Over on the Men’s Rights Subreddit, PacmanWasALangolier is taking concern trolling to a whole new level. Apparently, according to some unspecified research, the women of today have gotten picky — tragically picky — about the men they date.
It turns out that a lot of women aren’t interested in dating just any dude out there! They cruelly, selfishly, wantonly insist on choosing whom they date and whom they don’t.
The horror!
Mr. Pacman is concerned, “honestly concerned,” for this can only end in disaster, not just for men but for those poor misguided women themselves. And possibly civilization itself.
To drop the sarcasm for a moment, let’s look at his “evidence.” First, that bit about how, historically, only 40% of men have passed on their genes. This figure comes from a paper by psychologist Roy Baumeister that’s a favorite amongst the Men’s Rights crowd, and the claim seems to be true — at least if you’re talking about the whole span of human existence.
Does this prove that women have always looked down their noses at the majority of men, refusing to have sex with decent average Joes in favor of riding that old “alpha asshole cock carousel,” as manosphere assholes so delightfully put it?
Well, not exactly. It merely suggests that in the past, more powerful men had sex with more women than the poor and subjugated, and thus were far more likely to pass on their genes. (Or at least that, however many partners they had, their babies were more likely to survive to produce babies of their own.) The figure tells us very little about the actual preferences of women, because many times the choice about who had sex with whom was made by men. Powerful men collected women into harems; male soldiers routinely raped women on the defeated side; in patriarchal cultures, fathers decided whom their daughters would marry. And so on.
Mr Pacman might also be referring to an interesting post on the OKCupid blog that revealed some interesting data on how the dating site’s (straight and bi) men and women rated the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex. But (if that is indeed what he’s referring to) he’s leaving out half of the equation, and thus totally missing the point.
Yes, it’s true that women on the site rated roughly 80% of the men on the site as “below average,” while men were much more “charitable” in their choices, with “a woman … as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, [while] the majority of women have been rated about “medium.”
But Mr. Pacman has left out the most interesting part of the findings. Even though men on the site were charitable in how they rated women, with their assessments of female attractiveness falling roughly along a normal bell curve, they were more selective — much more selective — in whom they contacted. As the OKCupid blogger, Christian Rudder, puts it, “when it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque.” Women at the top of the bell curve in terms of attractiveness (at least as rated by site members) get
nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.
For women, the results are strikingly different. While they tended to be pretty selective when it came to rating men on their looks, in practice they were far more open to dating men they considered average or below average in looks. As Rudder notes,
women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. … [T]he average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Of course, the data here might be skewed by another factor that the blogger doesn’t address: on OKCupid, when someone rates someone else highly, and that someone else has also rated them highly, the site sends out a message informing both of them of a possible match. Women rating particular men as unattractive may not actually think of them as unattractive, but may be simply trying to avoid getting a lot of spammy messages from guys whose profiles they may not have looked at in detail.
So, yeah, once again, the real world is a lot more complicated, and much more interesting, than the world inside the head of the typical MRA.
I was actually wondering that, how you’d possibly figure out what percentage of men historically speaking have left descendents when it’s really only possibly to track that in men via the y chromosome. If we were to continue the MRAth and take into account the roughly equal gender distribution that tends to occur in nature, and they claim they’ve proved that historically 40% of men have left descendents, and we can only really be sure of the ones who were male, doesn’t that leave us with a best guess of 80% of men leaving descendents if we include the hypothetical daughters too?
See, MRAs, we can do dodgy math too! But we’re not going to, partly because it’s dodgy, and partly because why does this matter anyway?
Gods no! On the contrary, I need brain bleach for that, such as this:
http://youtu.be/ySYh3E6am_0
Repeating, for truth and emphasis.
CassandraSays: If you’re interested, here’s the paper they’re referencing. It’s even free.
And as to why we’re doing this, there’s a huge and unexpected disparity in variation of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. This is a hypothesis to explain that. (If your effective population size is smaller, it’s also less diverse.) There are other hypotheses out there; the only reason this study gets so much press is that it’s pat and fits preconceived ideas about early humans.
The whole business of descendents is so stupid … I mean, a few years ago there was a book out called The Descendents of Louis XIII, and it contained something like 100 000 names over three centuries. And all that’s from two surviving children. I know it’s not a representative line, but the example just comes to mind as to how variable descent is, and how fragile – one can have a great number of children and yet leave no descent beyond that generation, or one can have one or two survivors (Anne of Austria had four miscarriages before two live births) and end up as the ancestor of thousands. It’s meaningless, especially as these witless wonders in the MRM try to use it. And frankly, what does it matter to anyone if they leave descendants or not? These creeps don’t even want to care for their actual children. Why should they care about leaving descendants who’ll know nothing about them – or if they do, probably be embarrassed about being descended from such douchebags …
Kitteh’s Unpaid Help, I think the MRM would be collectively brain-sploded if they realized that there’s a single person who lived within historical times who is the ancestor of all living humans.
Phylogeny is so cool!
I was thinking about this whole “you have to have babies or your genes won’t be passed down and be part of evolution WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE EVOLUTION” trope the other day. My sister doesn’t have kids, but I do, and we have the same two parents, so haven’t her genes been passed down, more or less? My husband’s brother doesn’t have kids, but his brother and sister do, he’s wife’s sister and brother do, so haven’t their genes been passed down as well? If one of the couples with kids had died, one of the family members without has the resources to step up and raise the kids (and would have.)
If there was some trait, say Trait S, in my family that makes people not want to have kids or whatever, those traits have been passed down to the next generation.
Thanks, clairedammit!
My genes are going nowhere, ditto my brother’s and sister’s … which suits us. When you’re descended from a prize idiot, “the genes stop here” seems liike a pretty good plan. 😉
Yeah, what’s the big deal about passing on your genes? I mean, if you don’t have kids and you want them, that’s a bummer, but why would you care about distant descendants? You’ll be dead anyway, so what’s the big deal? I guess if you follow a religion with ancestor worship or prayers for the dead or some such where having a bunch of descendants will give you a better time in the afterlife, that makes sense, but I doubt that’s what MRAs are going on about.
(On a lighter note, you guys know the goofy-fundamentalist explanation for why the Y-chromosomal Adam is so much more recent than the mitochondrial Eve? It’s because all the men on the Ark were related, but the women weren’t!)
(In fairness, I should probably mention that I’ve never heard that theory from someone who actually believed it.)
Pretty sure in MRMspeak “left descendants” = “got to have sex with hot women” and “60% of guys don’t leave descendants” = “I am part of the (what I imagine is) huge number of guys not having sex with hot women and it’s not faaaaaaaair! “
It also conveniently ignores the effects of slavery or being on the losing side of a war. A lot of women, historically, were forced to have children they did not want with men they did not want. Men of fighting age were often killed if they lost a battle and women were the spoils.
For that matter, the problem continues in many parts of the world, where rape or the threat of rape and forced childbearing is used as a weapon of terror.
Tangentially related: I watched a documentary on DNA mapping of humanity around the world, and it would appear that a ridiculously large percentage of men in Asia and Europe are directly descended from one man around 1000 years ago, and they’re assuming it’s Genghis Khan.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan/
Also, apparently a large proportion of Irish men are descended from the same man, but I can’t remember enough details to google it. Some guy with 1000 in his name? Dunno.
“But THEN what would they do with all the bitter resentment coins they’ve been hoarding while waiting for a female sex dispensing unit?!?”
Buy a bunch of tickets and then trade it in for a slinky?
I have always wondered why these guys would be happy if some woman was forced to be with them against their will? I mean, just thinking about someone being FORCED to put up with me and hating my guts every second of every day (murder mystery for the insurance money and inheritance implications aside) makes me ill. How could ANYONE want to force someone to be with them, and seriously be ok with it?
When I chose my husband and he chose me (choosing is a two-way street, after all), it was very special. We both felt valued and loved, even though neither of us are either conventionally attractive or perfect human beings. So it boggles my mind that anyone would want to be in a situation where they can force someone to be with them against their will. And I certainly wouldn’t want to get naked with such a person. I mean, come on, if your sex partner HATES you for forcing yourself upon them, doesn’t it stand to reason that they’re going to figure out some way to get revenge, or at the very least make sure that you are horribly miserable in any way that they can get away with making you miserable?
@dualityheart
I suspect what they want is for women to be more like dogs. Enthusiastically loving and loyal to whoever feeds them and pats them. Or they think women *are* like dogs and have just been trained by culture to like expensive kibble and just need to be retrained. (To belabour a metaphor).
Or maybe they’re just counting on Stockholm Syndrome.
@Kim- I doubt that most of these douchenozzles ought to be *ALLOWED* to have a dog. They’d probably abuse it and then get angry when the dog became mean because it was starving and hurt.
And they’d be angry because the dog wouldn’t make them dinner and keep the house until they get home.
When I hear MRAs talk about women, it sounds like they’re talking about brainwashed zombie slaves instead of actual autonomous people.
Pear_tree:
All relationships involve compromise to some extent (certainly in my experience) – the trick to managing them is what you decide to compromise over.
For instance, I was not prepared to compromise over:
1. Sexual attraction;
2. Sense of humor;
3. Similar political/societal views;
4. Similar ambitions re family, income, etc.
…by which I don’t mean that they have to be identical (for instance, my wife is an out-and-out socialist, while my political views are broadly centrist), but they certainly have to be running along roughly the same tracks.
But I was prepared to compromise over things like cultural interests – for instance, my wife has no discernible interest in music, thinks that fiction is essentially made-up nonsense and that films with subtitles are invariably arty pretension. But that’s far less of a problem relationship-wise, since I have plenty of other friends to share those interests with (online and off).
I think that when people say “you have to compromise” they mean more “you should be open to people you might not otherwise be interested in, they might surprise you.”
For instance, I’m dating a DJ who likes partying, has never read a Shakespeare play, and enjoys certain illegal pastimes that I do not partake in. If I were imagining a boyfriend, I would not imagine him. But he’s good about the things that matter to me– respectful of boundaries, obviously wants to be with me, curious about the world, interesting to talk to, kind.
I prefer “cooperation” instead of “compromise” when it comes to actually getting down and figuring out what both people are willing to accept in a relationship. Pretty much all human interaction is negotiation and communication, and the best human interaction is negotiation and communication that really allows people to fully understand the other persons’ meaning.
My husband loves a lot of hardcore metal. I’m more of an electronica person. Still, we both have a lot of similar music interests, and both of us have expanded each other’s music library and tastes. And just because I love techie stuff and games from Japan while my husband has a passion for cooking and FPS doesn’t mean we can’t sit down with some grilled cheese sandwiches and play Mini Ninjas or retro Mario games together and mutually enjoy the experience.
The problem, I think, is that in our patriarchal society, a lot of things that are actively abusive are added to the list of things that women are supposed to “accomodate” or “settle for” in a heterosexual relationship. Things like, “he will leave his shit all over the place and you are responsible for cleaning it up by default” or “he doesn’t have to give you oral sex or touch you in a sexual way for your pleasure unless you’re perfectly toned, wax all your genital areas, and engage in all the gonzo porn acts that HE has decided is sexy.”
For me, the boundaries that include bodily integrity, unexamined-toxic-gender-dichotomy-bullshit and (in general) basic respect of another human being’s desires are NON NEGOTIABLE. And I don’t think that makes me picky. I think that makes me healthy and reasonable.
But I am fucking tired of people acting like “different tastes in music” is on the same list as “pushes me to engage in sex acts that I am not comfortable with doing.”
Was this purposefully phrased this way to manger the Nice Guy/women-like-assholes crowd? It’s brilliant either way.
Those are pretty good basic standards (they’re my basic standards, which explains some of my more ‘out-of-character’ crushes.)
lowquacks: I actually have been trying to sort out if he’s an alpha or not. On one hand, he’s pretty much EVERYTHING the women-like-assholes crowd rails against. On the other hand, he’s… not an asshole. Like, at all.
dualityheart: COSIGNED. Did you read about that ridiculous Lori Gottlieb person? She literally did not seem to see the difference between “he bores you to tears” and “he has a weird laugh.” (My other boyfriend has weird verbal tics. It annoyed me when I first hooked up with him, but two years later I find it adorable.)
Unimaginative: Anyone who lived 1000 years ago and left a lasting genetic effect would have thousands if not millions of descendants today because their genes would have mixed into all of the local population, if not further.
Genghis Khan could easily have hundreds of millions of descendants, not because he had many kids (likely dozens, at most hundreds) but because he had them in different places all over Eurasia, affecting many local populations, some of which were rather large.