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It is suboptimal for society but probably optimal for a good amount of women. Let's say you have two life paths to choose from as a young, high-IQ, non-obese woman:
Career focus with upper middle class luxuries and you can be in a dating paradise for 20-30 years where men jockey for your attention. Optionally pop out a geriatric pregnancy or two when you're around 40. Retire in reasonable comfort and wealth.
Raise five kids as a tradwife and hope your husband doesn't leave you for a younger, prettier woman later on.
It's a no brainer when the risks and rewards are this unbalanced. High IQ women logically want a life of luxuries and comfort over the uncertain guarantees of raising a large family, outside of niche religious or cultural pressure to marry young and bear many children.
Aren't there a lot of high IQ women who married wealthy people and had lots of kids? Angelina Jolie had three kids (and adopted 3 more), Melinda Gates had three kids, MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott) had four...the scheme of getting society to idealize women like this has its problems, but I doubt it's due to a lack of examples.
And yes, these aren't great examples, but I suspect that's sampling bias due to notoriety; if you dig a bit you can find hundreds more women who were smart and talented, married smart and talented men, had 2 - 5 children, and didn't end up in front-page-divorce proceedings.
Yeah, but look at what happened there: she was with Jeff from the start, she stuck with him when he was just getting going, she gave him three sons (plus the adopted daughter) and managed the house and was the supportive executive wife and didn't get entangled in any scandals, and what was the end result? He cheats on her with a plastic surgery bunny that he then goes on to eventually marry, and while she got a nice slice of the pie in the divorce, I remember on here all the lamentations that she did nothing to deserve any of that.
Moral of story seems to be: don't bother doing the wifely bit, enhance your assets with surgery, find a rich sucker going through a midlife crisis, get him to dump the wife and kids, and reap the benefit of all that massive profitability without having to be there for the rough patches and backing him and his dreams.
This is a bad lesson to take, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are ruining their lives this way. This was basically the seething resentment at the heart of FemaleDatingStrategy. There's no point since men can cheat so let's be hyper-transactional and demanding upfront. There's no consideration they have the leverage to behave this way (or what they lose when they do)
First of all, the system worked: Mackenzie Scott supported her husband, made a family and when that family broke down for reasons not of her own choosing, the state rewarded her with her share of the community property. It's a better deal than many people get in breakups.
And if you don't break up (like Zuckerberg hasn't) then you just won.
Also: this is pretty arrogant. Who said you're beating the Lauren Sanchezes of the world in a head-to-head matchup if your man really wants a sycophant-sexpot? Charisma is a skill. You can watch some videos of a younger Sanchez and see that she's put her reps in in the gym and she has the right career to put her in contact with these men. Not everyone is so practiced, not everyone has a talent for ball and some people even find the whole thing unpalatable.
And she still got lucky.
That video being one of her glazing (as the kids say now) Bill Clinton is probably all we need to know about Ms. Sanchez and her map for making it through life 🤣
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Most of the criticism I see of the former Mrs. Bezos is centered around her use of the money. It's not even that she isn't being economically productive with it, she's splurging enormous fortunes on actively anti-social leftist nonsense.
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Yeah, there are high-IQ women still having above replacement amounts of children, but overall they do not seem to be having enough children to offset falling TFR overall. And they are possibly being outbred by low-IQ women, as IQ has been dropping since the 70's or 80's.
While the end-Baby-Boom-to-1990s fertility decline was dysgenic, the post-2010 decline in coupling and fertility is eugenic, in that the lower classes are being hit harder than the middle class and above. It is only dysgenic relative to the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where people still use flip phones.
If we cared more about IQ than TFR, we could levy a yearly tax on each living child. Would be pretty bad for our pension systems though.
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I don’t quite disagree, but that’s why it’s important to promote the civilizational ideal of women through stories, including via news stories like the above. If you proclaim the superiority of women who give up creature comforts in favor of the creation of new life, then that provides social / emotional / spiritual comfort to these women, while restricting it from women who make incorrect life decisions (who don’t get these positive feelings). You are, in essence, increasing the rewards for the right decision. But the prostitute story increases the rewards for the wrong decision. It’s like, why did MacKenzie Scott donate 1 billion dollars to HBCUs? The news taught her that this was socially valuable; it enhanced her honor, status, sense of worth, and thus her comfort with herself. It absolved her from the fear and the shame of not doing what she’s supposed to be doing, which is a common feeling among humans and which we can guide through stories. America’s hyper-striving Bayareans feel guilty or ashamed that they’ve never completed a marathon or sold a startup or gotten into some party, but you can literally just rewire them into feeling this way about prosocial and pro-civilizational things if you own their news and algorithms.
Yeah, the stories matter, I agree on that. Unfortunately in an age of Youtube and Instagram, anybody can write a story and have it reach a large audience. We can no longer restrict media story content like how news outlets hid FDR's polio from the public. We can restrict technology and outside content like the Amish, but I don't think thats a reasonable solution.
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