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).
@paradoxical
… yep, that makes just as much sense as anything bystander said. Which is to say none at all.
@Paradoxical Intention
What…how does that…abortions? How does gay marriage cause abortions? This is so confusing.
The Conservative motion in the United States seems to go something like this: If we don’t like something, then it must also cause another thing we don’t like and our constituency is deathly afraid of! Because the devil!
I see the word ‘scholars’ is now getting thrown around very… loosely.
900,000 abortions is so specific, too. Where the hell did they get that number?
Your approach to 50 Shades of Grey and the subject of History is pretty much the same, but you probably know about the former since you’ve been absolutely butchering the latter this entire thread.
I always get a kick out of how much MRAs love their completely ineffectual “Checkmate, feminist” talking point. Jeremy Irons. Heh.
Banana Cake Jackie: I’m thinking he got those statistics from a study conducted by the Institute of His Ass
Here’s a synopsis of his “argument,” from a Washington Post Op-Ed.
So yeah. Basically talking out his ass.
@Sparky
So there’s 900,000 women who would have sex out of marriage and decide to abort spontaneously if the men and women who never wanted to screw people of the opposite sex decide to marry? So millions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, whoever would come out of the closet to marry someone they love that happen to have the same genital configuration instead of marrying a beard when same sex marriage is legalized?
Okay then.
Schaerr needs to leave my hometown outta their bullshit. : /
Just out of curiosity, I did some research into the actual marriage and divorce rates in the US and found this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=5&abt=0002&abg=0
MARRYING FOR LOVE. THE HORROR.
According to the CDC, the rates of divorce are in fact dropping. So are the rates of marriage (though they’ve stabilized since 2009), mostly because people are waiting longer and not marrying just for survival.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm
Granted, there are other factors at play, like socioeconomic status (tied closely to educational level also), but the overall trend looks good, not apocalyptic.
It’s telling how fixated you are on the idea that women must be perpetually happy, and if they aren’t, they should just suffer quietly while acting outwardly cheerful and pleasing. Feminists pointing out injustice, sometimes in an angry way, clearly bothers you. You see this as a grave threat to society, because it threatens your own well-being. You don’t want to have to feel uncomfortable about subjugating another human being. No, much better to fool yourself with a bunch of self-serving misconceptions about “what women really want”. You’d rather live under the illusion that women are happy waiting on men hand and foot, sexing men multiple times a day no matter how tired or sad or sick they feel, having no say in where they live or whether their parents are cared for, being utterly dependent on the man’s whim for their very survival.
That isn’t a marriage, it’s slavery, and you’re heaping insult on injury by asking women to go along with you and cheerfully place their happiness and self-esteem on the back burner so you can be king, guilt free.
Furthermore, if women “instinctively submit to men”, then why did women stop doing that as soon as they were no longer forced to by law and custom? Why did we even need those laws and customs in the first place?
You know, there’s over 300 million people in the USA and around 75 million of those are under the age of 18 so 900,000 is definitely not a generation’s worth. That’s not even 5%. That’s 1.33%. These people don’t math.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
You. Are. A. Terrible. Person. That is an awful thing to say about kind and loving men.
Divorce. My husband and I have been together for almost 40 years and married for most of those. Both of us were previously married. Obviously those marriages were unhappy, in my case because of abuse. Which raises an interesting statistic.
No fault divorce, what’s the interesting side effect of that? There’s one startling statistic. Once women were able to freely leave unhappy marriages, there was a steep decline in the rate of women killing their husbands. It turns out they weren’t evil people who wanted to murder men, they were desperate people who saw no other way out of their terrible situations. Once the law opened the door, most of them left rather than take the extreme option. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for men murdering their wives and partners. That rate has also declined, but only at the same steady rate as other violent crime has declined in the last 4 decades.
Money. When we married, my husband was the one with an irregular income and masses of debts and obligations. I was the one with the well paying permanent job and the house (but with an increased mortgage from having to pay half the value to my previous husband despite the fact that he was a profligate drunkard who’d contributed far less than half – but that’s the way marriage and divorce work).
And we’ve managed just fine. Most of the time we’ve both earned reasonable to good money. Sometimes one or other of us had little to no income, but we managed. We raised two wonderful children who are now responsible adults with partner/ spouse and jobs of their own. None of this would have happened if we’d been unable to divorce our way out of our previous marriages.
Love. Almost 40 years and we’re still deeply in love. Nobody obeys anybody. Sex is wonderful and always has been. Strangely enough, neither my husband nor I insist on sex when the other is not interested. Sometimes it’s timing – when one of us simply suggests waiting until morning or evening or whatever. There are other times when it’s just not on – after a birth or a miscarriage for example, or when one of us is unwell or distressed about something. Illness or death of a parent or friend, or worries at work, or any of the hundred other things that detract from libido or lust – but not from love. We’ve had to “work around” my permanent pain issues ever since my pregnancies having had a disastrous, permanent effect on my joints. When you love someone rather than merely insisting on having sex with them, you can manage to both have sex and take loving care of your partner’s physical pain/problems.
Sharing housework, childcare, cooking and everything else isn’t difficult when both people want it to work for everyone. One thing I’d suggest if you really love someone, learn CPR. I only know one other person who’s had to revive a dead-at-my-feet partner, but love and adrenaline are wonderful things when they combine with knowing what to do. Getting your partner back afterwards is a marvelous thing.
tl:dr Marriage isn’t about one or another person winning anything except when both of you win deeper mutual love and affection.
One thing you’ve never mentioned in your depiction of marriage. Fun! I see no sign of fun or playfulness or intellectual stimulation, let alone a mutual admiration society, in your ideas about marriage. Fun, silliness, arguments about books and music and politics. Where are they in your grey little world of duties, obligations, sex on demand and other forms of obedience?
I once met a lesbian minister. I bet that would blow Irritable bowel boy’s little mind.
IBB is banned for homophobia, rape apologia, probably five other things I haven’t seen yet since I’m not caught up on the thread. Sorry I didn’t get to him sooner; I was, er, napping. (My sleep schedule is very weird.) Thanks to the commenter who emailed me!
I’m a little late to the party, but there’s a nice little Bible story in Acts 5 that throws doubt on the whole “it’s Christian for wives to submit to their husbands ALL THE TIME” thing:
This man named Ananias sold a piece of property and gave some money to the disciple Peter, pretending it was all the money from the land, while really he kept some back for himself. Peter called him out for having “lied to God” and Ananias dropped dead.
Then Ananias’ wife Sapphira came along, not knowing what had happened, and Peter asked her too whether the money was the whole price they’d gotten. (Side note: it’s almost as if he was treating her like a person with her own agency!) Anyway, she lied too, so Peter said she’d drop dead too, and she did.
While it’s not exactly the most comforting reading, you could say that Sapphira was submitting to her husband by agreeing to cover for him. And presumably God smote her dead.
But what do I know? Since it was a money thing, it was probably all her idea, because all women want is money, unless they’re busy submitting to men. Right? Makes sense?
Thank you David. We still love you.
Oh, and what’s if I interpret “submission” like submitting a book proposal? Like, “Here, dear, I offer you my snotty Kleenex for your consideration?”
I’d like to throw this out there wrt wives submitting to their husbands:
https://defeatingthedragons.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/complementarianism-and-the-genesis-fall/
My father didn’t give me away at my wedding. My husband didn’t ask for dad’s permission to propose to me or get married. Hell, our parents had nothing to do with our meeting or dating. We’ve managed fourteen years, the deaths of three parents, and a serious illness that ended up requiring a radical hysterectomy for me. I don’t obey him, he doesn’t obey me, and we’ve been poor as hell for most of our marriage.
My sister got pregnant by accident (despite being at least as paranoid about bc as I was). She and the father got married just last year. My nephew was the ring bearer.
My parents were married for seven years before they had me. If cancer hadn’t taken dad, they would have more than forty years together. So: three examples of happily married couples that look nothing like Troolboy says marriage should look like. Could it be that he’s full of shit?
That sounds like the beginning of a limerick.
I once met a lesbian minister
Whose existence was awfully sinister.
Of the times she’s a sign
So you’d best toe the line
Or you’ll end up with cats as a spin(i)ster.
Praise be to Dark Lord David! That asshole was really stinking up the place.
What I don’t get is why it matters so damn much to these people. Like, okay, more people are getting divorced now than before. If your marriage is so perfect and happy, WHY DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER COUPLES DO? What difference does it make? If the vile heathens ruin their lives with their sinful ways, how does that affect YOU?
Well, actually, I know the reason why; these guys are scared shitless that they won’t get the obedient sex slave/maid that had always been promised to their forefathers. Because they’re scared that women who have more of a choice than sex slave or starvation will never lower themselves to being involved with these sacks of shit. That their sex slave might get uppity ideas from other, free women and escape with these easy divorce laws that are on the books now.
Also, illegitimacy has nothing to do with Detroit’s decline. Here are some real things that did:
– The decline of Michigan as the auto manufacturing capitol of the US
– Predatory lending practices that led to massive numbers of foreclosures when the housing market collapsed.
– Generational corruption and indifference in the city government.
– State officials ignoring the crisis potential.
And yes, I live in Michigan, on the opposite side of the state.
It’s cool David, you do you. :3 We need you healthy and well-rested if you are to spread the word of The Almighty Furrinati!
I’m frustrated that he’s gone before he even addressed most of the awesome critiques of his worldview that so many regulars took the time to write. That’s just a crime.
…but I know he was intentionally choosing not to address those points. It just irritates me is all. Such a cheap cop out.
I did enjoy reading the responses of everyone who isn’t the troll, for what it’s worth. It’s nice to have generous doses of intellect and comedy to soothe the rage. <3