A lot of readers have sent me a link to this article by Kay Hymowitz, “Love in the Time of Darwinism“. I decided to take a look at it, not expecting much as is usually the case with any article written by a woman on the current state of dating, sex and game. Surprisingly, Hymowitz gets closer to the truth than any other journalist, but that’s not saying much — she’s still a million miles deep in lala land, hamstrung by her feminist biases. Her tone drips with resentment and condescension for the men who have successfully navigated the new dating landscape.
Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM [single young male] is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry.
Or smart.
He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging.
Women have always been this way. What changed was the pill, condom, economic parity and feminist devolution. Contrary to the conventional wisdom propagandized by our ignoble Kunty Kommissars of the Kulturkampf in charge of punishing the masses for daring to pull the wool from their own eyes, women’s sexual nature, not men’s, is the wilder of the two. Women’s pussy keeps men in check, but dick doesn’t keep women in check, save for organically emergent cultural controls that put the brakes on female sexuality through the consequences of shaming, accidental pregnancy and potential out-of-wedlock destitution. If men in the trenches are reporting that women are more dishonest, shallow and sluttier than ever, then the blame rests with giving women *more* freedom, not less. It’s understandable that a feminist would shirk from this conclusion.
He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male.
Captain Obvious agrees. Has there ever been a period in human history when the men who built the tribe from the ground up into a gleaming civilization on the hill were more actively marginalized than now?
He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.
He thinks this because it’s true. The blessed Word of Chateau is spreading far and wide across the land. Spreading, I say.
This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.”
This guy sounds like he got taken to the cleaners and has lost his perspective. When you see yourself as a walking wallet, women will agree. The way out of that self-fulfilling prophecy is knowledge of women, and game as practical application of that knowledge. Women will use men with money and nothing else, but they’ll fall in love with men who are psychologically dominant. Where marriage sucks because it is a social mechanism designed to exchange sex for indentured servitude and enforced by the law, committed loving relationships are great.
You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).
Oh Kay, don’t be coy. You’ve been here, scared little bunny rabbit.
The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos.
Freedom is chaos.
SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional.
The way out of this morass is to not play by women’s rules.
And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion.
Note: The median individual income in America is $32,000. The “elites” (and I use the term disparagingly) are completely out of touch.
PS: I use individual income and not household income because the former matters more to a man’s chances for finding a woman. If the culture were truly arranged to the benefit of beta provider males, the tax code would reflect that. It does not. In fact, just the opposite.
By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him.
This system worked when men held the economic and social upper hand.
Maxim #15: Female cultural equality = male dating inequality. Female cultural inequality = male dating equality. You cannot have both. So sayeth human nature.
For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.
Unfortunately, she does not make the connection and put two and two together. The problem lies not with men, who are merely skeleton keys that adapt to whatever lock women weld on their gates; the “problem” lies with women who have no choice but to obey their hindbrain programming and seek higher status mates in the sexual market as long as their assets allow.
But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas.
Women are incorrigibly capricious. This is why men must lead. Without male leadership, women spiral into a maelstrom of their emotions, buffetted to the point of ecstatic overdose until they wake up one day older and none the wiser, with no male attention off of which to ricochet helplessly addicted.
In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning.
No woman has ever done this to me, but if she did I’d tell her “Fuck you, that’s my name.”
Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks.
Chivalry cannot coexist with female empowerment and unfettered sexual choice. The days of door holding are long over. Get used to it.
The cultural muddle is at its greatest when the dinner check arrives. The question of who grabs it is a subject of endless discussion on the hundreds of Internet dating sites.
Mistake number one: Taking the chick out for dinner. Quiz for the readers: What changed in the culture that dinner dates became less than useless?
The general consensus among women is that a guy should pay on a first date: they see it as a way for him to demonstrate interest.
Mistake number two: Actively trying to demonstrate interest before attraction.
“Women seemingly have decided that they want it all (and deserve it, too),” Kevin from Ann Arbor writes. “They want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual.”
As long as the government and the culture are there to pay for women’s freedom in the forms of, for example, divorce theft, child support, on-site daycare, and overregulated totalitarian nanny state intrusion, they will be able to have it all. But there is a price to pay: Men abdicating any obligation to behave according to women’s expectations. Hence, the pump and dump. The Game. The elevation of self-interest above all. Ironically, the trappings of modern society are forcing a return to a primal state of nature.
To this day, male-bashing is the lingua franca of situation comedies and advertising: take the dimwitted television dads from Homer Simpson to Ray Romano to Tim Allen, or the guy who starts a cooking fire to be put out by his multitasking wife, who is already ordering takeout.
There’s a reason I almost entirely stopped watching TV. That shit pollutes your state.
By far the most important philosopher of the Menaissance is Charles Darwin. The theory that human sexual preferences evolved from the time that hominids successfully reproduced in the primeval African grasslands can explain the mystery of women’s preference for macho—or alpha—males.
Evolutionary psychology is the most parsimonious explanation for gender differences.
At the same time, evolutionary theory gives the former wuss permission to pursue massive amounts of sex with an endless assortment of women.
Permission has got nothing to do with it. Men have always had “permission”, in the strictest sense of the word. What evolutionary theory gives men is a solid scientifically backed framework for maximizing their advantage in the mating game.
Women want alpha males, the Seduction Community agrees; with some effort at self-improvement, any man can learn the game—Game, as it is reverently known—that will turn him into a Pick Up Artist (PUA).
Not every man can become a PUA, but every man can improve his lot with women by learning game.
A highly skilled PUA can get any woman, even an HB10[…]
I don’t know any PUA who claims this. What they claim is that any man can experience more choice in women through game.
It’s impossible to know just how many wannabe PUAs there are out there, but judging from the multitude of websites like AlphaSeduction, Fast Seduction 101, Grow Your Game, SeductionTutor, and The Seduction Chronicles, as well as chat rooms, conferences, ads for seduction gurus, boot camps not just in the United States but all over Europe and parts of Asia, and books, including Neil Strauss’s 2005 best-selling The Game, their numbers are considerable.
The barn door is open and the animals are running free. Women will respond. They are genetically wired to make it as hard as possible for men to get up their skirts. It’s a sexual arms race now and forevermore.
Game is best understood as an SYM attempt to bring order to contemporary dating confusion.
Not really. It’s best understood not as an attempt to bring order, but as an attempt to cash in on the chaos.
Remember those women who want a guy who will open the car door for them? They may be lucky if they find one willing to add “please” to “Pass the ketchup.”
And they can’t help but love these men for it.
Game goes even further, actually encouraging men to “neg” their “target” women—that is, to undermine their confidence subtly by ignoring or mildly insulting them.
Why is it so hard for women to grasp the neg concept? No term has been as misconstrued as this one. A neg is not an insult, it’s a backhanded compliment.
Indeed, the Darwinists wonder, why pretend we’re interested in anything other than sex?
Darwinistic game is equally effective in the realm of love as in the steambath of sex.
Darwinian mores, or anti-mores, also explain the brutal status jockeying that pervades the contemporary dating scene and that makes the high school cafeteria look like a feminist utopia. Check out DarwinDating.com, a matchmaking website “created exclusively for beautiful, desirable people.” Members rank your picture on a scale of one to five and vote on whether to let you join their honored ranks or throw you into the slush pile of “saggy,” “hairy,” “sweaty,” “nerdy” rejects.
The ugly truths are seeping into every crevice of society, poisoning the marrow of idealistic impulse. As we learn more about how the brain works, this is inevitable. The pretty lies once served some higher, nobler purpose, but that is dead now. Embrace the known.
With good Darwinian logic, though, [men] believe that women tend to do their reckoning on the basis of wallet size rather than pulchritude.
Not exactly. Wallet size is just one of many factors. Women do their reckoning on the basis of power, status and dominance.
Seduction artists even say they prefer savvy women who understand Game as a male version of cleavage-revealing tops.
Except tougher to implement. Hey, no guts no glory.
No, the problem with the Darwinian tenor of the Menaissance is neither antipathy to women’s equality nor a misguided reading of female nature. It is an uncompromising biological determinism that makes no room for human cultivation.
And finally we get to the part where Hymowitz desperately claws for some escape out of the tar pits of Darwinistic cruelty. It is practically preordained that her gestures toward spiritually-tinged human transcendence, particularly as she expects it of men alone, will be feeble. A simple question many men ask themselves: If I play by the rules and make room for human cultivation, and the asshole down the street is getting laid like gangbusters, then what’s in it for me?
If Hymowitz answers “An ennobling of your spirit and dignity as a man”, she will lose the argument.
As well she should.
They define manhood as alpha-style toughness and unsentimental promiscuity.
Not quite. Women love to play the promiscuity card to belittle men’s choices, but alpha manhood is better defined as projecting the behaviors and attitude that make promiscuity an option. It is the ability to be promiscuous, not necessarily the promiscuity itself, that defines the man loved by women.
And in that spirit, they cultivate manipulation, calculation, and naked (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) self-interest.
Manipulation is a loaded word meant to manipulate the reader into agreement. Truth: All goal-oriented language and behavior is manipulation. We all do it, all the time, even when we engage in trite politesse to smooth social interactions. To argue that Game is manipulation is to argue that every twist and turn of courtship is as well. And in the manipulation sweepstakes of seduction, I’d give the edge to women. By a country mile.
But human beings rely on culture to tame natural selfishness.
Some cultures amplify natural selfishness, others tame it. You can’t rely on that which is actively dispossessing. If Hymowitz wants a taming culture, she had better be ready to accept that the current configuration is a failed experiment. By Chateau standards, though, it’s been a glowing success!
After all, we have prohibitions against grabbing a neighbor’s steak off the grill or kidnapping his daughter, to give just two examples of behavior about which Nature also doesn’t care.
Normally, when we refrain from stealing the neighbor’s steak, we expect our neighbor to reciprocate our restraint. As an analogy to the present state of sexual affairs, that is not what we have today.
For this reason, successful human cultures expect far more of their men than muscle and promiscuity.
Tit for tat, baby. Minus expectations from women, it makes no sense to expect anything from men.
They see that when the old dating and courting regime fell, it left a cultural vacuum with no rules for taming or shaming the boors, jerks, and assholes.
More appropriately, the whores, sluts, and serial daters.
And if the past is any guide, most of them, even the most masterly PUAs, will eventually find themselves coaching Little League on weekends.
Change is coming. Give it time. Soon the Little League fields will echo with the empty sound of wind rustling the uncut grass.
In a national survey of young, heterosexual men, the National Marriage Project, a research organization at Rutgers University, found that the majority of single subjects hoped to marry and have kids someday.
Hope is the tribute reality pays to fantasy.
Neil Strauss, the author of The Game, says that during his PUA years, he saw enough lies and infidelity to make Darwin look like an optimist. “Losing all hope is freedom,” snarls the blogger at Eternal Bachelor.
True. But would you rather get laid and lose all hope, or be a failure with women and lose all hope? The choice is clear. The pleasure of a woman’s company and the enrichment of her love more than compensates for the loss of hope.
In fact, some people would wager that the Darwinian answer to dating chaos is our future normal.
Barring any radical reorientation of our culture, yes. But I foresee the pendulum swinging back.
And I predict you will not like it, Kay, because it would mean a betrayal of your core ideology.
[crypto-donation-box]
