The Rawness

Getting ready to head to Jaco, Costa Rica today. Should be fun. Going to take surfing lessons to boot. I’ll return to posting next week. Will be checking and responding to comments though.

This is something I’m going to do now and again, posting links to articles and interviews I find that somehow relate to topics and posts I did in the past.

First, Psychology Today had an interesting article called “The Appeal of the Bad Boy.” This is the part I found interesting:

From a Darwinian point of view, females are the choosier sex, and males compete for their attention. The result of this competition is that men have evolved strategies such as seeking alpha status.

The more likely a relationship is to be fleeting, the more likely a woman is to seek a man with high quality genes. Evolutionary psychologists define “good genes” for men as high-testosterone-fueled masculinity, symmetry, height, and, believe it or not, parasite resistance. Men who are blessed with these qualities tend to be confident and dominant. And able to get away with roguish behavior.

It’s not all a positive for them, since they are also more prone to taking risks and getting into fights and accidents. Still, they offer a primal appeal that would have been advantageous in the ancestral setting—fighting skills, passion, lust for the damsel.

“Women intuitively get attracted to brave acts of altruism more than to altruism per se,” says Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan, principal author of a study on “dads and cads.” “A distinction between long-term and short-term relationships is important for understanding women’s partner choices.” A love of boldness helps women find strong males as mates. Secretly they harbor the fantasy of turning their genetically gifted cads into loving dads who stick around long-term, long enough to help raise the kids. Think Warren Beatty and Keith Richards; fairy tales sometimes come true.

But wait; don’t all women want a kind, understanding guy? Of course; it’s just that nice isn’t a high-caliber turn-on in the short term, unlike bravado. Says Kruger, “Women want their emotions activated.” And audacity grabs attention, even if only in the service of marshaling good genes.

A clue to female psychology emerges in a study examining the cheesy best sellers that set millions of women on a Harlequin high. The male protagonists are invariably studs on steeds who morph into devoted dads by novel’s end. That is, the women get the best of both worlds.

When women want it all—great genes, and a reliable breadwinner—the odds of finding satisfaction grow slim. It’s human nature to want it all; what man doesn’t want a gorgeous young woman who is equally devoted to having sex and washing his car? But it’s a slightly elusive proposition, because in reality we have forced choices.

Trade-offs are the stuff of economics, evolution, and, of course, sex. We rarely get it all, or if we do, it won’t be for long. That’s not so bad, since romantic goals and appreciation evolve as we age. Women, for example, can cavort with cads at little cost when they’re young, but may later need to tighten up their standards for what constitutes a good relationship when they feel the urge to raise a family.

The part that was most interesting to me was that altruism didn’t do much for women on its own unless accompanied by brave or bold actions that excited their emotions. It makes sense but I never thought about it much before.

And of course, there is the opposite of the bad boy, the infamous “Nice Guy,” not to be confused with the genuinely nice guy. Heartless Bitches International (HBI) have done a great series discussing why many women don’t like “nice guys.” Although they screw it up occasionally when switching into a riotgrrl feminist stance, they do hit the target a lot.

First comes from HBI the parable for “Nice Guys” entitled “The Man With No Spine.” HBI also has “10 Reasons Women Date Jerks Instead of Nice Guys.”

Psychology Today had another article called “Nation of Wimps” that I think everyone should read. It’s by Hara Estroff Marano, who later expanded it into a book A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting She also has a blog discussing how overparenting is making the next generation of kids into wimps. One part that really jumped out at me from the Psychology Today article:

Just Whose Shark Tank Is It Anyway?

The stressful world of cutthroat competition that parents see their kids facing may not even exist. Or it exists, but more in their mind than in reality—not quite a fiction, more like a distorting mirror. “Parents perceive the world as a terribly competitive place,” observes Anderegg. “And many of them project that onto their children when they’re the ones who live or work in a competitive environment. They then imagine that their children must be swimming in a big shark tank, too.”

“It’s hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now,” says Elkind. “How best do you prepare kids for that? Parents think that earlier is better. That’s a natural intuition, but it happens to be wrong.”

It gave me pause because I suspect it’s the exact type of parenting I would be guilty whenever I have kids.

There was an article in Daily Mail over three years ago called “How Feminism Destroyed Real Men.” It was notable not only for its astute insights and acidic barbs, but for the controversy-generating curveball ending of the piece, which was a pretty damn ballsy way to end the thing.

Some of the insights that stood out to me:

At a dinner party recently, I encountered the depressingly familiar sight of a dynamic thirty- something woman accompanied by a nerdy male sidekick that she’d browbeaten into proposing to her.

I felt instant recognition when reading this line. In white yuppie and bourgieous bohemian gentrifying Brooklyn I have seen an insane number of these couples, with many of the men emasculated to the point of seeming gay. I was even having a discussion with some friends about how often we met a couple we thought was a single woman and her fag hag only to find it was her fiance or her husband. We wondered if on average these men attracted the women because they were already emasculated or if they were emasculated from being with the women.

Now, over a decade later, women are waking up to the fact that these [post-feminism] men are drippy, sexless bores. The feminisation of men hasn’t produced the well-rounded uber-males women were hoping for.

Instead, women are now lumped with flabby invertebrates, little more than doormats, whom they secretly despise but are too proud to admit it.

This is a key point. Many of these women who bought into radical feminism wholeheartedly can’t bear to admit they hate the feminized Frankenstein monster they created, so they still pay positive lip service to the phenomenon. This in turn encourages more men to remain that way, which leads to more enmity from the women who hate them but can’t admit it out of feminist pride.

These women consider themselves to be alpha-females, but they are nothing but a pathetic sham.

A true Amazon couldn’t stand the company of a supplicant male, let alone marry one. Real alpha-women are the ones who can more than hold their own with an alpha-man.

Deep down, women love men who stand up to them, who won’t be pushed around. They love men who will look them in the eye and tell them to shut up when their hormonal bickering has become too much.

Exhibit A:

Long ago, I realised it is unhealthy for a man to embroil himself in arguments with women.

While men want an argument to make sense and have a rational conclusion, women solely want the argument itself: it’s a pressure valve for their emotions, and once they get started there is no stopping them.

This is just good advice I tell people all the time and deserves to be highlighted. As the article proceeds it gets bolder and more controversial.

Like I said earlier, the type of browbeated emo man it was describing above was very recognizable to me, as someone living in Brooklyn. And I don’t think any subculture celebrates this type of guy as much as the hipsters here do. And here is a great piece called “Meet the Whimpster: The Manipulative Asshole in Sensitive Clothing” that does a great job of describing and calling them out. This one is so good I can’t even isolate one part to quote. It’s all golden.

And finally, a Salon article interviewing Susan Squire, author of the book I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage.

She talks about the role Martin Luther played in our modern image of marriage:

By the time Luther came around in the early 16th century there was a lot of hatred of the church — [its] greed and [its] antisexual notions. Even popes were famous for having out-of-wedlock children and millions of mistresses.

Luther came out of a monastery saying that celibacy was a depraved state and that marriage was a holy state. He said this even while he was still a monk and still celibate. God wanted marriage, because God said “be fruitful and multiply.” He was going back to the original Genesis stipulation.

He also said that marriage should not be primarily about reproduction or property, that its highest value was emotional comfort, affection, companionship, not necessarily passion.

Luther popularized this idea that middle-aged men should not marry teenagers, that there had to be some compatibility in age and background, and that the people who were getting married should not be forced into marriage by their parents. This brought up this idea of choice in marriage. Marriages were arranged for many, many, many centuries up and down the classes, because young people were not considered capable of making such a huge choice that was going to impact on generations.

Luther said the bride and groom should have some say in who they’re marrying — at least they should have the power to say “no” to a match — and that they should be compatible, and that they should work on developing affection, and realizing his concept of married love.

But he went along with all the centuries of thinking that men were superior to women, and that men ruled the family and ruled their wives. Nobody in society up to that point, men or women, could really visualize anything but a hierarchy in marriage. That would have to wait until the democratic revolution.

Luther said that couples should be compatible and be friends and have affection for each other, but he didn’t take in the fact that you can’t really look to an inferior as a great companion. Society embraced the idea of love in marriage before people were able to come around to this idea that women and men should be partners, that women’s brains were no less competent than men’s brains. This is an attitude change that’s very recent.

She also adds about love and marriage:

We should know going into it that the nature of love and sex changes from what it begins as, and that a great love affair doesn’t necessarily make a great marriage. It might, but you have to look for other things, too.

So much emphasis, certainly in movies and pop culture, is placed on falling in love and getting married. But then everyone kind of shuts up and doesn’t really look at what happens during married life, and how married love is very different from the premarital love that got you to the altar.

We could learn a lot about what is in the nature of marriage and separate that from what our personal problems might be. We could probably have fewer divorces if people realized that some of the problems have to do with the nature of married life. It’s the only relationship that is both domestic and sexual. It’s very hard when you’re living day in and day out with one person. That’s the antithesis of passionate sex. Passion withers in a daily routine. It just does. It doesn’t mean that you don’t desire each other. It doesn’t mean that marriage isn’t hugely rewarding.

The life span has more than doubled since 1900. We’re talking about marriages that at best lasted 18 years before someone died. Now you’re looking at 50 years of marriage to one person. That’s a great thing and a terrible thing, because there are going to be bad times.

And finally, if you liked the Madonna/Whore Series, check out these two posts by Alpha Dominance, “Question For the Ladies: Why do you raise your son to be a ‘Nice Guy’” and “Could Humans Become Parthogenetic? Why Culture Needs Men.”

Laterz.