jacksonjules
6d ago
I am a big believer in the idea of revealed preferences—which is fancy econspeak for “Watch what people do, not what they say.”
I also used to be a lurker in various manosphere-adjacent internet subcultures. I just couldn’t help myself: the combination of surprisingly erudite references to Ancient Greek philosophy & evolutionary psychology mixed with highschool-lockerroom levels of pent-up sexual frustration made for some quality threads. And the one thing the manosphere loved to do—above all else—was complain about Western women: how third-wave feminism ruined them, how modern women are masculinized, hypergamous, promiscuous, etc. etc.
Despite all of the complaining, I couldn’t help but notice that the men of the manosphere were devoting the best years of their lives to analyzing how to sleep with the exact people they claimed to despise. They would create Excel spreadsheets for every date that they went on so they could track whether getting the Rocky Road flavor instead of the chocolate correlated with getting to third base at the end of the night. They would write multi-thousand-word “field reports”, detailing in excruciating and anthropological detail, the outcome of their most recent seduction attempt. They would pick up new hobbies, change jobs, buy new clothes—all to get laid.
So on the one hand: their explicit beliefs were that Western women are the worse. But their revealed preferences were that the validation of Western women is the single most important and valuable thing in the world.
Granted, even back then, there were a couple oddballs who would advocate for foreign women, praising their femininity and their “obedience”. There would be a thread like “Struggling with date-closing a flaky HB-9” and a foreign-bro—serene and graceful among the herd of sexually-frustrated chumps—would talk about how stress-free their life was with their Thai wife who cooks and cleans and knows not to talk too much when the Redzone is on. But these men seemed to be a minority. Most of the men of the manosphere were young urban professionals trying to win the affections of their young urban co-eds.
And when I looked at the young couples I knew in real life, most were of similar social class, intelligence, and broad cultural background. They had met in college or on OKCupid or through a friend of a friend. There certainly didn’t seem to be an abundance of men booking roundtrip flights to Caracas to seduce the Latina minx of their dreams.
Maybe all of that talk about “third-wave feminism” was overblown?
But in the past year or so, I’ve been seeing threads pop up on reddit about “passport bros”. A passport bro is a man from a first-world country who goes abroad to look for women, believing foreign women to be more traditional and conservative. It even has a page on Know Your Meme.
Suddenly, the old manosphere advice had become a Discourse-worthy phenomenon.
A lot can be said about the rise of the passport bro: how it's yet another indicator of the decay of our social values, how it represents the arbitraging of sexual market value differentials between Western men and their third-world counterparts, even how passport bros are not something entirely new, going by other names like 'sex tourists' in the past.
But I want to focus on one particular element that has caught my attention: how black the phenomenon of the passport bro is.
An important aspect of the passport bro movement is that not only do they praise foreign women, they dump heavily on black women. From black-manosphere.org:
Ever since going viral at the end of last year, the Passport Bros have become a topic of fierce debate throughout the online Black community… The argument as articulated by my opponent above, is that the Passport Bros, being part and parcel with the Black Manosphere, are dumping on Black women writ large in order to justify their reasoning for leaving the country in search for love.
Before researching for this post, I wasn’t even aware that the Black Manosphere was a thing. Like most Very Online people, if you asked me to draw a caricatured sketch of a denizen of the manosphere, he would invariably be white: perhaps of a Charlottesville, vaguely-Appalachian phenotype. For one, the text-based internet just feels white. Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated by way of dank anuran memes. The surprising diversity of the Internet Right continues.
I’m not interested in wading into the debate about whether or not the passport bros are justified in their behavior. There are many threads about passport bros and all of the arguments are the same. Detractors of passport bros accuse them of being predatory incels who will get scammed out of a green card. Supporters of passport bros call them heroes who are brave for fighting the Leviathan that is third-wave feminism. (The internet is so tiring sometimes.)
But unfortunately, we can’t just ignore the passport bros either. The story of the last sixty years of America is that if you want a glimpse of the future of White America, there is no better place to look than Black America. Starting in the 60s, there were a set of broad changes—both legally and culturally—in American gender relations that are lumped under the umbrella of “second-wave feminism”. As Arctotherium explained in “The Baby Boom”:
[S]econd wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.
These changes hit Black America first and hardest. Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality. White people, being more “genetically monogamous”, didn’t react immediately to the change in incentive structure. But fastforward to the present and marriage is increasingly less common among the lower classes, now being reserved for upper-middle and upper class families who have the foresight, the ability to delay gratification, and the cultural upbringing to know the importance of raising children in a traditional nuclear family.
It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.
It will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to White America or if it stays confined to Tiktok and Black Twitter.
jacksonjules
5d ago
The first link when I googled "defiant disorder by race": https://neurodivergentinsights.com/adhd-infographics/adhd-odd-and-racial-bias
Did you know that [oppositional defiant disorder] is disproportionately diagnosed in Black, Latino, and Hispanic children? Studies show that racial and ethnic diagnostic disparities in disruptive behavioral disorders are well-documented, particularly among urban, low-income Black American and Latino youth
Of course, I haven't provided proof that this disparity is genetic. But I'm so far along in my HBD journey that I just don't find these sorts of "Ah, but what if [alternative explanation]!" type of arguments very interesting anymore. You caught me: I don't have some convenient within-sibling GWAS where they pinpoint the precise genetic markers that corresponds to "the ability to follow instructions". But considering that, whenever we've bothered to check, behavioral differences that aren't obviously cultural (e.g language spoken) always have some genetic component, I've stopped reflexively hedging when talking about these sorts of things.
jacksonjules
5d ago
It was quite the statement to throw out there, but it's true. If black people's natural inclination was towards monogamy, you would see monogamy be the dominant mode of relationship in African countries. Or if you want to argue colonialism is responsible for Africa's current state, there would be large reservoirs of archeological evidence showing monogamy in pre-modern African societies. But we don't see that.
I would argue where my statement was misleading is that monogamy isn't natural for any race. But still, there are degrees: it's easier for whites and Asians than it is for black people.
This has been considered by HBD aficionados. There are indeed behavioral differences between the races that go beyond IQ. A good place to start is with Rushton's work on r vs K strategy.
But overall, controlling for IQ gets rid of the most of the difference in life outcomes between people of different races. But you do see a residual: for example if you control for SAT scores, black applicants to college are still predicted to perform somewhat worse (measured e.g. by GPA) than an equivalent white applicant. This is somewhat ambiguous to interpret since part of the effect will be due to regression to mean causing the true intelligence of a group of white people and black people with the same average SAT score to be different. But a part of it will be behavioral differences that can be credibly called "domestication"--traits like conscientiousness, the ability to delay gratification, the ability to follow instructions, not being impulsive enough to get kicked out, etc.
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