HT to Vox Day. This is what happens when a man breaks up with a woman, and still tries to remain friends with her.
Archive for Game/SMP
Hypergamouse
Vox Day has an excellent take on what I call the Maureen Dowd defense:
Stupid Comment of All-Time
I about choked on my coffee when I read this piece by “Sigrid”, in her attempt to attack Susan Walsh:
@Susan:
Your argument(s) (and I use “argument” loosely) about female promiscuity and its correlation to a litany of negative individual/societal outcomes notwithstanding, I find your tacit (0r perhaps not so tacit) support of “slut shaming” deeply disturbing. As a PhD student at a large university with two two nieces and one nephew in their first years of college (representative of your primary audience), I cringe that their earnest navigation (whatever that may look like) through the inevitably disorienting and murky terrain of their sexuality and sociality should be so crudely measured on a loaded and psychologically damaging binary of shame vs. exaltation. And I would posit that, indeed, it is the rhetoric and discourse emanating from that binary that exacts the profound negative toll on all of us. To “shame” anyone (although in your case you have a particular penchant for females, it seems) is cruel and counterproductive.
I admit, I’ve only recently become acquainted with this site, and I have yet to investigate whether you are a proper journalist, a working scholar in the academy, or a self-appointed pundit, but if either of the two former, you should be careful to so readily employ sweeping phrases such as “we all know” and unqualified pronouns (i.e., “they”, “few”…example below). Who, exactly, is “we all” and “they,” I ask?
“Fifteen years later, we all know that few found “newer, truer, less sexist and more ecstatic ways of being sexual.” They found ways of being sexual that were risky, superficial, awkward and unsatisfying. The sexual double standard is as prominent as ever, being biologically determined and therefore immutable. If anything, men have become hypersensitive to female promiscuity, warily inquiring about a woman’s number before investing one ounce of emotional energy.”
In addition, do you feel any responsibility to justify your claims to causality/correlation?
“…female promiscuity is not a problem “for one reason or another.” It is directly responsible for the near disappearance of fulfilling and intimate cross-sex relationships among young people in college, the mistaken and tragic sense that most college students have of themselves as sexual “losers,” the rapid rise of sexually transmitted diseases in the U.S., and the creation of a “spinster class” of women now in their 30s and 40s.”
I am an unattached woman in my thirties, and I just want to thank you for answering with such unflinching confidence that my status as a…what do you call it?…”spinster”?…. is the fault either of my own “promiscuity” (in my case, a drawn out virginity followed by a personal decision that I’m generally uncomfortable with casual sex, and am better in committed, monogamous relationships, though I’ve experimented some), or a cult of young women who actively engage in casual sex (oh…and maybe their “man-whore” partners…yes, lets *not* forget those). Who knew the answer (which happens to *also* explain the rise of STDs in the US!) was so readily at my hands?! I’m sure your readership breathlessly awaits the quantitative and qualitative data sets you’ve marshaled to support this “argument.”
Maybe if I include a photo, you can size me up and further illuminate me on my “spinster” status with some added commentary based on my haircut, fashion sense, posture, or general appearance, in the same way you did my colleague, Extragiraffe, who, far from a “douchebag” or “frat boy,” is a kind and incredibly decent human being, a respected and decorated academic-in-training who is well-read in feminist theory/praxis, and a thoughtful discussant on a range of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality. If I wasn’t already put off by your crude category-building and your amateur sociology, your sophomoric, evasive, and baseless response to my friend solidifies that I will discourage everyone I know (but particularly my nieces and nephew and their peers) from ever taking your web site or its logics seriously.
Here is my 1000 mph assessment:
(1) Extragiraffe is more than likely pulling a Hugo Schwyzer and embracing feminism only insofar as to land bed partners. (Russ and myself observed a fair amount of that dynamic at Southern Baptist Theological Cemetary, during days when the feministas were making their last stand.)
(2) Susan Walsh is right: don’t forget about the manwhores. Both sexes have their share in this mess.
(3) Sigrid has provided a great illustration of WHY MEN DON’T GIVE AN AIRBORNE RODENT COPULATION ABOUT WOMEN’S “SUCCESS”!!!!
I’m going to be blunt here, Sigrid, but, if the only two women left on this earth were you and a crack whore with AIDS, and God told me I HAD to marry one, I’d be gambling on a cure for AIDS.
You might do well to learn from Walsh on this one, Sigrid…
While Walsh has an MBA from Wharton, she doesn’t use her credentials in any attempt to show that she is smarter than everyone else in the room. She simply lets the facts speak for themselves, and provides insights into factors that have made life hell for men and women. I don’t agree with her all the time, but she’s right most of the time.
And that brings me to another point: YOUR CREDENTIALS MEAN LITTLE TO NOTHING OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA! Those of us who work for a living could care less what you are doing in an establishment that has little connection to the real world. Fact is, Walsh’s MBA from Wharton is worth more than the PhD you don’t even have yet.
Oh, and you may not want to speak too soon about that PhD: the ranks of the academy are littered with folks–smarter than you–who got shot down just short of their dissertation defenses. Even in soft fields like education…
I’d kick you even harder, but I have real work to do. Hat tip to Vox Day and Munson for their smackdowns, though.
Vox Day’s Marital Fidelity Survey
The results of it were a little surprising. I’ll let Vox’s words speak for themselves and leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
There were 232 male and 59 female responses that were usable. I had to throw out a few that didn’t provide meaningful responses, such as those that answered “N” for a question concerning which the possible answers ranged from A to E. I also omitted the responses of a few polyamorous snowflakes; since the objective is to examine normal human fidelity the behavior of those who define the concept differently is of neither interest nor use.
Women
32% never married. 8% reported their own marital infidelity, 14% reported marital infidelity on their husband or ex-husband’s part. 31% of all women, married and unmarried, reported cheating on one or more pre-marital boyfriends. Of those who were unfaithful in marriage, 100% cheated on other boyfriends who were not their eventual husbands.
Female sexual infidelity rose considerably with increased sexual experience. None of the married women with 1-3 partners reported cheating, 20% with 4-9 partners did, as did 43% of women with 10+ partners. (There was an insufficient number of married women in category E, reporting 20+ partners, to be meaningful, so I included them with category D here.) There was no discernible pattern relating female sexual experience to male infidelity.
Men
24% never married. 15% reported their own marital infidelity, 24% reported marital infidelity on their wife or ex-wife’s part. 28% of all men, married and unmarried, reported cheating on one or more pre-marital girlfriends. Of those who were unfaithful in marriage, 65% cheated on other girlfriends they did not eventually marry.
The risk of both marital cheating and marital betrayal rose with male sexual experience. 3% of the men with 1-3 partners reported cheating and 14% reported betrayal, 12% of the men with 4-9 partners reported cheating and 30% reported betrayal, 28% of the men with 10-19 partners reported cheating and 31% reported betrayal, and 43% of the men with 20+ partners reported both cheating and betrayal.
The risk of divorce also rose with male sexual experience, although less smoothly. Whereas only 6% of the men with between 1-9 partners were divorced, 13% of the men with 10-19 partners and 35% of the men with 20+ partners were divorced.
Now, there superficially appears to be somewhat of a chicken-or-the-egg problem here, as one could argue that divorce and female infidelity precedes promiscuous male behavior. But the reports of premarital behavior tends to preclude this possibility, because men with 1-3 partners average one-half the number of serious premarital girlfriends and one-twentieth the number of betrayed premarital girlfriends as those with 10+ partners.
Conclusions
Infidelity is neither as rampant as is commonly assumed nor does it lead to divorce in the majority of cases. More of the men here than the women have experienced marital infidelity, nearly one quarter, which is unsurprising given a betrayed man will tend to be more inclined to swallow the red pill of Game. Both male and female cheaters tend to marry cheaters, but there is a surprising amount of premarital infidelity even among the relatively inexperienced. However, that premarital infidelity is less likely to translate into subsequent marital infidelity.
I was also surprised to see that the more sexually alpha a man is, the more likely it is that he will be betrayed by his wife. This is directly contra conventional Game theory, although both Athol and Roissy have theorized that while most women seek ALPHA, those with a surfeit of it may develop a craving for BETA. Alternatively, it could simply be a tit-for-tat reaction to habitual Alpha infidelity, or it could be the explanation towards which I incline, which is that because ALPHAS will tolerate higher Ns than lower rank men, they will tend to marry higher rank, higher N women who not only possess a greater proclivity to stray, but are subject to more frequent and determined attempts to seduce them. Of course, it could simply be a combination of all three of these factors.
I also noticed that female infidelity was somewhat more predictable than male infidelity, which is to say that her premarital behavior tends to be more in line with her marital behavior. Men tended to show more variability, as unlike women, there were men who were unfaithful in marriage who had never been unfaithful before marriage. This may or may not be because women with high N are less likely to marry than their male counterparts; only 43% of women in the N=20+ category had ever married versus 64% of men.
Good News and Bad News
Susan Walsh has provided a fascinating assessment of the sexual landscape in America. The results are, shall we say, interesting but not completely surprising.
In a nutshell:
(1) The good news: the majority of people aren’t hooking up and engaging in the casual sex culture.
(2) The bad news: the hookup culture is getting all the coverage, but it doesn’t represent the majority.
Still, the news is ominous for the ladies: in every age bracket, the male virgins outnumbered the female virgins.
Why is it bad news for the ladies? Fairly or unfairly, premarital sexual experience puts them behind the 8-ball. While male premarital sexual experience is encouraged by society (not here), that is not true for the ladies. Nor will it be.
But the marketing of the hookup culture–and the drive by college groups with various agendas to suck people into it (pun intended)–is a huge travesty.
“I’ll man up after she womans up”, and other childish arguments.
When it comes to advancing the dynamics of male-female interaction–i.e. Game–Roissy has few equals. Say what you want about his crude, crass secularism, he gets it about how women think, even as he uses that for his own base advantages.
Like Vox Day, I accept that Game is no respecter of religious or personal motivations: for folks like Roissy, Game is a means to get an endless stream of sexual partners. For the Christian who desires to marry well, an understanding of Game allows one to navigate through the dynamics of her tests and off-the-wall questions, in your quest to get her to marry you.
At the same time, one must always consider the source of information. With Vox, you’ll get an explication of Game from the perspective of a Christian. With Roissy, OTOH, you will get a lot of secularized angst about women. Vox is a Christian whereas Roissy is an Atheist.
This leads me to an argument that Roissy made on his blog.
First, some disclosures:
(1) We realize that all single mothers are not in that position due to immorality. Some are widowed, some are divorced due to exigent circumstances, and some are wives who were abandoned by their husbands.
Those, however, do not begin to account for the larger deluge in unwed childbirths. That is a serious problem, and it is a sign that, as a society, we are on the fast track to decline.
(2) Conception requires two people. Unless you are the small percentage who got pregnant from rape, sex is a very consensual matter. That goes for her; that goes for him.
Before I take Roissy to the woodshed, I agree with him in the following respects:
(a) While The New York Times is giving great attention to the men who are nowhere to be found with these children they helped bring into the world, NO ATTENTION IS GIVEN TO THE FACT THAT THESE WOMEN WERE HALF OF THE PROBLEM.
When you take ANY course of action, you are responsible for the outcomes of your decision. That is on the men who slept with these women; that is also on the women who chose to risk single motherhood by sleeping with these men.
No one “led these women down the path to promiscuity”, these men and women VOLUNTARILY chose it. Sex takes effort and thought. Trying to rationalize after the fact that “it just happened” is a total lie.
(b) He’s absolutely correct about government’s role in this problem: you DO get what you pay for. If you subsidize unwed motherhood, then you’ll get more of it. The last 50 years have proven that assessment correct, in spades.
With that, I shall now take Roissy to the woodshed…
(1) The maxim “you get what you pay for” applies to everyone involved. Whereas Roissy lambastes the appearances of these women, let it also be known that the men involved CHOSE to sleep with them. It matters not what Roissy or myself think of those women: the men who slept with them felt otherwise.
(2) The call to “man up” in this case is no respecter of what you think of the woman you slept with.
If you slept with her and got her pregnant, it matters not that you think she is a slut: you should have thought about that before you slept with her.
It matters not that you think she is ugly and not the kind of person you want to spend the rest of your life with: you should have thought about that before you slept with her.
What you think of her is irrelevant: you are now responsible for giving that child a father.
Roissy is a finance guy, so he knows about risk and return. High return means high risk, and unmarried sex is a very high-risk endeavor.
And as with finances, so it is with unmarried sex: if you take a big risk, you may not always get the return you were counting on. She may use The Pill, but that is not foolproof. And while 1 in 3 women of childbearing age will have one or more abortions, the other 2 of 3 women won’t be so high on the idea of killing their babies to get you off the hook.
Still, just as with finances, the time to consider the risk is BEFORE you take it. Once you make the decision, you own it.
And once there is a child involved, you are tied to her for the rest of your life, whether you wanted it or not.
Now, to the ladies, this part is for you…
(1) Just as with the men, unmarried sex is a high-risk endeavor. Aside from the fact that you are at higher risk for STDs than he is–due to anatomy and physiology–you will also, due to anatomy and physiology, bear the brunt if you get pregnant.
(a) That he is required by law to support a child if you get pregnant, does not guarantee that the state will be successful in compelling him to pay up. Nor is there any guarantee that he will be consistent in keeping his obligations.
(b) Abortion may look like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, but–if you have any smidgeon of a conscience, you will carry that burden for the rest of your life. Don’t kid yourself into believing otherwise: I’ve seen women attempt post-abortion suicide. I’ve seen women go through years of treatment for bipolar disorder, including shock therapy, whose problems began when they had abortions.
(c) If you get pregnant, the more honorable way out–a shotgun wedding–still has risks all its own.
(d) As family law becomes better-developed, it is also more possible that he may be able to get full custody, and YOU WILL BE FORCED TO PAY CHILD SUPPORT. Don’t kid yourself on this one, ladies: I’ve seen it happen, and there is a credible and strong logical case for it.
Ultimately, there really is no such thing as “no strings attached” sex.
Sooner or later, you will get your reckoning for it. I cannot tell you how that will play out for you, but I’m old enough to know that it does eventually play out.
Susan Walsh Opines on “Single by Choice” Folks
I’ll comment more on this later. Very good post by Walsh.
Stunning News
If you had asked me which group–men versus women–had, in percentage terms, more virgins among their college ranks, I would have answered, without hesitation, that the women do. My reason: societal expectations. Men are, more or less, EXPECTED to acquire notches on their belts; male sexual experience is REWARDED by women; women, in turn, are EXPECTED not to “put out”, as loose sexual mores are DISCOURAGED by men.
So color me SHOCKED to learn that, not only are the women–as a group–more promiscuous than men, they are so by a significant margin (virginity rate on campuses is 43% for the men, compared to to 37% for the women).
Now don’t get me wrong: I had dropped any pedestals on which I had placed women many years ago. That is not to say that I look at women with low regard, but rather that I don’t look at them as any better–or worse–than the men. Over the years, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the Total in Total Depravity.
At the same time, the trend in female promiscuity should be very troubling. This is because–like it or not–promiscuity adversely impacts the quality of men that a woman can attract. Even in a society awash in feminism, female promiscuity is still not looked upon as a good thing by men who are seeking a gal to marry. While the Alpha Males will gladly take such women home for a roll in the hay, they won’t consider a long-term relationship–let alone marriage–with such a one.
But I’ll bet you the women aren’t learning these things at home or at school or at college.
Oh, and please don’t start ranting here about double-standards, because–while you will have a point–it is a moot point.
There are two ways to look at the world: there is the world as we want it to be, and there’s the world as it is. We can bloviate all day about what we want the world to look like and what is fair and what is not, but–IF YOU WANT TO GET MARRIED, YOU’D BETTER BE READY TO DEAL WITH THE WORLD AS IT IS!!!
It’s not that I don’t care–in fact, I do–but, if you are going to make equitable, high-percentage decisions TODAY about your best chances of a positive future TOMORROW, YOU MUST DEAL WITH YOUR PRESENT REALITY!!!
If you don’t like it, then fine. But consider yourself warned.
In the Church, men catch no small amount of flak–Headship Theology anyone?–over promiscuity. In addition to their own vices–which include pornography–the men get blamed for every vice and crisis of the women, including their eating disorders, their promiscuity, and their singleness. Heck, the men end up getting blamed for the divorce culture, even though women file two thirds–or more–of the divorces.
It is long past time to deal with sins fairly and equitably, and that requires destroying the pedestal on which Christians have–as a group–placed women.
That also requires getting into the ugly mess that is singleness, and dealing–head-on–with the subcultures that singles are finding themselves navigating, and confronting that with the Gospel.
Looking at what Susan Walsh calls the “sexual marketplace”, men and women have a situation that, in secular terms, ranges from bad to downright ugly.
This is a golden opportunity for the Church to offer a more equitable alternative to singles. To date, singles are not seeing it.
