Tuesday, October 06, 2009

The Social Intelligence Hypothesis

For the few of you that don't already read Roissy, check this out:

[T]he absurdity of mid-20th to early 21st century feminism and all its adjuncts are better understood as progressively sophisticated emergent sexual selection strategies which act as social obstacles to filter out men who aren’t able to successfully navigate them. In essence, feminism is an advanced biocomputational Turing test; a giant social subcommunication roadblock devised and embraced by women and, at least in principle if not in practice, by alpha males intended to ensure the continuation of the hypergamous weeding out of lesser men who don’t possess the savvy to play by ever-shifting sexual market rules. Feminism is only superficially about female equality; at its core it is a ginanomicon of secrets to which only socially adroit men are privy.

Why feminism? Why now? In a word: Beta males acquired too much power. The ascendance of the beta male (and, not coincidentally, the rise of American power) through the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, exemplified by the common man seeing his income and standard of living rise and his opportunities for marriage with quality women rise in response, resulted, as is necessary in the zero sum sexual market, in a lessening of female market leverage to satisfactorily satiate their hypergamous impulse. As I wrote back in this post:

Roissy Maxim #15: Female cultural equality = male dating inequality. Female cultural inequality = male dating equality. You cannot have both. So sayeth human nature.

. . . .

Given the endless appetite of women to date up (even though there is evidence that engorgement of this appetite makes them unhappier), this wide and deep Beta Ascendance was an evolutionarily unstable environment. New complex memes would naturally arise in reaction to assist in pushing the evolutionary envelope of what qualifies as an alpha male, and here feminism and its discontents, its counterintuitive criteria and amorphous edicts, entered the vacuum left by the absence of widely practiced hypergamy to serve as the newest iteration of female sexual selection strategy. And the winners were the alpha males who could mouth the right platitudes while practicing the dominant behavior that put the lie to those same platitudes.

Wow!

I would push back on that last bit, though. Roissy himself has nothing but contempt for those men who "mouth the right platitudes," identifying this behavior as the mark of the "mangina". But certainly the primary effect of feminism has been to increase inequality among males and thereby make hypergamy easier to indulge.

6 comments:

Thursday said...

Nah, Roissy's analysis is seriously flawed. Beta males were in control for a long time without provoking feminism and there wasn’t any noticable increase in beta power. It’s not the variable.

Increasing prosperity is what fueled earlier feminist movements, and female behavior under conditions of widely available birth control, female financial independence, and urban anonymity needed ideological justification and gave us the current wave.

Elusive Wapiti said...

Interesting take that feminism was in response to beta men having too much power.

I join Thursday in disagreeing. But I don't think that prosperity was it either. Certainly prosperity is what permits feminism to exist, but it was the view that the individual is the core atomistic particle of society that was causal.

Feminism seeks to maximize autonomy for the female. That's it. Individual autonomy is a distinctly post-reformation, post-enlightenment concept.

Trumwill said...

The view that the entire social upheaval surrounding feminism was borne on the basis of screwing over betas is perhaps the most self-absorbed, self-centered thing I have heard the pro-beta folks say in quite some time. As the saying goes, "Not everything is about you, sweetheart."

Burke said...

Trumwill: yeah, pretty self-absorbed. On the other hand, if feminism were about screwing betas, how would it be different?

Justin said...

Agree with above, this is near-total bs. Correlation is not causation.

I don't even poison my mind with his pornographic crapola.

Anonymous said...

I'll cast a lone vote for the self-absorbed analysis - but not about "betas."

I would follow William S. Lind's analysis of feminism - that it was a purely destructive idea, an offshoot of Cultural Marxism.

However, this destruction was not aimed at "beta" men, but at Western Civilization.

http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

Roissy is a big exaggeration, I think. He's not entirely fake, IMHO - he probably has a few STDs to prove it. But he's 99% fake.