Another in an ongoing series of posts on seminal works in the manosphere canon, as it were. At some point, I’ll make a page for these.
Like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, F. Roger Devlin’s 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power (downloadable here) is a kind of Manospherian urtext, an original source of many of the terrible ideas that are now accepted as gospel wherever misogynists gather in large numbers online. Though the name of Devlin is hardly as well known as that of Farrell, many of his ideas, most notably his reworked notion of “hypergamy” — which we will get to in a minute — are omnipresent in the manosphere.
Among misogynists with intellectual pretensions, Devlin’s Sexual Utopia is considered a must-read. Originally brought to the attention of fellow manospherians by PUA pseudointellectual Roissy — now Heartiste — in 2007, the essay has received lavish praise on such familiar sites as The Spearhead (where WF Price praised Devlin’s “critiques of feminism” as “some of the best out there”) and A Voice for Men (where one post described the essay as “supremely indispensable.”) It’s listed in the sidebar of The Red Pill subreddit as “required reading.” And Norwegian MRA Eivind Berge gushed that the essay was
possibly the best article I have ever read. My blogging against feminism is almost redundant after F. Roger Devlin has put it so well.
So what exactly are all these guys falling over themselves to praise so highly? To put it bluntly, a strange and sprawling compendium of ideas that range from frankly abhorrent to merely silly, motivated by misogyny and racism. Virtually none of the essay’s many gross generalizations about women (or men) are supported by any sort of evidence.
And did I mention that it originally ran in a white nationalist journal?
Yes, “Sexual Utopia in Power” originally ran in The Occidental Quarterly, an explicitly racist journal that described its mission as protecting “the civilization and free governments that whites have created” from the rise of the evil non-white hordes. Indeed, Devlin is on the editorial advisory board of the journal, which currently features an article on its site praising Disney’s Snow White as “a White Nationalist classic.”
While the bulk of Devlin’s essay deals with gender, not race, it is framed — in the very first sentence — by his concern over what he calls the “catastrophic decline” of “white birthrates worldwide.” In other words, no one who has read his article, even if they don’t know what the Occidental Quarterly is, can possibly miss Devlin’s fundamental racism (which is spelled out even more explicitly at the end of this piece).
There is so much in Devlin’s essay that is so objectionable that it cannot fit in a single post, so today I will focus only on his reworked notion of “hypergamy.”
The term was originally a technical way of saying “marrying up” — that is, “the act or practice of marrying a spouse of higher caste or status than oneself,” as Wikipedia rather unromantically puts it.
In Devlin’s hands, the term comes to mean something entirely different:
It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. …
It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female “sexual orientations” are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.
This may sound vaguely familiar to you. Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground’s first album that only 30,000 people may have bought copies of it, but “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Similarly, everyone who has read Devlin seems to have started a blog or YouTube channel.
Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and, second, he “commits,” or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.
It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d’état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power.
And yes, we are rapidly moving towards the manosphere myth that virtually all women are having sex with the same tiny number of men.
Although there may be only one “alpha male” at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime.
From here, it seems, comes the widespread manosphere myth that women are inherently amoral creatures who will instantly dump whatever man they’re with whenever an alpha strolls by.
Devlin is also the apparent source of the related manosphere myth that most men live lives of quiet celibacy.
An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males.
Indeed, Devlin is so convinced by this notion that he simply hand-waves away all data to the contrary.
Survey results are occasionally announced apparently indicating male satisfaction with their “sex lives” and female unhappiness with theirs. This creates an impression that there really is “more sex” for men today than before some misguided girls misbehaved themselves forty years ago. …
It is child’s play to show, not merely that this is untrue, but that it cannot be true. … What happens when female sexual desire is liberated is not an increase in the total amount of sex available to men, but a redistribution of the existing supply. Society becomes polygamous. A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but most women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men. …
Sexual liberation really means the Darwinian mating pattern of the baboon pack reappears among humans.
And …. scene!
Devlin is sometimes described as an “independent scholar,” but even aside from its misogyny and racism “Sexual Utopia in Power” is anything but scholarly. There are only a relative handful of footnotes, which don’t come close to backing up Devlin’s numerous factual claims. Most of the footnotes refer to the writings not of scholars but of conservative and far-right journalists. One links to an article on the racist hate site VDare.com; another favorably cites this article by Henry Makow, an early Men’s Rights Activist turned conspiracy theorist who literally believes that feminists are in league with an evil Satanic-Illuminati cult that rules the world.
Devlin offers precisely zero evidence to back up his claims about hypergamy — aside from a couple of surveys, whose conclusions he rejects, and several quotes from literature, including that one from Oscar Wilde. The rest is, to use the formal term for it, assdata.
Nonetheless, the manosphere has adopted Devlin’s new-and-not-improved version of “hypergamy” with enthusiasm. I won’t even bother citing examples; a Google search for “manosphere” and “hypergamy” brings up 17,700 results. Hell, there are several dozen articles about hypergamy on A Voice for Men alone. And of course I’ve written about the manosphere obsession with hypergamy many times before.
But so far essentially the only people who have picked up on this particular definition of hypergamy have been misogynists, pickup artists, MRAs and others vaguely associated with, or around, the manosphere. The only academic I know of who has ever even addressed Devlin’s peculiar thesis is libertarian economist Tyler Cowan, who wrote about it briefly, and I think accurately, on his blog several years back.
This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously). The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle. So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak. The birth rate falls, for one thing. The piece also claims that the modern “abolition” of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive. Some of you will hate the piece. I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.
As an actual idea, new or old, this is probably all the consideration Devlin‘s version of “hypergamy” really deserves. But as a case study in the history and sociology of bad ideas, the strange story of Devlin’s hypergamy is a bit more interesting, and I no doubt will return to it in future posts.
There is also a good deal in Devlin’s essay that’s a good deal worse than his discussion of hypergamy, and I’ll be coming back to that as well.
Sometimes I take short notes in cryptogram. I’m not sure if this deters or encourages other people to read them.
@Kittehserf: Holy crap THIS: “And as Fade said – why are you so fixated on sex anyway? If it’s just your precious orgasm, why don’t you masturbate or use sex toys? If it’s more than that, what’s the point of running around chasing one-night-stands?”
I was thinking about this the other day. There are a lot of sex toys for men that provide a surprisingly “vagina-like” masturbatory experience. If you’re just going to treat women like a masturbatory tool anyway, why do you need a REAL person to hurt? Why not a sex toy?
Last I checked, sex, is usually about SOME kind of intimate connection with another human being. If you just want to “pump and dump” then why is a physical woman SO damn important?
I largely suspect it’s because other men in their circle will consider them “losers” if they can’t “get women”, so it’s not really about just sexual release and their NEEDS… it’s about not looking like “losers” to other men who think that way. Well… how is that something to blame women for!?!?!
@Cassandra of COURSE PUA’s don’t know any women older than 25, that’s when they get too ugly and wrinkly and slutty and loose vagina-y to bother sleeping with. Weren’t you paying attention? 😛
WonderWoman – so agree! It seems to be partly about their tally sheets with the other men* and, with some of them at least, partly about the desire to hurt women, whether physically or emotionally, but manipulating or coercing us into sex we don’t want.
Eurofail claims he prefers partnered sex to masturbation, and blahblahblah intimate touch or something, but what’s the point? How does he even convince himself there’s any good reason for it, if he’s (a la Mr Al) SO repellent that he has to gaslight women into sleeping with him anyway? One would think that knowing “This person is only sleeping with me because I tricked/coerced/bullied them into it” would be even worse than worrying someone was giving you a pity fuck.
Of course, to come to that conclusion, you have to be a decent person who cares about other people’s feelings. Euroskeeve’s posting history here shows he’s anything but. Which leads me to ask again: how does this sort of thing alleviate loneliness at all? Oh, it doesn’t, of course, and the whole “I’m lonely” thing sounds more and more like a lie, considering the source. Because that sort of behaviour isn’t about establishing an affectionate, or even just friendly fuck-buddy connection with anyone; it’s about “winning” and treating sex as a zero-sum game in which the woman has to lose if the man is to win, ie. orgasm.
It’s on the same track as something the godawful NWOslave said once, that sex is a contest where whoever comes first wins, and he’s never lost. I strongly suspect the woman in his equation wouldn’t come at all,** which probably means bonus points for someone as full of hate as him.
*Reminds me of a description of a character in Death Before Wicket: “A graduate of the school of What Will The Other Blokes Think.”
**That’s as well as the fact that the first sex with a new partner isn’t usually that good for women – can’t recall if it applies to men – and there’d be no second time with Slavey, unless one was a sex worker who really needed the cash.
Not to mention, he said that it’s frustrating to get a “no” after a date b/c he has a chronic pain disease (lupus, I think?) and therefore it drained more energy than it would have for people w/o it. So wouldn’t masturbating be even better if you view this much work = orgasm, because then you’d know what you have to do, instead of interacting with pesky humans?
@kittehserf I always get confused about manipulation and coercion for sex we don’t want followed up with “but I’m a NICE GUY”… um… howso? By what extremely loose definition are we going?
If you have to manipulate and coerce a woman, you aren’t a “nice guy”, though I guess PUA’s drop the “nice guy act” since they’ve graduated to “learning to behave like assholes so they can get what they want.” (Because women want assholes! They do! Really! No matter how much you deny it!!!)* It’s like the secret manipulation ingredient they were missing from their nice guy tool kit. But now… now they know they secrets of the universe!
If he just wants the comfort of being physically touched by another human being… maybe he should think about getting a massage (a legit massage). At least that situation is a largely compassionate experience and not about someone you have to manipulate. Of course if you’re paying to be touched anyway and you want to be sexually touched… why not go to a massage parlour with “happy endings” (i.e. not therapeutic massage… since that is NOT an appropriate request there.), or go straight to a full-out prostitute or an escort. These are women who are consenting to these exchanges… yes… you have to pay money, but isn’t that better than being a borderline date rapist? I mean, come on.
There are SO many ways to get one’s physical and intimate touch needs met that don’t involve being a sleaze.
Re: orgasms: This is why I don’t get one night stands from a female perspective. I mean I’m not saying you are evil if you have them, but since your odds of having an orgasm are so small, your odds of seeing this guy again are so small, your odds of pregnancy are not insignificant… nor your odds of STDs… well… um… no wonder women who are into one night stands are so choosy about it. There has to be something major in it for her, either a reasonable idea that she’ll have an orgasm (maybe based on stories from friends who have been with that person before and say he’s a good lover), or someone so attractive that just being touched by such a guy sends you into happy orbit. But just random non-impressive guy who probably doesn’t know where the clitoris is, who may have STDs, who might get you pregnant should the condom break… um… yeah wonder why women aren’t lining up for THAT? Oh the mysteries of the universe.
Oh, that’s right… silly me. Women don’t have desires… or any worth hearing about! **
* using your little asterisk thing. That parenthetical statement was sarcasm in case you were worried I thought women liked assholes.
** Oh look, I did that sarcasm thing again.
Good point, Fade!
Seems to me he’s going about it all the wrong way. Yes, there’s always a chance a first date (especially if you don’t already know each other very well) will be stressful, even if one doesn’t have any energy-draining conditions to deal with. But treating it as the means to an end, or an exam with a pass-fail result and nothing else – how can that not make matters worse? Instead of just seeing if you enjoy each other’s company, whether or not there’s a spark of sexual attraction, it’s all about the goal of sex. How much fun can that be?
Never mind how dehumanising the whole process is. The date’s just a process of overcoming the inconvenient obstacle (known to decent people as “another human being”) that’s blocking access to The Vagina.
Gross doesn’t begin to describe it. And it makes me SO SO SO grateful never to have been involved in dating, and potentially have any contact with creeps like this.
::thinks back to yesterday’s hug-in-the-park::
::says prayer of thanks to Ceiling Cat or whoever might be listening::
“or someone so attractive that just being touched by such a guy sends you into happy orbit.”
I am just loving that description! 😀
Don’t worry, I got the “women like assholes” thing!
Though I confess my evil brain thought “Only if I’m holding a vibrator at the time.”
@Wonderwoman and everyone else who wonders what the point is with having one-night-stands when there’s masturbation to be had:
As a woman who’s had plenty of one-night-stands in my youth, my reason was that it’s just way more exciting and therefore arousing to go home with another person than by yourself. Maybe more men than women feel that way, and if so, there’s another reason why it would be harder for the average man than the average woman to get one-night-stands.
Still, it’s not the end of the world not to get laid, and not getting laid doesn’t excuse being an asshole.
hehe Kittehserf, I can definitely think of a few men that would apply to… like if Joe Manganiello http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542133/?ref_=sr_1 wanted to for some strange reason have sex with me and he was a horrible lay (obviously this is just speculation), I would jump through flaming firey hoops to say YES because holy god, I could probably just have an orgasm being a couple of feet away from him. Like… I don’t know if you’ve heard of those women who can have an orgasm just by THINKING about dirty things? But… if that’s some latent ability I’m pretty freaking sure that Joe Manganiello would just magically turn that ability on in me. And if not… we’d be so close to it that who the hell cares? Cigarette please?
And… I wish the “women like assholes” thing would just die. Because… no we don’t.
re: the one night stands… did you expect and have orgasms regularly from them or was what you liked about it a totally different thing? Like I get how the right guy even touching you in the right way is its own brand of excitement for many.
@Dvärghundspossen and I didn’t type your name out in reply because I didn’t know how I should type it with my likelihood of misspelling it and the dots over the A, then I discovered the magic of copy/paste so we’re all good now.
@Wonderwoman again: And when it comes to the odds of pregnancy and STDS:, they are NOT significantly high with proper protection. Like, for people who do proper condom use and have regular intercourse the probability of getting pregnant over the course of a YEAR is a couple of percent, the probability of getting pregnant at a single intercourse is like super-super-tiny. If you’re also on the pill the pregnancy risk is to tiny that it can hardly be measured. (When it comes to STD:s I don’t have any probability numbers in my head right now.)
Regarding the odds of having an orgasm that really varies a lot between persons, you can’t just take the percentage of women getting orgasms from one-night-stands and assume that accurately represents the probability of a given woman having one. And maybe some people think getting it on with a stranger is super-exciting and therefore worth it even if an orgasm wouldn’t result?
Seriously, I don’t think this was your INTENT, but your post DOES come off as a bit slut-shaming – not as saying that sluts are evil or filthy, but as saying that sluts are stupid girls who just don’t REALIZE they’d be better off masturbating on their own than having one-night-stands.
“Still, it’s not the end of the world not to get laid, and not getting laid doesn’t excuse being an asshole.”
The one thing that MRAs and PUAs will never get through their thick skulls!
I guess the thing that makes no sense for me is the claims by characters like Eurocreep that they want to alleviate loneliness, but how does a one-night stand do anything for that, especially when it’s obvious he doesn’t like women at all? I confess this one’s a bit hard for me to wrap my head around, because to me “intimacy” and “stranger” are two words that just don’t go together at all; intimacy is about love and friendship, and the physical desire is just part of that. I can understand the fun and excitement of going home with someone you’re attracted to, sure, but not how that – if it’s a one-night stand – is supposed to help something like loneliness. I guess it’s just a matter of different perspectives, or maybe even libido levels.
/thinking out loud
@Wonderwoman: You replied while I typed my post. 🙂 I’m gonna stick to writing about one-night-stands in a sort of general way rather than going into details when it comes to my own experiences since I’m not actually anonymous here. 🙂
Regarding my name, I’ve used it on a lot of Swedish dog boards as well as a blog I have where I mostly write about dog stuff, and then just brought it with me to Manboobs. It means “the toy dog posse”. It’s taken from something people used to say when I lived in a neighbourhood where most people had pitbull mixes, while I had three toy dogs. They were a little pack with lots of attitude, they always had their chests puffed out and their heads held high on walking past our neighbours’ much bigger dogs, and one neighbour girl would always go “Look! Here comes the toy dog posse!”. 🙂
@Dvärghundspossen
I don’t assume one-night stands would be pointless, but Eurosabra seems to think of women as something to be overcome to get sex or w/e, like you have to gaslight them b/c if they knew you they wouldn’t want to sleep with you…
I’m guessing done right, one-night stands can be average to fun. But in Eurosabra’s context, I don’t get the point.
@Kitten: Yeah, one-night-stands as a cure for loneliness does seem a weird idea…
@Fade: Yeah, despising the gender you’re having the one-night-stands with would seem to take the fun out of it.
In theory a one night stand in which you make a genuine connection with someone could help with loneliness, but when you get the other person into bed via manipulation and deception? Not seeing how that would help at all.
@Dvärghundspossen re: STDs and pregnancy, I think that’s an individual woman judgment thing… i.e. some people consider the pleasures they get from casual sex to be more than the risk of STDs or pregnancy and some people don’t. Probably the ones who find the risks less scary or big compared to what they personally get out of casual sex have more casual sex and the ones who think the other way have less. That’s not a moral judgment on either, just a “different people rate and scale things differently”.
And re: the excitement of a stranger… yeah I can get behind that and see how that would be exciting and why someone would be really into that factor with or without orgasm.
And yeah that was NOT what I meant. I was trying to figure out WHAT women are getting out of casual sex and why they might be more picky in their partners than guys would (Something other people in this thread have also pointed out, they just didn’t say it in a way that came across as slut shaming. But seriously I don’t care WHAT other women do… I just personally don’t find casual sex to be something I would want to engage in. But again, I don’t care what other women do as long as that’s what they really want to do and they weren’t manipulated or coerced into it.)
For ME masturbating would be better than ANY casual sex. Obviously for a lot of women masturbating is better than indiscriminate casual sex (not that I’m suggesting you or anybody else here is having ‘indiscriminate’ casual sex). My point is just… that most people in this thread have stated and acknowledged that women “tend to be” more discriminating in who they will have casual sex with for various reasons. My guess is that if these women are really horny but no guy meets whatever bar they’ve set… they’re going to just go home and masturbate and be okay with that because it’s preferable to sleeping with someone they find unappealing, given all the other factors. (Again, which others have mentioned in this thread and not been ‘called to task’ for.)
@kittehserf that’s what I was thinking… “I’m lonely but I hate you!!!” How does THAT work. MRA’s like to call women “hamsters” but this sounds very much like a “hamster running around in a wheel” thing to me.
@Dvärghundspossen I love dogs. Re: you not sharing personal details, I totally respect that, I was just curious because you said something about liking something that I don’t really have a personal frame of reference for and I just wanted to understand what it was for you. Again, not slut shaming or judging, just trying to understand from the perspective of someone so outside that thought process. i.e. some people say they like things like peanut butter and mayonaise which I don’t get at all… but… it’s not a character flaw to like something I don’t like. Nor am I implying that it is.
Thanks for the explanation, Wonderwoman. Btw, I’m a Kantian, so I think intent does matter. 🙂
And I shouldn’t shame people either who think that even a small pregnancy/STD-risk makes it not worth it. Everyone has to judge for themselves, hopefully based on facts though rather than some conservative propaganda, but still judge for themselves, what risks they are willing to take.
But yeah, if women are, on average, less interested than men in one-night-stands, that could be explained by less women than men getting orgasms/sexual pleasure overall out of one-night-stands, besides the higher rape risk and more slut shaming directed at women.
And yeah, that “indiscriminate” thing is what people don’t get when they go “women can get sex any time they like!”. I suppose that’s true if you WERE completely indiscriminate, but I think it’s true for men as well that they could get sex any time they liked if they had NO standards WHATSOEVER but were literally prepared to sleep with ANYONE, no matter how desperate/smelly/scary and so on that other person is. If there’s gonna be a point in talking about how easy/not-easy it is for men vs women to get one-night-stands we have to set the bar a little bit higher than that. I’m willing to grant that it’s still easier for women than for men due to reasons mentioned above, but that’s a far cry from “women can get it any time they want” and “it’s super duper difficult for all men”.
Dvärghundspossen – to begin with, we were talking more about how MRAs and PUAs behave, and Eurosabra’s carrying-on about the effort to get sex, his claims of being lonely, and his garbage about it being easier for women to get casual sex, quite ignoring the downsides for women (not all women are conventionally attractive; the dangers involved; the likelihood of the sex being meh for many). It wasn’t about slut-shaming or why women should just masturbate, it was about why men like Eurosabra are of the get-laid-or-die mindset, and why masturbation never seems to enter the equation when it’s the Precious Peen that seems to be the be-all and end-all for these guys who don’t like women one little bit.
If anything I said came across as slut-shaming or shading that way, I apologise.
@WonderWoman – that Joe Manganiello is a handsome bloke. He looks like a more mature Keanur Reeves, around the eyes. (My mind’s eye pic of KR is from his Dracula era; I’ve only seen him in two films.)
Naturally I can’t resist putting up a pic of Mr Two Feet Away.
I don’t orgasm from just thinking about stuff but I sure as hell get weak at the knees on occasion. Somewhat inconvenient when a memory strikes while I’m en route to work! 😛