Even romantic comedies can’t be upbeat anymore.

SPOILER WARNING: In this post, I’m going to reveal plot details of two romantic comedies, (500) Days of Summer and Adam.

Romantic comedies are expected to be upbeat. They center on the courtship, relationship, and love that emerges between two people. The source of conflict is a person’s natural resistance against love– a confusing, hard-to-find, and exhaustingly powerful emotion– and the formation of relationships. There’s usually external resistance as well; the man and woman might be of different social classes or races, one or both might be involved with the wrong person at the time, or the parents may disapprove of the relationship. These obstacles threaten to derail the relationship but, in the end, “love conquers all”, and there’s a happy ending. That’s what makes this genre romantic comedy, not romantic drama or tragedy.

Two of 2009’s more inventive and interesting romantic comedies have been Adam and (500) Days of Summer, and neither had a happy ending. The first of these, Adam, is about a man with Asperger’s syndrome, who is (as we’d expect) a bit socially awkward. Actually, he’s good-looking and his social ineptitude is mild-to-moderate as far as Aspies go, but never mind that. The conflict is obvious: Adam says the wrong thing sometimes, Beth is faced with the task of training him, and her father– a stereotypical sleazebag alpha-male– disapproves of the relationship. They fall in love anyway. Adam, laid off at the start off the movie, finds a job in California due to Beth’s social training. He’s proven himself remediable and able to learn basic social skills. Beth plans to come along with him to California, but she wants to know why he wants her to be with him, so she asks him, point-blank. He obviously loves her, but he says the wrong thing, which is that he’s nervous about moving alone. She pulls the stereotypical female “I can’t do this” and dumps him, and he goes to the west coast alone. Some men, apparently, are just too awkward– too broken– to deserve happy endings.

(500) Days is set in Los Angeles, an unusual choice for a romantic comedy, because rom-coms need visible seasons to hint at the passing of time. When the characters meet in a model romantic comedy, the trees are green and it’s warm enough to see the female lead’s shoulders. They’re wearing light jackets when they start formally dating. The leaves turn red, suggestive of fiery passion, around the first time they have sleep together. Snow is falling and people are shivering when the conflict reaches its climax. (The wintry setting is conducive to, say, the male lead’s 10-mile trek through a blizzard to prove his devotion.) Spring begins shortly after the conflict’s resolved, and mention of a September wedding date rounds the story out to a 15-month courtship. Visible seasonal cues allow this to happen in the space of 90 minutes.

(500) Days takes a different approach, being set in a city without visible seasons. It tells you what time it is, with a counter informing the viewer where in the film’s 500-day plot each scene fits, and taking liberties with non-linear time. Very early, we learn that Summer is not a very nice person. On day 290, she breaks up with the male lead, Tom Hansen, for a vague and unclear reason. “Stupid female reasons” is how most men describe this style of breakup. As the film back-fills days 1 to 289, we learn why: Summer’s a capricious girl, her fancy as ephemeral as the season she’s named for, and she never was that much into Tom. Being a complete beta, he is, on the other hand, obsessed with her.

He collapses utterly after she dumps him, although it’s not clear what there was to Summer other than a pretty face, and his work and social life fall to pieces. He encounters Summer a few months later and she invites him to a party. Showing a typical level of class for an American woman, it’s her engagement party, held only three months after she trashed him. The woman who claimed love was fleeting– never permanent or “true”– has a ring on her finger after her first helping of alpha-cock. Well done. Summer gets the traditional Hollywood happy ending, while Tom loses his job and requires several grueling months to rebuild himself.

Tom’s 500 days end on an ambiguous note. He’s rebuilt himself into a confident man, now applying for positions in architecture, his dream career. At his first interview, he meets an attractive woman named Autumn. The film’s odometer resets to Day 1, and although this is supposed to be a “happy”– or at least acceptable– ending, it seems evident that he’s in for the same ride again.

In both films, we see a caring, kind man fall in love with an attractive and charming but ultimately selfish woman, and she fails him miserably out of weakness and caprice. This is what a 2009-era romantic comedy must have in order to be believable. Why? Because the vast majority of American women, at this point, are so morally bankrupt that most people in their 20s can’t imagine things being any different. It would be impossible for young people to suspend disbelief when watching a rom-com where the female lead knew what behaviors and choices are acceptable, and avoided those that are not. It would be “sappy” and unrealistic, because it’s so far removed from actual experience– at least, as life is lived now.

The glowing counter-truth is that “happily ever after” actually exists in the real world. It’s not a fantasy. A relationship without any problems and arguments is obviously unrealistic, but people fall in love every day. Some of them stay in love for 10, 20, or even 50 years. This is why rom-coms are romantic comedies and not fantasies; they’re plausible (if sanitized and contrived) depictions of a real-life courtship and marriage. In love, the happy ending can be realistic, because it actually happens to more than a few people. The problem: most American women aren’t up to the task, and everyone knows it. Summer, dumping her beta lover and shortly afterward getting hitched to an alpha, with no apology, proved herself to be a typical American woman. The same holds for Beth in Adam, unceremoniously leaving her boyfriend after he said the wrong thing.

There’s “happily ever after”, but there’s never been an “easily ever after”, and there never will be. Life, love, and relationships take a lot of work. “The spark” isn’t going to be there in the first 45 seconds, and every relationship is going to require work, but there are good reasons not to abandon the relationship at the first sign of difficulty. These truths, unfortunately, are lost on most under-40 American women, due to their obsessive and selfish need for instant gratification. Even Hollywood can’t believe otherwise anymore.

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In one letter, the problem with modern American women

The pick-up artist community and its bastardization of evolutionary psychology have given us one term that can describe, at root, the psychological problems of the modern American woman: α. Unicode-character U+0251. Alpha. Usually applied to men, I’m going to discuss the unhealthy character of the “alpha female”, and how her counterproductive behaviors have infected American culture. As American men increasingly leave our women behind, this discussion is, for young women, of critical importance.

Let’s first agree on some working definitions for four discernible levels of social status, applying to men in pre-monogamous societies: alpha, beta, gamma, and omega. Each has a different personality, family structure, and survival/reproductive strategy. With the most wives– we define a wife as one whose sexuality is exclusively betrothed to one man, making no religious implications– are the alpha males. They tend to have three or more wives and a large number of children. They’re r-strategists. Their wives are treated like chattel, and paternal investment in children is minimal, as the alpha male has to invest all of his energy in defending and maintaining his status. Beta males, on the other hand, tend strongly toward monogamy. (A beta might take two or three wives if there a severe shortage of men, but is disinclined to do so.) Either unable to acquire alpha status, or uninterested in doing so, they prefer seek out one highly desirable partner and form a pair bond with her. The beta male’s reproductive future relies on one woman, so he values her health highly, and tends strongly toward egalitarian partnership. Paternal investment is high, because the beta has few children and must see them succeed if his genetic line is to continue. Betas, being K-strategists, are the best husbands and fathers. Finally, gammas are the excess men who have no wives. Mostly celibate and angry, their reproductive strategies involve turmoil and risk. They can cuckold men of higher status (risking violence and death). They can start a revolution against the high-status men (risking violent death). Or, if the alphas recognize the danger these low-status, angry men present, the gammas will be sent to war against another tribe (risking violent death). Last are the abysmally low, usually deformed and unhealthy, omegas, the invisible and inert bottom. (What differentiates gammas from omegas is that gammas have the potential to become alphas or betas, often through war and insurrection. Omegas don’t.)

Worth noting is that alpha and gamma males have more in common with each other than with betas. Both sorts are violent, manipulative, subversive, and risk-seeking. The only difference between the alpha and gamma male is that the former is successful and the latter is not; their attitudes are fairly similar. Likewise, beta males have more in common with women than with alpha or gamma men. Having few children in whom they invest highly, they tend to be future-oriented and value stability, wishing for their children to inherit a just society in which they can prosper. They become the priests, scholars, judges, and entrepreneurs. Over time, by virtue of being the predominant contributors to the advancement of civilization, betas end up running it. Eventually, out of a desire to mute the destabilizing effect of polygamy and status-based violence, they enforce monogamy on society as a whole, coercing everyone’s status into the beta region of the spectrum.

According to the male status spectrum, most women are natively beta. Limited in the number of children they can have, they tend toward high paternal investment, a preference for egalitarian relationships, and future orientation. Still, is there an alpha female? Yes, and her reproductive strategy is dissimilar from that of the normal (beta) female, and from that of the alpha male.

Beta females seek quality men of medium-high social status– the most desirable beta men– for monogamous relationships. Alpha females, on the other hand, seek alpha males exclusively. Their evolutionary reason for doing so is obvious: they want their children to inherit the father’s alpha status. In order to achieve this, to have sexual access to an alpha male is not enough; a large number of women have such access, but most of them are not alpha females, and their children will not inherit the father’s status. Women of low status within an alpha’s harem are gamma, not alpha. Their children will be viewed as the alpha father’s bastards, not his heirs. Only the favored wife qualifies as an alpha female. Thus, the strategy of the alpha female is to enter an alpha’s harem and rise to the top of it.

Although the sexual fates of alphas and gammas are different between men and women, there is a similarity between the genders. Both “alpha” and “gamma” represent the winning and losing sides of a social gamble, a gamble for which the betas of both genders have opted out by pursuing monogamous relationships. For men, the contest is for social dominance against other men. For women, it is the contest within the harem to achieve “favorite wife” status.

Modern humans are generally impossible to classify as “alpha” or “beta”– society strongly encourages us to be beta, but both strategies live within our genetic lineage and tendencies. Our term for a person with overbearing alpha-male traits is psychopath— a person with narcissistic and promiscuous tendencies, lacking empathy and conscience. (Most psychopaths are male; that female psychopaths exist is indicative of that female “alpha males” can exist.) What does an alpha female look like? A less physically violent analogue of the alpha male, she’s a hypercompetitive, gossiping, catty, back-stabbing, relationally aggressive bitch. She’s the hypergamous Carrie Bradshaw, lusting after “Mr. Big” despite his repulsive and obnoxious character. She’s what a perverse offshoot of feminism has told young women that it’s “empowering” to be.

As societies become more civilized, they tend to marginalize the true alpha male, outlawing polygamy, rape, and domestic violence, and demanding paternal investment (child support) in biological children. So the worst traits of alpha males have been criminalized, and rightly so. Such men are senselessly violent, parasitic, and extremely disruptive. However, the alpha-female variety of behavior is too subtle to control by law. Where a man would physically lash out at someone, the woman is inclined to inflict grievous social harm, and it’s easy to do this without breaking any laws. The alpha female, nearly as much of a monster as the alpha male, is allowed to roam free.

Modern Sex and the City culture has trained a generation of women to think of men as accessories, placing the status benefits of the pairing at a substantially higher priority than the quality of the relationship itself. The result is that American women have, as a group, lost interest in the skills necessary to make a relationship work, instead concentrating on the quest for the high-status male. This has turned them, unwittingly, into alpha females. The nightmare of hypergamy, “soft polygamy”, casual sex and combat dating that the modern dating landscape has become is a direct result of this.

An interesting question about the “alpha”/”beta” debate is that of whether it is “better” to be one or the other. For men, this question is difficult to answer, because a substantial proportion of men have an “alpha” desire for sexual variety, especially when they are young. Alpha males seem to be significantly happier (and more respected) than low-beta and gamma males, but less content (and less respected) than high betas. People admire loyal high betas like Barack Obama (with one highly desirable wife and two daughters, all of whom he clearly loves) more than mid-alphas like Jonathan Edwards, or low-alphas like Bill Clinton. On the other hand, alpha males are able to achieve a lifestyle that an inordinate number of men envy; I’m sure Silvio Berlusconi is much more envied for his sex life than Obama is. Though most men would agree that it’s more mature to be a high beta, there’s no clear hedonic superiority of one approach over the other.

For a woman, the question can be more clearly answered: it is preferable to be beta. The alpha female tolerates a philandering and dangerous husband not for the sake of her own well-being, but to impart the father’s status to her children. Her attraction to the violent, narcissistic, and cruel sort of men who achieve high status puts her in danger, and if she does not achieve “favorite wife” status within the harem, her fate is chattel slavery. Nature is playing a devilish trick on the alpha female, bringing her to be attracted to dangerous men, thereby sacrificing her own interests, for the benefit of her progeny.

A perversion of feminism has glorified the lifestyle and behavior of the alpha female, starting with Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl and continuing into the current era via television shows and movies like Sex and the City. The alpha female’s promiscuous and hypergamous lifestyle, however, is not conducive to a woman’s happiness. Even most men would find it utterly empty. For this reason, women are becoming unhappier despite their improved position in society.

Most feminist advances have been of great benefit to women and society. Women must have the right to vote, and to be respected equally within the workplace. We simply can’t afford to ignore half of our nation’s talent go ignored. On the other hand, the rise of the modern, “post-feminist” Sex and the City alpha-female has been a disaster for men, women, and dating as a whole. It’s great to live in an time where women have the same political freedoms as men, and are encouraged to enjoy and explore their own sexuality. However, upgrading the beta-female “angel in the house”– and the concept of a lady— for a more liberal era is the correct response to these new freedoms. Letting the alpha bitch off the leash is not.

(Irrelevant but amusing side note: the alpha female’s prevalence extends beyond the female gender. Consider the social structure of corporate capitalism. CEOs love to cast themselves as “alpha male” leaders, but the behaviors of rival executives within a modern corporation have little to do with the natural behavior of a real alpha male. The real alpha males are those with the money, the influential and extremely wealthy shareholders. What are top-level corporate executives? Though men, they’re essentially alpha females, those who have successfully risen to the top of the corporate harem hierarchy. It’s fun to point this out to the Reaganoids and the Randists.)

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