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).
Search costs? What does he think he’s doing, looking for a house or car to buy?
And “courtship”? Seriously? What
decadecentury is he living in?Feck, a seventeenth-century man has a more up-to-date attitude to relationships than Dudblock.
Terminally Unattractive: Thrash metal
Two Logical Ways: Electronica duo
Bad Bets for Courtship: Country blues. Their greatest hit: “Wasting Resources on the Wrong Women.”
Early Thirties White Women: All-female garage rock band. Their greatest hit: “Not Seriously Looking for a Husband (We Just Wanna Rock)”
“that the risk of divorce is lower if you marry younger”
It could also be true if you consider all marriages and not just first marriages. Second or third marriages with the prior ended with divorce have ( I think) a higher risk of divorce. and also happen at a higher age.
Terminally unattractive = all MRAs, PUAs, MGTOW, etc. They could be the ultimate distillation of male beauty physically and they’d still be terminally unattractive.
I also wasn’t aware that “unattractive” was a terminal condition. Being “ugly” doesn’t usually kill a person, the way, say heart disease or cancer does.
Consumers of Courtship – Doo-wop
Risk of Rejection – Punk
Terminally Unattractive – Emo (2nd album – Incel Blues)
Extended Delay of Marriage – Improv Jazz
Debasing Marriage – Psychobilly
Freebasing Marriage – Trance
Freemage, it appears that someone forgot to oil the otters.
Apparently “being unattractive to men who can barely hide their pedophilic tendencies” is deadly for women.
This lot are terminally unattractive to me in the senses that they’re going to be repulsive lifelong. I don’t want to add the other half of that thought, it might be triggering.
Doesn’t it not matter if women are “terminally unattractive” anyway since we can all apparently get laid no problem?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
baileyrenee – good point, and aren’t the guys trying to get married just betas anyway, grateful for the alphas’ leavings?
Hey, I have that single!
Kitteh – I guess the logic is betas = marry whoever they happen to love, Alphas = marry for BioTruths?
If we’re terminally unattractive past the age of (whatever) does that mean that wrinkles literally kill?
(I await the explanation as to how people whose ugliness is supposed to kill can get laid any time they want, no problem.)
chibigodzilla: I’m adding my “BWAHAHAHAHAHA!” Zing!
And what’s that saying? “Beauty is only skin deep, but stupid goes all the way to the bones.” I think that applies nicely to Mr. Dalrock.
If wrinkles were death rays for misogynists, I’d never bother with foundation again.
I must say, when Terminally Unattractive (Thrash Metal) and Terminally Unattractive (Emo) collaborated for A Courtship Perspective (Less Attractive) it was ambitious, but ultimately not the best work from either group.
Even Ron White knows better than these guys:
(Still some eye-rolling parts, but for the most part, pretty good, Ron)
Random but does anyone have the link to that beaver trying to cross the road? Someone posted it here and I want it for FemBorg’s cuteness section. (Thanks for the cute banhammer!)
This one?
A Courtship Perspective (Less Attractive) was met with tepid reviews and a general round of head scratching from music critics.
I would listen to Early Thirties White Women, most definitely. I’d also probably enjoy Two Logical Ways, as long all the tunes were intrumentals.
In other news, Nutmeg just unplugged my modem. Bad kitty!
Without wanting to gazump your blog, I wrote a response to Dalrock on my blog. Basically, I think the solution to the cost/benefit dilemma he raises is to dump American dating rituals altogether and take up British ones – head down to the pub with your mates and all get wasted and see who you’ve landed in bed with the next morning. Much cheaper and less chance of rejection!
I had an entire poem typed up and stuff, but it boiled down to “Ehgads, so wrong”, so I’ll just write that:
Ehgads, so wrong.
—
The “solution” to the “Cost / benefit” dillemma he raises is to realize that “Cost / benefit” is bullshit when applied to social rituals as designed to create social events. It’s bad enough to yammer on about a sexual market place, once you start talking marriage market place (MMP!? MMP!!??!? There are not enough expression marks to express my withering inability to comprehend just how much someone saying that does not understand anything even approaching economics).
Terms like “inflation” and “investment” and “supply and demand” and “pareto optimality” and “consumers” and “producers” and “price elasticity of demand” and “Keyneesian macro economic expansion” and “Neo-classical understanding of labor market forces confluxing with wage stickiness and market instability” has no place when talking about sex, and much, much less of a place when you talk about things like marriage, wherein two people decided to do something together that is a social ritual with very little cost.
I’m going to type out a very, very long blog post one day about why this is all wrong, if it keeps coming up. And then I’d have to get a blog. And then i’d have a vehicle for my own ongoing talking, and then I’d frankly just never stop q: