Sixteen Volts

The heteronormative assumption is accurate: the vast majority of people would enjoy pairing up with an attractive member of the opposite sex and prefer doing so over remaining alone. In addition, the preferences of each sex are highly uniform and strongly correlated, so that it is possible to rank people on how desirable they are to the opposite sex. This has been known for a long time, as the English expressions "A is way above B's league" and "A could do better" illustrate. Come on, you all know what these two expressions refer to.

Just like it makes a pretty huge difference whether you scrub toilets at McDonalds or design large-scale software systems in a comfortable office while counting your stock options, who you get to pair up with makes a pretty huge difference in your life. Everybody understands that pairing up with somebody who is in the top 10% of desirability is almost astronomically more enjoyable and pleasant and satisfying that pairing up with somebody who is in the bottom 10% of desirability. Unfortunately, at most 10% of the population can do this at a time under a system of monogamous pairings, which causes a merciless competition in which nobody wants to end up at the bottom. Just take a look at the hideous people down there, and you understand why. You probably won't envy their lives in most aspects, even those far removed from the sexual one.

That is, everybody understands these commonsense observations except feminists, who categorically deny that cold economic concepts such as supply and demand could ever have anything to do with the way that human sexual relationships are formed and maintained. (One exception to this denial is when they perennially complain that in sitcoms, a fat schlub husband has a hot slender wife, which they claim is somehow "unrealistic" but never bother to explain why it would be, assuming that market thinking really has nothing to do with human sexual pairings.) This is pretty funny, since when you think about it, feminists really ought to have the clearest and most realistic understanding of the scarcity of good men. After all, according to their ideology, the vast majority of men are scum that no woman should have to stoop down to pair up with, and good progressive men are scarce. But since even the heterosexual feminists are prenumeric in their mental development, they see no problem in demanding that they should have to pay no attention whatsoever to their looks, behaviour or attitude, and still be entitled to pair up with a top-level male. (I guess that it's no wonder feminists are such heavy supporters of polygamy... oops, silly me, of course I meant polyamory. Which is, like, totally different.)

Since men want casual sex with women much more than women want it with men (and Sociobiology 101 explains why this has been so in every era and culture), casual sex is always as easy to acquire for young women as turning on the tap to get water, even with males who would be "way above their league" in the monogamous pairings market. This ease of getting casual sex confuses some young women to overestimate their position in the market of long-term monogamous mating market. These deluded women keep providing free sex for alpha males year after year, and wonder why these men never seem to stick around. As years pass by and the woman starts to lose her looks, most of the the bad boys that were initially so "hawt" have turned out to be pathetic and scary, whereas the real alpha males get hitched with women who are simply better in every sense than the sad heroine of our story. All men that she could consider marrying have been taken a long time ago and only dregs remain, so our hapless feminist finds herself in a position similar to the time she really wanted to go the big concert but waited for a week to buy a ticket. But the real tragedy of this is that instead of lowering her requirements she will only raise them higher, filled with bitterness towards the world that denies her the top male who she is entitled to get simply by virtue of her owning a vagina. Even if she has a wailing bastard or two in tow, their dads long gone.

I finally read Maureen Dowd's much-discussed tome "Are Men Necessary?" yesterday. It has been hard to avoid the central ideas of this book discussed in the blogosphere, so in that sense there wasn't really anything new in it, but this book is so laugh-out-loud hilarious since it is such a sad and pitiful sight of an aging feminist who finally has come to face the facts of life, even though these facts are so horrible that she is still unable to directly look at them. Many Internet feminists have read this book and seen their own future vividly depicted in it. On the other side of the fence, Bernard Chapin has already skewered the silly writings of Dowd so well that I really have nothing to add to it. The essay "Maureen Dowd: A Hermes Study in Bitterness" goes through the book. In addition, his series of essays "The Quagmire of Older Women" (one, two, three, four, five) explains the process in which a young feminist grows up to be a bitter old maid much better than I ever could, so all of my readers who are not already familiar with Bernie, hop hop! And of course, there has never been a better writer about the realities of sexual market than The Danimal.

One particular example of the feminist inability to understand market realities is their strange idea that in our society, women are somehow "not allowed" to pursue men. You know, "men are afraid of strong women", and that if an attractive woman approaches a man in the bar, that man will be disgusted and run away because he didn't get to be a mighty hunter and chase her. [dr. evil]Right[/dr. evil]. This idea beautifully manages to get the cause and effect exactly backwards, and is thus illustrative to analyse. It's not that women are somehow "not allowed to pursue men", but that women who have to pursue men because they are so undesirable to men as long-term mating prospects that they can't just sit back and pick and choose among the men who pursue them, generally fail in their attempts to pursue men who are above their league. These women then go on to attribute their failure to the fact that they were actively pursuing men which somehow scared them away, instead of correctly attributing this failure to who did the pursuing. (Denial is not just a river in Egypt, and of course, if a man has any manners and decency, he will reject the woman nicely and thus give the woman a false impression of the real reason of why she was rejected.) The problem is thus not in the act of pursuing, but the fact of who engages in it. If the desirable women ever started to pursue men, they would find their attempts to be greatly successful. But of course, such women don't have to pursue men, since they already have enough demand (<= this word is used in its economic sense, all of you illiterate feminists who read this and get all outraged that men "demand" sex from women).

As an aside, the same phenomenon can be seen with the recent pop-psych femo-lit idea that "men love bitches". Again, cause and effect have been flipped exactly backwards. If a woman is highly desirable to men, she can get away by acting like a bitch as a signaling mechanism, whereas an undesirable woman has to behave significantly better if she wants to monopolize a male that she would settle for.

It is truly cosmic justice when feminists first make themselves less desirable to men on purpose, and then have to settle for the less desirable men who have all kinds of undesirable and defective traits and thus validate their views on the male sex. No wonder feminists seem to have such difficulty in maintaining long-term relationships. It gives me a slight chuckle when I remember that even I of all men would probably be a much better relationship partner for most thirtysomething feminists than the men they can attract to monopolize. Heck, at least I don't have to beg for a living.

One of the most amusing social ironies in life (and I actually remember realizing this one at a relatively young age) is that people who are the loudest about how they have the right to exercise their preferences and be the way they are since "it's a free country" and "you don't tell me what to do", also tend to be the most totalitarian about not allowing other people to have the exact same freedom to exercise their inviolable preferences. For example, a feminist will tell you that she has the right to balloon up to 300 pounds and not use makeup, but will in the next breath complain that "looksist" and "sexist" men also exercise their own preferences by paying no attention to her and treating other women differently in all aspects of life, leaving only the loser men for her. Freedom for me, but not for thee. The general principle seems to be that leftists have the right to do anything they want, but the others have no right to discriminate them because of this.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, June 05, 2006 at 9:32 AM