When sport sex is the national sport

Both Novaseeker and Chuck have written recently on how sex ratios affect mating patterns. Both of them focused on debunking the misbegotten notion that an excess of men is good for marriage. The studies they cited made the mistake of assuming that women are monogamous, a notion that anyone with an inkling of knowledge about female sexuality knows to be false. In the comments to both Novaseeker’s and Chuck’s posts, I referenced my July entry on Chinese hypergamy, which tackled the same subject, but in a real-world scenario. Go read it now, if you haven’t already. I’m here to talk about the other side of the coin – scenarios in which there is a deficit of men as opposed to a surfeit.

As I established in my post on China, sexual economics dictates that the sex that has the fewer numbers in a given environment has a power advantage when it comes to mating. When women are in the minority, their hypergamous nature leads them to leverage their increased value into polyamorous relationships with alpha males. Outside of a handful of alphas, any man who manages to snare a woman has no choice but to put up with her shit if he wants her to stay with him. But what happens when men are in the minority? When men are liberated from the constraints of what women demand, as Michael Blowhard reports (hat tip: Thursday), anarchy and debauchery results:

If Fire Island was acres of beef on the hoof, Christopher Street was Mardi Gras in New Orleans, only with fewer inhibitions and without a female to be seen. One club or bar after another … Each establishment, and the street itself, filled with exuberant gayguys in freaky costumes … Music, drugs, and booze everywhere … Carousing of a pitch that would put beer-drinking Spring Break jocks to shame …

As well as the most aggressive and direct sexual behavior I’ve ever witnessed. I found the scene overheated and hair-raising all at once. I’d never before and have never since witnessed a scene so single-mindedly focused on getting off. People as commodities … Relentless dick-centeredness …

What a reminder that men depend on women to moderate and focus things. God knows that women can be no-fun, moralizing wet blankets — C’mon baby, let’s have us some fun! But maybe slamming on the brakes can serve a positive human function too. I remember one gay friend during those years laughing about the way straight people would often ask him, “Do you gays behave that way because you’re gay?” He enjoyed replying, “We behave this way because we’re guys.”

At the bars and on the sidewalks of Christopher Street there wasn’t a pretence at conversation, let alone at recognizing that anyone might have a personality. You were understood to be there to have sex, period. The single and only point was to find someone you could get off with, and quickly, because someone else you would want to get off with might stroll by in a few minutes. Imagine city block after city block offering nothing but sexual challenge and sexual invitation. A few studly gayguys threw even cloddish me some scarily-direct come-hither looks. Flattering! But yikes!

A number of sex ratio researchers, including Uecker & Regnerus and Kruger & Schlemmer, hypothesize that the hookup culture on college campuses is the result of women outnumbering men by a significant margin. In the general sense, they’re correct. Owing to the male compulsion to spread the seed to as many women as possible, a scarcity of men makes it possible for more of them to leverage their greater value into polyamorous relations with women. (Which is why if you’re just starting out in the game, you should frequent venues where women outnumber men.) Alphas will still get more pussy, but betas will be able to get more than they would under a balanced sex ratio. Basically, if you’re a college undergrad and can’t get laid, you’re either an asocial shut-in or a complete loser. The college experience isn’t a perfect example of life when males are in short supply, as its tribal nature makes, for example, racking up lays a delicate procedure that could completely wipe out your sexual market value if handled improperly (no “urban anonymity” in a dorm). For a more stark example, we’ll have to travel all the way to Russia.

It’s well known that in the Third Rome, women outnumber men by a considerable margin. According to the CIA World Factbook, Russia’s sex ratio is 0.86 male(s) to 1 female, way below the world’s ratio of 1.01 males per female. There’s also a huge gap between male and female life expectancy (59.33 years for males, 73.14 years for females – worldwide its 64.52 years for males and 68.76 years for females), so the ratio isn’t going to balance itself out anytime soon. The current dearth of dudes in Russia is a result of the massive wipeout of the motherland’s manhood that occurred during World War II. The combination of German military supremacy, Soviet military incompetence (a direct consequence of the Great Purge), and Nazi racial genocide led to massive casualties for Russian men on the Eastern Front. As Richard Bickerstaff reports in the eXile:

The estimate for Soviet War dead in World War 2 is 24 million (plus five million, if you count Poland). The Soviet casualties are split pretty evenly between military and civilian. The military casualties were men–young men, most without children. Civilian casualties are likely stacked 2-1, men to women. The battle-plan on the Eastern Front was basically Gary Brecher’s genocidal “primitive warfare”; men were most worth butchering, whatever the situation, and the nearer to fighting (marrying) age, the better. While the Nazis wanted to exterminate whole Slavic populations for “living space,” women were killed less promiscuously. Stalinist purges, likewise, focusing mainly on party-members, also targeted men.

This wholesale slaughter of Russian men made the survivors all that more valuable to women, resulting in these survivors overwhelmingly going for hotties. This more or less resulted in the attractiveness of the average dyevushka going up over time. Bickerstaff continues:

If you’re a living Russian man at age 23 in 1947, being alive, you are a rock star. Who are you going to marry? The situation creates the strongest possible selection pressure for female hotness, as we recognize it. You don’t even look at the plain girls. Whatever “hotness” is, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, men generally recognize it as the single most important factor in choosing a mate. Within a second any man can rank any woman on a scale from one to ten. When women outnumber you two to one, you’d only aim for eight and above. Throughout history, ugly women have gotten knocked-up nearly as often as their attractive counterparts. It’s human nature to pair up with somebody. But not in the postwar Soviet Union, the spinster-maker.

So within a single generation, genes producing five to sevens (remember, marrying-age girls) are gone. You get populations notably weighted toward Liv Tylers. Where? In Poland, where there was more wholesale slaughter, you see the phenomenon a little. It flares up most noticeably across Ukraine and into Russia, where male baby-boomer deaths were most demographically significant. Now compare the women of Eastern-bloc countries to… the women of England.

Those guys died for your sex life.

Fast forward to the end of the Cold War. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and Mother Russia has been freed from the shackles of communist puritanism. What do you get? Libertinism and hedonism! Moscow in the nineties was heaven for guys both domestic and foreign, as Antonella Morosi writes in this forgotten eXile classic:

By now, everyone pretty much knows the sordid truth about Moscow’s male eXpats. And yet it never ceases to amaze. Formerly respectable, squeaky-voiced Western men arrive in Moscow and, in a matter of a couple of months, transform into barking sexist pigs of a sort we thought only existed in the paranoid fantasies of turbo-feminist Andrea Dworkin. Almost without fail, they abandon their eXpat girlfriends and turn into modern day Hun-a-bies, burning their money on $500 whores, coke-head bimbos, and teenie-bop airheads in an orgy of condomless one-night stands. Things are even worse in the office. There must be more boss/secretary sex going on just in the conference rooms of Moscow’s multinationals than in all of Switzerland at any given time. Expat men, most of whom were sex-starved nerds growing hair on the palms of their hands back home, are now living lives they thought were reserved for rock stars, and nothing, it seems, can stop them.

When men are in short supply, good men are in even shorter supply. In situations where women outnumber men, the former are at the mercy of the latter and must conform to their expectations if they want to date and mate. Won’t put out, ladies? Give your man guff? Demand that he sack his cock before taking you from behind? Piss him off in any way? Say buh-bye as your guy replaces you with another chick who’ll shut up, blow him with extra tongue, and get in the kitchen and make him a sandwich afterwards. That is, if he doesn’t give you a second chance after beating you to a pulp first. The drive to survive forces women to do whatever men want of them, as Morosi continues:

The typical scenario goes something like this. Expat girl comes to Russia either in possession of or expecting a good, high-paying job, and also expecting to find or, frequently, already having an eXpat boyfriend. Unlike Western men who’ve heard all the raves over Russian women, she hasn’t heard anything flattering about Russian men that would attract her; upon arriving, for a variety of reasons, she is even less inclined to start up a relationship with a Russian. Instead, she expects a monogamous medium-to-long-term relationship with a sensitive, non-alcoholic, drug-and-disease-free Western guy who holds a decent job, and respects her as a person, not as an object. As for dating, sex is out of the question on the first, if not the fifth, date. Sex is a matter of mutual consent, safety and respect.

Six months later-after 183 days of disappointment and bitterness-she has become a different creature. The eXpat boyfriend has long since abandoned her for the polygamous pursuit of dyevushki flesh. After a spell of loneliness, she’s reduced to dating guys she never would even talk to back home, and sleeping around far more easily, and with far lower standards, than in her worst nightmares. And that’s only if she’s lucky.

There is a story going around that I ran into more than once while researching this piece. Whether it is apochryphal or not is something I can’t tell you. But it goes something like this: an eXpat woman-a USAID employee, to be exact-was said to be complaining to a bar manager at one of Moscow’s eXpat hangouts.

“I want you to understand something,” she says. “I’m not a lesbian. But I’ve been reduced to licking pussy.”

“A Russian guy will chat you up for fifteen, twenty minutes, then expect you to go home with him,” said “Stacy,” an American from New Jersey who works at a local advertising agency. “I’ve heard things about them-beatings and stuff-I don’t want to find out.”

So eXpat women are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The men-expats and locals alike-prefer Russian girls. Expat women resort to lowering their standards. In the absence of the possibility of finding Mr. Right, they succumb to one-night stands with Mr. Wrong. And that’s only on a good night.

A second opinion, from occasional Roissy commenter Dynamo Kiev:

Your hot Russian girl will be grabbed and approached by no less than 15 men a day here, and half of the men will probably physically grab her and not accept no as an answer.  There’s no room for subtlety here.  There is no need for “approach” or “opening” here.  See a girl you like?  “Come sit with us girl.”  “Come ride in our Mercedes with us, girl.”  That’s it.

Women here are beautiful because it’s a Darwinistic society.  They know men go for looks, so they all compete on looks.  If you’re over 50 kg and a young woman, you must lock yourself in your bedroom and not leave until you’ve lost the weight. American women are quite ugly, but I think it’s mainly because they are fat and dress poorly.    Subject them to the same kind of pressures they’d face here and I’m sure they’d gain 2.5 points of beauty within a few years.

As a side note, I’ve witnessed no less that 6 American women having nervous breakdowns here, usually at cafes talking to some male coworker, saying things like “I can’t take it here anymore!  The girls are such sluts!”

What she really wants to say is: “I can’t take it anymore.  I can’t compete on any level with these women.  I was so popular with men in America even as a warpig, but here, not only do all Russian guys ignore me, but all the American men can’t be bothered either.”

So we’ve established that a man deficit results in looser morals, greater sluttiness, and more woman-beating. But what are the long-term effects of this on society? As Al Fin frequently blogs, Russia is a third-world country, mired in backwardness and regression. From his most recent report, on the Russian educational system:

Russia’s population is shrinking steadily, and will be only 1/3 the population of the US in a few decades. Its medical system is crap, its journalistic media is crap, its educational system is crap, and its military is crap. Russia cannot man its own vast mineral resources infrastructure, and is letting many billions of resource dollars slip away each year from crumbling machinery due to neglect.

Psychologically and spiritually, Russia is engaged in a slow but sure suicide. Its educational system is playing a crucial role in maintaining the downward course. Its journalistic media are keeping quiet, staying subservient. Its bureaucratic health care system is likely killing more people than it is saving.

In addition, much has been made of the high mortality rate of Russian men. The primary culprit is excessive alcohol consumption. All of the middlebrow hacks blame Russian men’s alcoholism on “economic change,” when in fact the answer is much simpler. When men don’t have to expend more than the bare minimum of effort to get laid, not only will they won’t do anything above and beyond the call of duty, they’ll gleefully wallow in their own filth. I forget the name of the comedian who joked that men would live in cardboard boxes if women would tolerate it, but it’s true. As Roissy detailed in this post:

Rampant sex and the perpetual pursuit of sex with thousands of willing partners would grind society to a halt.  If STDs didn’t wipe out a significant portion of the population, sheer physical exhaustion from day-long fuck marathons would render the rest incapable of anything more than satisfying the bottom of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs.

Marriage?  Kids?  Um, yeah.  Civilization?  It’d putter along for a while, but eventually the voracious id unleashed would reverse human achievement so rapidly that the forests would retake the cities, as it is doing in Detroit right now.  I doubt you could walk M Street more than two blocks without seeing penis in vagina somewhere along the way.

Drink, fuck, and be merry, for tomorrow its all gonna burn!

The people who claim that women civilize men are wrong, but only half so. It is not women themselves, but the PURSUIT of women that tames men. When pussy is too hard to get, as in the case of China, it leads to insurrection among the sex-starved masses; when pussy is too easy to get, as in the case of Russia, the satiated masses are content to let society collapse around them. Civilization is only sustainable at the equilibrium.

All of the idiots claiming that Russia is reclaiming its position as a world power are as wrong as the people who are claiming that China will become a world power. You can’t build a functioning society with a bunch of guys up to their eyeballs in vaj.