By David Futrelle
There comes a time in every Jordan Peterson fanboy’s life when he starts to think about settling down with a high quality female for mating purposes.
And so one such fan recently turned to the Jordan Peterson subreddit to ask his fellow lobsters (yes, they call themselves that) to ask for some help with his mating math. At what age, he asked, should a man who is “progressing up the hierarchy ” allow himself “to be peeled off by a female” seeking marriage?
jtillery32 laid out his dilemma, noting first that
JP has often said women mate across and up [the] competence hierarchy. … Which is patently true. The problem that leaves me (and I’m sure a bunch of other lobsters vying for position) with is wondering when the appropriate time to allow yourself to be peeled off by a female.
Get out your calculators and lobster bibs, people, because things are going to get messy!
Essentially the question is this: if a man is progressing up the hierarchy (status, financial, getting into shape, etc), would it be in his and his future wife’s best interest to wait on settling down until he believed he was at his peak?
Because god forbid you marry some HB 7 you merely love and want to spend the rest of your life with when, if you had waited a few more years, you could have had yourself an 8 or 9 who was more interested in your money than your personality?
A good example of this problem is a 21 year old man who is handsome, articulate, athletic, in college, maybe works as a bartender and probably has pick of the women that attend the school or in some proximity, maybe from ages 18-25 VS the same man, 9 years later who is now in better shape, more handsome, more confident, more wise, financially “minted”, and has a much larger pool to choose from, maybe 21-35 year old women who are of higher quality (that sounds like a cut of beef) by nature of hypergamy.
Sounds a bit like that famous (if recently somewhat tarnished) “marshmallow test” where you offer a kid either one marshmallow right away or two if they’re willing to wait ten minutes. But with hot ladies instead of marshmallows. A whole pool of high quality hot lady marshmallows.
It would seem that if that 21 year old man was to marry someone at that age it would have been a grave mistake as he would have been able to have a higher quality partner had he waited 9 years.
Seriously, why settle for a One Marshmallow Stacey if you could wait a little and snag yourself a Two Marshmallow Stacey?
I would love an actual wise answer here and not some “well when you know she’s the right one when you just know” BS.
Fuck love, we’re all about Marshmallow Stacey Maximization here.
That sounds callous, but the reality is that you really can fall in love with many people and some people do multiple times in their lives, and could probably have successful marriages with more than “the one”.
Obviously this dude who rates women like cuts of beef has a great understanding of what makes for a successful marriage.
When should a man who is trying and succeeding to better himself in every way let himself be peeled off into marriage? And does preemptive peeling lead to resentment?
Dude, I suspect that with you EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD LEADS TO RESENTMENT. Waiting. Not waiting. EVERYTHING.
You see this a lot in professional athletes, and people who are aggressively climbing the hierarchy. The superstar dated and married the best girl (smartest, funniest, prettiest) at the high school, but now he’s the quarterback of an nfl team and has his pick of the best girls in the world. It’s a common theme among meteoric rises in men and I haven’t seen a good answer for it. Be loyal to the person who loved you before the status or keep aiming up to someone better?
And plenty of these “superstars” do in fact stay loyal to what you would see as sub-optimal partners. Because, you know, love?
I hate to tell you this, dude, but if this is really the way you think about relationships, you are NOT the great catch you think you are. You’ll make yourself miserable no matter who you marry — if you can find anyone gullible enough to marry you in the first place.
And the chances are good that nine years from now you won’t actually be “in better shape, more handsome, more confident, more wise” with “a much larger pool to choose from,” You will probably be earning more money. But you’ll also be nine years more bitter and resentful, and that’s not an attractive look for any man.
Don’t get married now. But don’t get married nine years from now either — at least not until you clear your head of this utterly toxic way of thinking.
Unfortunately, this being the Jordan Peterson subreddit, none of the commenters offered him the blunt advice he so desperately needs — though a few did warn him that by waiting too long for the “perfect woman” he might end up old and resentful and alone. (Might? Almost certainly will.)
He also got this less-than-optimal advice, from someone calling himself liberal_hr.
I agree that you should wait until your reach your maximum potential peak and then start looking for potential females.
There is just too much of a risk of you falling head over heels for a female and settling for less than you deserve.
Given that he literally deserves no one, I find this a little hard to believe.
And then there was NoelTrotsky, whose advice was somehow even worse:
It would be interesting to apply economic game theory to this problem. I’d bet that a young man’s best move would be to marry an older rich woman while young , take the help up the ladder, have kids, then leave at about 35 and marry young for a second round. Why not increase your odds with several marriages of significant lengths?
So, in other words he should act like a male version of every “Red Pill” dude’s caricature of a calculating, mercenary hypergamous woman who would drop any man she was with if in a second if she had a chance to “branch swing” to a higher-status man?
It’s almost as if the Red Pill notion of female hypergamy is less a reflection of how women actually behave in the real world than a projection of every Red Pill dude’s not-so-secret desire to trade up to a Victoria’s Secret model.
Jordan Peterson really brings out the worst in people, huh?
@kupo
Oh I love the sound of your salon! ❤
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy:
Have I ever got on my soap-box about evo-psych here before?
OK, so a few years back, I realized that what really strikes me as wrong about most evo-psych ideas of female attractiveness is that they’re based on the premise that fertile women are some kind of super-scarce resource. Now, all respect and sympathy to individuals who have trouble conceiving, but if that were a problem for most humans there wouldn’t be several billion of us and no birth-control methods would ever have been invented.
The result of starting from this premise is that any physical characteristic the evo-psych types find attractive in women, they not only assume to be a universal preference but they also have to find some way to claim it’s an indicator that the woman in question is particularly fertile, even when said logic doesn’t necessarily make sense (i.e. the physical characteristics of young-adulthood (20-30 years old) may correlate to fertility, but *pre-pubescent* characteristics don’t, and blonde hair often tends to darken in adolescence).
I tend to argue from culture rather than biology – the really hard part isn’t producing babies, it’s spending the next twenty years raising them. For that the parent(s) need both material and social resources, and I would therefore suggest that the beauty ideal for women varies by time and place, but generally boils down to “look like you’re from a well-off family.” I’d also point out that this is the high-status “wife material” ideal – individual taste varies pretty wildly, as any passing glance at the internet will show you, but a lot of guys throughout history didn’t get the option to pick their wives, only their lovers. Thank you for coming to my TED talk (question – is it pronounced “ted” or “T. E. D.?”)
@ moon_custafor
I notice a lot of people don’t like evo-psych.
That makes sense though, because being angry at pop science used to be a sign of dominance; so it got sexually selected.
That’s a good point. It’s also true of the “men need to spread their seed” hypothesis.
It’s not so much the ability to conceive that is important for the survival of the human species back in the Flintstones days. It was delivering a healthy baby who survives childbirth along with the mother and ability to raise the childhood for years until they can survive more or less independently.
The evopsych theory that makes most sense is that men who are devoted partners and future dads who will likely stick around and help the kids survive are more sexually attractive than “alpha males” who like to knock up multiple women and leave them to single motherhood. Women who aren’t too skinny and have wide hips and pelvises should be universally sexually attractive because that is in theory the body type that will be most likely to survive childbirth and deliver a healthy baby. Since teen pregnancy is dangerous, evopsych should say that 14-15 year olds are not sexy and grown men should not try to get with them. Just as responsible and nurturing men should be the ultimate in sexy, so should responsible and nurturing women. They will be more likely to parent well and help their kids survive than the giggly and adoring “bimbo” type that sexist evopsych loving men like so much. Responsible parenting is another reason that maturity should be hotter than youth in women. Hey, maybe that’s why MILF porn is so popular!
Fertility and sex are much, much easier for most people than raising a child. So yeah, agree that it’s silly to regard fertility as a rare and special quality.
@Moon_Custafer, Alan Robertshaw
Most coherent people don’t like evo-psych because, in its current form, it doesn’t follow the scientific method. I personally feel that it’s nothing more than pseudoscience because, more often than not, rather than coming up with a hypothesis and testing it to see whether it holds water or not, evo-psych is about confirming bias.
Evolutionary psychologists look at the current state of society and, rather than looking at the cultural and historical sources of some conducts, beliefs and customs, they try to find an explanation for these in biology.
– Heels were not invented to help ride horses, no women came up with it to make themselves sexually attractive.
– It’s not that women do not vote for fascists because they will restrict their reproductive rights; no, they just like open borders because they subconsciously want to maximize their chances of finding an alpha male partner.
– It’s not that colonialism and imperialism have destroyed and sabotaged development in third world countries, making life over there pretty unsustainable; no, evidently we are of an inferior stock and nothing more than savages who can’t get their act together.
Evolutionary psychology is nothing more than a sham, which seeks to justify the status quo and hierarchies in place as entirely natural.
MY “favorite” example of evo-psych is that boys prefer blue and girls before pink because something something about hunter-gatherer gender roles.
Nevermind that just over a century ago the very same cultures that now promote “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” believed the exact opposite, or that other cultures associate different colors with gender.
No, the specific attitudes of the evo-psych expert’s time and culture are clearly universal human traits with BioTroof explanations.
The best parody of evo-psychobabble I’ve ever seen was that time N. Leroy Gingrich, advocate of civilization, definer of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who form civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, and leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces, explained that men are better suited to battlefield roles than to sitting in a chair on an Aegis-class cruiser because they “are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.” The fact that he was completely serious when he said it does not make it not a parody.
Experiment: re-read this article, in full, replacing the words “man” with “woman”, “male” with “female”, etc.
Thoughts?
@Diego Duarte
Sorry for coming in late, but reading your previous comments about how some men are raised up to be entitled and you mentioning anime as one factor makes me come to the conclusion that, indeed, anime REALLY was a mistake after all.
I’ve complained to other people who are into the medium that the genre that irks me the most is harem, as it is the most blatant, and perhaps cynical, one as its selling point is that a Nice Guy™ can literally get hot girls to fall to his feet, just for having a bland personality besides being “nice”. As some critics in Youtube have pointed out, this is all too intentional as the protagonist is supposed to be us, the viewers, so that most series in that genre are literally quick-cash schemes that try to give the illusion of power to horny teenagers. Don’t get me started on fanservice and the ecchi genres, both which put tropes that makes series borderline porn in some cases.
Is it any wonder why some MRAs and Nazis (could be trolls too) usually have anime girl profiles when writing how much they despise feminism, for example? I once came across someone who said that anime portrays what femininity is supposed to be (which no longer exists in the West, thanks to muh feminism), nevermind that some recent series like Aggretsuko overturn some tropes and may be more realistic in that aspect. Some anti-feminist videos have anime footage, too, to make their point apparently.
Going back to the meme I mentioned at the beginning, are the guys at Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki the only ones who can make anime that can be considered “feminist”? If so that’s a bit worrying.