Harem - Monogamy - Feminism

Posted by Jew from Jersey
26 May 2021

Social change can happen very quickly. Genetic evolution happens very slowly — millions of years slowly in human beings. Genetically, human beings have not changed much in their short history and will not change much for the foreseeable future. What genetic change has occurred in humans took place over a long period of time before history, before religion, before science, and before most of the social changes familiar to us today. Thus, we are at heart still genetically programmed to inhabit a social environment very different from what we see around us or even what we know of from history books. Social change, however desirable, may run against our genetic natures, resulting in backlash to return us to conditions more like those of our distant ancestors. This prehistoric, murky, before-time that makes up 90% of the timeline of our species, we will call here — the harem. The single most significant social change in our history we will call — monogamy, and the backlash against it — feminism.

The following theory is conjecture on my part. Spoiler alert: plots to some Jane Austen novels are revealed.

Harem and Taboo

A harem of women necessarily implies a large number of men who are involuntarily celibate. Each of these men would like to have his own harem, but in reality the only sexual avenue open to him is homosexuality. Male homosexuality is then widespread, but hated, because it represents self-hatred, low status, and weakness. The women of the harem on the other hand all have access to the highest status males who meet all their sexual, material, social, and status needs. The other men, the low-status and non-status ones, are largely invisible to the women. These men provide food and protection and other vital work, but it is done out of the women’s sight and indirectly. The women enjoy the results of this labor as it is redistributed to them by the powerful males.

In the age of monogamy, low-status males have at last gained open access to women. Each low-class male has in effect become the dominant male of his own small tribe. He has given up his pipe dream of having his own harem in exchange for a flesh and blood harem of one. His labor and what he provides from it, however small, is now front and center for his wife, who is tasked with raising a family on it with little outside support. This is true whether or not the wife works outside the home. She has in any case lost access to the far greater material and social resources of the harem and to higher status men, and the only socially acceptable intimacy allowed to her now is with a man whom most other women regard as insignificant, if not repugnant.

This is also why civilization at its root always bans male homosexuality, but not necessarily female homosexuality. Open male homosexuality, even if exercised by only a few men, is reminiscent of the harem and begins again to free up women for monopolization by other men. Note the rather strong language in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Female homosexuality was probably known at the time and was probably frowned upon, but there is no specific prohibition against it. Gossip and coveting are specifically prohibited, but not female homosexuality. And men to this day tend to feel genuinely disgusted by male homosexuality on a physical level, regardless of any moral or religious or ideological objections. Men who make a point of politically and socially supporting homosexual rights also make a point of calling attention to the fact that they personally are not gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). They also studiously avoid the kinds of mock displays of kissing and suggestive homosexual behavior that are easily enacted by women. It represents to men viscerally everything they would lose in a return to the age before monogamy. Women seldom find male homosexuality to be physically repugnant, even if they object to it for ideological reasons. And female homosexuality is never repugnant to anyone.

What women find physically disgusting is sex with men whom they would not freely choose. This represents to women everything they have lost in the age of monogamy. It is not homosexuality that is horrific to women, but prostitution. This is not easily understood by men, who tend to assume that prostitutes are having the time of their lives. Men would sure be happy if women lined up to have sex with them and even paid for the privilege. In reality, prostitutes tend to hate their customers. And there is much about monogamous marriage that is eerily reminiscent of prostitution. In Pride and Prejudice, the character Charlotte Lucas says of Mr. Collins, her husband-to-be: “I am not romantic, you know; I never was. I ask only a comfortable home.” Her friend Elizabeth Bennet is incredulous of Charlotte’s rationalizations. She senses intuitively that a woman will come to hate a recipient of sex that is transactional in nature. Betty Friedan concurs in her book The Feminine Mystique where she describes such arrangements as trapping women in a “comfortable concentration camp.” A large part of Feminism is an attempt not only to shake the foundations of monogamy, but to recreate a sort of bureaucratized simulacrum of the harem.

The Belle Curve

Of course, men compromise in marriage too, at least as far as their dreams are concerned. A man’s harem would ideally include all women, even the less attractive ones. He compromises first by marrying only one woman and again by marrying a less attractive one, if that’s all he can get. A less attractive woman is still a woman and still at least somewhat attractive. But a less attractive man is not attractive at all and is not even perceived as being a man. Herein lies the unequal and ultimately transactional nature of the resulting relations. While most of the ideas presented here are pure conjecture, this phenomenon actually has some evidence to back it up. According to Roy Baumeister, in his speech at the 2007 convention of the American Psychological Association, today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did. Unfortunately, the full text of his speech is no longer available on the APA website.

This asymmetry between men’s and women’s attractiveness to each other is not just a thing of the prehistoric past. Data from OkCupid showing a normal distribution for men’s perceptions of women and a lopsided distribution for women’s perceptions of men was posted by OkCupid-founder Christian Rudder on his blog in 2009. The implications of this were pointed out by Opinionjournal editor James Taranto (The Belle Curve: The average woman has average looks. The average man is unsightly. WSJ March 8, 2013). Rudder has since deleted the original data.

Rather than get into the statistics presented by Baumeister and Rudder, consider the case of Cinderella. Cindy and her ugly stepsisters all want to marry Prince Charming. Other men are so invisible to them that they aren’t even mentioned in the story. The prince is chivalrous because he forgoes a harem and lets other men marry the ugly stepsisters. But he finds the stepsisters at least somewhat desirable. Otherwise, chivalry would not be meritorious. There can be nothing chivalrous in a woman’s behavior. Cinderella has no desire for the coachmen or any of the servants, nor do her stepsisters. Her happy ending is her victory over her stepsisters. It is also a happy ending for the unnamed coachmen and servants, who can now marry the stepsisters. They are the true beneficiaries of the prince’s chivalry. It is not a happy ending for the stepsisters, who are likely on a one-way trip to the fairytale version of the comfortable concentration camp.

But of course the world of men is not divided categorically into princes and coachmen. The point is not that some men are unlovable. The point is that no individual woman sees any man as “slightly” or “somewhat” attractive. Women don’t usually bother rating men from one to ten. Each woman has a shortlist of possible candidates for “the one”, with all other men effectively being “the zeroes.” This is the asymmetric distribution noted in the OkCupid data. But this does not mean that most men are not desired by any women, because each woman imposes her binary split of malekind slightly differently. Some men will be considered “princes” by just about all women. But even the poorest, lamest, ugliest coachman is bound to be seen as a prince by at least one woman somewhere.

Monogamy makes marriage difficult for women because they must search longer to find a desirable man who is still unattached. And any as yet unattached man is less likely to be a desirable one. The result is the disabusal of a girl’s dreams and the embarking on a long and arduous journey of sublimation, maturation, and preparation for the monogamous world. Think of Marianne Dashwood’s ordeal in Sense and Sensibility. Think of the sister in Fiddler on the Roof who says: “We only have one rabbi and he only has one son. Why shouldn’t I want the best?” and her older sister replies “Because, you’re a poor girl from a poor family.” Both sisters eventually do find men they really like who are also within their social grasp. But Motl the tailor and Perchik the revolutionary are obscure men whom it takes additional time and effort to find, and marriage to whom entails a lifetime of hardship. Both girls’ first inclination was to want to marry the rabbi’s son. Significant social, familial, religious, and legal systems working in concert are required to get girls to take their eyes off the most prominent male and get them to look farther afield. The idea is not that a woman should “settle” for a man she is not attracted too, but that she take the time to find a man she does find attractive who is not also the heartthrob for every other girl in town.

You can imagine an alternate ending to the Cinderella story where the stepsisters search the length and breadth of the kingdom and eventually find some obscure coachmen they are just crazy about. And maybe they would be just as happy married to them as to Prince Charming. But that is not the stuff fairy tales are made of, even in the stepsisters own minds. They have in any case been snubbed by Cinderella. And how happy would Cindy’s happy ending really be without the stepsisters there to get snubbed? Cindy wants them to know that she got the one they all wanted first. If the Harem were in existence, she would be the higher-ranked wife and they would be the lower ranked wives. This kind of rivalry between female acquaintances can make finding a husband even more difficult and irrational than it has to be and a monogamous society does well to channel women’s social energies away from it. This is the source of the tradition common in many cultures by which sisters must marry in order of their ages.

Monogamy does not make marriage harder for men. For most men, it makes it easier, because it forces more women to remain in the marriage market for a longer time. For men whom only a small number of women find desirable, this can easily make the difference between whether they will marry at all or not. Think of what Motl and Perchik’s chances of marriage would have been if Tevye’s daughters could have all married the rabbi’s son. Men have preferences too, of course, but almost all their preferences are acceptable to them. They rate women from one to ten, but even a one or a two has her charms. They rate extremely few women zero. They do not require massive social pressure to get them to look elsewhere. Their eyes are constantly looking elsewhere. They don’t all want to marry the same girl. They are too easily distracted by just about any other girl. Note that there is no English phrase “Princess Charming.”

We are forced to conclude that a monogamous society is not necessarily better for any of the women. You can place yourself above it all and say: Look how much better off these women are having their own husbands, instead of all having to share the rabbi’s son or Prince Charming, etc. You can judge and say: It is worthwhile for a woman to expend additional time and effort to find her one and only. But this is not a tradeoff women would voluntarily make if it were up to them. At best, it means a woman must search longer and harder to find an available and desirable man. At worst, she will through haste or miscalculation marry a man she finds undesirable, making herself unhappy, while also taking the man off the marriage market for other women. Jane Austen created the character of Mr. Collins as an exemplar of a man almost no woman could desire, yet poor awkward Mary Bennet actually likes him and awaits his proposal. How unfortunate for her that the non-romantic Charlotte Lucas is more enterprising. But Charlotte soon finds herself trapped within the comfortable concentration camp of Hunsford parsonage. Now, both she and Mary are miserable. Of the three, only Mr. Collins is happy.

Women can be happy in a monogamous society, but only a harem guarantees it. And any chance a woman has of being happy in a monogamous marriage requires that she undergo the difficult process of abjuring feminine rivalry and girlish dreams, and spending a much longer time finding a man who will be hers alone and who will be her whole world. Women will not undergo such a process by themselves. A preponderance of social capital must be brought to bear on them. And even then, some longing for the lost dream remains. Perhaps this is what fairy tales were, and in the age of printing what romance novels became, and in the industrial what age what movies are.

Pimps Up, Ho's Down

Perhaps the closest look we have into the world of the harem in our own time is the subculture of pimps and hos as depicted in books like those of Iceberg Slim and in movies like American Pimp, Pimps Up, Ho's Down, and Pimp Snooky. A whore will typically hate her customers, who work to produce the money, but love her pimp, who redistributes that same money back to her as he sees fit. An explanation is sometimes offered that women give pimps their prostitution earnings because they are incapable of managing their own lives and the pimp serves as a sort of logistical concierge. But the two vital functions the pimp performs are not logistical at all. He dresses, acts, and talks in a way the women find attractive, and he regularly takes the women out in public, showing them off and claiming them as his own. A successful pimp may not have much accounting talent, but a pimp who dressed plainly and did not consort with his prostitutes publicly would not find success. Pimps may seem ridiculous to other men or even to most women, but they are dominant to their women.

An interesting aspect of pimp culture is that hos have no rights at all, except one: the right to choose which pimp to give their customers’ money to. In this right, they enjoy more power than married women, because they can choose to change pimps at any time with no questions asked and no repercussions, in effect perfect no-fault divorce with a guarantee of a new and better man and no loss of status. A monogamous society must severely curtail the option of divorce lest women leave their low-status husbands in pursuit of higher status ones leading to a sort of “soft polygamy.” Limited divorce options are the other side of chivalry. Any woman can be a ho, but most men could never be pimps. If pimps were chivalrous, many unfortunate hos would have to give their earnings to johns.

There is constant rivalry among hos to see which of them gets to be the pimp’s “bottom girl.”, but there is also solidarity. Sometimes hos who share a pimp will actually refer to each other as “wives-in-law.” There is no solidarity among the johns, only shame.

Opinions

Men may fight over a woman, and the fight may be to the death, but it may also be resolved when the woman chooses to leave one man and go to the other. Hence a woman’s opinion is important to men. The fight ends, and assuming both men are still alive, they need not remain enemies. But there is no human basis for a woman keeping a harem of men. So, in a sexual context, the opinions of men mean little to other men. Men will only take each other’s opinions seriously when they are equals not competing for the attentions of women. This is in fact the basis of civilization.

Women do not fight amongst themselves for access to a man, but for relative position within his harem. They need not fight to the death. All their victories are relative victories and all their fights are lifelong fights that can never be fully resolved. Note the biblical prohibition in Leviticus 18:18 against marrying a woman and her sister while the first is still alive. In the Harem, the opinions of women mean a great deal to other women, the opinions of men, even powerful men, not so much. But the opinions of women also mean a great deal to men. Women choose men, while men can only attempt to impress women. Both the pimp and the pickup artist are caricatures of what a woman will find impressive. They dress and jockey to impress the greatest number of women. But women do not dress to impress men, they dress and jockey to impress other women. A monogamous society is less concerned with dressing to impress, it is more concerned with propriety.

In a monogamous society, a woman has only one opinion of any consequence, whom she will marry. Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed by the seriousness exhibited by American women in this regard compared to European women. But however wisely a woman has exercised this choice, she no longer has the option of choosing another man if she meets a better one. And all of her skill and effort at jockeying with other women is now useless, because her position is now tied to the man she has chosen. Her only avenue towards bettering herself is then to invest her skill and effort in building up that man. But even the women who do achieve status through their husbands will have forfeited their own opinions.

Monogamy is sort of like sexual socialism for low-status men. They get something where before they would have gotten nothing, but they must give up their higher aspirations and make do with the little they are given. High-status men in theory are worse off because they have had much taken from them, but in practice they do well because high-status men tend to do well under any system. Women are the goods that are being redistributed, and they are not happy because mostly they are being taken out of competent and shrewd hands and put into crude and slovenly hands. Like farms and factories suddenly taken over by a Communist government, they suddenly become less productive. They are in fact in a form of passive aggressive revolt.

Only in a monogamous society can men be comrades instead of rivals, homosexual lovers, or partners in shame. As a society becomes more monogamous, men’s opinions will matter more. Men’s opinions will also become more rational than they were, not because men are inherently rational, but because their considerations will be less based on sexual jockeying. In his book “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill noted that even the most accomplished of men did not achieve most of their accomplishments until after they were married and settled. Of course all human society is highly irrational, but monogamous societies will tend to be slightly less irrational for this reason. Harems and feminized societies will become more irrational as women’s opinions become more important, not because women are inherently irrational, but because they will be increasingly engaged in lifelong competition of a sexual nature. In other words, they will behave more like the European women described by de Tocqueville and less like the American women of that time. Men’s opinions will become more irrational as well and for the same reason. They will degenerate into caricatures of what they think women will find impressive.

The Return of the Native

In his report of 1965 to the Department of Labor, D.P. Moynihan documented the negative effects welfare programs were having on family formation and described poor black single mothers as being effectively “married to the government”. This kind of marriage has long since jumped the color line. Thirty years later, a different U.S. senator, J.C. Watts, referred to big government Democrats as “poverty pimps.” And it has since jumped the poverty line, too, as women look to the government for more than just sustenance needs. The poster girl for the 2012 Democratic Convention was Sandra Fluke, a middle-class white woman who wanted the government to pay for her birth control. It wasn’t that she or her male sex partners couldn’t afford contraceptives, she just felt indignant at having to pay for them herself and embarrassed at having to ask the men she slept with to chip in. The Democratic nominee won the election, losing the male vote, but more than making up for it with an outsize margin of the female vote. Ms. Fluke got her free pills.

The post-monogamy harem is not just financial: women desire shared husbands of flesh and blood, too. The 1960s saw a lot of attention paid to “groupies”, women who sought sex with rock stars, because at that time it was unusual for women to openly share a sexual partner. The rock stars were effectively acting like a prince charming who insisted on sleeping with all the ugly stepsisters. Similar behavior was observed among commune leaders and gurus. Chivalry was dead. But if this kind of thing is less talked about now, it’s only because it has become far more common and is no longer relegated to the counterculture fringes. It now includes athletes, actors, and even the most minor of fleeting local celebrities. Like all forms of polygamy, this behavior removes large numbers of women from the process of family formation, if not for their entire lives, then at least for their most fertile and desirable years, effectively up until the moment when they are no longer so appealing to celebrity men.

If such a society produces few women who seek to be good wives to worthy if undistinguished men, neither does it produce particularly many worthy men. Men, too, now prepare less for marriage, reverting to more cynical modes of sexual competition and status-jockeying. Some learn “game” and become “players.” Others learn yoga and become “male feminists”. Some stay home and play video games, become “furries,” or “go their own way.” Sometimes such men are admonished to “man up” and do right by women as in the days of old. But there is no concomitant pressure on women to “woman down” and forego their thrills of self-pursuit. Besides, it’s not even clear how many women today want or would know what to do with Motl the tailor for a husband.

Women now face a crisis of “unmarriageable” men. On the heels of being “married to the government”, this dearth of marriageable men was first described in the late 20th century as a crisis affecting poor black women, but it now plagues even the most successful white women. Sociologists like William Julius Wilson ascribed this unmarriageability of men to prison records, lack of employment, etc. But as usual, they confuse cause and effect. Such men have always been present in great numbers. And unless women are going to start sharing a husband, most women will have to marry “unmarriageable” men or else remain single. In the age of monogamy, a woman spent quite a lot of time and effort in her youth seeking out a man whom she found desirable despite his lack of prospects. And this dynamic had a profound effect on the men as well, as captured beautifully in the lyric from Guys and Dolls: “When some lazy slob gets a good steady job... The guy’s only doing it for some doll.”

It is great that instead of orienting their young lives towards finding suitable husbands, women now have the option of pursuing their own careers, hobbies, travel, leisure, and sexual freedom. But none of those things enhance a woman’s marriageability, something that sociologists like Wilson never address. They only ever speak of marriageability as something that relates to men. Perhaps they assume that no woman could ever be unmarriageable, or that what makes a woman marriageable is obviously the same as what makes a man marriageable. It has also been forgotten, what was well understood in Tocqueville and Austen’s time, that marriage takes planning, effort, and preparation early in life. It is not just a matter of happening to find or not happening to find one’s “soulmate.”

Women in Limbo

It should be clear by this point that monogamy is not the property of an individual or even of a couple, but of a society. And a monogamous society can only exist through the constraints it imposes on individuals and couples. These include suppressing male homosexuality, female rivalry, and divorce, while encouraging sublimation, ownership, and propriety. Twenty-first century society imposes none of these restraints. What we have in the West right now is a society that very effectively socializes young men and women into Harem-like mentality and behaviors, without actually re-introducing polygamy as a legal or formal institution.

Women are in fact now being raised to be haremous, only to discover much later in life that the only form of marriage available to them is monogamous marriage, something they are wholly unprepared for. This is in fact quite cruel. In Sense and Sensibility, a monogamous culture forces Marianne Dashwood to understand that she can never marry John Willoughby. This understanding, however bitter, allows her to see that her sister Elinor is not so cold and unfeeling as she previously assumed. At the end of the book, we can almost believe that Marianne could be happy marrying Colonel Brandon, because we see that she is no longer the same young girl who thought Brandon so old and boring. She is still in her teens, but she has somehow grown to the point that she may be capable of loving such a man.

A monogamous society must work very hard to convince young women to make this change. Women’s natural tendencies, just like men’s, are to the harem. Reality will disabuse most men of this option early in life without society lifting a finger. The cold antiseptic sting of women constantly rejecting them will do the work. But to women, even the less attractive among them, the option continues to seem available throughout most of the first half of their lives. It is actually very difficult to convince them otherwise until after it is too late. It’s like asking an addict from birth to go cold turkey. More than mere explanation is required. Today’s Marianne Dashwood would never accept that she cannot marry Willoughby. She would likely either pursue an affair with the married Willoughby, engaging in rivalry with his wife, or else pursue casual sex with a succession of Willoughby look-alikes. None of this would be met with social disapproval and it would be several decades before the thought ever occurred to her that there might more to life than this. Even if she eventually married someone like Colonel Brandon, she would not have undergone the change that would make it possible for her to be happy with him. And she could continue to pursue affairs with Willoughby and his ilk and have the option of no-fault divorce. What we get is a sort of soft polygamy, a devaluation of marriage to the point that fewer men are even interested in it, and women are still unhappy.

I know what you’re thinking: Why put all the burden on women? Why not discipline the Willoughbys instead? It’s a chicken or egg question. Chivalry ended around the same time that Feminism began. But it’s true, Willoughby in the age of Sense and Sensibility would have been ashamed to carry on a clandestine affair with Marianne after his marriage to Miss Grey. As it was, most of polite Devonshire society refused to have anything to do with him merely for leading Marianne on. George Wickham, likewise, in Pride and Prejudice ended up a man without honor. And a solitary but virtuous millionaire like Colonel Brandon or Mr. Darcy might not even be possible today. They’d end up like Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein. These are men whom women dislike anyway. The men you would need to discipline are the kind of men women never want to discipline, like Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, George Clooney, and Frank Sinatra. Willoughby could have a successful public career today leading the feminist lynch mob against the likes of Colonel Brandon or Mr. Collins.

I am not advocating for a return to the mores of Jane Austen’s time. I am only pleading the obvious: that women are less likely to be happy today than at that time or other any time in the past. It’s got to go all one way or all the other. There simply are not enough prince charmings to go around. There never have been and there never will be. Either break women’s dreams when they’re young as one breaks wild horses, teach them to spend their youth searching for a worthy tailor or coachman they can be happy spending the rest of their lives building up, or else free them and let them all marry the same prominent flashy guy with all legal benefits. Today’s hybrid compromise is the worst of both worlds.

A Fish Needs a Bicycle

When Feminists like Betty Friedan first began to give active voice to the smoldering resentment experienced by monogamous women, it was not a return to the Harem that they had in mind. Rather, they thought women should do what men do. Yet, in more than half a century, the extent to which Feminism has made women better off is mostly confined to those ways that approximate the Harem.

While harems make it less likely that low status men will find mates, they guarantee to every woman three things: freedom from material concerns, freedom from transactional sex, and social standing for herself and paternity for her children. Monogamy will on average probably only get her one or two of these things. Feminism has made great strides towards guaranteeing women and their children material abundance regardless of marital status. It has done this by championing the welfare state, by changing divorce law, and by facilitating women’s entry into higher earning professions. And while none of these guarantee women desirable husbands, they have at least made it less likely that women will have to marry undesired husbands or remain with them.

Irina Dunn famously said “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and for all rational purposes this is true. But every other way it is not. Much of what women want from men is not material or sexual, but social: having a husband and a father for their children. This is why women amazingly continue to desire marriage, even as they equal and even surpass men professionally and can pursue extramarital sex with little social opprobrium. On this third and last point, Feminism has failed completely. And it is not for lack of trying. Feminists and their allies have gone to great lengths to undermine the social foundations that support marriage. And in this they have been more successful than they could have possibly dreamed. Women now marry later, are more likely to initiate divorce, and have more lifetime sexual partners and fewer children than ever before. Extramarital sex, abortion, divorce, and single motherhood are now celebrated by mainstream culture as rites of passage. Yet, despite all this social carnage, most women still want to marry at some point in their lives.

So Feminism has moved on to desegregating the higher-status professions in an attempt to bestow upon women themselves the standing they would otherwise seek from men. It is telling which professions Feminists seek women to equal men in, and which they do not. There is great hand-wringing that not enough women are U.S. Senators, Noble Prize recipients, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. It matters not at all that the vast majority of men have no chance of ever attaining these positions either. If only three in a million men have done any of these things, then it is completely unacceptable that only two in a million women have done the same. Meanwhile, professions like miners, mechanics, roustabouts, movers, construction workers, sanitation workers, remain predominantly male, if not exclusively male. Not only that, but these lower-status professions employ far greater numbers of people than the rarified ones and so affect far greater numbers of men and women. But Feminists have never shown the slightest interest in promoting gender equality in the low status professions. Of course, there are female-dominated lower-status professions, too, like childcare, beauty, house cleaning, and medical office support, but Feminists have never shown any more concern over the dearth of male daycare or nail-salon workers than they have in promoting women to get jobs on garbage trucks or oil rigs. Presumably, all such women should just do research science or go into politics.

Feminists are after all still women. And when they talk about “men”, they are not talking about all men, but about the small subset of men that they find impressive. The others occupy the position of animals or machines: not literally invisible such that a woman would bump into one because she couldn’t see him, but for all other intents and purposes, completely invisible. And just as invisible are the professions they work in, the culture they embody, and everything else associated with them.

Of course most women, just like most men, will never attain high-status success through their careers. So the feminist plan to liberate women through high-status careers is doomed for statistical reasons alone. But the failure of Feminism in this regard is guaranteed for still deeper reasons. Even if every last woman did in her turn win the Nobel Prize and become president of the United States, this would neither provide her with a husband nor alleviate her need for one. Simply put, for reasons I trust are clear by this point, high-status makes men more marriageable, it does not make women so. Furthermore, this marriageability-enhancing aspect of status is a major factor behind why men seek it in the first place. This is why, short of outright quotas, the number of women CEOs, senators, etc. will never quite equal the number of men in these positions. It is also why the women who do attain them will generally not derive the same physic benefits from them as men do. Only a woman of the Harem can “have it all.”