Why Women Are Not At The Top (of Politics, Business, and Culture)

Women have more freedom, power, and control over their lives in the West than any group of women ever, before. Women today have more wealth, freedom, comfort, and stability than any other group of women before. And yet, still they rarely occupy the highest rungs of power, being absent from political leadership, commercial leadership, and cultural leadership. A Black man was elected President of the US before a woman. Why?

Because women won't sacrifice the … sexiness in men. And no sexy, dominant Alpha male will put up with a woman having a career and power greater than his. That's why they are Alpha males in the first place. For a woman to advance to the top, she has to be … Margaret Thatcher. Or Leslie Blodgett of Bare Escentuals. Or Carly Fiorina of H-P. Married to a "boring" beta male who is supportive and stays out of the spotlight.


Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times was the first to make this clear:

The biggest reason that alpha women don’t become CEOs is that they have made the common, yet fatal, error of marrying an alpha man.
My evidence for this is based on long observation of the women I know. Some of them did brilliantly for a bit, but then their careers stalled. The problem was not that they had had too many children (successful women seem to have lots of them) but that their alpha husbands insisted on putting their own careers first.
Until last week this was just a vague prejudice. But on Wednesday I sat down with the FT’s list of the 50 top business women and Googled each one, searching for information about their home lives. Annoyingly, some of them have succeeded in keeping their private lives private, but with the rest I found my theory spectacularly well borne out. Nearly all have children, but I could not find a single one with an alpha male husband.
The only whiff of an alpha mate came from the household of Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon, whose husband was the CEO of Bloomingdale’s. I use the past tense not because he lost the job, but because he lost his wife – the marriage didn’t last.
…

Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi and the world’s most powerful businesswoman, is married to a man who quit his job and became a consultant to fit in with his wife and children. Ditto with Irene Rosenfeld at Kraft, whose husband decided to be self-employed 20 years ago to help her. Ditto with Ursula Burns at Xerox.
There are three pretty obvious reasons an alpha husband is a problem for the aspiring female CEO. First is logistics. If you want to be really successful you need to be mobile. You need to have a husband like Gregg Ahrendts, who wound up his construction business so Angela could move to London to be CEO of Burberry. You also need to have someone who is prepared to see the children occasionally. And above all you need a bit of encouragement. If you have spent all day competing with men at work, you don’t want to go on competing at home. You want someone like Lloyd Bean, Ursula Burns’s husband, who worked at Xerox long before she joined, but who claimed delight when his wife whizzed past him in the fast lane. Or like the husband of the Indian banking supremo Chanda Kochhar. She says he is “genuinely happy about my progress”.
The lesson for a future female corporate queen is to give more thought to her choice of spouse. She should go for someone who is mentally her match, but who is happy to play a supporting role. In other words, Mr Right should be a male Kate Middleton.
Alas, there is a problem here in both demand and supply. High-flying women are programmed to go for high-flying men. Most men aren’t attracted to women who are more successful than they are. And until those things change, there is not going to be more than the odd sprinkling of women emerging from the sticky yellow marzipan into the glorious royal icing on top.

As Business Week noted:

When Carly Fiorina became Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) first female chief executive officer, the existence of her househusband, Frank Fiorina, who had retired early from AT&T (T) to support her career, was a mini-sensation; now this arrangement isn’t at all unusual. Seven of the 18 women who are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—including Xerox’s (XRX) Ursula Burns, PepsiCo’s (PEP) Indra Nooyi, and WellPoint’s (WLP) Angela Braly—have, or at some point have had, a stay-at-home husband. So do scores of female CEOs of smaller companies and women in other senior executive jobs. Others, like IBM’s (IBM) new CEO, Ginni Rometty, have spouses who dialed back their careers to become their powerful wives’ chief domestic officers.
This role reversal is occurring more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S.

However, for most women, that trade-off, a supportive house-husband screams "Kitchen Bitch" and thus, poison. Most women would rather their husbands be high-flyers, than themselves. Because their reflection of self-worth is based on their sexual marketplace value (sad but true for most women, sad because that is so transient like a flower), and their sexual marketplace value is based around how much of a dominant, sexy Alpha asshole they can land.

Women don't go further in politics because they are unwilling to marry Denis Thatcher. An amiable businessman who kept his mouth shut and loyally supported his wife. They have fantasies of being Hillary Clinton, who did not sacrifice the Alpha Asshole Male, and still got to be a Senator and Secretary of State. [This is why many women love Hillary -- she got the Alpha Asshole, and the power, at least in part.]

Men who rise, mostly do so by either blind luck and opportunity, plus "seize the day" aggression and vision (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg), or grind-it-out steady rises like say, Howard Schultz generally require a supportive spouse. Business and politics are high-stress careers, and supportive advice and comfort are generally a requirement for those grinding it out, a decade at a time, to rise to the top. This is true for both men and women.

Men, more than women, tend to realize this and trade off on Alpha sexiness. This is particularly true when men are younger and less powerful, and thus less attractive to women, they will often settle and marry the best woman they can get. Sticking with her for the most part means no costly divorces, no emotional upheaval, and the perception of stability and sensibility, that boards of directors prefer. No one wants say, a Mark Hurd. A guy who is a walking lawsuit machine.

Women on the other hand, feel that settling is both a betrayal of their natures, and a slur on their very person. Saying basically that they are so ugly and unsexy that the best they can do is some "supportive" aka "kitchen bitch" beta male instead of the sexy bad boy Alpha asshole they crave.

Thus women are trading off opportunity for sex. This is entirely predictable, since eggs are expensive, and sperm cheap, women generally prefer less perceived risk and men more, comparatively speaking. Women will trade off the opportunity to become a top leader, for sexy times, most of the time.

It is the unwillingness to trade away those sexy times, in favor of beta male "kitchen bitch" supportiveness, that keeps women from occupying half or more of the CEO suites, upper reaches of political leadership, and the cultural power centers (such as directing, producing, and so on). Rising up that way requires generally guys women just can't stomach.

The goal of feminists is to have it all -- the sexy bad boys AND the power. Like most fantasies, too much of it tends to be destructive. Because real problems are never solved by ghost-dancing fantasies and fairy tales.
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Why Women Hate Nice Guys (and the Implications)

From Instapundit comes the link of 12 Reasons Women Can't Stand Nice Guys. Well, duh, nice guys are beta males. Which is another way of saying "un-sexy." American and Western society is completely and totally focused on providing the maximum of sexy men to most women. The only problem with this is that it provides no way to produce all the nice things women want, along with sexy men. A safe and secure environment? Nope. An expanding, growing economy? Nope. Ever advancing technology that makes food better and safer and cheaper, medical practices more life saving and life-enhancing, living better in every way? Nope.


Providing "sexy men" merely produces a fairly rapid fall into chaos, poverty, and violence. One need only look at how the Black community, which went from (per Juan Williams 2005 WSJ Father's Day op-ed) 24% illegitimacy in the early 1960's, to over 90% in the urban core and over 70% nationwide today. New Orleans in particular carries the shadow of former Black society. Building after building that housed Black Benevolent societies, Black associations of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like. New Orleans in Jelly Roll Morton's and Louis Armstrong's day (just listen to the former's Library of Congress Recordings, likely available at your public library and definitely on Amazon, they have been re-released, or the latter's painfully typed out, non-ghostwritten autobiography) had a Black society that worked. True, it was far more violent and chaotic than the matching White one, but it did function. Armstrong may have been placed in an orphanage when his drug and drink addicted mother could no longer care for him, and given a trumpet of a boy who died of tuberculosis (something Armstrong never forgot). But at least Armstrong was not on the streets, the orphanage and everything else run by Blacks for Blacks. White people provided nothing.

Today of course, all that is gone. And the White rates are estimated to be around 20% for the White middle class, and 40% for the White working class (below 4% for all Whites in the early 1960's). The Hispanic rate according to Heather McDonald at City Journal is over 50%.

Sexy men mean illegitimate children. They mean single motherhood, because the bad-boy things that make men sexy, make them totally uninterested and unable to provide for a single women (they are more interested in having the next sweet young thing, and can get them too!) Single motherhood of course, is a poverty factory. Maybe not if you're as good looking (and the son of a famous father) as Freddy Prinze Jr. Or the daughter of a College Professor, whose brothers are all lawyers and doctors (Eliza Dushku). But for those not on the upper one half of one percent of attractiveness or intelligence or both, or with the talent and physique of LeBron James, life as the child of a single mother is poor, violent, and hard. No matter how much welfare is thrown at the mothers and children.

Recently, Mike Huckabee criticized Natalee Portman's Oscar acceptance speech for glamorizing single motherhood. James Carville on CNN made the comment that in Huckabee's apology, he at least "realized" that government support is necessary for single mothers to avoid starvation and poverty. Carville of course did not get it, literally living in 1965.

A few single mothers can be amply and ably supported by a social welfare system that is not under financial pressure, from an ample middle class. A social welfare system under huge pressure from a Black underclass, an exodus of poor Mexicans (and significantly, their descendants), and a growing White working-underclass, is unsustainable.

Hispanic girls tend to start having kids at age 16, having nino after nino, until age 40 or so, with various bad boys. It might be very sexy. But it is not sustainable, because there just are not enough White middle class taxpayers able (much less willing) to pick up the tab. White (to some extent Asian, varying by community/culture/ethnic group) parents generally (mostly, not always) have kids they can afford. White women for the most part still (particularly in the middle class) have only the kids they can afford to have. Asking them, and even worse, their male counterparts to subsidize the family formation of Hispanic girls chasing bad boys at age 16 (and having kids they cannot afford) is simply impossible. There are too many single mothers needing subsidies, and too few taxpayers able to pay for them.

From the article on 12 Reasons Women Can't Stand Nice Guys, the consists of the following reasons:

1. Nice guys are too nice (translation: not sexy!


2. Nice guys don't take control and demand "respect" (translation: Are Not Socially Dominant A-holes with lots of other women


3. Nice guys are predictable (translation: not SEXY!


4. Nice guys don't need saving (translation: NOT SEXY!


5. Nice guys don't need to be fixed (translation: NOT NOT NOT! Sexy


6. Nice guys are genetically inferior and their sperm is unworthy (translation: Very, very, very, very, very un-sexy


7. Fear of intimacy (translation: NOT! Sexy!


8. Low self-esteem (translation: Not … sexy dammit!


9. Sex -- nice guys are not sexy! (no translation needed)


10. Charm, nice guys are not smooth talkers (translation: or, nice guys are not sexy!


11. Protection, bad boys are better protection because they are better fighters, doing it so much (translation: a guy beating the crap out of someone else, even a woman (see Rihanna) is sexy!

The article concludes:

Life is about balance. Most men fall into either the bad boy or the nice guy category. The ideal man is neither, but walks that fine line between the two. Until men learn how to do this, more often than not, women will choose the bad boy, until they realize that his bad qualities outweigh his good ones.

Or, perhaps we can turn that around:

Life is about balance. Most women fall into either the sexy stripper or the nice virginal girl category. The ideal woman is neither, but walks that fine line between the two. Until women learn how to do this, more often than not, men will choose (if they are sexy) to screw as many women as possible until they reach their late fifties at which point they'll marry their own Catherine Zeta-Jones, the rest will have occasional sex but find in the main, a used-up cougar to be inferior to a porn subscription. Regardless, women won't get quality men to marry them. And will be left with dregs whom if they do marry, they will resent as "kitchen bitches" and beta males.

There, all fixed!

The problem is that most women, even those of average attractiveness, can have sex with an Alpha male. Tiger Woods women, that of Jessie James, those of John Edwards, and so on, are not exactly Helen of Troy. Women over-estimate their beauty, and their beauty's duration, because they can be just another meaningless play-mate for an Alpha male with little discrimination.

Women find themselves getting old at 29:

Women consider themselves old at 29 – half the age of men who don’t feel over the hill until they are 58, according to a study.

A quarter of women say they felt old as soon as they spotted their first grey hairs.

In contrast men tend to think they are still young until they can no longer perform in the bedroom.

This is just another expression of desire for sexy men. Only the prettiest women can command the attention of the top sexiest men in any social setting. For most women, their looks start to fade fast in their twenties, and the fact of the hottest, bad boy men no longer noticing them can be a shock. Still, women tend to over-estimate how long they can play the field, and underestimate their chances of losing out by not making the best available choice sooner.

If the Duke F-List girl was at all representative, 13 partners in two years is not an extreme outlier. Needless to say, a girl with too many partners, all those bad boys, is a poor prospect for a wife, and any woman in her thirties is going to be fairly undesirable for any man with any options at all (this includes porn). [Women generally don't understand this, I explain below for them.]


Why is so many partners, and particularly bad boys, such a bad thing for a woman searching for a husband? Because the 90% of men who are not Alpha males (the sexy bad boys who can have almost any woman in their social circle) know fairly well that the most intense bonds, shared experiences, sexual pleasure, and memories will be with other men. At best, they are mere shadows of what was, and remains, in a woman's heart, at that age. Even the most beautiful woman in her thirties is less desirable therefore than a fairly inexperienced, un-baggage ridden average looking girl in her early twenties, or late teens. All the Botox, Pilates, Jillian Michaels workout videos, and Nautilus toned body won't change that fact. Only the most desperate, clueless, and lonely men will respond.

This is true even for widows and divorced women. The absent husband, no matter how badly he left, will always be the dominant man in the woman's heart and memories. Porn has the massive ability to substitute for what amounts to indifferent sex (even the most beautiful woman in her thirties loses her appeal, and lets face it Jane Average is not Jennifer Aniston at age 32) and emotionless coupling.

All the "man up" exhortations by writers like Kay Hymowitz can't force men to commit to women after they've chased their share of bad boys. Women can chase the bad boys all they want, but like everything, there is a cost.


Yes, it is true, about 90% of all middle class White guys are beta males. They are not sexy and exciting. They are neither bad boys in the mold of Russell Brand, nor George Clooney. News flash: About 90% of all Middle Class White women are not Jennifer Aniston, at age 40. Let alone beauties like Mila Kunis, or Brittany Snow. Asking about 90% of men to be something they are not is akin to asking 90% of all middle class White women to as beautiful as say, either Ashley Greene or Brittany Snow (to pick at random two Maxim cover-girls). Women's desire for sexy men is an unreasonable as men's desire for most women to look like Maxim cover-girls.

But women can make it, because they unlike most men have the asymmetric ability to sleep with the male equivalent of Brittany Snow (that would be the Russell Brands of the world). They just can't get those bad boys to marry them and support them.

The dynamic is complicated by both gender and racial spoils politics. A good part of the female demand for sexy men is the Hispanic/Mexican girls desire and willingness to start having kids at age 16 with bad boys who cannot support them. Thus inducing a massive welfare burden. A full 83% of Santa Ana Unified School District students receive subsidized/free meals. Obviously about 83%, or so, of SAUSD parents cannot afford to pay for their kids meals. Requiring federal subsidies.

In this, both White women, and non-Whites, are generally aligned in interests. Their interests are in extracting the maximum amount of money from taxpayers, to fuel children (family as defined as single mom plus kids by various sexy bad boys) and family formation. The catch is that a very significant portion (most of them, in fact) of Middle Class White women are also taxpayers, and don't like the money going to people not like them. Welfare for Hispanic/Mexican single mothers, means ultimately no subsidies for NPR (and jobs there), or federally supported foundations, or paper-pushing "studies" busywork in education, the environment, and so on. All the money increasingly needs to be poured into either K-12 or welfare spent on Mexican/Hispanic single mothers.

So what are the implications of the widespread female demand that most men be sexy (clearly most Mexican men are "sexy" to their female peers, mostly by an uber-macho, combative set of behaviors, particularly including gang membership and criminal violence)?

The first is obviously, a decline in technological advancement. Clearly, outsourcing, in-sourcing, and the export of American manufacturing to China and elsewhere has destroyed American innovation. But in part, this has been abetted by the total demand for sexiness. While nearly all of Aaron Sorkin's "the Social Network" was outright fabrication, what rang true was the total lack of desire (then and now) for billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Particularly for women with their own money, and earning power, a man must be sexy beyond mere wealth. Wealth alone will not cut it, hence the lack of desire expressed for beta males like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, no matter how much power and influence they wield. Neither has the smidgen of sex appeal of say, Lamar Odom or Chris Brown. [Good Morning America wants Chris Brown back, despite his temper tantrum of ripping off his shirt and throwing a chair through a window, and trashing his dressing room there. Because their female audience finds him sexy, no matter the beat-down he gave then girlfriend Rihanna. He's a BAD BOY. That means, sexy. For women, in general, all is forgiven as long as a man is sexy. Sexy, sexy, sexy.]

Facebook is not anything new. Its merely a Friendster or MySpace that works. With a few more features. It is not game-changing technology. Steve Sailer wondered, recently, where all the innovation went? "Where are my flying cars?" Well, they went the way of nuclear families formed by pocket protector wearing geeks. Those with that bent had few or no children, as women demanded sexy bad boys who are great in the sack, but cannot produce game-changing technology (like say, a cure for cancer or artificial organs that work, or electric car batteries with the power and weight ratio and range of the internal combustion engine, with comparable refill times). Add to it, the lack of incentive to strive. Those with the current bent for technology not only face a bleak outsourcing, in-sourcing H1-B visa environment, they face a life of sexless monkdom. No wonder they are slackers.

Innovation and change is rarely produced by some great idea borne out by a single genius. Most of the time, it requires an idea, that was fascinating, that was dropped, and then developed a bit later, by someone else, and then someone else and other people put it and other bits together to form a new whole. Something impossible without all the other bits around, done by other people, often in concert.

Sexy men means stagnant or reversing technology. People unable to build or maintain things they were fifty years ago. In 1969, America reached the moon. America has now abandoned even low Earth orbit. Not the least of which is that we lack the technology to make even that happen any more.

Sexy men also means a race to the bottom for sexiness. Women's demand for sexy men does not happen in a vacuum. Men tend to respond. The easiest way to be sexy, as noted by author Lucia, is to thug it up. Be dangerous, fight a lot, smack people around (even your girlfriend, see Chris Brown, or Charlie Sheen). The more violent and dangerous a man is, the more women will want him. Even if he's ugly, or is accused of murdering some other woman. Joran Van Der Sloot cut a wide swath among women in Asia, drawn by his infamy in the Natalee Holloway case (Van Der Sloot has all but confessed to murdering Holloway). Of course, Van Der Sloot killed a young woman in Peru, who unwisely went to his hotel room, drawn by his fame no doubt.

One need only look at the Ghetto and Barrio to see this in action. "Senseless" killings are not, merely the dark side of female sexuality. Since women find bad boys to be sexy, Ghetto and Barrio men make themselves bad boys by ultra-violence. When some little kid, or grandmother, or infant is shot in a drive-by, be assured that somewhere, a gang banger is having sex (if he's not arrested). As Roissy points out, even adjusting for race, criminals have more kids than non-criminals. In other words, comparing White guys to White guys, and Black guys to Black guys, and so on, those locked up or who have been locked up have more kids than those who were never locked up. Despite being, well, locked up for some non insignificant amount of time.

As Roissy points out, Chicks Dig Jerks. And as more and more men become aware of this, they will do their level best to turn themselves into the biggest jerk they can. Bet on it. And once they know it, it is almost impossible to turn them back.

Look at Black Rappers. They make all that money. All that fame and fortune. Or say, Michael Vick, at the time possessing a $130 million contract. Why risk all that money for stupid violence, a shooting in a club, dog fighting rings, etc? Because acting like a violent thug all their life has gotten them the hottest, most desirable women. And more women than they can even remember. Sexual rewards will work on the White middle class, and its men, just as much as they did on Black men in the Ghetto. Or Mexican men in the Barrio.

No, it won't happen overnight. Significant social conditioning, rewards, and so on make middle class White guys more resistant to violence. But certainly, the kids of single mothers will know exactly what turned their moms on: violent, dangerous bad boys. They'll copy those guys, and even provide some "improvements."

The idea that White guys are inherently non-violent and shrink from confrontation (which would have shocked Black and Hispanic men of Louis Armstrong's age) particularly with non-Whites, is going to go out the window. In some respect this will be long overdue, but the cost is basically a nation comprised entirely of Scots-Irish "hillbilly" types. Which simply cannot run a modern economy and will look for fights the way Black and Hispanic men do, because it gets them sex!

So the social implications of sexy men demanded by White women along with Black and Hispanic women, is a very rapid movement, towards decline and violence. Making the wealth struggles to cut the welfare pie off an America with declining innovation and technological power, a declining White middle class, and so on, even more desperate. As the take shrinks, the usual response is to deal people out. Vote them off the Island, so to speak.

All prosperous societies, such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, Switzerland, and Coastal China, tend to suppress sexy men. They tend to limit, in various ways, the ability for Bad Boys to dominate all the desirable women. And on the other hand, limit women's choices. A woman must generally choose fairly early, if she wants a husband (Japan and South Korea's and China's low birth rates currently likely stem from their women rejecting the unsexy men they have on offer). Japan and South Korea, at least, are declining from massive and probably unsustainable population peaks with a well educated and prosperous workforce, with first-class infrastructure for the most part. [China is not so lucky on either front.]

But those societies throughout history and now, that allow sexy men, the dominant bad boys, and women to run things, are typically very violent, and primitive. Male cooperation goes entirely out the window. Why cooperate when you get better sex and reproductive opportunities by constant fighting? The female sexual utopia looks a lot like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. And in some ways that is America's, and the West's, future.

Everything has its price, and the price for Sexy Men for Western women is basically the end as we know it, of Western civilization. With something approaching Dark Ages kingdoms or Mad Max as its replacement.

But at least the men will be sexy!


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