Sixteen Volts

I thought a little bit more about the issue of Western men going to find wives from aboard, in the spirit of the post "Sexual Poverty" by Bulletproof Pimp and "Foreign Affairs" at Feministe. Since the numbers of men and women are for all practical purposes equal in West, there can't possibly be two girls for every guy, let alone ten. In addition, pretty much everybody agrees on what is attractive, and especially on what is unattractive, which leads to a harsh zero-sum competition for the desirable partners within both sexes. There simply is no solution to this equation, and blaming either men or women for this situation is useless.

The vast majority of Western men therefore have to live under a severe sexual scarcity in which their choices of both short-term and long-term partners are severely constrained. The men in the bottom third or so have to settle for women who are in many ways deficient and worse than those men would ideally want to marry. This is pretty weird when we remember that these men easily belong to the richest 5% of all humanity. It would truly be strange if the richest 5% of people had to wear tattered rags and live in hovels, instead of being able to use their wealth to buy themselves a wider range of options. In every other aspect of life we take it for granted that the richest 5% get to have the best choices available to them, so why do these rich people tolerate this situation when it comes to sexual choices? Why isn't every American man with at least a minimum-wage job paired up with a woman in the top 5% of attractiveness? Mostly this is probably "it's always been this way" and "not invented here" type of tradition, and then there is especially that these men just don't realize how god damn filthy rich they are, because they can only see a small plot of the world in which everyone else is equally rich. (For more, read the excellent post "You Are Rich".) And there's the pesky fact that geographic distances, national borders and cultural differences make it much harder to move willing humans around compared to transporting socks, oil or computer chips, which makes the sexual markets a lot less efficient and transparent than other markets. Asymmetric information and high transaction and transition costs ruin the roast.

The much-touted globalization simply means that everybody belongs to one and the same market, and the national borders no longer shelter them from competition. We take this for granted when it comes to something like socks or computer software. I am certainly not going to pay $5 for a pair of sock to some local sockmaker, if his competitor in China is able and willing to sell me a dozen pairs of socks for the same price. The end result is that the local sockmaker will either lower his price or go out of business, and it's usually the latter. So what is going to happen when the bottom third of American and Western men eventually realize that in the era of Internet and jet travel, globalization does not help only the rich guys but that it also allows them to look for a much better wife abroad than they could realistically expect to find at home, under the draughtlike conditions of the assortative mating constrained with a severe scarcity of women who are young, slender and attractive?

Back in the past, the invention of automobile allowed men to look for wives much further away than just in their immediate neighbourhood, thus giving more options to both men and women. Imagine for a moment that instead of the sexual market being highly segregated and geographically isolated, anybody could try to find him- or herself a partner from the all of humanity, logistical and geographical barriers lowered down to insignificance. The realities of assortative mating and scarcity would still remain but in a much larger scale, so the average Western male would notice such a significant boost in his position in the mating market that for him, such issues would become irrelevant.

If the average young peasant woman who lives in some Third World hellhole of agrarian drudgery is given a free choice between the local men and the average American working man who is unimaginably richer and a better provider for her and her expensive offspring, more sophisticated and exciting, more loving, more respectful, which way do you think she would choose? As if she had to think about that choice even for a second. As if there could ever be any kind of realistic competition between the local men and American men, especially if the village has a television that has shown the villagers episodes of Dallas. The whole thing would be like a contest of tug-of-war between a gnat and an elephant. And the best of all, all this would come out of perfectly free choices of individuals, no coercion or slavery of any kind would be involved.

Allowing the American men to freely compete in trying to attract the local women to love and marriage (and later, babies in a baby carriage) would be more destructive to the marriage prospects of the average Third World male than polygamy and the ultrasound machine combined. Oh, come on, all you guys wealthy enough to read this: if it is us who have to suffer from scarcity, or some bunch of illiterate brown peasant men somewhere far away where they can't threaten us, is that really such a very difficult choice to make? Heck, we have already made similar choices several times. Unlike many other fields of economic competition, mating competition is rather unfortunately a zero-sum game, so it's better for them to be the losers than us.

Perhaps in a few decades, "Marry American" will sound as quaint as "Buy American", with an equally humorous olde-timey unenlightened nationalist ring to it. Hey, at least the libertarian-leaning economists would rejoice. Back in Europe, I wonder when the Finnish men will suddenly realize that within a few hundred kilometers of their Russian border, there is a large city that has almost as many people in it as there are in the whole Finland, and it is practically filled with a massive supply of attractive single women for whom the average Finnish man would be a superb catch.

(By the way, this is why I predict that one practical consequence of globalization and widespread Internet will be that the poor cultures will have to keep their women tightly in check. Expect to see more violent and desperate counterreactions towards the West and the modernity in general among the miserable. Once again, please do remember that five out six people on Earth live in countries that are poorer than Mexico, most of which are even significantly poorer, just to keep the proportions of this issue in mind. The Russian men are perhaps too drunk and destitute to even care, but the more... religious communities might not take the prospect of losing their women equally lightly. So perhaps, as Jussi Halla-Aho once suggested, the Third World religious fanatics could marry Western feminists instead, which would be the ideal marriage for both parties for several reasons. The feminist would get a real man who puts his foot down and treats her as a woman and is not afraid of her, while she could happily bask in the knowledge that she fought the patriarchal oppression of white males by totally rejecting them.)

Of course, the Western men who currently marry foreign women also tend to be highly despised by the women back home. The highly emotional arguments and putdowns are humorously analogous to the "arguments" that the progressives sling against Wal-Mart and the people who shop there. But this matters less than it perhaps should, for the simple reason that these men are usually already despised by women even before their proactive little trip (just like most people can't afford to shop at Saks, in this analogy), so it's not like it's a huge loss for these men.

(Here's a free hint to women: once you make it explicitly clear that sex with you is not a realistic future possibily for some man, you also lose your power of affecting his choices and behaviour with a possibility of sex. Scarcity and the resulting competition makes people ugly and do ugly things. The reality of supply and demand and the resulting market situation is not optional and can't be ignored. Of course, deep inside every feminist knows perfectly well which sex stands on which side of the supply and demand equation, as you can tell from their rare spouts of honesty when they are angry at some "loser" man who "can't get a date".)

Speaking of which, I have two questions for feminists about this topic, and I would appreciate answers. First, the philosophical question. What exactly makes you entitled to Western men so that you have the right to restrict the Western men to date and marry only Western women, while you consider your own right to freely date and marry anybody you want to be sacrosanct and inviolable? Second, the pragmatic question. If the Western men ever decide in significant numbers to take advantage of globalization, what practical real-world measures and actions you propose to stop them? Remember, the same game has already been played out many times with forces much stronger than you trying to go against the globalization, and each time they lost. Do you think that you are able to achieve what the, say, American manufacturing industry failed to do? In our modern times of global communications, travel and transport, it's just not possible to prevent anybody from looking for a better deal elsewhere. (Well, I guess that technically you can, but the price you'd pay for this is ending up like North Korea.) You can try social sanctions, but your social sanctions are nothing but empty threats. The era when the words such as "bastard" actually meant something is long gone. And once a man doesn't need anything from you, why should he even care? When I buy a ten-pack of socks at Wal-Mart, I certainly don't care one iota what the displaced Western sock manufacturer thinks about me.

I don't think that this matters, or that I will ever see these two questions seriously addressed, though. Deep inside, the Western leftists understand perfectly well what a totally unbeatable jiu-jitsu move against all aspects of the leftist ideology it is for a Western gamma man to travel abroad to find himself a high-quality wife, and that the femo-socialist left has no arguments against this that wouldn't at the same time refute all of the holy points of leftism. This makes them panic and lash out emotionally against this whole phenomenon.

First of all, it is certainly difficult to play the standard "racist" card at somebody who is willing to date, marry and have sex with women of different colour! Since leftists always call for open borders and completely unlimited Third World immigration, they really don't have much leverage to turn around and stop this man from bringing in his new wife to live with him. Next, if this man is middle-aged and obese, as these men often seem to be (the superficial and intolerant Western women just can't see past the surface to see the true inner beauty of these men, so these poor souls have to look abroad if they want a wife), him marrying a foreign woman who is slender and decades younger than him serves as a blow against ageism and anti-fat bigotry at the same time! (Somewhat mysteriously, leftists often seem to forget that they were supposed to oppose ageism and anti-fat bigotry as soon as the topic turns to obese middle-aged men.) Last, if the new wife comes from a culture in which the woman's place is more... traditional, which the vast majority of the cultures in the world are (Western leftism being a historical and geographic anomaly that will most likely disappear before the end of this century), and she will then behave according to the norms of her culture when she lives with him, then what, are you saying that all cultures are not equal, but that some cultures are somehow worse than others? Wassamatta, you some kind of racist? No matter which angle you look at this, the leftist is trapped in a snare of his very own making. It's almost breathtakingly beautiful.

Of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Nothing should stop Western women from similarly widening their search net for good husband material. It would be hypocritical and sexist to forbid them from doing so, and in a free society, such restrictions wouldn't even be possible anyway. I am sure that even the average American woman could similarly attract a horde of romeos to serenade her, each with dollar signs in his eyes and the dream of moving to America in his heart. Heck, I have even read that since the criteria for attractivenes are imaginary social constructs anyways with no biological or evo-psych basis, and these authentic Third World cultures are free from the looksist oppression perpetuated by the evil white men, their men often adore morbidly obese middle-aged women and consider them beautiful. So go on and book your flights already, especially all you donut-loving sisters!

The one problem here is just that the sexes have a serious asymmetry, and not just in the sense that white Western women tend to be less tolerant and more racist than the white Western men, so that they take it for granted that they are entitled to marry up with a good white husband. The main asymmetry is in that the women in the Third World are much closer to what the Western men are ideally looking for in a housewife, compared to the ugly reality of Third World men who fall seriously short of what the Western women are ideally looking from a husband. Girls, good luck trying to find many Third World men whose social attitudes are much different from those of the mainstream Western men about a hundred years ago (if such men time travelled to our era, their racial opinions alone would make them unemployable) and who are able to bring home the bacon by successfully competing in the American workplace. Compared to what is the mainstream in every single Third World country, even the most conservative reactionaries in the present-day America such as Vox Day look like enlightened liberals and women's rights activists. (Quickly, name a few Third World countries in which marital rape is currently illegal, or in which a husband who slaps his wife who has been uppity is widely condemned in public if he is found out, or that have an age of consent for sex.)

Of course, the leftists still have the argument that the Third World women don't really want to marry the Western men, but are somehow forced to do so. It would be better to leave them to simmer in their miserable poverty than become wives to disgusting Western men. These women are nothing but slaves sold to the highest bidder, although I would say that it is a very strange kind of slavery that entails the slave having to work, pay and compete a lot to be selected for it. One commenter "nik" in the Feministe post cut to the point by simply asking

Serious question: would these women be better off with Ukrainian men?

which is a short and sweet question that the other commenters then try to evade the best they can. For example, another commenter claims that this "choice" is merely a difference in the degree of abuse (she apparently doesn't think very much about the Ukrainian culture and their men, geez, what a racist), while another says that there’s no possible way to answer this question, as it depends on the individual woman and the individual man. Well then, all right, the next time somebody says that people of colour are worse off than white people in Canada, I'll counter that it's not possible to say that, because it depends on the individual person of colour and the individual white person. Granted, many questions do have a lot of hidden variables on which the final answer depends, but the question "If the average standard of living in country A is 30 times higher than in country B, which country would you rather prefer to live in?" is most certainly not among them. I know that I can answer that question without needing to hear anything else about the two countries A and B, because in the real world, this massive difference in the material well-being entails and implies pretty much everything else that I would possibly care about, so just from that fact I already know quite a few relevant things about both countries.

Let's end this long post with a simple thought experiment that might shed additional sunlight on this issue. Suppose that somewhere, perhaps in the middle of the currently empty Pacific Ocean, there was a large continent whose material standard of living per capita was 30-40 times higher than in America, so that a busboy there would enjoy the same material wealth as the successful American stockbroker. In addition, the average man living there would be so progressive, equalist, respectful and loving that he would make even Hugo Schwyzer look like Vox Day. Now, pray tell: what would the American women typically prefer to do in this scenario? Would it really benefit them if the wealthy do-gooders of that island prevented them from marrying the men of that island and moving to live there, so that they wouldn't be "oppressed"?

(Or instead of Vox, simply consider me and what you know of me from reading this blog. Leftists: do you think that I am in a small minority outside the mainstream with most of my opinions, when it really comes to it? Feminists: when it comes to equality and respect and treating the spouse well as an equal within the marriage, do you think that I would be in the bottom half of Canadian men, or that for most women who are currently married, I wouldn't be a massive step up? Think about that scary thought for a while before you go to sleep tonight.)

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 8:10 AM