The Rawness

New York magazine has an article on the rise of binge drinking among today’s generation of young women. It basically asks whether notions of gender equality should extend to binge drinking.

[M]ore women are drinking, yes—more than 48 percent acknowledge having had at least one drink in the past month (up from 42 percent in 1992). But beyond that, the women who drink are drinking more. The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined. At the same time, men are reining in their drinking, meaning that the gender gap of alcohol consumption is narrowing all the time.

This increase in drinking among women also includes a sharp increase in binge drinking as well, defined by the CDC’s website as follows:

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is defined as a pattern of alcohol consumption that brings the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level to 0.08% or above. This pattern of drinking usually corresponds to 5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on a single occasion for women, generally within about 2 hours.

The article gets better when it starts listing specific examples.  I cringed with recognition of these types of boozy babes:

I’m out drinking one Wednesday night when I run into Gail and Melanie, two women in their early twenties who are well on their way to what my grandmother would call “past precious.” It’s their third bar of the evening, or rather they were here earlier, they left to go to a beer garden a few blocks away, and now, at 2 a.m., they are back. Both are tall and slender, both wear red dresses with their dark hair pulled up, and the bartender has been slipping both of them freebies here and there throughout the night when they weren’t being offered drinks by other eager men.

“They were like, ‘Oh. You want another beer?’?” Mel says, rolling her eyes about a group of guys who tried to get their attention earlier.

Gail laughs. “They totally admitted they were going to be outdrank by us.”

“He was like, ‘I didn’t drink until I was 21,’?” Mel continues.

Gail arches her eyebrows in disbelief. “This is how we grew up,” she says, nodding in the direction of her drink. “I’ve been drinking since I was 13, you know? We went into my friend’s liquor cabinet and mixed everything together, whiskey, vodka, rum. I remember after that being like, ‘Alcohol is really fun. I want to do it again.’?”

Mel agrees. “I started drinking at a house party when I was going into eighth grade. I ended up throwing up Doritos in the bathroom. Not that that was fun, but from there, I was like, ‘I’m curious.’?”

Then comes the stats. None of them are surprising based on things I’ve seen or anecdotes I’ve heard, but to see them all compiled in a few short paragraphs even gave me pause…for like all of a second.

One-third of all women in the U.S. have their first alcoholic sip before they enter high school. Almost half of high-school girls drink, and more than a quarter binge drink. Then throw in college. For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

“I’m pretty sure college was a great time,” my college roommate likes to say, “but I remember none of it, sadly.” Not incidentally, we started college at the tail end of the nineties, the decade that invented the alcopop, otherwise known as “chick beer,” and MTV Spring Break. If the alcohol industry was conspiring to attract drinkers like us, it succeeded. The rate of frequent binge drinking increased by 124 percent between 1993 and 2001 at all-female colleges. When Amstel Light began marketing directly to women, its sales volume reportedly went up by 13 percent. Suddenly, alcohol commercials weren’t just of the big-breasted, mud-wrestling lineage. A Dewar’s ad from the era showed a lovely young woman donning her work clothes while a bare-chested man slept in the bed beside her. Tagline: “You finally have a real job, a real place, and a real boyfriend. How about a real drink?” I didn’t have any of the above but thought Dewar’s would suit me just fine.

That was back when the industry was just warming up. Dr. David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, believes that the real onslaught—and its effect on the beverages women consume—didn’t reach critical mass until the turn of this century. “For decades, we’ve assumed that the beverage preference for underage drinkers is beer because it’s cheaper,” he told me. “Boys are more likely to drink beer, but starting in about 2001, the girls shift. They are decisively more likely to drink liquor. This shift in beverage preference is a really big deal because it takes a lot to change the beverage preference of a group of people.”

The change could not have happened without a calculated effort. At a time when the number of cable channels and their appeal mushroomed, alcohol ads appeared during thirteen to fifteen of the most popular shows among teenagers and increasingly in women’s magazines, where according to Jernigan, in 2002 girls 12 to 20 saw 95 percent more ads for alcopops than women 21 and above. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors. “How many guys are going to drink a strawberry vodka?” Jernigan asks. “There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.”

Not that marketing should get all the credit for a woman’s relationship with drinking. Once an introduction to alcohol is made, the affair usually flourishes all on its own.

Given that modern feminism automatically equates gender equality with progress, so long as it’s in an area that men reap benefits from (for example feminists don’t really seem to be clamoring for the chance to get on the front lines of a raging battlefield oddly enough), it’s no surprise that today’s vapid feminists of the Jezebel.com and Feministing.com variety view women increasingly engaging in the hard partying and harder drinking lifestyle traditionally associated with men as some sort of gender progress.  Similarly many feminists, especially those of the Sex & The City variety viewed females embracing male-style revolving door urban promiscuity as some sort of gender progress also in the late 90s.

To see what all the recent waves of feminism from the second wave through to the Sex and the City wave to the Suicide Girl wave have combined to create, take for example the following horror story from the article:

Jezebel.com, a Website that is an avatar of a certain of-the-moment brand of feminism appealing to women too young to remember the heyday of Ms. magazine. Jezebel is very pro-alcohol. Last summer, the site stirred up controversy when a well-respected media personality invited two of its writers onto her Internet show “Thinking and Drinking”—typically a classy, semi-Socratic affair—and the younger women got so visibly shitfaced and the conversation so disturbing that some critics referred to it as “The Night Feminism Died.” (When asked why she didn’t prosecute her date-rapist, one of the young women, woozily clutching her can of beer, answered, “Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”)

The onslaught of criticism that followed, however warranted, failed to take into account the fact that, for better or worse, drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.

It’s a more maverick form of feminism, sure, and perhaps misguided—something akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated. But the paradox of a woman exerting her power by making herself, to one degree or another, incapacitated does not read as a disjunction to most of the women I spoke with. On the contrary, a woman’s control over her life—and the decision of when and how to lose that control—seems to be the point.

Reading about this trainwreck interview is one thing, but really, actually seeing it in action is a whole other level of clusterfuck to behold:

“Daddy, are you proud of me? That college education really paid off!  Look Mom, progress!” 

I’m kind of torn on seeing chicks like this be so candid.  In some ways it’s good because it shows the other side of the gender war that the media likes to overlook.  We only see men behaving badly stories but not women behaving badly.  I know a lot of women may read this and tell me, “Oh, they’re exceptions,” and maybe when taking the whole country into account that is true, but in NY and the other U.S. urban centers, these type of women have become the new norm, especially in the 18-34 age range.  When I was younger, had a lot less game and even less standards, these types of chicks were a godsend because they meant easy banging with mininal skill and effort.  What young guy with raging hormones and little patience wouldn’t love that?  But as I got older I realized these women are really just the equivalent of slapping a great paint job on a shitty car: sure it’s more than a lot of other people have, but it’s still nothing to be especially proud of.  And if you have any sort of standards or self-respect, you realize your shitty car with the nice pant job only impresses people not worth impressing, which makes it an even emptier feeling after a while.  Or even worse, after a long enough time lowering your standards and fucking slutty drunks, lowered standards go from being your last resort game to being your A-game.  And sure enough you become one of those low-class losers who are not worth impressing. 

When you lower your standards on a regular basis and only bang women you don’t respect, you think you’re getting over and proving something, but in actuality it sends a message to your subconscious mind about who you are.  Just like you are what you eat, you are what you fuck.  And since you’re fucking trash, your subconscious mind starts to absorb the message that you must be low value as well, and as a result starts influencing your conscious behavior accordingly.  Thus you start lowering your standards on how you look (slovenly, sloppy, unkempt, unimpressive, bland) and you lose all self-respect (desperate chasing of women, putting up with crap you shouldn’t, hooking up with unattractive women just because you’re both drunk and the opportunity is there).  That’s why so many of the guys who regularly hook up with the types of chicks like the two Jezebellers in the video above, the hipsters they deride and mock, look like unshaven slobs (lowering their standards for themselves) and regularly are at ease with making spectacles of themselves (no self-respect).  That’s why hipsters reach the point where they eventually feel no shame looking like the botched drive-by abortions found on Look at This Fucking Hipster website or are proud to be written up for engaging in crap like this or this for example.  It’s also why I started turning dow n one-night stand opportunities with stumblebum broads who were incoherent and sloppy, even if they were hot.  It was just tacky, unenjoyable and embarassing when I brought home a girl who was excited about sleeping with me, but by the time we got to more intimate settings she was nodding in and out of a stupor while taking off her own clothes.  So I’m drunk, my hormones are exploding like a volcano and my dick’s hard enough to cut diamonds and crack walnuts.  What do I do?  If we’re both drunk is it rape?  If we both start having sex and she seems awake and responsive in the beginning but at some point she becomes semi-conscious and out of it because her liquor intake is catching up with her, do I stop stroking or would that be rape?

The recent movie Observe & Report actually has such a scarily accurate scene, where [SPOILERS] Seth Rogen and hard-drinking Anna Faris go on a date that culminates in the type of sex I just described (and lived a few times).  He’s pounding away at her at the end of their date and she looks passed out drunk.  Slowly it hits him that she may not be conscious any more and he might be raping her.  He slows down and then stops, unsure what to do and slowly feeling disgusted by himself, wondering if he is a date rapist.  And Anna Faris’ character immediately slurs, without looking up or opening her eyes, “I didn’t tell you to stooppp motherrrfuckkerrr….”  Like, is it rape if she was conscious and slurs something that rhymes with “Yerrssh” when you started fucking but sort of kind of passed out before you finished?  When you actually start having to ask those types of questions, it’s time to raise your standards. Real men need at least need a little bit of a challenge in order to feel proud of an accomplishment.  And it’s scenarios like this, which are much more commonplace than older generations know,  that probably cause the girls to be so nonchalant toward their “rapists.”  Because these women are fully aware of how grey and vague the issue of consent is in such mutually drunk and debauched scenarios, especially when slutty behavior is thrown into the equation.  Shit, one of them even wrote a column for Gawker.com titled Slut Machine and had a blog called One D(ick) at a Time, so I don’t think I’m out of line calling their behavior slutty.

One interesting thing about the videos above and the Whimpster piece is how the women who date hipsters seem to hold them in total utter contempt and scorn them.  When I see hispter couples I see this emasculating scorn dynamic going on too.  What girls like the Jezebellers in the video and the woman who wrote The Whimpster piece don’t get is that yes the men they date are tools, but these men are tools that they created.  They have this love-hate relationship with hipster men.  They date them because on a social level they like them for being enlightened enough to accept their batshit crazy and ill-defined form of reactionary feminism and they accept their desire to be equal to men and they aren’t intimidated by a “strong,” defined as abrasive, narcissistic and shrewish in their world, woman.  Plus these men have no desire to be macho and try to lead them or ever pull rank on them or ever try to boss them around and take charge forcefully.  So these guys are the perfect complement to their socially constructed sense of identity.  Yet on a primal, unconscious level, they hate them because women are genetic hard-wired for hypergamy (meaning they don’t want a man who is equal in status but one who is higher), are hard-wired to seek out leadership in a man (meaning they don’t want a man who gives them 50% of more input on everything and is too democratic) and are hard-wired to respond with a dripping crotch to displays of machoness and assertiveness, because it satisfies their primal need to feel protected and secure (meaning on a primal level they don’t like guys with the same height, weight and muscle tone as them).  So for all those reasons, they don’t respect these men even though they are a perfect fit for their social side and they even grow to hate them with time.  Yet since the guys these women do respond to primally and hormonally to are socially forbidden to them by their religion of radical feminism, and more importantly, would have no tolerance for their radical feminist ways in return, they are forced to deal and make do with the type of hipster men that are cool with their radical feminist religion, even if everything else from their subconscious primal mind to their hormones to their genes utterly loathes them.  (And with time this hatred will start to surface on the conscious level too)

So look at the videos and read the Whimpster piece again.  They date and fuck these guys, yet appear to hold them in utter contempt as well.  One girl is basically calling them out for being nonassertive, but says that at least the way they rape is more acceptable because it’s not the macho kind of rape a frat boy would do.  Who is she complimenting and who is she insulting with this train of thought?  Does she even know?  It’s funny in a fucked up way, but it turns out even the way hipsters rape, using surreptitiously slipped drugs and inebriated and deranged (by feminism and college) targets is passive-aggressive.  But the irony is, they created the Whimpster and then want to punish him for having all the traits they continually reward and none of the “frat boy” or “macho” or “traditional” traits they openly deride every chance they get.  Yet they want to turn around and bash them for being exactly what they encouraged them to be, and continue to engage in the exact same behavior and subscribe to the exact same beliefs that encouraged them to be that way.  Because the alternative idea, that radical feminism sold them a bad bill of goods that created more problems than it solved for them, is impossible for them to even consider because they have devoted so much of their identity and so many years and resources to the ideology.  This is what’s known as a “sunk cost fallacy.”  Marshall McLuhan once said about humans “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”  It works for this context as well: yes these guys are tools, but these women shaped them, and now these tools are shaping them back, and the vicious circle that has been started is turning out to be a pitiful race to the bottom.

Huffingtonpost.com, a site for smelly granolas I never expected to link to in my lifetime, has some of the best highlights in print form:

These Jezebels recommend birth control methods:

Moe: Pulling out always works for me”
Tracie: “And I know it’s an irresponsible thing to day, but it’s (Pulling Out) The Most Fun Way Not To Get Pregnant”

The Jezebels on sex with total strangers:

Tracie: “People are always saying it’s not safe to go home with strange men, blah, blah blah, like Mr. Goodbar whatever”
Moe: “What’s gonna happen?’

Lizz You could get raped”

Moe: That’s happening too, but you live through that.”

Lizz: “Sometimes you don’t”

Moe: “That’s true if they have weapons.”

The Jezebels define the “rapists of our generation”

Tracie: “I live in Williamsburg, there aren’t very assertive men there”
Moe: “The thing about the rapists of our generation, is that they all use drugs, they all have some sort of drug they use on you, so it’s good to feel, and I don’t know if this has happed to me or if I just drink too much…

Moe: “It’s really hard to prosecute them (rapists), so you should try to avoid them at all costs.”

Tracie: “I once paid someone to rape me once.”

Tracie: “Well, I didn’t pay for it, I had a magazine pay for it

Tracie: “I moved here when I was 18 and you think you would encounter more rapists in a big city like this, but, I don’t know, I just haven’t.”

Moe on sexual regret:

Moe: “I guess, I like, regret being date raped”
Moe: “It seems like in terms of bad sexual experiences, that you have, the worst ones are in, always seem to be in countries where sex is not accepted. That is the good thing about New York, I’ve never has any problems with anyone here.”

Moe: “I guess third guy, I ever had sex with, date raped me, and I got very mad at him, but I wasn’t gonna fucking like turn him in to the police and fucking go through shit..

Lizz interrupts: “Why not, you see that’s the problem, why not, I am just curious?”

Moe: Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”

Tracie on why she has not been raped

” I think it has to do with the fact that I am like, smart”
“I don’t hang around with frat guys”

Moe on how she felt about her rapist:

“I always felt very like, safe around this guy even after he date raped me”

Moe on what women can take home from reading their blogs

If any of you guys use the pullout method, but you read you know, anything I wrote about Ben Bernanke, or you know, what ever, at least y’ll go to the grave with your syphilis, slightly informed, that’s all I care about

I suggest that the next writer who chooses to do a piece about the popular meme of how today’s urban young adult men are stunted man-children who refuse to commit actually take the time to learn about the boozy train wrecks they’re refusing to commit to. The marriage stats will make a lot more sense then.

By the way, Tracie Egan really did pay someone to rape her, as you can read here.  Believe it or not, I don’t hate the article. It’s well written, honest and indirectly confirms a lot of my beliefs about radical feminism that a radical feminist would never admit if I asked her directly. If you don’t believe my recurring theories that women don’t really want to be equal in power to a man in a relationship, or even worse more decisive than the man, check the opening paragraph where she describes why she wants to be raped:

I blame my recurring rape fantasy on the fact that I’m a feminist. I’ve never made any bones about getting boned in exactly the fashion that I want. But as a girl, my equipment can be trickier to manage, therefore I need to be a boss in the bedroom to ensure I get worked the right way. It gets really tiresome always being the one in charge, and don’t shrinks say that people usually fantasize about the opposite of their reality? I guess that’s why I find myself wishing that my typically sugary-sweet sexual encounters were sometimes peppered with assault. I decided that the best way to forfeit that control—while still holding on to a modicum of it for safekeeping—would be to hire someone for the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted a male whore to rape me.

Kind of like how when a person who loves food denies himself food too long he ends up wanting to destructively binge on it at some point, I guess when your ideology causes you to avoid assertive males too much, you end up going to an extreme to find assertiveness, like rape. You can read her blog here, where she used to regularly chronicle her promiscuous lifestyle and sexual exploits, at least until she announced she was engaged to be married last Fall. You can also read her take on the fallout to the above interview. To her credit, she’s a fantastic writer.

My laptop is still down, but I can still squeeze in a few short posts here and there when I can. Ordered my Lenovo laptop and it should be here in a few weeks. My laptop repair guy swears that it’s the best PC laptop you can get, although he swears I should give up PC laptops altogether and get a Mac laptop. Maybe later in the year.

Also, don’t forget to check out this post and comment on what kind of essays you’d like to see me tackle in a book, whether it’s new topics or expansions of previous blog post topics. I’m currently in an outlining stage.

Anyway, on to the current topic. Look at the picture below:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="392" caption="Female Swagger"][/caption]

It appeared in New York Magazine’s Look Book Section a while back. As I flipped through the magazine quickly I had to stop and do a double take when I hit that page. It stopped me a cold because at first glance when I saw that shit-eating smirk, confident aura, great fashion sense and sick, dominant swagger I was impressed. It’s rare to see an American bourgeois bohemian white guy with swagger like that these days. (For an idea of what a bourgeois bohemian is, click here, here or here to get a crystal clear idea). Usually such couples featured in mainstream NY mags has a unassuming, wispy, languid and ironically dressed whimpster geek with a more dynamic and attractive female specimen that is outshining him that is clearly wearing the pants in the relationship (aka the Brooklyn Bobo couple). See this Jessica Valenti story for comparison, picture below:

 Now that’s the type of unassuming whimpster I’m used to seeing as the male half of these bobo power couples.  The kind of guy you’d never see dominating the forefront of the shot with his arm confidently gripping his woman, exuding cockiness and swagger as his woman just fawns and melts all over him, dripping with adulation, reverence and lust.  No, he’s meant to be tolerated for being as inoffensive to her feminist views as possible.  If you don’t believe me read the accompanying story.

But back to the first picture, when I did the double-take and flipped back to it, I realized that they were a lesbian couple and not a man-woman couple.  At that point it all made sense.  I have no proof to back up this claim, but I bet that Allison Michael Orenstein, the dapper dan butch in the first photo, is the more hardcore lesbian while her mate, kissing up on her cheek, Simone Saint Laurent, was probably straight for much of her life and got ”turned out” by Orenstein or a butch similar to her.  The reason I assume this is because of what a butch lesbian who excelled at “converting” straight women once told me: that metropolitan straight women, living in this world of feminized bobo whimpsters, are getting so starved for traditional masculine swagger to activate their primal lust triggers and make them feel safe to be a submissive woman that they’re even increasingly willing to turn to another woman to get their dose of macho swagger.  This butch claimed to me that the sensitive wuss has been the biggest boon to her lesbo recruitment game, and looking at the two pics I believe her.  It’s even worse when you read the stories accompanying both pics.  I also think the bobo whimpsterization and swagger deprivation of urban white men has also played a major role in white women’s increased openness to the idea of dating minority men, who tend to have a lot more swagger on average as well. 

Read the story accompanying the lesbian couple’s picture and the story accompanying Valenti’s story, and ask yourself, who is more likely to be a follower of  The Renaissance Man Philosophy, the butch lesbian in the first story or the bobo whimpster guy in the second?  The lesson here is that real women who are in touch with their natural feminine side want a man who, while capable of being sensitive if necessary, conveys that he is confident and can protect, dominate and lead them at will.  If you can’t convey these things, or worse don’t believe them about yourself, you will end up with women like Valenti.  Women who are too insecure to let themselves be led by a man.  Whose are more interested in competing and dominating a man than being a complement to him.  Women who have deep rooted issues with masculine strength and feel the need to neuter any indication of it in our society and emasculate any man in their immediate vicinity to feel comfortable.  Basically, a shrew that defines herself by her radical feminist ideology.  She’ll have you walking on pins and needles and constantly double checking the toilet seat and making sure you organized the recycling bin right in fears she’ll chew you out mercilessly.  National Corner also did a great piece on her. 

Don’t be that guy.  And don’t be too proud to take lessons from a lesbian on male swagger if need be.  We need all the role models we can get these days.

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

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

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

Law 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Reading:

UPDATE: Please note that part 2 is now up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AGE

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

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

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

LOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for part 2.