The Chuck Finale: What Network TV Tells Us About Love and Marriage

Most people don't go to church anymore. Charles Murray notes that regular religious attendance is pretty restricted to the White Upper Class. But people, still, even with network audience erosion, park themselves in front of the TV every day. Television, and the attitudes it both reflects and helps create, in a feedback loop, is very interesting. It is a giant, two-way mirror into both public attitudes and elite opinion (nothing on TV, overwhelmingly, reflects anti-elite opinion) that if examined closely can predict trends and emerging opinions.

The Series Finale of NBC's "Chuck," one of the most unusual shows on the air, certainly helps the argument that TV's messages are worthy of examination. They also reinforce the observation of David Mamet, who in "the Secret Knowledge" said that years ago, love stories consisted of two people who loved each other intensely, and overcame barriers to be together. Today, love stories consist of people who don't really like each other, but decide for outside reasons to make a go of a relationship. Telling, that is. There is a reason for it. And another.


The first reason is of course, that today's society has absolute freedom. Freedom to be with whoever you choose. There are no Scarlett Letters anymore, nor forbidden love. Heck even Gays can marry, if not in say, South Dakota, then certainly California, or Hawaii, or Massachusetts. Gays can cohabit as partners anywhere. Openly gay personalities are beloved on TV, from Ellen, to Neil Patrick Harris, to the entire cast it would seem of Fox's "Glee," beloved of tweens, teen girls, and their moms. Almost any kind of relationship is possible, which is why Hollywood mines the past, ala Jane Austen, or various disabilities, such as The Surrogate where a man in an iron lung loses his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt.

There are no real barriers, that are believable, so the barriers Hollywood uses to amp up tension, are two people who have their own internal barriers: at least one does not like the other, and there is no mutual longing found fairly quickly. Instead outside forces combine to make people stick together. Generally involving one or more of the following actors and actresses: Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, the Ugly Truth, 27 Dresses, Life as We Know It); Gerard Butler (also the Ugly Truth, the Bounty Hunter, PS I Love You), Sandra Bullock (While You Were Sleeping, the Proposal), Matthew McConaghey (Failure to Launch), and any Jennifer Aniston movie. "Chuck" definitely falls into this category.

This is generally Hollywood's formula now: two people meet, one falls for the other, the other not. Outside forces (drunken one-night stand pregnancy, morning show stunts, immigration enforcement/deportation, a "spy assignment" as an asset handler) force the (almost always the woman) to put up with the obnoxious guy and over a period of being exposed to his "real" good qualities and inspiring better, more adult behavior, leading to finally a "real" relationship. Almost always, the deck is "stacked" by having handsome, virile men play the man-boys, Josh Duhamel, Butler, Owen Wilson, McConaghey, Ryan Reynolds, or "Chuck's" own Zachary Levi. Heigl famously objected to being paired in the movie "Knocked Up" with fattie Seth Rogen, which was just a performance. Even professional actresses doing a performance for a movie soon forgotten by everyone involved, object to being "insulted" by being paired on-screen with a less than A-List Alpha A-hole. In their minds it makes them look ugly.

The second, more hidden reason is that Hollywood itself has little confidence, reflected in both its own hot-house relationship failures, and ugly power dynamics, and the larger outside world, in any lasting, real relationship. This is particularly true in entertainment aimed at women. This is what guys tend to like:



Dr. Pepper Ten? Well it is funny, "not for women," chiefly because of the total absence of any kind of relationship drama.

Hollywood relationships don't last long. This has an effect particularly on writers, who tend to reflect this difficulty in what they create because they see it and know it well. The demands of catering to "ups and downs" in a TV or movie relationship, aimed at attracting women, makes this an easy short-cut as well. This caters to what blogger Dalrock calls the Endless Courtship Fantasy, such as the "Christian" movie "Fireproof," where the husband has to win his divorcing wife back all over again, constantly. Or the Vow (where a car accident leaves a wife with no memory of a husband who must woo her all over again). It is the fantasy of being eternally young, eternally pursued, eternally not having to make a choice, eternally the center of a man's attention. A roller coaster, and a proven way to attract women, either as a Pick Up Artist (that's a classic technique -- push/pull attraction, designed to elicit high highs and low lows of feeling that women get hooked on) … or a television or movie script writer. Offering the same thing. Because it works.

In short, Endless Courtship is the female immature version of playing WoW all day. Or slacking through life. No way to build a lasting relationship, that is critical for creating and sustaining a family. Creating and sustaining a family requires an adult moving-beyond passion, ups/downs in emotions, in favor of stability and sacrifice that kids need. That is what the nuclear family is all about, being more than just two people feeding the need (of one) to create intense emotion(s). Rather, mature and stable self-sacrifice and mutual dependency that raising healthy kids demands. Increasingly, both on-screen and in wider life, that sort of mutual self-sacrifice is just not in the cards, save for the few genetically blessed or the upper classes.

Not when ultimate freedom means walking away. How sad is that? That love stories depend on shadowy government agencies, or threats of deportation, or some bounty hunter, or taking care of a friend's baby after they die, to fall in love and get married? But that is the state of romance in movies and TV today, reflecting the reality of ultimate freedom. Anyone can and will walk away in a heartbeat. Sickness and health? More like, "Not happy, see you, bye!" Increasingly, relationships are defined by movies, TV, and real life, as endless courting not mature devotion. The attitude of endless courting, following an obvious "Happy Divorce" metaphor, and no actual mature relationship, characterized the finale in "Chuck."

Which is a shame, since there were many things that made "Chuck" unique: observations on relative advantages in intelligence in men and women; how truly repulsive omega males are to women (and how that is behaviorally based), and why Omega males stay that way; the idea of "improvement" of a beta male into a credible Alpha, with the help of family, friends, and (naturally) a hot, tough, but underneath sensitive woman. Certainly the show encapsulated the idea that it took an act of God (or his replacement: the Government) to put a man and a woman who obviously belonged together, well, together.

One of the really unique observations in "Chuck" was intelligence. The Bartowski siblings, Chuck and his older sister Ellie, are both highly intelligent, and attractive, tall people. Their father was depicted as a super-genius (and played by Scott Bakula). But Chuck's intelligence is consistently played as one reason for his lack of confidence and success with women generally, and the beautiful spy-handler he falls for in particular (Sarah, played wonderfully by Yvonne Strahowski). Star Zachary Levi does a great job portraying fumbling nervousness because he can imagine, in painful detail, the rejection, the mistake-making, the obvious disadvantages that his character's real persona (as opposed to his spy alias) create for him. His sister, who is shown to be equally as intelligent, and a Doctor, has no such problems. She is the pursued, and had been won by a guy who is both a Greek God (Ryan McPartlin), and a fellow Doctor. For her, intelligence was a plus, her brains plus beauty won her the top guy, who Chuck and best-pal Morgan (the incomparable Joshua Gomez) nickname "Captain Awesome." Because the guy is indeed, awesome.

Time and time again, Chuck over-thinks things, in approaching women, like he would approach a video game, or computer program, or any other highly technical problem. He also obsesses over particular women and gets one-itis, shown as a weakness on the show repeatedly. His great strength (sustained focus) thus becomes a hideous weakness, one that in the series pilot shows him bailing out of his own birthday party to avoid the inevitable humiliation around girls. This quandary is familiar to any guy who has been around high-IQ men and women. The women have no real problem, for the most part, in social settings, while the guys around women are ill at ease. Because all their strengths: obsessive focus, over-thinking, attacking complexity, produces failure after failure. And they don't know why. After all, it brings them success in work.

Also fascinating was the Beta Male/Omega Male hang-out of the "Buy More," a retail hell based loosely on Best Buy (with elaborate parody clothing and sets). Clearly the writers had worked retail, and the stupid employee hijinks ('Mystery Crisper' where best pal Morgan eats blindfolded long-lost employee lunches in the break room fridge) ring true for any who have ever worked retail. As do the Omega Male characters, particularly Lester and Jeffrey (Vik Sahay, Scott Krinsky, comic gold). Two guys so low on the totem pole they can't even see up, and who consequently lack any ambition or motivation other than to be difficult and destructive. "Chuck," as the leader of the group of Omega Males, is shown as their check from disaster,as a natural leader, but one whose lack of any woman in his life leads to "Going his own way" which amounts to going nowhere. A man who opts out of society, who has no hope of girlfriend or family life, easily ends up like Lester or Jeffrey. As Jeffrey put it, "Off by eight. Hammered by eight-fifteen." That's clearly where Chuck is headed, before Sarah shows up.

Slowly but surely, Chuck helps pull not only higher Omega male pal Morgan, but even Jeffrey and Lester out of Omega-dom, and for Morgan into an actual, real, sustainable relationship with a decent girl, and Jeffrey and Lester into some semblance of human functionality. That was a nice touch, though for much of the series, female fans found Jeffrey and Lester predictably appalling instead of funny. If you were a guy you understood. They were just difficult. Because they had no motivation to be otherwise.

Also interesting was the growth of Chuck as a character into a more commanding, assertive, confident, and important man, therefore worthy of sexiness. The deck was stacked again, with Zachary Levi's height and good looks helping things along, and his native intelligence shown to be an asset in "work" be it the useless "Buy More" retail hell work, or "spy work" (which bore as much resemblance to reality as Get Smart or Man from UNCLE). This the female fanbase liked. There are, after all, only so many Alpha males. And everyone likes a fixer-upper, as long as it is not a complete gut job. Merely a coat of paint, some new floors, and you're done! So too was the frustrations of the super-spies (Strahowski's "Sarah" and Adam Baldwin as "Casey") with the retail hell idiocy of a strip mall environment, though Baldwin's character dealt with it better, being a man. As dominant and assertive and comfortable as the spy Sarah was in colorful and exotic settings, the mundane world was a challenge and a mystery to her. The show clearly depicted the mundane, boring, grindingly meaningless life at the "Buy More" as better tolerated by the men, who could put up with it better, than the female characters.

But the center of the show was basically the observation of David Mamet, that two people who had no real love for each other try and make a relationship; again with the Government instead of God putting them together. The relationship was unequal, of course, and in the "Knocked Up" mode instead of the "female pursuit" mode of say, "the Proposal" where the chick pursues the hot guy. Here it is the guy pursuing the hot chick. Endlessly. And unequally, since the show took three seasons for the girl to even acknowledge she loved the main character, and another after that for her to marry him.

And … if that is the view of Hollywood, on what makes romance? The view preached to every woman (and gay) watching at home? [Chuck did skew somewhat male, as this post shows, being number 4 in male skewing in 2010.] Well the nuclear family is doomed. At best, one can be a hot and intelligent woman and find herself courted by a semi-Greek God and fellow med-student. But at worst, the intelligent man finds he must constantly be proving how Alpha he is, and how "romantic," by courting the woman endlessly, forever. Even after marriage. All that time on romance means no time for family formation. Ever. If you want to look at declining birth rates, one need only look at the social dynamics created by absolute freedom. It pretty much demands all available effort be put into constant courtship and romance, at the expense of starting a family for all but the most Alpha of men.

In the show's finale, Sarah, reverts her to the cold, hard, tough assassin she started out as, via the hackneyed ("the Vow" movie) device of memory loss. She does not regain her memory, and she shares only a kiss and some laughs with the hero, before the show fades out. Given that the show required three years for her character to even have feelings and act on them, and another year to marry the guy, what is shown on-screen is a "Happy Divorce" where the girl, now back to where she was, but with more human emotions, moves on with her life. While the guy, stuck again with a super-computer in his brain, has no money, no future, no motivation (lacking critically the girl), and now no extended family/friends, since they've all moved on to other things. Given the lack of warmth, trust, or any sign of "love," by the Sarah character, the show seems to say that even when made into a credible Alpha, any real difficulty means at best a happy Good-bye (the show is titled, in typical Chuck fashion, "Chuck vs. the Good-bye.")

Fan Opinion was mixed, some loved, it, others not so much. [Most of the commenters there are obviously female, and thus a useful peek into how they saw the show.]

The whole finale was of course, a thinly-disguised metaphor for divorce. The heroine loses all feelings and happy memories for the hero, is manipulated by an outsider villain (who resembled a fat, sleazy divorce lawyer), is cold and resentful to the hero throughout, never trusts or believes in him, removes herself from his family and friends, leaves several times, and in the end shares some happy reminiscence of good times past and not well recalled. A "happy divorce," but a divorce nevertheless. You could say that the shows writers and creators did not even buy the show's emotional premise -- that the two leads belonged together and would end up together. A fairly compelling portrait of Marriage 2.o, in Health but in Sickness, for richer but not poorer, to have but not to hold, requiring endless courtship, could not have been better constructed on any show in Hollywood.


And what is frustrating is that emotionally, psychologically, this is one big fat lie. Particularly to women, who end up believing it. Does Demi Moore look happy to you? Doing "Whipits" and K2 Spice (the former is the nitrous oxide from Whipped Cream cans, the latter some synthetic weed) is not the act of a happy woman. Particularly not indulged with one's grown, 23 year old daughter. The Daily Mail reports she is being treated for anorexia and other issues after suffering convulsions from Whipits and K2 Spice. Once one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she now looks like the picture above. Madonna, and other former beauties all share the same fate. Meanwhile soon-to-be ex husband Ashton Kutcher has no worries. Stepping right into the Charlie Sheen shoes on camera and in real-life, he's more popular than ever and has been asked back to co-star in "Two and A Half Men."

Both dramatically, and in real life, the challenge of ultimate freedom, and choice, where women and men can walk away from marriage, at any time, for any reason, makes the selection of the best, most faithful and loyal partner one can get, critical. Women in particular, since they lose attractiveness far quicker than men, walk a razor's edge. One false move, one bad choice, and there is no Second or Third Act for them. Their romantic lives are ruined, and with them the chance for most (save the wealthiest celebrities) at any possibility of a happy family life. This ought to be the real driving dramatic choice, and matching one in real life? How do I know that the last best hope I have for a guy who will stick with me when I get old and ugly is not walking past right now? That is the dramatic situation women ought to be given, by the Church of Television.

What was once the norm, the ordinary, the White Picket fence and nice suburban home (shown endlessly this final season of Chuck as the just-out-of-reach fantasy for Chuck and Sarah) is now out of reach for all but the most blessed, and shown so repeatedly on TV. The smartest of women who get won by guys like "Captain Awesome," but not those "married to their careers" (such as Sarah). Indeed the crutch of career-ism for women, and the dead-end (quite literally) that it implies, was a major theme on "Chuck." That's contrasted of course by a career. Chuck's sister Ellie, first engaged, then married, to a fellow doctor she fell for in med school, certainly has a career. But it does not consume her, rather family matters of her own, her luckless brother, desire for a kid, desire for the best for her kid when she has her, all drive her endlessly. Her job is just her job. Important but not the dominant feature of her emotional landscape. It is merely how she earns money for her family, not the endpoint of all ambition and feelings. This is why Ellie, is happy and Sarah is not. SHE has a husband, and a baby, and a career where her native intelligence and caring wisdom matter. One that requires neither coldness, nor "just following orders brutality," nor constant lying and manipulation.

Because freedom cuts both ways. And absolute freedom, and the propensity to walk away, creates Lemon Markets. One that hurts both buyers and sellers, and creates a degraded, debased market:

Akerlof's paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. A used car is one in which ownership is transferred from one person to another, after a period of use by its first owner and its inevitable wear and tear. There are good used cars ("cherries") and defective used cars ("lemons"), normally as a consequence of several not-always-traceable variables such as the owner's driving style, quality and frequency of maintenance and accident history. Because many important mechanical parts and other elements are hidden from view and not easily accessible for inspection, the buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a cherry or a lemon. So the buyer's best guess for a given car is that the car is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a car of known average quality. This means that the owner of a carefully maintained, never-abused, good used car will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that car worthwhile.

Therefore, owners of good cars will not place their cars on the used car market. The withdrawal of good cars reduces the average quality of cars on the market, causing buyers to revise downward their expectations for any given car. This, in turn, motivates the owners of moderately good cars not to sell, and so on. The result is that a market in which there is asymmetrical information with respect to quality shows characteristics similar to those described by Gresham's Law: the bad drives out the good (although Gresham's Law applies to a different situation).

"Lemon market" effects have also been noted in other markets, such as used computers . There are also parallels in the insurance market, where, unless those least likely to need insurance (i.e., those least likely to get in accidents) are forced to buy insurance, it is those most likely to need insurance compensation who tend most to buy insurance.

If you look at modern relationships, outside those of say, Ellie and Awesome in "Chuck" (akin to the Upper Class, i.e. both are "vetted" as medical students, intelligent, highly disciplined, high impulse control, and put together by an institution, in their case med school), information asymmetry, rules. People don't commit, because the cost of getting burned is high, i.e. lost time (particularly for women who have less of it) with someone else. Since it is hard to tell if a man is quality or not, superficial attributes such as styling and "hotness" tend to dominate. But over-committing to the "Lemon" (say, Ashton Kutcher), leads to disaster. Meanwhile, a car looking beat up superficially, but sound in all other aspects, tends to get devalued because the soundness in other aspects is basically, undiscoverable absent commitment.

That is the conundrum that Hollywood tries to solve in Romantic Comedies. The women don't commit, because even though the guys look like say, Ryan Reynolds, or Josh Duhamel, or Gerard Butler, or Zachary Levi, they've been burned before, are skeptical of the "market value" of the prospective mate, and approach romance like a used-car buyer while consumed with careerism to fill an empty romantic void. [Really, it is remarkable how often Hollywood shows this.] In a very real sense the female leads of romantic comedies are in a used car market. Gone are the intermediaries, such as relatives, (or med school in the case of Ellie and Awesome), friends, churches, and the like in such a highly mobile and anonymous society. Therefore, how do they get together? Their mutual best friends die in a car accident (how romantic!) and they have to raise their orphaned infant together. The INS will deport a female big shot exec unless she engages in a sham marriage. A one-night drunken stand regretted instantly by the woman gets her pregnant. A driven super-spy must provide protection and handling to the CIA and NSA's only spy-supercomputer in human form, one nerdy guy with sexy Alpha potential. The two are driven together until the real value of the (generally guy) is apparent. A girl's value is easily sussed out here: attractive, intelligent, faithful. Not much needed to discover. The man is not so easily discovered.

The show's creators understood this, since they milked it for years, as the Sarah character slowly through forced interaction with Chuck found his true market value, and fell in love with him. Obviously budget concerns plagued the show (pushing to flash-backs to save cash), as did the writers falling in love with symmetry, the Chuck character taking the lead on the beach to match Sarah in the pilot, as she not he struggles with a new situation -- marriage to a guy who loves her but for who she feels nothing, and does not believe in as a man, a spy (critical for how she evaluates men), or her husband. Laughs and a kiss as they say good-bye, so Chuck can woo her all over again. Maybe.

And that is just a lie. In a society where men can also choose at will, and walk away, with freedom just a lawyer and financial sacrifice away, re-courting is a fantasy. There is always a woman younger, hotter, and prettier, with less baggage and emotional instability, to be found by any man worth having (i.e. that other women want). Endless courting just means men won't put in the effort, and bounce around in semi-slackerdom ala Lester and Jeffrey, or PUA douchery, perhaps one interspersed with the other.

It was a cheap and easy out, for the show's writers and creators, and like all cheap and easy outs, revealing in how it exposes Hollywood's true beliefs. Fundamentally, Hollywood seems to believe that yes, there is something wrong with how men and women (largely don't) come together as they should. But its solution is endless romance, which prevents family formation. That furthermore only a blessed few, as signified generally by "correct" occupations (Doctors are seldom villains) can achieve marriage and family, without falling into the trap of Endless Courtship to validate (oh so obviously) poor self-images of their female audience.

The show did alright in the ratings, but nothing like it did once just a few years ago (which was around 2.0 in 18-34 Adults). Clearly the endless romance focus, and lack of "seal the deal" stuff with the Sarah character, turned off the nerdy guys who wanted Yvonne Strahowski as their fantasy girlfriend, without bringing in any women who wanted Zachary Levi as their perfectly acceptable "fixer-upper Alpha" to cover the loss, let alone improve upon it.

I can't remember a show before that depicted a nerdy, geeky guy as the hero. One who (for a while at least) credibly got the girl. And one that depicted the retail-hell underside of "Going your own way" which amounts to going nowhere, though in very male style. The show at its best was funny, with a lot of physical humor based on humiliating (and therefore hilarious) retail outfits the sexy female super spy Sarah was forced to wear as part of her cover. I'll miss the show, and the fantastic performances by gifted actors, who were better than the scripts most of the last few years: Adam Baldwin, Yvonne Strahowski (terrifically funny in a slow-burn way), Zachary Levi, Joshua Gomez, Ryan McPartlin, Sarah Lawrence (criminally under-appreciated and under-used), and the great Scott Krinsky and Vik Sahay.

But its failures are instructive. It shows that Hollywood still does not have a handle on romance, in a world of endless freedom and eternal choices. Nor, sadly, does much of America.
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Arrow of Desire: Sexy Not Dependable Men

A couple of recent articles in both Larry Auster's site and the Wall Street Journal show how the arrow of female desire in America (and really the West) has changed over the years. Towards Sexy not Dependable men. It is a massive shift, one likely irrevocable, with profound impact on family formation, wealth creation and retention, and national power. A massive preference for "sexy men" means basically an America and a West that is poor, violent, generally static, and unable to innovate around and over problems.


First, the view from the Upper Middle Class. Susan Gregory Thomas is a writer for the WSJ, Washington Post, MSNBC, and other news outlets. Her memoir of growing up as one of the children of Boomer Divorce, and the cost, is worth quoting from:

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Thomas talks of her search to avoid divorce and the pain it brings. Yet, by marrying a guy who was dependable, and solid, a guy she takes pains to praise, it is clear that ... she had no sexual desire for him at all. A boring Beta Male, no matter how good at taking care of kids, running the house, cooking, and all that, inspires nothing but contempt. She notes she had not slept with her husband for years. The contempt for lack of sexiness oozes off the page:

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.
…
To allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst childhood fears. More horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on what we most love and want to protect: our children. It is like slashing open our own wounds and turning the knife on our babies. To consider it is unbearable.
…
But marriages do dissolve, even among those determined never to let it happen. After nine years, my husband and I had become wretched, passive-aggressive roommates. I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. My husband had not been able to "find time" to read the book I had written. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn't slept in the same room for at least two years, a side effect of the nighttime musical bed routine that parents of so many young children play in semiconsciousness for years on end.

Yet I never considered divorce. It never even entered my mind. I was grateful that my babies had a perfect father, for our family meals, for the stability of our home, for neighborhood play dates.

But then, one evening, I found myself where I vowed I'd never be: miserable, in tears, telling my husband that we were like siblings who couldn't stand each other rather than a couple, and listening as my husband said he felt as though we had never really been a couple and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier. "I'm done," he said. It was as if a cosmic force had been unleashed; the awful finality of it roared in like an enormous black cloud blotting out the sky, over every inch of the world. It was done.
…
I had married the kindest, most stable person I'd ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

No, "divorce did not just happen." Any more than sex with an Alpha Male "just happened." Even with every reason to remain married, the woman divorced because a non-sexy, non-dominant male, is simply too repellent for most women to stomach for very long. Even Upper Middle Class ones with strong emotional reasons to remain married (note her imagery comparing divorce to slashing her babies with knives, strong stuff). But the pull of an Alpha male, and sex with one, was simply too strong. She married the kindest, most stable person she'd ever known. And grew to loathe him, as a sexless sibling, instead of a sexy man.

How many men can be sexy, all the time? Not even I'd wager, Antonio Banderas or Brad Pitt. A normal man, domesticated and involved in child-rearing, will not be sexy for long. No man, not even Brad Pitt, looks sexy changing diapers. Or cooking dinner. Or taking care of kids. Those are the unsexiest things a man can do, besides World of Warcraft and Cosplay. Well, maybe Star Trek and Star Wars nerdery qualifies too.

Then there is the view from the White working class. Larry Auster has the story of one Roderick Shonte Dantzler, who in Grand Rapids Michigan, killed seven people, including an ex girlfriend, her sister, her sister's daughter, his ex-wife, his daughter, and his ex-wife's mother and father. Before killing himself (he got the order wrong, he should have killed himself first). Sad and ugly though this is, it is not unusual, and the cross-racial issue is not as important as Auster thinks it is. Here in Southern California, not a day goes by without the same story playing out, only all the victims and the perpetrator are Latinos, generally Mexican immigrants (illegals) with little or no English skills. Here is one from the Orange County Register. Here is another.

No, what I found remarkable was that Roderick Shonte Dantzler, a man on anti-psychotics, in and out of prison, with no visible means of support, a man who threatened to set his own mother's house on fire, had a daughter by a much younger woman, and three attractive ex-girlfriends. The man's daughter, who he murdered, was by simple math conceived by her mother when she was 16 or so, as Larry Auster reports.
Dantzler married her ... while he was in prison. For shooting five times at a car with a (White) couple in it, in a road-rage incident. One would think this would prove to be a barrier to romantic love, but apparently not. Again, and I cannot stress this enough, a man with a prison record, no visible means of employment, on anti-psychotic medications, a man who threatened to burn his own mother's house down ... has three ex-girlfriends. One of whom he married and conceived a child by.

Note, not one weird/crazy woman found him attractive. By all accounts three working class White women found this guy attractive enough to become his girlfriend. None of the women were repulsive, each could have easily found more dependable, more reliable, and certainly less dangerous men to date and or marry. Yet they chose -- this guy. It is remarkable.

What is going on?

Among the White working class women, no less than among Black women, or Latino women, illegitimacy is rising. And the reason is, these women all demand sexy men. Sexy men don't stick around. They don't do dishes, cook dinners, help raise kids, contribute to the household, and certainly never change diapers. That's for loser Beta Males. Sexy men are well, sexy. And for working class women, that means T-H-U-G-S. That was true for Black women, by the early 1960's, and exploded by the late 1960's. For Latino women, it shifted sometime in the mid 1980's, judging by illegitimacy rates of only 17% in the 1980s, compared to over 50% today (Black women today have national illegitimacy rates of over 70% nationwide and over 90% in the urban core). For Working Class White women, illegitimacy is over 40%, according to Charles Murray.

A Black family, contrary to "noble Platonic lies" that TV advertising, movies, and the like tell us, is a single Black mother with two or more illegitimate kids by different fathers. This is not a recipe for a happy life for children. Kids of different fathers generally hate each other, and any observer of either faculty politics or dynastic politics knows that when kids fight, over trivial scraps of affection by a single mother, the effect is like a Plantagenet bloodbath, only with faculty politics low-stakes. Someone dies not for reasons of state, and dynasty, but because Mom favors the half-brother more.

Latino/Mexican families are rapidly approaching this point of no-return.

So too, are White working class families. This group is getting to it later, and slower, than the other groups, but it is getting there all the same. The train might be a bit late, but the same hellish destination awaits.

Even worse, so are White Middle and Upper Middle Class families heading for disaster. Thomas deludes herself that the price for her sexual satisfaction is not her children's best interests. A "happy divorce" is an oxymoron. No matter what, at best kids face a group of "instant siblings" in the case of remarriage who will all hate each other, despise the "new parent" and compete constantly for attention, love, and affection. That is the best case. The worst case is a parade of men, who have no interest or affection for the kids, and the formation of a new family by the ex-husband and the abandonment of the old one. A "shared family" is no family at all. Men simply seek to create another one to replace the one they lost. With the kids falling into the cracks, from which they never get out.

Steve Sailer has posted perhaps the best column he's done yet. On why there is no real "diversity" among the Women's (and Men's) US Soccer teams. Among his points is that the concerns of modern, Upper Class White parents is high parental AND paternal investment in kids, particularly daughters (to keep them away from sexy men who will get them pregnant at age 16 like Roderick Dantzler). With an emphasis on wholesome, outdoor sports that lead to College scholarships, not pro sports careers, and a lily-White, Upper Class environment. No Thugs, bad boys, goons, Chavs, etc. allowed.

And this is because the economic environment is incredibly competitive. As blogger Half-Sigma has written (be sure to check out his bios on the NYT writers, he's covering them all and so far they are all well connected, well-born, hereditary wealthy upper class folks which explains a lot) unless you are an economic winner, meaning the right school, the right career, the right grades, the right connections, the right attitude ... everything can blow up in your face. The winners win big, but unless you are an exceptionally talented athlete, actor, singer, or entertainer, you better be part of the prepare from Grade School track of Upper Middle Class striver. A man like say, Thomas Edison arise from poverty, to become powerful and rich and famous. Not today. It is tick all those boxes, make sure it's an Ivy or near Ivy (Stanford, Univ. of Chicago, Northwestern, NYU). Make sure its the right career, working for the right folks. Doing the right things. The littlest mistake can derail a career before it ever starts.

And this means, upward mobility requires two parents. Economic success, merely standing in place, doing no worse than your Upper Middle Class parents, means an intact nuclear family. Unfettered by divorce and the demands of multiple families, child support and the like. No parade of men, abandoned kids, and replacement families. This is something that Park Slope society knows well.

The same Susan Gregory Thomas who crowed about how she dumped her Beta Male Hubby (for a hotter hunk, btw), became a persona non-grata among the Park Slope mommies:

After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.

It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt bad for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”

That a woman who has been divorced should feel such awkwardness and isolation seems more part of a Todd Haynes set piece than a scene from “families come in all shapes and sizes” New York, circa 2011. But divorce statistics, which have followed a steady downward slope since their 1980 peak, reveal another interesting trend: According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.

For this cross section of American families — in the suburban playgrounds of Seattle, the breastfeeding-friendly coffee shops of Berkeley, Calif., and the stroller-trodden streets of the Upper West Side — divorce, especially for mothers with young children underfoot, has become relatively scarce since its “Ice Storm” heyday.

There is a reason for that:

The shift contains an economic as well as a social component.
“That this change has occurred mainly among the affluent suggests it’s not just a reaction to the divorce epidemic of the ’70s,” Dr. Cherlin said. “The condemnation of divorce is also coming from the group that is most confident it can make its marriages succeed, and that allows them to be dismissive of divorce.”

From this perspective, splitting up with tender, vulnerable children in the mix is seen as a parental infraction.

“I’ve definitely experienced judgment,” said Priscilla Gilman, author of a new memoir, “The Anti-Romantic Child,” which deals in large part with her 2006 divorce. “Everyone said: ‘Isn’t there anything more you can do? Your kids need you to be together. They’re so little.’ ” At the time, Ms. Gilman knew only one other person who was divorced. “I had progressive, feminist friends. None of them were getting divorced, none of them.”

Several divorced women suggested that the news of their marital unraveling seemed to unnerve other couples in their social circles, prompting unease about their own marriages. (That anxiety may not be entirely unfounded. One study out of Harvard, Brown and the University of California, San Diego, last year found that divorce actually is contagious: when close friends break up, the odds of a marital split among their friends increase by 75 percent.)

“There has been a striking shift in both beliefs and behavior towards marriage among educated and affluent Americans,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project. “There’s a tacit or explicit recognition among well-educated parents that their kids are less likely to thrive if Mom and Dad can’t be together.” [Emphasis added]

Is this, then, the revenge of the children-of-divorce generation, rebelling against the experiences of their mothers and fathers? When I asked people who divorced in their 20s and 30s while researching my 2002 book, “The Starter Marriage,” about why they divorced with such alacrity, the response was near universal: “I wanted to do it before it was too late — before we had kids.”

Whereas their parents were divorce pioneers in the ’70s, unsure of how marital dissolution affected children and letting caution blow in the wind, today’s splitting couples are viscerally aware of how divorce feels to a 7-year-old.

A good deal of the reason for divorce is of course, sex:

In another unexpected twist, some divorced women say they detect an unspoken envy. Other wives and mothers, they explained, were “battling it out” while dealing with the unceasing tasks of wifedom, motherhood and work.

“What I get from a number of married women in my community is jealousy of my new lifestyle,” Dr. Monet said. “Dating, going to yoga five times a week, having time for myself. Raising young kids with a spouse doesn’t afford you much time.”

But in a place like Brooklyn, income divided among two households means that your kid ends up in Public school. Where life is hell for White kids. Even in gentrified Brooklyn. Heck the property boom in the Financial District of Manhattan is partly due to the fact that there are few schools there that are not White-majority. No Upper Class woman wants their kids beaten or worse at school, where wolfpacks roam and teachers merely babysit. That won't get them into Harvard, or at worst, NYU. It means CCNY, or low-level proletarian living. Which in NYC metro area, is hellish indeed, for working-class Whites who moved down not up.

Hence the social disapproval of divorce, the shunning of the divorced women (by other women afraid it is catching). Its all about making sure your kid does not become worse off. In a place like Brooklyn the pressures to stay together to avoid the non-White underclass are strong. Even so, a non-trivial number of women in that milieu follow their urges. Note that Susan Gregory Thomas quickly had another kid with her new husband to cement the bond. [It is highly likely that half siblings will hate or at least deeply resent each other, family is not merely a random collection of people dropped in on a household. The older kids are not the new Husband's, he's unlikely to give a damn about them compared to his own, generally speaking. And the Wife has to keep new Hubby happy, he's the one she threw over the old guy for. Her older kids are unlikely to get much compared to the new kid, in that situation. After all, they came from an "inferior" father she rejected in favor of a "sexy" guy. She's already made the calculation that she could and would do better. And at event, she's unlikely to be the face launching a thousand ships, as women that age generally don't even launch second glances. She's stuck with her choice and it will always come down, in general terms to the choice she made. Older kids be damned.]

Clearly, the women of Park Slope, Brooklyn, are fighting a valiant and determined fighting retreat, a vigorous defense that Lee, or Napoleon, would have applauded. A defense that however, is as doomed as those notable military leaders conducted. Ultimately, not even the desire to do better by one's children is a force that can contend with female desire. Desire is what it is, women want, and have always wanted, sexy men. They are now in a position to get, exactly what they want. And they will get it.

For women in the working class, that is likely to be thugs-a-plenty. Men like Dantzler, of any race really. [Proof positive, somewhat tangentially, of lack of White racism against Blacks -- no consequences of any not happened to either Dantzler or the White women he dated, married, and impregnated (before killing two of them and their entire families) because of the relationships. No beatings, no threats, no cross burnings, nothing.] The important thing is sexy. Which for the working class means violent thuggery.

For women in the Upper Middle Class (and Middle Class) that is likely to be defined as stud-hopping. A fortunate few will land new guys, who hopefully will never make the mistake of actually doing any housework or caring for the kids. Women say they want it, but it makes men unsexy -- and women will never forgive that mistake. Not ever. Stud Hopping makes women happy, but at the expense of producing kids who are able to compete in a vicious, extremely competitive world where mistakes are punished ruthlessly and there is no real margin for error.

The way the world used to work, how lower to middle to upper classes formed their families, and nearly all save the top Aristocrats and Royalty (who were as distant and as alien as movie stars and pop stars are today) was that desire played a part, but only a part, in family formation. Certainly men had to have some sexiness in them. But Mr. Darcy was not the best dancer, nor the most witty speaker, nor the man who simply dominated the room by being the biggest thug. The Jane Austen model while flawed in many ways functioned well by not ignoring or sidestepping female desire, but requiring women to master their own desire. Even with full voting rights, and other liberty, women until the pill, condom, urban living, and highly mobile anonymity retained the essentials of the Jane Austen model. Which meant a deliberate trade-off, sacrificing some sexiness in men, for more stability and support, with the knowledge that even the sexiest man will grow old, gray, and unsexy. As will they too, if they are lucky.

Sexy was part of the demands on men, but not the only thing, and women would be relatively happy for just a bit of sexy, now and then, in exchange for stability and support.

That was blown apart by technology. Allowing women unheard of mobility, including physical mobility, anonymity, easy contraception, and welfare for the working class, not much lifestyle changes in the middle and upper classes. Yoga classes, dating, and such still go on. Divorce does not mean sleeping in a car, with cans of dog food for dinner. Even highly educated, professional Upper Class women will divorce when the burden of unsexy husbands are too great, and of course when an Alpha male is on the horizon, available.

The valiant, and unprecedented brave fighting retreat waged by the women of Park Slope, might last for a full twenty years or more. But eventually they too will fall. Brought down by untrammeled, unrestricted, unmoderated female desire. For sexy men. Family has changed, irrevocably. Family is now, whatever guy Mom has shacked up with, for now, and who likely does nothing and contributes nothing but being sexy. Which is a full time job in and of itself. Being sexy is not easy, just ask the Situation.

So we are looking, twenty or thirty years out, at a total collapse of the White working, middle, and EVEN Upper Classes. With only intact Asian families (where divorce is not unknown but strongly discouraged) as the knowledge elite, and hereditary aristocrats (the Murdochs, the Kennedy clan, the Clintons perhaps, and so on). America and the West will soon resemble say, in social structure, Brazil or Venezuela instead of say, Sweden. A collapse, fairly rapidly, of the White middle class into lumpenproletarianism, is something no one among the political and cultural elite has considered. If Gen X hated the Boomers for divorcing, what will the kids of Gen X feel towards both the non-White population that makes them easy lunch, and the chaotic family situation that led them to vastly reduced status from their parents? [Take Thomas's kids for an example. The older ones are unlikely to get much resources invested in them, or inherit much -- the younger one is likely to get it all. Write that out big among the next generations.]

The answer is not likely to marching jackboots (which in any event required a modern, middle class industrial power on the part of Germany, machine guns do not simply create themselves, nor do Stutkas or Panzers). But rather a grinding, feuding-style set of violence familiar to Mark Twain or any observer of the Hatfields and McCoys. That is where the arrow of desire will fall.
...Read more

Woman Marries Herself

A Taiwanese woman is marrying herself.

Uninspired by the men she's met but facing social pressure to get married, the 30-year-old Taipei office worker will hold the reception next month in honor of just one person.

"Age thirty is a prime period for me. My work and experience are in good shape, but I haven't found a partner, so what can I do?" Chen said.

"It's not that I'm anti-marriage. I just hope that I can express a different idea within the bounds of a tradition," she added.
Her $5,675 wedding comes after online publicity that has netted 1,800 largely sympathetic comments.

The story notes that Taiwanese women are marrying less and later, as their economic status advances. This is female hypergamy at work.

Could the woman find a husband? Why certainly. It is hard to tell if the woman is grossly fat, but even fat women can get married. They simply have to compromise. The woman, like many, in Taiwan and all over the developed world, simply won't settle for the boring, beta male provider her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother married. Why? Because she feels she "deserves" a better class of guy.

No doubt, she had Alpha male attention, in her younger days, but obviously was not pretty enough to hold him. This is the tragedy of the modern world. Women don't find out, until far too late to do anyone any good at all, that most of them can certainly have sex with exciting, dominant, Alpha men, as long as they are young and relatively attractive. But nearly all of them will lack the extraordinary beauty to make one their husband. And even then, they'll have to share said Alpha male with any number of other women, many far less attractive than themselves. Ask Sandra Bullock, or Elin Nordgren.

Thus women marrying themselves. A party all for them! Groom not even required. Yes this is "Muriel's Wedding" with Toni Collete and the music of ABBA.

As sad, and pathetic, as the X-boxen obsessed slackers on the couch, gaming away, this bit of news is every bit as sad. Consumer society breeds unrealistic expectations about life that prevent many from actually living it. The woman in question would have been better advised to have found a slightly older man, mature enough not to be hormonally crazed, and stable, after careful vetting and finding compatibility. Not searching for the perfect guy till the opportunity to find a good enough one slips away.

As always, the perfect is the enemy of the good. A lesson sadly her mother was not able to teach her.
...Read more

The Duke F List and the Dog in the Night-Time

In the short story "Silver Blaze" from "the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes," the famous dialog between Holmes and Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard occurs:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Doyle's insight was that what does not happen, that by all rights should happen, tells us more, at times, than anything else. So that is with the strange case of the Duke University F-List, compiled by one Karen F. Owen, the brunette on the left in the picture above. [Whiskeys-Place has no intention of running afoul of language filters, hence the sad euphemism. While presumably all readers here are adults, and not offended by Anglo-Saxonisms, language filters are. Hence the sad, admittedly pathetic euphemisms which we beg our readers to forgive in the interests of not running afoul of automated filtering systems.]

For those not in the know, the Duke University F-List is a mock senior thesis in Powerpoint form compiled by one Duke University co-ed, Karen F. Owen, the Powerpoint slides may be found here. The co-ed in question, e-mailed the mock presentation (which she lavished some considerable time) to a number of close friends, who naturally posted it on the internet in various places where it went viral. Various commenters have hit the obvious: the wisdom of e-mailing private information in the internet age, violation of privacy (for the 13 men Owens had sex with). The dog not doing anything in the night-time is of course, any discussion on the wisdom of that amount of partners for a young woman over four years, and the larger social impact if this behavior is indeed representative of most young women in college today. And it is this non-reaction and what it tells us about our society today that is most important about this otherwise boring story.


Those seeking another site with less cut-off of the powerpoint slides may find it here. Owen reportedly has offers for a book deal, and a movie, based on her experiences, while the University mulls whatever it will do. The young men in question are meanwhile dialing their lawyers. Arguing their privacy rights have been violated, and quite probably seeking compensation from any putative book or movie deal. Yes, it is always about the money. But this is not the dog in the night-time. What is the dog in the night-time, first, is the lack of shame.

It is simply inconceivable that before Sex and the City, young women would openly brag to friends, or seek book and movie deals, detailing their amorous adventures. That was the province of a certain class of man, one whom was often regarded as "unmanly" and slightly off, and certainly possessed of scandalous attributes rendering him perhaps exciting for dinner conversation but unsuitable for much of anything else. It is possible that the inflection point goes further back, to Monica Lewinski, and her "girl-talk" with one Linda Tripp, both asking for sympathy and bragging over her relationship with father-figure and uber-powerful Bill Clinton. Or the relationship between the late Chandra Levy, and the former Congressman Gary Condit. But the cultural impact of Sex and the City cannot be denied. With re-runs at 3:30, on TBS, a whole generation of middle school girls have run home to watch it, with Samantha the favorite character. Admired for her man-eating ways, rather than pitied for her fairly pathetic, post-Cougar behavior.

It is also a significant point that this male behavior, bragging to friends over conquests, has now become acceptable among young college attending women. This is a major change in behavior, gone un-remarked. It is significant in that it removes a powerful incentive (not to appear "White Trash" aka downwardly mobile) among one's peers by adopting lower-class standards of sexuality. It was a major character point of "My Name Is Earl," that his former girlfriend played by Jamie Pressly was in fact, possessed of the same male instinct to maximize partners and brag upon it, that traditionally adolescent boys have exhibited. Thus allowing the audience to mock the "White Trash" (translation: working class White) characters that make up "My Name is Earl." Which might as well have been: "A Show for SWPL to Laugh at Lower Class Whites."

The success of the West has been on "soft" social controls over male and female behavior, particularly on sex and mate selection, to form solid, upwardly mobile, middle-class families. This has been far more successful than the Islamic harems and brutal restrictions on women, or the macho/ultra-feminine village peasant model of Latin America, or until recently that model in Asia. Indeed the rise of Japan, post-War, and South Korea, post-Korean War, and Taiwan, and Coastal China, and parts of Southeast Asia and parts of India, have been through the adoption, in different degrees of enthusiasm, of the "soft" model of control of both male and female behavior, to be aspiring to "upper class" models of restraint over one's own sexuality. High investment in one's mate, in education for their (fewer) children, high rates of thrift, saving, deferred consumption, pursuit of technical education, abjuring affairs, of general sobriety, have been a proven path to economic success for these societies, many of whom were traditionally impoverished, Korea and Japan (before the Meji Restoration) being two prime examples. Not the least of which is that soft controls don't require considerable social investment in a policing mechanism (like Muslim countries) and leave individuals with the maximum amount of initiative and freedom and self-interest aligned directly with that of society. Avoiding both a "tragedy of the commons" and a rigid social-police state consuming all extra resources.

Another dog in the night-time is the reaction of (the mostly female) commenters in the media.

First, we'll have a little round of applause for the girl for the following reasons: some of these dudes are pretty hot, the majority of her anecdotes are hilarious, and she's managed to have sex like Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, in a highly superficial manner that's completely devoid of emotion – we thought that was just make believe.

Many of the female commenters of course, defend the powerpoint and of course, the hook-ups themselves in scope. On Jezebel.com, the reaction was "13 is not slutty." This itself is significant. The non-reaction shows that the key point for controlling sexuality (gender peer pressure) is now gone. Thus the soft pressure no longer exists.

This can be seen in how the illegitimacy rates have changed over time for different races, which possess greater or lesser amounts of soft pressure. As Juan Williams of NPR noted in a column in the WSJ (sadly on Father's Day), the Black rate of illegitimacy has changed from 24% in the mid-1960's, to over 90% in the urban core today, and over 70% nationwide. Among Hispanics, this rate changed from 17% in 1980, to over 50% today (to be fair this is likely a function of increased immigration from Mexico as much as anything else). Charles Murray wrote:

It comes down to this: well-educated white women in moderately affluent circumstances almost never had babies without a husband, and women from middle class homes were almost as finicky about requiring a husband. At the same time, white women with no more than a high school education in low-income households were having nearly half of their babies without a husband.

And that was in a population that had an overall illegitimacy ratio of 11 percent. Today, the illegitimacy ratio for non-Latino whites is 28 percent. How do the classes break down now? As it happens, I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring that question. I’m not done, and want to save that discussion for a formal presentation in any case, but here are some tentative estimates: The illegitimacy ratio for the white underclass is probably now in the region of 70 percent. I think that the proportion for the white working class may be above 40 percent. The white middle class is approaching 20 percent—a scarily high figure when you think about all the ways that the middle class has been the spine of the nation.

The white overclass? They’re still living in the 1950s—their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent tops.

Now, it is possible that if most college age girls who are utterly ordinary, as it would appear that Owen is, with an average partner rate of 3.25 per year, can form a lasting bond leading to monogamous marriage and nuclear family formation. But that would be, on average, a poor bet overall. While it is nearly impossible to predict the success or failure of any individual in the marriage market, it is fairly straightforward to predict group behavior, and indeed the whole of consumer marketing, political polling, and the business of insurance and credit markets depends on relatively accurate predictions about group behavior.

Can anyone make any accurate prediction about Owen herself? No. But relatively accurate predictions can be made, about the probable success rate of large groups of women like Owen. Which in the case of nuclear family formation, the bedrock of the West's social success, is rather depressingly small. The collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in Chav Britain, as detailed by Theodore Dalrymple, in his various books including "Life at the Bottom," is a direct result of the lack of soft, social pressures to conform to an upper class ideal of sexual restraint (regardless of the reality) as a means to upward mobility.

Widespread, successful, nuclear family formation requires widespread, monogamous relationships, among peers in attractiveness and socio-economic status. The upending the sexual marketplace provides definite advantages to the Alpha male, and to the woman of average attractiveness, but at the cost of nuclear family formation and pretty much everyone else. Attractive women, must now share regular boyfriends or husbands, with the likes of Owen, with the collapse of same-gender social shaming restricting sexual access, in general. This is seen with "Client Number 9" Eliot Spitzer (his wife Silda recently noted it was her fault he turned to prostitutes half his age because she no longer sexually satisfied him), John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Jessie James, Antonio Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsome, New York's Governor Patterson, and more. This is the "new normal" of social behavior among the upper, and now middle and lower classes.

It is worth noting that the Duke University F-List is comprised entirely of Alpha males, successful, hunky athletes, almost all of them rated as experienced with women and knowledgeable about their sexual needs and satisfying the same. For them, sexual access is a movable smorgasbord, and one also with little commitment to very transient relationships. Assuming the picture of Owen is a fair one, it is a safe assumption to label her of about average attractiveness for the average, upper to middle class college coed. But nothing of the kind of attractiveness that in a society formed around relatively strong monogamy or at least limited amounts of partners, would enable her to compete for the monogamous attentions of Alpha males with her more beautiful peers.

The current sexual marketplace dynamics, as French writer Michel Houellebecq has noted, advantages women of average attractiveness. Who can have sex with men they could not under the old system of soft social pressures to limit sex to a few partners per lifetime. This explains the extraordinary support for it, among most women. Few women have the beauty of an Elin Nordgren, or the wealth and background of a Silda Spitzer (who came from a wealthy family). Or the drive of an Elizabeth Edwards or Hillary Clinton (the latter from a family considerably more wealthy than Bill Clinton's single-mother family marked by lower class income). But all can trade sex willingly with Alpha males to "share" an Alpha male.

And as Roissy notes, five minutes of Alpha beats five years of beta.

The other losers, of course, are beta males, who fifty years ago made perfectly acceptable husbands to their peers, and now are unsuitable. Because of the newly enabled access to Alpha males. At best, women who have had a parade of Alphas, find themselves losing most attractiveness, and settle, quite deliberately, for men they have no attraction to and even less respect. The phrase Kitchen Bitch of course denoting a helpful, beta husband who does chores, the cooking, taking care of the kids. All bitterly resented by their wives who find that cheap, illegal aliens can do those chores, and prefer Alpha dominantion and excitement.

Women, contrary to all sorts of misleading social messages in the media and entertainment, do not want or need men's domestic help. Labor saving devices, and cheap illegal alien labor, make that irrelevant for middle class women. Rather, they crave the wild, sexual excitement and domination they found among Alpha males they had in their youth. The do not forgive or forget the failure of the beta men they marry, for the most part, to be the dominant Alpha man they had when they were attractive. Indeed, the very beta helpfulness and niceness (rather than cocky aloofness of an Alpha, who would NEVER help around the house) of their husbands is a bitter indictment of their own fading sexual attractiveness. No wonder they hate their husbands, their husbands are a mirror of their own sexual power fading.

While many, many factors contribute to the high divorce rate, including no-fault divorce, custody of children routinely granted to women, alimony and child support, lack of social shaming, a significant factor must be the late marriages (mid 30's) to beta males who lack the Alpha A-hole dynamic that women crave. Consider women like Owen. After a near lifetime of Alpha studs, how can she be happy with a boring, beta nice guy who's main attributes are that he mirrors her in attractiveness, is a decent and reliable provider, helps around the house, and has notably less partners than she does?

Indeed, even on campuses where men are in short supply, women choose only the top men.

Indeed, there are a fair number of Mr. Lonelyhearts on campus. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

By all accounts, this pattern continues later in life. I.E. Houellebecq's central insight that the sexual marketplace does not function by magic, or romantic notions. Like any other marketplace, it can find equilibriums that promote massive inequality and social instability. In the case of modern Western society, most average women like Owen, having a lot of sex, with a few Alpha studs, and most boring beta providers getting priced out of the marketplace.

Nowhere is this pattern stronger, than in China. With its sex imbalance, recently noted here, millions of girls have disappeared.

By 2020 it is thought there will be 50 million men who cannot find a wife. In a culture where marriage and reproduction are considered the highest moral duties the result is a social time bomb.

Kidnapping of women as brides is already common in China's countryside. In one case last year in the northern province of Shanxi, 25 women were rescued from a village where they had been sold for £3,000 a head to men who could not find wives.

The traditional preference is for male children

Experts predict that kidnappings will rise as further generations of boys grow up to find a shortage of women.

While the driving forces behind the sex imbalance in China, and the defacto sex imbalance in the US and other Western nations (i.e. lack of soft social controls on female hypergamy, Alpha hunting to the tune of "13 is not slutty") are profoundly different, in broad strokes they have the same result.

Which is destruction of the formation of a society's ability to create and sustain wealth creation. Nothing less and more.

There is not enough wealth and control, in the most centrally planned economy, to implement the notion in Plato's Republic of the State raising children. This effort has always failed, because of scale. Raising children, and investing a vast amount of capital, in labor and time and money, including education, and formation of an optimistic, sober, restrained, and "middle class" personality requires an immense amount of resources. The overhead of an orphanage, or other state institution for raising children simply does not scale. Far too much resources are devoted to things not directly related to producing a wealth producing new citizen, and far too few resources invested, particularly in early childhood, in producing intense bonding, emotional security, and relationship/behavior role modeling. Child care is perhaps the most labor intensive function in human society. Successful citizens require almost 24/7 child care for the first 10 years of life, and considerable investment after that. This is why Plato's Republic scheme, where the state would raise children instead of the family, has always failed. Even Sparta, eventually fell, because they had few children, and many slaves, and lacked in the end enough manpower despite their martial prowess, to defend against their Greek city-state enemies. No people invested more in Plato's idea of the state raising children, and no nation fell more quickly once they lacked enough citizens to put in arms against their enemy.

Thus the future of the West, and of China, is the end of wealth creation and indeed preservation. Wealth creation on a broad, society wide scale, has only been accomplished by having a nuclear family society. Where families on their own accord, for their own interests, invest staggering sums of capital, labor, and time in producing wealth creating men and women of the next generation. This does not happen by magic. Great sweeping love affairs do not create it, nor do defacto harems of the Muslim or the old Nineteenth Century Mormon variety. The Mormon possessions of the Utah Territory were whittled down extensively, by the larger, and more energetic and monogamous populations around them. Until Brigham Young had a revelation that monogamy was now required. For entry into the Union.

Indeed, the embrace and open-ness to technological change that characterized the West, is a function of nuclear family monogamy. Other peoples often pioneered technical advances, but the West embraced them far more fully, and extended them radically. Thus China, in the Emperor driven, non-nuclear family system of Harems and Eunuchs, came up with gunpowder, the compass, printing, rockets, and many other advances, only to see them fail to advance (because of the broad social changes they bring) while the West, far less advanced initially, had a resilient base of a nuclear family, allowing it embrace the changes brought upon by technology, and indeed push those changes ever farther and faster, because the technology gave them more advantages, and indeed only increased the strength of the nuclear family which generated, with technology advantages (printing, the telegraph and telephone, radio, railways, industrial production, public education, etc.) more and more wealth for the nuclear family, and re-inforced the whole cycle of change.

What we are now witnessing, essentially, is the end of that process that began around 1000 AD and the gradual introduction of water power technology back into Europe (the Romans had it extensively), and is now coming to the end with what amounts to a single mother society.

The declining birth rate among all Western nations (and more urbanized Muslim ones such as Algeria, Iran, and Tunisia), Japan, and Coastal China, is a function of the ongoing collapse of the nuclear family and delayed marriage, and child-birth, driven by the pursuit of Alpha men by liberated women. Increasingly, particularly among working class Whites, women are choosing to have kids by themselves, as single mothers, presumably with hot Alpha men instead of boring beta providers (who they would have married in the first place if that's what they wanted). Indeed, this message is validate by Jennifer Aniston, who opined that women do not need husbands to raise kids. The proliferation of single mother by artificial insemination (Aniston's movie, Jennifer Lopez's) shows social acceptance of this behavior in fairly wide forms. At best, the West will see a lot of Bill Clinton types created. Ambitious men on the make, ruthless as they learned in early childhood to compete for a mother's affection with the man of the moment, and often abused by the latest new man in the household. Or perhaps, the female equivalent. Needless to say, this is not the type of person to create and sustain wealth on a broad scale. At worst, the example of Chav Britain looms upon us all.

Currently, Western Society is optimized for sexual access to Alpha men by ordinary women. This optimization comes naturally at the expense of forming a nuclear family society wide. Increasingly, the phenomena of "slacker dudes" who drive such movies as "Failure to Launch" are a mere expression of ordinary beta men opting out. The supply of men who can make a leap into Alpha status, by use of "Game" (ala Roissy and Neil Strauss and many other Pick Up Artist writers and instructors) is fairly limited. About the number of average men who can practice martial arts and become proficient. In Britain, Chavs did not practice "Game" and the careful opening, posturing, and Alpha male displays. They simply short-cut by brutal but effective violence, which has been successful for them in attracting women. As Dalrymple noted, even or especially his educated, professional nurses found violent men who abused them irresistible, and the boring beta guys who made good husbands, well boring. This pattern persists until menopause. Dalrymple resists this conclusion, being an old-school social conservative who puts women on a Victorian pedestal, but this is the pattern he narrates in compelling fashion.

There is probably a non-trivial segment of the beta male population who will attempt to thug it up, particularly as blue collar and indeed, white collar jobs and opportunities disappear. Thugging it up works in attracting women. And of course, thugging it up precludes by its very nature, a stable, middle class nuclear family. This is the pattern of Chav Britain. The other pattern is of course best shown by Japan's herbivore men.

Those left out in the race for Alpha, in Japan, are turning to virtual reality girlfriends. Notably, younger, more feminine anime characters that appear in Nintendo DS games, complete with virtual reality enhancements. Pathetically, men go to "romantic" hotels in honeymoon resorts to have "week-ends" with the fantasy girlfriends, including taking pictures with the anime characters digitally inserted into the scene. Called "Love Plus" no further indictment can be made or further explanation needed of Japan's plummeting birth rate. Slate has more here, and CNN here, and clearly opting out of society in general because they cannot get much out of it is the motivation.

And that social cost is huge. The West (which includes Japan) needs almost every man and woman to devote themselves (on behalf of their children) to wealth creation and preservation. Not video games or virtual reality or a closet full of shoes, or hip-trendy jobs in media and the like. America has not seen this trend to the same degree, but it exists. The metrosexual, effiminate hipster lives in America in widespread numbers. Its not just the skinny jeans, sort of gay, sort of not, type of behavior and dress that infests Generation Y men and younger ones, it is the glorification of this behavior:



A truly revolting scene, not the least of which is the effeminate hipster audience. The West's answer to Herbivore Men. Note how few men seem to have girlfriends, in the audience, the obligatory lesbian couple, and the large amount of girls alone. No Alpha, of course, would be caught dead at such an event.

But think about it. If Owen is at all average in the amount of partners per year, and the total lack of reaction to her story suggests strongly that it is, at least in respect to partner count (again, "13 is not slutty") then between 16-32, a woman like Owen would have 3.25 partners on average, or 52 by the age of 32, when she is looking for a mate. More if she husband shops later in life. The flip side of pursuit of Alphas by women at places like Duke, is the lack of any value they bring to the picture for a beta male. Increasingly, it seems (from women's complaints about this), men in their thirties find their age peers, basically worthless for marriage. IMHO this is simply because a high-partner count woman, of limited fertility and youth, with much relationship baggage, is a bad bet for marriage. Love is out of the question, even companionship would be tinged (and beta men know it) with thinly disguised contempt for lack of being Alpha.

Beta men have on their own, valid reasons to opt out of marriage as well. No one can force either sex to get married without a social police state, which tends to be very rigid, and high-cost (all available resources devoted to enforcement not wealth creation). This describes the late Roman Empire in the West, plagued by a demographic collapse and men abandoning marriage, to the point where Emperors imposed bachelor taxes.

In order for a nuclear family to function (and any hope of a replacement level birth rate), soft social pressure upon women (and men) must constrain sexual choices. In particular, it must be thought lower class, "trashy" and yes, "slutty" for women to engage in large amounts of Alpha chasing. The lack of any dogs barking in the night-time, media commenters studiously ignoring the notch count of Owen, and failing to condemn such behavior as unwise and "trashy" is a signal that the social controls which constrained that behavior are gone. As is the formation of wealth creating and preserving nuclear families. America's future, will probably include some form of virtual girlfriends for the beta males, and thugging it up, the exact proportion to be determined by chance and social pressures. This is unlikely to change, because women overwhelmingly benefit from this ability to pursue Alphas to ridiculous levels.

Owen sent her powerpoint, to her friends, not just because she found it funny, but also to brag. About the Alphas she had, and her ability to have exciting, "tempestous" sex. Western societies are now built upon optimizing the access to Alphas by women like Owen, to the exclusion of the bedrock of the society, the nuclear family. Thus, after nearly a thousand years, the technology whose embrace empowered the West finally proves its undoing. By undermining the ability to create the next generation of Westerners. This end of course extends to societies that embraced Westernization as well, including China and Japan.

That is the depressing conclusion of the Owen Duke University F-List affair.


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Sandra Tsing Loh and The State of Marriage

In my previous post, How Many (White) Men Are Getting Married I noted that there was a definite trend for White Men, between ages 35-40, to be unmarried. Using the GSS Data, the increase was from 5% in 1972 to 25% in 2004. A marked increase. Recent, a couple of articles by married women have shed light on the state of marriage by people who are, in fact, married, and are the Yuppie, White upper income class of people.

The infamous, Sandra Tsing Loh article in the Atlantic, extolling the virtues of divorce and a new post-marriage order where,

...let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see.

Tellingly, the article derides Dads who help around the house and kitchen as "kitchen bitches" and finds both un-manly and un-romantic. Another woman writes that her marriage is a prison and she needs to bust out, because her beta male husband is not exciting, though a good father and husband. Comments about Loh's article can be found both here and here. Ross Douhat in the New York Times makes some silly observations and stupid ones on the matter (that the Upper classes are in fact stable, and with few incidences of divorce, and that cross-class marriages should take place, respectively).

But what is the real picture of marriage today, in America, among Whites? Increasingly, it looks as if marriage was for Upper Class people only, and no longer something that characterizes lower and middle class Whites.

Sandra Tsing Loh's article is not new. Barbara Ehrenreich, of "Nickel and Dimed" wrote a December, 1999 Essay on the future of the family, sadly no longer online, in Time Magazine, in which she advocated a "fluid and ever-changing arrangement" for family care in which "the community" would care for children while women pursued passionate, intense, but short-lasting affairs. More recently, she's written here that:

Which brings us to the third big scenario. This is the diversity option, arising from the realization that the one-size-fits-all model of marriage may have been one of the biggest sources of tension between the sexes all along--based as it is on the wildly unrealistic expectation that a single spouse can meet one's needs for a lover, friend, co-parent, financial partner, reliably, 24-7. Instead there will be renewable marriages, which get re-evaluated every five to seven years, after which they can be revised, recelebrated or dissolved with no, or at least fewer, hard feelings. There will be unions between people who don't live together full-time but do want to share a home base. And of course there will always be plenty of people who live together but don't want to make a big deal out of it. Already, thanks to the gay-rights movement, more than 600 corporations and other employers offer domestic-partner benefits, a 60-fold increase since 1990.

Standard stuff from a feminist who thinks Muslim misogyny is based on fears of globalization.

Betty Friedan, who wrote of marriage as a prison, in "The Feminine Mystique" set the tone, years earlier of course. It is striking, however, that all of these women belong to a class. Fairly rich, ranging from mansions on the Hudson (Friedan never did housework, she had maids and servants) to various maids and nannies, but not rich enough to prevent divorce or longing for divorce.

The film The Nanny Diaries has a scene in which the prospective nanny, played by Scarlett Johansson, has lunch with her prospective employer (played by Laura Linney). There is an uncomfortable moment when an old friend of the Linney character stops by the table and laments her downward mobility after the divorce. Near the end of the film, the Linney character divorces her husband also, and loses the ability to live the high-life with mansions, summer homes at Martha's Vineyard, and other luxury amenities provided by her master of the universe, Wall Street titan husband. In reality of course, most married couples with that level of wealth try to stay together. The stakes, particularly for the children, are tremendous. There is a lot more ability to rise high on a net worth of $20 million, than there is with only perhaps $8 million an ex-spouse, after lawyer fees. Serious money creates serious behavior, though perhaps the super-rich divorce at the rate of those on the lower end of the financial spectrum.

It's striking that the women complaining about their sexless, "beta male" husbands (Loh, others) and the need to "re-invent" marriage as a formless, shapeless mess in which kids and husbands come last after a woman's need for passion and excitement, all come from a certain class. One able to afford nannies and maids and carpenters, making "kitchen bitches" superfluous, and speaking to the need to indulge "passion" while not at the level of wealth in which divorce means no more summering at the Hamptons in a private mansion. At least one of the women in Loh's article is described as making $120,000 a year, in addition to her husband's income (which should push their dual-incomes to around $200,000 or more a year). Given their social network, it's reasonable to assume the same for Loh and her husband (she an NPR commentator, and Atlantic writer, he a guitarist for Bette Midler) and the rest of her friends.

These women have enough money to hire their own nannies, their own carpenters, their own part-time cooks, and thus don't need or want their husbands helping around the house. It's not any accident that the women describe it as unmanly, as does the Salon.com woman who describes her marriage as a prison. Their basic needs are met by their income, and they desire stimulation and excitement. [This is why, middle income women always support more immigration, legal or illegal. Because immigration increases the supply and lowers the cost of Rosa the Nanny and Manuel the carpenter, without facing competition as, say, a Concert Violinist or Environmental Lawyer, two of the occupations of Loh's friends.]

The women also have another beef with their husbands: they don't respect them because they earn as much or more than their husbands. This is a trend that has been developing for some time.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics website has a wealth of demographic data. Their 2007 report on Women's Earnings has a wealth of data. Among the highlights are:

• The difference between women’s and men’s earnings was largest among those aged 55 to 64, with women earning about 73 percent as much as men in this age group. By
  comparison, women earned 87 percent as much as men among workers 25 to 34 years old, and 92 percent as much among 16- to 24-year-olds. (See table 1.)


• Between 1979 and 2007, the earnings gap between women and men narrowed for most age groups. The women’s to men’s earnings ratio among 35- to 44-year-olds, for example, rose from 58 percent in 1979 to 77 percent in 2007, and the ratio for 45- to 54-year-olds increased from 57 percent to 75 percent. The earnings ratios for teenagers and for workers aged 65 and older fluctuated from 1979 to 2007, but their long-term trend has been essentially flat. (See table 12.)

From the report, we have the following graphs:


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Clearly we can see that women's earnings have been increasing. Correlation is not causation, but it is interesting that as women's earnings have increased both in absolute and relative to men's earnings, divorce and later marriage and single motherhood have all increased. Charles Murray believes that the single motherhood rate among White working and middle class women may be as high as 40% and 20% respectively.


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Again, correlation is not causation, but marriage seems strongest in those populations (Asian and White) that have the biggest earnings gap between men and women, and weakest in those populations (Black and Hispanics) that have the smallest gap.


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Men have done poorly in 1979 dollar amounts (and 1979 was a miserable year, economically) to 2007, in all educational areas except Bachelor's Degree and Higher. But even there, they are far out-stripped by women, and women have done better than men, with small but measurable increases for Associate's Degree and High School Grad, where in comparison men have losses, and substantial ones, from 1979 dollars. Even with less than High School diplomas, women posted smaller losses than men in 1979 dollar amounts, i.e. inflation adjusted.


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Finally, we can see that women outnumber men in most workplace areas, except things like mining, trucking, and the like. In Professional occupations, women outnumber men by 9.4%. This is the largest gap on the graph.

It's possible, that as women have closed the earnings gap with men, particularly among middle class, professional occupations (such as lawyers, doctors, the like), the ability of most men, who won't be very exciting even on a good day, to first attract a woman into marriage, and then keep her happy, is low. Given that women can as Loh recounts her friend "Ellen" can pursue lots of bad boys, why not replace "nice guy" husbands like Ron with maids and nannies, and keep the bad boys around? Increasingly, this seems to be the choice women are making.

The Wall Street Journal in the "Real Pregnancy Crisis" suggests that the real issue is non-College White, Latino, and Black women having children out of wedlock. The CDC reports that 40% of children were born illegitimately, compared to 11% in 1970. Fully 60% of these children were born to women in their twenties, only 23% to teens. The article decries the nonsense feminist academics praising this development, ala Loh, Ehrenreich, and Friedan before her.

ABC News notes that America is not alone. Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark post rates of 66%, 55%, 54%, and 46% respectively of illegitimacy. Nations known for rough gender parity in earnings, feminist politics, and lack of respect for their men. [One of Loh's friends notes in the Atlantic how "enlightened" Swedish women prefer dominant, aggressive Muslim men to their nice-guy Swedish men.] But then Sweden allows for gender-based abortion. Not the mark of a successful society, as China attests to. With 32 million more men than women under the age of twenty, gender imbalances due to sex-based abortions can be explosive. So too, lurching into illegitimacy as the social norm.

Thanks to reader Puma, for the link to Rutgers University study on the family.



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Over the last 40 years, marriage has declined radically, among women. While there are no class breakdowns, the largest slices of women are naturally going to be lower and middle class women, not upper class women.

We can see this decline in respect for marriage and husbands in the culture too. Nearly every ad, even those now featuring Black fathers, have doofus dads who are the butt of jokes.

Marriage, and the traditional nuclear family it seems, is something only for rich people. Yuppie women like Loh or Ehrenreich, can afford to replace husbands with exciting lovers and immigrant labor. For poorer women, out-of-wedlock children and rotating bad boys are the rule. Only where divorce means giving up real, serious money, in the millions of dollars, and giving up great luxury, do we see stable families and intact, nuclear family marriages. This great sea change, might incidentally explain the hatred of Sarah Palin, who famously married a blue collar guy of no great wealth, in her early twenties, and leveraged his support to run for office, first as Mayor of Wasilla, and then as Governor of Alaska.

After all, even the author of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, cannot get his wife's respect of that of other women. Lewis, a best-selling author not once but twice, with "Liar's Poker" is treated like a doofus.

In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it was eerie how the literally empowered women treated men. Written by avowed feminist Joss Whedon, Buffy and her super-powered female friends pursued, non-stop, dangerous bad boys with superpowers, who were their superiors. Character, morality, and duty meant nothing, only the thrill of violent, dangerous, super-powered men. Perhaps the most illustrative moment came when Buffy's second vampire boyfriend, "Spike" raped her, and she fell in love with him and (implied off-screen sex) with him again. [Star Sarah Michelle Gellar hated that particular storyline and feuded with series creator and show-runner Whedon over it.]

Now, women don't have superpowers. But the better earnings, status, social conditions, and opportunities afforded women have not come without a cost, all across the West. If women are hard-wired to be hypergamous, i.e. desire men of greater power and status than themselves, this would make "kitchen bitches" irrelevant and explain our brave new world of single mothers, rotating bad boys, and disdain, shown over and over again, for fatherhood and men who embrace it. It would also explain the success of the institution of marriage in the only class that still sustains it: high powered men making millions every year and women who work only part-time in jobs that pay little but give prestige, i.e. the Non Governmental Organizations, the NGOs, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International or Heal the Bay.

The very rich men, those of the Upper Class have superpowers. They have more power and status than their wives.
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