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To quote a line usually attributed to Kissinger: “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
Man would know. Mao once jokingly offered the United States ten million Chinese women, and Kissinger responded by proposing to study their “utilization and allocation”. Presented with ten million prospective ABG baddies, the man commissioned a feasibility study. You can take the professor out of Harvard.
His name was also literally Kissing-(h)er. He'd know.
I, as a rule, tend to avoid the gender wars. I have too much sympathy for the opposition. I’m half-woman on my mother’s side.
I am fond of women, as a whole. Their strengths, as a class, seem reasonably complementary to mine. So do the weaknesses. I am sure there are men capable of independently organizing socialization, remembering the kid’s vaccines, and keeping track of the miscellaneous errata that constitute a functional household. Some of them probably even know when their bedsheets were last changed.
Women make this look effortless, at least until they explain, with considerable justification, how much unacknowledged effort goes into making it look effortless.
Look ladies, I open jars. I get you flowers. I work like a donkey to be a good provider. I even come with bad puns. Some might call me emotionally aware, with the usual parenthetical qualification: for a man.
I appreciate that this doesn’t settle who’s booking the dentist.
So you’ll usually find me sitting on the sidelines, sighing, and wishing we could all get along. Or get it on, given this is an age of declining TFRs.
Unfortunately, “have you considered liking each other?” is an inadequate explanation for how we got here. If I had to offer an overarching, semi-evidence-based account, it would go something like this.
First, the economic necessity of a husband has declined.
A woman with her own income, access to contraception, and some institutional support has substantially more scope to remain single than her grandmother did. Marriage can become something she evaluates on its merits. Is this particular man going to make her life better? Does she actually enjoy his company? What is his position on discovering where the laundry basket lives?
What do you offer her over a dildo?
This is quite rough, given that your grandfather’s principal qualification was “has a job”.
There are obvious benefits to being wanted. There are also uncomfortable implications for those of us who might previously have got by on being needed. A man can be perfectly decent and discover that his contribution no longer clears the threshold. He's competing with the life she already has, including her friends, her peace, and so on. Women tend to be happier without a man than vice versa.
Second, a great deal of socialization has migrated online, taking courtship with it.
The American research showing online meetings displacing introductions through friends is real, even if “online” is a broader category than Tinder and America is not the entire planet. Once enough people go somewhere to find partners, everyone else acquires a reason to join them.
Even the conscientious objectors feel the pressure. You might prefer meeting someone through friends, at a party, or during repeated accidental encounters that gradually become less accidental. Unfortunately, your friends are busy, the party is next month, and the attractive stranger has headphones in.
Your phone is right there.
The apps are seductive because the next attempt costs almost nothing. The cumulative experience can cost quite a lot. You can only resist so much solo, if everyone else caves.
They also make certain qualities much easier to evaluate than others. Height photographs well when expressed as a number. A capacity for affection under adverse circumstances requires considerably more demonstration. Being funny helps, but so does having someone around long enough to hear the joke.
A man who becomes attractive after six ordinary conversations may struggle in a venue where he gets half a second.
Third, expectations can adjust more slowly than circumstances.
Women’s educational and professional gains create some awkwardness for an inherited script in which the man is supposed to be at least as accomplished as his partner, preferably a little more so. If you want someone educated, successful, attractive, available, and enthusiastic about you specifically, the intersection can become rather small.
The female doctor and the well-paid electrician may look financially compatible on paper. Whether they meet, share friends, enjoy the same things, and recognize each other as plausible partners is another question. Money, education, and status overlap without being interchangeable. Men participate in this sorting too. Most of us are wonderfully open-minded about dating outside our milieu, provided the opportunity happens to someone else.
None of this requires a conspiracy. A lot of individually understandable preferences can produce unpleasant collective results.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t heavily weight gender-war rhetoric as a guide to what people actually want.
A surprising number of the angriest voices seem perfectly willing to shack up if they meet Mr or Ms Right. Their sweeping denunciation of the opposite sex contains an exemption clause for someone hot who texts back.
I suspect much of it functions as a fashionable costume for status-signaling, or as emotional armour. “I have rejected this entire category of people” feels rather better than “I would quite like one of them to choose me”.
Oh boy.
Call me cynical, but I suspect being 6'3 had something to do with how readily this intervention could be arranged.
Height carries a lot of... uh, weight.
I recognize some of the emotional territory.
My childhood and most of my teenage years were spent rather starved for feminine attention. I was either at an all-boys school or attending extracurricular tuition. There were girls at the latter, but the grind is a harsh mistress.
I spent years bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t getting laid, finding solace mainly in the observation that neither was anyone else in my cohort.
The exceptions were a handful of cool kids from socialite families, apparently operating under a different licensing regime. Everyone else understood that college was where you acquired a reasonable hope of getting poon. If that failed, well, you would eventually get married.
A surprising fraction of Indian men don’t have sex until then. Older research on Indian youth is consistent with premarital sex being far from universal, though self-reports on a taboo subject deserve the usual raised eyebrow. The restrictions apply to women too, of course. Parents tend to loosen the leash once you’re away studying or working, partly because surveillance becomes less feasible.
I remember the angst, the horniness, and the desperation. I remember how much of it subsided once I started having some luck with the ladies.
To this day, I have considerable sympathy for incels in the original, technical sense. It sucks to want a meaningful relationship and be unable to find one. The absence of sex is unpleasant enough. The suspicion that nobody will ever voluntarily make you their person reaches considerably deeper.
Then some well-meaning soul tells you to enjoy being single.
Yeah, thanks buddy. I have the experience, which is why I've avoided it the moment avoidance was an option.
I look at people who struggle and think: there but for the grace of $Deity go I. I could have been dumber, shorter, less funny, less fortunate in where I lived or whom I met. It would be flattering to interpret my eventual success as evidence of outstanding character. I wish.
And then I look at people who seem to have it all, who get laid effortlessly, and grumble to myself.
The cosmic irony of my gay brother being the handsome one is not lost on me. When we went clubbing in the UK, we seemed to attract exclusively feminine attention.
At gay clubs.
Bruh.
The disparity rankled more when I was younger and doing less well. Having experienced both the resentment and its gradual attenuation, I find it difficult to treat the resentment as either incomprehensible or particularly trustworthy.
You can notice a real unfairness and still spend far too much of your life staring at it.
This is where I would advise men to tend to their own. Quite literally.
Working out, getting a better job, dressing presentably, cultivating friendships, and simply putting yourself out there are all rather boring suggestions. They are also things you can actually do. Going on a grand crusade against sexual inequality brings about negative dates.
I understand why self-improvement advice irritates people. It can sound like an assurance that effort will eventually be rewarded, delivered by someone whose reward arrived before he had to test the proposition very seriously.
There are no guarantees. Some people try hard and remain lonely. Some have disadvantages a haircut won’t meaningfully address. They deserve sympathy without first presenting receipts from the gym.
But you still have decisions to make about tomorrow.
You can improve your chances while improving the life you inhabit between attempts. You can become more socially connected, more competent, better dressed, and easier to live with. Those gains remain available even when a particular woman declines to cooperate with your carefully constructed redemption arc.
The global equilibrium is largely beyond your control. Your own contribution is somewhat more tractable.
And I have trouble imagining what winning the gender war would even mean. Everyone becomes sufficiently suspicious and exhausted that they stop bothering? The sexes retreat into separate camps, each enjoying the satisfaction of having correctly identified the other as the problem?
I look at South Korea and feel little enthusiasm for exploring this possibility.
Face it. If you’re going to be k-selected, lean into it.
I use the term loosely. I mean the strategy of becoming a viable long-term partner, finding someone you like who likes you back, and investing heavily in the resulting arrangement.
I’m the product of quite a lot of this. Coached most of my life to be a Good Indian Boy: get into med school, get through med school, get into a specialty. Sex and love be
damnedsecondarytertiary.There were drawbacks to this upbringing. I have mentioned the horniness.
But I think it has worked out for me. I didn’t need the comfortable backup of an arranged marriage, and I appreciate that most people reading this don’t have that option. I also benefited from luck, including the sort you only recognize after meeting someone whose presence makes your earlier disappointments feel less consequential.
It really does take one lady you like, who likes you back. Then you bump uglies.
You can still notice the men with better cheekbones, the easier lives, the apparent abundance. I certainly do. But having someone whose company you actively want makes the rankings considerably less urgent. There are flowers to buy. Someone needs to book the dentist. With luck, there will also be some bumping of uglies.
So try some self-improvement. Give other people repeated opportunities to discover that you’re good company. If that doesn’t work, we can drink some pity beers together. I mean that sincerely.
Otherwise, I would like people to chill the fuck out a little. Enough of this battle takes place in your head that it is worth inspecting who keeps sending in reinforcements.
Quick aside: this is a great turn of phrase I intend to shamelessly steal for my own use.
"I can no more remember all the books I've read than I can all the meals I've eaten, but they have made me nonetheless."
Feel free!
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This is not a script, right, but a built in preference of women - like the equivalent of men liking well endowed 22 year olds? Is there any society in which women don’t go for men of higher social status or means, however that may be defined? I don’t know the answer, but it does seem that social status is really low on the list for men, and that elevating the earnings and educational outcome of women above men made a large swath of the population undatable.
Men do seem to care about the social status of their partners. Women care a little bit more, but it's not like height where many to most men see it as an irrelevancy and most women have strong preferences(although this preference is for 'taller than her' rather than 'being 6'3' and- gentlemen- cowboy boots are cool right now, you can add two inches for $200 with significant resale value and they never wear out).
For me(n?), status only matters to the extent its a signal of shared experience/interests and a baseline level of maturity (is she going to want to go to museums or discuss interesting books with me? Will she tank the family finances with irresponsible spending? Will she be able to help our children with their homework?). Social status only matters in itself at the extremes (I'm not bringing a stripper to meet my parents), and in that I have a slight aversion to dating someone who makes substantially more than me (I work at a non-profit, so I've made my peace with the possibility of being slightly outearned, couldn't abide a situation where I felt financially dependent). If anything, her father's social status is more important, because it speaks to how she was raised and how she likely intends to raise our children, as well as what her expectations are for me.
Elementary school teacher is the single most attractive profession for a woman, in my opinion. It's a respectable middle class career, not highly remunerative or prestigious, but strongly signalling an affinity for and skill working with young children, as well as with hours/benefits ideally suited for raising children if she chooses to continue working after starting a family. A "high status" job like doctor or lawyer is slightly unattractive, because it sends opposite signals. I'm not looking for someone to help finance expensive vacations or get me into exclusive parties, I'm looking for someone who I enjoy spending time with and who will be a good mother, which if anything slightly anti-correlates with a high status career.
Of course earning potential looks bad when you frame all the upsides as being used to purchase disposable hedonistic experiences. Women provide half the genes, my doctor wife's gene combined with my software engineer genes are going to produce an autist that will rule the universe. The extra money can be spent on a home in a great school district where my kids will be among the kids of other people with great genes and highly agentic parents. And despite the caricature in right wing circles successful women are very much still in possession of nurturing instincts.
It all reads like the sour grapes of someone who thinks individuals need bad traits to counterbalance their good traits for it to be "fair", like it's a video game where the classes have been balanced. There can be downsides to pursuing high status to be sure, but having it is nearly a pure upside. Tales of how money is actually a curse are almost all cope.
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I think what matters to men is what status correlates with. A woman raised in a trailer park with low-status parents is more likely to be either obese or on drugs, most likely covered in nasty tattoos, foul-mouthed, may have had to exchange sex for housing. All traits that a lot of men might not like.
On the other hand, a woman raised by absent professionals might have similarly damaging personality traits, but might be more effective at concealing them (having parents bail them out, paying for abortions, etc).
The ideal for a regular guy is a humble woman who was not raised in desperate circumstances but with strong conservative family values. Unfortunately these women usually get taken pretty quickly.
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I think it's more accurate to say that upper middle-class established men care about the social status of their marriage partners.
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Well, it's true everywhere I've cared to look. Definitely everywhere I've ever been.
At that point, biology becomes the most parsimonious candidate.
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Considering how many women fall for musicians and gang members, it is clearly not as simple as men liking well endowed 22 year olds. "Money and accomplishments" does not make you attractive to women the same way as "Young, fit, nice tits and ass" makes you attractive to men.
The common characteristic here is “Has lots of social status”. A man can get this by either being a pillar of the community or the nastiest gang member.
This is, alas, an inherently scarce resource as it runs on a ranked rather than an absolute scale, whereas “tits and ass” is, at least in principle, something every woman could acquire.
It could also be ambition, drive, initiative, spontaneity, and ability to stand your ground.
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