AUCs: They Don’t Mean What You Think

The androsphere (see here and here) is taking issue with a comment, originally appearing on Dalrock’s blog and echoed by Susan Walsh, by “Kelly the PhD Statistician” on the difference between men and women with respect to their changing sexual market values over their lifetimes:

Dr. Kelly opines:

Those graphs are wrong because, with a fixed number of people in the world, equal between the sexes, you have to scale the curves so that the area under each one is the same.

I wouldn’t make a firm assertion either way as to whether the area under the two Excel graphs above are equal or not – appearances can be deceptive – but I do want to offer qualified support to my fellow PhD’s contention that the areas under the SMV curves of men and women are equal – or if you prefer, that the useful comparison is between normalized curves – provided we stipulate the curves are derived from weighted averages.

That the curves are averages of their respective sexes is beyond dispute:  nobody is likely to pretend that individuals’ curves don’t differ substantially in both their AUC and their shape over time.  But the weighting of individuals’ curves is likely to escape many readers’ consideration.

I would argue that the curves should be weighted by not less than two factors:

1. The relative attraction that each has for members of the opposite sex.

   All parties to this discussion recognize that, considered collectively, both men’s and women’s “buying power” is in inverse proportion to their attraction.   (Attraction here should be understood as “demand for” in general, not just sexual attraction.)  I stress that this only applies collectively; no single market player magically increases his individual buying power by being disinterested, not if there are lots of other buyers and sellers.  But if the downward-sloping demand curve moves left, the price increases.  Again, I will not make a dogmatic assertion that the attraction men and women have for each other are equal on lifetime averages, but I will say that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that the relative demand has changed over time, and that such changes have in the last few hundred years raised the relative attractiveness of women.

   Consider, for instance, the discarded custom of dowry.  The cultural assumption of yore was apparently that the only way to persuade a young man to take a woman off her parents’ hands was to pay him some amount of money or other goods.  In contrast, while no money changes hands today, it is a commonly accepted generality that a man must earn more than any prospective mate, at least as far as marriage is concerned.

   Consider also that philosophers, from (for instance) Francis Bacon in the 17th century to Nietzsche in the 19th, could be taken seriously when they wrote that women in their sexual capacity were mostly nuisances not worth the bother.  (My apologies to those philosophical historians who can better characterize the nuances of their thoughts on this subject.)  To the extent their opinions were representative of the men of their station, such views required women to bring more to any effort at attracting them.  But I doubt such opinions would gain mainstream attention today – yes, because of feminist sensibility, but also because, lower-order physical needs having been broadly met, sexual gratification remains in relatively high demand as an important element of both physical pleasure and self-actualization.

   Meanwhile, on the distaff side of the supply-demand curve, the need of an individual woman to obtain the assistance of an individual man in her own material provision has, in the modern economy, mostly dissipated.  That’s not to say that women don’t desire men for their own sexual gratification, but this leads us to the second weighting of the SMV curves:

2. The extent to which polygamy is tolerated.

      Specifically, any given man’s SMV should be weighted by his relative ability, desire, and permission to monopolize the attention of multiple women.  In a society in which monogamy is the legal and social norm, then each man’s SMV curve carries equal weight in the averaging.  But if a man’ s attractiveness is such that he can command the affections of, say, three women, either serially or simultaneously, then his effective contribution to the SMV average for the duration of this arrangement is thereby tripled.  Likewise, the (mathematically necessary) two uncompetitive men have their SMVs, whatever they might be, multiplied by zero for the averaging purposes, since they are not market players.  Of course, in the by-and-by, if either the well-endowed man or his women tire of the polygamous arrangement, there may be an opportunity for the two remaining men to get back in the game, and the SMV averages must be adjusted accordingly.

   It is a well-established critique of contemporary social arrangements that many women today embrace, if not formal polygamy, then at least a willingness to rotate in and out of the sexual orbits of sufficiently attractive men.  For their part, men may have always been willing to enjoy the affection of multiple women, to the extent they could afford them, although this demand was latent under the pressure of socially-enforced monogamy.  That pressure, while still present when children are at issue, is otherwise quite diminished, and the standard of “affordability” in the monetary sense has been obviated by female economic emancipation.  Notice that, in contrast to the first weighting, this would predict the increase in the area under the male SMV curve rather than a decrease.

With these caveats in mind, then, I would concur with Dr. Kelly’s judgment that the AUCs of the male and female SMV curves are identical.

But I find it somewhat ironic that, confronted with SMV curves that imply (maybe) that men have higher lifetime average attractiveness than do women, feminists* turn to arguing in favor of SMV equality as a first-order principle.  I could point to numerous comment threads here and elsewhere in which they see no problem pairing average men with far-left-tail war-pigs on the grounds that, “Hey, that’s who’ll have you!” ignoring the extent to which, say, de-facto polygamy makes that possible.

UPDATE:  Here is my own Excel graph of the Rayleigh distribution with modal SMVs at 25 and 35 years old for women and men respectively and subtracting the years prior to the onset of puberty (ages 10 and 11 according to Wikipedia).  I hasten to say that there is no theoretical reason why the Rayleigh distribution would apply here except that it seems to be shaped right and has the advantage that the AUCs are mathematically identical.

It occurs to me that one of the implications of these graphs is that the average female at her peak attractiveness has no equal among the average men at any age.  In practice, I would argue that the male SMV variance at any age is higher, so women will have equals among men.  But there are necessarily fewer such men, which is why the competition for them among hypergamously inclined women appears so fierce.  And the rest?

They settle.  Women at their peak attractiveness who accept an average man are betting that 10 – 15 years on, the man is still around.  That strategy is not without risk, but the divorce statistics imply that men tend to be pretty loyal to the women they fall in love with at their peak beauty.

Of course, many women do not settle.  They keep “chasing the alphas” until their own SMV has fallen below the male average.  This strategy is also not without risk:  many men are out of the game at this point, and the average male SMV of those that remain is (in general) much lower given their higher variance.  But I will leave women themselves to testify to the extent this strategy secures their happiness.

* Used here as a pejorative meaning “women I disagree with”.  I have no idea whether, say, Susan Walsh qualifies as a feminist in the philosophical sense.

Lies, Damned Lies, and I-Just-Want-A-Nice-Guy

At my family's urging, I just watched the What Not to Wear episode featuring Denise, the flight attendant. It's pretty clear from the get-go that underneath the nigh clown-face makeup and hair extensions, Denise is an exceptionally beautiful and well-built young woman (and unfortunately, the TLC clips at the link don't include any profile shots highlighting just how well-built). The makeover succeeds in upping the class of her appearance considerably.

But I got mad when she told Stacy and Clinton that all she wanted was to "meet a nice, cute, dork". At some point, these kind of lies become cruel in a way that dangling a piece of candy in front of a child is when you have no intention whatsoever of giving the candy to him.

Then again, for a young woman like Denise, there isn't really a winning answer to that question. I suppose I should feel guilty about creating no-win situations for, um, the particular types of woman she represents. I don't though, probably because my "situations" couldn't be more irrelevant to the way she will actually experience her life. But I am willing to admit that had Denise answered that she "wanted to meet a nice, cute, dork who happens to own his own Cessna Citation," which, I think, is a lot closer to the truth of it, I would dismiss her as a gold-digger.

Christian women should be encouraged to (1) be self-aware, and (2) elevate certain priorities over others (and I should say that neither of these is worthwhile without the other). But otherwise, I don't see much point in asking a woman what she wants. Within fairly narrow parameters, we all know perfectly well what she wants: the same things every other woman wants. These things, to the extent they vary, vary with the wider culture. Inviting women to go on about "nice guys" only serves to mislead us nerdy aspies into misdirecting our energies.

Nod vs. Toss

Via Roissy, a study on head angles:

Our research investigated if looking at the face from different perspectives as a result of the height differential between men and women influenced perceived masculinity or femininity. The research found the way we angle our faces affects our attractiveness to the opposite sex.”

Men, typically taller than women, view a woman’s face from above; and women view men’s faces from below. Through a series of simulations, the research tested whether the angle of view was an important determinant of masculinity/femininity and attractiveness.

The research found that female faces are judged to be more feminine and more attractive when tilted forwards (simulating viewing from above), and less feminine when tilted backwards (simulating viewing from below). Conversely, male faces are judged more masculine when tilted backwards and less masculine when tilted forwards.

Back in the early 80s when I was a freshman in high school, I noticed that some male students, when they greeted people, would give a little toss of their head.  This “reverse nod” (up, then down) was remarkable because it ran counter to my own habit of nodding (down, then up) to people when I greeted them.  I don’t know how it got to be a habit, but it’s probably what I saw the adults around me do, and adults in movies and TV do, rather than something that somebody told me I was supposed to do.

Because the toss was new, and because the upperclassmen did it, I associated it with being “cool”, and tried to emulate it.  I may have had a dim sense of the biomechanics, but I lacked the analytical tools and vocabulary to appreciate what was at stake.  But as much as I practiced the toss in front of a mirror, I almost never remembered to deploy it in an actual social situation, and eventually I gave up.

As I have moved from youth to adulthood, I have observed others using the toss with diminishing frequency, although this could be me just not paying attention anymore.  But it’s easy to see how the study cited above maps onto the implications of the head toss.  The question I have now is, how did everyone else seem to understand the importance of the toss vs. the nod sufficiently to adopt it for themselves?  Why didn’t I get that memo?

Sex Ratios and College

Roissy, with his usual brio, makes an interesting point:

A sex ratio favoring women might have very different effects in Afghanistan than in the US. In cultures where women have little incentive to slut it up, delay marriage, or pop out bastard spawn confident that the government will act as uber beta provider, they may well become more chaste, and pickier about choosing reliable Dad types. But in cultures of free-wheeling sexuality, easy availability of contraceptives and abortion, female economic empowerment, anti-male divorce laws, and disappearance of anti-slut social shaming mechanisms, women may very well respond to a favorable sex ratio by opening their legs for every alpha male to shower five minutes of attention on them, preferring to share the choicest cock with other women rather than monopolizing the ground beef cock of the squabbling male masses.

As I have blogged before, my daughter's ambition is to attend a service academy, wherein the sex ratios run around 3-4 men for every woman. My chauvinism about women in the military notwithstanding, I have encouraged this ambition for the obvious reasons: fully funded education, potential full funding (with salary) for medical school, and a guaranteed job on graduation. But it also seems like an outstanding way of avoiding the girls-gone-wild atmosphere of civilian colleges where women outnumber men.

But is this expectation realistic? I had thought that by their relative scarcity, the female cadets could hold the male cadets to high standards of courtship behavior. As Roissy points out, however, this depends on female morality, itself a function of a lot of structural factors that are not what they once were.

I'm aware of the academies' episodic scandals, but I had previously chalked these up to higher levels of scrutiny, given the political sensitivities surrounding female soldiers, and the fact that the highly structured life at the academies makes all misbehavior a bad bet for the cadets. But let me ask my readers: does anyone know whether these scandals are, in fact, representative? What is the academies' moral environment for a young woman?

I see three possibilities:

• The high behavioral expectations of the female cadets create a superior moral enviornment compared to the civilian schools where women are more numerous;

• The low behavioral expectations of the female cadets create a fetid swamp; or

• Each individual woman uses her high marginal SMV and her own values to create her own personally-designed dating environment.

Thoughts? Evidence, or at least anecdotes, are preferred to more theory.

Gene Simmons on NPR

Most of you have probably already heard this interview that KISS member Gene Simmons gave to Terry Gross on NPR back in 2002. But for those of you who haven't, it's definitely worth the 20 minutes.

Before Justin accuses me of being a reprobate, let me state for the record that I do not endorse to the "Epicurean hedonism" to which Simmons subscribes. But I was nevertheless struck by how intellectually unarmed is modern liberal feminism, as typified by Gross, in the face of such a challenge to its core premises. Simmons quite literally reduces Gross to point-and-sputter. I lost count of the number of times in which she uses the word "obnoxious".

Here is part one of the interview; the other two parts should automatically load in succession.

Since we had discussed the lifestyle of Christian rock musicians last week, I wanted to say, in the context of Simmons' assertion that all rock performers are in it to boost their sex appeal, that the members of Rush seem to be an exception to that generality. I'm not invested in that observation; on the contrary, absent any religious devotion, chastity doesn't make much sense as an individual commitment. (It makes much more sense as an enforced social norm, but that's a discussion for another day.) Yet despite being committed secularists, it appears from the Wikipedia entries that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart all married in their early twenties and stayed married. (Technically, Neil Peart's first wife, who died of cancer in 1998, was common law.) I don't know what kind of . . . compromises were involved in this achievement, but still: pretty impressive.

Movie Dweebs, Then and Now

For all the complaining about the unreality of the typical Seth Rogan or Kevin James movie scenario, wherein a dumpy no-hoper wins the heart of the princess, we should admit that these story lines have emerged only in the last few years.

Oh, yeah, there's Ducky.

Thing is, though, that Jon Cryer's character in Pretty in Pink, like Anthony Michael Hall's character in Sixteen Candles, were comic relief. The audience was never supposed to identify with them as romantic protagonists, and the females whose attentions they won, while certainly beautiful, were frankly ridiculous. So while it's certainly kind of Judd Apatow to pay tribute to John Hughes' work, Apatow and his contemporaries are doing something truly unprecedented.

In contrast, The Ugly Duckly/Cinderella scenario, wherein nerd girl undergoes a metamorphosis, has a long pedigree, from Molly Ringwald all the way to the present:

Obviously, Hollywood cheats the sh!t out of this storyline, too. The only actress that was ever remotely plausible in the ugly duckling role was Rosanna Arquette, and then only just. Few other actresses came close: it was obvious from the beginning that they were beautiful, and their efforts to appear otherwise, pre-metamorphosis, were as convincing as . . . well, as Taylor Swift's.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm not especially interested in complaints about how it's encouraging unrealistic expectations in men (although I will deal with this in the next post). I'm much more interested in explanations as to why this cultural phenomenom is emerging now. Whiskey addressed this question obliquely in two posts last year.

Game we can believe in.

Ferdinand enumerates the principles of game:

• assertiveness – The ability to project your will on the world. The capability to direct situations to your benefit, insert yourself into the center of social interactions, and act on your own volition.

• calmness – The ability to remain unaffected by the emotional storms of those around you. The will to be a pillar of stability in a world of chaos.

• confidence – Complete faith in your ability to navigate the world. An unshakable belief in the righteousness of your actions.

• independence – The willingness to carve your own path through the world, while remaining mindful of those connected to you.

• indifference – The ability to avoid being overly invested in individual outcomes. The foresight to keep your eye on the bigger picture.

• presentability – The ability to groom yourself and look good. The possession of style.

• sociability – The skills to interact with other human beings. The capability to understand, relate to, and engage those around you. The ability to smile when appropriate and not take things too seriously.

With the possible exception of "indifference", I would be surprised if Roissy's critics -- Justin, Trumwill, Sheila, etc. -- would find much to argue with here.

Race or Culture?

Prime, of Beta Revolution, comments:

I didn't mean to say that the writers of [Sons of Anarchy] were instructing us that it was morally reprehensible to be explicitly white in our associations. I think they were just presenting what is true for the majority of us. We don't feel comfortable in exclusively ethnocentric groupings, for ourselves especially, but we also want to see other groups not completely endogamous. What we find natural and praiseworthy is a grouping based on shared principles and outlook. It just so happens that these often turn out heavily majority white, whether it's in our churches, fraternities, or Motorcycle clubs. But when you create an association as an enclave for a particular ethnic group, then you lose some control over what the principles and outlook are for the association, sacrificing these to an inclusiveness which carries with it dysfunctional co-ethnics.

Hard to argue with. Thirty years ago, in the age before video cameras, I was that kid in Belleville often enough, except that I could never make any generalizations about the race of my tormenters. I was everybody's equal-opportunity target. So I'm not inclined to romaticize America's white working class, at least from the perspective of a skinny, awkward geek. More generally, would my vision of community share more in common with, say, a Berber or Assyrian Christian fleeing persecution, or Ditchkins? The answer isn't obvious.

But then I read this post (H.T.: Ferdinand) about present day Memphis (the demographics, for those of you keeping score at home), and I think, so, if race predicts culture, then what difference does it make?

A Subversive Thought, Addressed

Regarding the question from my last post, here, with assists from my commenters, is an effort to resolve the apparent incongruity.

• The premise of the question is flawed. It's not really HBD full-stop vs. root-causes. Rather, HBD is a tool of analysis applied to both cases. For instance, nothing about Human Bio-Diversity requires us to deny that broad social trends -- high immigration, lax social mores, the death of the manufacturing sector -- have worked against the ability of American blacks to find an economically and socially useful role in society. On the contrary, we've been pointing this out for years. But acknowledging HBD does undermine the premise of the political Left: some variant of how racist white folks oppress blacks and make them dysfunctional. (This is in contrast to the radical Left, which asserts that it isn't really dysfunction.) But what was plausible 40 years ago is remarkably less plausible today.

• Likewise, HBD gives us a key for understanding female mate choice and its long-run consequences. The "alpha-beta theory" is often characterized by its adversaries as saying, in the words of Trumwill:

  [M]en who mistreat women are "alpha" types with dominant personalities and a lot of romantic options and that women could avoid being mistreated by coupling with beta types, who have fewer romantic options and more passive personalities.

  Now admittedly, I really do think that something like this is true, on average. But, first, I will acknowledge that actually following this advice would involve real trade-offs, and second, I don't think that women will follow this advice merely because the advice is offered. I think the natural female tendency toward hypergamy was for many thousand years constrained by culture and economics. These impediments have eased, and we are seeing what we are now seeing. I think this is bad, because I think a free society cannot long survive it.

• Similarly flawed is the assumption that HBD, in itself, is being offered as a solution; rather, it's a tool of analysis that helps us sift through policy alternatives. Again, after 40 years of Leftist social policy designed to "fight racism", we've succeeded at almost nothing except perhaps creating a class of resentful, paranoid affirmative-action beneficiaries typified by Michele Obama. Meanwhile, Steve Sailer doesn't say "man the barricades" in response to black poverty. He recommends changing the value of low-skill labor on both the supply side (by reversing the flow of unskilled labor into the U.S.) and the demand side (by using trade policy to revitalize our manufacturing sector).

  Likewise, an understanding of HBD recommends two different but not necessarily contradictory approaches to the problem of beta sexual impoverishment:

  • On the micro level, betas should learn game (the PUA community); and

  • On the macro level, we must reverse the social policies of the last 40 years (social conservatives).

  Personally, I recommend both. I appreciate the criticism that the social conservative program is unlikely, but at least legally and socially enforced monogamy has the advantage of having worked at widely distributing sexual access and, yeah, also sustaining civilization.

• As commenter Justin suggested, the problems have different levels of containability. If by "manning the barricades" you mean agressive policing, stiff sentencing, de-facto segregation, widespread firearm ownership and the Castle Doctrine, we have, in fact, done these things, and we have been rewarded with a drop in black-on-white crime to manageable levels, Lily Burke notwithstanding. So long as we stop doing dumb policies, like enforced integration, or inventing "rights" to vagrancy, we will probably be okay.

  But what can we contain George Sodini? The fact is that we need beta computer and engineering nerds doing what we do if we want our society to function; thus, society needs to socially reward our work, including giving us the opportunity to marry and have families. But while my impression is that most women begin appreciating our virtues by the time they reach their 30s, the fear is that our continued slide into hypergamy will push that age upward and multiply the Sodinis of the world. But other than whine about "misogyny" and guns, I haven't seen a single feminist solution to this problem.

  The world worked in the pre-feminist era. Yes, many women found "Marriage 1.0" oppresive, but it did offer something for everyone and assured maximum buy-in by the majority of males. It may be true that the road home is not politically realizable, but its existence is not fanciful. The same cannot be said with respect to race. There was never, anywhere, at any time, a utopia of racial equality. Nor can there ever be, saith HBD.

• On a more personal level, I think commenter Peter put it well: "Many men in the blogosphere, perhaps especially in the HBD segment, see Sodini as different from themselves in degree rather than in kind." Quite true. I can see myself in Sodini, not in his violence, but in his suffering and disillusion. Those of us who grew up before the age of the internet, and who therefore relied on our mothers for advice about girls, believed that intelligence, conscientiousness, and Gal. 5:22 were qualities that would gain us the favor of women in general and help us secure wives and families in particular. And then, eventually, reality bites.

  This may not have anything to do with HBD directly. I think the personality type of those of us willing to swallow The Red Pill of HBD is also the personality type likely to have endured the disillusion of what really attracts women. Our relations (or lack thereof) with women give us a lower investment in parroting politically correct opinions. Call us highly analytical with a social-skills deficit.

• As commenter PeterW and others pointed out, we didn't conjure the meta-narrative ex nihlo. Sodini himself left a reasonably articulate account of why he would do what he did. Granted, the justification offered by criminals for their crimes is usually more self-serving than objective, but in the case of Sodini, we seem unable to uncover any reason not to accept his claims. Had Sodini been fat, or poor, or stupid, or abusive, his life would not be receiving nearly the sympathy that it has. But Sodini was none of these things. He was a well-compensated professional. He was in excellent physical condition for a man his age. His claim to "nice guy" status was verified by all who knew him. He was exactly what an earlier generation of women would have considered a "good catch". And yet to this generation, he couldn't make himself desirable.

  In contrast, the typical urban criminal brings little but base motives to his work. If you've ever watched the show The First 48, you quickly learned that urban murderers aren't very interesting. They are stupid and depressing. Such ex post root-cause explanations for their actions, whatever their merits, are proferred by pointy-heads in ivory towers, far removed from the reality.

That's my effort to resolve the issue.

Geoffrey Miller on Assortative Living

Spent concerns the ways in which conspicuous consumption serves as modern America's primary method of trait signaling. Geoffrey Miller credibly argues that this method is inefficient, decreases our happiness, and generates negative externalities. Near the end of the book, he looks at ways in which government policy encourages conspicuous consumption, and examines alternatives. The following section deals with themes familiar to the readers of Half Sigma, Steve Sailer, and the old Bobvis blog, but Miller weaves them together in a way that shows genuine insight.

Multiculturalism Versus Local Social Norms

There is a major legal problem with creating and enforcing new social norms in developed nations, and the problem concerns housing law. Humans are still embodied beings who interact mostly with other humans who liver nearby. The social norms and trait-display tactics most favored by the local community heavily influence our behavior. However, through antidiscrimination laws regarding property rental and ownership, many countries unwittingly prohibit the development and diversification of cohesive local norms. For example, the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development prohibits “housing discrimination based on your race color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.” The laws were passed with the best of intentions, but they have toxic side effects on the ability of voluntarily organized communities to create the physical, social, and moral environments that their members want.

There is increasing evidence that communities with a chaotic diversity of social norms do not function very well. Some of this evidence comes from studies of ethnically diverse communities. I mention this evidence not because I think ethnic diversity is bad, but because it is one of the only proxies for social-norm diversity that has been studied so far.

For example, the political scientist Robert Putnam has found that American communities with higher levels of ethnic diversity tend to have lower levels of “social capital” -- trust, altruism, cohesion, and sense of community. He and his colleagues analyzed data from thirty thousand people across forty-one U. S. communities, and found that people who live in communities with higher ethnic diversity (meaning, in the United States, more equal mixtures of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian citizens) tend to have lower

• trust across ethnic groups
• trust within their own ethnic group
• community solidarity and cohesion
• community cooperation
• sense of political empowerment
• confidence in local government and leaders
• voter registration rates
• charity and volunteering
• investment in common goods
• interest in maintaining community facilities
• rates of carpooling
• numbers of friends
• perceived quality of life
• general happiness

These effects remained substantial even after controlling for each individual’s age, sex, education, ethnicity, income, and language, and for each community’s poverty rate, income inequality, crime rate, population density, mobility, and average education. Putnam did not set out to look for these effects; a great advocate of both social capital and diversity, he seems to have been appalled at these results, and published them only reluctantly. Many other researchers have reported similar findings.

I suspect that these corrosive effects of “ethnic diversity” on social capital are not really an effect of ethnicity per se, but of each ethnicity’s having different social norms -- different dialects, values, political attitudes, religions, social assumptions, and systems of etiquette. As Robert Kurzban and his collaborators have shown, ethnicity fades into the background when people feel motivated to cooperate with one another for the common good, based on shared interests and norms. Communities without a coherent set of social norms just don’t feel much like communities at all, so people withdraw from community life into their own families and houses.

Sadly, it has become almost impossible now for like-minded people to arrange to live together in a small community with cohesive social norms. Real norms can be sustained effectively only be selecting who moves in, by praising or punishing those who uphold or violate norms as residents, and by expelling those who repeatedly violate the norms. These are the requirements to sustain the type of cooperation called network reciprocity, in which cooperators form local “network clusters” (communities) in which they help one another. Current laws in most developed countries make network reciprocity almost impossible. Black Muslim property developers cannot set up gated communities that exclude white oppressors. Lesbians who were traumatized by childhood sexual abuse or rape cannot set up male-free zones. Pentecostals cannot exclude Satanists and Wiccans from their neighborhoods. Medical-marijuana users with cancer or glaucoma cannot set up cannabis-friendly zones. Polyamorous swingers cannot exclude monogamous puritans, or vice versa.

So, while modern multicultural communities may be very free at the level of individual lifestyle choice, they are very un-free at the level of allowing people to create and sustain distinctive local community norms and values. This is actually a bad thing, liberal ideologies notwithstanding. It means that the only way to have any influence over who your neighbors are, and how they behave, is to rent or buy at a particular price point, to achieve economic stratification. Antidiscrimination laws apply, de facto, to everything except income, with the result that we have low-income ghettos, working-class tract houses, professional exurbs: a form of assortative living by income, which correlates only moderately with intelligence and conscientiousness.

Moreover, when economic stratification is the only basis for choosing where to lie, wealth becomes reified as the central form of status in every community  the lowest common denominator of human virtue, the only trait-display game in town. Since you end up living next to people who might well respect wildly different intellectual, political, social, and moral values, the only way to compete for status is through conspicuous consumption. Grow a greener lawn, buy a bigger car, add a media room. If a Pentecostal lives next to a polyamorist, the only way they can compete with each other is at the default economic level of wealth display. But if all the Pentecostals lived together, they could establish new social norms that renounce such wealth displays, and compete for status through Bible-quoting, speaking in tongues, and spreading the gospel. And if all the polyamorists lived together, they could compete for status through good conversation, great sex, minimal jealousy, maximal affection, and emotional authenticity. In both cases, their local social norms could rein in runaway consumption, and shift their time and energy to other activities that are more congruent with their most fundamental values.

This idea -- the freedom to live near folks with shared values -- may sound radical to members of the educated Euro-American elite, who tend to take multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance for granted as good things. But it would sound perfectly sensible to almost any of our ancestors from any well-functioning culture in any epoch of history. It’s called choosing your tribe: you have to be able to control who enters your community, and under what conditions they will be exiled. The efficiency and cohesiveness of local social life demands protection against outside threats and internal selfishness. Minimally, this requires that everyone local shares rules of etiquette for avoiding conflict, a common spoken language for resolving conflict, norms governing social, sexual, parental, kin, and economic-exchange relationships, and norms for coordinating group action, especially in emergencies. Strangely, many “communities” in developed nations lack these basic prerequisites for living together. These communities function like computers that have hardware (a physical location and infrastructure) and an operating system (a government, an economic system, and a set of metanorms concerning tolerance and diversity), but no software applications (no specific social norms governing trait display and status seeking in any domains other than wealth).

To a limited degree, people with shared values and lifestyles can sometimes coordinate their movements into particular locations. American gay men often move to San Francisco or New York. Mormons often congregate in Utah. But they are always mixed up with others hostile to their values; they must rub elbows with homophobes or atheists, and they cannot do anything about it. Under some special circumstances, people can create co-living communities with a limited set of shared rules that constrain runaway consumerism: college fraternities and sororities, communes, cooperative housing, condominium governing by internal rules and managerial boards, gated communities with restrictive covenants. However, the antidiscrimination laws still apply -- these co-living systems still cannot legally select or expel members on the basis of sexual orientation or religion, which doesn’t help gay men or Mormons create their own communities, and it still leaves wealth display as the default basis for social status.

So governments should give people the freedom to create local housing communities with the power to sustain their own social norms, as long as a few basic human rights are respected. Adults must be free to move away from a community they don’t like. The punishment for violating social norms must not exceed temporary ostracism or permanent exile. As John Stuart Mill argued, children must not be subject to abuse that is permanently physically or mentally disabling (such as, arguably, circumcision, clitoridectomy, religious indoctrination, or anorexia-inducing ballet lessons). Clearly, it is hard to draw the line between normal acculturation and disabling child abuse, but that has always been true, and I can’t offer a panacea. Civilization progresses in part through people arguing about these issues and reaching the most enlightened, provisional, pragmatic consensus that they can achieve within their culture. At any rate, the government still has a crucial role to play in protecting the oppressed or vulnerable from the tyranny of the majority, even within the most radical of the local communities. However, if the local majority cannot impose some distinctive social norms on our forms of trait signaling, conspicuous consumption will remain the only game in town.

I will make a couple of comments. First, Miller's "educated Euro-American elite" -- in which Miller himself is a member in good standing -- is well-served by our current assortative housing patterns. Beyond a certain price point, "diversity" costs nothing: the interaction of zoning and finance means that nobody able to afford a large house in "good school district" full of other large houses will rank low on the social traits that make for bad neighbors. These houses may strain the budgets of the middle and upper middle classes, but not of the elites. And at higher thresholds, our elite is remarkable in its social uniformity. Its members, regardless of race, came from the same social background, went to the same Ivy League schools, and hold the same values. They have no interest in polyamory and Mormonism. They are already surrounded by exactly the people with whom they would freely choose to associate. Extending assortative opportunity to the middle class gives them no benefit.

It would, however, carry a heavy psychic burden on their own moral vanity. Miller is naive, or pretends to be, about what assortative neighborhoods would look like down the income scale. Outside of, say, Idaho, the social taboo against overt racial discrimination would prevent race-exclusive neighborhoods -- at first. But the imposition of middle-class behavioral norms would have -- wait for it -- a disparate impact on non-Asian minorities. Kind of like how the young black male character on MTV's Real World always got chucked mid-season: it was never because of his race but because of his behavior . . . which correlated with his race.

For an idea of how intolerable this would be to our "educated Euro-American elite", consider poor Huntingdon Valley Swim Club. Their half-hearted effort to enforce behavioral norms at a private club -- in full compliance with the law -- has generated outraged commentary across the entire country for a couple of weeks. Miller's voice in defense of Huntingdon Valley has been conspicuously absent.

Geoffrey Miller on Male Agression and Female Conformity

From Spent: Evolution and Consumer Behavior:

Highly agreeable people want to get along with everyone, so they tend to be conformists, whether with respect to peer-group opinions, fashions, or product choices. Conversely, anti-conformity can signal dominance, assertiveness, and low agreeableness.

To test the idea that people use conformity strategically to signal agreeableness, Vladas Griskevicius and his colleagues ran another “mating prime” study. They expected a sex difference, because women have a stronger preference than men do for mates who display assertiveness, dominance, leadership, and risk taking. So, mating primed males may try to display these lower-agreeableness traits through conspicuous anti-conformity  by resisting and rebelling against peer influence. On the other hand, mating-primed females may try to display their higher-agreeableness traits (kindness, empathy, social networking ability) through conspicuous conformity to peer influence.

Subjects were randomly assigned to one of three priming conditions. In the mating-prime condition, they read a romantically arousing story about being on a vacation with friends, meeting and spending the day with a highly desirable person of the opposite sex, and kissing passionately on a moonlit beach. In the “threat prime,” they read a frightening story about an intruder breaking and entering when they were home alone at night. In the “neutral prime,” they read a happy story about going to a much-anticipated live music event with a same-sex friend. After experiencing one of these primes, the subjects were shown various artistic images. They were told that all three of their peers gave either positive or negative ratings to each of the images, and then they gave their own ratings. Their level of agreement with the peers indicated their degree of conformity.

As predicted Griskevicius found that mating-primed men showed less conformity than in the threat or neutral conditions, whereas mating-primed women showed more conformity. These mating-prime effects were modulated an a fascinating way by the direction of the peer evaluations. If all the peers rated a particular artistic image positively, mating-primed men showed neither conformity nor anti-conformity; they just followed their previously measured aesthetic tastes. But if all the peers rated a particular artistic image negatively, mating-primed men showed strong anti-conformity (and thus higher openness) by rating the image much more positively. However, mating-primed women showed stronger conformity if all their female peers rated the artistic image positively, and neither conformity nor anti-conformity if their peers rated the image negatively. It looks as though each sex wants to act “positive” in their aesthetic ratings, but the males prefer to act positive most strongly when all the other males act negative, whereas the females prefer to act positive most strongly when all the other females are also positive. Conformity interacts with positivity in the strategic signaling of this personality trait. (By contrast, the threat prime concerning the home intruder led both sexes equally to show higher conformity in their ratings of the artisit images, as if a self-protection motive were favoring group-mindedness.)

In a follow-up study, Griskevicius discovered a further nuance in human self-presentation: the sex-specific effects of the mating prime on conformity are influenced by whether a person’s judgment concerns subjective taste or objective fact. Mating-primed males show especially strong nonconformity when they make subjective judgments about which consumer product they would prefer (a Mercedes or BMW luxury car, a Ferrari or Lamborghini sports car), but they switch to showing very high conformity when they are asked objective knowledge questions (is it more expensive to live in New York or San Francisco? Which airline has more on-time arrivals, Southwest or America West?). So mating-primed men want to stand out from the crown when it comes to having distinctive taste, but they rely on peer opinion to avoid factual errors. On the other hand, mating primed females show strong conformity when making the subjective judgments, but they show neither conformity nor anti-conformity when answering the objective questions.

Thus, men seem especially keen to show off their assertiveness and independence through their anti-conformity when they want to impress a woman, as long as the anti-conformity doesn’t make them look more negative and closed-minded than their rivals, and doesn’t lead them to make an embarrassing factual error. Women are keen to show off their agreeableness through conformity when they want to impress a man, especially when they’re conforming to a positive, open-minded judgment. At least in these experiments, women were less influenced than men by peer opinion when answering factual questions.

Novaseeker on Alpha-Beta Theory

Novaseeker writes of the danger taking the alpha-beta paradigm a bridge too far:

Some of the young men who have been exposed to PUA ideas seem to have convinced themselves that no women are capable of loving anyone but an extreme “alpha” male, and that therefore any system which pairs “beta” males together with women is worthless – because they're convinced that no women will ever love, want, or be happy with any beta male, and that the sex and love would be fake, false and worthless. It follows from this perspective that any “beta” male who does not have “Game” is far better off with porn and masturbation than he is with women, whom, it is assumed, are simply naturally incapable of loving a man like him. This is an unfortunate example of what happens when certain general trends are absolutized and calcified into an unrealistically hardened model.

While there is a grain of truth that in a more “open” system, such as the one we have today, women tend to “drift up” towards the top men, in no way is this absolute, fixed, or inevitable. Not all women are slutting their way through their 20s hopping from one alpha bed to the next – but the ones who are doing that are certainly overrepresented in the bar and club scene. Outside that scene, there are plenty of women who only sleep with men in relationships, and plenty who have serial relationships with “beta” men, and end up happily married to one. Women are not monolithic, once you get outside certain settings where they tend to be more similar to each other. Yes, women tend to prefer men who are masculine rather than men who are passive doormats, but this in no way means that all women are entering short term relationships with “alpha” men.

It deeply concerns me that the worldview, and in particular the view of women in general, of some of these young men is being formed based on a set of rules and assumptions that apply to the kind of young women who hang out in bars and clubs, and the priorities and assumptions of these women. PUA's assumptions are as good as it goes for that setting, where the goal is simply getting laid. They are effective in that kind of effort. They are not very good for projecting out to society as a whole in a general, hardened way.

Megan on the Israeli Lobby

An excellent, thoughtful post:

I share the discomfort with noting the obvious fact that Jewish Americans, like every other hyphenated-american, actively seek the benefit of their ethnic compatriots by influencing US policy. Other hyphenated Americans don't have the same history of accusations that they are engaged in a virulent conspiracy to run the world for their benefit, and thus we have no need to pretend that all the Turks just happen to take a different position on the Armenian genocide than all the Armenians do--nay, not even the Turks and Armenians themselves bother to claim this . . . .

But though I understand why statements like this have to be made very carefully, if at all, the strenuous efforts to avoid making them have become cancerous. The reluctance to state the obvious allows Israel's partisans to duck the undeniable fact that AIPAC and so forth do actively attempt to influence American policy, and frequently succeed. Questions about whether this is really best for America, or the world, can be countered with more-or-less sly insinuations of anti-semitism. In part because almost the only people who will state the obvious are looney-tunes anti-semites who think that there's a Jewish conspiracy, rather than . . . Jews acting boringly just like every other ethnic group to ever hit our shores. Or Arabs with tin ears who come off as mostly mad because they're way behind in the ethnic lobbying sweepstakes.

It will not do my career much good to say it, but here goes. America has an influential Israel lobby in large part because of ethnic affinity. Not just Jewish ethnic affinity, I hasten to point out. Yes, we have a large number of Jewish people--many more than we have Arabs. And those Jewish people mostly strongly identify with Israel in the conflict . . . .

But America also has an influential Israel lobby because it has a much larger group of people who identify, quasi-ethnically, with Israel: evangelical Christians who think of themselves as in some way descended from the ten tribes of Israel. [As noted in the comments, these are Mormons, not evangelicals. - Φ] (Not to mention the lunatic fringe who hopes that the Israelis can in some way hasten the End Times. [These are the evangelicals, sadly. - Φ] As if God could be influenced by a sufficiently robust foreign policy.)

And then most of the rest of us, because almost all Americans see Israelis as sharing a common European cultural heritage that the Palestinians do not. (I believe Al-Qaeda agrees.)

Such identifications are, I'd wager, rooted deeply in our genes--our selfish alleles want to advance alleles more similar to them, which is why we tend to side with our family against our nation, our nation against foreigners, and foreigners against sabre-toothed tigers. Those ties are not all-powerful, of course, which is why mothers don't let their children kill all the other children on the block. But they are often decisive in complicated situations like the one in Gaza.

So we are the Israel lobby, to a greater or a lesser extent--all Americans who think of themselves as more like the Israelis than the Palestinians.

Read the whole thing. Megan, unfortunately, is pretty sanguine about how multicultural immigration has turned our foreign policy into little more than special interest pork. But still and all the most balanced treatment I've read on this subject.

UPDATE: For the record, and in the context of the Walt thought experiment she quotes, I should acknowledge that there is more than just affinity -- the Jews are like us, their adversaries not like us -- at work here. Israel benefits from the widespread perception that we share the same enemies, going back to at least the Beirut barracks bombing if not before, and including at a minimum Achille Lauro, Berlin, Lockerbie, Aden, and 9/11. Yes, I know: different groups with different grievences, perhaps, but all Moslems. Meanwhile, it very difficult to imagine circumstances in which Jews would murder my family and me for being Christians.

Facebook, wherein Φ triumphs at long last in the high school status competition

I first joined Facebook while a university instructor. I had read about it in the Washington Post, via a blog post (I forget whose) that characterized the site, as, well, a little creepy. It was strictly a college ghetto back then, and I was mainly interested to see how many of my students would be so foolish as to put personal information about themselves on the internet in front of God and everybody.

Quite a few, as it turned out. I was an "early adopter" among the faculty and received a few "friend requests" from my students, but there really didn't seem to be much there to keep a grownup interested.

Flash forward to last summer. A couple of old high school classmates alerted me to the fact that Facebook had since gone mainstream, and that the graduates of our small Christian high school had established a substantial network.

Facebook "friending" is very viral. By friending those initial couple of people, my name appeared on the "Walls" of all the people on their "friends list." (If you don't know what the Facebook "Wall" is, you pretty much have to join to understand it.) Anyway, I began receiving a steady stream of messages and/or friend requests that only died down close to saturation. (Like I said, it was a small school.)

High School. What can I say about it? Well, it's not like the movie, obviously, but because it was small, and Christian, it wasn't the dystopian social hell that it would have been at a public school. On the contrary, I had a great time. I found there an unprecedented (for me) level of social acceptance that would not be again matched until after I was married. And this despite the fact that my religious background (mainline Presbyterian) was different from the school's (fundamentalist).

But it was high school. Religion did indeed moderate behavior, and size kept us relatively unified as a student body, but there were still cliques, status hierarchies, and the like. Even here I should be hesitant to complain. I was an elected member of student government, for instance; I was pretty tight with a couple of the acknowledged alpha males; and I was the school's recognized "math brain". But the fact is that these don't translate into much in the way of female attention (or, to be fair, not enough to compensate for whatever other drawbacks I possessed).

How to handle all this on Facebook?

Facebook friending rules. Maybe Facebook should have called it something else, but "friend request" sounds . . . I don't know, needy maybe, or a little creepy if the recipient doesn't know or sufficiently like the sender. So to manage this psychology, I had a few simple rules (because Φ is hyperanalytical that way). First, while I would approve "friend requests" from anyone who initiated, I would try to never myself initiate a request to anyone whose high school status exceeded my own. Second, I limited my friend requests to people with whom I already had established an email correspondence. Third, I limit my friend requests to people with whom we shared no common friends, on the grounds that they know how to find me if they want me.

And, finally, I never sent a friend request to a woman. If I had something specific to communicate to her, I would send a Facebook message, but I would always leave the friending for her to initiate.

It wasn't long before, with no prior message from me, I received a friend request from one of them. One of The Clique. A certified Alpha Girl. A member of The Trio of girls with whom I associate all my feelings of being locked out of the high school dating scene (or what passed for it). A girl who, twenty-odd years later, is still really attractive

A couple of months later, the second one rolled in. Φ's social momentum starts to build.

[delusional]

Finally, last weekend, I bagged her. The queen mother of the trio. The genesis of Φ's twenty-three-year bout with misogyny. From my fortress of solitude I had waited her out! Now, in desperation, she has finally come with what remains of her fading powers to bestow the social recognition Φ deserves!

[\delusional]

Something like that, anyway.

No Country for Old Men

I saw No Country for Old Men on DVD. A few thoughts:

First, don't watch it. Yeah, it's a good movie, but it's depressing as hell. Spare yourself the assault on your mental health.

As a technical matter, Josh Broslin is a little old for his role. If his character was 18 years old on enlisting in the army in 1965, he would be only 33 by 1980, not the 39 that Broslin was when the movie was released.

I can't help comparing the movie to A Simple Plan, another movie about how the discovery of a suitcase full of money can ruin your happiness. But there are differences:

In A Simple Plan, Bill Paxton and his pretty, younger (by nine years) wife (Bridget Fonda) are happily living a lower-middle-class life (he's a clerk, she's a librarian) when he discovers the suitcase in a plane wreck. As their efforts to conceal the discovery lead them to ever-greater acts of evil, it is her greed and ambition as much as his that spur them on.

In No Country, Josh Broslin and his pretty, younger (by eight years) wife (Kelly Macdonald) are living a lower-working-class life -- in a trailer park no less -- when he discovers the suitcase at the site of a drug deal gone horrifically bad. "Happy" would be exaggerating their level of contentment with their circumstances; "resigned" might be more appropriate. But they love each other in a quiet been-married-awhile way, which is where, as a man, I would assert that true happiness lies. Interestingly, although she has less, the prospect of great wealth delights her less. Indeed, her immediate reaction is fear for her husband's safety and loosing the little she has.

Obviously, between the two, I would rather be married to Kelly Macdonald's character, but I'm mainly curious about which, if either, character could be generalized as representative.

Φ is a Jeans Snob

Ever since Mrs. Φ introduced them to me, I have been a fan of Gap jeans.

After a lifetime of seeking the balance between a too-tight ass and a too-loose waist, here was a pair of relaxed-fit jeans that actually, you know, fit.

About a year ago, I put out that I was down to only one pair of jeans, having worn the knees out of my other pair. But I was nonplussed the other day when Mrs. Φ called me from, um, K-mart.

"I want to get a couple of pairs of jeans for you to try on," she said.

"But . . . I thought I liked Gap jeans," I replied skeptically.

"Yeah, but . . . these jeans are on sale for $8.99," she informed me. "Gap jeans are $30 when they're on sale."

So she brought home the K-mart jeans for me to try on. I surveyed myself in the mirror and said, "Sweetheart, I love you very much, and I know that as a married man my evolutionary fitness doesn't depend anymore on how I look.

"But I don't think I'm ever going to be . . . that married."

"HA!" scoffed Mrs. Φ. "Listen to you! This is exactly what you wore before I came along to clean up your sartorial act."

She had a point. But I liken this to how I started buying my own cheese after I left home. Sure, as a kid, Kraft Singles processed cheese food was fine. But after I started eating real cheese, I could never go back.

"Honey, I promise that, when we're poor, I'll wear K-mart jeans with pride. But since I don't get a new pair of jeans except every few years, I'd just as soon pay the extra money."

EPILOGUE: We were getting in the car to go to the pool when Mrs. Φ said, "I need you to stop at the fabric store on the way."

"Um, is that the one next to the K-mart?"

"Yup, that's the one," she replied, and then rolled her eyes at the realization.

She went back inside to get the jeans.

New York Magazine on Adultery

Philip Weiss' article,

"The Affairs of Men", while "fair and balanced" as these things go, isn't terribly original in recycling stories of Europe's more "evolved" attitude towards adultery, nor in pimping Kinsey Institute propaganda as if it was solid research.

But the article's primary shortcoming was in being blind to the obvious: that the Ashley Dupree's must come from somewhere if they are to be made available to the Eliot Spitzer's, and that "somewhere" is at the expense of other men. We can't all keep a mistress; this realization is, to me, the most forceful non-moral argument against the practice, and NY Mag is blind to it.

The Coming Feminist War on Engineering

Via Steve Sailer, this story, and its implications for the future of Science and Engineering in America, is the scariest thing I have seen all year.

On a lighter note, this story (via Juliette Akinyi Ochieng) . . . well, let's just say that Ann Althouse has decended into self-parody.

Why We Blog, Part One: Sex

Anyone reading the last dozen or so posts might conclude that Delenda is a blog obsessed with two topics:

1) Race

2) Sex

That was never the plan. Actually, the plan was never to blog at all, but only link to other stories and posts that I found compelling for one reason or another. Then I really only wanted to blog about the evolution / creation debate. Yet here I am, wrapped around these two topics.

I will address the issue of race another day. Today, I would like to try to explain what motivates the postings on sex. It's easier to start with what doesn't motivate it.

1. You're lonely and bitter.

Nope, sorry. I'm happily married with two children. I've had a reasonably successful career that's paying for a PhD. I have a church and friends and all that.

2. You're a misogynist.

As near as I can tell, for many of its users, "misogynist" = "non-feminist". And I am not a feminist. I do not resent women for their greater freedom, but I have little vested interest in it. I am opposed, in general, to the growth of the central state at the expense of individual and local liberty. I am concerned about the social costs to families and children that the legal and social changes on behalf of a certain kind of careerist woman have wrought. But I do not hate women as a class, nor do I seek to "put them in their place," whatever that means.

3. You're ungrateful.

Over on Bobvis, Kirk poignantly commented:

To me, most of your complaints sound almost like bragging. For example, from your posts about your husband's shoes, I'm made aware of the fact that not only do you have a husband (which many single women pine for), but that he can afford expensive things. Ditto your "I have too much booze," post. Ditto, your "Newsroom outsourcing forced me to become a successful lawyer" posts.

Here, you're obviously bragging about how much better things turned out for you than for Beemus. Although you seem to understand that much, you still manage to turn it into some bizarre complaint.

And maybe it's just because it's getting near Valentine's Day, but the one thing that really stuck with me about this particular post (and it stuck with me all day) is that you're compaining that someone (Beemus) found you desirable.

Me, I don't know what that feels like. I've never felt wanted, or desired, at any point of my life. And I'm 41.

I can't imagine ever complaining about it.

So, to reiterate. You were hot enough in college that you could take your pick of men. You picked one who makes a decent living. After a career in journalism, you're now a successful lawyer.

Maybe you're just unappreciative. Maybe we just come from different worlds. I don't know. But to me your complaints read like a veiled form of bragging.

Even though this comment wasn't directed at me, it made me think. Wow, sometimes I probably DO come across as exceedingly ungrateful for how my life turned out. Especially to someone like Kirk who hasn't had it so good. And especially for someone who, however imperfectly, strives to lead a Christian life, to which gratitude is fairly integral.

But the problem is, gratitude is tough to blog. Rehashing the pain of 13 years ago, that's easy to blog. And the fact is, there was a fair amount of pain along the way to married bliss. But the pain isn't really the point either.

Here is the point:

The truth.

The fact is, I was fed a lot of bull coming along. Much of it well meaning. Much of it by people who honestly didn't know how the world really worked. Stuff like:

Don't worry, God will put someone in your life.

. . . or not.

The right girl will come along.

. . . and in the meantime, nobody really wants you around.

Be nice to people, and people will be nice to you.

. . . and maybe pat you on the head on her way out to sleep with this guy.

Girls want commitment.

. . . but they don't choose commitment.

And so on.

So if you wonder why a blogger like me links to someone like this, the reason is that he manages to capture more truth of the way the world works than all the well meaning pablum listed above. Sure, the knowledge is deployed for dishonorable ends. And fossil fuels can pollute the atmosphere. But they get you out of the dark. And I'm tired of the dark.

And maybe, just maybe . . . if we're honest about all of this, instead of dishonest, we might be able to find a way to bring meaningful ethical principles to bear on how we treat each other. We might be able to answer questions like, what kind of courtesy do we owe each other? How can we spread happiness instead of misery? Even to people that are single. And even if we don't want to date them.

Men, Women, & Moral Universalism

In my latter high school years, I had the opportunity to attend a small private Christian School. One of the non-credit classes mandatory for all students was sex-ed, taught by the high school principal.

You might think that there would be little useful left for a tenth grader to learn about sex, expecially at a religious school, but such was my innocence (okay, ignorance) up to that time that the class did, in fact, clarify a number of the technical details. And before you ask, birth control techniques were discussed, but no condoms were distributed.

In addition to the technical and moral issues of sexuality, we had several lectures on the differences between men and women. And among these differences were those relating to both how we behave sexually and what we value in our dating and marriage partners.

In fairness, I should write carefully here when I describe what I "learned" in this class, because in all honesty I wore pretty heavy ideological blinders at the time. Specifically, one of my dominant paradigms relating to women was their moral superiority, and this was used to filter out a lot of what I heard. Years later, thinking about sex-ed, I was able to recall that, yes, our principal did say X, Y, and Z that agreed with my paradigm and therefore was readily integrated, but he also said P and Q which, had I not filtered it out, would have given me a more nuanced view of reality than the one I actually came away with.

For instance, one of the things the principal said was that women were monogamous, men less so. Put this way, as a generality, with due regard for outliers, I am pretty sure that few people of any politics would argue with the observation. However, given my paradigm, and given that I believed my own moral universalism to be, well, universal, I came away with the conviction that women valued chasity as a virtue; in other words, that they would respond positively to sexual restraint as a character trait, a general pattern of behavior.

This was a very different thing altogether, and whatever its veracity during my principal's generation, it did not, um, hold up well as a generality about the world I experienced after graduation. As so many men in my situation realize to our chagrin, when women say they value something like fidelity in a relationship, what they mean is that they want their men to be faithful to them. Not only does a man's prior promiscuity not bother them, it actually works to their advantage.

This can be tricky to apprehend. Despite their protestations that they want monogamous relationships, what they actually respond to are demonstrations of social status. Now I realize that the factors that buy social status (wealth, power, physicality, charm, etc.) manifest themselves in a variety of ways and are probably context-dependent. It is not my purpose here to comprehensively predict how all these add up in attracting women. But I will insist that, all else being equal, the ability to sexually attract women does constitute proof of status in the eyes of other women.

As moral particularists, women see nothing problematic in their ambition to marry James Bond. "Yes, my love," they say, "you may have spent a life bedding hotties around the world, but now you're mine, and I expect you to give up all that for me."

Consider also their oft-stated desire for kindness. This, too, I learned in high school; this, too, I interpreted as a desire for kindness in the abstract; and this, too, did not long survive contact with the wider world. For here again, when women actually mean is that they want their men to be kind to them; moral particularism. But what they respond to is dominance. Yes, in theory, dominance does not necessarily require harshness, cruelty, or mistreatment. But in practice, the Christian virtue, "blessed are the poor in spirit" is most assuredly NOT dominance. If the meek really do inherit the earth, it will be after all the women have left it.

I should at this point make clear that this post is not an assertion of male moral superiority by virtue of our moral univeralism. On the contrary, I am inclined to think that the differences between men and women have a purpose, whether viewed from an evolutionary or creationist perspective. In general, I am therefore reluctant to cast judgment on these differences. And specifically, I can appreciate the value of, and am indeed grateful for, the particularism of the women in my life: my wife and my mother. They have always been on my side in any outside conflict, indeed, they are more my partisans than I am. I am much more inclined to see misfortune as my own fault, while they are quick to point to the mistakes and malice of others.

But I will say this: in the examples shown above, women may be poorly served by their particularism as they go about the process of finding a mate. Yes, it's possiblethat the rake will domesticate, as it is possible that the tyrant will become gentle. But women need to more honestly evaluate the likelihood that these sudden reversals of character will occur and stick. Because in truth, absent a life-changing religious conversion (and even then), these character changes are seldom so dramatic, and often reverse under the inevitable stresses of life and marriage, and for women to believe otherwise is often an exercise in wishful thinking.

Update: In the comments, Trumwill says:

I'd love to see some numbers.

Here are a couple of scholarly treatments:

"The Social Organization of Sexualty", by Edward O. Laumann, is "the complete findings from America's most comprehensive survey of sexual behavior." Laumann, a professor at the University of Chicago, finds that compared to those who marry as virgins, men are 63 percent more likely and women 76 percent more likely to divorce if they have had sex before marriage.

"Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce", by Joan R. Kahn and Kathryn A. London, Journal of Marriage and the Family,, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), Kahn (University of Maryland, College Park) and London (National Center for Health Statistics) find that individuals who engage in premarital sexual activity are 50 percent more likely to divorce later in life than those who remained abstinent prior to their marriage.

There are also many non-scholarly examinations:

"Not Just Friends", by Shirley Glass. Google's book view doesn't include this particular chapter, but Glass has been quoted elsewhere to the effect that pre-marital sex increases the odds of infidelity.

Christianity Today did a random survey of its subscribers and found that those who had engaged in sex before marriage were more likely to commit adultery than those who had no premarital sexual experience.

Physicians For Life (see finding #9) assert that the research supports a positive correlation between premarital sexual activity and infidelity, but do not offer citiations.

The more-narrow link between pre-marital cohabitation and the likelihood of divorce has also been examined. Among the professional literature:

"Sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting, and married women", by Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer, Journal of Marriage & the Family, v58n1 (Feb 1996): 33-47 ISSN: 0022-2445 Number: 02878128. Forste (Brigham Young University) and Tanfer (University of Washington) find that women that had cohabited before marriage were 3.3 times more likely to have a secondary sex partner after marriage. So I guess men have to consider this factor, too, not just women.

Alfred DeMaris and K. Vaninadha Rao, “Premartial Cohabitation and Marital Instability in the United States: A Reassessment” Journal of Marriage and the Family 54 (1992): 178-190;

Pamela J. Smock, “Cohabitation in the United States” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000)

The upshot is that cohabitation increases the likelihood of divorce, although there are all sorts of confounding SES variables.

Perhaps my readers (all three of you) can point me to other references?