The George Clooney Effect: Female Hypergamy Confirmed

In a story that might as well be titled, "Beta Males Can't Win," Science Daily reports on a new study of women's mate preferences. To the utter surprise of no one, older, higher earning women don't want beta males, or even for that matter hot young guys (they certainly cannot get them, Demi Moore no exception). Nope, they want in effect, George Clooney. Men even older than themselves, and even more successful. This preference makes sense.

Women, no matter how much they protest, don't want or need equalist marriages or want a partner of roughly equal attractiveness and status and age. Women with options (their own independent earnings) confirm this with their choices:

The finding suggests that greater financial independence gives women greater confidence in choosing their partner. Instinctive preferences for material stability and security become less important, physical attractiveness becomes more important, and the age of partner women pick also increases.

"The behaviour of men and women does become more similar as women earn more, but only in terms of the importance of physical attraction," Dr Moore added. "But the similarities stop there: greater income makes women prefer even older men, and men prefer even younger women."

As women now out-number men in the workforce, and out-earn them, this means even more soft-harem forming. Women, as they age out of the younger bad boys, pursue the George Clooneys as they start to earn serious money. Unsurprisingly, the beta male age-peers, who are the same age, same level of attractiveness, and so on, are simply invisible. Or, quite likely, an annoyance given interest that is not shared. Certainly, women don't find men who are the same as they are in status (which includes, looks, wealth, power, and age) exciting.

What matters to women most when choosing partners unconstrained by money/social pressure, is power. Power that comes from social dominance, fame, money, or anything else that a George Clooney type would possess. Including, looks. For which almost anything can be excused. Even Gay Rosie O'Donnell makes excuses for John Edwards, saying he suffered the most, instead of his late wife Elizabeth Edwards. Consider Charlie Sheen. A man who has a questionable history with women at best, considering the accidental shooting of then-girlfriend Kelly Preston, the allegations of abuse and violence by ex-wife Denise Richards, the arrest for putting a knife to his second wife's throat on Christmas Day (and threatening to kill her), and the account of the woman (a porn star) terrified of Sheen in his hotel room rampage. One would think this record would make Sheen toxic to the female audience, but his series Two and a Half Men is hitting new ratings highs. Sheen remains the "good looking bad boy" women aim to tame.

If China has a long-term problem on its hands, with a lot of men who will never marry, and won't as Mark Steyn notes, being turning into the world's first Gay Superpower since Sparta, the US similarly has a problem. Lots and lots of beta males, who even if they strive hard are not even the preference to their female peers, will be at loose ends. With, quite likely the power of the internet and sites like Roissy's and others to explain the reasons why (things worked out so differently for them than their fathers), a built in incentive to change things. So that they are Alpha.

Call it another Silverado Moment.

If the reality of illegal immigration is such that, the only way to create a balanced budget in the States, and not have taxes be so sky-high that they are confiscatory to average working people, is simple deportation of illegals (and their children) regardless of anything else, well then the same holds true for the position of beta males. If it is all about the money (and it always is), then public outlays decrease radically for education, health, welfare, and prison/corrections by simply deporting illegals (and their children, even if they are US citizens) back to Mexico. Eventually States will start doing it, not the least of which is that rule of law cannot exist with some laws not applying (to Mexican nationals) and all other laws applying to a selected few on the bottom of the PC totem pole (Whites and particularly Straight White Beta guys). If the law does not exist, for Mexicans entering the US illegally and working illegally and putting their families on the taxpayer's support, but does exist for those expected to pay out that support, ultimately the law does not exist at all. And Mexicans, eventually, will be deported, one way or another. As White guilt fades and Lifeboat Economics moves to the forefront.

But just as certain is that the same Beta Males are unlikely to stop there. If the problem is the equalist status between men and women, a few will certainly follow PUA guru advice and move to become an Alpha Male. By changing their posture, clothes, personality, and essentially lie about everything:

In the relationship that ended three months ago, I had made the mistake of taking women at their word when they say they want you to be honest about your feelings. Well, I guess women aren’t exactly lying when they say this; it’s more that they just don’t mean it the way you assume. Women do in fact want you to be honest about your feelings, but it’s not so they can love you better—it’s so they know whether to dump your pathetic ass. Women want you to be honest about your feelings the way the IRS wants you to be honest about your finances. What I realized too late was that it was totally within my power to keep that relationship going. All I would have had to do was lie about what I’m really thinking every moment for the rest of my life.

Yes, women HATE HATE HATE Beta Males (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) They'd prefer that they all be Gay, or gone from the planet. This is almost entirely because, yes, most men are their equal, or indeed inferior in power and status. A few men can make the leap (which has considerable cost as seen above) into Alpha Male status, basically a performance that implies superior status due to superior social power, or network, or looks, or any combination. Even fewer men are lucky enough to be born natural Alphas, the Tom Bradys and such. Early maturers, physically, gifted at Athletics, dominant in some way, so that they have women throwing themselves at them from age 15 onwards and never look back.

Everyone else is likely to come to the same conclusion. It would be better for them if their status were higher. And the only way to do that is to make most women's status lower. By destroying the female job-base: health, education, welfare, marketing, corporate finance, advertising, media, etc. Remaking the economy into one dominated by men: resource extraction, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, engineering. Or, in reality TV terms, destroying the Kardashians and making all of America look like Ice Road Truckers or Axe Men.

If China has a built-in pool of angry young men looking for an outlet of aggression and figuring it would be a very good thing for China to conquer Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, and other places with attractive women nearby, so maybe they can get a girlfriend (by the age old method of killing the boyfriends of said women in the near-abroad), the US has its own problem. Beta males by and large are unattached to most women. A married man would never contemplate destroying his wife's livelihood -- she brings in home money required to run the household, and live better. A single man, contemplating the hard hurdle to become in effect, George Clooney (not in the cards for about 90% of all Beta Males, or about 81% of all men), can figure its better to simply remake the economy so HE is in effect George Clooney by taking down the earnings and income and social position of most of his age peer (and younger) women.

Gone would be jobs in media, in entertainment, in government, in most health and education and welfare roles. Gone would be jobs in corporate HR, or diversity, or any such thing. Welfare for single mothers? Why? Not their kids. Corporate finance and HR and marketing jobs? Move to trim them (by taxing them). Put costs right on top of the entertainment industry to make it a broken shell. The same for media companies, and fashion, and the like.

Now, this effort is unlikely to be successful, in and of itself, but it will certainly be attempted. Men are not stupid, and the bigger the group of beta singletons, unattached (and thus uncaring) towards women (and a particular woman), and the longer that cohort ages, the more they will push for this policy. It won't be labeled as such. The measures will be "fiscally responsible" or "work to welfare" or "improving productivity" or "revenue neutral" but there will be a sizable group of beta men wanting their own preferences by pushing down their female peer's.

Beta males cannot become George Clooney (which is what their age peers in their thirties and older seem to want). Only a select few can create that wealth/power/looks premium that women demand. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's wealthy billionaire founder, has less social power and attraction than say, Grade Z actor Jared Leto. While Sorkin's movie was completely untruthful about how Facebook was created and developed ("the Social Network") he did capture one unpleasant truth: when women have their own money, power, and status, only the most massively dominant of men are attractive. Mere money and brains makes one an afterthought, even at Zuckerberg's levels. The dog that is not barking there, is the complete lack of women throwing themselves at Zuckerberg. Compared to even fairly pathetic guys like … Charlie Sheen or Ashton Kutcher.

Nope. Beta males won't be able to remake themselves into Clooney. Or Sheen, or even Kutcher. But they can reduce their female peers, or at least try to. In this, they are likely to be helped by the "Rendezvous with Scarcity" that Ed Driscoll has predicted. In a later post I will identify the factors driving scarcity of almost everything, from investment capital, to natural gas, to oil, to food, and clothing. But suffice it to say that even marginal improvements in China's average income means a lot more competition for scarce resources, and the likelihood of economic autarky and trade bloc moat building. India and Russia have already banned sugar and wheat exports, respectively, due to bad harvests and the politically sensible desire to keep domestic prices as low as possible. The whole female-dominated super-structure of marketing, advertising, corporate finance, HR, fashion, and the rest including the Kardashians and Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus is coming to an end in a long-lasting age of scarcity and massive international resource competition.

As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's right hand man says, the power of incentives in shaping human behavior is massive. If Beta males cannot become George Clooney, and are not tied to women's income (single men) they are likely to demand their own status become much higher by remaking the economic and social order in any crisis coming to hand. And the new international system hard-wiring instability globally into the US and the West guarantees there will be no lack of shocks and crisis.

If the social order can muddle through, without any real stress, if the economy magically recovers, everyone goes back to work, and the old social-economic-political alliance of White Women, various non-Whites, and connected White social elites, reasserts itself by producing economic good times, of course there is zero chance of Beta males remaking the system. But in a crisis, the old values are upended. New ones come to the fore, when its to the lifeboats. In J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun," pickpockets and thieves rule the Japanese run internment camps for the British and other Western Whites, not the old elites who have no ability to provide food and survival in a brutal new environment. If the markets decide that the US Government cannot repay the implied debt of the States and localities on top of its own debt, without massive inflation or repudiation (same thing), or oil, gas, food, cotton, and money shocks occur, or war breaks out somewhere sensitive (Korea, the Persian Gulf), then it is to the lifeboats. Events themselves will drive survival, and the "thieves and pickpockets," the lowest of the low, (beta White males) are unlikely to return to old ways of deference and social order once one storm has passed and another gathers.

But clearly, everything has its cost, everything is connected, and everything in turn has an effect on everything else. Women's choices in men, preferring George Clooney, are in turn inexorably driving the 81% of all men that excludes into behavior designed to make them that powerful. One way or another.