Over at Mexican Annexation, T. “cheap chalupas uber alles” Cowen has a theory on the dating market for men in Washington DC:
I think it’s better to date here if you are male. Government attracts a disproportionate share of intelligent women. I’ve never lived in New York, but there are so many celebrities, billionaires. If you are a guy in New York, there’s always another guy that crushes you on the scale. Here, there are all these politicians but they are really out of commission for the most part — or if they fool around, it’s with interns. You don’t have to compete with them. The people who are really high status are off the market. As a male in Washington, you can be high in status fairly easily without the true very high status competing. In New York or L.A., there are movie stars and directors. Even if a woman can’t be with a movie star, women can still say, ‘Gee, this guy or that guy is not a movie star or a director.’ There’s lobbyists and lawyers here, a lot of them. You can be more interesting than that. This is a great place to live.
Allow me to add my more correct thoughts.
1. Government attracts a disproportionate share of *credentialed* women. While intelligence and credentials are correlated, they aren’t the same. Some of the most boring women I have ever met were multi-degreed widgets freshly pressed off the academia soulsucking assembly line. Some of the sassiest and funniest women I have ever met never had the luck to pay off a crushing student loan debt. And let’s cut the crap about smart women — most men measure a woman’s dating market worth by her looks, her feminine personality, and her willingness to experiment sexually in bed. Her smarts comes in a distant — waaaaay distant — fourth place. There is a place for female smarts, but that place is at an easy to reach lower bound of IQ where she isn’t so much dumber than the man she is with that he finds it insufferable to deal with her continually not getting his jokes and cultural references. Generally, the men who wax eloquent about the romantic charms of female intelligence are nerdos who have an incentive to pump up the one redeeming quality of womankind they can afford to bargain for.
2. NYC is a good example of what happens when a male-favorable sex ratio smashes up against a female-favorable hypergamous culture — the latter usually wins. There are more fertile-age women in NYC than in other cities, but the few male super alphas operate essentially Sultan of Brunei-like harems. Nonetheless, New York is still pretty good for the average man who can survive there, because there are so many cute chicks from which to choose. Betas may have to tolerate banging 7s disappointed they aren’t going to be the next Mrs. Hedge Fund Guy, but on the bright side for them, it beats self-beating.
3. Nobody who is high status is “off the market”. Even marriage is no escape from the sexual market. The divorce revolution is a lagging indicator of this reality. If there’s something to be said for betas wondering about the playing field in DC, it’s that the behavior of conventional alphas there is more constrained by political necessity. There’s a higher price to be paid for a politician caught with two mistresses than for a stockbroker or business owner.
4. Senor Cowen exaggerates the hypergamous calculating of women in NY and LA. There are only a relative handful of movie stars in LA. Most women are not so blinkered to think that sitting out their dating lives in celibacy for years while waiting for a shot at that 0.001% of the local “authentic” alpha male population is an acceptable lifestyle. If you are a man with game — i.e. you have an understanding of psychosocial dominance and how to apply it — you will get laid with hot girls in LA, even those of the monomaniacal actor- and director-chasing variety. Especially with those if you are a skilled liar.
5. I agree that the conventional alphas with pull in DC tend to be boring, and that it is a simple matter to project a more interesting personality in comparison. The guys I used to know in DC who did best with women were, respectively, a bartender, a bike messenger, a real estate agent, a lawyer, and a technical writer. Only the lawyer was what women would describe as a traditional, high status alpha. What did they have in common? Unstoppable confidence. Charm. Balls. There ya go.
6. The widely-cited female skewed sex ratio of DC is a myth. This website neatly explains why. Only if you count all women between the ages of 20 and 64 does DC have a large surplus of women. But what man who isn’t a total loser wants to date a woman who made splat with the wall decades ago? Change the slider on the map to cover the age range of singles from 20 – 39, the years for which women still retain rapidly declining sexual marketability, and you’ll see that every major city in America except for Springfield, MA (5 extra women per 1,000 people) has a surplus of single men. No wonder most bars look like this. However, in DC’s defense, its male surplus isn’t as bad as the male surplus in most big cities.
7. DC girls are not ugly. There are plenty of cute chicks, and even some beautiful ones, gallivanting through the halls of trendy lounges and shamtastic art shows. They might not be as beautiful on average as NY or LA girls, but they can hold their own versus girls in Chicago, Houston, and Seattle. And don’t get me started on Portland girls. Ugh.
8. The best looking women won’t be found in America. For that, you’ll have to travel to Tallinn or Kiev.
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