Rich Lowry: Alpha Girls and Child Men

Rich Lowry's latest post on Kay Hymowitz's "Manning Up" book demonstrates absolutely and completely how most conservatives don't have a clue about what is reshaping our society: the female preference for sexy over reliable men. It really is that simple. But would require Lowry to believe the evidence, instead of his deep-set social conditioning akin to the Catholic Church's belief in a Geocentric universe. Ask Galileo how that went.


Hymowitz, Lowry repeats, laments that today's Alpha female does not have a match for her high achievement. Well, duh. Women find status, power, social dominance, along with physicality, sexy and attractive in men. They are the necessary conditions for any sex, let alone romance, to happen between a man and a woman. The man MUST have higher amounts of status and social dominance than the woman. He must be more aggressive than the woman. He must be more attractive than the woman. This makes female selection very, very choosy. And women are at their most choosy when they are in their teens and twenties. Selecting only the man with the most margin of social status over themselves, the men with the most margin of social dominance over themselves, the men more attractive and aggressive than themselves.

Basically, Brad Pitt, or George Clooney, or NFL Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Mark Sanchez. These are the standards of most young, professional urban White women. Obviously they won't be dating these famous men, but generally compete for the few rock climbing, BASE-jumping, Venture Capitalist types so expertly parodied in "the Wedding Crashers."

Women fundamentally don't get it. Their high achievement is a turn-off to most men, who understand the basis of female selection well. Women find men their own status and social power, well either repulsive or sexually invisible. Women are not now nor have they ever been, interested in a marriage of equals. Or even a romance among equals. The man MUST bring something "more" to the table than the woman: looks, social status, dominance, aggressiveness, and so on.

The pool of such men is vanishingly small. Most men know that they will be going nowhere with their peers in their twenties. At best, a "mistake" soon regretted as the ladies discover the lack of more dominance, or social aggressiveness than themselves. The men who DO possess these qualities have their pick of the most beautiful women. All the credentials, income, and achievement mean nothing to these men, only sheer physical beauty.

By increasing their status to higher levels, all the women Hymowitz and Lowry commiserate with have done, is price themselves out of the market. Ordinary men won't approach them (a lament I've heard often among women I knew in the workplace) because they are essentially, their equal, and know from experience they have no real shot. Those that do approach, tend to be the "Jersey Shore" jerk, the guys who have figured out total obnoxious and total aggressiveness can carry the day, in compensation for being totally average and equal in status, earnings, and social status to their female peers.

In short, by making women equal or superior to most men, those men instantly became unsexy. About as desirable for women as a cold bowl of oatmeal. This is the problem.

The "schleps" that Hymowitz derides, played in movies by Adam Sandler or Seth Rogen (or Matthew McConaughey, "Failure to Launch") know very well that they will not be husbands and fathers. They're not the equivalent of Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Which is exactly what it takes to be a twenty something professional woman of average looks prospective husband/fiancee. So for all those men not devastatingly handsome and with chiseled physiques (against "average" female bodies by the way), or enormous amounts of charisma, or not trustafarians, or felons, or tattooed bicycle messengers, or hip-edgy guitarists in indie bands, or artistic hipster drug addicts (often also trustafarians), well there is no point in maturity.

The "best" that awaits is a sexless, loveless marriage to their age peers in the mid to late thirties, after a parade of said trustafarian hipster drug addicts, felons, hip-edgy guitarists, and so on. Who will always be first and foremost in the hearts and minds of their very "settling" wives. Followed no doubt by a quickie divorce when the revulsion of their wives against their beta male selves becomes too much.

The feminists were in fact correct. Much of Western society DOES rest on controlling, limiting, and coercing the free expression of female sexuality. Limiting it in fairly significant ways. Of course, the few Alpha men (those deemed sexy and desired by nearly every woman) are also limited in significant, though lesser way, in the free expression of their sexuality. Women in the West were forced to marry, and marry relatively early (compared to today), in their early to mid twenties, in order to have children. Though women often worked outside the home, and often side by side with men on farms, cottages, villages, and cities, their status though BETTER than that of contemporary women in other societies, was lesser than their male peers. This had the social function of making their male peers at least minimally sexy.

Lesson: women find loathsome and unsexy men who are their equal. They want men who are superior to them in some way.

Therefore, the rise of the "Child-Man." Why bother with responsibility when all that is available is a shadow of the family life that their grandfathers mostly had and their fathers partially had? What is really all that attractive about a mutually loveless desperation marriage at age 36 between an aging, used up cougar and a Beta Male?

Lowry agrees with Hymowitz that men (basically White men) are not that important. That a family is a single mom and the kids by various bad boys, or "hot" sperm donors. That's a pretty heavy bet. I don't see women being capable of defending the nation, or securing vital resources (like oil, for starters). Much less working drilling rigs, or power lines, or construction projects. Much of the idiocy of so-called conservatives like Lowry and Hymowitz is "magical thinking" -- the infrastructure of the modern world "just happens" and "dirty things" like oil production and refining and transportation, power generation, sewers, just magically happens. With "hopefully" a compliant, serf-class group of non-Whites. If not the "Aunt Jemima" and "Uncle Ben" image of smiling and subservient Black cooks, then perhaps one equally subservient group of Mexican laborers. [This process is inevitable once writers/thinkers cease having had to work for a living, and become bloodless and removed semi-aristocrats, without the hunting and military experience to bring to mind the bloodiness of life and death.]

Alpha women made their own bed. They like all women, disdain men their equals. And they advanced so that nearly all men are very distinctly, either their equals or worse, gasp their inferiors. In status if nothing else.

There is a solution, but one that deserves another post.