Yesterday, I opened up the topic of the rarity of white-male/black-female couplings, and asserted the following: most men are decent and not at all racist, but the bulk of those decent men are inassertive. These are the “invisible” beta males. It’s true that they don’t often pursue black women; but this is because they rarely pursue women, of any race, at all. They’re just very timid. Many of these men end up happily married, but this often requires a bit of work on the woman’s part.
In response to yesterday’s post, ErzulieRedEyes said:
White men are not masculine in my opinon, if you are a real man why would you be afraid of a woman? Pathetic!
Why are real men afraid of women? I’ll answer this. There’s a (possibly apocryphal) science experiment that was once conducted with 5 monkeys in a cage, with a stepladder leading up to a banana. Any time one of the monkeys climbed the ladder, all five would be hosed down with ice-cold water. Quickly, the monkeys learned not to climb the ladder, and to prevent others from doing so. Intermittently, a monkey would be rotated out of the cage, and another would be brought in. The new monkey would quickly move toward the stepladder and the banana, but the other four would prevent him from getting anywhere near it, and beat him up if he tried. He’d quickly learn to avoid it.
After five rotations, none of the monkeys in the cage had any experience with the hose. It was never used, since the other monkeys trained each other to avoid the stepladder. The hose may have been inactivated. None of the monkeys would have any idea why the stepladder was to be avoided, but they’d all prevent new monkeys from going near it. This learned avoidance continued, even when the original trigger had faded out entirely.
So, let’s consider the question: why are most decent men so damned inassertive?
It begins in high school and college, when the costs of rejection are very high. A man who is rejected loses standing not only with the woman he asks out, but with all of her friends. In fact, the reach of the damage is at least two social degrees, because any woman he asks out later is going to consult her friends about him. If there’s any overlap between the two womens’ social circles, she’ll find out about the rejection, and be less attracted to him. So, even if only 20 women find out about the original rejection, he suffers a loss of social standing with hundreds of women on the second-degree. His social status declines, making the success of future romantic pursuits unlikely. Consider the damaging labels– “creepy”, “sketchy”, and “stalker”– given to men who are unsuccessful at pursuing women, even if the worst characterization that could accurately be applied is “slightly inept”. Is it any surprise that men, in such circumstances, would be afraid to ask women out?
Furthermore, gossip can spread the social damage of rejection beyond two degrees, out to the far corners of the social graph. Men learn quickly that there’s very little justice in the court of small-community gossip. An action that is “creepy” coming from one man is desired coming from another. We, the beta “nice guys”, learn not to be abrasive, aggressive, or boorish. We’re told, from age 11 onward, to respect women and not to engage in behaviors that would qualify as “sexual harassment”. We willingly comply. Then we discover a class of men– “alphas”– to whom the rules don’t seem to apply. They behave disgustingly and are rewarded, when they ought to be physically beaten for their behavior, while slightly less skilled men get the fatal “creepy” label for asking the wrong girl out for coffee.
Preselection is the final nail in the coffin. Men– even timid beta males– can tolerate rejection. Most of us would rather be rejected than have regrets. Rejection would be acceptable, were it not for the fact that, in a high-school or college environment, being rejected by one woman results in a loss of standing in the eyes of 50-200 other women. Women aren’t known for thinking fot themselves when it comes to tastes in the opposite gender, and they generally don’t want men who have been rejected by other women, regardless of the man’s merits. Women want the man that other women want. So a man has to choose his targets carefully, because he has a very limited number of chances. In a small social group, he gets one chance. In a 5000-student college, he gets two or three per year. Any more rejections and he becomes “that guy”, and no woman wants him.
The “betas”– the nice guys who seem so difficult to find– become timid and selective to a fault, and most women complain that they’ve become inassertive. Alphas and gammas– undesirable men, from a long-term perspective– remain assertive, for the following reasons. Gammas are just openly desperate and have nothing to lose, having hit rock-bottom in terms of social status and self-image. Alphas are so over-the-top boorish that they inspire a little bit of fear in women and can thereby acquire sociosexual success. In the bad old days, the imposing male was about to commit rape, so a defense mechanism sets in: the woman becomes sexually attracted to him, giving up willingly what would otherwise be violently taken. Much of “psychosocial dominance” is a simulation of the early stages of rape. Physical strength communicates: I can physically rape you. An imposing and sociopathic manner indicates: I have no problem with raping you. Social smoothness indicates: I’ll be able to get away with raping you. This is not to say that women wish to be raped or enjoy rape– neither is true. Nonetheless, this vestigial script exists due to the morally void environment in which our mammalian ancestors evolved, and alpha males are exceptionally good at exploiting it.
Step forward to age 23, in “the big city”. Alphas and gammas have been chasing women for years, shoveling out undesirable attention by the shitload, and are going to continue doing so. Betas have fallen into a pattern of learned helplessness, not due to a lack of success, but due to a lack of control. By age 23, the average beta has had one or two girlfriends, but mostly at the woman’s initiation. The beta male, realistically, has had very little control over his own romantic or sexual fortune to this point in his life. Moreover, he has learned the hard way, in high school and college, about the social costs of rejection, leaving him bitter and more than a little bit rejection phobic.
In a massive city like New York, rejection truly isn’t a big deal. It’s a massive time-saver, not something to be feared or dreaded. For a man to rejected by a woman doesn’t mean that her whole clique or dormitory floor will think of him as a loser; it just means that he’ll never see her again. A man can ask out a new woman every month and he won’t end up being “that guy”. Revisiting the parable of the monkeys, the hose has been turned off, and there’s no longer a reason to avoid the stepladder.
Unfortunately, most mens’ formative experiences, when it comes to sociosexual confidence, occur between the ages of 14 and 22. A man whose first experiences are extremely negative is unlikely to develop the confidence necessary to pursue women. Like I said, it’s not rejection that turns men into bitter and inassertive weaklings, but the social fallout of rejection. If women want to be pursued by a significant number of men who aren’t assholes, they must evolve away from gossip and preselection, reducing substantially the penalty associated with rejection.
For the record, I’m a 26-year-old high beta, and I ask women out all the time. I get rejected all the time. In Manhattan, it’s not a big deal. Yes, ErzulieRedEyes, I’ve asked a number of black women out, have dated a few, and I can definitely see myself marrying a black woman. I’m not one of those inassertive, timid men, so I have nothing to gain by making excuses for them. I’m a decent and desirable person who will ask a woman out, but I’m only one man. I’m merely writing this to explain why women are pursued by so few decent men like me.
Excellent. But you already know how I feel on this subject…
Do you really expect women (or men) to stop gossiping? I like your ideas, but most do not seem very practicable.
Probably not. A better solution would be for women to outgrow preselection and therefore stop relying on gossip and others’ opinions so much in deciding whether they find a man attractive, because you’re right that gossip will always be around.
What you describe is what Whiskey calls “anonymous urban living”. My take on this, as a native NYer myself (and now living for years in the exurban fringe of northern Nevada) is that Manhattan isn’t quite as anonymous as everyone thinks it is. There’s a lot of overlap among social networks.
There is, which is why meeting romantic partners through “friends of friends” is so risky. You do run into the preselection problem if you try to find dates this way, or through clubs and activities. On the other hand, you can ask a pretty girl out on the subway, and if she rejects you, nothing bad will ever come of it. So you have opportunities to get rejected with essentially no cost.
Damn, this was a great write up. I really enjoyed reading it. However, I doubt preselection will simply be “outgrown”; desire for a man desired by other women is a biologically ingrained instinct of women and can’t be rectified by them simply stopping gossipy behavior. I like to think that trying to change women’s behavior is futile, but what we can do is educate young boys in a more realistic fashion on how women and girls actually function rather than automatically assuming moral superiority on the behalf of females. I personally don’t carry any resentment toward women for behaving like insensitive animals, none of us can ever completely conquer our carnal desires as mammals no matter how much they contradict our ideologies. What I do feel very angry with is being lied to and deceived about the amoral nature of human sexuality on the part of both sexes.
Nobody can shut the fuck up about how wrong and bad male sexuality is, how about we start letting early adolescent males know about the evils of female sexuality, such as preselection and the criteria by which women ACTUALLY use to assess males rather than what they claim to use?
Some women have more of a preselection problem than others, and I believe that it’s at least somewhat cultural. I believe the preselection gremlin can be defeated, or at least contained, through cultural means.
Fair. I’m only 26, but I never had any belief in female moral superiority. I knew that many of the worst people were men, but it also seemed like a lot of the best people are men. Somehow I knew, even when young, that men had much more variance than women in intelligence and moral character.
I do, because not all women are like this. Some women are wonderful human beings, which means all of them can be great. They’re not biologically built to be monsters. However, many of them, as you indicated, are ignorant animals.
Misogyny, rape, and domestic violence would go through the roof if men learned, at a young age, the success afforded to brutish men on the sexual market. This knowledge is hidden because it would destabilize society if distributed.
I have a better idea: breed out preselection and poor taste in men. Allow enough governmental watch over peoples’ comings and goings to keep a benevolent eye over sexuality in general. With enough data, we can figure out which women tend toward preselection and alpha-chasing, and sterilize them. We can do the same with the alpha cads. I’d support reversible chemical castration, so that people who make drastic improvements can regain their fertility.
I have absolutely no problem with eugenics, for the record, when its goal is to reduce suffering. I would never support murdering people for this goal, and the racism that was dressed as “eugenics” by the Nazis was useless and utterly disgusting, but eugenics itself can be a good thing. For example, I support free college tuition for everyone sufficiently smart to attend, and this is a “eugenic” program as it makes it cheaper for smart people to have children. In fact, the most powerful eugenic force is assortative mating for intelligence, and I’m fully guilty of that one.
Too late for that now, I think. Game and the related stuff is out there now, the memes are spreading like wildfire. I don’t see that being reversed. Women are going to have to either change up their behaviors, or deal with the consequences, I think.
I think women are changing, oddly enough. At least, I hope this to be true. It’s hard to compare women of different ages, but the 20-year-olds now seem a lot more wholesome and shy than they were a decade ago. Then again, I was a completely different person back then, as I was 16 instead of 26.
Even in college, there were wholesome women around. While I was busy being bitter and indignant about the combat-dating and gossip, my friends were dating and marrying great women who were under my nose the whole time. It’s obviously entirely my fault that I didn’t notice these opportunities when they existed.
Although this change probably began before her, I think there’s also a Michelle Obama effect going on. I think she’s a great female role model, in that she’s accomplished but also sexy, and not in a cheap Paris Hilton way; she’s elegant and devoted to her husband. She and her daughters are inspiring a lot of young girls to make something better of themselves than the generation of women ahead of them did.
“I think there’s also a Michelle Obama effect going on. I think she’s a great female role model, in that she’s accomplished but also sexy, and not in a cheap Paris Hilton way.”
I also think 20 yo women are more wholesome today. Which is really refreshing. Also, I think Michelle is the type of woman that demands respect from men, just by the way she presents herself. She’s definetly the type of woman that’s going to walk down the street to yells and whistles from men, even though she is considered sexy. She commands respect before she even opens her mouth. It’s good that we can look up to her.
I don’t see Game changing things as much as some of its supporters in the roissysphere claim it will.
For one, the roissysphere is just one subculture of Game, a subculture that happens to be unusually obsessed with this whole “alpha”/”beta” thing… as if that were the only thing that mattered in dealing with women. Indeed, I think if you were a clueless guy and tried to learn game from Roissy’s posts alone, you’d probably become a demented weirdo and might actually do worse with women.
In general, I just don’t think Game is going to change the average guy who encounters it a huge amount. Those who put in a lot of effort will see some modest improvements. Those who put in less effort will see no improvement at all. A lot of guys will get drawn in by the various charlatans that the field attracts. There’s so much idiotic blather out there in the Game world and it’s hard to sift through it all.
Look at all the fat people out there who’ve “failed” to lose weight. They claim that they tried diet and exercise and that it “didn’t work.” Yet, biologically speaking, it is impossible for a properly constructed diet and exercise plan to fail; and clearly the causes of obesity cannot be primarily genetic, because obesity was much lower a few decades ago. Clearly there is a substantial element of willpower involved here.
Learning Game is much harder than diet and exercise. There is not, and there can never be, a step-by-step formula for winning a woman’s heart. Plus, you have to stay ahead of the curve. You can’t use 5-year-old canned material.
The effect of Game, I suspect, will be smaller than both its supporters and its detractors believe.
Actually I wasn’t referring to the techniques of “Game”. I was referring to the “gender realism” aspects of it, such that the behaviors of women are being de-mystified and seen in a more clear light. That kind of knowledge is going to have wide repercussions, even though the actual number of guys who use game *techniques* will likely remain small, as you say.
In fact, the most powerful eugenic force is assortative mating for intelligence, and I’m fully guilty of that one.
Hmm… Also guilty as charged.
Warning, going off on a tangent:
But now we have to deal with the difficulties of high-IQ children. Most of my close friends are in the same group (typical gifted clique) and you see what happens with intellectual inbreeding. By the time they reach 5 or 6 years old most of them are pretty normal but early childhood can be absolutely grueling.
I have a friend whose daughter has selective mutism and whose kindergarten teacher thinks she’s autistic even though she has a proven 135 IQ and has always impressed me with her speech abilities. She’s currently in a legal battle to keep her child out of “special education” despite having multiple reports from child psychologists that her child is not autistic and/or mentally disabled and that this is merely a form of panic attack. She’s considering homeschooling (join the club, girl).
I have another friend whose 3 children are all complete insomniacs and she actually pays someone to come over and babysit on Wednesdays so that she can crawl into bed and sleep. Really, she just sleeps on Wednesdays and she walks around the rest of the week with huge dark circles under her eyes. They sleep from about 11pm to 5am. That’s it. And sometimes her 3 year-old gets up at 3am with a particularly pressing question like, “Mom, what was here before the earth began?”
Both of my children have an expressive speech delay (hence my chauffeur duties to speech therapy sessions), which is common enough with the visual/spatial gifted, but my son has apparently woken up out of his silent fog and a continual stream of chatter follows me around all day now, except when he’s working on a project (like right now — yeah!).
Example from our drive home yesterday:
Mommy, what’s that?
That’s a rainbow.
What’s a rainbow?
It’s a bow — that’s a half-circle, like an arc — of colored light; a spectrum.
Is that the same spectrum Daddy showed me on the ceiling yesterday?
Yes, except that that one was caused by the glass in our door.
What causes it now?
It usually shows up after it rains.
Why is that? Why can’t we see it when it doesn’t rain?
Because the raindrops act as a prism.
What’s a prism?
…
It’s like that all freaking day. Sometimes I feel like my brain is melting. And sometimes it’s just too much and I just lose it totally and yell, “Will you be quiet for once!” The silence usually holds for about 3.5 seconds.
I actually had to good laugh at the Roissy post yesterday:
heh. yes, there is the downside to dating a smart chick. the squirrels running in her head NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP.
because my son has hyperactive squirrels. A whole herd of them.
Sometimes I pretend not to know the answer and say, “Why don’t you save that question and ask your dad when he comes home?” My husband HATES that because my son doesn’t forget. He actually saves all of his questions and calmly goes through the list with Daddy every evening.
And sometimes he’ll ask a question I’ve already answered before just to see if I’ll give the same answer. I really hate that.
Heh, heh. Just wanted to give you a taste of what you’re in for. Gifted children can be… fun. :-p
Actually, the rainbow thing went continued on that night. We were painting and he was just mixing the red, green, and blue paint colors together on his paper. It was just this big brownish mess. When I asked him why he was doing that he said, “I’m trying to make white.” At which point I handed him over to Dad for a discussion of why light-color combinations form different colors than paint-color combinations.
LOL! It never ends.
My dad’s nickname for me, when I was 5-6, was “1000 Questions”. When I’d ask him a first question of the day, he’d say that I had only 999 left.
LOL! That’s cute. So, you know what’s coming. Sometimes I just run to the bed and put a pillow over my head and scream.
This morning I got peppered with more paint questions.
Mom, Daddy said that red and blue makes purple.
Mmm, hmm.
Mom, Daddy said that blue and yellow makes green.
Mmm, hmm.
Mom, what do purple and green make?
What the heck do I know? Sludge?
Dude, you’re on *very* shaky ground defending Eugenics. College tuition for smart people isn’t Eugenics. It’s college subsidy. Look it up.
A lot of what you are writing about could be solved by you getting over whatever happened to you in highschool, but obsessing about what happened in high school is very american. The rest of the world just grows up- we don’t need to advocate government programs to sterilise the ‘slutty’ girls that wouldn’t sleep with us. WTF?
The rape thing is bullshit.
What alpha communicates is:
-With my genes your child will be more successful.
-Having a relationship with me will give you a shot to greater social status (survival value for the kid).
Btw, there is nothing inherently undesirable in a alpha, from a long-term view, if the female has high enough value. Of course lesser females just get pumped and dumped.
White men do not pursue black women because (ding!) we are not interested in them. It’s as simple as that.
Speak for yourself. I certainly am.
I’m starting to notice that this is a geographical thing. On Abagond a bunch of us (black women) were complaining about white men hitting on us (in a sleazy/racist way) and cat-calling obscene things at us. And then some black women came on and proclaimed that they couldn’t believe that to be true. Apparently, it had never happened to them in their entire lives. In fact, no white man had ever even hit on them, not even in a tasteful way. I couldn’t believe it!
To make a long story short, we’re in NY or DC or Austin and they’re in Mississippi. Case closed.
Aaagh! That’s totally freaky. I think I’ll look around for something inanimate for my avatar. Big sister is watching you…
It’s “unassertive” …
I think the effect you are describing is genetic, not learned.
Through long periods of selective pressure those males who have been reticent and careful in which females they approach have managed to keep their genes in the game, while those who are not Alpha material who have been less careful have eliminated their genes from the pool. The proximate reasons are as you suggest, however.
Of course, I know a number of females who fucked up big time, so I get to laugh at them now.
A coward is a coward. I don’t believe in these new labels (Alpha/Beta) that have been invented to describe a cowardly man from an aggressive man.
White men are “Beta men” when it comes to black women but “Alpha men” when it comes to white women.
White men are not shy, they are afraid of black women. After all, we are the women that are most hated because everyone thinks we are ugly and sub-human.
I would be afraid to approach someone that i had been trying to eliminate for hundreds of years too.
White men wanted black women dead and gone after they tired of using us as slaves, we are not even supposed to be alive.
After the physical and psychological abuse at the hands of white people, whites expected us to be dead.
We are still here and the aftermath of the abuse is the reason why white men are “inassertive” because they are afraid to face the women they planned to destroy.
But in general, when a man wants a woman they go after the woman and seek the woman out.
A coward does and says nothing because they don’t have the balls to get what they want out of life.
Not because they are “shy” or “Betas” or “inassertive.”
White men could rape us, kill us, and use us as slaves, but they don’t have the guts to admit that they are AFRAID of us!
I Love this post!! I could not of of written it any better myself
Wow! what an idea! What a concept! Beautiful .. Remarkable …
Its a YEAR later, you still “inassertive”?
if you REALLY want something you just go get it.
It ain’t quantum physics.
You like somebody then you go get them, its simple.