The disease is in your genes

Susan Walsh, the proprietor of Hooking Up Smart, has named Tucker Max, Roissy, and myself as an unholy triumvirate of “douchebaggery” in her post, “Stop Putting Out for Alpha Asshats“:

Tucker Max is the poster boy for treating women like crap before and after sex to keep them in their place. He may be just a narcissist pig, but he’s practicing the Game as proselytized by Roissy. If Tucker is the Prince of Douchebaggery, then Roissy is the undisputed King.

Roissy’s blog is very successful, as beta males worldwide worship at his altar in hopes of picking up tips for picking up girls. One of his disciples is a guy who calls himself Ferdinand Bardamu and writes the blog In Mala Fide (In Bad Faith).

When I first saw Mrs. Walsh following my Twitter weeks ago, I chalked it up to the sort of mass following that lazy Tweeters engage in by searching for certain keywords. For instance, my quantblogging post demolishing the primary argument for gun control lead to me being followed by a gun-grabber group. But it appears she’s the real deal. Upon reading her entry, I thought: “I’ve only been blogging for four months, and already I’m being targeted in the same breath as more popular writers for Two-Minute Hate Sessions? Hot damn.” After seeing In Mala Fide linked in Mrs. Walsh’s post, I was gearing up into “rip her a new one” mode, but I was stymied when she forced herself to bite the bullet at the end:

Charming, no? Here’s the real problem: Tucker Max, Roissy and Ferdinand Bardamu are right.

These tactics work. The doctrine relies heavily on evolutionary psychology, which states that women prefer alpha males to betas. I disagree with their definition of what constitutes an alpha male, but I frequently hear first-hand accounts of guys finding great success by demeaning and objectifying women. Women are being called whores and delightedly climbing into bed. Men approach women with the pickup line “34C?” and far too many giggle and reply, “32C!”

Unfortunately, she follows up with this:

It couldn’t be any more clear. If you want a good man who respects you, you’re going to have to keep your knickers on until you find one. You owe it to yourself, and to all the other women who deserve more than utter degradation.

I hate to break it to you, Susan, but it’s not quite that simple. Women’s attraction for guys who are socially dominant is as hardwired as breathing. It’s not a switch you can turn on and off at will.

Susan Walsh, so far as I can tell, is part of the branch of feminism I call “prude feminism,” because its proponents oppose the sexualization in modern culture. This group of feminists is openly courted by conservatives in general and social conservatives in particular because, on the surface, they share the same goals. The prude feminists see themselves as fighting the objectification of women that occurs in the modern West, claiming that the proliferation of porn, epidemic of sluttiness, and other markers of female liberation are not reflective of feminism’s success, but its failure. The queen prophet of prude feminism is Ariel Levy, whose 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture was quoted approvingly across the right-o-sphere when it was released.

Writers like Levy and Susan Walsh who talk of extricating slut culture from feminism remind me of the Laputan scientist from Gulliver’s Travels who spent all his time trying to turn shit back into food. Their feminism is contradictory and nonsensical. The title of Mrs. Walsh’s site, Hooking Up Smart, says it all. Girls can’t “hook up smart,” because hooking up is by nature an incredibly stupid, sexual market value-killing act. She even acknowledges this, repeatedly citing a statistic that says only twelve percent of hookups lead to relationships. I don’t know about you, but if something only works twelve percent of the time, it might be a good idea to chuck it and start anew.

To her credit, Mrs. Walsh has correctly diagnosed that one of the prime reasons why the “hook up culture” on college campuses exists is the lopsided sex ratio. Thing is, instead of doing the sensible thing and addressing the failure of so many boys to succeed in grade school and make it to college (as Richard Whitmire has pushed for), or better yet, lobbying to fundamentally change the flawed, predatory, and obsolete nature of American higher learning, Susan Walsh spends “40 hours a week for pennies” dispensing dating advice that is at best marginally more useful then the usual stuff. Take for instance, the foolishness on display in her recent article, “What Women Really Want From Men“:

4. When you tease us about our weight, you make us feel completely worthless and disgusting.

It’s about the worst thing a woman can hear. And it makes us want to keep our clothes on.

We wouldn’t rib you if you would just lay off the fucking Doritos.

8. We are incredibly self-conscious about the way we smell.

Believe me, we know better than you do how gross VO can be. If you like the way we taste and smell, please say so. If you don’t have anything nice to say….well, you remember what Mama said. And we promise to keep it clean.

Don’t even THINK about me keeping my mouth shut if your lady parts smell like a fish hatchery. This is 2009. We have soap and water. Use them.

10. We know you enjoy looking at other women.

But it makes us feel terrible if we detect it. When we’re together, please don’t look at other girls.

Your brain says no, your va-jay-jay says “oui”!

11. We’re the generation of women caught between wanting chivalry and wanting independence.

It’s confusing. We are proud to be self-sufficient, but we love it when you act chivalrous and protective.

Any woman who talks about “wanting chivalry” is pig-ignorant about what it entails. Chivalry isn’t so much men treating women well for no other reason then because they have vaginas, but men treating women well because women are social inferiors, akin to the relationship between a master and a slave. Chivalry became obsolete the day women got the right to vote. Ladies, if you want your man to treat you in a “chivalrous and protective” way, you have to reciprocate by shutting the fuck up and doing whatever he says. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then please be quiet on this subject.

16. We can’t resist a guy acting domestic.

Cook us dinner, and you will almost certainly get laid.

Supplication = fail.

18. The things a woman longs to hear:

• You’re the only one I want.
• I’ve never felt like this before.
• You’re all I think about.

But only if you mean it.

Saying any of those things is a one-way ticket to Chump City.

21. I want to know that I’m sexually attractive, even though I’m taken.

I can get that from you, but if you don’t express how hot you think I am, I’ll wind up seeking that validation elsewhere. Don’t make me flirt with other guys.

There is not a woman alive who struggles with figuring out whether she is sexually attractive, and those who claim they do are lying to fish for male sympathy. Do random men stare at you when you’re out in public? Does your man’s man-tool get stiff looking at you naked? If your answer to one or both of those is “yes,” then you’re hot. No words needed.

26. We are incapable of understanding your natural need for sexual variety.

We view it as a direct threat to our femininity and desirability. And we worry that we are just some of that variety, not the real deal. If you are willing to be monogamous with us, let us know asap. It makes a huge difference.

Here’s what I said on this last August:

Shows what you know about male sexuality. Men aren’t women. When we wander off to bang other broads, we do so because we’re:

a) Looking for sexual variety.

b) You don’t want to fuck anymore.

c) Your weight gain has transformed you into a walrus with tits.

d) b and c.

e) All of the above.

You can avoid B and C by laying off the ho-hos and keeping your legs open. As for A, it’s unavoidable if you’re dating an alpha or a greater beta. Take pride in knowing you’re his number one girl.

Oh, I do get a tingle up my spine whenever I quote myself.

27. We love it when you ask us for our opinion or advice.

Men seem so self-sufficient that it’s rewarding when you can use a little help. We’ve been trained to offer support and nurturing since we were two, so let us do that once in a while.

Wrong.

There are a bunch of other posts and points to this effect, but I’d be wasting my time analyzing them all. While she gets some things right, the overall thrust of Susan Walsh’s advice for men could be termed “The Idiot’s Guide to Being a Beta.” If any of the above pointers were rooted in reality, the seduction community and the Roissysphere wouldn’t exist. Like so many writers on this issue, Mrs. Walsh is “not even wrong.” F. Roger Devlin addressed her type of thinking in his now-famous takedown of Wendy Shalit, a writer with a similar oeuvre:

In the environment in which we evolved, the careful choice of a mate was critical to a female’s success in passing on her genes. If her man was not strong enough to be a successful hunter, or not of sufficiently high rank within the tribe to commandeer food from others, her children might be in trouble. The women who were reproductively successful were those with a sexual preference for effective providers. A kind of erotic “tunnel vision” was selected for, which causes women to focus their mating effort on the men at the top of the pack — the “alpha males” with good physical endowments, social rank, and economic resources (or an ability to acquire them). Today the female preference for tall men, to give just one example, no longer makes much sense, but they, and we, are stuck with it.

What women instinctively want is for 99 percent of the men they run into to leave them alone, buzz off, drop dead — while the one to whom they feel attracted makes all their dreams come true. One of the keys to deciphering female speech is that the term “men” signifies for them only the very restricted number of men they find sexually attractive. All the dirty articles in Cosmo about “giving him the sex he craves” and “driving him wild in bed” concern this man of her dreams, who by some amazing coincidence usually turns out to be the man of some other girl’s dreams as well.

During their nubile years, many women are at least as concerned with turning male desire off (i.e., telling the 99 percent to drop dead) as with turning it on (getting Mr. Alpha to commit): they get more offers of attention than they have time to process. Cunning feminists, many of them lesbians, have exploited this circumstance to the hilt, convincing naive young women they are being “harassed.” Quietly observing the furor over so-called harassment during the past two decades, I wondered how these women could fail to realize that the men of whom they were complaining constituted their pool of potential husbands and that they could not afford to alienate all of them. Clearly, I overestimated their intelligence. And Wendy Shalit does not distinguish herself in this respect either; she uses the term “harassment” as freely and uncritically as any man-hating feminist could wish.

Monogamy means that women are not permitted to mate with a man, however attractive, once he has been claimed by another woman. It does not get a more attractive mate for a woman than she would otherwise get; it normally gets her a less attractive one. “Liberated,” hypergamous female mating — i.e., what we have now — is what ensures highly attractive mates for most women. But, of course, those mates “don’t commit” — really, are unable to commit to all the women who desire them. The average woman must decide between having the most attractive “sex partner” possible and having a permanent husband. If she were serious about seeking commitment, in fact, the rational procedure would be to seek out a particularly unattractive man, i.e., one for whom there is the least possible competition. This thought seldom occurs to young women, however.

For an ordinary man to mate with a woman, either (1) he must work himself into her field of erotic vision (e.g., by amassing wealth and achieving status — not by demonstrating that he is “kind” and “respectful of women”); or (2) she must take off the blinders and widen her own field of vision until it includes him. This latter is what I term the “grandmother effect.” Young women used to be routinely advised by their elders not to base their behavior toward men upon sexual attraction, despising ordinary men and immodestly throwing themselves at good-looking, high-status men. Most young women concluded from this that grandma was just too old to understand love.

Mrs. Walsh claims to agree with me and Roissy that women prefer alpha males, but her weak-sauce advice suggests she is not truly cognizant of the problem’s origins. The issue is that the natural female instinct of hypergamy has been heightened in Western society by what Roissy terms “The Four Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse” (cheap and easily available contraception, no-fault divorce, female economic emancipation, and feminist laws that discourage men from getting married). Contrary to what she claims, the current crisis is not a result of women having too little power, but a result of them having too much power, given to them by feminists and their mangina allies. The “hookup culture” that Susan Walsh derides is itself a product of the Sirens (albeit one of the few where men have the upper hand), as it would be impossible without the Pill and Roe v. Wade. Her hope that “women will own up to not enjoying a steady diet of casual sex, and hold out for something more emotionally satisfying” is as pointless as hoping a snotty brat left to his own devices will stop eating candy and cookies and have some nutritious broccoli. If women can’t even get over the fact that men don’t think like they do, how the hell are they going to adjust their behavior on something as important as this?

Game is nothing more then an adaptation to evolutionary pressures. When you subsidize something, you get more of it, and right now women are being subsidized to choose sexy men – in other words, men with game. If you want to get women to stop chasing alphas and playing the field right up until they hit Wile E. Coyote territory, you need to remove the incentives they have to do so. No-fault divorce, VAWA, welfare, affirmative action – they all gotta go. If you’re unwilling to concede these points, you might as well hang up your spurs.

And this is why “prude feminism” is ludicrous. Its adherents may want the sexual dystopia to end, but because they stubbornly cling to the ideology responsible for its creation, they are left intellectually impotent in the face of reality. Say what you will about sluttastic harpies like Jessica Valenti who write tomes on why chastity is a myth – at least they’re ideologically consistent. Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative recently authored a must-read piece on this subject:

By the 1970s, second wave feminists began to demand sexual liberation. What this meant, in its historical context, was the pursuit of relationships by women without regard to marriage or to male expectations of romantic love.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that feminist women often spoke negatively of women being put on a pedestal (idealised) and of marriage being an oppressive feature of a patriarchy.

And so feminism helped to usher in (with the help of male sexual liberationists like Hugh Hefner) the modern culture we have now, in which many young people are oriented to casual sexual relationships.

But there’s a catch. What do men who are oriented to one night stands look for in a woman? One thing: hotness. That’s what matters most if all you are looking for is sex.

Feminists thought that they could control the outcomes of the sexual revolution in favour of female agency, but many seem to be angrier than ever about a culture of relationships that they themselves largely instigated.

Susan Walsh, you claim that the current culture of women pursuing “alpha asshats” “is NOT what our mothers and grandmothers fought for.” Au contraire, my dear, it is precisely what they fought for – total sexual freedom. What they didn’t realize was that Newton’s Second Law of Motion applies to the sexual marketplace as well as the physical world. The Roissysphere is part of that pushback. We are here to save you girls…save you from yourselves. Harsh taskmasters we are, but you would do well to listen to what we have to say.