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.)
So, basically you all have no actual argument against my arguments about population growth and resource consumption; you’re more interested in assigning culpability and demolishing typical arguments.
Look, it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is. It doesn’t matter who’s consuming the resources. It’s simple math. If we don’t find some tech magic soon on the order of the Green Revolution, there won’t be resources to redistribute. Key words: non-renewable and finite. Another good phrase is “diminishing returns”.
Yeah, I’m just getting pretty tired about people commenting on the West African food crisis and other crises by saying, “If they didn’t have so many kids they wouldn’t be in this mess.” It’s like, well, yes, but if their agricultural production and human development hadn’t been deliberately held back for a century by colonial governments, and if Western countries hadnb’t caused climate change in the first place, they wouldn’t be in this mess either.
Um, no, my argument was that population growth is obviously, demonstratably, not as big a foctor driving resource use as overconsumption, and is used almost exclusively as a scapegoat to justify inaction.
I already posted a link showing that the food losses of climate change could be offset by roughly 1.5% of Western countries’ GDP. Or, you know, by everyone eating less meat. Both of which seem more just and more feasible than policing billions of people’s family planning decisions.
I mean, it’s obviously Western countries’ fault, so what’s the point of confusing the issue with statements like that?
Soooooo, Vox Day likes the way the Iranians roll?
Bad news for Vox.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-19/iran-cleric-pummeled-by-badly-covered-woman-after-warning-her.html
Money quote: “YOU cover YOUR EYES.”
Iranian women are not meek robots. It takes a lot of work to keep women in that little box of ‘acceptable feminine behavior.’
What did Princess Leia say to Darth Vader? “The harder you squeeze…”
I mean, colonialism IS the resource consumption issue. It isn’t just a war crime that happened to someone else, it is the foundation of the modern world. Cars wouldn’t exist with Congolese and Phillipine rubber. Computers wouldn’t exist without West African minerals. America’s largest overseas oil source is East Africa.
Wait, so before the problem was that poor uneducated people have too many kids, and now the problem is that educating people and lifting them out of poverty, which would stabilize the population faster, wouldn’t solve anything?
@Ugh
From what I am aware part of the problems in the developing world and their growing population is not due their consumption of meat or production of CO2 but their water consumption and the affect on the environment on a small scale.
The biggest issues in sub-Saharan Africa linked to increasing population is depletion of groundwater levels, the stripping of semi-desert areas of their vegetation to feed livestock and for firewood (thus contributing to the desertification of the Sahel regions) and severe soil erosion caused by over farming land that was never that fertile to begin with.
Basically the Sahara is getting bigger at a much faster rate than it would otherwise due to a growing population which will have huge consequences for the entire continent and possibly for global weather patterns (the air that heats up over the Sahara is a big driver of the worlds air currents and wind patterns).
Other issues facing African countries is the effect of indiscriminate food aid dumping on countries that do have the capacity to feed themselves.
While of course food aid is needed in cases of severe crisis there is still a tendency for cheap surplus food from Europe to be shipped to African nations whether there is an acute crisis or not. This undercuts local food producers and drives them out of business, damaging the local economy and actually making it far harder for the country to feed itself and making a future food crisis more likely.
It is also stopping economic development as a whole, as without a solid agricultural base it is very difficult for a country to develop other industries.
These are all issues that are particular to Africa and can’t be balanced out by people in the West eating less.
What Africa needs is education, generally, as this is the most effective way to bring down birth rates. And specifically, in sustainable and modern forms of farming that do not cause soil erosion and that maintain the fertility of the soil.
It also needs less Aid dumping and more investment in it’s primary economy and food production.
It also needs to introduce water conservation strategies and educate people about saving water.
The growing African population is a big concern and claiming that to say this is racist is, I’m afraid, incredibly simplistic.
There is enough water in African aquifers to last a century. Renewable desalinization is increasingly possible, as is renewable decontamination of Lake Victoria. Americ had the same problems in the Dust Bowl almost a hundred years ago and was able to fix them, with money.
Absolutely true. However, I never said otherwise.
Yes. That is why I keep posting about how much this would cost.
Haha oh man.http://chartsbin.com/view/1455
Total water consumption per capita per year of Ethipoia: 1000 m3
And Ethiopia has a lot of malnourished people. Can you see how condescending statements about how starving people should use less water, when they already use vastly less water than we do, are, in fact, pretty racist?
Well, you know, Western countries could always adopt mor lax immigration policies, instead of letting thousands of people die in frigates and detention camps, and that would pretty much solve the problem right there.
But of course, many people think it is more reasonable to condescendingly criticize poor women for their life choices.
*oops I cut out a sentence in there
Per capita water consumption of Ethiopia: 1000 m3
Oh I see my greater than and less than signs make it get cut out.
Per capita water consumption of Ethiopia: less that 110 m3
Per capita water consumption of the United States: greater than 1000 m3
Dangit, I just want to write ASSUMES FACTS NOT IN EVIDENCE all over this.
Most of my friends, and even most of my parents’ friends, are with partners of a similar educational level as them. Some of them are in the same career field at the same level of seniority and pay. And my current top-candidate for boyfriend is in grad school for a similar field, but one with slightly smaller long-term earning potential. He makes me really happy, and my friends’ partners make them really happy too. We have shared interests, shared emphasis on education, and shared life goals with our partners. Which is exactly what we want out of a romantic relationship.
@Fembot
Not if the guy is suitably dominant. Chicks dig dominance.
Truther, it occurs to me that if you knew what “chicks” as a whole “dug” (for real tho, are you a baby boomer?), you wouldn’t have all this time to spend posting in support of hate groups.
Truthie living up to his name again and again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
And therein lies his problem. Chicks as a whole do not dig the same things because chicks are not a monolithic group. Men are also not a monolithic group.
Fugh, no one with your post count should be making a “too much time on your hands” quip.
For sure! Also, his problem is that he apparently learned his adult vocaublary from the 70s nostalgia film Dazed and Confused.
@Truth
Haha does it really need to be said how much more worthwhile a pursuit it is to mock a hate group than to defend it?
Also, I don’t pretend to have the key to all human interaction, or even believe that such a key exists, and I wouldn’t manipulate everyone around me even if I could, so there’s quite a few differences between your situation and mine.
What baffles me about the whole “hypergamy” thing is: doesn’t everybody want to date the best person they can? Obviously what counts as “best” is going to vary wildly due to personal tastes, but we’re pretty much *all* trying to optimize. I have no idea if I’m dating “up” or “down,” because I’m not really an unbiased observer of my own awesomeness, but I know that I think my SO is pretty darn cool (in this case, meaning kind/thoughtful/motivated/good-looking) — and if they weren’t, I would be dating someone else. I fully expect them to feel the same way! I don’t want to feel “settled for.”
Because when 90 percent of the guys go for the hottest 10 percent of women, it’s just the way things are. Those other women aren’t even REAL women anyway. When 90 percent of the girls go for the hottest 10 percent of the guys, we’re “not giving them a chance to prove themselves”.
@Ugh
We are coming at these questions from entirely different paradigms and, without one of us being hit on the head in the near future, it’s really pointless to continue.
@Troof: Go back to Gor.
I’m not even sure what Vox Day is complaining about. These women are clearly attempting to do science (lol) and surely their uteri will explode soon, because fuzzy ladybrains can’t deal with that sort of analytical, manly stuff. Thus, we’ll never have to deal with a high population of educated women.
/sarcasm
DINGDINGDINGDING
…..any problem in Africa is stinking TINY compared to the American problem.
A chart.
Do they have a problem?
We all have a problem.
….why are we spending more words talking about solving their ‘big concern’ than the biggest concern of all?
Shouldn’t the relative size of the American problem mean that for every one word you post about Africa you’re required to say ten words about America?
Or a hundred?
That’s why it seems racist. They own a tiny part of the overall problem. And what parts of that problem they own have been hugely driven by… NOT THEM. Focusing on them is INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC.
Why do NON-AFRICANS get to make these decisions? Paternalistic much? Are we going to ask the Africans to decide how the American problem will be dealt with? No?
I am personally amenable to discussing problems from all around the globe, but let us apply perspective… and anti-racism.