The dudes of the manosphere are concerned, deeply concerned, about the fate of young women today who won’t have the opportunity to marry dudes richer and better educated than they are, as they are apparently hard-wired by evolution to do. Turns out when women start investing in good educations and getting good jobs, some of them end up making more than most dudes! Clearly, this portends disaster, for these young ladies, and for civilization itself.
On his Alpha Game blog, reactionary racist doucheblogger Vox Day has a puckish solution to the Hypergamy Crisis: we should just eject a good chunk of women from our universities – as 36 of Iran’s universities have recently announced they will do, starting in the coming academic year, by making 77 different fields of study male only.
Vox explains his, er, logic:
[T]he Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.
Well, that’s one … way of looking at it.
No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society’s future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?
Let’s just say I’m going to bet on the one that respects and utilizes the talents of all of its people, instead of treating half the population as little more than egg repositories and baby-making machines.
This isn’t the first time dear Vox has addressed the dangers of allowing women into college. See here for some comments from him that are a good deal worse than the ones I quoted here. (TW: Violence against women.)
The really horrifying notion: these dudes wanting to reproduce THEMSELVES. much less be “fathers.” *shudder*
I’m really pissed off now. And I had such a good morning otherwise Q____Q
The logic – or more like lack off – just baffles me. They really think that kicking out actually competent future workforce out just to make sure that more men than women will graduate out of these fields, regardless of their competence?
Must also piss off those ladies who would otherwise soon graduate from the field of their choice, only to get kicked out. Or ladies who wish to enter a certain field who won’t even be allowed to take the exam just to favor some dudes who wouldn’t otherwise get accepted in.
Not to mention the breeding scare, which is stupid on so many levels. It’s good for the well being of people in general as well as for the economy to educate women and have them working. It’s the reason so many organizations are dedicated to get poor children, especially girls, into schools. It’s demonstrated that education for both sexes is an important factor for well being. (Few kids who survive is better than a lot of whom only few do.)
We don’t need more people, we’ve got more than enough. And educated working women can still have children. Seems their logic is that a woman who works, contributes to culture, science, economy and wellfare besides raising a family is lesser than a woman who just stays at home with sixteen kids. (Not jabbing at stay-at-home parents or saying they don’t offer anything to society – more power to you, if it makes you happy. )
Less can be more – it’s easier to raise a family you can support and properly care for anyway.
The whole decision is made on old fashioned, sexist ideals that dictate that men should be superior and do most if not all of the work and women are only truly useful if they are popping out kids – preferably male ones.
Also, genetics isn’t the only factor to intelligence.
Not to mention I doubt a lot of “intelligent women” are content with the idea that, despite all their abilities, the best they still can do is make babies. Especially male ones, because they are the ones that do all that important thinking stuff. Having smart girls just means they can make more smart boys, unless they make smart girls to make smart boy – ARGH !!
What’s the point of being intelligent if you’re not allowed to think ?
Well… If we have a situation where most people end up getting married, and it’s simultaneously true that most men make more money than most women, then it’s just mathematics that women will tend to “marry up” and men will tend to “marry down”. It doesn’t support the thesis that women consciously strive to do so.
However, I think hypergamy might actually be a thing, not for all women, and not because we would be biologically hard-wired to look for PhD or fat wallet (it’s not like these go together, btw) when choosing a spouse, but because there’s this widespread cultural idea that the man should be the more successful in the relationship. And some, perhaps many, people will buy into that crap. I also think it’s pretty obvious that these cultural ideas are gradually changing.
It’s really, really implausible that there will be loads of people in unwanted celibacy in the future just because so many women have university educations. People will only buy into hypergamy ideas as long as they still have a good possibility of finding a spouse who’s more successful (for straight women) or less successful (for straight men). If we ever reach a situation where women on average are far more well-educated then men, men dating and marrying women with a higher education than they have WILL become completely normalised.
Anyway, regarding the stupid gene pool argument… Plato actually used “improving the gene pool” (although he didn’t know about genes of course, but he did understand that children tend to resemble their parents, and that mental as well as physical qualities can be inherited) as an argument FOR allowing women to have all kinds of jobs. Like, if you want to breed good philosophers, then the best philosophers of both genders must mate. If you want to have good soldiers, the best soldiers should have babies with each other, and so on for all other professions. For this to work, women must be out there in the work force so men can tell whether they are talented or not. As long as women just stay at home doing nothing, there’s no way to separate the good ones from the bad ones, genetically speaking.
As abborrhent as this whole human breeding idea is – IF for the sake of argument we accept that it’s important to try to improve the human gene pool and produce talented humans, Plato’s argument makes way more sense than Vox Day’s. Just look at successful breeders of, say, hunting dogs or police dogs (Plato explicitly makes the comparison with breeding hunting dogs) – you have various tests and trials for the bitches as well as the males. You’ll be far less successful if you just mated the best males to any random bitches, or, say, the prettiest bitches.
some guy, I started your blog for you. It took 30 seconds.
http://someguyboredwithyourschtick.wordpress.com/
Needs moar Comic Sans.
And font colours. So many, many pretty colours.
Well that’s the last time I drink around neurotypical people who aren’t aware of what AS does to someone when they’re drunk.
@aworldanonymous
Hugs, intellectual rants about penises, stories about the time your cookies tasted like soap?
Impromptu and terrible dancing down the high street singing Frank Sinatra songs?
numbers of children for educated women are mostly down because it’s next to impossile to juggle even a mid-level career and raising children at the same time. Given that they don’t have to worry about having them fed and taken care of, most of them opt to have two or three though, which is plenty enough.
At least if countries like Sweden or France are anything to go by…
also in other news:
>Menz get the chance for cheapass upwards mobility through marriage, previously only open to women
>MRAs whine, bitch and moan
EQUALITY!
Did you put a chair in a cardboard box and then laugh about it for about 20 minutes?
(Totally did this once, though we were high on sugar and caffeine rather than drunk 😛 ).
They also seem to be completely unaware of the overtly racist, classist, and ableist history of this attitude, too. People have been freaking out that the “right kind of people” aren’t breeding enough for over a century.
I once got high on my own brain chemicals and made maroon cookies filled with sprinkles and popping candy.
My friend liked them, but then she has a massive sweet tooth. Everyone else who wasn’t put off by the colour was all “dear god in heaven, sweetnees, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…”
Is it just me, or do MRAs have a terrible habit of over-extending?
“Some women like spankings, ALL DV LAWS INHIBIT WOMEN FROM BONDING THROUGH SPANKINGS!”
“Some women have lots of casual sex partners, ALL WOMEN ARE DIRTY SLUTS!”
“Some women still worry about being able to marry up, MAKE SURE NO WOMAN HAS MORE RESOURCES THAN A MAN!”
Seriously. If they want to run along and set up tables with consenting women about who should breed with whom, they have my blessing. Go for it. But the assumption that everyone should or wants to go along with them (or that it is “for the common good” and so should be done against everyone’s will) just pisses me off.
They can go live their hateful little lives exactly how they want with other consenting people. I’d just really appreciate if they’d keep it off of me.
When it comes to the behavior of women it’s all about what’s good for society and making sacrifices for the betterment of the human race, no matter how shady your reasoning. But adjusting society so that it’s better for women, like say reasonable controls on the porn industry (maybe a union?), it’s all about individual choice and the free market needs to be free-er.
Naira – they don’t see us as human, much less as individual humans. (Not that they’re all that flash at seeing men as individual, either.)
Ruby, you do know that the “we have seven billion people and that’s plenty/too many” is a racists dog whistle right? Because it always comes down to the fact that white people are genetically freakish and are outnumbered by “those brown people”.
In general, beware when people start advocating that people should be having larger or smaller families. Right now its not the number of people that’s problematic, its the distribution of resources.
Ah so now I finally what the actual flying fish Hypergamy is.
That is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard…
I’ve also just realised that my own dear mother is pretty much the epitome of what MRA’s hate.
She is a highly educated woman (up to Doctorate of Biology level) who has married a man with a mere Bachelors degree (albeit from Oxford but leaving that aside).
She also did not even meet my father until she was over 30 when according to MRA’s she should have been all dried up and withered and undesirable to men. She spent her 20’s pursuing her educating, building a successful career and having boyfriends who she did not marry.
She didn’t start having children until she was 36 (me) and 38 (my brother) and continued her career after having us.
She has also been the primary earner in my household for about the last 8 or 9 years and is significantly more senior and respected in her field than my Father is or ever has been. In fact even when for some years my Father was the higher earner, she was still a more respected player in her field at the time.
So you know by rights she should in fact she a withered up spinster living on her own with 10 cats. Or she should have terribly emasculated my father and driven him to depression. Or something.
To the Cynic
Please stop using the word “if” to sound like you’re reasonable, since its clear you do not want to test whether MRA writing meets the conditions of your if.
We are not here to spoonfeed you information. As a “cynic” (more like skeptic of feminism), you should be prepared to go in search of the information yourself.
As for your great libralism, 240 years was a long time ago, and the liberals of that time had huge problems with their thinking, since what they had to say was largely only to be applied to white, wealthy men.
Even if it were true, this hardly matters. At current rates of reproduction, we’ll have several more billion people on this planet before the human population stabilizes (assuming that nothing wonky happens with religious folk and current trends toward smaller families continues). Our planet is finite and has a particular carrying capacity. While it’s unclear at the moment what exactly that capacity is, it’s fairly clear that it’s less than, say 12 billion humans.
And when you factor in the consumption of non-renewable resources, basically we’re fucked. At this moment, resource distribution of, say, food is a problem. When we no longer literally have the capacity to produce enough food to feed every human (arable land is also a finite and nearly non-renewable resource), all the efficient supply chains in the world will not help.
It doesn’t matter who’s breeding. They need to stop. For historical reasons, *coughcolonialismcough* predominantly white countries are reaching the replacement rate first. They emphatically do not, however, need to increase their reproductive output to, I dunno, outbreed the brown people, regardless of what some assholes might claim.
@Nepenthe
According the the UN’s projections, the world population will peak at 9.5 billion around 2030. That’s only 35% above the current rate. Most of this growth will be in Africa and South Asia.
If you look at the concumption patterns of Africa and South Asia, they consume:virtually no grain-fed meat and, on average, emit roughly 0.1 to 1 tonnes of CO2. This means that they consume:
-Roughly 1/5th of the food of a Westerner
-Roughly 1/20th of the energy of a Westerner
The added load of those 2.5 billion people could be offset if all Westerners ate half as much grain-fed meat and used 25% less energy.
So, I think you might find that Westerners’ focus on how Third World people who need children to look after them in old age are destroying the world, when these extra children could easily be accomodated by the most basic consumption controls in the West, is actually pretty racist.
@Ugh
And presumably a) the consumption patterns of Africans and South Asians are going to stay the same b) the desertification of Africa and resultant decrease in available arable land will stop c) we will, by some magic, find a way to keep those 9.5 billion people from consuming non-renewable resources at the current rates and lessen that consumption (even though those rates are increasing) d) there is any chance in hell of consumption controls in the west, given that the greatest consumer of resources is dealing with half of it’s political system believing that the world is literally going to end soon
Non-renewable resources are a big deal. A 35% increase in the human population is huge. We are not immune to ecology, even if it’s considered racist to point that out.
I mean, basically when you talk about smaller rate of consumption in the global South, you’re pointing out that the desperately poor use fewer resources. You might find that relying on desperately poor brown people to remain desperately poor in order to offset population growth is actually pretty racist.
Yeah, I’m on the side of Ugh. Let’s just say that I’ll scream about raw population growth when western nations quit hogging up the resources.
Andthe argument that its not just resource distribution that is entirely a problem seems to be the out that westerners use to be able to shrug their shoulders and play helpless. Now, in instances where developing nations government is interfering in programs to help a struggling populace, that needs to be addressed as well. Even there, however, you will find a western nation culpable to a degree because they helped prop the corrupt government in the first placer.
They are going to increase, but they are also being offset by renewables. The growth and efficiency of renewable energy has vastly exceeded IPCC recommendations every single year of the past two decades. There is currently much more investment in renewables than in fossil fuels (mostly by the Chinese central government).
The current running tally of how much it will cost to mitigate agricultural losses due to climate change is arounf $700 billion a year, or 1.5% of Western countries’ GDP.
http://www.gsdrc.org/go/topic-guides/climate-change-adaptation/understanding-climate-change-adaptation-as-a-development-issue#costs
It’s certainly a lot more feasible than telling 3 billion poor people to stop having kids and just starve in their old age instead. Also, a lot more relevant. I don’t really see a non-racist reason to scapegoat the problem onto Third World women when it could be easily dealt with by the West.
In several nations, the reason that the nation is poor and struggling is directly due to western corporations, western politics and general thoughtlessnes by the western populace.
I’m all for removing a few conveniences here to ensure depserately poor folk in the developing world aren’t so frigging poor.
Until the west really gets its head out of its arse, it doesn’t matter what we do, it will be the developing nations that pay the price.