The Rawness

A reader (I forgot to ask him if he wanted his name used) forwarded me this clip of an NPR show called Radiolab, in particular a clip that he said speaks directly to my Myth of the Middle Class Alpha Male series.

Putting aside the annoyingly nebbish yuppie cadences of the presenters, it makes some great points that speak directly to things I was going to mention in Part 4 of the series.  So consider this both an illustration of things described in parts 1-3 and a preview of part 4. I’ll elaborate on the parallels in part 4.

Brian Hare tells us the story of Dmitri Belyaev, a geneticist and clandestine Darwinian who lived in Stalinist Russia and studied the domestication of the silver fox. Through generations of selectively breeding a captive population, Belyaev noticed not only increased docility, but also unexpected physical changes. Why did these gentler foxes necessarily look different than their wild ancestors? Tecumseh Fitch has a hypothesis, something about trailblazing cells and embryonic development. And Richard Wrangham takes it a step further, suggesting us humans may have domesticated ourselves.

Click here for Part 1, click here for Part 2.  Now let’s get started with this installment, part 3:

How and Why Modern Western Society Keeps Alphadom in Check and Penalizes Any Excess of It

I have to warn you, this will seem repetitive at times as I will cite overlapping points repeated by several sources, but I really, really want to make sure the logic behind my reasoning comes across clearly so bear with me.

Let’s start off with a passage from the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley:

In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry:The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines: Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size: Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.

As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.

In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects: The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren: In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.”

The connection between sex and power is a long one.

There are several important lessons to derive from this passage. One lesson is that an unfettered, free-for-all competition for resources usually leads to incredible inequality where only a few of the men control most of the resources, including access to women, while most men are forced to suffer in misery and celibacy. The second is that being a major alpha male in today’s industrialized West is much, much less rewarding than it was at other moments in humankind’s history. We’ve gone from legalized harems and rule with an iron fist as a reward for major alphas to societies where we expect monogamy and a degree of humility exercised by comparable alpha males today. For example we recently saw the fallout a billionaire of today like Tiger Woods faces when he cheats for banging 14 low class hoes, which is nothing in comparison to the sexual escapades of the alphas of era past described above:

To get an idea of how powerful the vagina-hoarding effect of polygamy throughout history was, consider this: today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

How did we go from there to here? From polygamous societies where high status alphas with all the resources hoarded all the women and the average man didn’t get a chance to reproduce to a society where the most powerful alphas are expected to stay loyal to one wife and risk getting half their resources taken away from them if they don’t? How did we get from the richest alphas running harems to being publicly shamed on every television network and punished for straying even once?

The Red Queen tackles this question also, emphasis added by me:

[T]he long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopardized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.

What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman’s: Women’s rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband’s affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power. Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.

Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of humanity…[M]en have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great:The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.

Democracy happened. Democracy empowered lower status men and gave them a voice. Individually lower status men may have much less power than individual high status alphas, but as a group since there are so many more lower-status men in a society than there are powerful alphas, a “one-man, one-vote” society allows lower status men to collectively exercise much more power against alpha males than any others. And what these lower-status men will use that power to do shape a society that will (1) give themselves more access to women while giving alphas less access to women and (2) place limits to the abuses an uber-alpha can get away with. So democracy leads to legal limits on polygamy which leads to increased monogamy which leads to less sexual spoils and unfettered power for alpha males and more sexual spoils and more political power for all other lower-status males in a society. This means limitations on the upper-levels of alphadom are an essential part of a strong democracy.

The character of Hopper in A Bug’s Life understood the dangers of  lower status people, who naturally outnumber higher status people, getting an equal voice quite well:

Robert Wright also comes to a similar conclusion about the relationship of democracy to both the lessening of alpha political and sexual power and the increase of the political and sexual power of lower-class men:

Polygamy. This is the natural state of our species. Then again, the natural state of our species is also a small hunter-gatherer society, with little wealth and thus, only mild inequalities of status and power among men. In this “ancestral environment,” large harems were rare; competition for women, though intense, was seldom epically intense. But then came agriculture and other sources of economic surplus. Suddenly some males could be way more powerful than others. The commensurately massive sexual rewards made men ill-inclined to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most prolific genetic replicator in the history of our species was the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had 888 offspring. He was known as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Get the picture?

And, in polygamous societies, low-status males weren’t exactly pacifists either. With scads of women monopolized by the well-to-do, less fortunate men could get mighty lonely and become very unhappy campers. This volatile discontent may be the reason that, as anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown, polygamy and authoritarianism have gone hand in hand. Back when the Zulu king was entitled to more than 100 women, coughing or spitting at his dinner table was punishable by death.

In this sense, monogamy meshes better than polygamy with the egalitarian values of a democracy. One-man-one-vote, one-man-one-wife.

So hoarding of women by powerful men in the form of polygamy and despotism go hand in hand, and more equitable distribution of women in the form of monogamy and democracy go hand in hand. A lot of men mistakenly believe polygamous society represents a paradise for men in general, but it doesn’t. It represents a paradise for one or a few men over all other men, who exist in a hell. Most men in highly polygamous societies are condemned to celibacy and their lives are less free and consist of extreme oppression by uber-alphas to boot.

Consider the following excerpts from this article by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy

When there is resource inequality among men—the case in every human society—most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy…

For an example of the mindset such an environment creates in lower-status men, let’s look at Muslim suicide bombers:

According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?

The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Modern democratic society is a tradeoff. A lower status man ostensibly obtains the same vote and therefore voice as a higher status man. Since lower status men outnumber higher status uberalphas, they can now create a system of laws, checks and balances called the State that contains innate limitations to just how powerful an alpha can become. Powerful men keep adapting to the new status quos and try to become more powerful regardless, and the State, which mostly represents the collective voice of the lower-status peoplee, in turn keeps adapting to find new ways to put limitations on their alphadom. It’s an arms race between uberalphas who want to become as powerful as they can thanks to human nature, and the State, which is the tool lower status men collectively use throughout history to keep uberalphas in check by limiting their access to political power and the best vagina.

Yet because most men still harbor dreams of becoming more powerful and alpha themselves, these societies are still constructed with enough flexibility to allow for social mobility as well.  Evolution has designed men to naturally seek out power, status, and as a consequence, access to better and more women, so no matter how much lower-status men desire to squash uber-alphas, they will never tolerate a society that totally crushes the ability of everyone to become more powerful.  These tensions are what leads to our society that rewards people for being a mix of both alpha and beta as opposed to other societies that reward people strictly for being super-alpha, a society that crushes you for being too beta and for being too alpha, especially when you’re sandwiched between both extremes in the middle class.

This is a big reason why I said in the last installment that middle-class men are the worst equipped to achieve pure unadulterated alpha status in our society. Upper class men have the resources to possibly buy the State or work it from the inside. Lower class men often have little to lose and are used to hardship so they are often more willing to just straight up refuse to abide by the rules of the State. Then you have men who embody both attitudes, a ton of resources to buy off the State or work it from the inside combined with a willingness to thumb their nose at the rules of the State and refuse to abide by them when necessary. The patron saint of this last category is Joseph Kennedy. Is it any wonder his family is considered the ultimate American dynasty?

But even among these groups, sooner or later they more often then not lose against the State, whether it’s the IRS or divorce court for the rich or jail for the poor. So what chance does the middle-class man have to aim for pure alpha status in a society that by design is meant to curb any attempts to be alpha for the benefit of all men?

Next installment: The two major concepts modern industrialized democracies use to limit uberalpha potential: (1) alpha-proxies and (2) renegade alpha suppression.

I didn’t watch the Superbowl this year. One reason is that I hate how hard the commercials try these days, and how much hard the people you watch with try to convince themselves they’re outrageously entertained by these try-hard commercials. It comes off sounding like a live-action canned laugh track.

Superbowl commercials are the single most lowest common denominator creation in the history of modern civilization. But someone sent me this ad and it surpassed even my lowest expectations.

Feel free to supply your own commentary.

UPDATE: I showed this ad to my friend Beethoven, and he made a good point. He said in his regular poker game, which consists of middle-class white men living in Houston, this commercial fits their lives and conversations to a tee. Beethoven’s point was, if something’s true it’s not really insulting, it’s just smart advertising. These guys wouldn’t be insulted by the ad because they themselves describe their lives that way.

First off, the “Myth of the Middle Class Alpha” posts take a while to write, so you won’t get a new one until Monday.  I write them on the weekend.

I have a lot of blogs, websites and forums linking to me, and occasionally I like to follow those links to see who’s talking about The Rawness.  A while ago I saw this post on Roosh V’s forum that linked to my blog that I never got around to addressing.  It was started by a poster named Primetime and here was his problem:

I’m in college right now and there’s this guy thats ripping into me and I so pissed off that I don’t have any comebacks. The guy is basically trampling over me to ascend up the social circle ladder. I try to laugh it off and pretend we’re all having fun but deep down I wanna rip into him but just dont have enough heavy artillery if you like. Now all he has to do is say my name and people start sniggering because they know what’s coming, I FUCKING HATE IT!! The guy is ugly, wears glasses looks clumsy, its embarrasing. Guys I need help???

It gets worse:

we all live on campus and share the same house…

The thing is now the two of them are fucking around with my facebook and I’m about to post a message on her wall to stop doing that or I’ll block them. I just wanted to know how you guys feel about that.

Ignoring him isnt working!!

Another person on the forum, Basil Ransom, gave the guy this advice:

Yo you’re lucky, another great blogger put up a few posts on this issue (his name is T, his blog is very popular among the Roissy-Roosh crowd and is brilliant)

See these three posts, or just the last one for straight up advice:

http://therawness.com/my-european-trip-p…rontation/
http://therawness.com/the-rearden/
http://therawness.com/my-european-trip-p…in-action/

Now I appreciate the shout out by Basil, and his great judge of character by calling me brilliant, but there’s a reason why the Rearden wouldn’t work in this case. He’s already insulting you.

When I saw this thread, I realized that there was a danger of people misinterpreting the Rearden and having it backfire on them and thinking it doesn’t work. So I’ll take this time to clarify: The Rearden is only appropriate when the offense is either ambiguous or being presented as complimentary or polite. The point of it is to lift the veil off the communication and reveal it for what it really is.

In this case, the guy is openly insulting you so there’s nothing to life the veil off of. He’s already revealed what the point of his communication is. He’s not being passive-aggressive at all, just being a dick. When in a conflict, your response should be equal to or above the level of what you’re responding to. When dealing with passive aggression or aggression disguised as politeness, the Rearden is an attempt to escalate the level of aggression so that you can deal with the situation accordingly. Either the person will back off and you can leave it alone, or the person will be forced to escalate it to an outright overt conflict and whatever you feel the correct response is. But you should never, ever use it in response to an open, overt insult. For that, you need to respond more strongly.

Also, once you do use the Rearden, you need to have a plan for what to do if the conflict does get escalated, because there’s always a chance that might happen. For example say you use it and ask the person, “So what exactly are you trying to say? Are you trying to say x, y, z?” and the person responds “I’m saying you’re a bitch-ass dude!” Now what? You need to have a personal plan of what to do as a follow-up in the case the conflict goes that direction.

In the case of the guy with the problem above, if he’s dissing you and you pull a Rearden on him you’ll look ridiculous because it’s an inadequate response, too little, too late. You can’t ignore him because you live with him and you’ve already let him know it gets under your skin.

Roosh put it best:

Unless you make it uncomfortable to tease you, why would he stop?

If you ever look at nature shows, oftentimes predators won’t keep chasing the prey that will cause them too much grief to conquer, even if they have a chance of winning in the long run. If the prey is too fast and the chase is carrying on too long, they’ll just give up the chase and look for a weaker prey. If the prey is putting too much of a fight and has some natural defenses that are causing too much pain or discomfort, the predator will also give up. Human beings are the same way. Even if you don’t have a chance of winning, you have to incur some kind of cost for fucking with you. Something that makes the predator say “Even if I win, this is really not worth the trouble or pain to accomplish.”

A poster named speakeasy gives a good response:

First thing is to avoid being around people who act stupid in the first place. But if you have no choice, either you got to punk him back verbally or physically. Some people are just not good at ragging. I’m not. Ragging on people is a talent. I noticed that in high school. Some guys can say anything no matter how stupid and everybody is laughing because of the way they said it. It’s not everybody’s game though. If not, I’d say threaten to beat his ass next time he starts talking shit. And do it right in front of everyone. Or better yet, give no warning. Just sock his ass in the mouth. That’ll shut him up for good. If you’re not a fighter either, use a few techniques from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3K-mrlYG7Y

Always remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Never let it get this far in the first place. Even if you do stand up for yourself when you reach this point, the amount you’ll have to do to fix it is going to be probably five times the energy and effort it would have taken if you took preventative measures instead. A lot of men don’t want to fight back for the same reason they don’t want to approach strange women: they’re afraid of losing. But sometimes making the effort is all the victory you need, even if it doesn’t work out in the end. Like Wayne Gretzky says, “I miss all the shots I don’t take.” Likewise, you automatically lose all the conflicts you back down from anyway, so you might as well fight back when appropriate.

Click here for Part 1.

The nightclub we were at was on the second floor of the building, with different landings in multiple directions that allowed you to lean on a railing and look downward at people entering from the ground floor and heading upstairs. I was spending my time at the club people watching rather than actively socializing.  As I saw one unremarkable person after another enter, my eyes began to glaze over with boredom.  I was just counting down the hours, no minutes, before I’d be heading home.

Suddenly my vision sharpened. I saw a man enter that caught my attention. Let’s call him CR Alpha.  On the surface there was nothing really impressive about him. He wasn’t remarkably fit. He wasn’t remarkably unfit. He was slim but not muscular. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t particularly short either. He wasn’t incredibly handsome although he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t especially well dressed. He definitely wasn’t peacocking. He just had a basketball jersey, some track pants and some sneakers. He had a slight swagger but it was understated and not a godzilla-stomping-out-tokyo badass strut or anything like that; he had no chip on his shoulder or attitude that he was looking for trouble. He had some tattoos, but not the outrageous amount guys get when they’re blatantly overselling the bad boy image. But I could tell there was something about him.  He exuded maximum confidence and control of his domain with a bare minimum of cocky displays or overt exertion.

As I described before, the streets of Jaco were filled with a lot of crash test dummy criminal types. The kind of petty crooks who would try to sell you drugs or steal your stuff in a heartbeat if you left it unattended. They walked around trying to look as grimy and hard as possible all the time. I classified them immediately as opportunist punks, dangerous in that if they saw a moment of weakness, like you were drunk and outnumbered and a herb, they may try something, but if you were street smart and willing to show some heart they wouldn’t consider you worth the trouble of bothering. But this guy was different. I immediately identified him as a different class of criminal: a player.

I tapped my partner in crime Beethoven and pointed at the dude with my chin. “This fucking guy.”

Beethoven took notice and immediately knew who I was talking about. “Yeah, I see him.  He’s all business. He carries it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like if anything goes down, he’ll have the last word. But he’s not obnoxious about it. Like he’ll never go looking for trouble or causing unnecessary shit. Like he’s just chill as shit unless you come at him sideways. And then that’s that. No extra talk, no prolonged “man dance” where you argue and puff your chest out for 45 minutes straight but no one makes a move. He just handles his shit.”

Beethoven’s eyes stuck with the guy. “Yeah, yeah that sounds about right.”

The guy makes his way upstairs. We forget about him for a while. When I look at the beautiful girl from part 1 of this tale again, she is with him. Until he arrived, she was aloof and her expression was somewhat blank. She wasn’t acting stuck up or standoffish anything, just not particularly emotional one way or the other. But now that he was here, she was smiling, gregarious and warmer. She and her friend were only talking to him. But more important was the body language between him, the girl and her friend, who was also female. He would smile approvingly whenever they addressed him, speak a few words, but otherwise just lean back against the railing and stare at an undetermined spot in the room rather than at them. He wasn’t hugged up on the girl and she wasn’t attached at his hip. She and her friend would dance in his vicinity, almost for his benefit, but rarely directly in his line of sight. More like within his peripheral vision, so that he could keep his eye on them without having to look preoccupied with them. It was almost like there was an invisible semicircle area of personal space around him, a force field of unspoken protection, and they happily occupied the area within it, never going beyong the outer perimeter, held within his orbit by the invisible gravity of his quiet charisma much like a moon predictably orbits a planet and is content to never go beyond that orbit. He just leaned back, surveyed his domain and held these two girls in his sway with minimal maintenance.

Now you can always tell a winner mentality from a loser mentality by how they react to viewing situational winners. Losers see winners in a situation and try to visualize either how it should be the losers winning instead or try to think about how the winner doesn’t really deserve to be winning and got his gains unfairly. A man with a winner mentality sees someone winning in a situation and thinks, “Why is he a winner right now, and what can I learn from this?”  That was my attitude when seeing this guy.  I couldn’t hate, I had to congratulate.  A lot of square guys, especially from developed Western nations, would have seen this dude and say “What does he have? Why is that chick with his third-world criminal thug ass and not a classy civilized nice guy like me? The world is unfair.  After all, doesn’t she realize I’m smart, have a high IQ, am from the West, have American dollars, would treat her like a queen the way she deserves instead of ignoring her like this alpha thug does?  She must be brainwashed or low IQ trash to be content with a third-world badboy asshole like him instead of jumping through hoops for a good guy going places like me.” Even worse is the guy who puts a chick like that on a pedestal and imagines how all she needs is his nice treatment and exposure to his worldly ways to see the errors of her dating choices. That’s sucka mentality.

But there’s a saying in the hood, “game recognizes game.” Any guy with real game, I’m talking truly internalized game that comes from years in the game and not a bunch of barely tested scripts and gimmicks, would recognize that this guy deserved what he got, because he was giving her what she needed in that harsh environment. He was an alpha in the purest sense, and in an environment like that pure alphaness mattered more than anything else.  He was alpha in the way a middle class man could never be, especially in the West. The more primal and dog-eat-dog the environment, the scarcer the available resources for both the average man and woman, the harder the everyday grind, the weaker the property rights, the weaker the governmental representation, the more corrupt and powerless the police force and most importantly the more powerless and more nonexistent the middle class population, then the more women in said environment will select for pure, true alphas.

Here in the modernized West where there is a strong middle class and the average woman has more and more self-reliance thanks to feminism and doesn’t need a man as much for survival, a woman doesn’t need to select for pure alphadom as much, and probably won’t.  She may still be primally drawn to such alphas due to her genetic hard-wiring, a holdover from the more primal Pleistocene era, but she has enough counterprogramming from Western culture to ultimately balance it out.  What women in our modernized western societies are screening for, contrary to popular belief, are not the most purely alpha men but the most relatively alpha men within reasonable limits, or what I dub the Renaissance Man (credit for originally coining the term though goes to Tariq Nasheed).

To a chick surviving in the bleak, primal grind of a Jaco, Costa Rica, does she have time to seriously entertain this as an alpha male?

Is that really the pure essence of an alpha male in traditional evolutionary terms?  Or this frat guy?

No offense to any of the guys up there (Mystery, Style, Tucker Max), but most middle class men that are successful with women aren’t true alphas in the historical evolutionary sense.  They’re alphas in a relative sense, when compared to other middle-class men in their social circles.  Not only are most middle-class men not alpha males in the pure sense, but it would be stupid for them to even aspire to true pure alphadom.  Because true alphadom is a pointless goal for middle-class men in the West.

The successful middle-class alpha male is a mythical figure that can’t exist for any significant amount of time.  Our society is specifically built to put most alpha behavior in check.  The only types of men who can pull off any semblance of true alpha behavior in the West are men at the extreme lower end of the socioeconomic scale because they feel they have nothing to lose and men at the extremely high end of the socioeconomic scale because despite having something to lose they have more resources with which to get away with alpha behavior.  This is a society that keeps the peace and maintains the status quo by keeping alpha behavior in check through various disincentives and punishments.

Middle-class men in the West especially feel the pressure of these disincentives and punishments because on one hand they have enough resources and civility that they feel they have too much to lose by receiving these disincentives and punishment.  They have enough property and status and career that it will hurt them to lose any of it.  And if they end up in jail, they’re so civilized and genteel that they aren’t built for that setting the way a man from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale is.  Yet on the flip side they don’t have so much resources that they can shield themselves from the consequences of alpha behavior either, either buy buying themselves out of punishment or getting afforded a cushy punishment in the form of a country club prison stretch the way a man from the higher end of the socioeconomic scale can. For these reasons lower class and upper class men have much more freedom to push the envelope in pure alpha male behavior than middle class men do. And even for these groups in America there are limits to how alpha they can be, for various reasons.  I touched on limitations on the alpha status of the lower class already.  One of these days I’ll do the Myth of the Upper-Class Alpha Male as well.

Western middle class women are willing to enjoy these middle-class Western men because they have grown up conditioned to aspire to self-sufficient career woman status and expect to have two-income households when they marry.  So they don’t have to select mates with enough extreme wealth that can support a family singlehandedly.  Thanks to their own careers and middle-class status, they can still get a great quality of life from combining their own middle-class income with the income of a middle-class man, as opposed to the woman of the past with few big career opportunities who needed to rely totally on her prospective mate’s income and resources to improve her socioeconomic status.  Also, because of the higher expectations of monogamy in the modern West, even if a bunch of Western women wanted to effectively share a powerhouse alpha’s resources, it would be logistically too hard to pull off.  Rich men in America and the developed West are expected to be and actually are much more monogamous than rich men elsewhere in the world or throughout history because polygamy is very frowned upon here and the financial consequences to the rich man for engaging in it if caught can be very high.  Not to mention the social shaming (ask Tiger Woods).

Also, two more factors.  Rich people have less leisure time than ever, which is an important part of philandering.  They work more than ever nowadays, limiting the time they can spend on building and maintaining a harem.  Second, the cost of a decent standard of living in urban environments and big cities, the places that offer the most opportunity for rising in socioeconomic class these days, becomes a natural obstacle in harem building as well.  For a rich guy in a small town or the third world or a less expensive bygone era, maintaining a harem of extramarital women is a much less economically draining proposition than for a rich man in New York or Tokyo.  That’s why in America it takes a man of Tiger Woods’s flexible schedule and exorbitant wealth to pull off a harem of 14 women (not all simultaneously) throughout the years while a successful businessman in some parts of the world can accomplish the same feat with ease.

So rich men in America get monopolized by one lucky wife and may have one or two long-term mistresses with assorted quickies and escorts here and there.  The most access the average lower and middle-class woman can get to one of these high powered alpha men is the parting gift of occasional fling or quickie, and not the first prize of marriage or second prize of kept mistress status.  Societies like ours that strongly enforce monogamy shrink the supply of powerful alpha men women can choose from since they aren’t allowed to share these men amongst each other the way they could in a society that allows, explicitly or implicitly, long-term polygamous arrangements.  But as I pointed out, this shortage of powerful rich men available for long-term pair bonding is irrelevant because Western women don’t need such men for their survival like women in the past did.

In addition, thanks to a strong police force, strong property rights and strong paternalistic democratic government to offer physical protection and entitlement benefits if needed, thanks to feminism altering gender role expectations and giving women equal representational votes, thanks to a strong court system to provide retribution and justice if a man tries to violate them in any way, thanks to their own careers that allow them to be self-sufficient enough to provide their own sustenance and resources, thanks to birth control and abortions, thanks to the conveniences offered by appliance technology like washing machines, food processors, blenders and trash compactors, they are free to engage in sexual escapades and mating arrangements their female predecessors never dreamed of.  Or as I like to call it, “sport fucking” or “fun fucking” whoever she wants, be it bad boy alphas, metrosexual artfag hipsters, starving artists, ad account executives, Starbucks employees, and all types of middle class and working class guys who would have normally died without reproducing in the old dog-eat-dog primal eras of the past.  Choosing non-committing alpha males for flings or weak betas with little to moderate resources, while not the optimal choice of her genetic hard-wiring, doesn’t have the same dire consequences her in the Western world that it had for humans in the primal environments of the Pleistocene era or in modern third world hellholes.

In the West, a powerful resource-rich alpha isn’t a necessity thanks to the factors I described above, and in addition such an alpha isn’t widely available thanks to strongly enforced monogamy (only one women for each man) keeping the supply low.  This is why middle-class men are able to thrive in Western society.  They are a luxury only Western women can afford.  And the ideal middle class man is alpha enough to be a prize, but due to his circumstances there are natural ceilings to how alpha he can be.  A middle-class alpha who aims to have any longevity and reproductive success can’t exercise pure alpha status.  Sure he can work hard until he moves into a higher socioeconomic status and becomes rich, and at that point become more of a true, pure alpha, but so long as he remains in the middle-class status he won’t be able to pull off true, pure alpha status.  It’s for these reasons I specifically called my self-improvement series The Renaissance Man series and not The Alpha Male series.  The choice of terms was very deliberate and the two concepts are not interchangeable.  Because I think telling the average middle class man that alphadom is attainable or even desirable while remaining in middle class status is the biggest crock of shit going on today.  The best thing for a middle-class man to be in today’s society is not a true, pure alpha but a blend of the best aspects of an alpha male and the best aspects of a beta male, with the trappings of neither. A Renaissance Man.

Back to the Costa Rican Alpha Female I described in Part 1.  If you came up to her using some cheezy negs and magic tricks, she’d look at you like you were a joke.  The first thing she’d think is, if some crazy dude came up to me and tried to attack me or force me into prostitution or some drunk tourist tried to rape me, this dancing monkey couldn’t do shit. Can he guarantee that I’ll never have to resort to prostituting myself to get big bucks or slaving away at a shitty service or hospitality job for peanuts just to barely keep above grinding poverty level and stay at the same class level? This middle-class guy with his check-to-check existence, his meager 401(k) plan, his Netflix queue that he updates religiously, his mirthless materialism that he uses to convince himself he has more status than he actually has ans he works like a dog to maintain, his DVD box sets and encyclopedic knowledge of sports stats trivia, fantasy basketball league and collection of Bill Simmons Sports Guy columns, his 367 facebook friends, his witty repartee of popular movie quotes, his blog following, his X-Box 360 or whatever other middle-class trappings he has?  He’d be utterly useless to her.

“Fun-fucking” men like that for sport the way Western women can is a luxury not afforded to women who don’t come from the same environment.  For these women, choosing the right man is a decision so critical that it means the difference between surviving and thriving or wasting away in poverty, shame and degradation.  A woman like this may view such a middle class guy as as a trick or a simp and use him for some short term material gain like some free drinks or quick cash, but that’s it.  She may maintain a correspondence with him in hopes he’s a Captain Save-A-Ho type so that she can hit him up later with some sob story about her sick babies and get him to wire money to her if he’s enough of a big-hearted sap to go for it.  And if he’s a that type of jackpot middle-class sucker who can be used for a real long-term benefit like getting immigration to the West then she may really entertain him seriously, usually by playing to his emasculated Western male ego in a way American women would never do.  This type of treatment usually blows the  middle class Western man’s mind and he’s immediately sprung and wrapped around her finger.  But she’ll never respect him fully due to the type of men she’s grown up exposed to and once she immigrates and gets a foothold in her new country to the point where she no longer needs him anymore, she’ll leave him and get with the type of alpha male she’s been conditioned to be turned on by. Oftentimes she’ll even cheat with such an alpha behind her beta husband’s back soon after arriving in her new country.  Such stories are common.

Most of the time, what the average woman in a primal dog-eat-dog environment need in their immediate future is a lower-class guy who is so badass he can physically protect her from the dangers of the ghetto, or a guy uber-rich and uber-powerful enough to immediately lift her far away from the ghetto, so far in fact that she feels she is never in danger of going back.  In the specific case of Costa Rican Alpha Female, she is so top notch, even by the standards of the world stage, she can get the best of both worlds in Jaco: the guy who is both badass and tough enough to offer physical protection and powerful and rich enough to lift her far away from her poor beginnings.  A guy like CR Alpha.

So who exactly was CR Alpha?

The next day I discussed this with our guide for the trip.  This guy knew was a street-smart American expat who now lived in Costa Rica and functioned as both our concierge and tour guide.  He had been there for years and knew the ins and outs very well, from the seedy underbelly to the well-to-do parts.  We described the guy to him to see what he could tell us.  He immediately knew who we were talking about.  “He’s a lieutenant for the Colombians here.”  I can’t remember the full details because I was pretty wasted, but he was a ranking member of a Colombian organization known as either the White Colombians or the Black Colombians, I forget which.  He was their representative and highest ranking member in CR.  He ranked pretty high in the gang’s heirarchy, and of their members stationed in Costa Rica there was none higher.  Our concierge also said things that echoed the speculations Beethoven and I made the night before.  That he carried himself as a really cool guy and didn’t walk around acting like he had something to prove, but if there was ever a problem (which there rarely was because few were willing to cross him), he handled it in a definitive, unambiguous fashion.  He was no joke, and our concierge said over the years he even used him to handle some of his own “problems” that our concierge didn’t have the clout or muscle to handle on his own (presumably for a fee or in exchange for a favor, I didn’t ask for elaboration).

But that’s true alpha.  Not a fuzzy hat and black nail polish.  Not a cubicle job or middle management office. Not blog stardom.  None of this shit is true alpha.  And that’s fine.  For reasons I’ll explain in the next installment.

Next installment, how and why modern Western Society keeps alphadom in check and penalizes any excess of it.  And the pros and cons of such a system.

Click Here for Part 3

Unbeatable at spitting slang.

[Last week I promised a post that would go up on Monday and be controversial. As I started writing it, it kept getting longer and longer and was taking too much time to complete. So I decided to break it up instead, it will probably end up being three parts in total. Here's part 1:]

Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

I was about to find out.

Click Here For Part 2

I’ve been going through my old posts, looking for ideas for new ones and theories to expand on, and I’ve come to a realization.

I can’t front. My shit is brilliant. I am the shit.

That’s all.

P.S. I predict next Monday’s post is going to cause a lot of controversy. I encourage you to weigh in on it when it goes up.

Sometime in 2010 I plan to do a “Game for Women” month. But in the meantime this mini-linkblogging post should whet your appetites.

The accompanying article.

Also, an article from the Daily Mail in the UK. “The ego epidemic: How more and more of us women have an inflated sense of our own fabulousness.” Same dilemma across the pond.

A related article from the Atlantic, “In Search of Mr. Right.”

UPDATE: E-Sizz in the comments said:

Watch a little of the video with the sound off. She’s bug eyed manic. Whatever she’s saying she doesn’t strike me as a balanced person. She’s fanatical about what she’s saying, like Manson. From what I’ve read, her previous book was about her anorexia. I can totally believe it. This is a narcicistic, driven woman.

I note she smiles alot. Fake I assume. Her book/article seems pretty demanding and negative. She pretends to be affable and easy. Lots of dissonance there.

Is her book a long tirade to herself? A black hole of self absorbsion about why she shouldn’t be so self absorbed?

Interesting study for the professionals.

As far as her looking for a partner, the main quality that guy’s going to have is patience, or a long honed ability to just ignore what the people around him are screeching about.

Based on this article and this article, E-Sizz may indeed be right.

UPDATE 2: Americo added this link in the comments that I think is a great, great analysis of Gottlieb.

A common complaint from women today is how society, primarily through the media, promotes all these unrealistic expectations of women. Thanks to celebrity plastic surgery and airbrushing and photoshop in magazines and posters, a lot of men have delusions about what constitutes the average female body shape and typical cellulite levels. Plus feminists for the past few decades have been promoting this idea of the superwoman who can “have it all,” from the high powered career to the Prince Charming husband to the 3 kids to the Martha Stewart homemaking proficiency, all without missing a beat.  For these reasons, I agree with these female complaints to a degree, but they nonetheless become tiresome to me.  I’ll explain why.

One of the big problems I’ve complained about in this blog for a while is how much I hate the modern images of men we receive in the media, of the slacker slobs that often pass for protaganists in Apatow movies or the death of credible action heroes in today’s cinema. In the latter case, as I’ve pointed out in the past, how many (1) American (2) white men (3) under 35 outside of Channing Tatum can pass as credible action heroes? It’s for this reason I believe so many action heroes of yesteryear have been able to make credible comebacks: because Hollywood has yet to find any worthy successors. Despite being past their prime, we’ve seen recent successful action comebacks for Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 3), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa and John Rambo), Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls) and Bruce Willis (Live Free or Die Hard). Notice in these movies there was usually a man from the next generation as a sidekick who was either unconvincingly (I can’t stress that word enough) being groomed as the next action hero (like Shia LeBeouf in Indy) or blatantly being shown as not being cut out of the same rugged cloth as the tough guy cloth as the older mentor (Rocky’s son in Rocky Balboa, Hipster Mac Commercial Douche in Live Free or Die Hard). So it seemed like either way, the modern generation of 18-35 year olds was getting reminded of its inadequacies. We either had movies where we were the protaganists and reveling in our underachieving slacker slob status, or we had action movies with the male archetypes of yesteryear reminding us of our inadequacies, either explicitly by outright stating it or implicitly just by a comparison of respective actions shown on the screen. Also, look at a trailer for what’s being touted as the hottest coming action movie of 2010 and see what you notice:

I think a big reason people long for these old school types of movies is because they’ve long become bored with how politically correct and lowest common denominator movies have become.  Every non-kid movie is targeted to immature 18-34 year old beta males with ADD or to narcissistic, empowered feminist Sex and the City fans.  I myself have made a conscious effort in recent years to watch old movies, either through cable programming on AMC, Turner Classics and Fox Movie Channel or through DVDs, and it’s been a mostly rewarding experience, but not totally.  Because as a result of immersing myself in this old entertainment, I’ve realized a different set of problems arising from the ones I had when watching modern entertainment; problems that made me identify with yet at the same time have less sympathy for the “unrealistic standards for females” debate I mentioned earlier.

One weekend I was having a movie watching marathon. I watched some westerns like High Noon with Gary Cooper, My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda and Pale Rider with Clint Eastwood along with other classic movies. These were wonderful, inspiring movies but I noticed at the end of the day that I was feeling a little down and inadequate and felt existential angst building.

It took me a while but eventually I made the connection between my mood and the movies I watched earlier. I was feeling inadequate because I was doubting whether I was capable of doing the great acts of heroism and bravery these men onscreen were making look as natural as breathing. There were scenes where guys could easily have escaped to safety and taken the easy way out, but they decide to stick around and face down four guys singlehandedly in a gunfight. Or routinely walk into the heart of danger, outnumbers and outgunned, and win the encounter without even doing any violence, solely through masculine presence and badass intimidation. Walking through rooms of cutthroats and hired killers, right up to the boss of the crew, to tell him not to threaten women and children anymore or he’d have to answer to the hero. And no one raises a finger against him in the whole room, because he’s just that badass. Or on the flipside the guy who chooses practical self-preservation over commiting a suicide mission to preserve his honor and ends up getting shamed by his woman or by children into stepping up and doing the right thing, despite how impractical and suicidal it is. There were numerous times during these movies I found myself asking “Would I do that? Could I do that?” It’s hard to know exactly what you’d do in a crisis until you’re actually in it. You’d always like to believe the best about yourself, but you never actually know how you’ll perform until the moment of truth.

Or how about the suave guy who has a snappy retort for every verbal challenge  thrown at him by a male rival or a female target who is testing him and resisting his wooing?  Who never lets himself get flustered by anything?  Who bursts into the boardroom and delivers the crunchtime presentation that saves the company and gets him the promotion?  The guy who beats all the enemies, solves all the crises and always gets the girl in the end?

Basically, when did we get this idea that women have a monopoly on receiving impossible standards to meet from the media and society?  Men have been dealing with unrealistic standards and expectations from society and the media for as long as media and society have existed!  A lot of what women complain about with body image and superwoman pressures from media and society is not that different than the pressures men get in regards to being both hypermasculine, suave, yet also sensitive to women’s needs. In some ways it’s even worse because while we’ve reached a point where thanks to public sympathy the term “real women” now means America Ferrera or average, slightly chunky women in a Dove ad, while on the flip side the term “real men” still conjurs the image of the hypermasculine, perfect ideal from these old movies, even among people who consider themselves progressive, modern and liberal. And it’s also worse for men in that living up to that male ideal is much more likely to lead to bodily harm and death than what a woman faces living up to the feminine ideal.  I realize now that a lot of this beta male media glorification is probably for men a backlash to media pressure in the same way this “real woman” let’s-let-ourselves-get-fat-without-guilt movement is for women.

I’m conflicted about all this.  On one hand, I agree with the idea that delusionally unrealistic standards do need to be exposed.  For example it’s ridiculous when both men and women think a woman with just a little cellulite, so little cellulite that she still has less cellulite than 3/4 of the adult female population, is bashed for being fat because the average guy has no idea how common cellulite actually is on women thanks to rampant photoshopping of models and celebrities.  But likewise when single decent men feel inadequate if they aren’t perfection squared (have to be macho like Eastwood, stoic and unemotional like Robert Mitchum, suave like Cary Grant, yet sensitive and big-hearted like Jimmy Stewart, all with an Ivy League degree and six figure salary before 30), someone has to be the voice of reason in that case too.  So far, so good, right?

Where I draw the line though is that there seems to be a growing movement among both genders to respond to delusional standards by going too far to the the opposite extremes and celebrating mediocrity and averageness.  We keep downgrading expectations and lowering the standards for average and above average to the point where people are actually suffering from too much self esteem for no good reason.  And at the same time, people’s standards for people of the opposite sex remain higher than ever.  They’re only lowering expectations for themselves.  So now you have chunky or fat chicks or underemployed airheads who can’t cook or clean and only know how to spend money expecting to land Prince Charming.  And you have videogame playing, Maxim reading, flabby manchildren expecting to land Katherine Heigl caliber chicks like Seth Rogen did in Knocked Up.  Unwarranted narcissism along with entitlement are out of control.

My take on it is, as bad as delusionally high levels of role models can be for one’s self esteem, the overly relatable and pitifully average role model is immeasurably worse.  At the end of the day, even if you scale them back some from dangerously delusional levels, our role models still need to be at a healthy level of unattainability in order to keep us aspirational.  We should only accept breaking even after trying and failing to win the big jackpot.  We shouldn’t set out aiming to break even as our ultimate goal from the very beginning.  If you’re a young girl, hit the gym and try to look like a supermodel not America Ferrera.  Try to be Martha Stewart.  If you’re a young guy, work on your game and aim to be as smooth as James Bond; don’t aim to be adorably nerdy like Michael Cera.  If you don’t succeed in the long run, so be it.  Sometimes things don’t work out.  It’s not the end of the world, don’t beat yourself up, don’t kill yourself over it.  As you get older and wiser, scale back your goals and your expectations accordingly.

Most posts on this blog get several comments right after I post them, but occasionally there will be a post that continues to get comments for months and months after I originally post it. One of these posts is an early one titled “Why Women Are Called Sluts When They Sleep Around, But Men Aren’t.”

It amazes me how this one post continues to strike a nerve with readers so long after I posted it. It’s my first actual substantive post on this whole blog, not including my introduction post. A lot of women vehemently took issue with that post and continue to do so, and it surprises me because I don’t think I really said anything all that controversial (although I have changed my view on on aspect of the original article, but that’s a story for another post). Most of it seemed common sense, especially the part where I said getting lots of sex (quality is a different issue of course) is easy for women and not a challenge, but for men it is a big challenge, hence the different treatments for both genders when they score a lot, but even that premise angers quite a few commenters.

So last week I thought, why not do a thought experiment with a different gender double standard that touches on a few of the same issues involved in the “male/female slut double standard” but without saying so and see what answers pop up. I wanted to see what directions the discussion would go in and see if I got any answers that changed my original conclusions and also see if women would be willing to admit my original conclusions had merit when I don’t set off the “slut shaming” alarm.

Thus, last week’s thought experiment. A decent idea in theory, but there was one problem: my readers are too smart. I expected the comments to go all over the place before someone touched on the same issues I touched on in my male/female slut double standard post.

Instead Liz pops in and hits the bullseye in the very first comment!

Because it is widely assumed, and in most cases true, that a woman CAN get sex whenever she wants, just by lowering her standards a bit. That being said, a woman using a sex toy is seen as a voluntary action. She’s doing it because she wants to. A man using them is seen as doing it because he HAS to. He can’t find ayone willing to have sex with him. True or not, that, I think, is the crux of the discrepancy.

And if that wasn’t enough, Maake swooped in a few comments later and even got the tie-in I was going for:

Liz is right and that is the reason whu woman with many sexual relationships is a whore but man a hero.

It did confirm something I suspect though, and that is that sometimes no matter how much people agree with your reasoning and premises deep down, if it leads to a conclusion they find personally discomforting they’ll still fight you tooth and nail the whole way.