I’m back now, but not sure how soon I’ll have a substantive post out. In the meantime I’ve read some excellent posts by other bloggers.
Alte has two posts which deal with the topic of women’s safety. The first is So… why are women not afraid? where she picks up where we left off discussing violence last week. She makes the inarguable point that from a historical perspective women (and men) are largely free of the risk of violent crime. As a consequence, she suggests that women are left craving the excitement which would normally be a part of their lives:
There are no consequences. There just aren’t. No one is going to hit us, rape us, kidnap us, or murder us. We can do pretty much as we like, and we’re stifled by our very freedom. It’s unnatural. Our bodies and minds aren’t designed for such comfort and safety, and it frustrates us. So we instigate things. We shit-test, we push men around, we beg them to be rough with us in bed, we demand ridiculous things, we wander around town half-naked, we throw fits, we invite trouble, we play, “Let’s you and him fight.” Why not? There’s no risk involved! It’s like watching gladiators on television, dreaming about werewolves, or reading a Victorian novel. It’s harmless fun, meant to satisfy our natural appetite for violent excitement.
I don’t agree with her entire argument, but I think there is at least a kernel of truth to what she is saying. I also think that both men and women tend to romanticize chaotic or end of the world scenarios when the daily grind of worrying about much more real (but mundane) problems like unemployment/layoffs, paying a mortgage, etc. is getting to them.
Alte’s next post on the topic covers Arming your wife. Again, my position is different than hers, but I often enjoy seeing how she goes about making her case.
I might go back to one or both of Alte’s posts in the future, but in the meantime I thought I would point them out for those who haven’t already read them.
Mike at Crime and Federalism has a very powerful post about his father. It adds perspective to a previous post of his: Bipolar Disorder Meets “Eat, Pray, Love”
Badger has a post you might enjoy titled: Two Encounters This week
Captain Capitalism has an interesting chart comparing the relative freedom levels of each of the U.S. states.
What have I missed? I’ll turn this over for DIY linkage. Share your own posts which you think I or my readers would enjoy, or the posts of another blogger.
An interesting post from “Half Sigma”, who is skeptical of “game” the way Roissy (and Mystery, etc.) push it: Real divorce statistics.
[D: Thanks. That looks like a promising link.]
Mike’s post about his father was interesting.
At the time Mike’s father got married, the system at least gave some incentive to being a beta working stiff. So, Mike’s father followed the path of incentives.
Now, the system doesn’t give any incentive at all to being a beta working stiff. Beta working stiffs just get shit on by the system and get no pussy at all. So, Mike himself is just following the path of incentives.
There’s no real difference between the men. With different incentives, people behave differently.
I’ll offer a shameless plug:
Adapting to What Works in Your Marriage
And for the health conscious, Hawaiian Libertarian always has something interesting of note:
Conspiracy Theory Vs. Conspiracy Fact
I’ve got a couple of new posts up…. nothing like the quality socio-cultural commentary observations here, but more personal stuff.
http://theprivateman.wordpress.com
I’ve put up a new blog with a few posts:
http://betasattva.wordpress.com
Are all PUA gurus sex addicts?
You’re such an asshole!
Why women can’t find a man
Being myself
Hi,
Thought of you when I read this. A bit lenghty, but REALLY worth the read. Discussion on women’s natural inclination towards infidelity.
http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/06/rotating-polyandry-and-its-enforcers-part-1/
Okay, Dalrock, you’ve been back at least a day, time to quit goofing around. Here’s an article that is just begging for some commentary- after describing at length an episode of MTV’s Stupid Teenagers, er, I mean, “16 and Pregnant”, the author’s big question is- “How do we get young fathers to be more serious about fatherhood?”
http://blog.chron.com/momhouston/2011/06/16-and-pregnant-recap-pasadena-girl-gets-kicked-out-of-her-house/
Welcome back!
Of course, the most important question for you to address is…
How was the fishing?
Thanks slwerner!
Unfortunately the fishing was pretty poor. We took a charter out on Galveston bay but didn’t catch anything. Only a handful of the people on the charter caught anything, and all of the fish were very small. Little catfish smaller than the ones I can easily catch on the local lake from my kayak, and a few sand trout the size of a small brook trout. The wind was up on the bay which the crew said had pretty much shut down the fish. Still, it was great to get out on the water (as always). It reminds me that I need to get out more on my own lake here.
Our daughter was a trooper on the boat. It was pretty rough for a while and several of the guys next to us were pretty seasick, and she kept asking me if she could eat more of the food that we brought. She also wanted to touch the squid we used for bait (so I let her), and if I hadn’t stopped her she would have picked up the little trout the guy next to us dropped. He was pretty surprised “she isn’t afraid of that, is she?”. Nope.
Anthony makes a really good point – the marital experience is very different in the upper and lower classes.
TOTALLY SPECULATIVE THEORY: However, I wonder if the effect is moderated not by “better” marriages, but by higher-class people cohabiting. Just about every educated white-collar person I know today has cohabited with their long-term partner before getting engaged. If you split after a period of cohabitation, that’s effectively a short-marriage divorce without the lawyers getting involved, and often involves the informal division of leases, dual-acquired personal property and even pets.
The interesting thing is that the people who would most materially benefit from the combined assets of marriage are the ones most likely to divorce, and since they have diminished ability to afford counsel, probably have the most unjust divorces and custody agreements as well.
Flavia,
Roger Devlin is/was legendary in the early manosphere. He was even name-checked in Charlotte Allen’s Weekly Standard article about the game community.
In The Bell Curve they showed that IQ predicts divorce rates quite well. Interestingly almost any other predictor of divorce also tends to correlate strongly with IQ (race, class, education, income, age of marriage, even religious affiliation). This kind of covariance is a statistical nightmare, but most researchers seem to deal with this by pretending that IQ doesn’t exist. I’ve never been able to find any statistics on the probability of divorce I felt very comfortable with. Maybe someone here can help me out though. I’m always on the lookout for good data.
Welcome back!
I think is very likely that upper classes had been raised to evaluate long term benefits/costs from very early on.
So they are more likely to date in the traditional sense to filter the best possible partner and no just for fun/sex. Upper classes have a lot to lose to a divorce they can’t afford the luxury of marrying wrong and remaining unmarried keeps them in lower status among their peers, so once they commit is easier for them to deal with all the issues marriage arise, they picked someone that will have as much to lose in marriage as them (money, status) and someone that probably also think they married the best they can get and is just downhill from them going back to the dating world, not a lot of incentives on getting a divorce, IMO.
[D: What makes this more murky is the fact that IQ is also correlated with traits like altruism, impulse control, future time orientation, etc.]
Question can I steal your post title called: The problem that has no name?
I had the strangest dream with a movie with Nicole Kidman married to James Marsden, two beautiful daughters and cheating on him with every man that arrived to her home (she was a famous painter thus she worked at home) out of a vague sense of unhappiness that she couldn’t understand herself…Funny enough this is the type of movies I’ll hate to watch but I guess the manosphere has gone into my subconscious. I probably will write the script in the near future and I like that title. Don’t ask me how it ends though I have no idea yet, some stories don’t become crystal clear till I start writing them.
[D: I took that title from the book by the woman who started the second wave of feminism. I don’t have any problem with you using it, but her heirs might.]
In The Bell Curve they showed that IQ predicts divorce rates quite well.
That book was published in 1994, so Murray and the late Hermstein were surely working with data that was from the 1980’s or even the 1970’s. That data, as you have shown, is out of date with regard to current culture.
Perhaps a better way to say this would be: “IQ correlates negatively with divorce rates, however, when a high IQ individual is determined to divorce, watch out!”. I would hazard a guess that Gilbert of Eat, Betray, Love is above the median IQ, for example. The exceptions may prove the rule, but those exceptions can be extremely hazardous.
Sorry the fishing wasn’t good. How about taking the child fishing for bluegills/sunnies in some small lake, sometime?
I just put up a new post you might like. It is in the same vein as your post-marital spinsterhood posts.
http://likeinbooks.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/millionaire-matchmaker/
[D: Thanks Paige. I look forward to reading it.]
I didn’t knew about the book…I guess I will try another title. Thanks 🙂
@Dalrock
And IQ correlates with number of children (A.K.A “the future society”). The correlation is strongly negative (even my personal observations confirm it). And Half-Sigma also pointed out that high IQ men have lowest numbers of partners, late time of the first sexual intercourse, and most likely to visit prostitutes.
Self restraint and future time orientation are evolutionary disadvantages in socialist/matrifocal societies.
…Just to saturate my daily shot of malice.
So, Half Sigma is only about 5 years behind Kay Hymowitz on this one.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.html