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Reposted from Theschism
Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.
According to privilege theory, this is impossible. ADHD medications are disproportionately given to white boys, the most privileged cohort on the planet. The System was supposed to protect them from harm. Anything given to that population was supposed to be checked rigorously. Medication that helps short term but ruins you later sounds exactly like something that would be given to minorities.
This is personal for me. I have adult ADHD (and possibly bipolar) so earlier in life I was trying to get Adderall. Ironically, my reasoning was the same as described by privilege theory although I didn't know it back then: "this is the same thing that western elite is using, so it must be good. Surely they woudn't poison their own children. That would be monstrous."
Fortunately, as I live in one of those "shithole countries" and not in the west I couldn't afford to see a psychiatrist. Only recently have I realized what a massive bullet I dodged. Today I am pretty well off and could probably afford any treatment but would never, ever see either psychologist or psychiatrist. Who knows which seemingly sound treatment will be revealed as ruinous decade from now? And that's why this male won't go to therapy. Or trust privilege theory.
In chess there is something called "material advantage". A point system you use to roughly determine who is in the lead. So Queen is worth 9 points, Rook 5, Bishop and Knight 3. So someone with queen and a rook is supposedly better than someone with two knights and two bishops. This analysis is pretty helpful on beginner and intermediate level.
But in chess, spatial positioning of the pieces is what really determines the victor. Grandmasters have no problem sacrificing materially valuable pieces if that puts them in favorable position. This is even more true of superhuman chess engines who play crazy alien chess that defies simple analysis.
I think privilege theorists (I think this is nicer term for wokists) have tendency to assign privilege according to point system which grades things like skin color but can't tell you how well positioned someone is. It is just kinda assumed each white person has access to privilege, regardless whether he truly has access to old boy network or not.
Pharma executives -- most of them white males -- are not going to shield white males outside old boy networks. Hence dementia-inducing medication given to white boys, and highly addictive opioids given to white men. Theorized general connection between white elite and all the other whites is just not there. There is only shareholder satisfaction.
I am uncharitable enough to compare privilege theory to evolutionary psychology -especially simplified version of evopsych as espoused by RedPillians and the similar. Both systems give you simplified toolset that is seemingly applicable to every situation, giving you the illusion of understanding everything while actually explaining little.
We hear how women are hypergamous. And they are. Women definitely do like high-status males. But what RedPill doesn't understand is that there are other countering forces. Namely, women don't like to share. High-status male that is already taken is less attractive than low-status one that isn't. And that's why high-status males generally don't have harems. (Although they benefit somewhat from serial monogamy).
Popular version of privilege theory similarly take into account some forces while ignoring some other forces. Sure middle class has privileges. But they are deeply anxious because transferring those privileges to their offspring is harder than ever. It is much less British aristocracy and more walking the tightrope over the abyss. This makes them deeply vulnerable to anyone promising them nostrums such as pills that would make their offspring better behaved.
Also if you have some money, but not enough to afford attorney from petty cash, you are much more vulnerable to any regulation that the powerful dream up. Because unlike the underclass, you are much more legible to the system. You have a job you and all your property is easy to find. I think that's what conservatives think by "anarcho-tyranny".
When you declare such people as privileged, you are declaring that you are simply not interested in helping them with any of those issues. And so, just as the pole is greasier than ever (due to outsourcing), those slipping are being scolded harder than ever.
But you know what? I am probably the last person who should complain about this. Ultimately, all this is to my advantage, as outsourcing that ratchets western middle class anxiety to the point of madness is directly benefiting me. I as a non-westerner am getting those jobs. So please continue belittling your middle class. Please continue ignoring all their problems.
Edit:
Studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063150/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110220193013.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161813X06000921
This has been an age-old accusation (well, if you count "since right before Gamergate" to be "age-old") against social justice proponents, that their politics make them engage in "oppression olympics" and box-ticking--even when it's not literally quantified (there's a much older image of a possibly-faked score card from Tumblr that I can't find now), the "privilege theory" will indeed lead to failures to recognize legit oppression or disadvantage because it happened to the "wrong" group or it "didn't count."
This "accusation" has been vindicated a million times by countless word games about how men or whites can never be oppressed, how female privilege cannot exist, and about how anything bad that ever happens to them must be qua one of their other characteristics, never qua them being men. Intersectionality in practice is a network of one-way streets.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but it's my impression that medicating children for ADHD in America (in contrast to students/professionals using the medications for performance enhancement as adults) is something of a lower/working-class thing in contrast to sending them to therapists or whatever. Indeed, it is the South (along with a few northeastern states) that diagnoses children with ADHD and medicates them for it the most frequently.
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The first study linked, which concludes that ADHD treatment isn't very effective (after skimming the article, "boost lasts for only two years or so" seems to be an oversimplification), is from 2009. The second and third, which find a correlation between amphetamine use and Parkinson's disease, are from 2011 and 2006, respectively.
I understand that some fields move more slowly than others, and that a clinical trial by its nature must take several years (plus the time to prepare the trial before it starts, to collect enough participants, etc., and the time needed to analyse the data after the trial is done and to write up the results, and the delays related to publishing). Nevertheless, I think describing a study published 17 years ago as "recent" is a bit of a stretch.
(It could be that you just didn't see when they were published, and assumed they were recent, for some reasonable definition of "recent". This is known to happen. I've read on Snopes that stories sometimes reappear randomly: someone stumbles upon an article from years ago, assumes it's recent and shares it, other people see it and share it, and suddenly thousands of people believe something new and important has happened, when in fact it happened years ago and was unimportant and quickly forgotten. It's why The Guardian added a big bright yellow warning above older articles saying "this article is x years old".)
When I first read the quoted sentence, before any links to the actual studies were present, my interpretation was that a series of related studies (I think it's not unusual for one clinical trial to result in multiple publications) examining in detail all the long-term effects of ADHD medication had been published within, say, the past few months. In fact, the first study reports the findings from a clinical trial on the effectiveness of a certain kind of treatment for a certain subtype of ADHD, and makes no mention of dementia; the other two investigate a hypothesized correlation between amphetamine use for any reason, apparently including recreational use (the third even counts methamphetamine as a relevant type of amphetamine), and make no mention of ADHD treatment.
Meth is a known neurotoxin, not much to say there. Recreational use of amphetamine, at doses significantly higher than those used to treat ADHD, is likewise already known to cause neuropsychiatric problems, including psychosis. Your post, however, implies that treatment of ADHD with amphetamine was recently found to be dangerous, a claim not supported by the studies linked. If it had been discovered in 2006, or even in 2011, that treating ADHD with amphetamine increased the risk of dementia, this would have become widespread knowledge by now. As I noted in another comment, however, looking up "ADHD medication dementia" only returns results of ADHD medication being used to treat dementia.
In conclusion, the central premise upon which your entire post is based is false. This does not mean that "privilege theory" is correct, just that this particular argument against it is invalid.
P.S. Anyone who was treated for ADHD and became concerned after reading the original post should now relax. (Maybe with some benzos?)
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Where are these studies? Googling "ADHD medication dementia" just gives me articles about ADHD medication being used to treat dementia.
Linked now
The studies you linked are from 2006-2011. How is that "recently"?
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God, this sounds like it would change my life, but I've already been through Risperdal in my teen years and I don't think getting back on that BS would be a good idea nowadays. I share your reluctance towards medication.
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So why do you not take amphetamines?
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I've seen the effects of withdrawal and addiction to it and I think I'll pass. Adderall sounds like a great idea to PMC 20-somethings who don't think they have anything to lose, but heroin is also fucking awesome and i still wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Frying your brain is not worth any high powered job.
Broke: I don't take adderall, people who do are losers who can't work hard.
Woke: I take adderall, people who don't are losers who can't work hard.
Bespoke: I don't take adderall, people who do are losers who work hard.
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"Defection game" implies that it's zero-sum, but from what you're saying, it seems like the world would be greatly improved if all low-conscientiousness people used amphetamine. Unless there are some serious side effects that would outweigh the improvements in conscientiousness, of course.
When it's in an academic context, it absolutely is- grades tend to be on a curve rather than objective (though that depends on the institution), and if you're taking performance-enhancing drugs to get As, that means someone else is closer to getting an F. Sure, one could argue that it's valid to cheat to get a credential that doesn't matter, but that outlook doesn't help anyone else in the class.
Otherwise, I would tend to agree that widespread amphetamine usage, if the accelerated productivity is rewarded by employers rather than simply becoming a new baseline, would yield massive improvements. Because I'm absolutely certain that won't happen and have seen examples (though some fictional) of a population's chemical dependence being abused for some other goal, I don't actually think this is a good idea.
EA would do well to fund a second-generation amphetamine, though.
I might be sounding a little too idealistic here, but grades are definitely not the main point when you're "in an academic context". Hopefully you're actually trying to learn something and having stronger, more focused peers to talk to makes this significantly easier.
This is very much not true! Grading is almost always against the difficulty of the material, not against your peers. I have never heard of a single colleague who ever made their class this insanely zero-sum. Any sort of curve is just a sanity check to make sure that estimates of difficulty are correct and always take into account impressions of how strong a given class is compared to past ones. If someone is closer to getting an A, they ask better questions in class, are a better resource to talk to outside of class, and in general make the class better.
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As others have noted, this is a misstatement of "privilege theory." That theory does not state that everything done by those in power is purposely done to help those with privilege. Rather, it states that society is structured in a way such that some people, because of their race, gender, or whatever, get certain advantages or are spared certain costs that are experienced by others of different races, genders, or whatever, and that assumptions about what is normal tend to be shaped by the experiences of those with "privilege."
For example, years ago I rented an apartment in what was supposedly a marginally unsafe area. But I never felt unsafe, including walking late at night a couple of blocks from where I had to park to where my apartment was. However, I am a guy, so I did not have to worry about being sexually assaulted, and for all I know the signs of risk of sexual assault might have been present, but I was oblivious. A woman might well have been at risk in that area. That is a form of "male privilege." (And, in fact, my landlord told me that she rented to me over a woman who also applied because she was not comfortable renting to a woman in that area).
Similarly, when I first started teaching, I was told: "Don't assume that every kid has a quiet place to do homework at home." The assumption that every kid has such a place is a form of "class privilege."
None of this is to say that the concept is not often, or even frequently, trotted out and used stupidly, dishonestly, or both. Nor does it mean that privilege, even to the extent it exists, has much actual effect; it could well be quite trivial. But you are attacking a strawman.
But note, your supposed privilege here is entirely based on your own feelings and perception, and not reality, which is that males are many times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than females.
Is a person actually privileged if they only feel privileged because they have been psychologically conditioned to feel privileged? This does lead directly to quality of life enhancements so it's not entirely a theoretical question but that does suggest that the solution to many cases of disprivilege would be to psychologically coach a feeling of empowerment rather than changing the reality of the world, and this is exactly the opposite of how privilege theory is received at large.
I specifically referred to sexual assault.
Men are more likely to be the victim of violent crimes because they are more likely to engage in altercations. But I am talking about the risk of being the victim of a crime while minding one's own business walking home at night. I believe that women are more likely than men to be a victim in that context.
Do you have a citation on that second point? I haven't seen any hard data on that, but I think it may be confounded by frequency with which men are forced into more dangerous situations for criminal violence via occupation (night shift, security guards, etc) and their statistical propensity for perhaps-careless-but-not-illegal risk taking.
Well, this says that the rate of violent crime victimization for women was about the same in 2018 and 2019, so since, as you note, men are more likely to be in dangerous situations and have a propensity for risk-taking, that implies that women who are just minding their own business are indeed at greater risk than are men. And that is purely quantitative; it ignores the qualitative aspect of being a victim of rape or sexual assault.
Note that the fact that men are careless might well be evidence of "privilege" -- men can "carelessly" walk home late at night because they are at very low risk of sexual assault. They can better afford to be careless than can women.
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Nitpick but even if they assume distributions instead of a single value, their conclusions are still expected if they assume the distributions mean being sufficiently different enough.
But I'd agree with Tim Urban that the broad woke ideology is fairly low rung and they might as well be thinking in a point system.
Did you also consider uncertainty?
That you can extensively test the supposed long-term and short-term effects of a drug, do all the expensive studies, yada yada, and still be wrong about it? Not having intended to be wrong about it at all?
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As ever, it turns out that it's easier for narrative explanations if everyone just pretends Asian kids don't exist. But once they do:
So what does one draw from this, that Black children are more privileged than Asian children and slightly more privileged than Hispanic children? I know what I draw from it, but I'm a psychiatric medicine denialist, so my conclusions surely aren't the same as those of people who think drugging kids up when they don't pay attention is a good thing.
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Can you link the studies?
Not being a proponent of privilege theory myself this doesn't sound like a steel man. I don't think that people who support privilege theory think that whites being helped is a fundamental force of the universe, it's believe to be sourced from human bias, which is known to be fallible.
This I do think is true and under appreciated by the identitarian based theories. Liberal white men do not have much of an in group bias and where they hold the reins the power is rarely used to help whites or men as a class because whites and men don't really have class consciousness. And I think the people trying to awaken this class consciousness might discover why that particular hatchet was buried to all of our losses.
Linked now in op
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That's just called "accelerationism" though. It's revealing that the best idea that labor has to deal with the usurious taxes of capital is "try to speed the inevitable collapse along", but then again that's probably the reason why they're labor in the first place.
But then again... is there really a problem with this?
I always figured it's an evo-psych thing: losing a war in ancient times generally meant being sold into slavery (labor and capital alike), but if that slavery was better than the slavery your own society imposed then it's very difficult to argue that resisting was the right call (and "then we won't fight for you; better to die trying to kill you than the supposed enemy" is a decently effective threat- draftees killing your officers with the guns you necessarily had to give them is not good for military efficiency).
And we see this played out through history. If the population legitimately considers the enemy to be a better choice over their own rulers (or at least, insufficiently bad to bother throwing bodies at the problem with no guarantee of victory), they'll let them walk right on into the city. Ancient cities in the path of invading armies did this time and time again when the invaders weren't actually that much different than them and they'd rather avoid the siege- this is why people pay Dane-geld in the first place. If the price is right, it can work.
The best example of this was, in my opinion, the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan. No Afghani defended Kabul- the average Afghani male actively chose the Taliban over Western ways because he knew what the enemy wanted, and what they wanted wasn't worth dying to resist. Sure, sucks for the women, but they were perfectly capable of mounting a defense of the city themselves because they were Liberated and Strong per the imported/imposed Western ideology... well, apparently the Islamic view was more correct.
By contrast, the Ukrainian response to invading Russians. Guess the men must feel like they have something worth defending; they could have welcomed the Russians to deal with their "Nazi problem" and their first strike teams were claimed to have been found with riot gear to enforce the peace (that might be propaganda though), but they very clearly did not do that.
I enjoyed the recent Bennett's Phylactery podcast on this topic. I'm no expert and have done no work to verify details, but the core points make sense in any case.
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If you follow the logic of the actually existing privilege theory, rather than allow theorists do damage control after being confronted with an uncomfortable example, then he's right. There was a relatively recent discussion on TheMotte (still back on reddit, I believe), where the fortification of milk was being used as an example of systemic racism. There was no evidence provided for bias being in any way involved, and it never is. The existence of the discrepancy is always evidence for systemic racism in itself. At the very least that would mean our society is systemically racist against white people, and that is explicitly said to be impossible by privilege theorists.
I see now(and that you mentioned this and I missed it) that you're using privilege theory as a moniker for all of the social justice/woke/progressive and not the more narrow subsection of their theory. I still think this is a failing of the ideological Turing test. Even by their theories if we eliminate privilege we're all supposed to be uplifted and thus a 'universe with whites in charge can only do things that help whites' contradicts 'if we don't hold down people of color then we'll all benefit from their unique perspectives'. You can assert that they're only espousing that second axiom as a cynical lie but this is not a steel man and fails the sniff test to me as I live among the progressives and this is not how they think. Right or wrong they truly believe.
I disagree. If anything, isn't "systemic dyscrimination" a subsection of privilege theory, rather than the other way around?
I'm only accusing them of contradicting themselves, whether that's because of cynical lies, or bias of their own, or some other explanation, is not relevant to me. There's a very simple way to prove me wrong. Find me an example from their literature where they consider some example of disparate outcome as a potential example of systemic discrimination, but ultimately argue against it because of lack of evidence of bias. Alternatively you can show me how they call out a case of systemic racism against white people.
Ibram Kendi DID note structural barriers for whites and the incentives to "pass" it created.
And his response to people noticing this was just to delete it and pretend otherwise.
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It might be better for everyone if nobody has the consciousness you're talking about, but surely it's worse to be the only group without it when everyone else does have it.
This way leads to the mountains of skulls. It must be resisted until it cannot be.
I'm not endorsing the racial consciousness of any group. I preach color blindness and believe that we can return to it. Wokeness has not been around in the mainstream public consciousness for all that long and what it has wrought has been quite negative. It very much could still crumble. Call it copium if you must but I still see a way out. Your average progressive supporter has not peaked behind the curtain, they do not pay attention to the rhetoric or underlying belief structure. They simply think that progressivism is kindness. The facade cannot hold forever, the wrongness of the theory becomes more apparent every day. You see it with schooling reform, you see it with trans kids, you see it with police funding. Progressives can sell the credulous public on trying some policy but when these policies bear fruits and the fruits turn to ash on the average person's tongue the average person still trusts their senses and spits it out. Liberalism runs deep and can still be saved.
Also a response to @chickenoverlord
I think it does indeed run deep. When talking to progressives their arguments are often rooted in a kind of disjointed liberalism. They talk about unfairness, discrimination, equal treatment under the law as a goal that they believe we're failing. These are fundamentally liberal ideals. They can be induced to mouth and chant unexamined slogans about oppressors and Marx adjacent things but they do not recognize the Marx in it. When it comes down to actually needing to reason instead of regurgitate I have always found they fall back on liberalism immediately and instinctually.
I don't think almost anyone talks about equal treatment under the law any more, I much more frequently hear about equitable treatment which is an explicit rejection of equal treatment.
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I think you have it backwards. The normies believe in the disjointed liberal stuff. The progressives do not (and often enough claim these ideas are somehow racist or problematic); they believe in the oppressor stuff, but will often use liberal terms to keep the normies happy.
Case in point: "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Which Al Yankovich put better as "they kick you and they beat you and they tell you it's fair".
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Does it run deep? As much as I love it, it seems to largely be the product of English culture and institutions, and the weirdos who were most into it self-selected and yeeted themselves across the ocean to America. Continental Europeans never really seemed to get behind it, given their love of handing over absolute power to the state. And of late England and most of its former colonies other than the US seem more in favor of giving absolute power to the state rather than anything remotely resembling liberal democracy. The US is the last bastion of anyone and everyone who gives the smallest fuck about limiting state power, and even then it's a dwindling number. Covid lockdowns alone should have been enough to convince you of that.
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Oh wow, that feels oddly vindicating in a way I can't quite explain. I'm in a similar situation to you, but I don't think I was ever at risk. I also come from a Shithole, and when I was growing up ADHD, as well as other disorders, was seen as bizarre Western invention to justify your personal flaws. I also have a big personal bias against psycho-active drugs, so it never even felt tempting.
Maybe it fits right into my anti-elitism. Or maybe I just don't like treating psychology / psychiatry as a science.
I could see it that way if the Westerners could keep their neuroses inside their borders, but they seem pretty intent on spreading them around the world.
Honestly this is by far the worst western export, even more so than their bombs, at least you can rebuild after getting bombed, the mind viruses stay permanently...
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Hypergamy is a vacuous concept. People want to maximize positive attributes in their partners, you don’t say. It’s the male version of the female fear ‘all men want to do is replace their wives with younger models’.
Let's grant that. The difference: most men can't go out and get a younger girl to replace his wife. Only DiCaprio can do this reliably. Women, on the other hand, can get attention from higher-status men to replace her husband, but not as a husband. So, even if hypergamy is vacuous, it's still relevant if only one sex can act on their hypergamous instincts.
It's far easier for women to cheat, because men are hornier and less discriminating.
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I agree they can't find a better husband, but they can find someone who they think will be their husband, and this is the whole issue. Men using prostitutes isn't the same for obvious reasons.
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No, I do not think that the average women high-five each other every time they get pumped & dumped by a high status man and I find the insinuation rather insulting.
What I do claim however is that the average woman who struggles to find a long-term partner (note that this is already not the average woman) often has already been asked out by perfectly respectable similar-status men but rejected them for flimsy reasons. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll frequently mention a single, maybe two or three, high-status married men (or, to take an extreme example, the aforementioned non-existent Prof. Brad Pitt). Depending on their taste, they might instead be into a flaky artist they've been having an on-off relationship/affair with for years, their boss, or their most popular co-worker, but the principle stays the same. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply deem no men worthy of being in a relationship with them, except the ones that clearly have other options. The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal.
On the other hand the average man who struggles to find a long-term partner has already asked out similar or slightly below status women than themselves and been rejected. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll give you a long list of all their female friends, as well as most their female co-workers except the batshit crazy or disfigured, and the same for female acquaintances that may even be significantly below their own status. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply are not deemed worthy of being in a relationship by almost all women (no, a women telling other women to date him bc he's so "nice" doesn't count). If they wanted to reliably find a girl, they would have to go to great and unusual lengths that may even cause their peers to lose respect for them, like going to Thailand and hitting on every non-prostitute they can find. Otherwise their main options are a) waiting until the women among their peers become sufficiently desperate with age or b) work harder to become higher-status. But unfortunately the latter is a zero-sum approach that will mostly kick down other men even further.
For reference, I'm talking about upper-middle class behaviour here (i.e. the group of people we hear the most complaining from & about). So, well-mannered people with decent hygiene, good work ethic and enough income that any reasonable family can be provided for. I'm a research postdoc at a decent western university, and the number of women with frankly delusional expectations and a surprising amount of sneering disgust towards even slightly below their status men that try to hit on them is downright frightening. Single female professors with bitter attitudes towards the male professors who dared to marry a non-professor are basically a running joke. Plenty of my wife's female acquaintances and friends, who are mostly also researchers, therapists, or I/O psychologists at companies show exactly the behaviour described above, and my wife, who has also become a bit sick of their attitudes, occasionally digs a little deeper into who would actually be good enough for them, and it's reliably exactly who you'd expect.
And to repeat myself, I'm specifically talking about the women who claim to struggle to find a partner, not those that are in stable long-term relationships (I do think women in general are hypergamous, but for most women that preference is weak enough to not lead to this obvious failure mode). And also to be clear, I have plenty of gripes with male mate-finding behaviour as well and do not consider women's behaviour worse overall. But the topic here is the existence of female hypergamy, and the specific issue of a seeming pandemic of unhappy single people is in my opinion mainly caused by female hypergamy, and not by men playing too much video games or similar claims in mainstream journalism.
As an aside, I'm also quite frustrated how reliably every time one complains about how much men suck as a group in some way (they're more violent & criminal, they constantly try sleeping around if given the chance, they flake on family duties, they're less reliable in general, etc. are all things I genuinely think are true on average), it's just everyone nodding along, but if one mentions a single way in which women might not be so great, they get these ridiculous assertions thrown at them.
Good post.
To put it succinctly: eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Female bodies are inherently valuable, male bodies are not. Everything follows from this principle.
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To contextualize a bit, I’m a MRA-ish antifeminist and rafa, while having some feminist sympathies, can hardly be called a mainstream one. So you shouldn't pattern-match this criticism to the general, frequently feminist, view. The line ‘men want to replace their wives with younger models” is indirectly aimed @2rafa , as they have expressed such sentiments in the past.
I think some redpill concepts obscure more than they reveal. You limit your argument to single women already, but that is not how it is used (awalt).
One can explain the attitude you describe in single college-educated women with general human failings, ego protection and sour graping. Feminism and other forms of female chauvinism, when present, obviously don’t help. But those are not the insurmountable, almost genetically coded obstacles redpill thought makes them out to be, encouraging bitterness and helplessness.
That's the thing, I think you're obscuring more than you're revealing by trying to put everything into generic boxes that can apply to both genders. For example, you can kind of explain "roid rage" through general human concepts like regular rage/anger. But no, the very specific hyper-violent presentation of roid rage is caused explicitly by excessive male hormones. You can also see in general that men express anger and rage much more violently, and that some unlucky men can even get something resembling roid rage more or less naturally. An angry women is just frankly not comparable, and will consistently express that anger very differently. Violence in general is more or less a male-specific problem, with women who are engaging in substantial violence being basically a rounding error (yes, I know the female domestic violence stats; no, I don't think it's very comparable).
The same applies here as well. Being perpetually, unhappily single due to inappropriately high standards is pretty much a female-specific problem. You can kind of find similar-ish behaviour in men if you squint hard enough (some super-high status men seem to have trouble holding a long-term relationship, but they also seem pretty happy dumping their young model gf for an even younger model gf), but again, it really isn't very well comparable. Every single guy I've met that claimed to be single due to his high standards immediately jumped at the opportunity once any woman showed him any attention whatsoever. It was just pure cope.
I agree though that viewing this as as insurmountable is wrong as well. As an individual, there's plenty of things you can do to improve your chances.
Don’t concur with your anecdotes. I don’t think incels or hikkikomoris act like they would jump at the chance to have any girlfriend (not that I condemn that attitude, again, legitimate preference).
I think the situation is symmetrical. For every complaint about men making no effort and being childish, there’s one about women being fat, expecting too much. It’s a market. At the end of the day, some of the inventory sits unsold despite there being some buyers left. Only they want to pay 10 dollars for a bunch of apples, and the sellers want 15. I have no sympathy for their intersex whining ‘the sellers/buyers want to exploit us, they’d rather have nothing than our perfectly good offer.’ Then it degenerates into two separate locker room talks about useless men and bitches.
Adjust your price or live with the fact no transaction will take place, both of you. No side is especially wrong or irrational here.
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Precisely! It's well that you're describing economic selection for marriage, and not sexual selection/attraction. That's the whole point! What you described does not disprove the thesis about hypergamy, and is not, in fact, a case of hypergamy.
Well, yes, if you word it that way, of course it comes across as stupid. The way I'd word the Red Pill thesis on this is this: for women, it's self-evident and natural to develop an emotional bond to the man they enjoy fucking, and assume that the same is happening to the man; it's so natural to assume that they don't even recognize it. But for men, it isn't. That's the point.
Er, the original use case of hyeprgamy was exactly economic selection for marriage and that is how the term is still used outside of redpill spheres. Women being hypergamous has been accepted in my (non-western) culture since time immemorial. Men being hypergamous too is accepted although them being successfully hypergamous is rarer. Indeed when I get married I'll be paying close attention to the economic status of potential in laws before making my decision (someone who's a 8/10 fit for me by the only child of a very rich family is a much better choice for my future children than someone who's a 9/10 fit for me but comes from penury).
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I've never seen this idea in RedPill spaces before - not from "official" sources, nor from any random commenters on reddit or blogs.
It's well understood in RedPill circles that men and women relate to sex differently and that women do not derive status from sex in the way that men do. The concept of hypergamy has nothing to do with women trying to make alleged displays of status.
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I think you've misrepresented what I've said a bit, no doubt mostly my fault for weak communication. And I take the important grain of salt that I'm a man trying to model the mind space of women, as I can tell how poorly that tends to go the other way I should be humble in my assumptions. That said I did not mean to imply women are happy to be "pumped and dumped" by higher status males. They definitely want these men as committed partners. My point was that 'settling' seems to be harder for women than men for reasons I can understand.
I'm not perfectly happy with my post, it seems weak to the criticism of:
To which I think I can respond that the stuff women find attractive in men, from what I can tell on the outside and having spent considerable effort in improving my attractiveness, are fairly legible but other male competition is more nuanced and not as dependent on the evaluation of women. I don't think I'm describing this all that well but do you at least agree that there is some asymmetry at play here?
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Disagree pretty hard. Men have a much lower bar for a partner before they say "I'd rather stay single" than women and men would rather sleep with many different partners than having a single super-high status partner. Or the other way around, some women, particularly while they're still young, apparently even prefer being a high-status man's affair over a low-status man's wife.
Just as an example, I personally know multiple women who "have trouble finding a good man" only to find out that they got hit on by a man who was, quite frankly, better than them. My wife confronted a friend of hers who had this problem and concluded herself that she will probably never find someone unless it's literally Brad Pitt, but he is also an accomplished researcher (her words, not mine). Meanwhile looking at my male friends who struggled, most jumped at the very first chance of getting any girlfriend whatsoever.
You should in particular compare what high-status man vs woman say and what they do, since this is the group that has most agency and can optimize for what they actually care about. High-status man will quite frequently have multiple affairs and rarely complain about finding a partner. High-status woman have much less affairs, and if they have one it's usually with a single man that is often even higher status than them, they will frequently complain about finding a good man and generally invest their resources into finding a single high-status man.
These are very simple, real differences between the sexes, and while you may use any word for it you like, hypergamy is a good one.
As a gay man I would absolutely prefer three 6/10 guys than one 9/10 guy. I have been with guys who are 9/10 and it feels degrading because I know they're hotter than me and it makes me feel bad to be with them. The older I get the less I want to sleep with a super hot guy because it just makes me feel worse about myself. It's basically this meme. In theory I love guys who look super hot because I am attracted to masculinity but it's the cheap thrill subsides when we both know who's hotter. I can imagine myself as richer or smarter or better educated or better on any other metric than any hotter guy but none of these dimensions really matter to me when I'm with a man I perceive as physically hotter than me. I can only imagine that straight men ultimately go through this same process of realization- the classic Gilligan's Island trope comes to mind (younger guys go for Ginger because she's a glam bombshell, older guys go for MaryAnn because she's sweet and loving). The older I get the more I'm looking for a sweet and loving guy I can actually believe likes me, rather than a guy who others will think is hot. Having three men I can believe really like me is a million times more appealing than a guy hotter than me that makes me feel less hot than him.
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As a purely egoistic question? Absolutely the former, no questions asked, and I'm even talking about me personally here. Though I do think it applies to the average man as well, especially given I know how they talk when in all-male company & drunk. If anything in my experience I'm already somewhat unusual in that I actually want kids since I'm a teen instead of purely casual sex. But again, if I'm being honest to myself, I would prefer to have lots have kids with several 6/10 than to have only a few with a single 9/10, assuming I can provide for them.
Of course, in a how-to-structure-society meta way, I prefer for everyone to prefer the latter. So I do not think my egoistic preferences to be good, in fact they're very bad, but I think it is important to be aware of your failures & weaknesses.
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Is it wrong to say it would depend on the man's age? I think the % preferring each option would be noticeability tilted in opposite directions for say 21 vs 31.
Are you saying you think the 21 year old would prefer the three 6's over the 9 and the 31 year old would prefer the 9 over the 3 6's? Or the other way around?
Correct on the first one, I think the average 21 year old would prefer the greater quantity and the average 31 year old would prefer the greater quality.
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It’s undeniable that the status of their partner is more important for women than for men. If you want to call that hypergamy, fine, but to me it’s trivial, and doesn’t translate to the vitriol that usually accompanies the term.
That this way of choosing partners is worse than men’s is not clear. I don’t see much evidence that women would rather stay single than men, for example women are often asking men to commit more, ie be less single. But in any case this is also a legitimate preference, condemning an entire sex on that basis doesn’t make sense.
Where did I condemn women, or implied that their way of choosing partners is worse? If it satisfies you, I will say that men's mate-seeking behaviour ranges from pathetic groveling on one end to callous hedonism on the other end, depending on their status. It is in no way better than women's mate-seeking behaviour.
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Saying that women are hypergamous is not a “condemnation”. It’s supposed to be a neutral descriptor of their mating strategy. The strategy itself is neither good not evil; it’s simply a brute fact, the natural outcome of biological and evolutionary factors beyond the control of any one individual.
Of course no descriptor is ever entirely neutral, and you do see vitriol accompanying the term, simply due to the fact that TRP/manosphere circles attract a lot of vitriolic young men who can’t get laid and are angry about it. But hypergamy itself isn’t inherently a “bad” thing.
Like Marx's description of capitalism is supposedly morally neutral and a brute fact. It becomes this sprawling, undefeatable monster of negative attributes of the other.
I also disagree that hypergamy as redpillers use it ( meaning , women will leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher-status man, women in general are far more likely than men to think their prospective partners are below them, etc) correctly describes women's behaviour and attitudes.
I think either your understanding of the conversations taking place is flawed or you're just looking at lower quality redpillers. It never turned into this sprawling, undefeatable monster in the circles I travelled in - the term has a very specific meaning, and even the additional connotations it took on were related to and in service of that meaning. Women will absolutely not leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher status man(notice how all marriages on earth didn't break up so that the women could go join President Trump's harem), and among people who are actually having conversations (and not just incels transforming rage and sexual frustration into boring screeds) hypergamy is viewed as one of many factors involved in female mate choice. You don't need to have a 140 IQ to understand why such a drive would come into being, and at the same time it is something that men(who simply do not function the same way) would want to know about.
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Hypergamy doesn't describe a qualifier, it describes the disqualifier. Obviously, everyone WANTS the best, not the best they can get, but the best there is.
Men don't disqualify from having sex with or partnering up with a woman if she is of lower status than him. Women don't [dm]ate with lower-status men.
It's not what they want, it's what they viscerally don't want.
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I think the main difference is that male attributes are more legible and women are attuned to the relative status of their males. Men can have the relative attractiveness of their wives blur together and anyways they compete with other males on plenty of other categories that wife attractiveness is only one factor in many. Mean while until women have children to brag about other women can very quickly tell how tall, how apparently wealthy and how well placed a partner is in the legible male status hierarchy. Neither women nor men seem to care all that much about women's careers so despite energy being put there it doesn't really impact status anxiety all that much.
At least by perception the status of women is mostly one level removed from their control, what they can control is which man they attach themselves to. They get a facsimile of having high status by sleeping with the highest status male they can and convincing themselves that this is their true status. At least the single ones who didn't attach to a proto high status male, which is the underside of the iceberg often left undiscussed. These single people that make up the population we discuss have already been selected for something.
Interestingly, the same is true for crime. When men attempt to destroy their enemy, the signs are generally very, very visible- hard to hide scratches, bruises, and broken bones- but when women do the same, it's invisible and completely deniable (it's very difficult to prosecute a woman for false rape accusations, and their bullying more generally as the lies are told and the damage done behind closed doors and side channels).
As such, it takes a lot more effort to put an end to female bad actors (and a lot of the judgment will be on circumstantial evidence anyway), and the effect multiplies as the gender balance of an organization (including society at large) skews their way to the point where the (for lack of a better term) "begone thot" school of problem solving stops working.
Corruption is a difficult beast to deal with and no civilization ever survives it (States fall apart when the parasitic load gets too high, but can survive a lot of it to begin with); they all just fracture or are conquered (and we've managed to exterminate all barbarians that could do the latter).
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