RISHON LEZION, Israel — So I was once entering a local pub to meet some friends, and another regular rushed outside while I had been approaching the door. Her eyes were tearing up, and she was wiping them.
“Susan,” I asked. “What happened?” “Peter blew smoke in my eyes!” she exclaimed. “That a–hole!” (I have changed the names since they are obviously not Israeli ones.)
Now, Susan was a girl in whom I had been interested at the time. So, instinctively, I tried to comfort her while agreeing that Peter had acted like a jerk. Thirty minutes later, Susan was ignoring me and was “all over” Peter. And that was just one incident in the past several years that has slowly led to an increasing realization and understanding on my part of how the two sexes are relating to each other in modern times — for better and for worse.
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To understand how men and women related to each other today, it is important first to know how women think — first, because their mentalities are more complicated than those of men; and second, because the female sex nearly always makes the choices in the dating game. Except in rare cases involving so-called “alpha males,” women are generally the ones who decide when sex will occur, and they select which men have chances from among all of those in the “dating market” who have expressed an interest.
So, when women look at men in general, what do they see? The dating website OkCupid has an interesting post after analyzing vast amounts of data from the site (via Dr. Helen):
As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh.
Men, for their part, were accurate in their appraisals in the study — their critiques of women in the study resembled the normal, expected distribution of a bell curve. Of course, the logical response is that the responses of the women (and men) focused mainly on physical attractiveness and did not take other factors (education, job, and so on). But the reality is that, for the women, these factors are always taken into account — if even on a subconscious level — because men and women evaluate each other differently in the dating market.
Men, being the simple creatures that we are, focus almost entirely on physical attractiveness. Women judge the “whole package” because they must be pickier (in evolutionary-psychology terms) — they realize that they need economic security, good genes for the children, someone who will “stick” around and help to raise a family, someone who has the ability to provide protection and social status, and so on. This is the reason that it is rare to see a handsome man with an ugly woman while the opposite is common. Women know instinctively that they carry the burden of propagating the human race on their shoulders, so their mate-selection choices matter more than those of men (in short, they are pickier). Women are more important to humanity than men — an island with nine women and one man will produce more children than one with nine men and one woman. (See my prior essay on the worldwide reaction to the 2009 murder of the young Iranian woman Neda Agha-Soltan — the outcry would have been less, or even non-existent, if she had been male.)
In this context, it is the nature of women to be hypergamous and to be more likely to accept that their desired mate is involved with other women at the same time. Just imagine girls who are holding out for a man who is successfully “playing the field” rather than deciding to “settle” for a guy who just wants a single girl to whom he can devote himself. Women like a man who is desired by many other women because it is a form of social proof that the man is “quality.” Imagine a prehistoric time in which a woman (and any future children) were doomed to a miserable life and early death unless she partnered with one of the few men who had most of the food and weapons (and the other women as a result). Forty years of feminism cannot change hundreds of thousands of years of human nature.
Women are hit on so often that they need numerous, quick ways like social proof to narrow the field down to “acceptable” possibilities (like the hypothetical caveman I described above) — and they do so, according to a recent study, within 180 seconds of meeting a guy (via Vox Day).
The world’s major religions (particularly Christianity), to their credit, helped to improve the situation for men by encouraging — or even instituting — marriage between one man and one woman rather than allowing polygamy. (See a prior post entitled “Humans and Monogamy: The Benefits of Monogamist Dating.”) In a non-monogamous world — whether in pagan times thousands of years ago or in the secular times of today — so-called “lesser-status men,” those 80% who are viewed as “less than average” in the OkCupid study will be left alone while most of the women will “partner” with the few men who have high status (even if they must share him). The end result — at least in a modern, Western society in which premarital sex is common and people are marrying later, if at all — is that women are increasing acting like modern concubines. (See my prior post on how to define “concubine.”) The old becomes the new, and now the world is seeing “dating in the stone age.”
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