Part two is here and part three here.
It's a rare day when James Taranto doesn't write something that is well worth your time but his Valentine's Day piece was so good it shouldn't be missed. He hits on a lot of stuff but the thing that really caught attention all over the web was some important corrective remarks he made on the subject of hypergamy:
The first is that Coontz calls hypergamy a "social ideal". If she were an academic she'd have called it a "social construct". She thinks it is something more like the Twist, a trendy sort of dance that can be replaced by other dances than say, self-preservation, a powerful instinct that will never go away even though some people can, with great effort, bring themselves to die for others.
Most of what Taranto then goes on to say is about that point. But the second one is just as important to understand. Here it is:
All women respond this way. Every single last one, so any woman who tells you differently is lying. If she is sexually faithful to you that is either because she successfully resists acting on the impulse or she doesn't really have the option, which is to say she successfully resists acting on the impulse the same way I successfully resist the impulse to have sex with Norah Jones*. But don't let her tell you she doesn't feel the desire.
It isn't hard to think of the male parallel. You've seen the guy at the restaurant with his girlfriend, who is looking intently at the menu, salt shaker or even a blank spot on the table every time the really hot waitress comes by. He does this because he knows his girlfriend doesn't like it when he is sexually aroused by hot young women.
But it's important to see that they don't really see it quite the same way. From the guy's perspective, he is forcing his eyes elsewhere because he knows how he will react if he looks. As men, we know we are subject to irrational sexual impulses for the simple reason that they are screaming in our ears twenty four hours a day. Most women aren't like that, their sexual impulses are intermittent, so they can easily fool themselves into thinking that human sexual impulses aren't as strong as they really are. So when she sees the hot waitress with the big breasts coming towards them, she expects her boyfriend has a choice about whether or not he will react and she wants him not to react. So when he glances at the waitress's breasts when she bends over, the girlfriend sees that as a choice and it's a threat to her.
And her own instincts are also a threat to her for the very same reasons. That's why women like Stephanie Coontz live in denial about what hypergamy really is. You'll notice that many women treats their own hypergamist tendencies as if they were choices, as in a choice to marry up, as opposed to "guy walks in the room and suddenly she goes twang". She'll tell you she simply prefers certain traits in men as if she had thought about it and made a decision in favour of one type over another. Or she'll lie to you and herself and tell you that, for example, she'd consider dating a man who is shorter than she is and insist that it's just because she's never met one who "really interested her" but it could happen, you know, any day now.
And she'll do contradictory things like imagining a husband in the same terms she thinks about puppies and then dating a string of guys who are more like fully grown Rottweilers and wondering why she never meets Mr. Right. Or she'll fall in love with a guy and them immediately set about "domesticating" him and then their sex life goes to pot because he doesn't do it for her anymore after she succeeds. And then she'll maybe find herself in bed with another guy and have no idea how she got there.
Women don't want us thinking about them as driven by impulses but they are. If you want any kind of successful relationship with a woman, you need to be thinking of these all the time. A whole lot of what she does only makes sense in terms of these irrational impulses.
More to come next week.
* Originally this read "super models" but, thinking about it, I can't think of a single super model who turns my crank. Norah Jones, OTOH, is a dream. Paradoxicaly, a huge part of the thing I have for her is driven by my sense that she has very high moral standards when it comes to sex—that she'd never do such a thing.
It's a rare day when James Taranto doesn't write something that is well worth your time but his Valentine's Day piece was so good it shouldn't be missed. He hits on a lot of stuff but the thing that really caught attention all over the web was some important corrective remarks he made on the subject of hypergamy:
Most important, the problem that female education poses to marriage is a product of female, not male, mate preference—of what Coontz calls "the cultural ideal of hypergamy—that women must marry up."This is worth dwelling on for Stephanie Coontz makes not one, but two huge mistakes and it is important to grasp that Taranto is correcting both but he corrects the second one at a whisper.
That is where Coontz goes badly wrong. Any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that female hypergamy--more broadly defined as the drive to mate with dominant males--is an animal instinct, not a product of human culture, which can only restrain or direct it.
The first is that Coontz calls hypergamy a "social ideal". If she were an academic she'd have called it a "social construct". She thinks it is something more like the Twist, a trendy sort of dance that can be replaced by other dances than say, self-preservation, a powerful instinct that will never go away even though some people can, with great effort, bring themselves to die for others.
Most of what Taranto then goes on to say is about that point. But the second one is just as important to understand. Here it is:
... female hypergamy--more broadly defined as the drive to mate with dominant males ...In case this isn't blunt enough, I'll define it even more broadly,
Female hypergamy: the tendency to get sexually aroused by male status.Hypergamy is an instinct, not a choice. And it's not about marriage, it's about sexual arousal. It's not rational. If you've ever seen a woman put a loving relationship at risk in order to have one night's sex with a dominant male, you'll know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't seen it, you haven't been paying attention. The woman isn't stupid: she doesn't think, "Hey maybe this other guy I'm hooking up with will fall in love with me and we can make babies together". No, she doesn't think at all; the body part in control is not her brain.
All women respond this way. Every single last one, so any woman who tells you differently is lying. If she is sexually faithful to you that is either because she successfully resists acting on the impulse or she doesn't really have the option, which is to say she successfully resists acting on the impulse the same way I successfully resist the impulse to have sex with Norah Jones*. But don't let her tell you she doesn't feel the desire.
It isn't hard to think of the male parallel. You've seen the guy at the restaurant with his girlfriend, who is looking intently at the menu, salt shaker or even a blank spot on the table every time the really hot waitress comes by. He does this because he knows his girlfriend doesn't like it when he is sexually aroused by hot young women.
But it's important to see that they don't really see it quite the same way. From the guy's perspective, he is forcing his eyes elsewhere because he knows how he will react if he looks. As men, we know we are subject to irrational sexual impulses for the simple reason that they are screaming in our ears twenty four hours a day. Most women aren't like that, their sexual impulses are intermittent, so they can easily fool themselves into thinking that human sexual impulses aren't as strong as they really are. So when she sees the hot waitress with the big breasts coming towards them, she expects her boyfriend has a choice about whether or not he will react and she wants him not to react. So when he glances at the waitress's breasts when she bends over, the girlfriend sees that as a choice and it's a threat to her.
And her own instincts are also a threat to her for the very same reasons. That's why women like Stephanie Coontz live in denial about what hypergamy really is. You'll notice that many women treats their own hypergamist tendencies as if they were choices, as in a choice to marry up, as opposed to "guy walks in the room and suddenly she goes twang". She'll tell you she simply prefers certain traits in men as if she had thought about it and made a decision in favour of one type over another. Or she'll lie to you and herself and tell you that, for example, she'd consider dating a man who is shorter than she is and insist that it's just because she's never met one who "really interested her" but it could happen, you know, any day now.
And she'll do contradictory things like imagining a husband in the same terms she thinks about puppies and then dating a string of guys who are more like fully grown Rottweilers and wondering why she never meets Mr. Right. Or she'll fall in love with a guy and them immediately set about "domesticating" him and then their sex life goes to pot because he doesn't do it for her anymore after she succeeds. And then she'll maybe find herself in bed with another guy and have no idea how she got there.
Women don't want us thinking about them as driven by impulses but they are. If you want any kind of successful relationship with a woman, you need to be thinking of these all the time. A whole lot of what she does only makes sense in terms of these irrational impulses.
More to come next week.
* Originally this read "super models" but, thinking about it, I can't think of a single super model who turns my crank. Norah Jones, OTOH, is a dream. Paradoxicaly, a huge part of the thing I have for her is driven by my sense that she has very high moral standards when it comes to sex—that she'd never do such a thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment