The Rawness

CNN is doing a series called Black in America. Online they had a piece related to this series titled “Black and Single: Is Marriage Really for White People?” This article I especially found interesting because it touched on many of the things I discussed in my last two blog posts explaining why so many modern women have trouble getting married. The TV specials and the linked article were the typical PC excuses and canards that we hear when it comes to this topic: noble black women are working hard and being super-successful in the classroom and the workplace, but the irresponsible black man is just fucking up left and right and as a result we’re stuck with the statistics of 45% of black women having never been married and a 70% illegitimacy rate in the black community.

I read this piece and almost responded on this blog, because I really get tired of how only black men are thrown under the bus in these reports, but black women are lionized to look so consistently noble, self-sacrificing. I’m not claiming black men are blameless here, just that we shouldn’t let black women totally off the hook here either, and we need start challenging some of these accepted premises if we really want to come up with solutions. Part of the problem is that despite all the talk about how black women have it harder than anyone else but in actuality that’s not entirely true. Oftentimes people will be deathly afraid of criticizing a black woman because with a black woman there is the fear of coming off both sexist and racist, which often shields them from criticism from white men, white women and even black men. You can call Paris Hilton a bleached blonde whore all you want in the media or even have two black male comedians make a mainstream movie mocking white women called White Chicks, but you can’t joke that black women are “nappy headed hoes” without a media firestorm. Seriously, picture a movie of two white comics dressed in blackface called “Black Chicks” where they send up all the stereotypical loud sassiness, eyerolling, and side-to-side neck thing people often associate with black women. Could you see that being made?

I started coming up with a lengthy response, but then I found a much better response in this audio podcast by Tariq Nasheed so I decided to just link to that instead. It has some salty language that you probably don’t want to listen to at work, but it is brutal in its lack of sugarcoating, but I think it’s a much more honest discussion of the topic than you’ll find when you look to the politically correct liberal mainstream media and the usual suspects of the popular black intelligentsia for answers. Nasheed really tells it like it is, and I must warn that many will find it offensive.

Another reason I didn’t write a lengthy response to the CNN series was because I think a lot of the writing I’ve done on the blog answers the questions well enough. Especially these four posts:

• Myth of the Ghetto Alpha Male
• Why Black American Chicks Like Thugs
• Why You Can’t Find a Husband Pt. 1
• Why You Can’t Find a Husband Pt. 2

Any response I’d make would end up repeating a lot of the same points I made in those posts anyway, so I figure it would be easier to just link to them.

As for the point about black illegitimacy, I really hate when the mainstream media covers things like this because as progressive liberals they’ll never attack the real culprit: the welfare state. Do you know that in 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent, less than what it is now? After the 60s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs were introduced, illegitimacy rates in the black community immediately skyrocketed. By the early 1990s black illegitimacy was at 70%, where before the Great Society it was only 22%. Why? Because these welfare programs rewarded single-parent households!

If a woman had children out of wedlock, she got government assistance with housing, food, education and spending money. If a man was living in the house or she got married, she lost these benefits. And case workers would visit to make sure that no man was living in the household. This created an incentive to have children out of wedlock and to stay out of wedlock. And it also created a culture of phantom fathers, men who float in and out to check up on things but never actually live in the household or marry the mothers.

After getting used to this low level of required parental investment, it wasn’t much of a step for them to just stop coming around altogether after a while. The boys who grow up in this environment receive the message from their own households and those of their friends that noninvolvement is socially acceptable for a father. The girls receive the message that they don’t need a man for anything except a sperm donation and that the the government can be their husband and the father to their child. And many times this social pathology stays with black people even as later generations move up the socioeconomic ladder.

As for the incredible gap in accomplishment between black men and black women? Once again, look at entitlement programs. Between black men and black women, who has received a lion’s share of benefits from federal entitlement programs since the 60s? Programs that shielded them from the full consequences of their choices and allowed them to go to get food, schooling, education, housing and childcare? Among men and women of all races in America an accomplishment gap has arisen, but the welfare state, by giving a vast majority of benefits to black women over black men, has made this accomplishment gap even more extreme in the black community.

You won’t find any mention of these factors on CNN though, even if they extended their Black in America series to a full year.

Recommended Reading:

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="175" caption="Delusional Bride"][/caption]

Part 1 of this 2-part series was focused on women who couldn’t find a steady man period, much less one to marry. Part 2 is going to focus on women who can get long-term relationships but are unable to get the men in question to marry them.

One of my favorite books is The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. And one of the laws in the book is especially relevant to this topic, and it’s the one that women who want to marry ignore the most. It is Law 13, and it reads as follows:

Law 13

When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude. If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.

Women, when trying to get men to marry them, violate this rule all the time, and I’ll explain how.

What do women often say when they have finished playing the field and enjoying their teens and 20s and they now feel it’s time to get married? They tell a guy “I’m not getting any younger.” [Translation: "My looks are fading."] “My biological clock is ticking.” “All my friends are getting married.” “I’ve given up so much for you.” “I invested too much time into this relationship for it not to be leading to marriage. You wasted/ruined the best years of my life!”

All of these and many of the other pleas women use to get men to marry them, as you can see, appeal to gratitude (“l gave you my best years. I deserve marriage.”) or mercy (“I am getting older, less desirable with age and all my friends are getting married. I need to get married now.”). The problem with gratitude is that people resent having it dangled over them and being reminded of it. Especially if they don’t value what you did for them as much as you do. For example, any man who isn’t a chump with low self-esteem won’t think you choosing to be with them is some kind of huge favor. They’d prefer to think of it as a mutual favor at best. The problem with appealing to mercy or pity is that there is no shortage of people in need. If just going by need, there will always be someone in worse circumstances who needs the mercy or pity even more than you do. And need is not attractive. Keep in mind, banks rarely lend to people who need money the most, yet to people who already have money they can’t lend enough.

If you want to get your man to marry you, don’t try to sell the idea to him by emphasizing how much it will benefit you or how much you “deserve” and “need” it. Focus on how it will benefit him. Too many women only focus on their own perspective in the matter and not the man’s.

Picture being a job applicant and having this approach to selling yourself. You go to prospective employers telling them how much you need the job, mentioning how you’re on the verge of poverty and how you’ve exhausted your other employment options and conveying your desperation. What would that employer do? He’d either wonder why you have so few options and be turned off by your desperation, or he’ll take advantage of your state of need by underpaying you, giving you a lower job title than you feel qualified for or exploiting and manipulating you once you’re hired because he’ll know how badly you need to keep the job. No, what you do is downplay how much you need the job, act like you have plenty of options, present the strongest image of yourself that you can and focusing on how you can benefit the prospective employer more than how the employer can benefit you. This is the same approach you need to take toward getting your man to marry you.

So let’s look at the balance of power going into a marriage situation and see what each side has to gain and offer. In part 1, I laid the case for why a woman’s strongest assets are her youth and age rather than her credentials and career status.  Now on the male side of the equation, what gives him value are career status, social intelligence, confidence, power, stability and wealth. Unlike a woman’s main assets, youth and age, these assets of the male increase rather than decrease with age. Many men growing up don’t realize how much their stock will rise with age until it happens. In fact, our society has become so feminized that many men grow up thinking like women, fearing turning 30, focusing on their looks as metrosexuals and thinking their stock will fall with age the way women’s stock does.

But when men do start acquiring success, money and stability, start getting more comfortable with and less intimidated by women and start becoming consistently successful with women for the first time in their lives, they are placed in a situation they’ve never been in before. For once, they actually have the upper hand in the dating game. After years and years of chasing after women like hungry lapdogs and putting them on pedestals, they are suddenly in a position they never saw coming. They are now the prize, and they now want to make up for all the years when they weren’t. This is the mindset you’re now dealing with, ladies.  You need to understand it in order to handle it correctly.

So as a woman you have to place yourself in a man’s shoes. Up until now you’ve been in the driver’s seat, making men jump through hoops and twisting them around your finger at will while sitting on the top of the dating food chain. Young guys with their lack of money, status and game accepted their lower status without a fight and begged and even tried to buy approval. Now at the exact time that the tables are turning, roles are reversing and your stock is declining, you are asking a man to settle down with one woman at the exact moment his dating stock is at the highest it has ever been and only stands to rise higher. He can afford his own apartment without roommates, is on a good career track, is no longer intimidated by women and has game, he is accumulating wealth and savings, he has more sexual experience and is no longer as clueless and intimidated in the bedroom, plus with all this rising dating stock, we know we have the option of dating younger and hotter than at any point in our lives, including the period of our lives when we ourselves were younger and hotter. So it’s not a lack of maturity keeping men from committing, it’s a lack of incentives. We as men see your incentive for wanting to get married, because your biological clock is ticking and your looks are fading and all your friends are getting married. We just don’t see the incentives for ourselves. Throw in all the divorce laws and other reasons why marriage is a bad deal for men and it just gets worse. This article also lays out all the liabilities men expose themselves to thanks to current divorce laws (emphasis added by me):

Sudden Divorce Syndrome. You won?t find it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that bible of psychiatric illnesses, but you will find it in life. In a 2004 poll by the AARP, one in four men who were divorced in the previous year said they ?never saw it coming.? (Only 14 percent of divorced women said they experienced the same unexpected broadside.) And few events in a man?s life can be as devastating to his physical, mental, and financial health…

The warning signs are usually there, claims Buckley, but the male mind is simply not very adept at recognizing them. ?When women make up their mind that the relationship is over, they stop talking about the relationship,? she says. ?Men interpret a woman?s lack of complaining as satisfaction. But more often, it?s because she?s simply given up.?

To understand how common this scenario is, consider figures provided by John Guidubaldi, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare. Nationwide, Guidubaldi reports, wives are the ones to file for divorce 66 percent of the time, and, in some years, that figure has soared to nearly 75 percent. ?It is easier to end a marriage than it is to fire an employee,? says Guidubaldi. If she wants out, it?s over. ?You can get a dissolution of marriage on the basis of nothing.?

Oftentimes, men have a divorce sprung on them in midlife, when their kids are more self-sufficient and they?ve finally started to think they were over the hump. Like Martin Paul, they could start to relax. But that?s exactly the time of life when the instance of divorce begins to swell (another occurs shortly after marriage). Joe Cordell, of the law firm Cordell and Cordell, which specializes in ?representing men in domestic cases, attributes this to wives deciding as they approach age 40 that it?s now or never for getting back into the marriage market. It?s the same phenomenon as rich guys trading in their long-time partners for trophy wives. Only it?s the women who are shedding men.

It didn?t used to be this way. While divorce has been legal for nearly two centuries, it was long a topic of such mortification that it was considered a last, desperate resort. The 1960s changed all that. The free-love decade both increased the inclination to divorce and dropped the social resistance to it. The rising financial independence of women began to free them from a need to stay in a stultifying or abusive marriage. As a result, divorce soared, doubling by most measures. But the stereotypical divorce story?man marries, starts a family, meets a younger women, and leaves his wife?just isn?t as common as we are led to believe.

?Marriage changes men more pervasively and more profoundly than it changes women,? explains sociologist Steven Nock, author of Marriage in Men?s Lives. ?The best way to put it is, marriage is for men what motherhood is for women.? Marriage makes men grow up. Nock observes that many men before marriage are indifferent workers, and, after hours, are likely to be found in bars or zoned out in front of a TV. After marriage, they are solid wage earners, frequent churchgoers, maybe members of a neighborhood protection association. But divorce takes that underpinning away, leaving men strangely infantilized and unsure of their place in the world. They feel like interlopers in the stands at their children?s soccer games or in the auditorium for their school plays.

Compounding this pain, men find the deck is stacked against them. The divorce system tends to award wives custody of the children, substantial child support, the marital home, half the couple?s assets, and, often, heavy alimony payments.

This may come as startling news to a public that has been led to believe that women are the ones who suffer financially postdivorce, not men. But the data show otherwise, according to an exhaustive study of the subject by Sanford L. Braver, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and author of

Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths. ?The man is in a lot poorer condition than the popular media portray,? he says. ?This idea of the swinging, happy-go-lucky, no-worries single guy in a bar?that?s just not it at all.? The misconception was fueled by Harvard professor Lenore Weitzman?s widely cited book, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America.

This is what you’re working against. And focusing even more on your own reasons for getting married will do no good. What you need to do is show how the incentives of getting married to you specifically outweigh all the incentives he has to stay single. So a guy is receiving the loss of his most enjoyable, prime dating years after a woman has already enjoyed her prime dating years, is receiving sex with one woman for the rest of his life, which will likely only decrease after marriage, is risking putting all his financial progress at risk if there’s a divorce thanks to divorce laws that are stacked against him, is risking bitter custody battles for any kids he may have, having to face a court system that presumptively sides with the woman when any charges of neglect, infidelity and emotional and physical abuse are levied…you can see why the fact that you’re getting older just isn’t enough justification for him.

So here’s what you have to do. First, follow the rules laid out in my perfect woman post to the letter. Also, take note of a comment left by a reader Mike in response to part 1 of this post:

I agree with your assessment about age/looks being a critical factor, but what about domestic skills – cooking, cleaning, etc. – and intangibles – non-materialistic values, interest compatibility, etc. – that many guys like myself view as prerequisites for wife status? Do these not factor in, or are they just assumed like ?good sex??

Feminism has convinced women that excelling in domestic skills that Mike mentions are a form of weakness or accepting oppressive tradition. I run into many women who even take pride in not knowing how to cook and hiring cleaning ladies rather than cleaning themselves. If you are willing to excel in these areas, you are adding much more value to yourself than you are from getting an excellent career. Now more than ever these skills are rare in women, while nowadays hypereducated career women are almost a dime a dozen. And honestly, most men suck at cooking and cleaning house, but most men are able to make ends meet, eat takeout and hire a cleaning lady. Take a look at the average guy’s bachelor pad and it’s usually a cluttered mess with tons of takeout boxes and TV dinners. Having someone else who makes money, can’t cook or clean and is able to hire a cleaning lady is redundant. Someone who can do those things however offers things the guy can’t do as well himself.

In addition, learn some of the advantages for men that come from marriage and sell those to him rather than focus on the disadvantages that come to you from not being married. For starters, married men tend to be more productive and successful across professions, stay in better physical and mental health, and are less likely to engage in “risky behaviors” which helps them live longer. Research as many benefits to men from marriage as you can and use them to sell him on the idea.  I’ll let you in on a secret: much of this research is actually debatable and shaky.  But that’s between you and me, he doesn’t need to know that.  What matters is that many reputable sources trumpet these studies as valid, and the power of authority (study conducted by doctor, at Harvard, and printed in NY Times) is good enough proof for most people.

And lastly, give indications that if he marries you, he will not be at risk of many of the downsides that usually scare men away from marriage. Give indications that you plan to actually have more sex with him after marriage, not less. Guys always hear stories from their married friends about how sex slows down after marriage while blow jobs stop completely. Coyly purr things like “Once we’re married, I’m so going to wear you out every day. I hope you’re up to it.” (Or whatever wording works for you) Hint that blow jobs will increase exponentially. Don’t battle over the prenup if it’s important to him. Let him know all the ways having you around will make his daily grind easier. Take a top-notch cooking class and say it’s for him. If he’s into working out and eating healthy, learn to cook a dazzling array of low-calorie, high-flavor dishes. Show him articles like this one about the recent rash of wives who immediately left their investment banker husbands and hired divorce lawyers after they got laid off of Wall Street and the shopping sprees and Hamptons trips dried up, and mention how outraged and disgusted you are by such behavior and how you are totally unsympathetic to them, thereby planting the seed in his mind that his worst fears in a future wife won’t apply to you. Find out what causes him the most grief in his daily life, what his most dreaded chores or tasks are, and find a way to indicate that being married to you will alleviate that aspect of his life.

Recommended Reading:

UPDATE: Please note that part 2 is now up.

I was inspired to write this piece by a female friend. This friend, who is in her mid-30s, recently asked me “I don’t get it. I have a graduate degree, I make great money, I own property, I’ve got a great car, I’m independent and I’m ambitious. Why can’t I get a good man to marry?” I told her the truth, and it seemed to shock her: “Most guys don’t care about any of that. They want the hottest, youngest girl they can find that pumps their egos and make them feel like a million bucks.” Of course she totally refused to believe it.

But this was hardly an isolated case. I’ve definitely noticed a rising epidemic among modern, “politically enlightened” big-city women. They’ve figured out everything, it seems, except how to get married. There are more women than ever in their 30s and 40s who seem to have figured out everything from career to real estate to retirement; everything, that is, except how to get a partner for life. I’m here to help, but I have to warn you that this will be unpleasant for many of you to hear, especially since it goes against what modern society has been telling women to do for the past two generations, which is to chase status and career accomplishments like men traditionally have. This is part 1 of a 2-part series, and it focuses on modern women who can’t find a steady man at all. Part 2 will focus on women who have a man or can find men but can’t seem to get them to commit to marriage.

The main problem many modern women have as far as finding satisfactory men is that they have let feminism tell them what men like rather than actually watching the actions of men. And a major problem of feminist ideology is that it often confuses being equal with men with being identical to men. Therefore many women start believing that the things that make a man’s stock rise will also help their own stock rise in the exact same way, and that’s simply not the case. Most men don’t really care about your graduate degree or high powered job since they can’t have sex and reproduce with either. Doctors, politicians and lawyers are often very status-obsessed, at least when starting out professionally, so they may be impressed with such credentials at first, but once they arrive at the top even they don’t care anymore and often trade their starter wives in for a younger, hotter woman with less credentials.

That’s why the most important things a woman can do is capitalize on her youth and her looks and the health of her eggs. If you want to marry and have kids, you’re better off being hot but less educated and having less status than letting your looks and physique go while chasing a high-powered job. Status and riches don’t attract men the way they attract women. Or at least they don’t attract the right kind of man.

Women see a man with status and wealth and power and that man genuinely starts becoming more attractive to them. It’s not like they’re just pretending they’re attracted as they go for his money and status, he actually becomes genuinely attractive to them, especially if he’s got game to boot. To a man on the other hand, a woman looks the same to him whether she is powerful and wealthy or not. Oprah is a billionaire and is no where close to being a sex symbol to men. Even to a gigolo who uses powerful women for money, those women never actually become any more attractive to him as a result of the wealth and status.

For a woman, credentials, status and wealth in a man can create attraction.  For most men, credentials, status and wealth in a woman are just a bonus to whatever looks and poise a woman already possesses.  There are exceptions, for sure, but do you really want to bank your whole mating strategy on landing the rare exceptions?

Things are this way  because of how men and women evolved. I wrote in the past about the two drives of human beings, which are basically to survive and to reproduce. Just about every instinct and tendency we have helps us in one or both of these goals. Since women have always been the physically weaker of the species, it makes sense that they’ve evolved to place more value on mates that can help them fulfill the survival drive. As for the reproduction drive, most men are fertile well into their older years, so just about all man can satisfy that part of the equation. This is why age and looks traditionally matter less to women than they do to men, since age and looks don’t play as big a role in indicating male fertility as they do in indicating female fertility. Since fertility is abundant in men, women focus more on things that satisfy the survival drive than the reproduction drive, which in men are in no particular order physical power, bravery, wealth, social intelligence, power and class status.

Men on the other hand didn’t evolve to rely on women to satisfy their survival drive. To fulfill the survival part men traditionally relied on themselves or other men in their tribes for physical protection. The only possible survival questions a man has when dealing with a woman is whether she has the type of attitude or mouth that will get him killed by getting him into fights with other men or whether she’ll shorten his lifespan through excessive stress and nagging. Otherwise, women usually can’t do much to help a man survive, so as a result men have been conditioned by evolution to judge women mostly on how they satisfy the reproductive drive. To illustrate the difference in male and women fertility windows, consider the following information from this website on sexual selection:

There is a great difference in the number of babies a man and a woman can potentially produce. Women can only become pregnant and bear young a maximum of once a year, more typically once every two years at most. This means that during a lifetime a woman can have a maximum of only about 12 children. Although there are some notable exceptions with women having over 20 children, this is mostly due to them producing sets of twins, triplets or more.

For men the picture is very different. If a man went from ovulating woman to ovulating woman, and mated with each, he could potentially sire thousands of young during his lifetime. Of course this would never really happen, but it does illustrate the fact that a single man can have many more children than a single woman.

A mans reproductive success is limited by his access to women willing to mate with him. A woman’s reproductive success is limited by her biological circumstances.

So to sum up where we are so far: humans care most about two things, survival and reproduction. When choosing mates, women are conditioned to focus on the survival part of the equation because they are the physically weaker sex, as well as the people most likely to be stuck raising a child. Although reproductive health of a man matters to them, it’s not something they obsess about as much as men because fertility is hardly a limited resource in men.  After all men are usually physically capable of fathering up to thousands of children in a lifetime. Hence women focus more on things about a man related to helping the survival of her and her offspring: wealth, class status, social intelligence, power, and physical dominance in the form of height and physique. Men have the survival aspect down, so women can’t help them much there. But when it comes to reproduction, women have much more fertility limitations than men, so men have to focus on a woman’s fertility indicators much more than anything else.

When judging a woman for reproductive health and fertility indicators, two things matter more than anything else: age and looks.

AGE

Unlike men, women have a much shorter window for having children, which is why men are conditioned to value young women so much.

• Female fertility peaks between ages 19-24.
• A woman’s fertility starts to measurably decline by age 27.
• For women under 30, the chances of getting pregnant in a single cycle are between 20-30%. By 40, it’s down to 5%.
• Miscarriage rates are higher in older women. According to the March of Dimes, “about 9 percent of recognised pregnancies for women aged 20 to 24 ended in miscarriage. The risk rose to about 20 percent at age 35 to 39, and more than 50 percent by age 42″.
• According to the March of Dimes, “At age 25, a woman has about a 1-in-1,250 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome; at age 30, a 1-in-1,000 chance; at age 35, a 1-in-400 chance; at age 40, a 1-in-100 chance; and at 45, a 1-in-30 chance.”
• A woman’s menstrual cycle tends to become shorter and more irregular as she ages.
• The lining of a woman’s womb may decline or become thinner with age.
• A woman’s ovarian reserve, or the number of follicles capable of producing viable eggs a woman has left in her ovaries, declines with age.

And as far as looks go, it’s no coincidence that many of the things men are conditioned by evolution to find attractive also happen to be indicators of reproductive health:

LOOKS

• Not being too skinny or too fat, having clear, smooth skin and waist-to-hip ratio of less than 70% are all associated with good overall health and good fertility health in particular.
• A conventionally attractive female face advertises high levels of estrogen, which in turn advertise fertility. Full lips and larger eyes are linked to higher levels of estrogen (estrogen leads to larger eyes, fuller lips and bigger cheeks in women than men).
• In puberty, higher levels of estrogen causes the bones in the face to grow less, particularly in the nose and chin. Thus women with smaller chins and noses tend to convey reproductive health through their faces and are therefore considered more attractive.
• Estrogen leads to a curvier figure, causing more fat to be deposited on the hips and buttocks, which is why men are usually turned off by women who are anorexically thin. However being too fat also causes reproductive problems in women and indicates poor health, which is why overweight women are usually not considered attractive either.
• For more proof on how a woman’s fertility can be conveyed through facial features, consider this study:
  

  The link between female attractiveness and fertility was demonstrated by St. Andrews researcher Marian Law Smith. She and her team took photographs of 59 women who were between the ages of 18 and 25. Each woman was asked to provide a urine sample at exactly the same point in their menstrual cycles, so that the researchers could ascertain their levels of sex hormones. A different group of volunteers was shown the photographs of the women and was asked to rank all 59 for attractiveness and health, based on the pictures of their faces. Both male and female volunteers rated the faces of the women with the highest levels of estrogen as most attractive.

• Even style apparently plays a part in conveying fertility according to new research:
  

  There are lots of them – women who like an occasion to dress-to-impress. But how many truly know why they do it? New research suggests that beyond the innate desire so many have to simply look good, the answer might actually lie in hormones. According to a study completed by researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, the more fertile a woman is, the more attention she will pay to the way she dresses. Not only do fertile women focus on their appearance more closely, but “they tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably,” Martie Haselton, the study’s lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology, said…Like female birds or other animals that change color or release strong scents when seeking a mate, human females apparently spruce themselves up similarly around the 15th day of their menstrual cycles, when most women ovulate.

For the evolutionary reasons outlined above, the best things you can do as a woman who wants to get married is to capitalize on your age and looks while you can. Sure it’s politically incorrect, but it’s reality. Some may try to call it shallow for men to focus on age and looks, but it’s just optimal reproductive strategy and is a major reason for the success of our species. If men traditionally had the biological urge to choose women they way modern women wish, the species would have probably died out a long time ago.

At some point in human existence there were may have been many men who preferred genius intelligence, homely, fat women over 50, but since these women had poor fertility health these men ended up having little to no kids and their fat-loving, ugly-preferring, genius-admiring genes ended up getting weeded out of existence. After thousands upon thousands of years of natural selection, the genes of men who preferred reproductively inferior women are long gone and today we’re left with men who have inherited their mate preferences from those with the best mating strategy: the men who primarily were concerned with looks and age in their female mates.

These are the cards women were dealt. There are two types of people in this world, those who complain about how the world should be and focus on changing the world rather than themselves and those who accept the world and reality as it is and work to conform to that reality and work within that framework. The former face a life of frustration, disappointment and angst and end up bitter. The latter usually are life’s great successes. Progressive feminists are among the former, and like Maureen Dowd they tend to write bitter articles like this railing against men for not going against their biology and choosing older, successful career women over younger, hotter, more fertile females. As a woman, you don’t want to be Maureen Dowd. You just don’t.

Does that mean there are no men out there who are more impressed by credentials, education and earning power than looks and youth? Sure there are. They tend to be ambitious lower-status guys however. As low-status guys with ambition, they are trying to build their power, wealth and status by any means necessary, including marrying up. Also, as lower-status guys, they have less options than high-status guys, so even though they may want younger and prettier women, they take what they can get because they feel the younger, prettier women are out of their grasp. High-status men on the other hand have more options to mate with younger and prettier women. This is why many ambitious men start off with an older, less attractive and smarter woman when they are low-status but trade her in for a younger, hotter, less intellectual model as they get older and wealthier. Their stock rises as their wealth, status, and social intelligence increase with age, enabling them to attract the younger and hotter women they couldn’t get before.  So ironically, the more a woman works on her education, career and status while squandering her youth and squandering her peak prettiness years, the more likely she is to attract a low-status male. And even if that low-status male has high ambition, once he becomes high-status he is likely to trade her in thanks to his increased options.

Also, since women have a natural inclination toward hypergamy, the urge to look for men with higher status than themselves, this means the more successful and powerful women make themselves, the less and less successful men they have to choose from for marrying up. In addition, the successful men they need to get with in order to marry upward are precisely the ones most likely to overlook them for a younger and hotter model thanks to having so many options. This leads to three options for many of these women: (1) keep holding out for that mate that will allow you to marry up in status, despite the fact that each passing year is likely to make you less and less attractive to the type of man you want, (2) settle for a lower-status male, keeping in mind the risk that if he’s ambitious he may end up trading you in or (3) if you are the type of women for whom marrying down is an unacceptable option, you can decide to forego marriage altogether, claiming things like “I’d rather be happy than married.” (And I never believe option #3 when I hear it, because I guarantee you that many of these “rather be happy than married” women, if given the chance to marry a high-status man of acceptable pedigree, would suddenly be all for marriage).

For women who want to be married, focus on doing it while you’re young and at your most beautiful. Go to school, get an undergraduate degree, be as financially independent as you can, but I’d recommend foregoing grad school, if you must go, until after you get married or at least are in a marriage-bound relationship, and not to wait too long to start having kids either. And throughout it all, never let your looks, weight or fashion go down the tubes while you chase your goals. They carry more weight with men than your credentials do, and this is especially true the more successful the man is.  All these things are important, but they should aim to use them in addition to your hotness and youth, not in lieu of them.

Click here for part 2.

Radar Magazine asks “Who Killed The Movie Star?“. It’s an article that ties in pretty well to one I wrote about the newest and most important type of celebrity of the modern era, The Tabloid Star. Radar Magazine points out:

For most of the century…having the right name on the marquee?be it Chaplin, Garbo, Grant, McQueen, Schwarzenegger, or Hanks?has been the most cruc predictor of a film’s success.

No longer. The past year has seen more falling stars than the skies above Roswell. Since 2007, with the notable exception of Will Smith, whose upcoming tent-pole flick Hancock is enjoying some of the best prerelease buzz of any summer film, virtually every star of note has tanked at the box office, sending a collective shiver down the industry’s spine. Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Reese Witherspoon, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Ben Stiller, and Will Ferrell have all starred in movies that made less than $40 million domestically, far from the magic number?$100 million?that’s become the standard measure of a successful release. Outside of their tried-and-true franchises, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz, and Johnny Depp have fared little better, topping out, in some cases, at less than $70 million. Same thing for the presumably unbeatable duo of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, whose widely praised political romp, Charlie Wilson’s War, took in a scant $66 million.

In 1995, Jim Carrey was paid $20 million for The Cable Guy. For his next comedy, Yes Man, he’s receiving nothing up-front and shares in the profits only if there are any (Photo: Getty Images)

“We’re in a cycle where stars aren’t as important to a film’s success as they used to be,” says Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, echoing a May cover story in the Hollywood Reporter. Between 1990 and 2000, roughly two-thirds of the top 10 grossing films each year could chalk up their success to star power; since 2001, that number has declined by more than half. “There was a period of time when studio marketing departments could count on just hiring a movie star to open a movie,” says producer Lynda Obst?casting, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the absurd Kindergarten Cop, and Julia Roberts in the aggressively mediocre Runaway Bride. “It’s not so easy anymore,” she adds.

Accordingly, movie star paychecks aren’t what they used to be. In 1995, the rubber-faced Jim Carrey was the first actor to be awarded a $20 million contract?for the ill-fated Cable Guy. (Soon after, Sandler, Smith, Cruise, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and others were commanding the same price.) At the time that Columbia Pictures made him the offer, the funnyman had never had a flop. Since then, he’s had plenty. As a result, Warner Bros. just financed his next comedy, Yes Man, with a very different sort of deal: Carrey will receive zippo up front, but is entitled to 36.2 percent of the movie’s profits … should any materialize.

Face it: The movie star as we’ve come to know him?an actor who can reliably put butts in seats on opening weekend?is dead.

Then the article goes into reasons why this may be the case. Culprit #1? The tabloids:

THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! So why would we pay $11.50 to watch them?

Call it death by a thousand crotch shots. The incredible success of the weekly tabs, an innovation credited to Bonnie Fuller, the former Us Weekly editrix (who went on to bring her dark magic to Star before stepping down in May), has reduced the movie star to someone who’s “just like us!” And if they are mere mortals?as we’re forever being reminded, one Starbucks run at a time?who needs them? By chronicling an actor’s every bad hair day, sartorial screwup, and debased love life, the tabs?joined by TMZ with its nightly curbside ambushes and Perez with his doodled penises?have ripped the veneer of glamour from one matinee idol after another, exposing the sad, unbalanced, attention-starved creatures underneath. As a result, we’ve adopted what Hollywood historian David Thomson calls “a bitter, acidic, vengeful attitude toward the stars.”

To see the carnage Fuller has wrought, look no further than former box-office golden boy?now perpetual superfreak?Tom Cruise. Or recall the horrifying fate of the original Bennifer, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who were poised to become Hollywood royalty and instead watched helplessly as their careers were shredded by the tabloids (granted, the couple all but invited the harpies into their bedroom, but still). In 2001, the year before they began dating, Lopez was the first star ever to have the country’s No. 1 album (J.Lo) and top-grossing film (The Wedding Planner) simultaneously. That same year, Affleck starred in the blockbuster Pearl Harbor, which grossed a gargantuan $198 million. In 2002, the duo hooked up and proceeded to hijack the media, flaunting their relationship in music videos, magazines, and a prime-time television special. After their breakup in 2004, blamed on “media scrutiny,” both went into virtual hiding for years. Now he’s bleeping Jimmy Kimmel, and she’s bleeping Marc Anthony. Ouch.

Like I said in my blog post, using tabloids to gain exposure seems to increase your fame and buzz, but actually destroys your primary career. It makes you too relatable to the masses thereby taking away much of your mystique. We all know how flawed many of our past matinee idols were, but we usually found out long after it mattered posthumously. At the time we didn’t know Marilyn Monroe’s demons, were unaware of Rock Hudson’s sexuality, were clueless about Joan Crawford’s child raising techniques, were oblivious to JFK’s affairs and Elvis’s drug habits, and Jayne Kennedy’s sex tape wasn’t readily available for purchase by the masses. Their handlers guarded their secrets religiously.

And this level of insight into celebrity lives leads into the other reason tabloid exposure hurts the stars: the lurid details of their real lives form narratives become more compelling than the fake narratives they create onscreen. The details of Lindsey Lohan’s train wreck of a life, along with the cast of outrageous characters that come along with it like her parents and sister and lovers, are much more interesting and fascinating than any of the characters or storylines I’ve seen described for her recent movies. When the truth becomes more fascinating than fiction, people will choose the truth. Compare this to old newsreels of past matinee idols where they strove to create the illusion of a glamorous but relatively bland drama-free personal life that paled in comparison to the roles they played on the screen. Why pay $11.50 to see a celebrity act out a fake story when you can keep track of their real life stories that are a lot more salacious, fast-paced and outrageous for a fraction of the price? The movie roles almost seem to be a distraction to audiences from the more compelling drama that is the actor’s real life shenanigans.
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Remember when I linked to this video of Madonna emasculating her husband?

Now it turns out they may be getting divorced. No surprise there.
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I also declared that the Pete Wentz/Ashlee Simpson pregnancy may be the highest concentration of douche genes ever seen in a single human being, a long-awaited (dreaded?) messiah of douchedom even. This latest public statement by Pete Wentz just confirms my worst fears:

Dad-to-be Pete Wentz has a confession: He’s made out with dudes.

He tells Out magazine he first smooched a guy when he was 16 or 17, probably on a dare.

He experimented again around 18 and 19, he says.

His last same-sex make out?

“A long time ago,” Wentz, 29, says. “Probably when I was 22?”

The Fall Out Boy bassist ? who wed Ashlee Simpson in May ? puts all his experimenting in perspective.

“When I said that I make out with dudes, there was a slight sense of sexual rebellion in that,” he tells Out. “And I probably even made it a bigger deal than it was.”

Lordy, has edginess ever come off as more forced and contrived? Do people really still get impressed with stuff like this at this point?

What’s he doing in this picture? Is that supposed to be a sneer or something? I remember when punks and alt-rockers actually used to be fuck ups. I mean, real-deal fuck ups. Not normal, suburban whitebread clean cut kids trying hard to seem fucked up and edgy in order to emulate their punk heroes from decades past. The traditional symbols of rebellion from bisexuality to tattoos to piercings have been so co-opted and resold that no one even takes them seriously as symbols of rebellion anymore. Even asexual hipster geeks now have more sleeve tattoos than heroin and meth-addicted z-list metal road bands, but instead of the tattoo making them look edgy they just end up sucking the cool out of the tattoo. With every new tattooed and pierced Pete Wentz and Joel Madden that hits the big time, the more douchey that old punk aesthetic becomes. No amount of tattoos and piercings and spikey hair will ever erase this level of lame geekiness:

Remember that old Sesame Street sketch “One of these things is not like the other?” Read I Need More, the autobiography of Iggy Pop or the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (An Evergreen book) by Legs McNeil and then watch that clip again and tell me which one it is.

I’ve become convinced that the most edgy, daring and rebellious show of the past decade was actually 7th Heaven, because it was probably the only one that was willing to go against the mainstream grain and didn’t care how much criticism and backlash it got from the masses. People think it was mainstream because it was uncynical and focused on family values and religion and morality. But mainstream simply means what the majority finds socially acceptable, and nowadays with the widespread pornification of pop culture, the majority of entertainment celebrating piercings, the pornstar aesthetic, debauchery, binge drinking, promiscuous women and tattoos the idea of a repressive society is now a myth, if anything our current problem is that our society is too permissive. It’s probably the most daring thing that will ever grace Jessica Biel’s acting resume.

If being punk rock is about going against the grain and doing stuff that actually shocks and outrages people, I think Charlton Heston with his unabashedly pro-gun and outspoken conservative views as a member of the ultraliberal entertainment community and the scorn it won him probably made him one of the most punk rock celebrity in recent years. I’m sure he’s garnered more scorn, shock and outrage from the mainstream than Good Charlotte, Green Day and Fall Out Boy combined. Madonna doing another statement against Christianity and sexual prudes? *Yawn* Brigitte Bardot bashing Muslims and multiculturalism? That’s “punk.” Kirk Cameron suddenly becoming a born-again christian at the height of his fame is way more “punk” than Wentz and his homo makeout sessions.

Now my problem isn’t that I think that clean-cut goody-goody geeks don’t have a right to make rock music. I’m all for it. But don’t go around trying to portray yourself as this gritty, edgy bad boy because you aren’t fooling anyone worth fooling. Be yourself. Live what you know. It’s one of those things I always liked about Will Smith, even when his music wasn’t my cup of tea. The guy was ridiculously comfortable in his own skin and never tried to be anything he wasn’t. He did wholesome rap ditties about high school, the suburbs, his parents and trying to meet girls. And this is during the height of West Coast gangster rap and East Coast afrocentric rap when everyone thought you had to be either a stone cold gangster or a black revolutionary to have any validity in hip-hop. And people embraced him for being true to himself and he spun that sincerity off into one of the most illustrious Hollywood careers ever. It’s probably why he’s one of the few A-list actors left that can make a move huge just by attaching his name to it. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

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