House of Eratosthenes

Sonic Charmer brings it. If you’re one of these time-travelers out of the 1970’s ready to get offended-at-the-drop-of-a-hat at any suggestion that men & women might be a tiny bit different…reading this will be like wiping out on your motorcycle on a gravel road wearing a thong & a grin, jumping in a vat of alcohol, then going back & doing it again.

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.

He goes on to engage in some good old-fashioned generalizing. But, if you don’t like that, it’s going to be difficult to form a coherent, rational objection to it because he’s laboring under no delusion that his generalizations make for absolute, verifiable rules. As observations of statistical skew, they are entirely valid ones, and have been for a very long time.

And it’s a serious issue. I remember arriving in Seattle from out in the sticks, with some “skills,” wondering what I could make of them; I suddenly realized that with my talents all tied up in the figuring-out-what-needs-to-be-done-and-doing-it in an office — I was uniquely suited to do all kinds of things, which were overwhelmingly being done by nice looking and not-nice-looking females. Of course, like lots of young people my priority system was all tied up in paying the rent…make enough to just-get-by…and that helped. But there were a few moments where I had to wonder what was going to happen over the long term. “Business” seemed to know exactly what kind of creature should be doing what was then called “word processing,” and it was a female creature. Before you can achieve excellence in any position you first have to fit the bill of mediocrity.

Well, the computers had to be set up. Fortunately for me, the dream of a business-to-business service of a nice obedient sharply-dressed male setting everything up and then dashing off, so the female who worked there could just “push a button and make it go,” never actually materialized. Know-how made such an enormous difference back then. The dreams the entrepreneurs had about what technology could do, were (rightfully) out of this world. But the common reality, all too often, was a bunch of harried people swarming around a box that had lately consumed some gargantuan quantity of investment capital and were busily trying to figure out how to turn it on, plug it in, or achieve some other Step One with the damn thing. My time in the typing pool lasted all of four months, during which time I was sent out on all sorts of temp assignments where they “needed some kind of a computer guy.” The Marge-Simpson’s-sisters types lampooned by Sonic, would not have been sent out on these. At the end of the four months I was a full-time software developer. This was not a random-chance hire, this was actually set up by way of the old-fashioned Victorian-era introduction; I had made a positive impression, back where I came from, on someone who knew someone else.

My point is that this is not just damaging to the ladies alone, but on the gentlemen as well. And being the age I am, with the skills back then that I had, with what the business world was trying to get through, what I bore was very far displaced from the full brunt of the damage. Our sons as well as our daughters are being wretchedly and viciously short-changed here. The girls have to be wondering — with a special, acute reasoning not shared by the boys — what in the hell they’re doing getting this degree or that degree, if it will make a difference in their career prospects, if the money is being spent well. As for the boys, can they come out on top just being “some guy who knows a lot about computers”?

This passage illustrates candidly where exactly where headed:

The end goal sought is, as stated brilliantly in the comment unearthed by Vox Day…

…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.

Yeah yeah, I know — a perfect description of high school, so we ought to cope just fine. It’s just evolution at work on the males. Boys can just be what they’re expected to be, and if they deserve to, they’ll climb into that tight circle of the five percent.

There is a problem with that though, and the problem impacts lots of people who aren’t males: What makes that five percent? In context, this is the description of the alpha male. Google the term “alpha male” and half the pages you get back will have something to do with “how to become” one. Definitions? Taking charge. Dominant. Socially desirable. Think, not so much of humans, but of sled dogs. Or wolves.

Problem: We’re not talking about canines or quasi-canines. We’re talking about people. When wolves hold some kind of “election” about who’s going to be the alpha, what they are evaluating is the alpha’s skills — how that alpha could function individually. How likely is that alpha to survive not only within the immediate group, but out in the wilds. From this, the other wolves make a calculation about their own odds of survival, should they consider forming an association with him.

It is only on this last point that humans share any commonality with wolves, as they select alphas — calculating their own odds of survival as they ponder the prospects of supporting a prospective alpha. We do not evaluate his individual skills for survival…or even for setting up computers. Within our species, it is all about the social structure. We have no natural predators and we don’t need to hunt for our food, so there are no other considerations.

As a result, the archetype of our “alpha male” fantasy is Bill Clinton, whom according to some legends has difficulty trying to work an ordinary blender.

We figure out who deserves to be called an alpha male, based on who can sharply turn the emotional vibe emanating within a room.

That is something girls do.

Our so-called alpha males, I’m afraid, are being shoehorned into the classic mold of females, far more than I ever was in my temp-typing-job days back in Seattle. Masculinity has been disconnected from knowing how to do things; we, today, wouldn’t know real masculinity if it ran up and kicked us square in the ass.

And the people paying the price for this are not men. We’re having a little bit tougher time getting work and when we get it, we’re paying a little bit more in taxes…but it’s the women who are losing their bearings on what it is they’re supposed to be doing, what they should know how to do, how to get good at it & stay good at it, whether any of it matters, how they’ll know it does — in short, what life is all about.

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New Perspective on the Gender GapFriday, January 28th, 2011

New Perspective on the Gender Gap
Friday, January 28th, 2011