Dalrock, a manosphere traditionalist with a great love of charts and statistics and other accoutrements of SCIENCE, has managed to figure out a way to stretch “don’t be so picky, ladies, or you’ll get old and ugly and no man will ever want you” out to 1500 words.
Here are a few of them:
Men foot the searching costs in the marriage and sexual marketplace (MMP & SMP). This means bearing most of the risk of rejection and expending the bulk of the resources to facilitate the process of meeting and getting to know one another.
Oh dear. We’re off to a very unpromising start here.
As the ones who bear the costs of courtship, men have a strong incentive to minimize the number of women they court and the overall duration of time spent in the process. However, as the consumers of courtship, women have an incentive to draw the process out as long as possible and to receive courtship from as many men as possible.
Here’s some surveillance footage of an average American woman being courted by several men.
But now — get this — the ladies are waiting longer to marry!
Just think about what this does to the dude navigating the marriage market hoping to “maximize his Pareto efficiency,” if you know what I mean and I think you do.
He needs to manage risk vs reward. When courting, there are two fundamental risks. These are the risk of wasting resources on the wrong women, and the risk of rejection harming the man’s reputation/MMV.
So watch out, ladies, because if you wait too long, guys are going to decide you’re not much of a bargain!
For a man who is managing the risks of courtship outlined above, the age of a woman is very important. The older a woman is, the more likely it is that she is very picky and/or not seriously looking for a husband.
Exactly! Because women never change their mind because they’re, you know, in a different stage of their life or anything.
Older women also are less attractive from a courtship perspective because they have used up more of their most attractive/fertile years, and while their attractiveness for marriage has declined their expectations for courtship have only increased.
This reminds me of that famous joke, you know, where that woman approaches Winston Churchill at a party and says, “Sir, you are drunk.”
And he replies: “And you, Bessie, have used up your most attractive/fertile years. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still have used up your most attractive/fertile years.”
That Churchill, what a card!
Consider the 25% of current early thirties White women who still haven’t married; unless they are terminally unattractive an awful lot of courtship has almost certainly been wasted on them.
Are there really a lot of guys who look back on the women they dated in their twenties and think, “boy, I wasted a lot of courtship on those gals! I mean, I wasted nearly 14 courtship on Jessa alone!” (Also, who knew that the women are always the ones to blame when heterosexual couples in their twenties break up?)
They aren’t just bad bets for courtship today, but (in retrospect) they clearly were bad bets for courtship for the last 15 years. …
Put simply, the extended delay of marriage by women has placed marriage minded men in a dilemma; older women are (generally speaking) known bad bets for courtship, but half of early twenties women are also poor bets for courtship.
Well, you could always marry a dude.
There are only two logical ways men can respond to women’s extension of courtship.
Wait, really? Please, please, please, let one of the ways be “marry a dude.”
The first logical choice is to recognize that these women are debasing marriage, and decide to “court” for sex and not marriage.
Damn. Anyway, sexual relationships are fine, but you are aware that there are other kinds of relationships — sorry, “courting” — besides sex and marriage, right?
Ok, we still have one more. Marry a dude. Marry a dude. Marry a dude.
But while “courting” for sex is a logical choice, it is not a moral choice, and we still do see men courting for marriage. For these men, having a fairly low age cutoff makes a great deal of sense.
That’s your, er, “solution?” Marry a teenager? Or a woman at most in her early twenties?
As Dalrock knows, but doesn’t want to believe, those who marry when they’re very young are much more likely to divorce than those who marry when they’re older. For evidence, see this chart, which I found elsewhere on Dalrock’s own blog:
But hope springs eternal for modern misogynistic manospherian marriage market minded men (MMMMMMM).
Yup. That whole anti-abortion thing just adds layers of squick to an already squicky situation. Hector’s coming across like someone with incest fantasies at this stage.
Truth! 😀
RE: Kittehs
I loathe the idea of calling a lover Daddy or Baby or Mummy or whatever.
It’s funny, where those boundaries lie for people. I never called my father Daddy, and the idea makes me want to run screaming into the sunset. That name is excised from all other usually-parental names in my head, and therefore is okay to use. I will also accept being called ‘baby,’ in select situations by hubby only, because my parents specifically never, ever called me that. If I were to be called anything they called me, I’d flip my shit.
It’s highly variable. And as someone with LOTS of parent issues, the only way I can really soothe myself is the knowledge that ‘daddy’ isn’t necessarily a parent-only term, and wasn’t back in the day. Suffice to say that my actual father is not someone I ever, EVER want to associate with my sex life. EVER.
Is it bad that I think that certain types of incest (e.g. cousin-cousin incest) are okay? I don’t support cross-generational incest (ewwwwww, creepy and inherently abusive), but I don’t see a problem if a brother and a sister (of similar ages) want to get it on with each other, so long as they’re adults and consenting. >_>
You’re not the only one!
It is interesting about boundaries. For me, Daddy, Mummy and any other parental titles are specific, and inapplicable to other situations (except with titles for priests and nuns). There’s a bright, razor-sharp line between anything parental and anything romantic or sexual, for me. Ditto any other family titles – cousin, aunt, brother, sister, whatever.
Baby/babe I doubly dislike, not only for the family association, but for the infantilising. Treating an adult as a child, or implying they are, doesn’t strike me as romantic or protective, but slimy and horrible. I am SO glad Louis never calls me that or anything like it. Mostly he calls me “my lady”. Or “madame” if he’s being smart. Loving and wanting to protect someone and be protected by them does NOT mean one has some sort of pukeologous fake parent-child thing going on.
All I know is I never wanted my husband to call me mommy. And I never wanted to call him daddy .(besides referencing him to a 3rd party that he was the daddy of).
@ Bina
Yep. There are plenty of younger men who I find attractive, and plenty of younger men who hit on me too. Thing is, though, if I was in the market for a new man (or woman) I wouldn’t even consider anyone who didn’t appear to be a competent adult who was quite capable of running their own life without my assistance.
Same here. And I had to swallow my offendedness when a past boyfriend called me “Babes”. All the ooky associations gone plural did not dilute the ookiness….
I never call my husband by anything but his first name . Or sometimes (occasionally) dick head or ass hole. I know I know..I’m a hot head.
I DID go through a “weird” phase one time where I wanted him to call my Scully and I call him “Mulder. But I got over that after the the X-files movie was anti climactic. I got tired of being jerked around.
“Babes”
EEEEWWWWWWWWWWW
I don’t even call the kitties that!
LOL lana, I call Louis a smartarse on occasion, or a PSAH – persistently smart-arse husband.
“Babes” I can live with because I associate it with boarding school, where it was something female friends of similar age called each other. It sounds like a toff thing to me, basically. Whereas if someone called me “baby” I’d give them some side-eye.
Well my husband calls me food. That’s even more gross.
Well even “babes” know how to properly identify an ass hole . Watch “meet the fockers”
Quote:Yup. That whole anti-abortion thing just adds layers of squick to an already squicky situation. Hector’s coming across like someone with incest fantasies at this stage. END
I was trying to lay off of him .Because I know he is already old and lonely looking for a teenager to “marry”. I was thinking (for me anyway) I’m best to try and do what I can to block sex trafficking and especially of minors.
This is probably really weird but “baby” is pretty much the only romantic pet name that I am comfortable with <.<. I guess in my head baby-as-in-infant and baby-as-in-lover feel like totally unrelated homonyms. That's obviously not the case at all, but I just don't mentally connect the two usages unless I'm giving it conscious thought (as I'm doing now)
All the other common pet names are either things that my parents called me or cutesy-wootsy to the point where they feel infantalizing — and yes, I do recognize the irony in saying that.
This is true.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcPoUPTpcps&w=560&h=315]
Cutest scene in the whole thing.
I dated this really nice guy in second year who was uncomfortable with “baby.” He was always trying to think of special things to call me that didn’t set off either of our creep-dars. “Ace” was a frequent one. I would try to do the same back, but I was never as inventive as he was.
I don’t recall my parents using pet names (thank goodness). I go for darling, or darling man, or darling heart, or beloved, with Louis. We tend not to use each other’s actual names unless we’re calling out across the house, or in bed. Odd!
RE: Alice
I don’t see a problem if a brother and a sister (of similar ages) want to get it on with each other, so long as they’re adults and consenting. >_>
Ennnnh. Even between siblings, there can be power dynamics. I’m… I’m on the fence on that, and defer to actual people who have DEALT with that kind of incest, so know more things.
RE: pet names
At first, I couldn’t stand ANY of them. None that could possibly give me any connotations of being female, none that could give any infantilizing connotations, none that were tainted from associations with abusive folks of the past… pretty much, my hubby could call me ‘boo’ and that was it.
So for me, actually being able to use more loaded terms is an incredibly liberating experience. I can use them without my brain making siren noises! I can use the words I’ve always kind of wanted to use but never got to because it was in the middle of a psychological minefield and it was so fucked up and aaaaaughbrainsiren. But now I can! And it’s AWESOME!
Yeah, I’m wary of the power dynamics wrt sibling incest, too, on top of an instant “yech” reaction.
Since the patriarchy thread seems to have fallen over (thank goodness) here’s another go at showing the pic I did at lunchtime. I hope I can persuade Louis to wear this jumper, it is SO GORGEOUS.
http://i.imgur.com/KHxXLJ9.png
I’m aware of the power dynamics, which is why I only limit it to siblings of similar ages, or to cousins of similar ages. I can’t judge them for loving each other romantically though, so long as it’s not cross-generational incest (because power dynamics, ew) and so long as the lovers are adults and are consenting. To me, telling a couple that their relationship is wrong just because they happen to be cousins or something is akin to telling a couple that their relationship is wrong because they have multiple partners, or because they’re dating someone of the “wrong” gender. It seems hypocritical otherwise.
I will happily defer to someone who is or has been in a consensual incest relationship, though. But this is my current opinion.
RE pet names: The only pet name that I’ve ever gotten was “Big Sister”, and that’s only because that’s traditionally how children are addressed in Chinese households.
That’s funny – my sister and I have taken to calling each other Big Sister and Little Sister in our emails in recent years.
Mind you when I think of Big Sister I think of a brand of tinned puddings. 😛
kittehs – XD I’m so used to being called “Big Sister” at my house that it’s actually jarring to hear my parents refer to me by my legal name. In fact, my mother didn’t even know exactly what my legal name was for years.
That sounds straight out of Pratchett … 😯