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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The Modern View of Marriage

A recent Citibank commercial exhibits the modern view of marriage found in the young, White professional women who are the target of Citbank's rewards program. The commercial features an attractive, athletic woman who says, "My boyfriend and I were going on vacation ... we talked about getting a diamond, ... but with all the points I earned ... I flew us to the rock I really had in mind."





The guy, is never shown in detail, and is a lesser rock climber than the girl (who goes first and stands alone on a towering, dangerous spire). Complete with faux-tribal yodeling and grrrl power! singing, its almost a SWPL parody. One might ask why marriage has become less attractive, to the point that Citibank (which only cares about getting consumers to sign up for its rewards cards program so they can reap fees off it, in the essentials) points out that its target young White female professionals can use the card to go rock climbing instead of getting married?

Let me repeat this. The commercial says flat out that the card allows women to avoid marriage in favor of "exciting" rock-climbing. The "rock I really had in mind."

How has marriage come to this?

It came to this, because in essentials, most White women find their men not very sexy. After all, modern life provides a lot of comfort and security. But the essentials of that security and comfort can only be provided if the men trade-off sexiness for reliability and agreeableness and cooperation. Women don't find happy, smiling men attractive, as any reader of Twilight or its "Teen Paranormal Romance" spawn (that's a genre inside Barnes and Noble Bookstores, no lie they have an entire section devoted to it) would know.

More than a thousand men and women were shown pictures of faces making various expressions and asked to rate them for attractiveness. Some pictures of a neutral face were also included.
The women were least attracted to the smiling happy men and most interested in those whose head was held high with pride. They also found the men who looked ashamed rather attractive, the journal Emotion reports.
Researcher Jessica Tracy said: ‘Pride may signal a man’s competence and ability to provide for a partner and offspring.’

Just as Satoshi Kanazawa's work showing that Black women were the least attractive to men of all races (which earned him a PC defenestration and forced, Gallileo-like apology after a PC inquisition) has not been disproven, just shouted down as not following the dogma of PC, this work and others are sure to generate lots of PC heat.

Is this assumption accurate, i.e. the cooperative, happy, smiling men who are "nice" and mostly equal to most women, are less attractive, than bad, broody guys, and thus account for the decline of marriage (because that is the supply essentially of prospective grooms -- agreeable "nice guys" for the most part)? Probably a lot more study is needed. It might very well not be. But then again, it might.

Does it make sense, or this another History Channel "Ancient Aliens Were At the First Thanksgiving (Hunting Bigfoot)" series?

In my view, there are reasons to suspect something along these lines. Every pundit from John Derbyshire, to Spengler at the Asian Times and Pajamas Media, to Theodore Dalrymple, to Mark Steyn, has remarked upon: plummeting birth rates in the West and places where women have better conditions and status and earnings and independence. Also, decreased marriage rates. Also, vastly increased female preference for "bad" i.e. abusive, violent, and dangerous men. Also, among women, vastly increased display of skin and figures, i.e. "slutty" and ultra-revealing clothing. Also, as Steve Sailer once noted, prevalence of tattoos on young women to indicate an easy attitude towards sex. The Daily Mail has shown series after series of drunken young British women stumbling around in next to nothing looking for sex on the weekend nights.

All of these things are well known. But no pundit has ever said why. The best they can come up with is … well these things just happen as a rule, because well that's what modern life is like. But why is that?

In my view, the reason for the disdain for marriage, the dislike of Western Civilization, the preference for bad boys, and all the rest is the profound dissatisfaction with "Kitchen Bitches," that is equal or mostly equal men who are smiling, agreeable, cooperative, building wealth and security and comfort but providing no sexiness. No danger. No excitement. And no pure, powerful arousal.

Joran Van Der Sloot after all has aroused many women Straight-A, Bible Study Natalee Holloway wound up leaving the disco with hulking, six foot four Van Der Sloot. She was never seen since and Van Der Sloot admitted on TV her murder. Another woman in Peru went with him to his hotel room (and her death). Van Der Sloot apparently used his notoriety to cut a wide swath among women in Asia. As did accused wife killer (yes plural victims) Drew Peterson, a former police officer in Ohio, well into his fifties, with coeds from local colleges.

In the early days of his detention, the Lima papers were full of reports about him reading reams of letters from women who claimed to be in love with him. “I get more letters every day,” he bragged to the downmarket Dutch paper De Telegraaf. “One of them even wanted me to get her pregnant.”

Even a Florida Doctor, a woman in her fifties, was not immune to his spell, spending considerable amounts of money to see him, and hiring attorneys.

What is this? Nothing but market failure. Modern society requires men to be agreeable, smiling, and cooperative. And that coupled with their near equality, makes them sexless. Causing in turn a desperation among women for sexiness no matter what. This is not evil, or a reflection of "evil women." It is simply an adjustment that women need, a set of proper incentives and investment.

Women won't value marriage (to Joe Average) if the trade-off is no sex and excitement. Game, being a PUA, working on sexiness, will all help to some degree fill that market gap, but there are limits. A man can't neglect his job, his other duties, simply to be sexy all day. No group of men spends more on being sexy and dominant (primarily through ultra-thuggery) than Black men in the ghetto. Optimizing for sexy men means minimizing for wealth and security and comfort.

The problem is one of incentives. Women are essentially, among both White working class (illegitimacy around 40%) and the White professional class (illegitimacy around 20%) betting it ALL on a continued long run of prosperity, safety, security, and comfort. Where life is so risk-less and "boring" that rock climbing, and other thrills (named Mr. Sexy Bad Boy) are required just to feel alive. Starving women in the Third World feel no such requirement for adrenaline fixes nor bad boy parades. They'd be happier if their husbands did not patronize prostitutes, drink the family money away in bars, and did some actual work at home and outside.

Women need to know that the comfort, safety, and stability of the West is an illusion. All those disaster movies, the end of the world movies, the zombie movies, and so on have played upon the fears that indeed, the surface stability and safety is just such an illusion. One destined to be shattered. There **IS** a cultural awareness that the West is not all powerful, and can be shattered at any moment. For a long time after WWII, this was centered around the Cold War and nuclear annihilation. Now, bio-terror, or zombies, or aliens, or ancient prophecies, or "climate change" nonsense articulate this fear. Which is the "entertaining" version of the real risk -- social pressures and competition for limited food, water, and other resources in a global oil shock, or global famine, or any other threat (like a failure of the Euro and a global banking shock).

Forget the fantasy of zombies or aliens landing. If gas goes to $10 a gallon, there are roaming packs of inner city marauders, looting the suburbs, a "Kitchen Bitch" with a shotgun who sticks with you looks better than fabulous rock climbing and a bad boy who does not stick around. No matter how moody and thus sexy he is. It is all a question of incentives. Women and Men behave EXACTLY as incentives push them, in the mass. [Individuals can and do vary, but the mass is what we are concerned with. It does society no good to have a few wise women choose security and the nuclear family when most abjure it for risky single motherhood.]

Marriage does not work for women, now, because they assume the stability and power of the West is eternal. Never threatened, always "boring." This is a poor bet, and likely to work out disastrously in fairly short order. Food, oil, and other resources are tight globally, and an external shock (and there is ALWAYS an external shock) in the global system will push everything over. Not aliens invading, or zombie apocalypse, or Mayan prophecies, but a corn harvest failure in Brazil, or a Wheat harvest failure in Russia, the Ukraine, and Australia. The closing of the Persian Gulf to oil shipping for six months or longer. The Euro collapsing. Perhaps all of these, are enough to send the economy into a nose-dive and mobs of hungry people from the urban centers into looting marches on the suburbs. With a paralyzed and inept bureaucracy unable and unwilling to use force to stop it. In other words, the LA Riots writ nationally.

Hipster rock climbing instead of marriage is all well and good, but a woman's "boyfriend" is not going to display the same sacrifice and courage in fighting off intruders as one's husband.
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Why Are Men Angry?

Writer/author Kay Hymowitz offers her take on Why Are Men Angry? with shots at Roissy and other male oriented bloggers. Of course, she misses the point. Almost everyone is angry, being sold a bill of goods: PC and Diversity and Multiculturalism would bring utopia like a John Lennon "Imagine" song come to life, and instead brought war, misery, terrorism that never ends, and a general hard-wiring of nasty third world degeneracy and crisis right straight into the West, a hard-wiring that no one can disconnect. White middle class men have it the worst, being told and forced, to be the "nice guy" and sit through endless sexual harassment, diversity training, gender-bending seminars and meetings, while Alpha A-hole bad boys swoop up most women and all the half-way attractive ones, particularly in their prime years. No wonder White Middle and Working class men are angry, no other group has gotten the shaft quite so much since the end of the 1960s.


Hymowitz declares (wrongly of course) that most women want "nice guys." Exhibit A to the total cluelessness of women about their own and their gender's preference. Women want nice guys like they want a cold bowl of oatmeal in the morning. They'll put up with them if they are forced, but otherwise find it disgusting. This is why commercials are filled with depictions of boring Beta White guys as doofuses who are humiliated by the smart White women and various non-Whites around them. Women find boring beta male White guys rivals and unlikeable ones at that for promotions and pay and jobs in the workplace (which is why when women form a critical mass such as in education, health care, media, entertainment, publishing, corporate finance, human resources, and more, they push out non-Gay White guys).

Wage growth has been primarily in female-dominated professions, that are profoundly hostile to non-Gay, non-Alpha White males (because White professional women find beta male romantic/sexual attention insulting and degrading). Wage growth in such female dominated fields as health care, media, entertainment, publishing, have all outpaced such male dominated fields as electrical engineering, computer programming, and mechanical engineering. Worse, the male dominated fields have been ground zero for outsourcing and H1-B attacks (usually with female cheerleading). While women's groups have famously swayed Obama's infrastructure spending away from construction to female-dominated health care and education.

But the main complaint of ordinary, Middle Class White guys is that women in their twenties, at the height of their attractiveness, spend all their time having sex with various bad boys. Then expect utter romantic devotion from "nice guys" who they will very publicly "settle" for after a long string of bad boys at the very tail edge of attractiveness. Leaving none but the obese or otherwise deeply flawed women for the 80-90% of men who are utterly average, in their twenties, or used-up cougars in their thirties.

All women are not equal. Nor is a woman as beautiful, attractive, loving, kind, and lacking emotional baggage and resentment in her thirties after a long string of failed relationships with bad boys, drug addicts, felons, trustafarians, indie rockers, and so on, as she was in her early twenties before all those men. Men cannot even get what their grandfathers certainly got: companionship marriage with a rough age peer before a great deal of lovers (on her side) and enforced celibacy with intermittent hook-ups (on his side) generate a "marriage of utter desperation."

If men were only after sex, the "sluttiness" that Hymowitz cites would not be a problem: the easier to bed the women in question. But for a long term relationship expected to lead to marriage, sluttiness certainly is a problem and it from the perspective of most men certainly derails any prospect of a love-filled marriage.

A woman with many bad boys (sometimes merely one is enough) in her sexual past is not going to be able to form a deeply lasting relationship with a guy in her thirties. What for an aging lothario type man in his fifties or sixties might be a good catch (think Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, or Warren Beatty and Annette Benning) is a match destined to fail in mutual contempt. Hers that the man is not the dominant, commanding Alpha male all other women want and openly lust for, his that he's the last choice and last in line in parade of prior male lovers.

This is particularly true since biochemistry cannot have its way in making and deepening sexual and romantic connections, something both parties understand implicitly. A woman of even average looks in the flush of her youth, can command considerable attention and memory-building, affection, love, and devotion to an ordinary man, particularly if society pushes him to faithful husbandly duties. This is of course no guarantee, and a man can stray. Making selection of a man's character besides just his raw sex appeal something women must consider (and is usually stressed by older female relatives and friends -- will he be faithful to you when you age?) But the odds are generally good, for most women, when society pushes faithful duties. And for most people, most of the time, good enough beats a perfect ideal that collapses into ugly failure in reality: the idea that a bad boy can be "tamed" by a woman who has "special" sexual/romantic powers despite being ordinary. See "Twilight," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Tru Blood," "Vampire Diaries," "Gossip Girl," and nearly anything with Sex or the City in the title.

Men know what their grandfathers had. Perhaps even their fathers. You can see it in old movies. The idea that men and women would marry in their twenties, roughly the same age, form deep bonds un-threatened by a parade of past lovers (for either) and cemented more or less to each other.


Now, take for example a woman beautiful enough to have her own E! network talk show (and private personal trainer), and a comedian who has appeared multiple times on the Jay Leno Tonight Show (and the Jay Leno Show during that strange interregnum): Chelsea Handler. She's 36 years old. Despite her clowning around she's in decent shape, physically. And she is clearly in the upper 10% at least in looks for women in her age cohort. She was beautiful enough to attract the attention of rapper 50 Cent. A man used to having beautiful women throwing themselves at him.

Chelsea Handler, despite all that, is less beautiful than an average fit woman of ten years younger or so. Age matters. Average men are increasingly less inclined to "cougar it up" when porn and video games provide an excellent substitution. A cougar is not really fit to start a family, very likely she does not want one, or has one of her own already. Most men do not long to be a third wheel step-dad viewed by contempt by all parties alike: wife, biological (real) father, and children. A woman of twenty five is quite different in beauty alone, and its indicator of the ability to form a family, than a cougar of thirty six. No matter how beautiful the cougar is for her age.

All this leaves aside of course, the bitterness and resentment generated in women by a good fifteen years of failed attempts to snag and keep an Alpha Male. The bad boy nearly all women crave.

Men are bitter, and angry, because they were sold a bill of goods, cheated, and they know it. At best they are expected to be the dutiful, wife-dominated doormat husband of an aging cougar, and be grateful for it. Most of them have neither the skills, nor the talent, nor the desire, nor the personality, nor the ability to play dominant Alpha Asshole Male. They'd prefer to be married sometime in their twenties to a nice girl who did not have already twenty five felons, trustafarians, addicts, indie rockers, hipsters, and more to her bed count by age 25. The Duke F-List shows how ordinary young women of ordinary attractiveness can rack up at least thirteen men in four years and not consider it out of the ordinary. As anyone examining the material will note, the crudeness and graphic sexual nature of the "joke" meant to be shared among friends (and thus leaked out to generate a book deal) illustrates the bawdiness of young women can easily match if not exceed that of young men.

White, Middle class and working class men are angry, because they were told to be, and in fact forced to be, dutiful, go-along, boring beta White guys who would not constantly try to dominate and kick-ass and take names, all the time. In exchange, they got an X-box, some Ipods, and no ability to really form a family. Even if they had decent wages and affordable housing, the best they can do is an aging cougar whose contempt for them not being Warren Beatty or a reasonable low-rent copy is palpable. The workplace expects boring, White male conformity (and punishes all but the Charlie Sheens of the world for not being part of that conformity) which in turn makes male peers sexually and romantically invisible to outright repellent to their female peers. No wonder they are angry. They were cheated. Instead of a family, they got the dubious privilege of paying taxes to raise the spawn of bad-boys, and Chelsea Handler-types at the end of the rainbow.

The sexual utopia for the average White woman is a nightmare for the average White guy. While women have their choice of Alphas (even an ordinary woman can have sex with an Alpha, if not commitment), guys get very intermittent hook-ups, generally by "mistake" (they momentarily acted Alpha A-holish) and an aging cougar maybe in the end. That's the death of the American dream, for them. No wonder men are angry.
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Where Have All The Good Men Gone: Why Conservative Women Don't Get It

Older conservative women just don't get it. While writers like Kay Hymowitz may generally be culturally conservative, they are at their hearts, feminists. Their model of what is right with the world is (young women) and what is wrong with the world is (young men). Hymowitz's latest book, an excerpt featured in the Wall Street Journal blames an epidemic of slackerdom among young men, mostly due to the failure to "man up" for the dearth of marriage and children all across the West.

Updated!

[Update: over at the comments on Roissy's post on Emotional Pornography is the link to a post at Huffington Post, of all places. Called, Why You're Not Married by TV Writer (Mad Men, United States of Tara) Tracy McMillan. The reasons include: You're a Bitch, You're Shallow, You're a Slut, You're a Liar, You're Selfish, You're Not Good Enough. As one person responding noted, a man writing that would have been crucified. There are some folks, even liberal ones, who understand the driver of late marriage, few kids, mostly single motherhood.]

What Hymowitz cannot understand (and because she's an older conservative woman, is constitutionally incapable of understanding no matter how many times it is explained to her, no more than a cat could understand calculus) is that it is the condition of women, not men, that caused the great drop in fertility, the great increase in single-motherhood, and the great delay in marriage and adulthood by most men. Simply put, women for the first time ever, can widely choose sexy men instead of responsible ones. And they choose SEXY EVERY TIME just about. Leaving really, zero incentive for men to "man up" as she puts it. There are other factors at play, including a re-jiggering of the economy to put most jobs done by men by outsourced or H1-B visa holder cheaper replacements, the growth of female-dominated (and White male unfriendly) government, fashion, advertising, media, and corporate jobs. But the heart of the reason most White men in their twenties remain slackers is that women choose sexy men over responsible men. And only a very few men (usually less than 10% of the population) can be sexy.

Hymowitz approvingly quotes author/comedienne Julie Klausner, author of "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated" on how there are just not that many good men around:

"We are sick of hooking up with guys," writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated." What Ms. Klausner means by "guys" is males who are not boys or men but something in between. "Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home." One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, "I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?"

Here is my prior take on this, from 2010.

Historically, leading men, at least in comedy, have featured either the feckless or the boorish: the Fred Flintstones and Bullwinkles and then useless beta males. In my book, I say date guys like Rowlf and Fozzi and not Kermit. Let me think about it.
…
It's the teenage boys I'm worried about. They're not going to college in numbers. They're going to be angry -- depending on who's coming back from the war. There are charities for girls and I'm all for that, but ultimately, the real problem is the epidemic of inferior men - which is basically what my book is about.

Klausner is no great beauty. Not even heavy photoshopping on her book cover can make her look like a great beauty. She's promiscuous, making her a poor choice for a man with options. And she prefers, like all women, the top few men. Who will bed her but never marry her. After all, she was the one having sex in bathroom stalls, alleyways, and other tawdry, semi-public places with felons, indie rockers, and trustafarians. She could have married an accountant. But that would be BORING and not SEXY. Now a woman aging rapidly out of her attractiveness, she's not even a good mate choice for an accountant. Who could probably do better with straight out porn and X-boxes than a woman with proven poor judgment and a spectacularly bad sexual past. Yes, men DO make judgments about a woman's likely sexual past, which is generally well revealed in casual interaction. A woman with many partners is a poor long-term girlfriend much less potential wife and mother. Promiscuous men and women tend to remain so, behavior does not radically change with a wedding ceremony. [See Charlie Sheen.]

Klausner's complaint is the same as Hymowitz's. The universe of men from which they have to choose from does not consist of men like George Clooney (or Charlie Sheen). Instead, its mostly boring accountants, real estate salesman, and other desk jockeys. Not a bit of sexy danger, dominance, and excitement among them. They don't look like Josh Duhamel (never mind that the women don't look like Fergie or Katherine Heigl either), and frankly bore women who have had exciting, sexy, dominant, bad-boy bed partners. And now want those men to marry them.

Well, they won't. Those men can have any woman they want, and they might want to slum it around a bit (see Sheen, Tiger Woods, John Edwards, and so on). But they end up marrying women like Giselle Bundchen (Tom Brady's wife), or Elin Nordgren (Tiger Wood's ex wife) or Denise Richards (Charlie Sheen's ex wife) or Catherine Zeta-Jones (Michael Douglas's wife). They don't marry ordinary women of ordinary attractiveness.

For women to be really, really happy, the solution is to be born very, very beautiful. More beautiful than 99% of all women. Be a Swedish supermodel, or a Brazilian, or a German one. Or a beautiful Hollywood actress, or as near to it as you can be born. Otherwise, a woman of ordinary beauty should not fool herself. Tiger Woods or Charlie Sheen or George Clooney might sleep with an IHOP waitress. But they won't marry her.

Women want the men other women want. Its preselection. Here's the CW promo for "Hellcats" showing it in action:



Preselection is why a wedding ring is a useful pick-up prop in bars. It is why women in college compete over the top top 10%-20% of men and ignore the rest.

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.
...
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.”

Now, this situation, where women can choose sexy men over reliable men, has at its roots the highly mobile, atomized society of post-War Western society. Which in turn has little penalty for women riding the carousel of hot, sexy and dominant men in their late teens and twenties and into their thirties. Add into this the lowering of men's standards of living (men had a higher standard of living in the 1970's, when the average man of thirty could afford a house on his own) and the deliberate erasure of most of male-oriented jobs and the relative power differential (women despise men their equals in status and power, and find only more powerful men than themselves sexy) makes things even worse for men.


Throw in the destruction of in particular, the White male production and knowledge jobs, from skilled craftsmen in factories and production lines, to engineers, and manufacturing and engineering were either outsourced overseas or insourced via H1-B visas (Microsoft went from mostly nerdy White guys in the 1980's through mid 1990's to majority non-White, and non-US citizen, via the H1-B Visa employment programs), and the situation gets even worse. More men drop off the sexy list, because they don't make more money, than their equivalent average Jane, and don't throw around more social and cultural power either. Those are the original Microsoft Employees above right. You'd be hard pressed to find their like (absent hair styles) at any Microsoft office today. As Steve Sailer notes, you find White male employment at Silicon Valley declining. And as he also notes, the Valley itself does not employ many people compared to old industrial companies. Facebook has about 3,000 employees. That's not even a shift at a GM factory. Women and Blacks and Asians are complaining in various media outlets that their share of employment at Valley companies has not increased, yet they have no issue with the decline of White male employment.

In addition, the growth of government, non-profit, and related health/education/welfare jobs, has meant in effect a female-gay-non-White ghetto, where males fear to tread. Education is notorious for being male-unfriendly, as is health care, non-profits (places for trustafarians to hang out acting "respectable") and so on. Take a look at your local DMV. You won't find too many (straight) White males. Same with your public library. That pattern generally holds as well with most corporate jobs (as parodied in "the Office") and particularly finance, HR, and the like. The growth in media, advertising, and so on has created a gay-female ghetto, almost exclusively.

The dynamic is that White men and women are in competition for the same limited amount of jobs in the White-collar, middle class work environment. For most White women, most White men are the "enemy" and an open alliance with gays, non-Whites, and other women to drive them out has emerged. You'll find this characteristic of most educational institutions, non-profits/NGO's, and particularly government. Wise Latinas and the like are accounted better than the average White guy. To be White and a male is generally, to be a loser. Unless you are a dominant, sexy, obnoxious A-hole.

Which leads directly to the role that men play in their twenties that Hymowitz finds so annoying. Embrace responsibility for … what exactly? The women around them are too busy sleeping with felons, trustafarians, indie-rockers, and hipsters to even notice them. Indeed, about 80-90% of all men are sexually invisible to their female counterparts. As Roissy recently posted, women indulge in stuff even worse, "emotional porn" that plays to their hypergamous desire to snag (for themselves, exclusively) that dominant Alpha A-hole they dream of. Edward Cullen from Twilight, Dr. McDreamy-McSteamy, Charlie Sheen, the various rich guys on Gossip Girl, the Black professional Athletes of the Kardashian clan (there is apparently 112 Kardashian sisters and cousins, all entwined with Black professional athletes of some fame), all play to destructive fantasies by ordinary women.

No man the average Jane can possibly marry will be as immortal and powerful and devoted as Edward Cullen. None will be McDreamy or McSteamy (or even a Doctor). They won't be rich heirs to fortunes in NYC, or Black pro athletes. Oh sure, sex will be on offer. But not marriage, and even there, the most beautiful women get cheated on by the Alpha A-holes they marry. Because, well they can cheat. That's the consequence of the skewed female marketplace.

Hymowitz proposes to shout real loud at slacker men, to get married. Because "its all their fault" that women are sleeping with trustafarians and felons, or choosing artificial insemination and single motherhood. She can't understand, literally, that the men only respond to those who do the choosing: WOMEN.

To change this state of affairs, it is therefore necessary to change women's behavior. First, male dominated jobs must be brought back: eliminate outsourcing, insourcing, H1-Bs, remove Affirmative Action, and demand companies instead prefer White men for hiring. Push status and social and cultural power to engineering, production, and the like. Not awesomely fabulous designer shoes or awesomely fabulous media jobs.

Second, women need penalties to change their preference for sexy men over responsible ones. That means a stable, relatively non-mobile and deeply connected (not atomized) society where female friends, relatives, moms, and so on harshly criticize and penalize "slutty" behavior such as sleeping with felons, trustafarians, indie rockers, etc. Men are not going to line up to propose to women like Julie Klausner, so it is absolutely essential that society (and most societies have done so) put limits on the unfettered and unlimited female sexual expression. [Joe Average Beta Male is about as desirable to women as a cold bowl of oatmeal, so that in and of itself limits his expression outside of prostitution or porn.]

Third, women must face penalties for staying on the sex partner carousel too long, and benefits for getting off it with early marriage. Society must consider grad school and other things a woman does to further her career something done AFTER marriage and child-care, with women facing no penalty for marrying relatively young (age 22-25) and having kids in their twenties, going back to school in their mid thirties or so. Meanwhile, women need to be socialized to the effect that, if they delay marrying too long, all they'll get is the losers as other women picked off all the good guys. Again this needs a tight social network of other women constantly re-inforcing this message and using ostracism/pressure to penalize those who flout it.

This can be done but is very unlikely to be done. Because it would take away the ability of women to have sex with sexy bad boy men in their twenties. Which they are trading off the possibilities of husbands and good fathers, more or less. Even women who understood clearly (and most remain in denial about their loss of attractiveness due to age and bed partners) the costs of sexy bad boy men in their twenties, would almost invariably choose sexy, 90 times out of 100, instead of responsible. Women have their own money, their own earnings. Face no social pressure. Don't face unplanned pregnancies. Why wouldn't they choose sexy bad boys?

This is why Conservative Women like Hymowitz are useless when it comes to social issues. They either live in 1955 (where a considerable number of conservative men also live) or reflexively side with women because, dammit, those bad boys are just so sexy! We live in a society optimized to give the most women sexual access to the top 10% of men, the sexy bad boy dominant Alpha A-holes (women love). That optimization is deliberate (by well, women and the sexy bad boys) and for the now, irreversible. Women are not going to stop having sex in alleys with felons (like Klausner, read her book) unless forced by social structures to do so. They'll fight every step of the way demand access to the top sexiest men, and then support from Beta Males after a decade or more of Klausner like escapades. The Duke F-List powerpoint is a flashing red arrow to women's preferences. The young women in question who exclusively had sex with athletes and rated them in powerpoints is unlikely to find Joe in Accounting much of a catch. Even though her appearance is utterly average.

So we are thus, for the foreseeable future, resigned to single motherhood and the ills that follow. But women would not have it any other way, it is just too sexy!

The one "bright spot" is that a huge shock, nuclear attack by Iran or AQ, cyber sabotage taking down infrastructure, massive oil shocks due to a widespread Arab revolt, all promise to create massive instability and financial destruction. In which women would spell Beta Males (who are willing to fight, and can do so effectively) P-R-O-T-E-C-T-I-O-N. Think the LA Riots. Or any third world disturbance. Of course X-box playing guys are probably limited in their usefulness in fighting, but one looks for silver linings where ever one can.
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Erica Jong and the Kitchen Bitch

Erica Jong in an article in the WSJ complains at length that people are still having babies, noting:

Unless you've been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades. Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never tire of describing the joys of celebrity parenthood. Bearing and rearing children has come to be seen as life's greatest good. Never mind that there are now enough abandoned children on the planet to make breeding unnecessary. Professional narcissists like Angelina Jolie and Madonna want their own little replicas in addition to the African and Asian children that they collect to advertise their open-mindedness. Nannies are seldom photographed in these carefully arranged family scenes. We are to assume that all this baby-minding is painless, easy and cheap.

Motherhood for Jong is still not perfect. And its all everyone's fault. Even worse, people are having kids. Their own even! The horror! But even worse, is the lack of tragically hip measures to outsource child-bearing for everywoman, without the need for Sandra Tsing Loh's Kitchen Bitch quandry. For all of Jong's bitter lament that society does not provide nannies and caretakers for every woman to be a tragically hip "artiste" and creative woman, she ignores the obvious. There is an alternative to nannies whose own children, she notes are in the care of their grandmothers or no one. This alternative is called, husbands. And exciting, dynamic, Alpha males don't change diapers.

We are in a period of retrenchment against progressive social policies, and the women pursuing political life today owe more to Evita Peron than to Eleanor Roosevelt. "Mama grizzlies" like Sarah Palin never acknowledge that there are any difficulties in bearing and raising children. Nor do they acknowledge any helpers as they thrust their babies into the arms of siblings or daddies. The baby has become the ultimate political tool.

Here you have it. The real reason Sarah Palin is so hated. She rose from nothing, really, to become a national political figure. Not sacrificing family, either. The key was her husband. Who shared chores, family raising, and more. While Todd Palin is a masculine, aggressive man, he's not higher-status than Sarah Palin. Something women like Jong (and there are many who find her writing important, and worth paying for), find disgusting. Thrusting their babies into the arms of siblings or daddies? How gauche. How low class. No wonder Tina Fey hates Sarah Palin. Fey's own kids have well-paid professional nannies, the way a proper woman has.

Yes, class rules so much of American society. Not the least of which is that class is deeply entwined in feminism. There's nothing worse than marrying, after all, a Kitchen Bitch and "thrusting their babies into the arms of daddies." When a true, upper class woman goes from man to man (as Jong did) and hires nannies.

And this raises a larger point. The political and social culture is built upon upper class women and men, assuming a constant upward mobility and disposable income. For most women, that pawing off to nannies of children, is not possible. A husband looks better, though the supply of men willing to be Kitchen Bitches is now understandably short, and of inferior quality. Regardless, it is likely that we've reached a cultural inflection point. One where the desires of Jong and folks like her to move the culture in their direction comes up against one giant problem.

There just isn't any more money.
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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.
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Beyond Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage seems inevitable. While California's Proposition 8 has temporarily called a halt in that State's issuance of new gay marriage licenses, existing gay marriages are valid, and inevitably the courts (the elites favorite tool for forcing social change) will create Gay Marriage across the land. Likely, as a result of a Supreme Court 5-4 decision with Justices Kennedy, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Stevens (or their replacements by Obama) against Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas. A five-four decision is as good as nine-zero decision, as far as being legally binding. In every other Western nation, gay marriage is either the law of the land, or the forces pushing it unstoppable. This despite popular opposition, because the modern post-War era has produced fabulous amounts of wealth for middle-men like George Soros or David Geffen, or Warren Buffett, who then use their vast amounts of wealth to push policies that trump the interests of ordinary persons. This is true culturally and socially as well as economically. Indeed the ability of elites to routinely trump the interests of the populace is one of the key factors in the rising anger and pressure-cooker atmosphere all across the West, absent the calming factor of sustained economic growth and good times.

A Wall Street Journal Editorial notes how a federal lawsuit has been filed to invalidate Proposition 8 and other traditional marriage laws. Regardless of the merits of the suit and defense of laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman, it seems clear that the moneyed, Gentry Liberals that Joel Kotkin suggests drives most of the Democratic Party and make up most of the nations wealthiest individuals (being concentrated in finance, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and uber-financiers like Soros and Buffett) will have their way on this. As they have had, so far, their way on Cap and Trade, the ObamaCare proposals, and the stimulus bill. This is essentially the coastal elites having their way over everyone else, using the Supreme Court to do it. Kotkin warns this will have severe consequences politically, and he's right.


However, that's an issue for another post. When, not if, Gay Marriage comes, what will happen to marriage as it's defined, and what will society look like? I expect the following ills to accompany gay marriage and continue to wash away social bonds:

1. Polygamy will be legalized.


2. Marriage will be perceived as "gay," for Muslims and other non-mainstream people, or for the very, very rich by most people.


3. Increasing amounts of new marriages will be either mostly polygamous or gay, while marriage itself declines.


4. Men will increasingly co-habitate instead of marry, with fragile, chaotic, and short-lived relationships characterizing "family" for most Americans.


5. "Gay" norms of sexuality, i.e. non-monogamous conduct, will define non-polygamous marriage, driving acceptance of marriage among straight, non-polygamous men to near zero for new marriages


6. Women and children will be regarded by most men as something they are at best unconcerned with and at worst, openly hostile to, given the new marriage environment


7. Most children in the US will be born to single mothers, and single motherhood will define how children are raised, with the accompanying social pathologies found in that environment

UPDATE! check out these lunatics: here where two people who should NEVER have sex (aging hippies) talk about reprogramming jealousy. Yeah, that will work.

Obviously, not all of these will happen in an instant-on light-switch type of process, but the trends are un-mistakeable. Together, they threaten to remake America within a few generations into a combination of Morocco and Tijuana and Pacific Heights. With most of the nation resembling the first two instead of the latter.

From the Wall Street Journal Article some passages that deserve quoting in full:

If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.

A veneer of sentiment may prevent these norms from collapsing—but only temporarily. The marriage culture, already wounded by widespread divorce, nonmarital cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing will fare no better than it has in those European societies that were in the vanguard of sexual “enlightenment.” And the primary victims of a weakened marriage culture are always children and those in the poorest, most vulnerable sectors of society.

Candid and clear-thinking advocates of redefining marriage recognize that doing so entails abandoning norms such as monogamy. In a 2006 statement entitled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” over 300 lesbian, gay, and allied activists, educators, lawyers, and community organizers—including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and prominent Yale, Columbia and Georgetown professors—call for legally recognizing multiple sex partner (“polyamorous”) relationships. Their logic is unassailable once the historic definition of marriage is overthrown.

Is this a red herring? This week’s Newsweek reports more than 500,000 polyamorous households in the U.S.

Along with the Re-Norming of Marriage, the changes wrought by Gay Marriage will reshape the social landscape of America in profound ways. Intensifying some trends, and obliterating others.

First, Polygamy will be legalized. As seen above, feminists, gay activists, educators, lawyers, and community organizers, what Kotkin describes as "Gentry Liberals" are determined to have their way on this as well as with Gay Marriage. Legally, it seems inexplicable to allow marriage to be gay but not polygamous, and as Mark Steyn points out in jurisdiction where Gay Marriage has been the law of the land for long has polygamy remained outlawed. Polygamy is de-facto recognized in Great Britain and Canada (where Muslim men may claim welfare benefits for their four wives) and in the Netherlands the law of the land. As Steyn points out, there will be many more takers for Polygamy than Gay Marriage.

Last year, Aly Hindy, a Scarborough imam, told the Toronto Star that he’d performed 30 polygamous marriages just in the last few weeks.

Legalized polygamy and ostentatious displays by gays in gay weddings (what other kind you ask could there be?) will rapidly move marriage in the cultural sphere to "gay" and "Muslim" and for the rich. The rich can afford huge spreads, gigantic parties and ceremonies, and would remain both enamored of class distinctions and able to bear the costs of marriage (i.e. money makes it a bad deal for divorcing). In the otherwise forgettable "Nanny Diaries" the prospective Nanny (Scarlett Johanssen) lunches with the older, married woman thinking of hiring her (Laura Linney). A friend of the Linney character stops by, and the two commiserate on her recent divorce, which put the luxurious life of penthouse apartments in Manhattan and Cape Cod "Summer Homes" out of reach. Hyper-fabulous gay weddings, with the usual distasteful (to straight men) exhibitionist display, will rapidly push weddings and marriage into the "gay" category like Broadway. Lost in time, there was a moment when Broadway was not automatically considered gay and showtunes were popular among straight men. Straight men avoid like the plague any noticeably "gay" institution.

The non-acceptance of marriage as an institution for average, middle class Americans will simply accelerate. Kay Hymnowitz of City-Journal has called the marriage gap will continue to grow, as men find the institution itself defined by polygamous Muslims, gays, and the rich (but not hyper-rich like say, Paul McCartney). Hymnowitz argues that the gap comes educated, middle and upper class women having a "mission" to prepare their kids for college and success, but cites no evidence to back that assertion up. There certainly is a sizeable gap between blue-collar, working class White women and middle/upper class White women in marriage rates. But it's just as likely that rather than "the mission" the relative attractive quality of men (to entice women into marriage) is greater among upper and middle class women than in the working class.

In other words, the "script" that Hymnowitz asserts women follow, is marrying a man who might plausibly be "enough" of an Alpha Male, socially dominant, "cool/hip," and impressive to her friends and social circle, and critically, the supply of those men greater in middle/upper class circles, rather than child-success preparing. Delayed childbirth and marriage ages creeping upward are a factor in middle and upper class marriage, so this might just as well explain the marriage gap.

There is a limited supply of handsome lawyers, doctors, "venture capitalists" (ala the film "the Wedding Crashers") staffers in political offices, NGOs, and the like (think "Mr. Darcy" as a "respectable, but independently wealthy, human rights lawyer" in the film "Bridget Jones Diary.") These are the men "suitable" for marriage, i.e. the bride will not suffer embarrassment or humiliation to be seen marrying the man, and will be willing to be "off the market" for a period of time at a minimum as the wife of her husband. Women already complain about the supply of "good men" (i.e. top-rank Alpha males willing to commit) in upper and middle class circles. Anything that further reduces the supply, and gay marriage with polygamy making marriage irrevocably "gay" and "Muslim" will do it — creates far fewer "good men" and pushes even middle and upper class women to co-habitate with Alpha men rather than marry an undesirable "beta male."

Co-habitation, as noted in the link above, and also here and also here and the Heritage Foundation "Map of the Family" here is an unmitigated disaster. Co-habitation (unlike places such as Sweden and Iceland) is generally fragile, with fathers or men bowing out frequently, and much poverty, abuse and unhappiness for children en-meshed in co-habitation:


[Click Image to enlarge.]

Co-habitation was clearly on the rise before the economic melt-down. May 2009 is "National Cohabitation Month" and sites like "Alternatives to Marriage" which extols both Polyamory and Gay Marriage extol cohabitation as well as other arrangements in lieu of traditional marriage. Culturally, there is a great acceptance of co-habitation as "better" than marriage, and idolization of rich celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (who can afford it) helps move it along. Of course, co-habitation is still relatively minor, about 10% of all marriages, however from the link here we can see that this effect is not the same across all age cohorts:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

As you can see, the trends in the younger generation are not good. Increasingly, co-habitation seems to be the norm, for the younger generation. The older generation probably sways the national average, as many more older women are married. The graph below is a crude but useful estimation to see how the larger group of older women, who were mostly married at one point (I crudely subtracted the "Never Married" from the total age cohort to arrive at the married figure, others may refine the numbers to a better point, but you can see the large trends) which tends to make the growing acceptance of co-habition among younger women of all races better than it actually is.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Along with Co-habitation, comes greater acceptance of "gay norms" for marriage, and indeed relationships in general. From Television shows like Mercy to movies, the media, and social trends, casual sex with others in a relationship is not viewed as wrong, at least insofar as female infidelity is concerned. Male infidelity is viewed as situation-dependent. A John Edwards or Bill Clinton or Tony Villaraigosa or Gavin Newsome or Bobby Pitino , with the "correct" politics and Big Man demeanor, don't face social sanctions and condemnation. Those on the wrong side of politics, or with non-Alpha Big Man demeanor, face social condemnation (Mark Sanford, for one).

Gay norms of marriage, and the growing push in Hollywood to make marriage "gay" as possible, makes co-habitation a better deal for men versus marriage, since they can walk out at any time, and often do. Particularly if there are no children, and in states without "palimony" statutes or court decisions. Some have suggested that beta males will be happy to accept "Kitchen Bitch" status, that is a care-taker, dependent, and often-cheated upon house-husband, but the relative fragility of co-habitation, and the growing number of women in younger age cohorts who form households with another person co-habitating instead of marrying seems to suggest otherwise. Certainly the closest analogue to the US, the United Kingdom, has not seen the growth of "Kitchen Bitches" or Mr. Mom house-husbands who passively accept wives cheating, but rather the huge decline of traditional marriage and chaotic co-habitation.

These changes, marriage as "gay" (or Muslim and polygamous) will leave most men, particularly the backbone of the United States, the beta males who are in skilled professions, engineering, skilled blue collar jobs, and the like with no investment or incentive to become invested in the larger society. Women, and children, will be seen as someone else's concern, or matters for the government. This has been the case in the UK, where the disintegration of traditional marriage at all but the upper levels of society has led to most men becoming profoundly disinterested in the fate of women and children. Indeed, fatherly involvement in co-habitating arrangements, is less than for married fathers, and often non-existent when couples break up as they do far more often than married couples.

This will make all but the wealthy, born into de-facto single motherhood families. Even with the biological father present, there is little to tie him to the mother if relationships are amorphous and ever-changing, as Barbara Ehrenreich once lovingly described her vision of the future. The various social ills, besetting England, particularly youth crime (of all races, not just Pakistani youths) which makes the UK resemble "Clockwork Orange" more than "Goodbye Mr. Chips" is certain to bedevil the US over time.

The most powerful institutions in America are the Media and Hollywood, at least as far as shaping the culture. Religious attendance is down, across the board, for Catholics and Protestants alike. Most people take their values from those depicted in Hollywood and the media, particularly women, since both focus on the female audience and in doing so chase away male viewers. America seems lurching towards a new era of relationships between men and women, one characterized by mistrust, vastly different goals, and vastly different value systems.

Women, and the cultural institutions aimed at them, aided by moneyed elites such as George Soros or David Geffen, seem intent on making marriage and relationships "gay" and the ability of money to trump votes and the interests of most people seems unchallenged. I certainly expect a Supreme Court decision legalizing Gay Marriage across the United States.

But women can't force men to marry them under "gay" norms. Indeed, few of the men willing to be married (the George Sodini desperate for female contact types) under those conditions would be attractive in the first place. Sodini was in fact able to get dates. But no woman was willing to sleep with him, let alone marry him. The few men willing to accept "Kitchen Bitch" status, ironically, will be unwanted by those desiring a house-husband and numerous Alpha lovers.

Where does this leave men and women? For a few lucky Alpha PUA (Pick Up Artist) types, heaven. Women available, in relationships or outside them. Everywhere, all the time. For the rest of men, outside the Sodini types, unable to find women to sleep with them, occasional sex, intermittent co-habitating, chaotic and breakable relationships, with perhaps one or two children by women they never see anymore. Their children, merely distant facts in their lives, like the capital of Mongolia. A lucky few Alpha men who are upper class, or upper class with enough money/status/prestige to be considered Alpha, will marry, and have relatively stable relationships with no divorce and little cheating, given the stakes of the Hamptons Beach House (and cost of splitting a modest fortune in half).

For Women, most will be able to attract at least for a while, the Alpha men they crave. For women seeking to maximize sexual opportunities, this is heaven. Some Alpha men may live with them for a while, or they may attract some Beta men on the downward slope of their attractiveness to co-habitate. There will be little to fix these relationships in stone, however, and the least pressure will fracture them leaving each partner single and separate. Women will likely get some child support earnings in the face of co-habitating splits, but will face, under large uncertainty of parentage, increased legal challenges and DNA paternity tests, by men uninvested in them or society. Alimony, as women start to out-earn their co-habitating partners, can even break against them, and it's likely that as it does women will press for changes in the system. Most women who are at least moderately attractive, will have no trouble in attracting male attention, but keeping male investment in themselves and their children will become increasingly difficult to impossible with each successive age cohort.

Particularly given the college gap (more women than men attend), and attendant earnings gap, with some professions being profoundly feminized, several factors will negatively affect both men and women. Women, in feminized professions, such as medicine, law, and government, will compete heavily over the few men in such professions that are "Alpha" while the men in the professions who are not, will be regarded as "gay" and treated as sexually invisible. For most women, this means finding partners in a bar or other impromptu social gathering, with the collapse of mediating mate-finding institutions like Churches and neighborhood groups. This means, essentially, selecting on the hottest PUA in the bar, for most college educated women professionals. Which will price most men out, most of the time. Ordinary men who are college educated will increasingly opt out of competition in which they mostly lose in favor of porn and hobbies and "bromances" or seek women abroad by expatriate opportunties. A few will look to PUA gurus to become PUA themselves in the ruthless bar/club competition.

For the increasing majority of men NOT college educated, either a ruthless entrepreneurial path, which produces a few winners and a lot of losers, or chav-style brutality, will be the norm for being successful with women. In other words, Gordon Ramsay or the typical soccer yob. With lots of "mate-ism" (working class bromance) and macho displays.

That PUA in general are part of the popular culture, and can make substantial livings off of teaching men how to approach and romance women, is itself a big red flag. Men don't pay thousands of dollars for classes and guided instruction if they are not desperate. Indeed, there is a huge social shame among men who don't have a girlfriend, or wife, and the stigma of "loserdom" associated with that status, and the desperation, is a sign that the rules of society that many men grew up on, simply don't work. If PUA can make a living on teaching men what most of their fathers did without much thinking, that is approach women and be successful, or keep a relationship with one, that very market is a sign of deep trouble, like armed bodyguards for middle class people in kidnap-crazy Central America.

The blaming of Sodini's massacre in Pittsburgh on PUA has already begun. "Nice guy must die." Well, he must. And he is. Nice guys only exist when society creates them. In the neo-Darwinian struggle for sex and relationships based on "survival of the hottest" in the Bar on Friday night, male investment, protection, and support simply does not exist. Contrary to the article, Sodini got his ideas about women from being unable to form and keep a relationship with them, and observing other men who possessed simply social dominance, be successful.

America's danger is not Sodini or Cho type massacres. Though those are bound to become more frequent as social cohesion fails to leash the lunatic and insane. It is rather a whole class of men becoming Chavs or opting out, going abroad, or watching porn. This may look like a female paradise, but women also lose, since they get no male investment on their downside. Cougars and such may get transient male interest, but won't find in a society where relationships and marriage are "gay" any offers by men even remotely attractive and compatible with themselves.

The only hope, indeed for all of Western Society, is culture and entertainment that push a message of traditional morality, and the advantages to women of fidelity and faithfulness in relationships. Including comfort and companionship as they age, a defender and protector through life, and the willingness if need be, to lay down their lives for them. In the finale of the sadly cancelled "Life," the protagonist (Damien Lewis, "Band of Brothers") risks his life to save his female partner (Sarah Shahi). Because he loves her. It was as simple as that.

What America, and indeed the West, needs is more male-oriented entertainment with that cultural message, that also appeals to women and shows them concretely the advantages of traditional marriage and culture. Not the least of which is that they are both independent and protected within that culture. Hollywood, dominated by near-Apex Alpha males, gays, and oriented towards a mostly female audience, is to sclerotic to accomplish this goal. We in the West who seek reform must pin our hopes (and make sure we guide its development) on new media, created outside of Hollywood, distributed through the internet. Aimed at the broadest audience and encapsulating traditional American and Western values.
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