Women expect men to be emotion readers, not mind readers. However, since a woman’s mind is so much more ruled by emotion than a man’s mind, reading her emotions gives you the most insight into her mindset and logic as well. Reading her emotions is basically the same as reading her mind.  That is why I always tell guys that the best way to change a woman’s mind is to change her mood and her logic will change accordingly. To change a man’s mind on the other hand, you must attack and change his logic, and his emotions will react accordingly.

The reason men can’t read women’s minds the way women expect them to is twofold:

1. Men treat women like men and try to gauge their mindset by reading the linear logic of the interaction and basing their conclusions on that, because that’s how they correctly analyze interactions with other men.  So even when they are using linear logical analysis flawlessly, it doesn’t help because they are approaching the job with the wrong tools.
2. Even if men did focus on trying to read and analyze the emotional progression of the interaction rather than the logic, they are much worse at this than women are and will miss most of the emotional “tells” anyway. So even when they are approaching it with the right tools, they do a worse job using those tools than a woman would because they aren’t as well equipped for using those tools.

Now since women can read other people’s emotions so well, they expect men to be able to do the same, therefore when a man is unable to do so they get frustrated and feel he’s being insensitive or not trying hard enough.  And since men analyze the logic and expect their opponent to argue linearly from a logical standpoint, they get frustrated when women seem to just not make sense and are unable to just say what they mean and do what they say.

Women are better at reading emotional states than men for two reasons.  First, as the physically weaker sex, they need to compensate for this physical weakness by being better in other areas, like reading and manipulating emotions.  Remember, for most of human history women didn’t have the legal and societal protections they have now.  They were subject to the whims and physical brutalities of the men they encountered.  By being good at assessing the emotions of men, they could tell when emotional states in the men they encountered were escalating and a hostile situation was developing.  And by being good at manipulating emotion they had a weapon they could wield against men that made up for what weapons they lacked physically.

Second, as the ones most expected to nurture children, they had to be better at reading the emotional, nonverbal needs of the children.  The natural division of labor for most of human history made this the woman’s job while the man focused mostly on security to the family in the form of fighting off threats and providing resources.

Women who were not superior to men in emotional intelligence had their genes weeded out of existence because they not only lacked the physical tools to protect themselves from men but also the emotional tools to assess and defuse threats from men.  And in addition, these women of low emotional intelligence would be worse at properly nurturing their children and reading their moods correctly in order to properly attend to their needs.  So the women alive today descended from women of superior emotional intelligence, and as a result also have inherited this superior emotional intelligence.

And thanks to our society’s current cultural marxism where everyone is assumed to share the same strengths and weaknesses, we are less likely than ever to consider that some people are just naturally built for some things and some people naturally aren’t.  Therefore women expect men to read emotions as well as they do, and men expect women to use logic the way they do, and most relationship headaches originate from this disconnect.

Chris Rock touches on this dynamic in the clip below, when you reach about 2:18.

Men, don’t argue–you cannot win. You cannot beat a woman in an argument–it’s impossible. You will not win. Because men, we are handicapped when it comes to arguing, because we have a need to make sense. Women aren’t going to let a little thing like sense screw-up their argument.

As a man, you have two options. (1) Adapt and train yourself in emotional intelligence so that you can communicate better on her level, thereby learning to read her emotional state, recognize when it’s changing and intensifying and nip the argument in the bud before it even starts, or (2) teach your woman to understand that you are not as good an an emotion reader as she is and to communicate better on your level by being more forthright with you about what’s bothering her in a calm fashion. If she insists on escalating into argument anyway, just playfully deflect, dismissively ignore, or just leave. Whatever you do, don’t waste time arguing logically. It just doesn’t work.

Triflin’ ho.

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:

Delusional Bride

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:

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.

Recently Roissy had a post about the Beta Male of the Year, a man who petitioned to take his wife’s last name.

For those who don’t know, these are the definitions of Beta Male I use, from urbandictionary.com:

An unremarkable, careful man who avoids risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma and confidence of the Alpha male.

Pete knew he was losing the girl he’d just met at the bar to the guy who bought her a drink, but he was too much of a beta male to do anythigng about it.

and:

The opposite of Alpha male. In modern society an Alpha male not only requires physical prowess, but also confidence and attitude. The Beta male of modern society usually, only has one of these traits, if any. The Beta male tends to be smart, quiet and unconfrontational. If lucky, beta males can get a hot chick once in her 30′s, after she’s tired of fucking the Alpha Males, and decides to settle down with a beta male for money and stability.

Alpha Males get everything, Beta Males get the left overs. It’s a little thing called “Life”..

While I agree Roissy did indeed find the Beta of the Year, I think I may have topped him by finding the Beta of the Decade (note: I find the clip is even better when you play the above Joy Division song in the background):

One of the most telling things in the clip is the audience laughter. You can hear female snickers in there, and it’s part of a valuable life lesson: in the movies, beta male saps can win over the woman and get the last laugh in life by being lovable losers with a heart of gold. They can win a woman’s heart by garnering sympathy. But in real life, a beta male is more likely to get cuckolded by a homely, fat woman while getting laughed at by other women in a studio audience and by people watching the debacle on their TV sets or computer screens. And I don’t think it’s that people are cruel or pitiless. I think people genuinely feel sorry for the chump. He’s fallen into the thankless role of beta provider, something I touch on in this blog post.

Unfortunately, there’s also another natural human impulse at play here, and it’s something all men must work to keep in mind, especially in light of the false pro-beta, pro-geek and pro-feminization messages the media keeps sending them:

People see weakness in a woman and their first impulse is to protect and nurture and help her. People see weakness in a man and their first impulse is to crush it out of disgust and revulsion.

I can’t take credit for that line though, it’s a paraphrase from a wonderful book done by a lesbian who went undercover and lived as a man for a year, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent (great book, and much more sympathetic to men than you’d expect).

It also brings to mind a great line from The Godfather by Mario Puzo:

I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men…I

One of the most important things a man can do is to be congizant of how much geek glorification media he consumes. Cut back on Apatow flicks. Don’t watch too many NBC sitcomes like The Office. Don’t laugh at Stephen Colbert too much, or worse yet, try to emulate him, just because you think it wins you cool points with liberal women. If you read the blog Stuff White People Like and find yourself getting offended instead of laughing, you are on the wrong track. Be careful of movies like this one, which send the message that you can whine and whimper your way through life like a pathetic wuss, yet still manage to upgrade from a hottie like Kirsten Bell to a hotter hottie like Mina Kunis just through sheer sympathy:

Don’t you believe it.

Recommended Reading:

In this Esquire article, a magazine writer meets Blanton and plans to practice radical honesty himself. Here’s how he describes the movement:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

When the journalist meets Blanton, he encounters a man who totally practices what he preaches:

My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I’ve had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work. It’s my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it’s liberating, exhilarating.

When Blanton rambles on about President Bush, I say, “You know, I stopped listening about a minute ago.”

“Thanks for telling me,” he says.

I tell him, “You look older than you do in the author photo for your book,” and when he veers too far into therapyspeak, I say, “That just sounds like gobbledygook.”

“Thanks,” he replies.” Or, “That’s fine.”…

“I’m glad you picked your nose just now,” I say. “Because it was funny and disgusting, and it’ll make a good detail for the article.”

“That’s fine. I’ll pick my ass in a minute.” Then he unleashes his deep Texan laugh: heh, heh, heh. (He also burps and farts throughout our conversation; he believes the one-cheek sneak is “a little deceitful.”)

No topic is off-limits. “I’ve slept with more than five hundred women and about a half dozen men,” he tells me. “I’ve had a whole bunch of threesomes” — one of which involved a hermaphrodite prostitute equipped with dual organs.

What about animals?

Blanton thinks for a minute. “I let my dog lick my dick once.”

As I mentioned before, I haven’t read the book yet, but the premise really does interest me. I know that I’m just not the personality type that could totally follow the practices of the movement 100%, but I’d love to incorporate radical honesty into my life as much as I could.

What do you think life would be like if we embraced Radical Honesty all of the time? Hard to say, but here’s an example of what first dates might turn into:

Improvement over the current model or no?

Recommended Reading:

I’m a master of snap judgments.

Looking at this couple, a few words spring to mind. For him, I picture a life of being whipped, emasculated and eventually miserable. She, on the other hand, screams narcissism, entitlement and self-absorption. That poor man. The article describes her as Chidi Ogbuta of Allen, TX but doesn’t even bother giving the groom’s name, which is very indicative. He’s apparently just an extra in this epic movie that is his wife’s life:

Ogbuta said she had asked the groom for a “unique, personalized wedding” and he carried out the request “without reservations.” The cake took about a week to consume, with many guests stopping by to help.

Can you imagine how she’s going to financially bleed him dry if she’s already starting off like this? That cake is in no way cheap. She put the cake together by working with women in two different cities, a pastry chef and a separate woman to mold a likeness of the head. It must have been a logistical nightmare (and a financial nightmare for him).

“The cake actually fulfilled my childhood dream,” said Ogbuta, who said that she had long thought it would be fun to have a doll made in her likeness. While her fantasy never happened, she said the cake was pretty close.

I get the impression she was overindulged as a child, and is now going from spoiling parents to a whipped husband.

But I’m sure this is the worst of it, right? I’m sure she’ll show a lot of financial restraint during the marriage. And I’m sure compromise will come easy to her. And when they argue, I’m sure she’ll be empathetic and understand his point of view and value him and his needs as much as she values her own, right? But honestly, I don’t blame her. I blame him. If he’s dumb enough to tolerate that, why shouldn’t she go for it?

See the slideshow of the wedding here.

((“Wonderwall” by Ryan Adams))

Musclebound pervert/comedic blogging genius VK came up with an awesome idea for a theme week of blog posts featuring posts from Roissy, VK, DC Hero, Roosh and yours truly. The theme is Perfect Woman Week. Roissy kicked it off Monday and killed it on the spiritual poetry tip. VK followed up on Tuesday, pulled a head fake and a crossover dribble and shocked us all with his romantic sensitivity. And today is my turn. How the fuck do I follow after that? I can’t compete with those touching posts, so I’m going to take it in the opposite direction and show my age with a good old-fashioned angry, yet hopefully constructive rant.

I’m not single anymore, which means I’ve stopped searching for the perfect woman because I feel I’ve gotten as close as I’m going to get to that. And I’m also 33, which means my expectations are totally different than what they were when I was younger. Like most men, my standards for the perfect woman changed as I aged. They started off low at around 16-18 when the perfect woman was basically any girl that had a pulse and would agree to have sex with me (and honestly, I think if push came to shove the pulse would have been optional). That was the sheer quantity stage. I didn’t care if she looked like Monica Bellucci or Monica Seles. The standards changed again in my late 20s when my game really started sharpening, I started making better money and I started to realize I was a prize. That was when I really started demanding more from women in the looks, personality and ambition departments. But after a lot of dating in the big city, you reach the point where I am now and your standards change from a laundry list of superficial features about hair, looks, height, etc. to just one simple overarching feature: respect the male ego, self-esteem and identity. I think more than anything this is the common thread in why a lot of relationships fail. This is more important than anything else to me now, because so few modern women know how to do this anymore, especially after progressive and radical feminism has really done a number on their heads.

I have no problem with women being equal to men. But feminism messed women up by trying to convince them that being equal to men meant being exactly the same as men. And this is wrong. Women can see themselves as equal, but they shouldn’t be seeing themselves as being the same. Women today have been trained to become men with long hair and vaginas. Progress to women has increasingly become getting the corner office, working long hours, going to grad school, racking up sex partners, not learning to cook or do housework and binge drinking on the weekend, while giving up a lot of the things that made them unique and strong as women. And Sex and the City definitely didn’t help things but rather just fueled their delusions. Instead of complementing the male gender, the female of the species now aims to duplicate the male gender, and she’s lost a lot of what made her so special to begin with. But the worst part of modern feminism? It made it so that any attempt to please or cater to a man was automatically seen as a sign of weakness, self-hate or even glorified slavery. If a woman chose to stay at home and be a housewife she was a pariah. Cooking for a man or doing housework became a form of oppressive servitude. Then it reached the point where catering to and building up the male ego became the same as devaluing your worth as a woman.

Feminists still wanted to get married, yet felt if they tried to please men in order to get husbands like their mothers did they’d be selling out their feminist prinicples and turning into their mothers (never that!). Since they didn’t want to “sell out” and go overboard to please men, they came up with a better solution: churn out a new generation of feminized men, indoctrinated by the media and universities to not only never expect to have their male egos and male identities ever catered to, but to think that having a male ego and male identity at all was a source of shame in itself and was evil! We have men out there now screaming about the male patriarchy and women’s issues even louder than most feminists, yet they’d never think to even once consider much less assert their rights as men. Deep down though these men still have the needs and egos of men, yet are trained to feel guilty about having these needs and egos because they’ve been trained to see them as misogynistic or oppressive, and as a result they don’t express them. Or don’t even realize they have these traditional male needs. They just know they are lacking something and don’t know what it is (which is why I think movies like Fight Club and 300 resonate with so many modern men). Is it any wonder that the more “enlightened” our society becomes, the harder it is for people to find life partners and the divorce rate skyrockets through the roof? Some women won’t give men what they want because they feel it’ll compromise their feminist ideas, while other women want to give men what they want but can’t because men have become so emasculated and confused about their male identity they either can’t express what they want or worst-case scenario, don’t even know.

Which is where I come in. Women, I will teach you how to be the perfect woman in a relationship. Not just for me, but for every man. Stop listening to beta males and bitter, delusional feminists. Listen to an actual man and I’ll set you straight.

1. Realize that men view things differently than women, and those differences in view are equally valid and worthy of respect. Don’t try to turn your man into a woman. Don’t try to make him resolve his problems like a woman. Don’t chastise him for not thinking or emoting or talking things to death like you. You don’t have to understand why he sees things so differently than you, but you do have to respect his differences as equally valid. Men are not inclined to talk in circles about every problem until they’re emotionally drained. Respect that. For you it’s cathartic, for us it’s hell. It doesn’t mean we respect the problem less than you do, it just means that what’s a therapeutic method for you is not necessarily one for us.
2. Respect and faith in abilities are more important to a man than love. This is the hardest for a woman to grasp, and it’s an ugly truth, but if you don’t grasp and accept this you’ll always have relationship problems. If men had to choose between feeling (a) loved yet disrespected and inadequate or (b) unloved but respected and competent, a vast majority would choose choice (b). To men, love without feelings of respect and adequacy from their partner is a more hellish fate than receiving no love at all. And if you don’t give them respect and a feeling of competence, they will seek that validation elsewhere. I don’t just mean from other women, although that’s likely. It can be from a hobby that they know they’re good at, it can be at the gym, it can be from sports, it can be from writing in his study, it can be from his male friends that make him feel like he’s a great guy…there are tons of places he may withdraw to to get the validation he feels he lacks from you. Which in turn may cause you to nag him for not paying enough attention to you. Which in turn may just drive him further into his alternative source of validation. And then you get a vicious cycle.
3. Even the men who appear the strongest secretly have a fragile ego. One of the biggest secrets men have is how delicate our egos are. If you publicly build up your man’s ego, whether in front of his friends, family or even total strangers, he will think you’re the most wonderful woman in the world. Yet feminism and the media has given woman some strange mental block about this, as if doing so is some admission of weakness on their part. I call this the Claire Huxtable syndrome. I know it’s blasphemy for an ’80s kid to say this, but I hate the Cosby Show and I really fucking hate Claire Huxtable. Every chance she got, she emasculated Cliff for laughs in front of his parents, his friends and even his own children. And a generation of Americans ate it up and grew up thinking it was hilarious. Try watching several episodes of the Cosby Show now and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Cliff gets up, tells some story from his youth about some accomplishment he was proud of and may exaggerate a little. And almost immediately afterwards here comes Claire to set the record straight, poke holes in Cliff’s ego and embarrass Cliff by letting everyone know “what really happened.” And it ends with everyone in the room laughing at Cliff’s expense. Nowadays we see this dynamic as the norm in the media when marriages are depicted in sitcoms and commercials. It’s always depicted as cute and harmless. Is it any wonder public disrespect of men by their significant others, whether in the form of backhanded compliments or “harmless jokes” or outright chewing out, is practically an epidemic now? Below is a perfect illustration from the show Girlfriends, except instead of making it seem harmless, to the show’s credit it actually shows the devastating effect such behavior has on a man’s self-esteem:
4. Fuck his brains out. Self-explanatory.
5. If he’s telling you what’s wrong with the relationship, and your bitter manless friends are telling you something different is wrong with the relationship, listen to him over them. Those bitches are manless for a reason. And misery loves company. (this especially applies to black women, who for some reason seem to especially give a lot of weight to what their chronically single and bitter friends think)
6. Respect his ambition. Women tend to be geared more toward security. We as men understand that. Men, however, have a need to conquer. To hunt. To compete. To master things. Modern society doesn’t give us that many avenues to exercise those needs any more except in our careers, which leads to a lot of frustration in the modern man. So unless your man is talking about taking some seriously foolish or dangerous risks, support him in his personal ambitions to the best of your ability, even if you can’t totally understand them. Make him think he can achieve his lofty goals, and let him know you’ll still love and respect him even if he tries and fails. A real man would rather try his best and fail than never try at all.
7. Don’t let your looks go. Call it shallow, but men are programmed by nature to be visual creatures. We can’t help it. Just because you aren’t biologically and culturally programmed to value looks as much as we do doesn’t mean you should dismiss men’s preoccupation with looks as shallow and stupid. This is one of the easiest ways to keep your man happy, yet so many women foolishly underestimate and slack in this area.
8. Being a provider is at the core of a man’s identity, even if you make money too. So be sure to show appreciation for what a man contributes as a provider, and be understanding of a man’s depression when he feels like he comes up short in this area.
9. Be an interesting person. Have hobbies (shopping doesn’t count).  Have topics you like to read about.  Be able to converse on a wide range of things.  Have well thought out viewpoints. Travel and have experiences.  Have a wide range of friends.  In this age of narcissism and self-absorption, too many people presume they’re more interesting than they are for no apparent reason.  Don’t be one of them.

And there you have it. My perfect woman. And the perfect woman for a lot of men out there I suspect.

And tomorrow this guy drops some knowledge about the perfect woman. I can’t wait.