Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
[Kate] Bolick seems genuinely conflicted about marriage. The daughter of a committed feminist, she marched off to third grade “in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.” She recalls that when she was cuddling in the back seat of the family car with her high school boyfriend, her mother turned around and asked, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She took it for granted, she writes, “that (I) would marry, and that there would always be men (I) wanted to marry.”
So sure was she of the limitless romantic opportunities available that at the age of 28, she broke up with a wonderful boyfriend. They had been together for three years. He was “an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind.” Why did she discard him? “Something was missing.”
Ten years later, she writes somewhat (though not entirely) ruefully “If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace…today we’re contending with a new ‘dating gap,’ where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players.”
You should check out Bolick‘s article, and watch for yourself as she slowly comes around to what’s been going on:
According to Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell who has written on supply and demand in the marriage market, this shouldn’t be surprising. When the available women significantly outnumber men, which is the case on many campuses today, “courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want,” he told me recently. If women greatly outnumber men, he says, social norms against casual sex will weaken. He qualifies this by explaining that no matter how unbalanced the overall sex ratio may become (in either direction), “there will always be specific men and women who are in high demand as romantic partners—think Penélope Cruz and George Clooney.” But even Cruz and Clooney, Frank says, will be affected by changing mores. The likelihood increases “that even a highly sought-after woman will engage in casual sex, even though she would have sufficient market power to defy prevailing norms.” If a woman with the “market power” of a Penélope Cruz is affected by this, what are the rest of us to do?
Just wow. After 45 years of achieving power…”what are the rest of us to do.” Constantly oppressed.
Last year, a former management consultant named Susan Walsh tried to dig a little deeper. She applied what economists call the Pareto principle—the idea that for many events, roughly 20 percent of the causes create 80 percent of the effects—to the college dating market, and concluded that only 20 percent of the men (those considered to have the highest status) are having 80 percent of the sex, with only 20 percent of the women (those with the greatest sexual willingness); the remaining 80 percent, male and female, sit out the hookup dance altogether. (Surprisingly, a 2007 study commissioned by the Justice Department suggested that male virgins outnumber female virgins on campus.) As Walsh puts it, most of the leftover men are “have nots” in terms of access to sex, and most of the women—both those who are hooking up and those who are not—are “have nots” in terms of access to male attention that leads to commitment. (Of course, plenty of women are perfectly happy with casual, no-strings sex, but they are generally considered to be in the minority.) Yet the myth of everyone having sex all the time is so pervasive that it’s assumed to be true, which distorts how young men and women relate. “I think the 80/20 principle is the key to understanding the situation we find ourselves in—one in which casual sex is the cultural norm, despite the fact that most people would actually prefer something quite different,” Walsh told me.
This matches my experience as a single fella…except, as always seems to be the case with the book-smart, reality starts to separate away from theory like badly hung wallpaper, when it is implicitly presumed that individuals and their experiences remain static over time. As part of the eighty percent, I’d safely assumed my experiences in K-12 were part of an education about the opposite sex, and an incomplete one; in adulthood I was determined to figure out the rest of it. Dating and sex were about getting that done, and as life continued to throw me the lessons I needed to learn, and I moved on to new lessons, my experiences changed. By about sixteen years ago I was sharing these experiences with the only one of the exes with whom I still communicate, who is known colloquially as “Kidzmom” — just from that, it’s pretty clear I eventually had experiences different from the way things were going from the start.
I have a bad reputation of turning just about any ol’ humdrum subject into vast bloated wreckage of loquacious nonsense. It isn’t so with my four-phase days, in spite of the learning that had to take place; I can sum it up with a single sentence. Once I learned a few fundamental secrets about reeling them in, I found myself carnal witness to a seemingly endless parade of confused waifs. That says it all. But let me break it down: The passage “marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players” explains it (Charen pretty much lifted this from Bolick’s article)…of course, I must confess, I’m not completely sure in all cases how my “conquests” would qualify me. Assuming they could remember me.
Point is, they were daughters of the post-feminist era, just as I am one of its many hapless sons. They were looking for what they found. They were programmed to find deadbeats and players. I can recall a couple here and there who had problems with me for not dressing sharply enough, so I suppose they’d put me in the “deadbeat” file; many among the ones who didn’t have this issue with me, either because their standards were lower or because they met me after I figured out you need to dress like you care — would almost certainly pigeonhole me as a “player” because we ended up in that “Okay, we did it, now what?” phase.
I don’t know what sort of man really would make them happy, and I think I don’t know this because they don’t know either. I conclude this from applying the “remove everything from the block of marble that does not look like a horse” method, which works very well since it’s easy to identify what makes a modern marriageable female unhappy, and the customary sin of generalization becomes unusually safe. First on the list is a deficiency of financial wherewithal, or evidence of such a deficiency. Second would be problems with social interaction, recreational occasions — fun. Somewhere in that list, goes your male genetic breeding stock. This is where a whole lot of years of confusion and frustration and plate smashing and explaining domestic situations to cops, distills down into something embarrassingly simple: The trouble with women is simply that women are people, and people would prefer not to be miserable. Girls just want to have fun. And a future. How unreasonable, eh?
So you act like you can pay your bills, and then you have enough left over to take someone out and have a good time and behave properly in public. Then you can be part of the 20%, I suppose…some might say I eventually did that, although I’d hate to think so. The paradox is, that if it all works, you get a small loud pink thing that fills diapers and then you can forget about going out and having fun for quite awhile. The paradox exists because women are either really bad at planning ahead, or so good at it that it looks like they can’t do it. That part, I still haven’t quite got figured out yet. Don’t know if I’ll ever get that far.
But I find the “deadbeats or players” to be revealing. Like I said — they found what they were programmed to find. The maiden skips past all the ones who can’t dress properly, don’t live in the right neighborhoods, don’t have jobs she’d like to tell her mothers and girlfriends about, drive modest cars…these would be the deadbeats…whoever survives this initial round marries her immediately, unless he doesn’t, of course. Darn it all, who ever thought he might actually have a say in this?? Momma didn’t say anything about that! And so that would be your player. Deadbeats and players. The ones who she refused, and the ones that are refusing her.
My one liner that really sums it all up? Much of the time, looking back on each failed relationship with the benefit of hindsight, I realized I had used up a piece of life with someone who really wasn’t prepared to share life. They’d filed some other guys in the “deadbeat bin,” found me, decided I was a keeper and waited for that diamond ring. Got pissed off when it didn’t happen. And then, of course, there were the relationships that didn’t make it that far…when I was the guy who got skipped-past while they were looking for something else.
Almost like…I would say, exactly like…shopping. Shopping for a set of napkin rings, or linens, or interior paint or any fine retail product that is supposed to match up with something else. In a fine establishment where you expect your credit card to work all the time, and instead it works maybe one percent of the time. That’s the behavior I saw. Lots of merchandise being skipped over, for entirely nebulous reasons (“it’s not you, it’s me”), something perfect is found, it’s hauled up to the cash register and — WHA??? What do you mean? I just sent a payment! Try it again!
Yes. Perfect. That scenario sums up my single days; every female, every relationship casual and otherwise. My roles changed. But the serious ones, who found me suitable and waited for me to make that deeper commitment, acted exactly like a customer who handed her card to the cashier, watched her swipe it, and now was waiting for the approval to come back through the phone line — merchandise all bagged up in her well-manicured hand, sunglasses & car keys out ready to go. What’s taking so fucking long?
Guy’s perspective: Our lives do not revolve around the event of the “sale” (or, if they do, we don’t realize it). We don’t necessarily want to be single and we don’t necessarily want to be married, and this doesn’t mean we’re treating the girl as a plaything — we just want things to work. The lady treats the marriage as an asset, the gentleman treats it as a liability.
Hey, you know who else has been checking out the Pareto Principle? Sonic Charmer, better part of a year ago. This really struck a chord with me:
Been seeing a lot of chatter recently about the intersection of feminism, the sexual marketplace and progressivism. The basic pattern being observed is a cycle (whether virtuous or vicious depends on your POV) that resonates between female independence from men, female pursuit of alpha males, and female support for big government.
To describe the cycle (starting arbitrarily somewhere in the middle of it – it has no beginning or end):
The more women pursue and indulge alpha-male-exclusive fantasies, the less they have (stable, monogamous) relationships with men in their lives. The less monogamy and stability, the more big government women support. The more that government involves itself in and arrogates to itself the right to control, suckle, and nanny every aspect of human existence, the less pressure women will feel to have stable, monogamous relationships with men, and the more inclined they are to join alpha-male harems. The more they join alpha-male harems, the more they’ll need big government to be their husbands…
Compounding all this is a little-commented but not-unimportant side effect: as government gets bigger and power/money more concentrated, the few alpha males who come out on top of the game become that much more alpha. There’s far more ‘spoils’ accruing to a President, or Senator, or CEO of a firm tied to/dependent on government – which, increasingly, means virtually all firms – in a big-government world than in a small-government world; there’s far more in 2010 than there was in 1910. That makes those alphas that much more alpha, which makes alpha-pursuing women want them more, which only helps further the sort of society that creates these mega-alphas.
The end goal sought is, as stated brilliantly in the comment unearthed by Vox Day in the post linked above,
…a polyandryous society that still maintains a “Sex and the City” civilization. They somehow expect to limit sexual access to the five percent of men they find attractive while the rest toil away to make life easier and more comfortable for them.
It’s not clear how to halt or even slow down the progress of this development before it leads to real disaster.
Here we come to the crux of what’s been happening, throughout the decades. We’ve heard the complaints from men that women are finding boys in the sexual marketplace, because the boys have been deprived of any incentive they might have had to grow up into men. The classic status of the patriarch within the household was found oppressive, we’ve done away with that status, and without that place for the responsible male to occupy the responsible male has gone missing. You end up with spinsters like Bolick complaining they can’t find anybody as the golden years lunge threateningly toward them, with all their plastic surgery appointments and their shopping excursions for ice cream, liquor and cat food. The husband and father has been displaced by big government; manhood has been reduced to a paycheck, and then government has stepped in to provide that. We could make a movie out of it: No Country For…Men.
Well, perhaps the sexual revolution has intertwined with the big-government revolution to bring us a situation where the government not quite so much displaces the sort of masculinity that is required to raise and protect a family, but channels it. Through taxes and the various public assistance conduits, all of the productive males in our society are engaged in providing for all of the females/children. There is a great priority being placed on making sure these providing men don’t actually decide anything as they do the providing. Whatever is not involuntary, is simply not involuntary yet. There’s always a revolution taking place, be it large or be it small, toward the objective that some obligation that is opt-in today, will be made not opt-in, but rather compulsory, in the near future. That would be your “rest toil away to make life easier and more comfortable for them.” While the confused damsel wandering the dating market in this post-feminist age, continues her shopping trip…finding the perfect piece of merchandise, and then waiting endlessly by the credit card machine for the approval to come through…frustrated that the answer is taking so long, sunglasses and keys in hand.
The bank, meanwhile, doesn’t approve nor does it reject. It not been provided with reason to respond either way.
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Very nicely done.
Google this: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
Also, Citizen Renegade eviscerates the beast well. Spreads the entrails all about and explains how they work. You don’t actually need to BE in the 20%, but you must behave as if you were.
- seattle | 10/28/2011 @ 11:25So, simply put, women have a preference for being taken care of, and when a man chooses to not do it, it’s easier for a woman to rely upon government. Males who don’t achieve adulthood, who prefer adolescence to independence, also have a preference for being taken care of. Adult males who prefer independence become quickly leveraged out of political preference. The market for dependence has greater demand than the market for independence.
And politicians do what is necessary to get elected.
Efforts to mandate equality result in greater disparity.
Now that’s funny.
- TMI | 10/28/2011 @ 11:40.
Just think of it as evolution in action.
- pdwalker | 10/29/2011 @ 08:35Roosh says it better than I could: http://www.rooshv.com/you-did-this-to-me
- HoundOfDoom | 10/30/2011 @ 09:40