see Dan's comments for a more finely grained, contemporary discussion of as much). Levels of support for abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and permitting prayer in public schools are at the same levels today that they were forty years ago (the seventh issue, support for marijuana legalization, has crept up slightly but remains a minority position).

Here's another pervious point in the traditionalist's perimeter, however. The following graph shows the percentages of respondents over time who said that sexual relations between two people prior to marriage are either "always wrong" or "almost always wrong" (the other two options were "sometimes wrong" and "not wrong at all"):

The mean liberal position of a generation ago has become the mean mainstream position of today. The mean mainstream position of a generation ago has become the mean conservative position of today. When the ratchet turns, it turns to the left.

The treatment in popular culture of the idea that a couple should refrain from having sex until they've tied the knot as something quaint, prude, anachronistic, and, most importantly, unserious, demonstrates how the Establishment is comprised primarily of progressive standard-bearers. Not that I can legitimately distance myself from said treatment--while I'm sympathetic and theoretically supportive of the idea that premarital sex is civilizationally destructive, my behavior doesn't adhere abide by it, nor do the behaviors of just about everyone I know.

According to one of Jayman's hypotheses (and the guy seems to be generating an intriguing new one every week), it's plausible to think that not only will traditionalists hold the line, but that in the future, aided by a conservative advantage in fecundity, they will stage a counter offensive and push progressive positions on these issues back from whence they came.

Maybe. While the seven issues mentioned above are reasonably representative, they are of course not exhaustive, as the persistent shift towards moral acceptance of premarital sex illustrates. It gets at the question of how substantive the Jayman hypothesis will be if it plays out as predicted. If self-identified conservatives increase as a proportion of the total population but the positions they hold morph into those their parents' generation opposed, are traditionalists on the receiving end of little more than empty semantic success, of a Pyrrhic victory?

GSS variables used: PREMARSX(1-2)(3-4), YEAR, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

Wordsum score and age at first marriage

Respondents who are not currently nor have never been married are excluded. Not as stark a trend as I would've guessed, but it runs in the predictable direction. My guess as to why those of the most modest intelligence actually buck the it to some extent is due to a lack of prospects and very delayed emotional and psychological maturation. Only 1% of respondents failed to answer a single wordsum question correctly, so we're looking at the mentally handicapped here.

GSS variables used: AGEWED, WORDSUM, BORN(1)

Providing procreation predictors, pronto

++Addition++See Jason Malloy's work in the comments.

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"Have kids" wasn't exactly the right answer to the question of how one finds his way to happy happy village, though "don't have kids" doesn't get the peregrinator any closer, either. But happiness doesn't echo through time, it expires along with its bearer. A question of greater consequence is how we get people to have more (or fewer) children. Okay, it's obvious in a technical sense. But what about a behavioral one?

By way of ordinary least squares, here are the absolute multiple regression coefficients for eleven variables that may reasonably be assumed to have substantial predictive power in terms of realized fertility. 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, with parenthetical indications of what is associated with greater fecundity:

Marital status -- .37* (marriage = procreation)
Age -- .33* (time = procreation)
Church attendance -- .10* (churchgoing = procreation)
Education -- .07* (less = procreation)
Number of female partners -- .04 (fewer = procreation)
Political orientation -- .03 (conservatism = procreation)
Social class -- .03 (lower = procreation)
IQ (wordsum) -- .01 (intelligence = procreation)
Income -- .01 (less = procreation)
Happiness -- .00 (no relationship)
Belief in God -- .00 (no relationship)

The older a person is, the more time he's had to have kids. Surely age is the strongest predictor of the number of children a man has sired, isn't it? False. Marital status is even more powerful than age is, at least for those with a y-chromosome. Despite rising illegitimacy and declining marriage rates, there is no better* way to get a man to spread his seed than to have him tie the knot. Churchgoing and school-avoiding also push a man towards fatherhood. Nothing else matters much--getting around hurts a smidgen, being conservative helps a bit, but these things only marginally so.

Tangentially, a note to those interested in this sort of stuff: Religious activity tends to be more important than stated religious belief is. Speaking in broad generalities, the man who believes in God but doesn't pray, worship, or otherwise do anything else meaningful as a consequence of that stated belief is behaviorally more similar to an atheist or an agnostic than to a pious person who can reliably be found in the pews on Sunday.

For women:

Age -- .32* (time = procreation)
Marital status -- .24* (marriage = procreation)
Education -- .18* (less = procreation)
Class -- .11* (lower = procreation)
Church attendance -- .07* (churchgoing = procreation)
Political orientation -- .06* (conservatism = procreation)
Belief in God -- .06 (belief = procreation)
IQ (wordsum) -- .04 (stupidity = procreation)
Income -- .02 (less = procreation)
Happiness -- .02 (unhappiness = procreation)
Number of male partners -- .01 (fewer = procreation)

The variables are a more even keel than they are among men, with the only three not mattering much being how much a woman gets around, how happy she is, and how much money she (or her partner) makes. Age is the biggest predictor, followed by marital status, education (a killer of kid creation in the Western world), and then social class, all of which are notably influential.

Affordable family formation (and expressive piety!) isn't just the route to a Republican resurgence, it's the pathway to procreation, too. Societally, of course, we're moving in the opposite direction, as marriage and religious attendance declines while years spent accumulating debt in school instead of creating value in the workforce is still the predominant advice proffered to American youth. Forty more years!

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

* With the obligatory qualification that correlation does not necessarily prove causation and is in this context best thought of as merely suggestive.

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

Baby makers scorn porn?

Dennis Mangan has posted the transcript of an especially thought-provoking talk he recently gave. Essentially his hypothesis is that because of our biological predilections, contemporary processed food and the easy accessibility of sexual stimulation by virtual means have really screwed with our lives. Dennis speculating on the consequences of ubiquitous, cheap porn:

When pornography was being legalized throughout the Western world, those opposed to its legalization were scorned as people living in the past, and were told that since porn involved “consenting adults” only, that it was a “victimless crime”, legalization could only bring benefits. It does seem to be correlated to declining rates of sexual violence. But it also turns out that pornography may be connected to a decline in fertility rates. Writing in The Occidental Observer, Reginald Thompson showed that those countries which had banned pornography had highly significant differences in TFR, i.e. the fertility rates were greater than in countries with legalized pornography, and this held true even when Western nations were excluded from the analysis. 

Comprising about 35% of the population, those in the US who feel pornography should be illegal are firmly in the minority. Legally, the issue seems to be a settled one. But patriarchy sympathizers do a pretty good job breeding, so the case might not be closed forever. The following table shows the average number of children respondents have by whether or not they think pornography should be legal. To avoid racial confounding, only whites are considered. To allow family formation to have taken place, responses come from those aged 35 or older. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward (n = 4,200):

Pornography	Kids
Legal	1.94
Illegal	2.55

My immediate reaction is to assume this is a reflection of broader value differences, specifically with regards to religiosity. Pious people are a lot more supportive of banning pornography than the irreligious are (65% wanting to ban, 35% opposed and 29% wanting to ban, 61% opposed, respectively), and the correlation between religiosity and fecundity is a strong one.

Yet significant differences in fecundity are detectable among both the religious (defined here as those who attend religious services at least once a week) and irreligious (defined as those who attend religious services no more than once per year) when members of each group are sorted according to their position on outlawing pornography. The same racial, age, and time parameters used above are employed here (n = 2,947):

Pornography	Kids
Religious
Legal	2.72
Illegal	2.41
Irreligious
Legal	1.71
Illegal	2.34

This doesn't prove, of course, Dennis' hypothesis that the ubiquity of pornography has had a depressing effect on fertility rates to be true. There are surely people who say they want to see pornography made illegal who are nonetheless consumers of it. Conversely, there are those who never watch the stuff but don't think it should be banned, myself among them. That said, it's an interesting and surprising result. There are sizable differences in fertility among the most pious and least religious depending on whether or not they see pornography as being socially intolerable.

Now please take a moment to view this important public service announcement:



GSS variables used: PORNLAW(1)(2-3), AGE(35-89), YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), ATTEND(0-2)(7-8), 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

Steady studs, dysgenic dolls

Examining eugenic and dysgenic trends is a bit of a hobby horse here. Levels of educational attainment, religiosity, alpha vs. beta, and monogamy vs. getting around are a few of the angles we've explored. Jayman recently took a thorough look at fertility trends among blacks, simpliciter style, without adding in a bunch of variables, prompting me to want to do the same with whites and Hispanics. Unfortunately, the sample sizes are too small for the former to have much contemporary relevance, so we'll just consider whites.

The following graph shows the mean number of children among non-Hispanic whites aged 40-65 by wordsum grouping*. All data are from 2000 onward:

Jayman found that among black men, the trend is neutral, while a pronounced dysgenic trend exists among black women. The story is similar among whites, although the dysgenic tilt among white women is gentler than it is among black women.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, SEX, YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

North Carolina Amendment 1 exit polling?

++Addition++Inductivist looks at predictors of support for and opposition to same-sex marriage.

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I didn't get around to looking at the exit polling on North Carolina's recently passed Amendment 1 defining marriage as exclusively existing between one man and one woman last week after the vote had taken place. Finally getting around to doing so now, I'm taken aback in finding out that apparently no exit polling was conducted (although multiple articles written on the day of the vote reference what early exit poll results are showing). This led to a bit of controversy when Politico writer Joseph Williams erroneously asserted that:

African-Americans voted 2-1 in favor of the North Carolina amendment banning gay marriage Tuesday, but the White House is betting that black voters there and beyond will stick with the president, despite broad resistance to legalization.

Opinion polling conducted ahead of the vote found that 60%-65% of black North Carolinians planned to back the amendment, which is presumably how Williams (who is black) came up with the 2-to-1 margin. Black electoral behavior on California's Proposition 8 created a bit of embarrassment for the Establishment and its SWPL sympathizers, so we really shouldn't be too surprised that the data weren't collected this time around.

Opposition to same-sex marriage, a concept that wasn't even in the public's consciousness a decade ago (the GSS queried respondents about it in 1988 and found 12% of the population in support), has been steadily and rapidly eroding since it became a 'hot button' issue several years ago to such an extent that it is difficult to see its eventual widespread adoption as anything but inevitable.

In line with public awareness, the GSS resurrected the question on same-sex marriage in 2004 and has posed it every time the survey has been conducted since then. The proceeding graph shows support by race over that period of time, with those expressing no opinion one way or the other excluded (ie, 40% support, 40% opposition, 20% neutral is expressed as 50% support).

Even the 2010 data are becoming dated, though, as a recent Pew poll finds that opposition among both blacks and whites has dropped substantially in the last four years. However, the Pew graphs and tables show support and opposition separately, without accounting for those who are on the fence, insinuating that opposition and support (alternatively and respectively) are higher than they actually are (ie, showing black opposition at 49% in 2012 creates the perception that black support runs at 51%, when in actuality it is probably in the upper thirties). Hence the total exclusion of fence sitters in the graph below:

The annual Asian sample floats around 50 for each year so should be seen only as suggestive.

Getting overly editorial, I'm tired of hearing about gay marriage, which is probably what the LGBTSDFLSDFKLJSDGH activist movement is banking on, even though my opposition is of the anti-anti-gay more than it's of the pro-sanctity of marriage variety. If the mainstream right wants to try and create a wedge between blacks and Obama on it, which is an effort as doomed to failure as all the other attempts to get NAMs to side with the GOP on account of social issues are, if it has enough of a short-term, on-the-margins impact to tilt the general election against Obama, more power to it, I guess.

GSS variables used: MARHOMO(1-2)(4-5), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), YEAR

Fewer marriages, fewer children

++Addition++I'd cued this up but not yet published it ahead of a similar post by Inductivist. So this is complementary to and somewhat overlaps that.

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Inductivist's posts on fecundity and marital status among women in the US got me wondering if and how this has changed over time. Citing Roger Scruton's argument that the societal movement away from marriage leads to declining fertility rates that eventually drop society below replacement level, Inductivist turns to the GSS to see whether or not Scruton's assertion that marriage and children travel together is accurate. Not surprisingly, it is.

The question this raises in my mind is to what extent is the drop in US fertility is attributable to a decline in marriage rates? If fertility holds pretty steadily over time among those who are married and the overall decrease comes not from married couples having fewer children but from fewer people getting married, it certainly becomes plausible that protecting the institution of marriage is critical if the US is going to perpetuate itself.

The following graph shows the mean number of children for women aged 30-45 by marital status over the last four decades. To avoid racial confounding a la Charles Murray, only whites are considered:

The percentage of married women dropped continuously over the four decades, while the percentage of divorced and never married women increased, so the decline in marriage is, as Scruton claims, associated with a decline in fertility rates. It's not the entire story, though. Married women have become less fecund over the last couple of generations while never married women have become more so. The gap is still far from closed, but it's narrowing.

With illegitimacy rates around 70% among blacks and 50% among Hispanics, there is ample evidence that in 21st century America, procreation doesn't need marriage. Whether or not the US is able to retain a semblance of its former self if the two become decoupled, however, is another question entirely.