[speakeasy]

Xenocrates drops a heavy hitter intelligently breaking down why marriage as we've known it for thousands of years is going the way of the dodo bird:

Part I
http://xenlogic.blogspot.com/2011/12/imp...art-1.html

Part II
http://xenlogic.blogspot.com/2012/01/imp...art-2.html

Thought some of the fellas here might find it interesting. It really blows my mind how rapid these changes have happened.

[Excelsior]

Very, very good posts. Fascinating to read.

Here are some of my responses regarding the implications of many of Xen's points.

1). Birthrates and Societal Decline

Quoting Xen on birthrates:

Quote:

Whenever education becomes more ubiquitous and consciousnesses are raised in developing countries (especially among women), the nature of the society shifts from a subsistence driven culture (like those based on farming) to a technology driven culture. This means that people will rely less and less on the emergence of children as a core part of their survival and more on social services. Children become less important to subsequent generations as society evolves.

And beyond this comes an inevitable decline. As this society fails to replace itself, it either moves into oblivion or becomes entirely insignificant, with the people who perpetuated and created it now replaced or vastly outnumbered by others of a different sort who maintained higher fertility rates. Their society is the one that will own the future.

Suffice it to say that what we have isn't sustainable. Society cannot persist for long with a declining population-the government and its welfare systems (to which Xen correctly notes that the increasing obsolescence of marriage and growing incompatibility between the sexes is largely, in fact primarily, owed) will not be able to sustain themselves.

What we see is a negative feedback in civilization that works like this:

Populations grows (as we saw, 19th century medical advances cause massive boom during 20th century) --> prosperity grows (quality of life improves, welfare state rises, etc) --> traditional model of family becomes obsolete (women no longer dependent on men-government via welfare state now fills most of their old roles) -->decline in compatibility between sexes and sharp decline in fertility (fewer births, fewer marriages, cheapening of sex, etc-caused by obsolescence of old roles) --> population declines (as mentioned, lower fertility rates) --> prosperity declines (economic hit of sharp population decline) --> government/welfare state declines (population decline = no more money to feed the welfare programs that eroded the traditional model in the first place).

Then we end up back at square one (or closer to it).

A society could avoid the last step via immigration (at least in theory), but if done to the extent needed, that option would still result in the end of that society as we know it-new blood would likely reshape that civilization to a significant extent, and we'd again be back at square one, with the old society out of the picture.

In the presence of an extended and severe population decline (not unlike that which we are seeing now), society will either move down into oblivion/irrelevance or it will embrace new blood (to mitigate its population decline) which will fundamentally change its character and potentially create a whole new civilization.

My theory is that this is where several developed/urban cultures on this planet are heading. More conservative societies are outdoing them in the fertility race. These developed societies, unable to replace themselves due to an inability to maintain positive procreative relations between the modern sexes, will decline. Their place will be usurped by the more vibrant and fertile societies, who will take their place at the top. Then, as they too grow prosperous, they will also decline, likely for many of the same reasons that we will.

Rinse and repeat. Some have theorized that we may have historical precedent for this process in the Ancient Mediterrenean. We may just be rinsing and repeating again ourselves.

2). Inequality-"The Rich Get Richer", or a return to prehistoric mating patterns.

While we await this (in my view, inevitable) decline, I foresee some interesting developments within our modern society.

Xen mentions that a big reason for the decline in marriage rests in the fact that women are now out-earning men, and therefore simply do not need them as much as they once did. The fact is that, as women ascend, they will find fewer men attractive, simply because there will not be as many men available to satisfy their innate hypergamy.

I posit that this will lead to new winners in the mating race: The traditional "Big Men" and the more stereotypical "Alpha Male". The 80-20 rule of female hypergamy as we know it will simply become more exaggerated.

-The Big Men will be the wealthiest men of our society. These are going to be the only men left who women will still be able to "look up to", since they'll be outearning the vast majority of average guys. More women (led by their natural hypergamous inclinations) are going to gravitate to these few men in coming times. As females ascend, these will be the only men left in many cases for them to look up to, and they will be in very high demand.
In other words: The rich are going to get richer.

-The Alpha Males are the "natural" players. Xen mentions them here:

Quote:

While a sufficiently smooth male courter can still woo any female to his delight irrespective of her level of education, such alpha males are few and far between, and they have no interest in marriage. For the rest of the lot, these new breed of women can smell their fear from a mile off. The one thing a woman cannot stand the smell of, is fear coming from a man. They hate it.

We're going to see what I will call a "hypergamous genetic bottleneck" coming up soon. As women ascend, the average man will become less and less appealing to even the average women, and the alpha males (who, with their natural ability to hit her biological switches on demand, offer something different even if they lack money) will see more demand for their time, along with the "Big Men" (who, as I mentioned, have enough money/status to still satisfy female hypergamous instinct).

The vast majority of the male population, of course, will not fit into either of these two categories.

They'll be the losers in this game. As the average man becomes less desirable, the small number of big men and alpha males will become more desirable, widening the gap between the sexual haves and the have nots among men. The soft harems we see today are just going to get larger, in my estimation.

3). The potential slowdown of social change.

Xen mentions the effect of population growth on social change towards the end of the second part of his post:

Quote:

Secondly, because there are more people in the world, there is a propagation of many more ideas that factor into social development. This increases the complexity of society without a corresponding evolution of a construct like marriage. Social change is directly proportional to population growth. The more people there are, the faster and more regularly society changes.

In fact, right at that turning point some 300 years ago, the cognitive evolution of our society progressed in leaps and bounds, changing in 300 years around the world what previously would have taken over a thousand years to change before then. Why? Because we have more people now. If you plot the frequency of social change against population growth over the last 300 years, you will notice a J-curve, where social and population change remained stagnant until the 1800s. There it spiked dramatically with the advent of modern medicine.

Social change speeds up with rapid population increase. In the past two centuries, our world has seen the most rapid population increases it has ever seen. Why?
Modern medicine cut the child mortality rate by well over 90% globally, and double our lifespans. This created a population explosion, even though our fertility rate hadn't climbed significantly in this time span (and, in fact, towards the end of the 19th century, was actually beginning to decline).

This explains the rapid changes we've seen in this time span. But they will not continue.
Our growth rate is due to slow down. Globally, the world's population is actually expected to peak sometime in the middle of this century. Even if this is off, the fact is that the doubling and tripling of our population that we saw within the past 200 years is unlikely to repeat itself (unless we once again double our life expectancies-even then, we can't cut the child mortality rate down much more dramatically, so we'll not recreate that effect again).

What does this mean? I might posit that the rate of modern social change (the same change that has brought us modern liberalism and feminism, as well as all of the 10 factors of decline that Xen mentions) may be in for a slowdown. It feeds on growth, and growth is going to become increasingly more scarce in the coming century, especially in the west.

This brings up another interesting question: if increased growth = speedier and more drastic social change, is it possible that decreased growth/decline = more favorable environment for the growth of conservatism?
That'd be an interesting dynamic to ponder going forward.

That's all I got. Thanks for the link, speak.

[speakeasy]

(01-18-2012 05:17 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:  

In the presence of an extended and severe population decline (not unlike that which we are seeing now), society will either move down into oblivion/irrelevance or it will embrace new blood (to mitigate its population decline) which will fundamentally change its character and potentially create a whole new civilization.

Exactly. Mass immigration would eventually extinguish the pre-existing culture, and those in the present majority don't want to see their culture and way of live displaced, esp when those displacing it are seen as socially problematic. At the heart of it, that's what's really behind all this immigration debate. It's just the human survival instinct at work where you want to see people that look most like you coming out on top.

Quote:

We're going to see what I will call a "hypergamous genetic bottleneck" coming up soon. As women ascend, the average man will become less and less appealing to even the average women, and the alpha males (who, with their natural ability to hit her biological switches on demand, offer something different even if they lack money) will see more demand for their time, along with the "Big Men" (who, as I mentioned, have enough money/status to still satisfy female hypergamous instinct).

The vast majority of the male population, of course, will not fit into either of these two categories.

They'll be the losers in this game. As the average man becomes less desirable, the small number of big men and alpha males will become more desirable, widening the gap between the sexual haves and the have nots among men. The soft harems we see today are just going to get larger, in my estimation.

We're already seeing it. That's why marriage rates are declining fastest in big cities where women earn the most and have the most choice in mates. Although men are portrayed as promiscuous and women as flowers who most want life-long devotion, it's actually women that are causing marriage rates to fall. Men actually want to get married.

Another thing that causes the 80/20 rule of sex is that a woman that is a 5 has a higher sexual marketplace value than a guy that is a 5. At least while she's under 35. I was recently perusing that hookup site Skout that someone mentioned not long ago on another thread. Guys can leave women comments. I've seen obese women on there with thirsty ass dudes leaving them comments. Yet you'd never see the reverse. An average woman thinks she's too good for an average man and is trying to fuck an alpha. Whereas an average guy will gladly fuck average women. So thus you have this situation on dating sites where most average men will have little if any success and there will be 5-10% of dudes absolutely killing it.

But that shit isn't sustainable. Unless we want to start seeing George Sodini massacres every day of the week. For thousands of years, beta men and even omega men were pretty much guaranteed wives, and usually for life prior to women's liberation. I don't know how long such men will put up with alpha harems when brute alpha intimidation has been negated by laws, police and guns. I can't say what the result of that will be, but most men aren't going to take that quietly...unless we become another Japan where men just disappear into an otaku fantasy world of anime, porn and video games. But I just don't see that happening here.

Quote:

This brings up another interesting question: if increased growth = speedier and more drastic social change, is it possible that decreased growth/decline = more favorable environment for the growth of conservatism?

I would say no because liberalism(and I mean that in the liberty sense, not the political sense) is a pandora's box. It's the genie that is not going back in the bottle. Once people have a taste of freedom, it's pretty much irreversible. Take any woman in depths of India or Mali who is practically chained to her husband's will and put her in Western civilization where she is free to pick her own life and she will not return to what she had before. That's why guys here have umpteen threads about what are the last places they can go for traditional women that lie beyond the frontier of feminism. We all know that women's lib is pretty much inevitable in every part of the world. It may still take a few hundred years before it works it's way into the deep dark jungles of Africa and the Amazon where tribal people hold a traditional way of life, but once the nations they live become more economically advanced, those old roles will break down. We're at a point right now where we're still trying to figure out where this thing is going and what role should men and women play in one anothers lives.

[YoungGunner]

(01-19-2012 02:35 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

I don't know how long such men will put up with alpha harems when brute alpha intimidation has been negated by laws, police and guns.

I'm not sure if Alpha intimidation is necessarily hurt by guns and technology, or rather whether modern Alphas are hurt by that kind of technology.

Initially human Alpha males may have been the bigger, physically stronger males, but over time I think the smarter ones who learned how to make weapons, harness fire, hunt stealthily, and eliminate other males survived and had higher fertility rates, redefining the Alpha male. So the "Alpha" shifted from physical strength/intimidation to mental resourcefulness.

I guess what I'm saying is that Alphas who actually needed to defend their harems (ignoring laws/police) would by definition be resourceful/cunning enough to find ways of doing it with modern technology and deception rather than intimidation. Of course, if all the pissed of betas and omegas have access to guns, the Alpha's gonna have to think of a lot more elaborate methods to survive.

[Excelsior]

(01-19-2012 02:35 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

Exactly. Mass immigration would eventually extinguish the pre-existing culture, and those in the present majority don't want to see their culture and way of live displaced, esp when those displacing it are seen as socially problematic. At the heart of it, that's what's really behind all this immigration debate. It's just the human survival instinct at work where you want to see people that look most like you coming out on top.

Precisely.

The only way for the anti-immigration side to really win is to boost their population from within by having more children at home.
Of course, most are unable/unwilling to embrace this solution. In that case, change is coming-it can't be avoided. One way or another, the crap will hit the fan.

Quote:

But that shit isn't sustainable. Unless we want to start seeing George Sodini massacres every day of the week. For thousands of years, beta men and even omega men were pretty much guaranteed wives, and usually for life prior to women's liberation. I don't know how long such men will put up with alpha harems when brute alpha intimidation has been negated by laws, police and guns. I can't say what the result of that will be, but most men aren't going to take that quietly...unless we become another Japan where men just disappear into an otaku fantasy world of anime, porn and video games. But I just don't see that happening here.

Even if the men did go passively, the shit would hit the fan at some point. The average guys are the cogs that keep society going-if they all begin to check out, society suffers. Women (most of whom will, once their prime passes, have been unable to secure one of the few remaining Big Men/Alpha Males) will lose their chances to maintain a relationship (fewer betas to fall back on), and the welfare state (largely funded by the payments of the middle [predominantly beta] class) will take a big hit, likely going out into oblivion. Birth rates will fall further (as they have in Japan) and the society will begin marginalizing itself out slowly.

What we're more likely to see here in the US, though, is Black America writ large. The (rather depressing) modern tale of the African American state in this society is a blueprint for what happens when men are marginalized, made irrelevant and taken out of the picture.
It is not pretty.

Quote:

I would say no because liberalism(and I mean that in the liberty sense, not the political sense) is a pandora's box. It's the genie that is not going back in the bottle. Once people have a taste of freedom, it's pretty much irreversible. Take any woman in depths of India or Mali who is practically chained to her husband's will and put her in Western civilization where she is free to pick her own life and she will not return to what she had before.

This is valid-whatever happens down the road, we're not going to be going back to the "good old days" our grandfathers came up in. Those times are gone forever.

However, the ever-present nature of modern women's lib does not mean that some of its less tolerable, more fervently anti-male parts cannot be undone with time. In fact, I'm fairly certain that they will have to be undone, one way or another, given the unsustainable nature of current trends. Men simply aren't going to continue to put up with things like lifetime alimony, legalized cuckolding and the like forever.

That, and (as I outlined in a guest post for Roosh last year), not all women's lib/feminism is created equal. Some forms are much more hypocritical and hostile to men than others. I do not expect the more hostile forms to take root in every part or even most parts of the world, and the few places where they reside now (mainly the USA and parts of Canada and the UK) are going to have to adapt at some point, for reasons we already mentioned.

Change is inevitably coming, but I don't think that all of it will be uniformly bad. There's hope out there.

[Vitriol]

(01-19-2012 02:35 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

But that shit isn't sustainable. Unless we want to start seeing George Sodini massacres every day of the week. For thousands of years, beta men and even omega men were pretty much guaranteed wives, and usually for life prior to women's liberation. I don't know how long such men will put up with alpha harems when brute alpha intimidation has been negated by laws, police and guns. I can't say what the result of that will be, but most men aren't going to take that quietly...unless we become another Japan where men just disappear into an otaku fantasy world of anime, porn and video games. But I just don't see that happening here.

Actually, I think this is already happening, at least in the short term. American males have more socially acceptable forms of entertainment like television, movies, online video games that can be extremely engrossing. Combine that with the fact that most American males are heavily conditioned to be white knights and you have a perfect recipe for a bunch of dumb, passive, androgynous men-children who really don't know or give a shit what's going on as long as they can kill time in front of a TV or computer.

The spree killer type is actually pretty rare because only the most extreme forms of social ostracism combined with other undiagnosed mental health issues like schizophrenia and depression tend to produce a guy who is literally willing to take some guns and just start blowing motherfuckers away. An average guy on a year long dry spell isn't going to resort to that kind of extreme behavior.

I think something like long-term unemployment and the poverty that it brings will cause much more social unrest than guys not being able to get a nut off for an extended period of time. Although the forced celibacy will definitely cause most men to not shed a tear about women, children, and families dying because they're not invested in that game and have nothing to lose (Roissy pointed this out a long time ago if anyone can find the post).

So the forced celibacy and lack of access to women will cause changes in attitudes, but I doubt it will cause much serial killer behavior from men who are otherwise sane.

[Vitriol]

I'm going to quote the original article again to respond to one of his ten points:

Quote:

08. The digital devaluation of relationships

It is remarkably easier these days to find and hookup with someone on the internet. With the advent of smart phones and tablet computers, finding an empty liasion for a night of hot sex and herpes is literally only a few clicks away. Now that young people are constantly inundated with the emotional trials (and failures) that come with relationships by the media, it is no small wonder that fewer and fewer people want to deal with this sordid part of being human at all.


The previous generation had no choice but to deal with their immediate lover when problems arose. Replacing your lover would normally take awhile — until a new paradigm took off on the internet: Social Networking. Now with people's ridiculously lengthy list of friends (half of whom they've never met, but they look cute) there are many more available options for rebounding after a failed relationship. All you have to do is send off a virtual "poke" to get things started.


Now that the paradigm of Social Networking has become so ubiquitous on the internet, the inevitable engineering for sex made its début. There are now literally hundreds of internet sites online that cater to the need for a quick hook up. Some even help you cheat on your spouse. I'm not kidding. With the power of the internet at one's fingertips, just about anyone can skip straight to the sex. There is no courtship. There's no dating, no dinner and no movie.


If relationships have become this disposable, why would anyone want to bother being in one for the rest of their lives? Women are far more likely to retain this sentiment than men. While there is evidence to suggest that men burn out much of that testosterone by the time they hit 25 (and thus, engender the desire to marry), they tend to lose interest for another reason:

I think he's off the mark on this one. He's definitely exaggerating when he says that just about anyone can skip straight to sex because online dating or hookup sites are common. It's also absurd to say that most people could start a relationship just by "poking" one of their facebook friends. Shit isn't happening THAT fast and THAT easily.

Most of us on this site know that: 1. for most men it really isn't that easy to get laid over the internet (or at least easier and more effective to run old-fashioned real life game) 2. online dating mostly serves as an ego boost for women which causes them to be even more detached from their actual sexual market value. So he's wrong to say that marriage is becoming obsolete because of the ease of online dating, rather he should be saying that online dating is causing women to become even more unrealistic in their already high standards for men, which is having the effect of them opting out of relationships altogether if they can't snag someone who is the equivalent of the alpha male quarterback who pumped and dumped them ten years earlier.

I don't think that online dating has actually caused women to give up the pussy more often or more easily, but certainly has increased their attention whoring and made their standards higher. The seemingly endless number of options that a woman can have by simply making an online profile is causing things to get more difficult for men, but easier for women (even if they're undesirable) because they can choose one guy (or zero) to reply to out of 50 every day. Women are probably also becoming more suspicious of every man if they haven't seen his career, interests, and pictures laid out in a profile somewhere so they can do a criminal background check and get ten of their friends to approve before they go out with him. They're so used to having all of this information available they can take it for granted that they'll know a guy's life story through the internet before even meeting him (which will make her lose interest more quickly and destroy relationships). Every man who they haven't already screened over the internet is a stalker or a child molester.

[speakeasy]

(01-19-2012 08:13 PM)Vitriol Wrote:  

I think he's off the mark on this one. He's definitely exaggerating when he says that just about anyone can skip straight to sex because online dating or hookup sites are common. It's also absurd to say that most people could start a relationship just by "poking" one of their facebook friends. Shit isn't happening THAT fast and THAT easily.

I'd say that's largely not true for men, however much more true for women. And in the context of what he was saying, namely that female economic liberation, hypergamy and greater options plays to the advantage of women, he's right. Yes, if a female poked any of her FB male friends with the intentions of sex or even dating, she can get pretty good results, esp considering how many orbiters half these girls have on there anyway tripping over themselves to "like" everything she post.

Obviously for guys, these things don't work as effectively unless you are in the top 15% of men. Okcupid's blog(which everyone should read because every article of theirs is fascinating and backed up by math and data) proved using their data that women on the site basically consider the average man unattractive. For example, if you showed a picture to men of an average guy he may be rated a 5 by men. Which means okay, neither great nor bad. But woman when asked to rate the same photo, the exact same guy might be a 3 or IOW unattractive. Yet the reverse isn't true. A woman that's perfectly average will still be considered average or even somewhat cute by men. So men find an average woman much more attractive than women find an average man.

Quote:

Most of us on this site know that: 1. for most men it really isn't that easy to get laid over the internet (or at least easier and more effective to run old-fashioned real life game) 2. online dating mostly serves as an ego boost for women which causes them to be even more detached from their actual sexual market value. So he's wrong to say that marriage is becoming obsolete because of the ease of online dating, rather he should be saying that online dating is causing women to become even more unrealistic in their already high standards for men, which is having the effect of them opting out of relationships altogether if they can't snag someone who is the equivalent of the alpha male quarterback who pumped and dumped them ten years earlier.

I think you are ultimately saying the same thing he is. The endless options thing is a major cause. Because these options benefit women more than men. That's why online dating sites are essentially male brothels. Only the top 15% of guys on there have a wide choice or anything approaching the level of choice women have with men online. I've gotten laid on dating sites back when I was using them and even off myspace back when I was on there. But the only successes I had is when women hit me up first. Never laid even one of the girls that I contacted first.

Quote:

I don't think that online dating has actually caused women to give up the pussy more often or more easily, but certainly has increased their attention whoring and made their standards higher. The seemingly endless number of options that a woman can have by simply making an online profile is causing things to get more difficult for men, but easier for women (even if they're undesirable) because they can choose one guy (or zero) to reply to out of 50 every day. Women are probably also becoming more suspicious of every man if they haven't seen his career, interests, and pictures laid out in a profile somewhere so they can do a criminal background check and get ten of their friends to approve before they go out with him. They're so used to having all of this information available they can take it for granted that they'll know a guy's life story through the internet before even meeting him (which will make her lose interest more quickly and destroy relationships). Every man who they haven't already screened over the internet is a stalker or a child molester.

Exactly, online dating has taken away the magic of getting to know someone. Women will look at the dozens of messages flooding their inbox daily and to her they all seem like an endless stream of desperate men. Of course many of them are just normal guys. The kind of stable guys who may make a great father for her future kids. But online dating doesn't encourage women to have this kind of patience. If their vagina isn't tingling from the get go, it's next. Which is why there's now a game industry for men. Because what worked for our fathers isn't working so easy for us.

[Cincinnatus]

(01-19-2012 02:35 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

So the forced celibacy and lack of access to women will cause changes in attitudes, but I doubt it will cause much serial killer behavior from men who are otherwise sane.

I want to strongly agree, maybe even suggest that American males will mostly become Japanese-style omegas entranced more by video games and hentai than by real women and relationships.

However, considering other long-term societal problems and the fact that this is a nation of psychopaths and gun-nuts, spree shootings will probably go through the roof at the very least.

[speakeasy]

^^^ That was actually Vitriol's quote.

[Cincinnatus]

(01-21-2012 03:46 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

^^^ That was actually Vitriol's quote.

My apologies. I would fix it, but the forum doesn't allow for editing more than one hour after posting.