marriageable

Are Men Adapting to the New Sexual Marketplace?

I revisited the topic of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) last Saturday on Rule Zero. I don’t like rehashing old debates I’ve learned will ultimately go nowhere. You simply wont reach most people who don’t want to be reached. Once they’ve had some experiential lessons in life, reinforced it with the tribalistic need to affirm the beliefs derived from that experience and then invest their egos in them it becomes kind of pointless. I’m not saying just give up on people, far from it, but do understand what you’re up against. This is why I say unplugging men from the Matrix is dirty work, and a lot like triage. Know what’s worth expending energy for.

Most men, and nearly all women, don’t form a belief set based on multiple, independently funded, peer reviewed studies or statistical analyses. We go with experience first and then modify it from there.

I did a bit of preparation for this talk. My schedule last Saturday only permitted me an hour so I wanted to be succinct and throw out at least something new to the conversation. There’s a lot of tribalism in the Manosphere today and it’s no surprise that MGTOW as a tribe in growing – but likely not for the reasons most MGTOW would be willing to admit. MGTOW is becoming atomized and commercialized in the same manner as I predicted the Red Pill would (and has) last year.

What that means is MGTOW is rapidly becoming the same commercial vehicle for grifters that the Red Pill was just a year and a half ago. Life Coaches, Relationship Experts, Fitness Gurus, even Christian men’s ministry pastors are all looking online to find out ‘where have all the men gone?’ When men were found in the Red Pill this is where the grifters would coalesce. Thus, you had every ‘brand-of-me’ self-improvement hack calling himself “red pill”. A few of them still do. A few of them read verbatim from my book(s) and plagiarize it as their own. But more now I see these same grifters referring to themselves as MGTOW without realizing (or even caring) what it really means to men.

MGTOW is the new ‘brand’ that lifestyle ‘coaches’ are adding to their twitter profiles and YouTube channel About pages. They see the potential for growth by association. Even if they get owned in their comments and feeds, adding the tag MGTOW will draw clicks. A few of these ‘coaches’ had a familiarity with the tribe and decided to finally commit in the hopes that it would boost views, others are former ‘power-of-positivity‘ life-coaches who slide into MGTOW because the definition of what makes a man “go his own way” is so loose now that it can align with virtually anything the guy had written about before his new affiliation.

It’s a real short step from “Make yourself your Mental Point of Origin” to “Make yourself #1 in your life” and then to “Go your own way.” I’ve had at least four “dating experts” (one female) claim Mental Point of Origin was their own idea in their subscriber emails as recently as August. Grifters used the Red Pill and are now using MGTOW to legitimize their brands today. In 2015 the MRAs decided to appropriate the Red Pill as their own brand to name a feminist’s “journey of self-discovery” movie The Red Pill. This appropriation is continuing with MGTOW now.

As I said on the Red Man Group back in May, the Red Pill is going to have a real PR problem in the coming year. Everything I predicted in my State of the Manosphere address a year ago has come to pass and I predict it will only intensify in the 2020 election cycle. The Gender War needs a convenient, easy-to-hate villain to point to in order to reinforce the Future is Female narrative.

Very soon MGTOW will have the same PR problem. And once the next Eliot Rodger or Alex Minasian incident occurs you’ll see these grifters scatter from MGTOW like roaches when the lights come on. When there are dead women on the sidewalk somewhere, and the MSM is using terms like ‘MGTOW’, ‘Incel’ and ‘radicalization’ that is when all the ‘tribes’ of the Manosphere will throw each other under the bus. That’s when you’ll know who was ‘playing MGTOW’ for likes.

Adaptation

One thing this re-debate of MGTOW has made me reconsider is whether men are adapting to the new realities of the sexual marketplace or just looking to make their necessities a virtue. At its simplest MGTOW is men refusing to make women the measure of their lives, and then molding their lives to their own plan. This pairs nicely with virtually every pet ideology and ‘positivity’ grift in the ‘sphere today. Even Tradcons will agree with MGTOW if it means “Be the best man you can be“. It agrees with Mental Point of Origin. It agrees with Roissy – “You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority.” It agrees with “Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.“

If that was all there was to MGTOW it would simply be Red Pill. What “MGTOW” life-coach grifters don’t realize is that MGOTW is a derivative of the Red Pill. I’ve always argued that once a guy becomes Red Pill aware he cannot help but live in some different fashion. Even the guys who go into complete denial can’t unsee the truths of intersexual dynamics. It’s what you actually do with that new awareness that sets apart Red Pill praxeology from MGTOW in practice. There’s more to MGTOW than just refusing to make women the measure of a man’s life – it’s also deciding what actually is deference to women. And that’s where it becomes highly subjective.

In my last post I outlined how women were upset there weren’t enough ‘eligible‘ men to marry in the current (westernized) sexual marketplace (SMP) today. Of course the two most common responses were either:

  • Women are the victims of the SMP they created. Women’s solipsistic, socially enabled entitlements to an ‘economically attractive’ man (a man who exceeds her own productivity by 58%) only proves the point that women’s social media bloated egos have made them unrealistic tyrants. Now their beliefs and actions have come home to roost.
  • This is proof-positive that MGTOW is working! Finally women are waking up to the realities of their beliefs and actions. If enough guys abandon the SMP altogether then women will be forced to come back to reality and choose men based on other criteria than ‘economic attractiveness’.

One point I struggled to make on last week’s show was that I wondered if MGTOW believed that, from an evolved perspective, men and women are better together than they are apart. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pursue that question in depth; do MGTOW largely believe that, if social circumstances were different, men and women evolved to be complements to the other and the best social outcome would be for the sexes to be together rather than segregated?

For the last 60 years feminism has effectively driven a wedge between men and women. The Gender War of today exists because of a systematic segregation between men and women (don’t @me with the cultural marxism/’evil juice’ shit for the moment). Honestly, I’m sick of reading about how negative it is to merely point out the realities of this ‘gender cold war’ by Success Porn grifters, but is not MGTOW an adaptation to this segregation? Is not MGTOW an exacerbation of this segregation. When I read mantras like ‘Dogs, Dudes and Dolls’ it sounds an awful lot like ‘Cats, Girlfriends and Vibrators’.

Is MGTOW an adaptation to the conditions in a sexual marketplace that was (and still is) contrived by feminism/gynocentrism?

The following quote is from a long time commenter and friend Deti. This was from a larger discussion that began here if you want to get some context. Sorry guys, I just don’t have the space to repost the whole thread, but I don’t want this to get lost. Hopefully, it will inspire further discussion in this post’s comments:

I read Novaseeker as saying in his comments on this post, that women have adapted within this particular milieu. In other words, women noted the changes and have adapted to them. It helps that the changes were geared to them and prepared with them in mind. But women have adapted, and men have not.

About 100 years ago, it was all geared toward men and the sexual and marriage marketplaces were prepared with men in mind. They were prepared to advantage men and disadvantage women. Women responded to and lived within that milieu in a number of ways.

Using soft power, manipulation, deceit, subterfuge, behind the scenes machinations. Most women were more or less OK with marrying an OK guy, having OK sex, and living an OK life.

Of course, sometimes women cheated on the downlow. Sometimes women cuckolded husbands. I mean real actual traditional definition of cuckolding, which is a married woman getting pregnant by an Alpha and passing the child(ren) off as the Beta Husband’s. There’s no way to know how often that happened, but it wasn’t really rare – Maybe anywhere from 5 to 20% of children then weren’t fathered by their bio-moms’ husbands. In rare cases, not marrying and becoming spinsters, living as bohemians or as “favorite cousins” or “favorite aunts” with male relatives, working as teachers or seamstresses or some other job, and being live in nanny/maid. In rare cases, divorcing and living off family money or a husband’s alimony money. Living as widows and not remarrying.

The point is that women learned how to adapt. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they did adapt.

The main responses men have used today to adapt to changing circumstances have been:

  1. Game/PUA/Seduction – Use the changes to men’s advantage and go for easy sex and the bachelor lifestyle.
  2. MRA – Fighting the changes to advocate for either equalizing the laws or rolling them back to a return to Marriage 1.0 and pre-sexual revolution status.
  3. MGTOW – Check out of the new system, refuse to support or participate in it, and eschew relationships with women to varying degrees.

About, oh, 20 years in, I think we can safely say that option 2) is dead in the water and has been for some time. About the only real reforms here are that divorce and family laws are slowly, very, very slowly, moving toward 50/50 residential custody and away from alimony (except in the case of longer term marriages with breadwinner spouse/dependent nonemployed wife). Unless you have been married more than 20 years and support a housewife, you probably will not be paying alimony except for temporarily. Thats about the entire sum and substance of how “equal” it’s going to get between men and women.

That leaves 1) Game; and (3) MGTOW.

It’s hard to tell what will come out of this. I think we can say:

• Marriage 1.0 is dead and we are never going back to it for at least 2 more generations. If you think you’re going to have a “traditional marriage” where you don’t have to do much to maintain it or you can let up on your attractiveness levels, think again. Because that is not going to happen. If you’re going to marry a woman, you need to improve your attractiveness, marry a woman who is not financially dependent on you, and cultivate your own life separate and apart from her. You need a contingency plan in the event the marriage goes south. And with all that, you need to consider whether you want to risk bringing kids into the mix. You absolutely need a prenuptial agreement, even if it gets judicially torn up or modified later.

The bottom line is, people are still marrying, it’s just that it’s all being pushed out later and later, and people are staying single longer and spending less time married. Many women are meeting the men they eventually marry in their early to mid 20s, and then marrying in their late 20s and early 30s. That’s a paradigm that’s increasing in frequency; this idea of long term dating and engagements lasting 2 to 5 years while both the man and woman establish their careers.

If you want long term relationships you should consider marriage alternatives like living together, or being exclusive while living apart. You absolutely must avoid at all costs these polyamory/polygyny situations, and open marriages. You absolutely must avoid women who want to continue AF’ing it even after they marry. That must be an absolute no go, not an option, ever.

• Men have to improve and increase their sexual attractiveness to create, maintain, and sustain relationships with women. You can’t let up here. That’s IF you want relationships with women.

• More and more men will go pure MGTOW and will severely minimize if not eliminate their relationships with women. For a growing number of men, this option is going to be the best one, because (a) they did the work and still couldn’t attract women; or (b) they don’t want to do the work and it’s easier to stay as is than to try.

For most men, avoiding women entirely, except for paying hookers, is a no go. The thirst is that strong. The male sex drive is that potent. Most men want to have some contact with women, even if it’s just random hookups now and again. And the only way to do that is to make yourself as sexually attractive as possible. That just is so. Women are the ones who pick sex partners, and they have no problem with sharing attractive men with other women. So if you want sex partners, you have to make yourself sexually attractive. And you have to know male and female sexual nature, so that you know what you’re getting into, you know what you’re seeing, you know what women are doing, and you know what women really mean when they talk.

For men, improving one’s own attractiveness increases one’s power in the market. It increases his ability to control some of the selection process. It gives him an abundance mentality. It gives him the power to walk away from situations that disadvantage him. It gives him the ability to tell women “no” and to reject women who cannot or will not give him what he wants and needs.

On the other hand, going your own way can also increase your power in the market. It maximizes your control over your own life. It sharply reduces your responsibilities to others, and increases your opportunities. It frees up your resources to expend the way you want. Sharp reductions in responsibility means a sharp reduction in the needed resources for day to day living, meaning you can work less and increase your leisure time.

I think that more and more men will go pure MGTOW, which is essentially “make the best of a tough situation, be single, and don’t have a family. At least that’s better than getting divorce raped and it’s less work than going to the gym, getting in shape, and eating clean. This way I can eat what I want and work 30 hours a week, and live by myself in my apartment”. It’s kind of similar to women 100 years ago, where the path of least resistance was for Bertha BigGirl, Martha Dumptruck, and Plain Jane to “find a decent, OK man to support me, and probably have at least 3 of his kids. At least it’s better than living with Mom until she dies, and then having to live with my brother and his wife, and taking care of their kids.” And similar to the spinster, the MGTOW will be low status, or at least perceived as low status. But for the spinster and the MGTOW, their lifestyles will be at least better than whatever else they could have gotten.

Guys, Nova is absolutely correct in that men by and large are not adapting.

I think that what’s going on is that many men are saying “want to stay the same, don’t want to do a lot of work, but I still want women to be attracted to me and to be able to date a lot and eventually get married and have a family like (a) mom and dad had when I was growing up; or (b) like I didn’t get to have growing up.” Well, you can’t have that, at least not without working for it. If you want something you’re going to have to work for it. If you want women and sex, you’re going to have to make yourself attractive to women. And the way you’re going to do that, the only way to do that, is to stand out. And the way you stand out is by improving every area of your life – your job, your body, your finances, your lifestyle, your hobbies, your social acumen, and everything else that involves you going through your life.

The funny thing is that when a man stops caring so much about it, forgets about women, and sets about improving his life, he starts attracting women.

That’s the current state of things, I think.

I don’t disagree that we’re presently at a turning point in intersexual relations. After the advent of unilaterally female controlled birth control and the Sexual Revolution that followed the upheaval in how men and women come together and relate was inevitable. Now that we’re 50 odd years past that point we’re figuring out how reproduction, love, marriage, and something as simple as boy-meets-girl is going to look for future generations. The internet and a social media acculturation on a global scale has seen to it that it will likely never look like it did under the old social contract. There’s a theory that post-agrarian societies experienced a similar shift in intersexual dynamics in our ancestral past. Socially enforced monogamy was the obvious intersexual shift.

Right now we’re seeing a similar shift in intersexual relations. Is it simply better for men and women to live segregated lives? I don’t believe so, but it seems like a larger cultural narrative believes it’s time for both men and women to go their own ways. Until one side concedes, fuck any notion of evolved complementarity is the narrative I guess.

I do disagree with Deti in that I think men are adapting. They always have. It’s that the adaptation is counter to what we might hope is the natural order between men and women.

Unmarriageable

This week there’ve been a rash of articles all outlining the latest statistics about marriage in this decade. US marriage rates are at a 150 year low and, if you believe the all-female article writers, it’s of course men’s fault for failing to be marriageable. These articles are referencing a study published last week titled Mismatches in the Marriage Market and this study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses. One implication is that the unmarried may remain unmarried or marry less well‐suited partners.

That’s right gentlemen, you’re unmarriageable and the ladies want you to shape up. If you want to experience marital bliss – despite all the inherent personal dangers for men in today’s “marriage economy” – you must make yourself “economically attractive“:

“Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult,” says lead author Daniel Lichter in a press release.

The stats don’t lie and they are pretty bleak. More women are enrolled in college than ever before and more are expected to enter through the middle of the coming decade. Now, a degree doesn’t guarantee a woman a job, and it says nothing about the majors and job sectors women prefer, but a college education does reinforce the idea that women are entitled to marry an economically attractive man who himself has an education and enough aspiration to make something of himself to become marriageable.

That’s some real shit right there and we’re not even half way through this post. We’ve gotten to the point where the truth of the past five decades is apparent; gendered politics has actively, openly, disadvantaged men in terms of education. Whether this hobbling of men is via educational dispensations (Title IX) or social conventions (divorce, child support, Duluth model feminism) the outcome is now unignorable.

In most western societies today there is a separate standard of justice that applies to women. Women are receive far fewer consequences and are sentenced much more leniently than men for committing the exact same crimes. These are easily proven statistics, but even when they are brought to light the gynocentric social order doubles down and justifies them because, women.

My intent here today isn’t to depress anyone. Neither am I drawing attention to this because I’ve made a new turn to the Men Rights Movement. No doubt there’ve been many article already written about the female hubris inherent in these revelations – revelations the Red Pill community has been pointing out for almost two decades now.

The manifestations of about 50 years of social changes produced by a feminine-primary social order are unignorable. Even mainstream media sources are finally seeing these stories as the red meat du jour for the masses now. A lot of the Red Pill principles and I and many other men in the Manosphere have been drawing attention to about intersexual dynamics are now coming to light in popular consciousness.

Aww Quit Complaining

Last year I delivered the State of the Manosphere Address, and in that talk I outlined the rise of what I saw as a new Gender War (or gender cold war). Naturally I was called a reactionary, and have been since described as “overly negative” even by the organization that asked me to deliver that speech. But yet, everything in that outline has come to pass in less than a year. Of course, the easy dismissal is to blame this on election year propaganda. More than one mainstream talkshow conservative has jumped on the Toxic Masculinity bandwagon, pointing out how the Left and mainstream feminism are one and the same.

However, there have been many swings of the political pendulum in the past 50 years. Conservative zeitgeists have contributed to the same feminine-primary social order that’s resulted in men being unmarriageable today. It’s just been good politics to appeal to the Feminine Imperative no matter what side of the political aisle you happen to sit on.

But I’m a man. I’m not supposed to be overly concerned with issues like this. As long as I’m measuring up to my Burden of Performance any marginal raising-of-awareness to truths like the ones above make me seem like I’m complaining. And that’s something men are never allowed to do. It’s a very effective way of silencing men. Get them to feel like they ought to silence themselves. Real men don’t complain.

Meanwhile, it’s Broke Men who are hurting American Women’s Marriage Prospects. My good friend Dalrock once wrote a series of post around the idea that feminism would be so much more successful if men would only cooperate with it. When women are unable to optimally complete their mating (and life’s) strategies it’s men’s fault for being uncooperative. It’s men’s fault when women’s life plans don’t come together as Sheryl Sandberg told them it would. It’s men’s fault when they won’t play the approved role they should when women hit their Epiphany Phase and their sexual priorities shift.

Confirming the Red Pill

If you needed a better illustration of the Solipsism inherent in women’s nature you’ll be hard pressed to find it on a bigger scale than the dozens of stories bemoaning the lack of marriageable men today. Furthermore, it goes to prove another Red Pill truth: as a man, women don’t care who you are as much as what you are. I’ve taken a lot of heat over the years over my assessment of how men and women have different concepts of love. Men love idealistically. I rarely get any pushback on that assertion, but when I layout how women’s Hypergamous natures predispose them to a concept of love based on opportunism men and women lose their minds.

Yet, here we are. Women enthusiastically proving my point for me without me having to do any heavy lifting. As women become more comfortable in Open Hypergamy we see this embracing of their nature proudly flaunted. Naturally women will double down on this.

“Of course women don’t wanna marry no bum!”

And then the Trad-Cons join the chorus,

“It’s men’s fault they aren’t measuring up to being the men all women are entitled to.”

There are dozens of studies that correlate divorce with women earning more than their husbands. In fact, women are reluctant to admit that they out-earn their husbands. Throughout the history of this blog I’ve shown the evolved reasons for this dynamic, but what the articles all dance around is women’s natural evolutionary desire for men who exceed them in all aspects. But because we’ve opted to believe in, and standardized on, social constructionism we lay all of that on “societal expectations” of men and women. In a future essay I’ll be defining how the cope of humans being ‘above it all’ in their evolved instincts is the root source of many deliberate misgivings about intersexual conflict. For now, understand that blaming any inconvenient intersexual truth on a nebulous “society” is the go-to rationale for a feminine-primary social order.

“If only men would evolve and rise above what society foists on them we women would be happy” versus “Men need to accommodate women’s success by making themselves more ‘economically desirable’“

And “Oh, but love is important too, *wink wink*.”

“Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors’,” Lichter says.

It’s interesting that some articles advocate for marriage as a “stabilizing force” in society, all while never (maybe deliberately) seeing the economic risks of disaster that the divorce industry incentivizes in women. There’s nothing stabilizing about promoting marriage between men you’ve deemed “economically unattractive” and women who feel entitled to a man who exceeds their Hypergamous expectations. There’s nothing ‘stabilizing’ about the incidence of divorce between couples where the man is unable to out-earn his wife.

Naturally we want to make this a ‘his‘ problem. He can’t get over the fact that she makes more, has more education, etc. He’s insecure in his masculinity and must feel threatened by Her success. Or it could be the fact that on an instinctual level he understands that it’s an evolved imperative for a man to provide for and protect his family. This is the fallacy of Rise Above It. No matter how enlightened and progressive we’d like to think we are nature drags us back to reality. It’s not a socially constructed problem – if it were it would be easily solved – it’s a human nature problem. Women reveal the true Hypergamous nature in articles like these. They want a man who they can naturally look up to, respect and admire. That’s the natural truth coming out, but they source the problem in a socially constructed fantasy that it’s men’s insecurities that are holding them back from completing women’s mating/life strategies.

Women don’t need to get married anymore. The average age of first marriage is hovering around 27 years old for most couples. Studies also show that more than half of young people in America don’t have a romantic partner. We’ve all but eliminated the Beta Bucks side of the Hypergamous equation for women. Open Hypergamy (and Open Cuckoldry) are the logical outcomes of this provisioning insurance we’ve made ubiquitous for women over the last 40 years. Yet, women still want to be married to a man who outclasses them in all areas of life. They feel they deserve that guy. Their hindbrain knows they do, but the nebulous society still encourages women to believe there’s never been a better time for them to be single. This is the message women are being fed as they complain about men’s not living up to being their “equals”.

Nearly half of working-age women will be single in 2030, a new Morgan Stanley study predicts, a demographic that will drive increased sales for companies in the athletic wear, cosmetics and clothing sectors.

The investment bank’s “Rise of the SHEconomy” report says 45 percent of working-age women between 25 and 44 in the U.S. will be single women in 10 years, Forbes reported.

Single women will drive the economy in the next decade and savvy businesses are already planning on exploiting this demographic. But yet it’s men’s fault for not being marriageable and/or avoiding marriage altogether?

Too many people think I’m down on marriage. Apparently 23 years of what most guys would consider an ideal marriage isn’t enough to convince them. Honestly, as an institution – socially enforced monogamy – I think marriage, based on evolved gender difference complementarity has been the foundation of the success of western culture. But maybe we’re at a turning point in human history where traditional marriage is left behind, replaced by feminine-primary polygamy with all its inherently violent risks. It seems we’re heading in a direction where we convince Beta men it’s in their reproductive interests to abandon their evolved need to be invested in their own paternity – and that attending to and raising the children of men that women selected before them makes them ‘better men’.

There’s a lot more to the anti-marriage reasoning than just the “losing half my stuff” arguments.

It really sucks for a guy like me who’s managed to make a Red Pill aware marriage work in spite of all this. Guys get confused. How can I be anti-marriage and still married? But it’s just that dichotomy that tells the you about the nature of what marriage has become for men today. The way we do marriage today has the potential to be the most damaging decision a man can make in his life. It may even end his life. But despite all that I still believe men and women are better together than we are apart. We still evolved to be complements to the other.

It’s the coming together and living together, and all the downside risks to men today that I have no solution for at the moment. Maybe it’s going to take a war or a meteor striking the earth to set gender parity back in balance, but at the moment there’s only a future of sexual segregation to look forward to.