Hypergamy: How the harebrained notions of white nationalist F. Roger Devlin took the Manosphere by storm
How manosphere doofuses think the world actually works.
Another in an ongoing series of posts on seminal works in the manosphere canon, as it were. At some point, I’ll make a page for these.
Like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, F. Roger Devlin’s 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power (downloadable here) is a kind of Manospherian urtext, an original source of many of the terrible ideas that are now accepted as gospel wherever misogynists gather in large numbers online. Though the name of Devlin is hardly as well known as that of Farrell, many of his ideas, most notably his reworked notion of “hypergamy” — which we will get to in a minute — are omnipresent in the manosphere.
Among misogynists with intellectual pretensions, Devlin’s Sexual Utopia is considered a must-read. Originally brought to the attention of fellow manospherians by PUA pseudointellectual Roissy — now Heartiste — in 2007, the essay has received lavish praise on such familiar sites as The Spearhead (where WF Price praised Devlin’s “critiques of feminism” as “some of the best out there”) and A Voice for Men (where one post described the essay as “supremely indispensable.”) It’s listed in the sidebar of The Red Pill subreddit as “required reading.” And Norwegian MRA Eivind Berge gushed that the essay was
possibly the best article I have ever read. My blogging against feminism is almost redundant after F. Roger Devlin has put it so well.
So what exactly are all these guys falling over themselves to praise so highly? To put it bluntly, a strange and sprawling compendium of ideas that range from frankly abhorrent to merely silly, motivated by misogyny and racism. Virtually none of the essay’s many gross generalizations about women (or men) are supported by any sort of evidence.
And did I mention that it originally ran in a white nationalist journal?
Yes, “Sexual Utopia in Power” originally ran in The Occidental Quarterly, an explicitly racist journal that described its mission as protecting “the civilization and free governments that whites have created” from the rise of the evil non-white hordes. Indeed, Devlin is on the editorial advisory board of the journal, which currently features an article on its site praising Disney’s Snow White as “a White Nationalist classic.”
While the bulk of Devlin’s essay deals with gender, not race, it is framed — in the very first sentence — by his concern over what he calls the “catastrophic decline” of “white birthrates worldwide.” In other words, no one who has read his article, even if they don’t know what the Occidental Quarterly is, can possibly miss Devlin’s fundamental racism (which is spelled out even more explicitly at the end of this piece).
There is so much in Devlin’s essay that is so objectionable that it cannot fit in a single post, so today I will focus only on his reworked notion of “hypergamy.”
The term was originally a technical way of saying “marrying up” — that is, “the act or practice of marrying a spouse of higher caste or status than oneself,” as Wikipedia rather unromantically puts it.
In Devlin’s hands, the term comes to mean something entirely different:
It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. …
It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female “sexual orientations” are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.
This may sound vaguely familiar to you. Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground’s first album that only 30,000 people may have bought copies of it, but “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Similarly, everyone who has read Devlin seems to have started a blog or YouTube channel.
Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and, second, he “commits,” or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.
It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d’état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power.
And yes, we are rapidly moving towards the manosphere myth that virtually all women are having sex with the same tiny number of men.
Although there may be only one “alpha male” at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime.
From here, it seems, comes the widespread manosphere myth that women are inherently amoral creatures who will instantly dump whatever man they’re with whenever an alpha strolls by.
Devlin is also the apparent source of the related manosphere myth that most men live lives of quiet celibacy.
An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males.
Indeed, Devlin is so convinced by this notion that he simply hand-waves away all data to the contrary.
Survey results are occasionally announced apparently indicating male satisfaction with their “sex lives” and female unhappiness with theirs. This creates an impression that there really is “more sex” for men today than before some misguided girls misbehaved themselves forty years ago. …
It is child’s play to show, not merely that this is untrue, but that it cannot be true. … What happens when female sexual desire is liberated is not an increase in the total amount of sex available to men, but a redistribution of the existing supply. Society becomes polygamous. A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but most women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men. …
Sexual liberation really means the Darwinian mating pattern of the baboon pack reappears among humans.
And …. scene!
Devlin is sometimes described as an “independent scholar,” but even aside from its misogyny and racism “Sexual Utopia in Power” is anything but scholarly. There are only a relative handful of footnotes, which don’t come close to backing up Devlin’s numerous factual claims. Most of the footnotes refer to the writings not of scholars but of conservative and far-right journalists. One links to an article on the racist hate site VDare.com; another favorably cites this article by Henry Makow, an early Men’s Rights Activist turned conspiracy theorist who literally believes that feminists are in league with an evil Satanic-Illuminati cult that rules the world.
Devlin offers precisely zero evidence to back up his claims about hypergamy — aside from a couple of surveys, whose conclusions he rejects, and several quotes from literature, including that one from Oscar Wilde. The rest is, to use the formal term for it, assdata.
Nonetheless, the manosphere has adopted Devlin’s new-and-not-improved version of “hypergamy” with enthusiasm. I won’t even bother citing examples; a Google search for “manosphere” and “hypergamy” brings up 17,700 results. Hell, there are several dozen articles about hypergamy on A Voice for Men alone. And of course I’ve written about the manosphere obsession with hypergamy many times before.
But so far essentially the only people who have picked up on this particular definition of hypergamy have been misogynists, pickup artists, MRAs and others vaguely associated with, or around, the manosphere. The only academic I know of who has ever even addressed Devlin’s peculiar thesis is libertarian economist Tyler Cowan, who wrote about it briefly, and I think accurately, on his blog several years back.
This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously). The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle. So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak. The birth rate falls, for one thing. The piece also claims that the modern “abolition” of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive. Some of you will hate the piece. I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.
As an actual idea, new or old, this is probably all the consideration Devlin‘s version of “hypergamy” really deserves. But as a case study in the history and sociology of bad ideas, the strange story of Devlin’s hypergamy is a bit more interesting, and I no doubt will return to it in future posts.
There is also a good deal in Devlin’s essay that’s a good deal worse than his discussion of hypergamy, and I’ll be coming back to that as well.
Posted on May 16, 2013, in a voice for men, a woman is always to blame, alpha males, antifeminism, eivind berge, evil sexy ladies, evil women, evo psych fairy tales, f. roger devlin, heartiste, hypergamy, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, oppressed white men, playing the victim, racism, rape culture, reactionary bullshit, warren farrell and tagged antifeminism, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, PUA, racism. Bookmark the permalink. 859 Comments.
“Most men are desperate for wives”
I thought the narrative was that women were trying to trick men into marriage, and that MGTOW were heroically denying all those women a wedding ring.
Thanks for doing this, David. For those like myself new to this movement, it is helpful to get some historical background. I have to come back to this later because there is a lot to read here and I’m rushing to work. Have a great day everyone and I’ll rejoin the conversation later.
BTW, your graphic here (as always) is genius. Where do you find these images?
Always wondered why Janet goes to Carterhaugh even when she’s warned that Tam Lin will either demand her kirtle, or sex.
It’s the hypergamy, which is evidenced by the loads of sex Tam Lin is obviously getting, because of the warning, you see.
Hey, it makes as much sense as anything I just read.
Re: The post image. Obviously the way to be Alpha is to cosplay Lounge Lizard Captain America. Lounge Lizard Jean-Paul Sartres certainly cannot compete with the awesome peacocking thereof.
Glad I’m asexual. Unfortunately that won’t stop misogynists from bugging me.
And where are Devlin’s sources? Was he a psychologist of some sort, or did he come up with the nonsense? Another thing, I always ignore mrm terms such as female hypergamy and the feminine imperative (because we all know women where protected and respected through history in the name of those poor men who died – sarcasm). Now after learning what female hypergamy is I will continue to ignore the nonsense.
The use of baboons in the example is strange. Presumably, if you were trying to argue by analogy using primates, you’d want to use things that are more directly related to humans. Baboons aren’t even apes. In fact, if you’re going to argue that humans are somehow currently enslaved to biology and that we can understand the terms of this durance by studying our close relatives (an idiotic thing to do, obviously, but one that Devlin seems to insist on), you’d probably arrive at the conclusion that we’re meant to live our lives in mated pairs , with a somewhat high cheating rate, not the bizarre babbon troupe harem Devlin suggests.
You can generally tell what kind of reproductive model an ape will have based on its level of sexual dimorphism (greater dimorphism correlates with greater mate competition and more limited reproductive options for non-dominant males) and sexual adaptations. Though our closest relative, the chimpanzee, has a reproductive life characterized either by endless sexual coercion and infanticide or wild sexual experimentation, depending on subspecies, it’s not a good analogue for humans. Chimps exhibit moderate sexual dimorphism and the males have lots of adaptations for dealing with sperm competition (a male chimp’s testes are about the same size as it’s brain, for instance). Humans are less sexually dimorphic, and possess none of these adaptations (aside from possibly the shape of the male penis, although the studies arguing this were very shoddy). Gorillas are an even poorer model, with simply incredible levels of dimorphism (you can sex a gorilla skeleton with total certainty from a 5 second glance at the skull, something that is unthinkable in a human). Orangutans are also fairly dimorphic (flesh pads on the male face) and also probably too solitary in the wild to serve as anything like a model for humans. That leaves the lesser apes (gibbons and siamangs). If you were looking (for some insane reason) for an ape with equivalent sexual characteristics to a human, these are a good fit. Mild sexual dimorphism, not hyper adapted to deal with sperm competition. However, the reproductive model gibbons use (mated life pairs, with a surprising amount of cheating by both parties) is very different from this hypergamy bullshit.
Leaving aside all of the other biological determinist, sexually essentialist, binary perpetuating, misogyny fueling, entitlement abetting, generalizing nonsense that Devlin tries here, his argument isn’t even internally consistent.
Is it just me or MRAs sound like boys who can’t get a date? Sounds as women rejected them and thus women are evil and just want alphas which they are not.. am I following this? Because it sounds so puerile…
… and like women get any men they want. Any. Just like that. Look cute and you are set. Which I believe we all know it’s not reality. And if they think it is, it does not speak well of the picture of man they are portraying.
“manosphere myth” def. A reality of life that offends feminist sensibilities.
Hypergamy don’t real! IRepeat, hypergamy don’t real at all!
“A reality of life that offends feminist sensibilities”? What? õ_ô
@inconvenient truth
I control “f”ed hypergamy in the ucla article, and I didn’t see it. So how’s it supposed to prove it exists if they don’t even mention it?
What’s interesting is that he isn’t even right about baboons. In the Olive Baboon (Papio anubis) as I recall, males and females developed what the scientist studying them called “friendships” – they foraged together, the male helped care for the female’s current young (whether or not he was the genetic father), and when the female came into season she was more likely to mate with the friend than with the alpha male of the troop. This comes from a book by Barbara Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons. So nope, you can’t blame hypergamy on baboons. Must be fun to do “research” when you can make all your facts up.
Eh, i’m super bored and waiting for lunch to bake, so I skimmed the UCLA article
TL;DR cis women might treat their partners slightly differently during different points in their hormone cycle. I wonder if they do any studies about this for cis men… I’m gonna guess probably not.
Even reading the article, it totally does not prove that hypergamy exists. I mean, it felt a little evo-psych-bullshitty to me (though i can’t pinpoint why), but it did not say any of the stuff you thought it would say, truthy
So the concept of hypergamy was corrupted by a white nationalist but not created by him. That’s a relief.
Troofy: go away.
Hypergamy, like misandry, is not a thing. Since when are these MRA jagoffs so hot to get married in the first place? I thought that was slavery or something to them.
I recently submitted some Devlin shit to FSTDT, and now David writes about him. Coincidence? Probably.
And I’d like to thank you, Mr. Futrelle, for writing about ol’ Fucker Roger Devlin (I consider it a sort of birthday present, btw). While your going after commenters is also good, in the immortal words of Gradius, shoot the core.
Chimps have large testes, not as large as their brains:
(wikipedia entry on chimpnzees) (human testicles are about 1 oz.)
Even taken at its own (silly) terms this makes no sense.
If you’re so in to evo psych and biological determinism, shouldn’t you just accept that women are what their biology dictates (I know, but we’re taking this on its own terms right now)? What’s the point in railing against it? It’s like being angry that people eat or sleep.
Also, why are men desperate? If we really are like the species of apes where only the Alpha mates with the females in the group – except for the occasional fuck on the side, when he’s not looking – shouldn’t men have evolved to accept this order of things? Non-Alpha gorilla and chimp males don’t seem to be flipping out.
I covered some of this myth of “most men have no chance with women” on my post The Games We Play (Part 2). Although only from the viewpoint of gaming culture (which has so many stereotypes of single geek guys it’s incredible), I show that it really doesn’t seem to be true.
Usually when I bring my (admittedly casual) data up in conversation with MRAs, I’m told that I and/or my store are “outliers”. I’m getting ready to ask how many outliers it takes before one realizes they are the norm…
@GreySky
Let me see if I can imitate a manospherian long enough to figure this out.
*clears throat*
*manospherian mode engaged*
MEN need to mate with as many people as possible because SPERM, but females should be lucky for MEN because who else will protect them from saber tooth lions? females do not possess the ability to run away of course1!!!!!eleventy
MENS BIOLOGY MEANS WE CAN ACT HOWEVER WE WANT!!!!
FEMALES BIOLOGY MEANS SHAPE UP LADIES!!!!
*rage quits life*
/manospherian off.
obviously, b/c women are evil.
Amendment to my earlier post: although a chimp’s brain is of comparable size to its testicles, the testicles are indeed smaller. See attached image (possibly nsfw, depending on your work’s attitude toward skinless testicles):
I met a guy who wanted to get a gun licence to protect himself from “white knights” whom he had never met because of this kind of pseudo-science. It’s a sad day when people have to invent impossible scenarios. His level of thinking went so far as to believe that other men would attack him for asking women out and the like.
This reminds me of free market ideology. The argument has the same structure: first, start with a somewhat plausible premise, usually an essentialized or slightly-off version of something that’s actually true. Women generally tend to prefer men who have the respect or admiration of others; rephrase that as “alpha” or “status” to make it seem less obvious. Then they treat it like an axiom and derive elaborate structures of thought only loosely affiliated with the world we actually live in.
So, just out of curiosity, I just read the play the author of this silly, silly essay cited, Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes. And yes, the women do take over the Senate, but then, whereas he claims that:
What actually happens is that the women declare that the least attractive women and men must be satisfied first. What is then created is a situation whereby ugly men become wingmen for attractive men. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of a polygamous situation; instead, if one were to use the thrice-damned ‘point’ scale, a self-sorting procedure occurs whereby the ugliest people sleep with… other ugly people.
If anything, what results in the play, as a result of women, is an end to several men battling for one “ten”.
So, even within the horribly fucked-up universe of the MRA worldview, they get it wrong.
@Fade
Are you insinuating that there is no internally consistent explanation?? I am shocked.
@Grey sky
Not that it matters, but the only Lind of ape that has a dominant male gets all the females in a troupe currently is the gorilla (orangs might have had it once, although this depends on how much you think biological degradation has altered their social patterns. Dominant chimps get more sex, but every male in the group gets to have sex with a female in the group, because otherwise the excluded male will straight up murder any children they are certain aren’t theirs). Male gorillas struggle for control of packs fairly frequently, engaging in various dominance displays.
Yeah, baboons don’t work that way. When a female goes into estrus, all the males in the vicinity fight over her. The winning male (it would be inaccurate to call him the “alpha male” or anything like that, since he’s not the top guy, just the one who won that particular fight) then usually tries to isolate the female and drive off any competing males.
However, there’s considerable evidence that, given the opportunity, females buck this system and try to have sex with males other than the ones who “won” them. In one study, primatologists set up baboon cages so the males couldn’t fight with each other for the females, but the females could move freely from one male to another. When the females went into estrus, they had sex with lots of different males. In other words, it’s the males who enforce this “hypergamy,” while the females prefer multiple partners.
Gorillas might be a little closer to what he’s looking for, since they form permanent harems and the females generally don’t show an interest in other males. But neither of these species is closely related to humans. Our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, don’t exhibit anything like “hypergamy.” And frankly, they’re not very closely related to us either. As Darth points out, a huge difference is that most other living species of great apes have estrus cycles and can only mate during the brief period when the female is in heat, which strongly affects their mating strategies. And the way our bodies have developed suggests (though it certainly doesn’t prove) that our species has a history of living in mixed-sex groups with ongoing competition between males, not harems where one male hoards all the females.
I often wonder what sort of evolutionary environment MRAs think produced this alleged state of affairs. I mean, when they look at extant hunter-gatherer populations, with their stable groups of intermarried clans, do they ever see wandering alpha strangers coming through and stealing all the women? Do they think prehistoric savannah populations, who were (as far as we can tell) generally structured like extant H-G groups, suffered from this alpha passers-by problem? Is it even a thing in ape societies, which, as Darth Conans pointed out above, are so varied as to be useless as a model for early human sexual behavior?
Seriously, MRAs… they’re called textbooks. Try opening one sometime.
“It is child’s play to show, not merely that this is untrue, but that it cannot be true.”
See, if things cannot be true, we don’t actually need to prove they’re not true.
This … explains so much about MRAs.
Off topic, but I just got an email from Just Detention that the newest Bureau of Justice statistics (BJS) report on Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011–12 (PDF) is now out.
From the JD email:
Unsurprisingly, LGBT inmates report a high level of victimization. Also particularly vulnerable were prisoners with mental illnesses.
I first learned about Just Detention from David; I’ve never heard them promoted by MRAs. They do good work.
Thanks for info Darth and Shaenon :)
I was under the impression that mating with males other than the current boss happened somewhat secretly both with chimps and gorillas?
And that at least some types of baboons do live in small groups with only one male fathering the young. (I saw a National Geographic thing about that once, so I’m totally an expert! Interestingly, a male didn’t necessarily fight his way to this position, he could also win favor, particularly by taking care of the little ones. White knighting – or is it manginaing, I’m not sure? – is natural and they can stop sneering at it).
David Futrelle
One of the guiding lights of the manosphere was a racist, and his research was a joke? Why am I not surprised!?
CriticalDragon, it’s shocking, I know.
I am ashamed to admit that I probably do meet the stereotype. I tend to only be attracted to people who I think are interesting. When I consider dating someone I don’t like I realize that I prefer being single.
In fact the whole labelling of hypergamy scares me, because it implies men really have no standards for women other than their sexual function. I do not like the idea of dating someone who does not respect me as a person. I guess in general the MRA do not respect women, however the whole concept of hypergamy sounds like it is shaming people for wanting to like their partner.
Maybe I am using too broad definitions but I have translated
alpha male: Any man a woman is dating or wants to date. By definition you can not be attracted to a man who is not alpha because the very fact that you are attracted to him makes him alpha. In general if you are dating someone they are alpha unless you are forced to date him and do not like him.
hypergamy: Having preferences over who you date, and dating only alpha males given the definition above.
Also, I love that you guys know about eleventy billion times more about baboons and apes and evolution than Devlin. Also, that he even got the plot of the Aristophanes play wrong. And that you guys posted all this stuff utterly and totally demolishing him less than 2 hours after my post went up.
Nerds* FTW!
*I am a nerd.
Also also, glad you liked the pic. There are lots of funny panels/covers from old romance comics floating around online and I’ce collected a bunch that seem like then might be relevant for man boobz posts, so I can pull them out when they’re appropriate, and this one was obviously perfect for today. I have discovered that MRAS/PUAs think a lot like the writers of old romance comics. Or, at the very least, are as sexist and melodramatic.
Other than that I just look and look to find good images.
@Truthy
Nice job citing evo psych studies (lol) and studies that misrepresent feminist sociological theories.
@grey sky Happy to share my freakish ape knowledge. I’m unsure about gorillas. I’d be willing to bet that females mate with non-silverbacks from time to time, but I haven’t seen a study on it, so I can’t be certain.
Chimps have an odd mating system, based primarily on using doubt over paternal identity to avoid infanticide. Females go into heat about once every 36 days. When in heat, they generally seek out and mate with every sexually mature male in their group (you’re going to see a fair number of about and generally in this, because chimps are smart enough to override habit and instinct and so on). Males fight with one another for mating rights, meaning that everyone in the group generally gets at least one turn with the female, but physically powerful males get more. Chimps do this because, owing to long gestation and mothering times, a female who has given birth is generally sexually unavailable for several years, and males therefore have a distinct evolutionary advantage to killing children that they know aren’t theirs (frees up the woman). To get around this, females mate with everyone, so that no male can be sure the child isn’t theirs.
“In fact the whole labelling of hypergamy scares me, because it implies men really have no standards for women other than their sexual function. I do not like the idea of dating someone who does not respect me as a person. I guess in general the MRA do not respect women, however the whole concept of hypergamy sounds like it is shaming people for wanting to like their partner.”
exactly. that’s why I think it’s such a horrible way to see relationships in general and, to me, it is a terrible way to see men as well…
and I’m impressed about all the knowledge about baboons. I learned a lot today.
“However, the reproductive model gibbons use (mated life pairs, with a surprising amount of cheating by both parties) is very different from this hypergamy bullshit.”
In other words, the primates who are the most like humans in terms of reproductive physiology are also the most like humans in terms of reproductive behavior. ZOMG, how shocking.
Source on chimp menstrual cycle (not something I thought I’d be typing when I got up this morning):
http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/aboutp/anat/menstrual.html
Pear_tree: having preferences is nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what MRAs think. There’s ZERO point in dating someone who is not interesting to you.
I think it’s also important to point out the bad science too. Baboons aren’t used as a model for human sexual behavior since they are not apes. It only makes sense to compare humans to other apes and in particular to chimps and bonobos since we are both equally as close to those species genetically. Modern science shows that we’re most like bonobos as far as sexual behavior goes. The book Sex at Dawn overviews this very well.
We are more closely related to Bonobos who solve all their problems with sex.
Trying to categorize myself by MRM standards is always hilarious. Am I an alpha? Beta? Omega? … Gamma?
“We just don’t know.”
@Pear_tree
_In fact the whole labelling of hypergamy scares me, because it implies men really have no standards for women other than their sexual function
It might even be damaging then that. Hypergamy probably caught so much traction because it provides dudes an easy way to rationalize feeling of inadequacy and self doubt. Then it becomes a matter of she’s not rejecting you, she’s just living up to her biological imperative.
There’s a lot of emotional security to be had if you surround yourself in insurmountable rules.
And beatings. Which is really depressing.
I really want to thank you for writing this. I’ve read some of the ridiculous crap about this on the A Voice for Men blog and wondered how he came up with that. Of course, he didn’t. None of them can really think for themselves, can they? They’re like parrots – especially Paul Elam.
*gasp*
PATERNITY FRAUD! Somebody get Joe in here!!!
As far as natural white knighting (may I never have to use pua language again) depending on your definition, this is shockingly common in the natural world. If you use the broadest definition (favored by the most hateful pua dickheads) of just generally being nice to people unless they give you a reason not to be, it’s called reciprocal altruism, and you can find it in every complex social species in the world, from vampire bats to wolves to humans (indeed, I find the argument that it is the basis for all social interaction in the animal kingdom). If you mean “taking on unnecessary burdens to help females”, it’s slightly rarer, but still happens (emperor penguins are the most famous example, but I rather like prairie dog lookouts as well).
Proposed new Man Boobz testimonial: Come for the mockery, stay to learn about chimp menstrual cycles.
:D
That’s the difference between MRA/MGTOW and PUAs. The former complain and the latter adapt.
@Darth
Well, I know for sure that gorilla ladies flirt with their male zoo keepers, when they think the silverback isn’t looking – and when he does spot it it’s quite problematic, as it obviously makes him hostile – so I’d imagine that they aren’t adverse to a little something on the side, when they’re in a setting where they have the opportunity.
So chimps basically function the same way as lions in this regard. Vaguely related it reminds me of a study of a (human) tribe, where it was believed that children had several fathers and inherited something from each of them. Not really biologically sound of course, but I find it an interesting example because evo psych explanations always rely so heavily on the narrative of competing for the one best mate and provider for the survival of the offspring, when there are so many ways to tackle the upbringing of the next generation, and I’m inclined to think that during most of human evolutionary history it was probably more of a community effort than about individual couples.
“Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best.”
Er. Or “the best” is a totally abstract and subjective concept, so one woman might be satisfied with only one man (her best-case scenario) while another might only be satisfied by three men, four women and a Jack Daniels every night before bed. (Which I personally think is disgusting, but then I really hate Jack Daniels.) So…your entire premise is flawed?
A highly relevant discussion is happening on r/mr, where hypergamy is discussed in the context of the friend zone. My favorite comment so far:
56 points!
@greysky I’m dubious about ego psych in general. Leaving aside a few remarkable successes (The moral sense test) it seems to me to be at least 10 years out from offering anything more than interesting suggestions, as the difficulties with trying to separate culture from underlying biology are so monumental. Still, group and cultural selection theories certainly explain far more than just genetic selection.
Why is it that when these guys examine the behavior of female animals, they always apply it to human women in the least flattering way? Oh, right, it’s because they hate women.
I am reminded of the time I had an online argument with a guy who tried to convince me that women were “naturally” prostitutes because female chimps had been observed having sex with a male chimp who had earlier given her some fruit he found. To my unworthy opponent, this was clearly a transaction; it didn’t even occur to him that maybe the two chimps were friends, and he gave her food because friends do nice things for each other, and she had sex with him because she liked him.
(And that’s not even getting into the inherent dodginess of using non-human animal behavior to make any sort of in-depth point about human behavior.)
@cloudiah:
Er, how would this be a smokescreen if it were true? Seriously, the guy has, as his premise, men doing nice things for a woman as part of the act of pursuing her, with the implication that if the woman weren’t enticing them or encouraging them, the men wouldn’t do those nice things. They are literally only being nice in order to get the sex they believe they’ve been promised.
Um, so is this guy saying the goal of the MRM is to install a social order in which women will be required to have sex with men they don’t want?
Rape culture, FTW.
kirbywarp,
Logic is misandry!
~cloudia
Cloudiah, that comment is amazing. I think it may deserve a separate post.
And both are full of shit.
I mean, adapt to what? Building a your life around a fantasy world is delusional, thus arguably maladaptive.
Ehh, I haz a wary on your logic Bob, it needs the note of “if you’re hurting people in the process” — see that conversation on the trans* thread (the thread is trans*!) about otherkin. I really don’t care as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. So, arguably, MGTOW, if they’d just go, are much better adapted even if delusional. Only affects them after all, and if it’s what they want, I have no issue.
As for the actual post, the fucking fuck? Like, they get that much of historical hypergamy was father’s marrying their daughters off to higher status men? Like, male choice not female? (Also, bonobos are way more comfortable with both homosexual sex, and oral, than MRAs will ever be)
Holy crap, so it’ll be what, a felony not to sleep with a man who is hitting on you?
@Amused:
See, the way they see it, women are taking advantage of social custom to extort shit out of the men they “entice,” that social custom being men buy women shit, and women put out. So in their world, women must never “lead a man on” unless she is seriously considering having sex with him.
Since you can’t judge intentions, and you can’t know for sure whether intentions change or if they were real in the first place (can’t differentiate between a woman initially interested and later not versus a woman never interested but pretending to be to get free shit), they would have to conclude that any woman who accepts anything from a dude must follow through with sex.
So yeah, pretty much.
@David, The comments on the reddit thread that he linked to are pretty classic too. Like,
And,
“Women, or maybe emotions” is my new favorite equivalency.
Pear_Tree:
The whole ‘hypergamy/alpha male’ thing is, in part, an attempt to reduce women to some monolithic and mysterious Other. It’s a cheap trap of binary thinking. The theory literally only allows for men who get lots of women, and men who get none–the notion that, for instance, some men get some women, completely breaks the theory. So, too, does the idea that not all women use the same criteria for evaluating men; while some criteria are more common than others, there’s no ‘universal ubermensch’ who can literally have any woman just by walking into the room.
And it’s motivated mostly by fear. If these twits were to acknowledge that yes, women have differing standards, and yes, they have the right to their own personal preferences, then they’d have to acknowledge that if a given man does not live up to the standards of many women, then it’s likely he’s either failing at one big thing really badly, or that he’s failing at a whole broad spectrum of things.
Which would then place the onus on himself to do the work to make some changes.
However, if he can instead blame some non-existent, unobtainable ‘alpha-ness’ that you either have or don’t have, then it becomes not his fault that he can’t find a woman who wants to put up with his bullshit, and so he’ll never have to re-evaluate his own habits.
I have to laugh at his whole whining about women seeking the apparently nonexistent “perfect” man. Never strikes him that an ordinary person can be perfect to someone else in the sense that they love them for who they are, and as they are, and don’t want anyone else. Perfect in that sense doesn’t mean flawless, it means “perfect for me“.
But once again, love is something this creep and his followers know nothing about. They may mouth off about it, but that’s it.
Also who wouldn’t take the red striped trousers over the boring black striped ones? I mean come on, guyzzzzz!