Happy day! Susan Walsh has drawn another diagram! Loyal readers of Man Boobz will recall the last time that Walsh, a would-be relationship expert who blogs at Hooking Up Smart, tried her hand at diagram making. It wasn’t pretty. In an attempt to sketch out the economic costs of sluthood, Walsh cobbled together an extravagantly convoluted mess of a flow-chart based on little more than a few bad assumptions and what she insisted was common sense.
This time, Walsh attempts to chart how the sexual revolution has transformed dating, borrowing her argument largely from some dude called Frost who blogs about sex and relationships and PUA bullshit at Freedom Twenty-Five.
Back in the old “leave it to Beaver” days, Frost argues, virtually all men and women paired off efficiently with partners who exactly matched their level of hotness, as charted on the infamous ten-point scale beloved of pickup artists and other such creatures. Fives married fives, nines married nines, and even lowly ones were able to find true love and hot ugly sex with others as unfortunate as they were. As Walsh puts it, attempting to make all this somehow sound vaguely scientific:
This system worked pretty well in achieving equilibrium with respect to SMV (sexual market value).
Naturally, neither Frost nor Walsh offer any evidence that any of this was true. Which only makes sense, since it, er, wasn’t.
Let’s set that aside for a moment and move on to our current fallen state, post-sexual revolution. Now, apparently, a small minority of hot dudes score all the chicks, from nines on down to threes. Everyone else spends their lonely nights alone with their hands and a choice of vibrator or fleshlight.
Here’s where the diagram comes in. It’s a doozy:
Now, Walsh doesn’t actually explain how she knows this (or, rather believes it, since it clearly is not true), or why exactly she thinks the sexual revolution is to blame. But Frost does, sort of. With the sexual revolution, he argues,
the social convention of monogamy starts to break down. Women are free to do what they want, and they quickly realize that the men they can persuade to have short-term sexual relationships with are much, much more attractive than the men willing to marry them. Attractive men are free to eschew marriage, and instead maintain a harem of rotating friends-with-benefits and one-night stands. Super-attractive men (professional athletes, rock stars, bloggers) can spend every night with a different coterie of young, attractive women, railing lines off their ass cheeks and banging them senseless.
Sounds great for men. And not too bad for women either, who get to shag NHL players and bloggers instead of their ho-hum husbands.
Wait a minute. “… and bloggers?” Bloggers are now the alpha males? I wish I’d known this sooner!
But every woman who elects to join a harem, must necessarily leave a lonely man behind in the great mating scramble. … The men at the bottom are left to their RPGs and porn.
So there you have the effects of the sexual revolution on men: Great for the few, awful for the teeming masses.
Well, there’s a certain logic to that argument. It’s just not, you know, true.
Walsh and all the manosphere dudes who’ve convinced themselves that 80% of men have been left sexless have it backwards: as a handy FAQ at the Kinsey Institute points out, only about 10 percent of men don’t have sex during any given year. The average frequency of sex ranges from more than 100 times a year for those in their teens and twenties to about 70 times a year for those in their 40s.
But what about the ladies? Frost explains that they suffer too, especially those unfortunate enough to be mega-hotties. Frost seems to base this conclusion almost entirely on the sexual history of one Betty Draper. This seems a very small sample size to me. Also, she’is fictional. But that doesn’t stand in Frost’s way:
What about the top woman? The ultimate hottie? Previously, she had the top man all to herself. She literally could not have asked for anything more, assuming as I do that women naturally gravitate toward sleeping with the one man who is their best option at a given time, while men are only as faithful as their options. Suddenly, her man is beset by hussies, plying him with offers of cheap sex. How does Betty Draper feel about the breakdown of monogamy in her world? …
Now [the top women] must choose between sharing, or settling for a man far below her previous catch. Meanwhile, uglier women can choose between monogamy with a man far above her previous level, or a shared slice of one of the top men. She is unequivocally better off, as the hotter women are unequivocally worse off.
Frost concludes:
The Sexual Revolution harms attractive women, and unattractive men. It benefits unattractive women, and attractive men.
Naturally, none of this is the fault of men. It is, Frost and Walsh apparently agree, the fault of all those mid-level bitches slutting it up with the top men. It’s all their fault that the ladies at the top and bottom are getting left high and dry.
Indeed, it’s high time that the hottest hotties stood up for their rights, Frost argues in a second blog post:
It never seems to occur to the hot girls of the world that the sexual revolution is the cause of their troubles. Without it, the best that a top man could do is find a top woman, and devote his life to her. In our present dystopia, he can find that top woman, and rip her heart and soul to pieces by maintaining a harem of flings on the side.
If it wasn’t for the legions of female 7′s and 8′s throwing themselves at the male 9′s, the female 9′s could have their men all to themselves. But in the world as it is, they will always be competing with the omnipresent availability of cheap and easy sex.
Were the hot women to regain their hot pride, sluts and feminists alike would quake in their boots:
The greatest fear of the feminists is that desirable women like yourselves will wake up the lies they’ve been fed, embrace their feminine modesty, and cast the harsh light reality on of the fat, shrill, used-up slutwalkers and middle-aged divorcees.
What of the not-quite-hotties? Walsh has some harsher advice for all those “mediocre sluts” out there riding that alpha asshole cock carousel. She writes:
For less attractive women, an objective assessment of market value is essential. That can only be realized by evaluating which men are interested in dating you rather than banging you.
In other words: mid-level ladies, you’re still losers. Eventually, you asses will get fat, your skin will get wrinkly, and the alpha assholes will grow tired of banging you. So what are you poor gals to do? Walsh offers this grim assessment:
These are the hard truths of the Post Sexual Revolution era. There are a few winners, and many losers. It is difficult to see how equilibrium can ever be regained. For now at least, your only option is to think carefully and realistically about your personal life goals. Make sure the choices you’re making get you closer to them.
(Confidential to Susan Walsh: You do know that using terms like “equilibrium,” like you’re some sort of sexual economist, doesn’t actually make your bullshit true?)
Given that everything in Frost and Walsh’s posts here is such unmitigated bullshit, I think I have some better advice for women of all hotness levels (if they haven’t already figured this out for themselves): stop taking relationship advice from a woman who wants you to hate yourself.
And speaking of bad choices: those smileys? Oy. Strive for elegant simplicity, not tacky clutter.
NOTE: Chuck on Gucci Little Piggy has written a response of sorts to this post. I’ve replied on his blog here. But there is something distressing going on there: Someone has posted several rude comments there under the name “Man Boobz.” THAT PERSON IS NOT ME. If any of you are responsible, STOP IMMEDIATELY. I’ve asked Chuck to ban that person and delete the comments.
EDITED TO ADD: Chuck changed the name of the commenter to “not man boobz.” That makes sense to me.
I also will point out again, that Amp was utterly owned in the arguments by Ballgame who basically tore his points to logical shreds. Of course it helped that Amp was either dishonest or not bright and didn’t bother to carefully read CONSAD. I have. I haven’t just skimmed. I doubt a single one of you could say the same.
Or in the case of CONSAD, taking existing reports and claiming they say the opposite of what they really say. It’s a standard tactic of the Right-wing (i.e. Global Warming, Ann Coltier, Tobacco, etc.)
You seem unable to comprehend that the cited sources say the opposite of the CONSAD report. If Clarence actually read any of the data he keeps pounding the table with he’d see
Bt that doesn’t fit into his preconceived conclusion so it’s ignored as is any attempt to point out the errors in CONSAD.
“If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table”.
Good, because it’s false.
“Most of the “data” I’ve been pointed to, was already included in CONSAD. You seem unable to make fair or accurate arguments.”
And not actually contradicted. Even CONSAD found a disparity after controlling for these factors. It just tries to claim it’s irrelevant because it’s ‘so small’. That’s the difference; those studies produce evidence directly contrary to CONSAD’s claims, and CONSAD doesn’t actually counter them on their own grounds (Those of all full-time workers), but attempts to add new people to the previous studies and explain that part time workers obviously explain the wage gap present in datasets of people who all worked full time. That doesn’t really work well.
“A meta-analysis is a summation and analysis of data from other studies to try to tease out the relevant factors from the data of these studies. I’d tell you to go back to school, but I don’t think you liked seventh grade. Once again, argue the data and analysis of that study or kindly shut up about it.”
Yes, and this one instead chose to try to add more people who weren’t included in previous studies at all. That’s not a meta-analysis. Seriously, science better, this is embarrassing.
“I also will point out again, that Amp was utterly owned in the arguments by Ballgame who basically tore his points to logical shreds. Of course it helped that Amp was either dishonest or not bright and didn’t bother to carefully read CONSAD. I have. I haven’t just skimmed. I doubt a single one of you could say the same.”
I read CONSAD in some detail last time a troll thought it was a killer. It was as unimpressive then as it is now.
You also have an interesting view of defeat.
“The average frequency of sex ranges from more than 100 times a year for those in their teens and twenties to about 70 times a year for those in their 40s.”
Damn, I am really lagging behind the curve.
Rutee:
I say tomato, you say tomaato? Maybe that’s where I don’t see defeat here.
Esp. since you don’t understand those studies. Each of the studies controls for a very limited number of factors, and thus only captures part of the picture. CONSAD is better than any of them individually. You don’t like the findings from CONSAD. Big whoop. You might be on the verge of actually arguing methodology (your part about part time workers) but you don’t seem to actually want to go there. I think I know why.
“@bekabot So what do the men want? They’d rather be with someone repulsive?
Well, no, not exactly. Men can trade down without damage to their own standing, as long as they don’t trade down too far. (This is something with which I credit society and not nature. The sexual valuation system [SVS] is like banking or law — it’s too complicated to be the creation of raw nature, even though some of its practices may have a natural basis.)
But a woman who is Officially Hot can’t date too far down the scale without calling her Official Hotness into question. As in marriage, the status of the pairing is determined by the status of the male, not the female. This means that men at the top of the tree have a wider choice of mates than do women who share their status.
The ultimate effect of the rule which says that high-status women can’t interact other than very casually with lower-status men is that, for example, Lady Chatterly can go ahead and bang the gamekeeper if she wants — but that she must not be seen to do it. The moment she acknowledges her lower-status dude in public she loses class. Consequently a man can’t move up in life by mating above his status (something every little girl is routinely taught to dream about). Bragging rights are the most a man can get out of an arrangement like that— a real improvement in his circumstances is not on the table.
Like I said, this system of sex-values is something I attribute more to social mores than to natural imperatives. So that if MRA/MGTOW guys want to ameliorate some of the genuine unfairnesses to which they are subject, altering the law that says that the status of any pairing is dependent upon the status of the male within that pairing (rather than upon the standing of the female within that pairing) might be a good place to start. Also, I have to say that I’ve noticed that this law has loosened up somewhat since I was a kid, so that now, occasionally, you’ll see alpha females with non-alpha men whom they simply found personable or charming. But you’ll still hear a lot of unfavorable commentary coming from men and women alike whenever one of these pairings comes to the general attention, which is usually when the couple as a couple stumbles into some kind of trouble. “What’s a woman like her doing with that slob?” (or a variation on it) is the question most commonly asked under those circumstances.
So, if you think that’s a question which might be unfair to the slob (as I do) you might want to agitate in a way which calls into question the automatic assumption (which I think more artificial than natural) that she is trading down b/c he can’t possibly be trading up, because nobody ever heard of such a thing.
(I know that this reply didn’t have much to do with what I originally said, but then I thought the question didn’t have much to do with what I originally said, so I replied to the question on its own merits.)
CONSAD tries to make conclusions about previous studies that it literally can’t back up with its new data, and tries to make inferences about previous studies based on completely non-applying data (You can not, by any stretch of the imagination, claim that part time work explains the wage gap in data sets consisting entirely of full time workers; It’s piss-poor science). In theory, metastudies are better, but if their methodology is terrible and their conclusions poor, they aren’t actually better. Science, as always, is conditional.
I’m not arguing in greater detail because you’re a boring troll who thinks he’s hot shit. I only have so much tolerance for insipidity.
“(This is something with which I credit society and not nature. The sexual valuation system [SVS] is like banking or law — it’s too complicated to be the creation of raw nature, even though some of its practices may have a natural basis.)”
I’d like to point out that complexity is no indicator of human design. That’s poor reasoning, and unfortunate. It’d be better to point out that as it’s a social norm, it’s obviously subject to society’s rules and not biology’s.
Bekabot, when pretty woman are seen with less attractive men, it’s also common for other people to assume the ugly man must be rich or powerful to have gotten a hot girlfriend. What bothers me about those comments is that they are describing the woman as a prize to win with money and power. It never occurs to those people that the man may just have a great personality, good sense of humor, and intelligence. Those types of traits just never factor into the equation, only looks and money. When the couple is a handsome man with a less attractive woman, people don’t usually mention money but instead say something like, “He could do so much better than her” like she has no value as a partner if she isn’t beautiful.
Let’s play a game I call fun with numbers.
Grant, for the sake of argument, that CONSAD is completely valid, that paycheck-wage discrimination (that is, women paid less for a materially identical job) is sufficiently reduced such that a woman can expect, on average to receive 93-97% of the pay of a man for the same job.
93 to 97 percent sounds pretty good! It’s like an A. An A for equality. Well done, America!
But if you turn it around and compare it to other notable economic phenomena, it starts to look less impressive. Consider, for example, the fight over the Bush Tax Cut extension. The Republican and Democratic plans were very similar, save for their treatment of the top income tax bracket. The Democrats wanted to allow the bracket to rise from 35% to 39.6%, while the Republicans fought to keep it at 35%.
That’s a 4.6% difference. More than that, it’s a 4.6% difference on only those Americans making over $373,651 a year. More than *that*, it’s a 4.6% difference on the marginal rate for those very-wealthy Americans. That is, this 4.6% difference only applied on money over $373,650.
This 4.6% difference was the subject of massive national debate. It shut down the Congress for quite a while, and it has substantial implications for the long term fiscal viability of the US government. It also happens to be just a hair under the average discrimination value the CONSAD report suggests: 5%.
At a similar time, a bill about that 5% was being debated in the Congress. It received less coverage, less advocacy, and ultimately failed with a wimper rather than a bang. Even though it applied to every dollar earned by every working woman, rather than the highest dollars earned by the wealthiest US citizens. (I recognize that there’s a bit of an unfair comparison between tax rates, which may fairly be counted twice–both as burdens and revenues–and discrimination, which only seems to be counted once. I’d dispute that–discrimination is both a benefit to the employer and a burden to the employee–but even if that were so, the 9.2% difference discussed tax-wise is well within the same range as the 3 to 7% of discrimination, taking into account their relative scopes.)
Next, there’s the problem of averages. Averages, as Senator Al Franken once said, are funny things. The argument above treated the average penalty of discrimination as evenly distributed across female workers. That, of course, is not true.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that 3 out of every 4 jobs held by women is paid precisely equally to the same job held by men. That’s not that bad. But then the remaining 1 out of 4 jobs where discrimination does come into play, the cut would be 12-28%, a clearly substantial slice.
But that’s not all! Not every discriminator is equally bad. Let’s assume (again simplistically) that half of discriminators are half as bad as average, and the other half are half-again as bad. Then for one out of every eight women, the pay cut is 18% to 42%–that is, one out of every eight female jobs pays 58% to 82% as much as a male one. And because women are likely to hold several jobs throughout their life, more than one out of every eight women has suffered pay discrimination at rates comparable to the 70s rates. (I won’t speculate as to the percentage of working women in our hypothetical, because it’s not clear whether the pay discrimination concentrates in certain industries or whatnot.) Now, it’s certainly better to have discrimination that harsh be an uncommon experience (1 out of every 8) jobs than a universal one. But it’s still a major, major problem.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that even with CONSAD’s numbers, a substantial minority of working women have suffered a discrimination burden greater than the amount they were likely to spend on housing, tax, or any other major category of expenditure over the same time.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say, 97 percent or no, that’s effed up.
Rutee:
I’ll give you a hand for ACTUALLY MAKING A CRITIQUE OF THE METHODOLOGY. OMG, someone finally did. Where you are an idiot is if you think any of the studies cited by CONSAD are any better. So even if you are right (which I haven’t yet granted) we have a very incomplete picture.
“I’d like to point out that complexity is no indicator of human design.”
No, it’s not, but all the same Robert’s Rules of Order don’t look like a snowflake, or vice versa.
“It’d be better to point out that as it’s a social norm, it’s obviously subject to society’s rules and not biology’s.”
Yes, but in that case, you have to start out with the assumption that it is a social and not a biological norm, and I’m not comfortable doing that. “It’s debatable” would be more my position. When I notice that there’s a rule around (for which some people do claim the status of natural law) which says that when a male of high standing mates downward, his lower-status mate is wrapped up in his upmarket penumbra, but that when a woman of equally high standing does the same thing, all that happens is that she loses what cachet she’s got, what I think is that I’m watching the results of an Upper-Class Male Twit ploy whereby upper-class male twits can keep a pool of upper-class females reserved to themselves while they make raids on all the other pools (without fear of what their female counterparts may be doing behind their backs). But that’s just what I think. What I think and what I can prove are two different orders of tamales.
Erl:
Maybe you should talk to Rutee. S/he does understand this better than you. The “wage gap” is the sum total of the wages of women in the work force versus men in the work force. There is a gap there of various sizes (depending on how you measure it, but one thing is a fact: the more factors you include, the smaller it gets) and the whole schpiel is based on what you seem to believe, that is that somehow (though this can never be proven) men and woman are paid different for the exact same job. More sophisticated proponents believe its due to diffferential promotion rates -once again, based totally, or nearly totally on sexism against women, according to proponents.
Regardless the fact that group “man” has more wealth from wages and salaries than group” women ” is viewed as an issue that needs to be addressed. In fact, people such as myself believe it is almost entirely a gap based on women’s choices. I find it obnoxious whining to complain about unequal representation at the CEO level – even if discrimination at that level was nearly total, 99.99999 percent of men and women are never going to get there.
Kendra, yup.
Okay, catching up o_O
Wouldn’t the place to debate something be on email or something? xD “Neutral ground” like this is a war again xD Does NSWATM appreciate just ppl going “okay I want to use your comments section to argue things”? xD
If you ppl want, you can use MY blog to argue things 😀
Ami’s Ultimate Battle of Ultra Doom Thread! (of Doom) 😀
I’m also infinitely amused by the macho “I’ve been on the internet since 1997!” chestpuff xD (and NOBODY can outpuff Kirby! 😀 )
And “you don’t want to mess w/ me” thing xD So far I’m seeing a lot of “acting like you’re right” tactics like “omg you ppl are so pathetic I’m laughing!” xD plus the divide and conquer “Rutee you’re the smart one here!”
OMG EVERYBODY HERE IS SO PATHETIC I’M… meowing o:
:3
I’m guessing at this rate, this is gonna be another 1000 comment thread soon! 😀 Since I dun see Clare (is that his official name now? o_O ) as being the kind to ever back off from a fight xD
Also @Sarah I was a 15 y/o girl online and I still got a ton of older guys wanting to cyber w/ me o_o;;;
BTW, I was on the Internet since 1995. So nyah. In my days we used Usenet, none of them newfangled ‘Internet forums’ you kids use these days. And we walked miles uphill in the snow to get to a 9600 bauds connection, 14K if you had rich friends. Wifi? Pfah! We learned how to make modem sounds with our mouth so we could have wireless internet.
For a guy who complains about my lack of specificity and detail, your inability to be particular about failures of methodology is interesting. You say that the addition of workers that actually do not fit previous data sets, when trying to make a judgement on those previous data sets, is just as bad as… what, exactly?
Oh, btw folks, here’s another interesting factor; to arrive at this 95% number, CONSAD erased all benefits packages. Which favor full time work, when they apply to part time at all.
And don’t point Erl to me; she was merely telling you that a mathematical mean isn’t actually evenly distributed. That shouldn’t be controversial.
As a general rule I don’t delete comments. I have checked the IP and can corroborate that the person posting those vids is not you, David Futrelle. If they start posting under your actual name then I will delete them.
But don’t make hay out of someone posting that video and trying to tie you to it, David. The guy who made the video cited you as inspiration for the idea. Why run from the video now? I’m not offended by it; even if you had posted the video on my site wouldn’t change the fact that you agree with it’s content.
Bachelorette TV show = Shrew Dream. Shrews everywhere clutched their catsfor the finale holding on to their Jenny Craig/SATC dream of being pursued by decent looking men with jerbs.
LOL
Actually, I rather liked this posting that appears in the comment section of the OT (it wasn’t a comment that was posted by Susan):
I had my earlier posts with links to articles showing many things that feminism does that hurts men or ignores them entirely. Now I’ll post some statistics:
-Over 60% of the people that graduate from college are women.
-Women make 93-95% of what men make for the same amount of work and experience (source: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender Wage Gap Final Report.pdf. You have to copy from the http to the pdf at the ending.).
-Young childless women are beginning to make more money than young childless men in large urban cities.
-83% of women get full child custody in the divorce (let’s not forget alimony and child support).
-93% of work related deaths are from men.
-98% of war related deaths are from men.
-The laws surrounding domestic abuse are entirely in favor of women even though around 40% of domestic abuse is by women.
How the second point is a statistic that shows how feminism hurts men or ignores them entirely, I am not certain. But aside from that, if this second point is not demonstrative of discrimination, but, rather, of the different choices that women and men personally make, then, in true Farrellesque fashion, we could look at the remainder of the list and proclaim that some (if not most) of the items listed are not demonstrative of discrimination, but, rather, of the different choices that women and men make.
Here are a bunch of useful annotated links on the wage gap:
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/2010/11/further-reading-gender-pay-gap.html
Also, Chuck on Gucci Little Piggy has written a response of sorts to this post. I’ve replied on his blog. But there is something distressing going on there: Someone has posted several rude comments there under the name “Man Boobz.” THAT PERSON IS NOT ME. If any of you are responsible, STOP IMMEDIATELY. I’ve asked Chuck to ban that person and delete the comments. It appears that he is unwilling to do that.
http://glpiggy.net/2011/08/05/boobzmans-argument-without-an-argument/
here’s my first of several comments in response:
http://glpiggy.net/2011/08/05/boobzmans-argument-without-an-argument/#comment-21237
Some more data on the pay gap from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:
http://www.eowa.gov.au/Information_Centres/Resource_Centre/Statistics/EPD%2012_V2_May2011_OnlineVersion.pdf
including change over time, by industry, by occupation, by age, compared with OECD countries, graduate salaries, methods of setting pay, executive pay.
Lots of charts and tables for Clare to play with 🙂
Well David, I will give you that I believe it is not you.
While I know you “lurk” at some MRA sites, when you post, you invariably post as yourself.
You have that much guts at least.
David,
I’ve changed the name of “Man Boobz” commenter to “Not Man Boobz”. You can stop crying now.