Sixteen Volts

In his post "New Evidence for the Woman Shortage", Dennis Mangan points out an absolutely hilarious evasion in the FAQ of one popular online dating site. Of course, any sensible person should immediately understand what is really going on here, and how the imbalance in supply and demand can lead to absurdities such as this one. But do not worry, all you Western men who have the disfortune of standing in the bottom third of the attractiveness scale. As I explained in my recent post "The rich always eat first", your plight of sexual scarcity and lack of good options in marriageable women will soon evaporate.

Even by a conservative estimate, there should be about a hundred million single women of appropriate age out there around the Third World. Don't let the fact that these women don't speak English distract you from noticing that these women are just as smart and attractive than their counterparts in the West --- in fact, I would claim that they are even more so, since the schools they attended actually gave them a real education and unlike their Western sisters, they do not suffer from morbid obesity. Despite this, in their poor homelands the best that they can hope for is some ugly and dingy guy with bad teeth who gets paid maybe $2 for a day of work, and he spends most of it in booze and cigarettes. Besides for being considered wealthy for owning a TV or two pairs of pants, his general attitude towards women might also leave quite a lot to hope for.

Therefore for these women, even the sub-average American man would be an unimaginably fantastic catch, a literal white knight (heh) in a shining armor who they dream would come and take them to the magic land of fantastic wealth that they have only seen in TV shows and their daydreams. One should never underestimate the motivation created by the possibility of increasing your material standard of living hundredfold.

Once the Internet cafes become ubiquitous in the Third World as the cost of computers and communications bandwidth keeps plummeting, these women are going to find themselves constantly emailing and skyping with Western men. Well, at least in the countries that allow their young women sufficient freedom for this, such as Russia or Philippines, but perhaps not so much in the hardline Islamic countries. These women certainly have every possible incentive and motivation of doing this, so we are left with the question of technological feasibility. Which is already moot.

Western feminists might be delighted to hear that the nasty mail-order bride companies will soon wither and disappear for the lack of business. After all, such companies are classic transactional middlemen whose existence is possible only under the conditions of information poverty, so that they are necessary in finding the participants and bringing them together. But the whole point of the Internet has been to remove the need for such middlemen by allowing the interested participants find each other and do their business directly. A few simple websites serving as bulletin boards, which are what, dime a dozen these days, can connect all these millions of Third World women to the Western men they are looking for, and both parties can get to know each other by email and Skype in leisure. In a few years, there will simply be no money to be made in the business of connecting rich (on the world-scale) Western men and the hordes of Third World women who would really appreciate them.

You can call me cynical, but when the young and single Joe Average who lives in some remote town (I believe the canonical general name of such town would be Bumfuck, Arizona in the USA, and Peräseinäjoki in Finland) that has four unmarried men for every unmarried woman is given the choice between having to walk ten miles in a freezing rain to hear a woman say "no", as opposed to there being ten women of at least equal or even better quality who are actively competing for his attention, I'm gonna put my money on the bet that quite a few Joes will go for the door number two, perhaps even humming "I'm through accepting limits cause someone says they're so" as they happily enjoy their newfound market position that is equivalent to that of what any young and pretty Western woman currently enjoy in all online dating sites.

Elite women might now scoff and say that this is no problem, since they didn't want to pair up with Joe Average in the first place. The situation is vastly different for the lower-quality women who can't consider finding a good husband to be an automatic entitlement, as pointed out in the post ""Tell Your Boyfriend I Said Thanks": some thoughts on women's t-shirts, class, competition, and sisterhood" by Hugo Schwyzer:

As has often been noted here on this blog and elsewhere, this competitiveness on an "attractiveness market" is more intense in a community college with primarily lower middle class and working class students. To generalize enormously, the less privileged the background, the more intense the sense of competition among young women.

Well put, even though Hugo can't bring himself to explicitly say the reason for this competitiveness among women for whom a good and high-earning husband is not an automatic entitlement. These lower-quality women are displaced by their Third World competitors who many Joes go for will be competing for the remaining men who didn't utilize this opportunity, and the chain of displacements might eventually reach all the way up to the man that the elite woman would have actually liked to pair up with.

Of course, the elite women won't be able to directly observe this happening, so they will merely increasingly wonder why there seems to be such scarcity of good men as they feel the invisible but strong pull of the market forces. Well, I for one will be interested to see what will happen to the widespread open borders ideology that is so common among the Western women once the flood of women from the Third World really begins in full force. Of course, there is that old fish and bicycle thing, but only a small minority of women can actually enjoy it, since for most men and women, finding a good partner to share your life with is a pretty important thing in their lives. One of the most important, in fact.

So it will be interesting to watch the events unfold. Meanwhile, if anybody wants to argue that the influx of a hundred million extra who are women eager to find themselves Western husbands will not cause any noticeable changes in how the Western dating and relationship market works, I would certainly like to hear where my reasoning has gone wrong.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 4:08 PM