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.
Aaaand I’ve been ninjaed by the world in general! 😛
@Cassandra:
Yeah, and what starts out as a one-night-stand can also lead to an LTR, in which case you would be less lonely afterwards. I’ve had two LTR:s that started out that way, and there’s one girl whom I first just had sex with and then we ended up friends (and we’re still at least Facebook-friends and keep in touch that way sixteen years later). However, it’s hard to see how this could follow if you start out manipulating the person into bed PUA-style.
FWIW, for me it was the inability to tell in advance if the sex was going to be any good that always put me off one night stands. If that part could have been guaranteed I’d have done it a lot more often.
The way PUAs talk about sex totally reinforces the idea that it’s unlikely to be any fun for the woman.
LOL for me there is “no” level of risk worth it for casual sex, and I guess it’s because for me sex is a love thing. I need to feel secure and loved by the person first. I tried casual sex one time and really really didn’t like it and really regreted it. Supposedly it was supposed to be this awesome experience but it just wasn’t and actually I DID have an orgasm because he knew where the clitoris was! But… I just really hated it, because it didn’t fulfill the more important needs to me in sex which are emotional/love/caring. I really just want sex inside relationships. So… not for me and not something I think I would ever do again, but again, me not liking something doesn’t mean other people aren’t allowed to or that they are bad, dirty, or wrong if they do.
But having said that… I think it’s obvious that really the STD and pregnancy risk isn’t “why” I don’t do it. I guess it’s just easy to ALSO say… well and why would I take those risks if I don’t want to do this thing? But I think even without those things even existing I probably wouldn’t want to do it. I’m not sure I even realized that until just now, so thanks!
And you’re right re: indiscriminate… I mean does ANYBODY really have “indiscriminate” casual sex? Probably not! I mean all these PUA’s want to bang “hot chicks”. They could probably get laid if they aimed for something more reasonable compared to what they themselves bring to the table.
And I agree re: the views about the exaggeration of women “getting it whenever they want”… AND something I just thought of… one of the MRA whines is that women see men as these ravening sex beasts who have no feelings and yet… um… well… yeah… not ‘men’, but PUA’s um… yeah. Isn’t that what that subgroup largely boils down to? “The most important thing in the universe is sex!!!” Yeah.
Yeah, this all comes back to “if a PUA claims to be lonely, why the hell is he using PUA techniques at all?” I would think they’d guarantee continued loneliness, at least if he’s after an LTR with a woman.
@Kittehserf yes that’s what I was trying to say (but failing because I think i was trying to say too many things at once and it came out garbled.) Basically that… it never occurs to these types of men to masturbate for sexual release… but I think it would to most women. i.e. if a guy who met whatever standard she was looking for wasn’t available. I’m not aware of any women who find occasional masturbation instead of random sex to be a horrible travesty. But some may exist and if so that’s okay too.
And Bwahahahaha OMG I am not into KR so now you have ruined JM for me!!! 😛
So, I get it that nobody tried to slut-shame anyone. 🙂 However, regarding this discussion… I just remembered this lovely chart… http://manboobz.com/2011/07/14/chart-breakers/ (Not David’s venn diagram, but the Susan Walsh chart below). I clicked on it to enlarge it and it’s just… hilarious in its stupidity. Firstly, you can’t choose both “used a condom” and “habitual promiscuity” at the beginning, since they’re on two different strands. If you do choose “habitual promiscuity” then “marriage eliminated or delayed” just FOLLOWS, as if this were a law of nature. Hey… I got married at 24! And it just gets more and more stupid the more you try to follow her weird lines…
@kittehserf I’m developing this suspicion that “lonely” to a PUA simply means wanting to have sex with a person instead of his hand and not the actual dictionary definition of lonely that the rest of us have come to understand.
One might compare this to cars. A person who’s already opposed to cars, for instance, a person who lives in the city and also takes being environmentally friendly seriously and therefore always rides the underground and commuter trains rather than a car may also say “and besides, this and that many people are killed in car accidents every year!”. However, if you, for various reasons thinks it’s really handy for you to own a car and occasionally drive it places, you’re unlikely to abstain from it due to the risks involved.
It’s not precisely the same thing, since causal sex is something you do for enjoyment while riding a car is more something you do for convenience, but it’s still a bit of an analogue.
@WonderWoman – “And I agree re: the views about the exaggeration of women “getting it whenever they want”… AND something I just thought of… one of the MRA whines is that women see men as these ravening sex beasts who have no feelings and yet… um… well… yeah… not ‘men’, but PUA’s um… yeah. Isn’t that what that subgroup largely boils down to? “The most important thing in the universe is sex!!!” Yeah.”
THIS! They demonstrate all the fucking time that they just want to orgasm inside a woman’s body and don’t give a damn how they do it, whether by manipulation, physical attack (the whole “kino escalation” is assault as far as I’m concerned) or whatever, and then have the hide to complain that we have a poor opinion of them and their precious fee-fees? They can walk on legos forever.
“And Bwahahahaha OMG I am not into KR so now you have ruined JM for me!!!”
I totally take it back! He’s not like KR in any way shape or form!
::retires to corner of shame::
Hasn’t it been pretty well documented that the people who’re focused on “purity” are the ones least likely to use condoms?
@Cassandra: Yeah I think so. Because they plan to completely abstain, therefore don’t get condoms, and then they succumb to temptation anyway, have no condom ready and do it without one.
“@kittehserf I’m developing this suspicion that “lonely” to a PUA simply means wanting to have sex with a person instead of his hand and not the actual dictionary definition of lonely that the rest of us have come to understand.”
That makes sense, given how we’ve seen that dictionaries are things these clowns only use if they want to strip a word of all its social context in order to misuse it, or pretend it has no misogynistic/racist/ableist meaning at all.
okay wow… that diagram is just slightly overwrought. What’s wrong with just saying: “I don’t want to have casual sex, I’m not into it?” This reads to me like… she doesn’t like or want it for whatever reason, but whatever her reason was wasn’t ENOUGH so she had to make like 42 other reasons to show how she’s “right”. (But opinions aren’t facts, and I’m starting to think the internet at large doesn’t grok this.) And so since she’s “right” and has 42 reasons, everybody else is wrong and bad and evil and leading to the destruction of civilization as we know it. Alrighty then.
Does she think she’s going to be peer pressured by feminists into having casual sex? My understanding is that consent is this pretty big thing so if someone says: “No, I don’t want to do that” nobody’s going to coerce and manipulate them from the feminist side of things.
I think some people really aren’t happy unless all human beings think and behave just like them. If there’s any variation OMG Apocalypse!
Maybe I’ve just been super lucky to be around responsible people or something, but in my experience all of the people I’ve known who sleep around have been pretty devoted condom users. So this chart you’re talking about confuses me.
@Dvärghundspossen No, I get what you’re saying. That’s true. People tend to make a decision based on one thing, and then come up with more things that support that choice ‘in addition’ to their original reasoning. I wonder if it’s a human tendency to come up with “extra reasons” you do or don’t want or plan to do something because you’re afraid someone might not take you seriously or will “shoot you down” somehow? It’s a pre-emptive strike maybe? I don’t know. I know Walsh took it to insanity level 11 though.
Like, i think in the back of my mind that I have to say the pregnancy/STD things… (even though I really am probably overly paranoid about these issues anyway), to JUSTIFY the fact that I just want to have sex with love with it. Because I guess I feel like that by itself sounds “lame” and someone might mock me for it. So if I’m like OMG health threat! They’ll respect my feelings on it.
kittehserf Can you give me a very brief summary of what Kino Escalation is? I know I could Google it, but it’s too late at night to get pissed off and I have a feeling I’d get pissed off by what I’d find.
“and then have the hide to complain that we have a poor opinion of them and their precious fee-fees? They can walk on legos forever.” <——- LMAO!!!!!
Did I celebrity-shame you? 😛 Actually I'm not even going to ask because I know I did.
Oh, now I remember this chart. Note that there’s only one path that doesn’t end in DISASTER. Odd that the worst outcome I ever experienced as a result of casual sex was waking up with a hangover and not being sure what the quickest route home would be. Um…one time I didn’t get back till really late and my cat got mad at me?
@Cassandra Well, that’s just negligence on Walsh’s part… where is her Cat anger consequence!?!?! I mean… women should be warned about potential cat anger.
@Wonderwoman: Yeah, I think it’s a thing that you try to come up with “extra” reasons. Like, I don’t want to have kids. And people often have a hard time really getting this. When I was younger (I’m 36 now), they’d think I’d change my mind when I got older. (Since I’ve been married since 24 I haven’t had the opportunity to get a lot of “you’ll change your mind when you meet Mr Right” – otherwise my understanding is that this is quite common.) Now everyone thinks I’m bound to change my mind because I’ve just gotten this adorable nephew. But I still don’t want a child of my own. Sometimes I’ve made the mistake of saying that I can’t have kids because I’m on psych meds that you really really shouldn’t take while pregnant. But that just comes off as me REALLY wanting kids deep down but telling myself that I don’t want to because I can’t – so it’s really a stupid thing to say, and still, sometimes I’ve said it out of some sort of desperation when people don’t seem to take my simple “I don’t want to” seriously.
I guess people sometimes can fail to take “I only want to have sex with people I love” seriously, since particularly when it comes to sex, lots of people are really prone to taking their own case and extrapolating to everyone. I mean, it happens on both sides! People who only want to have sex in a loving relationship sometimes assume that people (or at least women) who do one-night-stands do it simply because they have low self-esteem and can’t say “no”. And people who like one-night-stands sometimes assume that people who never have those are just repressed or something.
Here’s my worst consequence of a one-night-stand: I was at a party, and I planned to go home fairly early since I was going to work next day. But I met this guy who was SO HOT and ended up going home with him instead. And ended up FORGETTING ABOUT WORK! Woke up really late next day at his place, and… well… I was just a temp at that job, and they didn’t want me back afterwards.
Thinking about this still makes me cringe with embarrassment to this very day. I can tell myself that I was only nineteen and everyone’s immature at that age and yada-yada… but I still think that was a really bad thing to do, since everyone else at that job had to cover up for me just because I wanted to bang a hot guy.
But in the world of conservatives, all negative consequences of sex has to be directly sex-related, so that the old saying “sin is its own punishment” will fit.
The wrath of the cat is far scarier than any of the crap she’s trying to use to bully women into compliance. He got between the duvet and the duvet cover and attacked my feet from there when I was falling asleep, knowing full well that there was no way for me to kick him out of bed while he was in there.
YES re: extrapolating one’s one situation to others. And I’m sure we’re all guilty of it at times (not necessarily on this topic but there are all sorts of life situations.) I am sure there are still areas where I think on a right/wrong dichotomy where it doesn’t really apply.
re: kids… same here. My husband and I both don’t want them. And I have like a ZILLION reasons why not. And probably the reason why I have so many reasons is because I really do LIKE kids, but I don’t want to be a parent. (for about a zillion reasons). But when people see how much kids like me and how much I like kids they don’t really get why I don’t want kids… so I feel like I have to be armed with thirty billionty reasons so they won’t just brush my feelings aside after seeing how “awesome I am with their kid”. I’m happy to be an aunt or a godmother or a babysitter but I don’t want to be a mother.
While I think my long list of reasons are logical and true for me… I don’t want to be a mother. I think if I wanted to be a mother I would find ways around all of those reasons because of my need and want to be a mother.
Though with a lot of people now when they ask I just have reverted to saying: “I really like kids and enjoy being around them but I don’t want to be a parent.” Because if I list all my reasons someone is going to feel “judged” and then it’s just going to be drama and hurt feelings all around, so why not keep it simple and friendly?
Though… by saying “I really like kids” I also am aware there are other childfree who really do NOT like kids but feel some women say they like kids but don’t want them so they don’t sound evil. But I really DO like kids, LOL. And I don’t often get that annoyed by little kids being little kids in public. But I also get that some women do NOT even LIKE kids and that’s okay, too. I mean not everybody likes anything.
And re: the casual sex thing… yes I don’t want to be seen as some repressed, judgmental, prude, because I’m not. And since I’m married and monogamous, this issue of casual sex hasn’t really come up that much for me in recent years. 😛
Celebrity-shaming LOL! Nah, it was the “spoiling someone else’s WHOA HOT STUFF guy with reference to someone they don’t like at all” corner of shame.
IIRC “kino escalation” essentially means uninvited and unwanted touching of a woman they’re trying to pick up, and persisting and getting more invasive with it. Groping or assault, in my lexicon.
Wow, that chart is so fucked up that “fucked up” doesn’t even describe it. All out-of-wedlock children end up violent criminals? All “habitual promiscuity” means decreasing fertility and no children? (Except those OOW ones, of course.)
Still it was worth clicking through just to see David’s comment about Miles Davis standing in a pond while playing trumpet. Or not.
@Cassandra – “Um…one time I didn’t get back till really late and my cat got mad at me?”
Well if you don’t count that as a disaster all I can say is your moral compass is totally skewed.
Haha, just checked out dear chart-makers homepage, what an insanely misogynistic piece of shit (and how tragic that it’s written by a woman): http://www.hookingupsmart.com/