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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Time for another dating market piece

From a non-Western angle this time. I enjoyed* this article on the Chinese dating market and its increasing level of dysfunction

*which is to say, I liked the information I gained. I did not at all enjoy reading it as it has the most irritating style known to man, a turbo Linkedin style piece by someone who thinks they are vastly more profound than they actually are. Do not read it. I have excerpted the interesting bits below:

Here’s a translated message from a Chinese woman to a man who confessed his feelings for her, sent via WeChat, which you should read as the mission statement for everything that follows:

“You chose me because of my appearance. I can also reject you because of your appearance. I’m telling you honestly, I’ve never been pursued by someone as ugly as you in my entire life. This isn’t just venting; it’s my genuine feeling, from the bottom of my heart. Ever since you confessed to me, I’ve felt incredibly inferior every day. Do you think Liu Yifei or Fan Bingbing would be pursued by someone like you? You wouldn’t pursue them, because you know those beauties wouldn’t be interested in you. But you’re pursuing me, which means that in your eyes, I’m a match for your looks. My God, just thinking about it gives me a vague urge to kill someone. I beg you to stop liking me. Your pursuit has deeply hurt my self-esteem.”

In 2010, a 22-year-old model named Ma Nuo appeared on If You Are the One (非诚勿扰), China’s most-watched dating show: fifty million viewers per episode, second only to the state news broadcast in ratings. An unemployed male contestant asked if she’d ride bicycles with him. She replied, with a small giggle that would become the most replayed giggle in Chinese internet history, that she’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.

The country detonated. Government censors ordered the show reformatted. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued regulations. A dating show required state intervention in the way that famines and insurrections require state intervention, because it was threatening social stability in exactly the same way.

Ma Nuo later revealed that the contestant wasn’t actually poor. He was a wealthy second-generation student studying abroad. The production crew had asked her to reject him. The BMW line was a joke she’d read online

In Zhengzhou, a Foxconn worker told a researcher: “The groom’s family is expected to provide a car and a new apartment. That’s more than 200,000 yuan. Our average farming income is 5,000 yuan a year.” He paused. “Having two sons,” he said, “is considered bad luck. It means you have to provide two apartments.”

The caili (彩礼), the betrothal gift, was originally symbolic: a gesture of respect to the bride’s family. Red envelopes. Dried fruits. Perhaps a pig

By 2023, the national average caili had risen to 69,000 RMB ($9,500). In Zhejiang province: 183,000 RMB. In rural Jiangxi: 380,000 RMB, not including the apartment, not including the car.

The state tried to intervene. Jiangsu capped caili at 50,000 RMB. Gansu tried similar limits. One county in Jiangxi tied caili compliance to school enrollment priority for your children, meaning if you paid too much bride price, your kids might not get into the right school. The state was literally bribing (blackmailing) families to accept smaller bribes for their daughters.

The sociologist Hu Hsien-chin made a distinction between two kinds of face: mianzi (social prestige from visible achievement and display) and lian (moral standing granted by others for your character). You can have high mianzi and no lian, everyone can see your Porsche and also know you’re a fraud. The marriage market optimizes for mianzi because mianzi is legible. Lian is subjective

Xiao Tao (“Little Peach”) streams from 8pm to midnight. She does not take her clothes off. She talks. She plays mobile games while talking. She reads comments aloud and responds to them. She calls her regulars da ge (“big brother”). When a da ge sends a virtual gift, she reacts with what appears to be genuine delight. When a big gift arrives, the animated cruise ship, the rocket, the supercar she gasps and says the sender’s username and thanks them by name, and 200,000 viewers see this, and the man who sent the gift receives, in exchange for 3,000 RMB, approximately forty seconds of being known .

The state has started cracking down on “excessive virtual gifting” as a social stability concern. Platforms are now required to cap daily gifting limits. This is not a coincidence. The state understands, even if it won’t say so, that the livestream economy is what happens when you price 30 million men out of the marriage market. They don’t riot. They buy virtual cruise ships for women in Chengdu.

A 2010 census showed 82.44% of Chinese men aged 20-29 had never married, fifteen percentage points above women in the same bracket. Demographers projected 29-33 million surplus males in the coming decades.

Historical records on what happens to surplus male populations are consistent and not reassuring. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, bare branches “tended to drift from their hometowns and form brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs, and military groups.” In extreme cases they toppled dynasties.

There are men who have been publicly shamed on Weibo for insufficient gift-giving. Birthday posts where the gifts are deemed, in comments, to be “not even trying.” Proposals live-streamed to followers where the ring is evaluated in real time. One man proposed in a restaurant while his girlfriend’s phone filmed it for her followers. The comments started arriving before he’d finished the sentence. The comments were not all positive. He could see them arriving on the phone screen while he was still on one knee.

This is cuihun (催婚). Relentless familial pressure to marry. It arrives with seasonal regularity, like the flu, and with roughly similar symptoms.

On Taobao, you can rent a boyfriend or girlfriend. Prices: 50 RMB per hour to watch a movie together. 100 RMB if it’s a horror film, because physical contact is implied and must be priced in. 3,000-plus yuan per day for the full meet-the-parents package. During Spring Festival, prices surge to 10,000 yuan per day.

In 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation, a state agency ostensibly created to advance women’s rights (and fully nails the aesthetic of the ‘The Supreme People's Assembly’ in North Korea), officially classified unmarried women over 27 as “sheng nu” (剩女): leftover women. The Ministry of Education added the term to the official lexicon.

The Federation then published taxonomies:

Ages 25-27: “Leftover fighters” (they still have courage!)

Ages 28-30: “The ones who must triumph” (this is a pun on Pizza Hut’s Chinese name, because what Chinese feminist propaganda needs is more fast food wordplay)

Ages 31-35: “Advanced leftover”

Ages 35+: “Master class of leftover women” (a reference to the Monkey King, which is definitely not insulting)

In 2011, the Women’s Federation published “Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy.” It included this sentence: “Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness.”

A state agency for women’s rights published that. In 2011. Not 1951.

Marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million in 2024, down a fifth year-over-year. Births fell to 7.92 million in 2025 as deaths rose to 11.31 million. China’s population is now actively shrinking. The fertility rate is 1.0 and falling. The women called “leftover” turned out to be the ones who could afford to say no.

China is no longer poor. But it behaves, in the intimate sphere, like a country that expects the famine to return. Houses are hoarded like grain. Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter. Partners are evaluated like wartime rations. The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.

Speaking from my own experience, the article is a touch overwrought. I'm in a major bubble - I haven't lived there for years, I was a foreigner, and all the expats I know now are successful families with children the same age as ours - but so is the person who uses anecdotes from TV shows and marriage markets. Nonetheless, there is some obvious truth here, given the collapse in marriage and fertility rates in the country.

There does seem to be an inherent contradiction in streaming, with the author assuming the government are both using it as a substitute for human affection, while also trying to crack down on gifting and parasocial relationships. Which is it? Perhaps this is a flaw of the CCP themselves, pulling in multiple directions and unable to find a fix for their country's broken dating market.

It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."

The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).

I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.

And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.

The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!

There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.

But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:

Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.

This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.

Women's satisfaction dropped 15 points spanning the emergence of #MeToo, while men's fell five points. The latest reading among women, 44%, is the lowest on record, although it is not statistically different from the 46% readings in 2018 and 2020. At the same time, men's satisfaction with the treatment of women has remained flat at 61% to 62% since 2018.

Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.

And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.

Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.

I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.

the highest status male in their local social system

I think one of the big changes since I was in the dating market (it's been a while) is that the size of local social system for both sexes is drastically larger than it used to be. Twenty years ago, I think the median dating pool was maybe in the low 3 figures: college undergraduates that cross paths, coworkers (even across departments), church members, bar and social group regulars. Somewhere around Dunbar's number, unless you went looking for speed-dating or something specifically. Dating apps, if nothing else, have made the "ocean" (seem) bigger, and I think some of the consequences we're seeing are reactions to that: "the highest status" is much higher than it used to be, and although rankings will vary person-to-person, everyone is now looking for something like the best 1-in-10000 where before they might have thought 1-in-100 was a great match.

It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."

I accept the basic idea that women are on average more selective with their sexual partners than men, but what push back on are the more extreme versions of this argument that tend to claim things like most women are cynical status/money/height-maxxing machines who'll only grudgingly accept settling for a non-chad once they're nearly 40 (and who'll they'll cheat on with an authentic chad whenever they get the chance). I've just met too many ordinary, average people in what appear to be genuinely happy relationships to be able to entertain this model of the world.

I've just met too many ordinary, average people in what appear to be genuinely happy relationships to be able to entertain this model of the world.

I've seen too many statistics from the last ten years about the rapid decline in relationship formation (among the young) and the womens' constant complaints about a lack of men worth marrying to pretend there's not an actual trend that mostly swamps the anecdotes.

The women will tell you this themselves:

https://archive.is/Lgk2V

EDIT: @erwgv3g34 found a working Archive link

Like I said, the hypergamy is baked into the culture. Women aren't 'hiding' it per se, but don't like being reminded that its their choices creating the outcomes.

Dating apps and social media in particular have led to a situation where the local 'social system' a woman is observing is no longer her school, or even her local village, but every single guy in a 20 mile radius.

The women will tell you this themselves:

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/american-women-are-giving-up-on-marriage-54840971?

(sadly I can't find a non-paywalled version)

Open Sesame

The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!

No, no, no! This is exactly wrong. You cannot solve this problem by placing additional restrictions on men. We have been trying that for decades. It doesn't work. High status males don't need to be reined in. Women need to be reined in. But this is so unthinkable, even your otherwise redpilled comment instinctively veers off from that conclusion.

A man needs to know, when he marries, that he owns his woman from that day forth, the same a man needs to know, when he buys a car, that he owns that car from that day forth, and that he will be allowed to defend that car with deadly force if needed, and that the state and his community will back him up if Daquan tries to dispute the ownership of his car. And if he does not, do not be surprised when nobody buys a car. The arguments for secure rights over women are isomorphic to the arguments for secure rights over any other form of property.

For marriage to work, a man needs to be able to kill his wife when he finds her in bed with another man. Instead, she files for divorce and gets rewarded with cash and prizes.

From "Why We Need the Double Standard" by the Dread Jim:

Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. Therefore we should guard eggs, not sperm. What this means is that it only needs a small number of badboys to render a very large number of women unmarriageable. Thus curtailing male badboy behavior is not going to succeed. And if we restrain prosocial well behaved upper class men from being badboys, the girls are going to get their kicks with Jeremy Meeks and Muslim rapeugees. Restraining male behavior results in upper class women fucking men low IQ men who live on towel folding jobs, petty burglary, drug dealing, and sponging off their numerous high IQ high socioeconomic status girlfriend, men whose careers are not going to be adversely affected by a few rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraint orders. The lawyerette does not fuck her fellow lawyers, she does not fuck judges, she fucks Jeremy Meeks. If we let upper class men be badboys, if we stopped afflicting judges with rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders, at least she would be fucking judges.

The problem is that law and society strengthens shit tests against well behaved, respectable, affluent men, but has limited success in strengthening shit tests against Jeremy Meeks. She fucks men against whom rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders have limited effect, because they can pass her shit tests, and you, even if you have a nicer car and a nicer hotel room than Jeremy Meeks, cannot. Plus the police and the courts just don’t seem to be pursuing rape charges against rapeugees, perhaps because of disparate impact.

All these laws have the effect of holding men responsible for female bad behavior. It is a lot more effective to hold women responsible for male bad behavior, because women, not men are the gate keepers to sex, romance, and reproduction. If you stop some men from behaving badly, women will just find men you cannot or dare not deter.

The problem is that we need to guard what is precious, guard eggs, not sperm. We need to restrain female sexual behavior, not male sexual behavior.

First, we need to change the social order so that the lawyerette fucks the judge instead of Jeremy Meeks. Then we can address the much harder problem of preventing her from fucking either one.

From the comments of "The Reactionary Program" by the same:

One pin can pop a hundred balloons. We have to control female sexuality, not male sexuality.

If you try to control male sexuality, that just means that uncontrollable anti social males father a large proportion of the children.

Eggs are precious, sperm is cheap. You guard what precious, not what is cheap.

And from the comments of "COVID Public Service Announcement", idem:

If a thirteen year old is permitted to wander where she pleases, she is going to be pleased to wander where someone can “rape” her. It is not the janitor that is the problem, it is the thirteen year old girl unsupervised. One pin can pop any number of baloons. We need balloon control, not pin control.

If you execute or castrate ninety-nine fuckboys, but miss fuckboy number one hundred, he gets to spoil a hundred nice girls.

Whereas if you lock up and marry off ninety-nine girls, but fail to control girl number one hundred, you get ninety-nine happily married wives and one fallen woman.

To end the wars of the sexes, make women property again.

To end the wars of the sexes, make women property again.

There's no need to "make women property" here. Removing their ability to avoid the consequences of their poor choices to a much greater extent than men should be more than sufficient.

Both are coup-complete problems, however.

A man needs to know, when he marries, that he owns his woman from that day forth, the same a man needs to know, when he buys a car, that he owns that car from that day forth

I understand the usual response to that is "Lincoln done freed the slaves".

If, in the year of our Lord 2026, you unironically want to own a woman, then no wonder there's a problem getting women to marry and have kids. Why, if you have the choice between "get a job, earn a living, pay your own way and be free" versus "be totally dependent economically on a man who puts you in the same category as a possession like his car", would you pick the man?

Why are some comments here making me (1) eternally thankful to God Almighty for leaving out the wiring in my brain that goes "I want to fall in love with a man and be his" and (2) want very much for those producing such comments to be reborn as a woman under the conditions they so want to impose?

Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?

The chattel thing is overwrought imo. But I think as policy, it’s rather better to target tge things that create stable and healthy societies rather than just “hedonistic capitalist consumption” as the end game. I don’t think anyone wants to be chattel in any sense. Heck, most people don’t want jobs, or to pay taxes, or to be governed by laws or institutions. The human being is an anarchist at heart, as can be seen by observing small children.

Of course the problem here is that a society run in that manner will very quickly become a society that nobody wants to live in. A society in which marriage is easier to end than most business contracts is one in which nobody wants to marry, and even among those who do, would be somewhat reluctant to have kids because they rightly worry that the marriage that makes the family stable enough to have children is not stable at all.

This isn’t much different from other problems. When a society decides that it wants to give support to people who don’t want to work, it finds it difficult to maintain itself. Nobody wants to clean sewers or pick up trash or work in a warehouse. Unless hunger compels them, those jobs won’t be filled. But if those jobs are not filled, you’ll live surrounded by garbage and sewage and the diseases that come from living in filth. If you decide you don’t want taxes, you will live cheaper, but there’s no police to call, the roads are not paved, and if some other country invades, it’s down to you and your neighbors to fend those people off.

Living in a civilization requires trade offs. And you can’t just think about it as just “I don’t want that restriction,” but in terms of what life wou be like when that restriction is gone for everyone. And I think we see the results. Fewer children, fewer families, and more loneliness is what you get. Is that a reasonable trade for the ability to dump your husband anytime you feel like it? I think I want a society with stable families and plenty of kids.

Sure, but trying to solve the problem by "let's take away all freedom from women and turn them into property" is going to be the fastest way to breakdown you could try. "Oh but it works fine in Saudi Arabia/other countries that cover women from the crown of their head to the tips of their toes and murders them with impunity if even suspected of looking at a man". Yes, quite, and do you think there is no such thing as adultery or promiscuity or prostitution in those societies?

If no man wanted to fuck a woman outside of marriage, then all the thots and cock carousel and the rest of it could not happen. As ever, it's both sides of the coin: men want sex more than women, but don't want women to be sexually active if it's not with them, and they want the relationship to end when they want it to end, and the woman should both be experienced enough to be able to satisfy the man sexually but also never have had a boyfriend before or after him.

How do you think that happens? How do you think a woman gets to be good in bed if she hasn't been sleeping with other men before you? Why complain about the friendzone if there is not the expectation that "if I'm interested in a woman, it is for sex, and she should reciprocate that"?

I don't want to be unfair to men. But I do think a lot of misery has been caused by Sexual Liberation, where women thought they could behave like men when it came to love and sex, and there would be no pushback and no more double standard and no more unhappiness. Turns out that you cannot have it all, and that men and women do have different expectations around relationships, and women giving in to male sexuality has not in fact made either sex happier. All the old prudish warnings about "men only want one thing" turned out to be correct, and it's deeply ironic that now men are complaining about this (women sleeping with men they find attractive even without commitment on the man's part).

We can't go back to the past, and unless people all suddenly convert to traditional Catholicism regarding sexual mores (and even many/the majority of Catholics don't stick to the rules), we're not going to put the sexual genie back in the bottle. Men want sex, but they seem to resent women both not wanting sex as much as they do, and thus not being sexually available, and wanting sex and being too available. Women are not blameless, but it's hard to be blamed for being frigid (if you won't sleep with Ted) and a whore if you will sleep with Ted, and with Joe before him when he was your boyfriend, and with Bill after him when he is your new boyfriend.

Suppose that by some act of the simulation overlords in the morning all women refused to have sex outside of marriage, demanded that their boyfriends commit to proposing marriage before entering into a serious relationship, and everyone had to wait until marriage to have sex. There would still be a ton of male sexual frustration around this, there would be the demand for porn and prostitutes, and where do you get prostitutes if not women who either have high sex drives or are driven to it by economic necessity? And so do we then go back to the happy days of silver nitrate eyewash for newborns, due to the risk of blindness from gonorrhoeal infection of the mothers, often given to them by their husbands who frequented prostitutes? The kind of historical background to this story by Arthur Conan Doyle, based on medical experience, where the grandson of a man who contracted venereal disease is suffering from the transmission of the same down the generations?

“Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly,” said the doctor, “but you must have known the nature of your complaint. Why, otherwise, should you have come to me?”

“God help me, I suspected it; but only today when my leg grew bad. My father had a leg like this.”

“It was from him, then——?”

“No, from my grandfather. You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian?”

The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile set with whom he consorted had shrunk away from him in horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the barmaid wife whom he had married in some drunken frolic. As he looked at the young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds— they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man.

“I see that you have heard of him,” said the young baronet. “He died horribly, I have been told; but not more horribly than he had lived. My father was his only son. He was a studious man, fond of books and canaries and the country; but his innocent life did not save him.”

“His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand.”

“He wore gloves in the house. That was the first thing I can remember. And then it was his throat. And then his legs. He used to ask me so often about my own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I tell what the meaning of it was. He was always watching me—always with a sidelong eye fixed upon me. Now, at last, I know what he was watching for.”

“Had you brothers or sisters?”

“None, thank God.”

“Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in my way. You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis. There are many thousands who bear the same cross as you do.”

“But where is the justice of it, doctor?” cried the young man, springing from his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room. “If I were heir to my grandfather’s sins as well as to their results, I could understand it, but I am of my father’s type. I love all that is gentle and beautiful—music and poetry and art. The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. Ask any of my friends and they would tell you that. And now that this vile, loathsome thing—ach, I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? Haven’t I a right to ask why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest. Talk about the sins of the father—how about the sins of the Creator?” He shook his two clinched hands in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite.

The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him back into his chair once more. “There, there, my dear lad,” said he; “you must not excite yourself. You are trembling all over. Your nerves cannot stand it. We must take these great questions upon trust. What are we, after all? Half-evolved creatures in a transition stage, nearer perhaps to the Medusa on the one side than to perfected humanity on the other. With half a complete brain we can’t expect to understand the whole of a complete fact, can we, now? It is all very dim and dark, no doubt; but I think that Pope’s famous couplet sums up the whole matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say——”

But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust. “Words, words, words! You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say them—and think them too, no doubt. You’ve had your life, but I’ve never had mine. You’ve healthy blood in your veins; mine is putrid. And yet I am as innocent as you. What would words do for you if you were in this chair and I in that? Ah, it’s such a mockery and a make-believe! Don’t think me rude, though, doctor. I don’t mean to be that. I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to realise it. But I’ve a question to ask you, doctor. It’s one on which my whole life must depend.” He writhed his fingers together in an agony of apprehension.

“Speak out, my dear sir. I have every sympathy with you.”

“Do you think—do you think the poison has spent itself on me? Do you think that if I had children they would suffer?”

“I can only give one answer to that. ‘The third and fourth generation,’ says the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of marriage.”

“I am to be married on Tuesday,” whispered the patient.

It was the doctor’s turn to be thrilled with horror. There were not many situations which would yield such a sensation to his seasoned nerves. He sat in silence while the babble of the card-table broke in upon them again. “We had a double ruff if you had returned a heart.” “I was bound to clear the trumps.” They were hot and angry about it.

“How could you?” cried the doctor severely. “It was criminal.”

“You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day.” He put his two hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively. “You are a man of the world, Dr. Selby. You have seen or heard of such things before. Give me some advice. I’m in your hands. It is all very sudden and horrible, and I don’t think I am strong enough to bear it.”

The doctor’s heavy brows thickened into two straight lines, and he bit his nails in perplexity.

“The marriage must not take place.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“At all costs it must not take place.”

“And I must give her up?”

“There can be no question about that.”

The young man took out a pocketbook and drew from it a small photograph, holding it out towards the doctor. The firm face softened as he looked at it.

“It is very hard on you, no doubt. I can appreciate it more now that I have seen that. But there is no alternative at all. You must give up all thought of it.”

I have no idea what the solution is. But it certainly won't come from people like our friend speaking of "my wife" in the same sense they mean "my car" or "my shoes". We've had that, and it wasn't happy families, it was the kind of thing satirised by Dean Swift in "A Modest Proposal":

Men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, or sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.

High status males DO need to be reined in since they're the ones setting the social trends for most everyone below them in the totem pole.

If they are deigning to eschew monogamy and go around banging and impregnating various women with no intentions of marriage, guess what norms end up ascending?

Of course, we could just let those new norms dominate.

Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.

IIRC Julia Roberts married a camera operator she met on one of her movies.

According to the wiki he's a Cinematographer that's a bit more prestigious and less blue-collar coded than just being a camera guy.

Still, she's been with him for 20+ years, not bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moder

Bit more research shows that she met him while she was working on a movie that ALSO STARRED BRAD PITT so yeah, good on him for outshining the most chad actor in modern history.

According to the wiki he's a Cinematographer that's a bit more prestigious and less blue-collar coded than just being a camera guy.

It's a department head, yes, but still below the line, which is basically the film industry equivalent of blue collar. Compare it to a foreman on a construction site.

Now that I'm looking at it, on the film where he met Roberts he wasn't even the department head, he was an AC, who operates focus on the lens during shots and probably a few other things when not shooting. But very very below the line.

It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."

To me, it's a no-brainer. In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.

The fact is that there are some problems in the dating market. A lot of men are having difficulty getting dates, let alone girlfriends and wives. A lot of women are having difficulty finding a suitable partner for a committed relationship or marriage. According to hypergamy theory, the main reason for these problems is that many women are way too picky; that their expectations are sky-high compared to what they bring to the table. By contrast, according to more conventional thinking, the main problem is that many men are immature man-children; that they are commitment-phobic; that they are lacking in basic hygiene; that they would rather spend their time playing video games and masturbating to online pornography; etc.

In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.

I mean, I read complaints on here about how women have it so easy in the dating market and that pretty much any woman can get sexual attention from pretty much any man.

Why is this? Because men are willing/desperate to stick their dick in a hole. So the male sex drive forces them to go to extremes to get that pussy, which means that providing she's not actively repugnant, Average Jane can have a hundred men competing to stick their dick in her. This then gives the Average Janes of the world way too high an opinion of their sexual marketplace value and they get too picky and fussy and won't even answer the desperate dating app cries of the Nice Guys.

Well, gentlemen, if you don't women to be spoiled, try turning the dial down so you are the ones more fussy about "if I don't get to stick my dick in someone soon, I'll literally die". Demand is outstripping supply in the sexual marketplace, and the dissatisfaction with women becoming more promiscuous to meet that demand is also the cri-de-coeur of the men out there. If you want women who are discriminating and only willing to date and eager to marry Nice Guys, then be more discriminating and stop dating (even for the single night it takes to get to stick your dick in her) the easy women.

Problem solved?

I don't mean to be mean, but I do get continually surprised - which is on me - how easy male sexuality is, based on comments elsewhere about "when I was 11/12/13 years old, I was fantasising about my hot teacher and jerking off to thoughts of the girls in my class". Just have the appropriate bits (be that for leg men, breast men, etc.) and they will reliably go "sproing!" and want to hit that. Then they are surprised and hurt when the objects of their sproinging do not want to reciprocate, and yet also angry that women will go around letting guys sproing them much too easily so they are not suitable wife-objects.

Why not both/and?

The younger generations have pretty strong failure to launch issues. Those issues are male tilted and the women who do NEET it up may not be at the top of the market, but a woman’s unemployment is just less important to the dating market. That (many)men need to get good is just factually true.

On the other hand social media trends seem to drive ridiculous expectations. That is also true.

Why not both/and?

That might very well be the case. In fact, I have generally observed that in life, when something goes wrong, there are usually multiple contributing causes.

The purpose of my post was to illustrate why there is so much resistance to the concept of hypergamy, even though though the evidence and argument in favor of it is pretty solid.

In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.

Take it one level deeper.

Why would it be 'unflattering' for women to actively seek out the best specimen as a potential partner/mate? Not very romantic, granted, but its not like that's a BAD strategy!

Part of it is because it DOES lead women to stray, cheat, and betray 'good' men due to perceived better options.

The other factor, I think, is that their instincts for what to look for in a guy, which were honed in the ancestral environment, run into some massive issues b/c traits that are adaptive in the modern world are different than those that were necessary to survive the ancient one. This unfortunately leads to them getting into abusive and one-sided relationships because a guy who is physically aggressive, risk-seeking, craves power, and flouts social rules would be very appealing on an instinctual level... and is less likely to care what an individual woman feels about him... and will likely want to have more than one woman. Modern prosperity likewise makes it easier to fake those traits long enough to knock up a woman before she figures out the truth.

Not that I would want to cull high-T males from the population.

So I'd argue the 'unflattering' part arises because women's instincts, even if pointed in the correct direction, lead them to sub-optimal choices when applied. We've given women almost full discretion to pick who they screw, who they marry, and who is even allowed to interact with them. And their choice-making has left much to be desired, even to themselves. And some large part of this is due to the actively deceptive males who are optimized for getting laid with minimal investment, who have figured out how to attract women while having few of the actually desirable traits.

In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.

Oh I know.

I've put up too many comments reflecting on and arguing that pretty much every single problem in the dating market today can be traced to women's behavior shifting, whilst mens' has remained largely the same... except to the extent they have to interact with women.

I wonder how far can one get sponsoring successful, well-adjusted and ordinary-seeming men and women to promote their choices and the advantages of following them.

What I mean by:

  • Successful - they are in a relationship that appears good for them.
  • Well-adjusted - neither of them is a covert or overt cheater, and both are serious about staying together (not necessarily married or planning to seal the deal, it's not like marriage carries a lot of weight with divorce being as easy as it is)
  • Ordinary-seeming - do not possess qualities that would lead the viewer to assume such life can only be achieved with outsized luck, effort, lifestyle changes. I.e. not overly rich, not met through a niche career or a heavily religious subculture, do not radiate youth pastor energy.

This is probably a solid way to put forth a pro-marriage, pro-natalism agenda.

But happy people in good relationships ostensibly don't feel much need to flaunt how good it is, and talk about what makes things work.

Would definitely need to be an outside observer intentionally tracking them down and publishing their observations from the outside.

The problem with poster-boying a monogamous couple is that monogamy is hard, and failure is easy and frequent even if you're trying your best. Putting a couple on a pedestal gives them a long way to fall.

Your Carrie Bradshaw type "complicated messy" women icons don't suffer from failure because it's an easier standard to reach.

Yeah, that's the problem - they don't feel the need to flaunt it, and many probably don't feel like their experiences apply to everyone. That's why I'm proposing sponsoring it. Like lifestyle influencers, but they'd be advertising pair-bonding values rather than makeup brands.

Naturally, it would have to be an exercise in philanthropy because there's no money in it.

There would be ways to monetize it, but yeah, you'd have to accept losses unless you want to be subject to the exact same pressures that lead to influencers putting out braindead, controversy-baiting content.

In a society where women are economically dependent on male provision on an individual basis in the context of monogamy, that is true. Otherwise it’s not necessarily the case.

Not sure which specific part of the post this is applied to.

'Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.'

I mean, a huge portion of women who get enough wealth to be independent just end up never settling at all, is the observed outcome, with large downstream impact on TFR.

True. My argument is that economic autonomy permits women to select for attributes other than provider ability when looking for a mate. This may result in them indeed not settling at all, or selecting mates that are below them in socio-economic status but otherwise being exceptional in some way that makes them hypergamously attractive.

Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former

Lana Del Rey.

The crass side of me wants to know how big that guy's schlong is. He isn't just a blue collar type, he had kids from a prior relationship, he got the bona fides.

But I choose to accept it as the feel-good story about finding true love in unlikely places that it appears as.

I've wondered if having a hard-working, weathered-but-handsome, otherwise well-put-together tradesman for a beau might become a status symbol in its own way, but that doesn't seem to have panned out.

Britney Spears as well married Kevin Federline who I believe was a no-name dancer

Also a broke-ass wigger with two children from a former relationship with a black woman.

Already having had children is a feature, not a bug, for pulling chicks (especially ones who may otherwise be deemed out of your league).

Not even rich, famous women are immune to female mate-choice copying *gestures toward Ariana Grande*.

Plus, the babies’ momma(s) provide(s) an organic, renewable source of drama and competition anxiety to keep a chick’s tingles going.

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