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| Peggy Olson has no time for pseudoscientific PUA crap. |
Note: As regular Man Boobz comment readers will notice, this post is an expanded version of some comments I made here and here.
An extraordinary number of men in the “manosphere” — whether they’re wannabe Pick-up artists or woman-avoiding Men Going Their Own Way — have a very strange notion of what goes on (and what doesn’t go on) behind the closed doors of America’s bedrooms. (And sometimes in the bathrooms of dive bars.) They envision a world in which a small number of men are having all the sex they want, with any women they want, while the rest of the men out there — at least the straight ones — are condemned to lives of celibacy or near-celibacy.
So who gets blamed for this (imagined) state of affairs? Women. And something called “hypergamy.”
The term refers to the practice of “marrying up”in social class. But the dudes of the manosphere aren’t merely content to accuse women of being mere gold-diggers. They’ve combined the notion of hypergamy with some ill-digested evolutionary psych speculations and convinced themselves that women are in fact a giant gang of nymphomaniacal sexual status seekers, compelled by their very genes to throw themselves at the males on top of the sexual heap — variously described as alphas, jocks, bad boys, and thugs.
And, since men are similarly programmed to spread their seed far and wide — by which I mean fuck anything that moves — these women are getting all the attention from the alphas that their hearts and loins desire, while themselves making beta guys beg for scraps, or, more often, rejecting them outright. Or so goes the theory.
Naturally, those manosphere men who find themselves sitting on the sidelines of this (imagined) orgy tend to build up a great deal of bitterness about this (imagined) state of affairs.
This little mythical tale of alpha males and the hypergamic nymphomaniacs who love them (long time) is repeated again and again on the blogs and message boards of the manosphere. But is there any real convincing evidence for any of this? I haven’t seen any yet.
But in a post earlier this year one of the more influential bloggers in the manosphere, a pick-up guru of sorts who calls himself Roissy, claimed he had found something like the smoking gun of hypergamy:
Twice as many women as men have genital herpes. This could only happen if a smaller group of infected men is giving the gift of their infectious love to a larger group of women. Looks like female hypergamy is conclusively proved.
As evidence for this claim, Roissy pointed to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control which found that some “21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men.” (That link takes you to the Reuters article Roissy cited in his blog post; the CDC’s press release on the survey can be found here.)
Case closed? Not exactly. Had Roissy actually bothered to read all of the news story he cited, or the CDC press release, or done even a minute or two of Googling, he would have seen the real explanation for the disparity: because of biological differences between men and women — you know, the whole penis vs vagina thing — it’s simply much easier for women to be infected with herpes. As one online FAQ notes (and I’ve put the key parts in bold):
Women are approximately 4 times more likely to acquire a herpes simplex type 2 infection than men. Susceptible women have a higher likelihood of contracting genital herpes from an infected man than a susceptible man becoming infected by a woman. In other words, if a non-infected man and woman each have intercourse with an infected partner, the woman is more likely than the man to contract a herpes simplex virus infection. …
Women may be more susceptible to genital herpes infections because:
* The genital area has a greater surface area of cells moist with body fluids (mucosal cells) than men.
*Hormone changes during a woman’s menstrual cycle may affect the immune system, making it easier for the herpes simplex virus to cause an infection.
You’d think a sex guru would know enough about herpes to know this, wouldn’t you?
>The 80% vs 40% thing is utter bullshit. According to information from the CDC's National Health Interview Survey of 2000, the numbers are 74%/62% for people ages 22-44, and 86%/84% for people over the age of 45. It took me ten seconds of googling to find the stats.Eoghan, way to ignore the actual post, which points out that women are FOUR TIMES MORE LIKELY to be infected with herpes than men, and a woman is far more likely to be infected by a man than vice versa.And I just want to confirm M's experience as well regarding dating. Not only is it much more likely to occur in groups of young people going out all together, but myself and all of my friends have always gone dutch and split the bill.
>Those women certainly didn't get herpes from uninfected men so your point is moot David!
>Eoghan is an idiot and is also banned so feel free to ignore him. His post will be deleted as soon as David sees it.
>Yes Andrea,Let's completely ignore the fact that those women who are FOUR TIMES MORE LIKELY to contract herpes got it from the same % of men with herpes.The fact that they are FOUR TIMES MORE LIKELY to contract herpes only serves to highlight the case that they are all vying for the attentions of the same small percent of males and it bit them in the ass (so to speak).
>I wish Yohan's comment about my providing links to longer discussions of clarifying concepts so that I don't have to write the same thing over and over to people who aren't actually invested in learning about feminism as "misleading" right before he linked some one-off story with no bearing on the discussion were satire. I definitely laughed!
>Yohan I just wanted to pop in and say your links are always hilarious. FEMINISTS ARE ALWAYS MISLEADING. HERE'S AN EXAMPLE OF FEMINIST RHETORIC: http://www.news.news-WOMAN-HITS-PUPPY-WITH-CAR-DOESN'T-CARE
>Nymeria,I can't find that story. Was it a joke?
>Herpes is a bad example.Chlamydia is the most common venereal disease.It is THREE times as prevalent in women than men.Lemme guess – women are also more susceptable to Chlamydia too eh.
>@ScareCrow,And the good girls who aren't practicing hypergamy are just spontaneously generating new cases of Chlamydia.Bad feminist math on this blog.
>witman — That link for the puppy story works fine on my computer. Yours must be broken. But seriously: STDs are generally more easily transmitted to women, due to the different biology of men and women:Many STIs are transmitted more efficiently from males to females. For example, the risk of genital herpes transmission from a male to female partner is 19%, whereas it is 5% for transmission from female to male[21]. After a single episode of sexual intercourse, a woman has a 60% to 90% chance of contracting gonorrhea from her infected male partner, whereas the risk for a man from a woman is 20% to 30%[22,23]. The reasons for this difference may include greater exposure in females as a result of pooled semen in the vagina and greater trauma to tissues during intercourse.http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6874/4/s1/s26This may not be the case with chlamydia,, which seems to be transmitted equally easily (though younger women are more likely to get it for biological reasons):http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/dec96/niaid-03.htmHowever, lots of people simply don't know they have chlamydia. The greater number of women who report it may be because women get screened for it more often:Of overall chlamydia diagnoses reported in 2008, the rate of infection among women was almost three times higher than the rate among men: 607.0 cases per 100,000 population compared to a rate of 233.9 among men. This is thought to be due to the higher number of women screened for chlamydia. http://www.avert.org/std-statistics-america.htm
>Nymeria said… Yohan I just wanted to pop in and say your links are always hilarious. Hilarious = inconvenient for feminists, about what feminists do not want you to know.Interesting, feminists never have any link as a reference to back up their claims.
>Yohan: "Interesting, feminists never have any link as a reference to back up their claims."Interesting, that this comment comes immediately after a comment in which I provide three links to back up my claims. Granted, those links weren't to a random news story about some crazy woman doing some crazy thing, so I guess they don't count.
>witman said… Nymeria,I can't find that story. Was it a joke? http://www.wfsb.com/news/25941881/detail.htmlYes, almost like a joke. The female driver found it totally funny. At least at the beginning.Maybe not so funny anymore after being arrested and charged for her behavior.
>David,I'm posting in both threads because they are both relevant. I am not disputing the fact that women are more susceptible to STDs, I am pointing out the fact that they are contracting them from a very small subset of the male population.This means that twice as many women had intercourse with and contracted Herpes from a small subset of the male population who have Herpes. On average, each man with Herpes would have banged two of the infected broads.
>Yohan, are…are you seriously suggesting that a woman running over a dog with her car (which, by the way, I made up, as a joke!) is some..feminist..plot that all women should be held accountable for?
>I did not refer to your link, David, which was psted about at the same time. I saw it after I posted my comments.I do not understand what you really want to say with your links, and one of them is from 1996, pretty outdated for medical care.Maybe you want to say that women will be easier infected with STD than men? And? What's your point or your advice to these women? Or to men?witman said… Those women certainly didn't get herpes from uninfected men so your point is moot David! Nothing else what I can add to Witman's comment.
>Yohan, you are ignoring the real enemy — evil feminist car-driving dogs. http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/accidents/hernando-man-run-over-by-own-truck-after-his-dog-puts-it-in-gear/1104156Notice that this dog deliberately targeted a MAN. Obviously feminism is to blame.
>Nymeria said… Yohan, are…are you seriously suggesting that a woman running over a dog with her car (which, by the way, I made up, as a joke!) is some..feminist..plot that all women should be held accountable for? You see, it really happened… a female driver was running over a dog, and newspapers are reporting it, how misogynistic…Sometimes it's not even a dog, but only a man. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/crime-scene/fairfax/woman-finds-body-stuck-under-c.htmlshe thought she had run over a "mannequin" of some sort and continued driving ——————some..feminist..plot that all women should be held accountable for? Seriously, only feminists – female and male, regardless their gender – should be kept accountable for their hateful actions against men.Most women, worldwide seen, are not feminists, they often even are suffering because of feminism. Why should they be kept accountable?You see, this is the difference between 'misogyny' and 'anti-feminism'.
>That red herring, the fact that women are more likely to get herpes than a man, was completely debunked on your comments on the other blog… by the simple logic that it doesn't matter how easily they got it from an infected partner, they STILL had to scrog an infected partner… that means twice as many women sleeping with half as many men… the only men who had the herpes to infect them with.However, the real lynchpin proof of hypergamy is the anthropological evidence that it is the natural order of human sexuality, from the pre-civilization days.According to Dr. Baumeister, a prominent social psychologist who teaches at Florida State University, "The 'single most underappreciated fact about gender, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did."You can google the details. The genome doesn't lie.
>Well, I'm glad my view that 'anti-feminism' was wildly deluded has been disproven.
>lovablenerd, gosh, it's not as if we actually discussed that EARLIER IN THE COMMENTS or anything.http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-herpes-and-hypergamy.html?showComment=1293692903431#c7423981420501536545
>The fact that they are FOUR TIMES MORE LIKELY to contract herpes only serves to highlight the case that they are all vying for the attentions of the same small percent of males I am not disputing the fact that women are more susceptible to STDs, I am pointing out the fact that they are contracting them from a very small subset of the male population.Your conclusion, the same in each of your posts highlighted above, is based on doing the math assuming that the conclusion that you're "proving" is already a given fact. Same with loveablenerd's that means twice as many women sleeping with half as many men. You're assuming that the smaller percentage of infected males is highly localized within a very small segment of the entire male population, rather than being more widely dispersed throughout a larger segment of the entire male population. If more widely dispersed throughout a larger segment of the entire male population, with members of this larger segment being or having been sexually active with more than one partner, and the females being or having been sexually active with more than one partner, as well (and that doesn't sound too far-fetched to me), the math still works.
>Witman, try this example.Let's say you have a population of 10 men and 10 women–and everyone in this population is having sex with everyone in the other population. Every single one of the 10 men–not just a single 'alpha male' will get to have a turn with every single one of the girls.The first man up for the girls has herpes. Assuming the rate of transmission to females is 40%, he gives 4 out of the 10 girls herpes.So now the other 9 men get to have sex with all the girls. However, the chance for a guy to get infected is one-fourth of that, only about ~10%. So by the end of it all, about one more guy will have gotten herpes, making the population of herpes-infected men probably 2 (or 3 if we're unlucky). Twice as many women infected as men, in this scenario, is more or less what we'd expect if women were having sex with everybody instead of being hypergamous and only having sex with a small number of alpha badboyz.This may prove women are just slutty, but this does not prove that women are "hypergamous." Hypergamy means they're only having sex with a very small subset of the male population, while in this example they're having sex with *everybody.* Yet the numbers in my free-love example came to be more similar to that we see in real life (roughly twice the amount of women have herpes than men). Your problem is both in how you and Roissy define hypergamy and the specific ratio of the chances of male to female transmission of the disease (women are four times more likely to catch it). If women really were hypergamous, i.e having sex with ONLY a small number of men, many of whom happen to have herpes, while leaving the rest of the men out in the cold, since women are four times more likely to catch the disease, there should be *four times* the number of herpes-infected women as there are men–for instance, if 20% of women are infected with herpes, only about 5% of men should be (1/4th of that number). In reality, however, about 10% of men are infected with herpes; the ratio is two to one rather than four to one. This indicates that many more men are actually getting lucky in the present regime than would be expected if women only went for the very top of the badboy heap. This means women aren't quite as "hypergamous" as you say they are.
>Actually that is not my definition of hypergamy. My definition is that women marry up. I simply stuck with the definition that was being used for simplicity.I would hate to be the 10th guy!
>My definition is that women marry up. Well, okay, but whatever you want to call it, the point I made is that the statistics do not support the assertion that a large number of women are having sex with only a small number of men. If this was true, there should be four times as many infected women as men, the fact that there are only twice as many indicates that a significantly higher proportion of men are getting lucky than you or Roissy would claim.I wouldn't want to be the 10th guy either, but then again, that was just an example…IRL there's probably some guy out there who's 50th in line…and enjoying it too. D: