Whatever may come of anyone's relationships, I commend Ms Lava for her pronoun choice.

@89. Hunter. WAF is unlikely to be asexual. He makes no claim to be asexual.

@93. AWS. My motivation for stating my different view is maybe not as you imagine it. I celebrate spf's great love. I wish him (?--am copying others re gender) well and certainly hope nothing tests or impugns his love. But I feel that other people who 'just know'--just like people who form ideas about romantic compatibility based on the horoscope--are vulnerable to changes in their partner or set themselves up for heartbreak. Someone can countenance bad treatment, even abuse esp. persistent, selfish cheating, because they 'know' their partner is right for them, that he/she/they will come round. Knowing, just knowing, takes the place of communicating. This concern wouldn't at all, I think, apply to spf. But I want to stress the value of listening and communication, on the assumption that partners are often alien to each other, not on the same page.

Venn, think about the German 'sie' (she/her/them). Even more flexible than 'they'.

@92, please cite something for that ridiculous claim. Actually, don't, as I'm sure it's on par with the evidence that 7+ billion people aren't responsible for climate change
@89, you're being cheeky, but as @92 demonstrates, there do exist men who aren't suitable for obtaining sex, and their randiness could perhaps be insufficient towards overcoming their douchiness. Thus, there exist incels.

@109. Antiserumite. Incels were not loved or taught well enough as children.

@110, No doubt.

@110, are you trying to pathologize a cultural meme?

I sadly wasted a few seconds of my time googling "hypergamy." It does not, as I suspected, mean seeking multiple partners, as other incels (and Dadddy himself) has alleged; it means "the action of marrying a person of a superior caste or class."

Which means it's obviously inaccurate, because most women marry men. Zing!

@113 honest mistake

@113 What you said still makes sense, regardless,

So, yes, zing!

This world view is ridiculous in so many ways. It really is an excuse for certain men to blame women for not being interested in them (as if anyone is obligated to provide sex to anyone else; that's some Handmaid's Tale shit right there) rather than work on their own personalities. The numbers simply don't bear this theory out. There are more women in the world than men, and more gay men than lesbians, so if attraction were indeed economics (which it isn't) it would be women who were left partnerless. If these entitled men were willing to adjust THEIR standards instead of expecting a woman who is young, virginal, beautiful, and without opinions of her own, the numbers are on their side. They simply can't see that viewing women -- sorry, "females" -- as a commodity is what's putting women off. In other words, exactly this: "there do exist men who aren't suitable for obtaining sex, and their randiness could perhaps be insufficient towards overcoming their douchiness." Well said @109!

@93 AWS
Thanks for that! I resonate better with your articulation of it than with Spf85's.

But you didn't address the "nothing could possibly change" part of Spf85's thesis. It was when he rolled THAT out that his claim seemed impossible to me so I posted @72.

Then when @84 he said he got there in "9 hours at a bar...I 'just knew'...within a week", well, I didn't even need to point out that that's not enough time to 'to know [her] well enough that' no matter what f-ing nightmare scenario occurred it would be mental illness and not you having then had imperfect knowledge of her psychologically/personality-wise", since Spf85 said himself that "I know this makes everything I said above probably seem absurd".

"I can sense and feel his thoughts"

It's actually common for couples to know what the other is about to say. We're all connected.

More significantly, what you describe sounds quite truly wonderful. But perhaps because of instead of in spite of that, it seems plausible to me that this iceberg below the water surface (that is, subconsciously) might contain significant amounts of the "NEED...dependence upon/addiction to" I spoke about @81; no offense intended, I think MOST people are as I said "more...in NEED than in love", and I only mention it here because it's a plausible explanation for being, so to speak, more in love than most.

@95 EricaP
"My overall view on this debate is that one can "just know" one will always love the other person, but one can't know that the two of you will remain compatible in any particular way."

My overall view of this debate is that EricaP puts this very well. I still love all the women I loved before but am no longer with.

@97 Registered European
"The "just know" people sound more like religious mystics than anything else."

Yes but I don't see anything necessarily wrong with that.

@100 BiDanFan
I too feel like Spf85's "feeling of certainty" that "nothing could possibly change" isn't just strong compatibility, it's also "good luck" that most others (and I hope never Spf85) need to retroactively retract when people change (as they all do, often apart from each other).

Dadddy @119: I now have a clue, and it's still utter codswallop. There are PLENTY of women out there with abysmal standards.

Hint: The only people who call women "females" are misogynists and Ferenghi. They're equally ugly.

I saw Company in London 2 weeks ago and it was awesome!

George Blagden was amazing- as well as Rosalie Craig and B-way goddess Patti LuPone. Really the whole show was terrific! I can't stop singing the soundtrack!

Dammit, I thought I finally had it out of my head until I read Dan today!

It doesn't feel healthy to use terms which animate incel communities. Google tells me that while hypergamy was originally an academic term, it's common usage now is "in use by the MRA, MGTOW and incel communities".

Perhaps there's truth in the common perception that, in the population, there's some partner-search tendency for:

Women to place relatively higher priority on money/power, and
Men to place relatively higher priority on physical attraction.

But even if true, that does NOT mean it's inherent. It's because patriarchy has oppressed women and denied them equal access to money and power.

Don’t remember the LW mentioned why he was still a virgin so any speculation is more an indication of the minds of those speculating than what any truth might be. Not our brief so please stick with the programme.
Thanks Mr Venn @106. Or is that sarcasm.

Dadddy @119: See @113 about the definition of "hypergamy" (or Google it yourself), and then get back to us on what "empirical fact" you're trying to point out. Please and thanks.

@123 Daddy
1.
I expect that when the word was academic jargon it wasn't misused like the incels do with it; in other words I bet a good academic referred to it as a result, not a cause.
2.
Are you blind to matriarchal societies, or are you telling me that when women have the money and power they are still motivated by a lack of these?

I googled it and saw Hindu mentioned and thought this is way too complex. So what’s the beef now? Dadddy, if I may. Don’t follow the institutionalised troll we have here or you’ll end up in the same ‘ignore’ lane. Maybe if you told us a little about yourself, these sudden eruptions could be smoothed a little. I went to bat for you, keeping you off the list, don’t prove my trust unfounded.

p.s. you're making it difficult not to wonder if your 'masculine energy' woo-woo you previously posted about doesn't come from an unhealthy place.

Congratulations on the hunsky Fan. Fantasy of your choice, may it be realised.

p.p.s. re: "'masculine energy' woo-woo"
That BS was a month or two ago, and I think the word "signifiers" or something was in there.

I don't want to belabor something I don't feel I can articulate because it's primarily intangible, as I've seen I lack the ability to resonate with those who feel they "just know" I am wrong about my own experience.

Comparisons to whether I would know next week's lottery numbers and statements that what I describe is controlling (?!?!?!) demonstrate to me quite clearly that where I'm coming from has just not landed - those kinds of comparisons/descriptions feel in an entirely different universe to me. In fact, being told that unconditionally accepting someone is in any way controlling them (it's in fact the exact, precise opposite of that) feels disturbingly a lot like how Trump says that certain policies will do the exact opposite of what they actually do (expanding Medicare will cut benefits! Cutting taxes for wealthy people is primarily helping poor people! ...I would accept anything this person does! They can do anything and I'd still love them! See how much I'm controlling them?!), but I digress... And that said, the fault may be on me if I've in any way failed to describe something so miserably that I've implied there is anything controlling about it. (sorry for the rant but that was/is in particular a wtf moment for me - if somehow I've spent the time trying to articulate everything I did yesterday and you got "prison" out of it, then I have definitely failed entirely to communicate it.)

I had been intending to raise some points on the role of open mutuality (which I'd say needs to exist for this) and comparisons to the literally brain-expanding effects of psychedelics, and maybe at some point I'll come back to it. I think there's an area of activating untapped components of the brain that may play a role which I haven't touched on at all. But it's feeling increasingly futile to convey my experience, and I also don't want to go overboard trying to sell it or argue it or get needlessly defensive. Just had initially wanted to counter the conclusive, assertive, no-room-for-possibly-being-wrong statement in the original column with an alternative experiential perspective, in case anyone might open their mind to what might exist as a result. Maybe some have; maybe none have. Either way it has been an interesting engagement, so thanks to those who have engaged thoughtfully with me on this!

Spf85, nobody is doubting your connection to your wife. I celebrate it.
For you to suspend critical judgement is lazy as I see it. Fine, after five minutes you decide ‘she’s the one’ and bang, she’s encased in concrete you made. Now for the moment she might be happy there because unconditional love, what if she suddenly gets the urge to crack the concrete open?
This I’ve found something you guys can only dream of line is about control and keeping people As Is.
Even children can act in a way to break the unconditional love a good parent maintains for their child. One can trust, given past behaviour, that one’s partner is not going to suddenly start being an abusive creep.. to say one would still love them if they became an abusive creep, that’s unconditional love. No. Adults need to keep open in their minds that ever relationship could be broken, depending on behaviour.

Dadddy @123: "The fact that women have historically gained access to resources and power through men has been true for as long as there have been humans."

The fact that women are the ones who bear children has been true for as long as there have been humans.

The fact that women are not capable of the same amounts of physical labour as men when they are pregnant and nursing has been true for as long as there have been humans.

Therefore, for some portion of their lives, women are in fact physically dependent upon men to provide for them, while they are doing the (oft disregarded) work of bearing and caring for their children. You can't pretend that this dependence is evidence that women flagrantly use men for their own enrichment. Is pregnancy the "scientific fact" you're referring to?

Gender equality, or steps towards it, have only become possible with the widespread availability of birth control. Without it, there would be no means of avoiding temporary, repeated periods of financial helplessness and therefore dependence. With it, old habits die hard. Wealth as a virtue to be desired in men is so ingrained in most cultures that women who don't care if their partners earn less than they do are subject to ridicule. So valuing financial security in a mate signals conformity to social norms more than it does anything else. Tl:dr, women have sought to gain resources through men because they have had few opportunities otherwise. And it is still the case that women's salaries lag behind men's. Even women who decidedly do not want children are seldom in the position where THEY can support two people, so yes, it's no surprise that close to 20 out of 20 women would prefer a man with a job to one without. This is not gold-digging, it's practicality.

Oh, I understand now, Dadddy @135. Thank you for sharing your vocabulary from the world of 4Chan, to prevent the rest of us from having to directly experience its bile. My understanding is that "hypergamy" means "a word used to pathologise women for having preferences." Correct?

Apologies for inadvertently debunking the wrong misogynist myth.

@133 BiDanFan
"women are not capable of the same amounts of physical labour as men when they are pregnant and nursing"

And men historically exploited this differential in physical strength to establish patriarchy. Then complain when women seek what men took from them.

@131 Spf85
Earlier I stated my belief one can't know the future as it doesn't exist yet. (Even God [if I agreed there was a supreme being] can't know something that doesn't exist to be known.)

Yes, you (and AWS) said a lot of stuff that I didn't voice philosophical objections to, but YOUR assertions about the future simply seem epistemologically impossible.

But maybe that's just to the human mind. Maybe there's some higher plane on which time is not linear and all exists at once, that is only irrational to humans. I do think where there's smoke there's fire; maybe you are onto /something/.

But as you know since you've been good about looking at this from our perspective,
Occam's Razor doesn't encourage us to believe someone knows the unknowable via a higher plane.

Nerd alert - not exactly relevant to the conversation, but I was curious so I did a quick search of "hypergamy" in a database of peer-reviewed social science academic journals (i only read abstracts). It is worth noting that the unit of analysis in all hypergamy studies is couples, not individuals. That is, the concept of hypergamy isn't about female behavior, but about how partnerships work. The term is used today primarily in the sense of "educational hypergamy" (and to some extent age hypergamy). The consensus seems to be that up until the recent past, heterosexual couples in which the male was more highly educated were quite common, but due to the fact that females are now gaining higher levels of education, the trend is more towards educational homogamy. The main exceptions are class hypergamy studies in China and India which find that social systems and issues (e.g. castes, gender imbalance), still result in social-class hypergamous marriage.

Separately, studies on human mating preferences agree that for long-term partnerships, females prioritize social status whereas males prioritize physical appearance, but there is a lack of consensus on whether these preferences predict actual mate choices (that was a much less thorough search, but the consensus on preferences is pretty well established).

@141 Dadddy
"women have (mostly) relied on men to provide, while men have (mostly) relied on women to raise kids. This separation of roles is built into our physical anatomy, wouldn't you agree?"

Division of labor has been based upon anatomy. While women are burdened with pregnancy, in prehistory women when not pregnant women did as much providing (perhaps gathering), as men (perhaps hunting, including large game), so...

"I think it's reasonable to suppose that it's also present, to some extent, in the neuroanatomy of human attraction."

...based upon physical anatomy I think it's reasonable to suppose attraction for BOTH genders WOULD be grounded in providing... (Perhaps not equally: anatomy is probably more key in hunting large game than in gathering.)

...but it's more asymmetrical than that would suggest, owing to that (as I wrote @138) men "historically exploited this differential in physical strength to establish patriarchy. Then complain when women seek what men took from them."

In other words, I think the attraction to money/power you're saying is innate in women, actually results from men's oppression of women.

@139 curious2 - You've raised an important distinction, so here I am, back again on this. I want to note that I don't necessarily expect anyone here to believe that "just knowing" as I've described it exists, necessarily. I have not provided conclusive evidence that it does. I would instead prefer to facilitate merely the open-mindedness that this might exist. Dan's original remarks were too dogmatic, and that's what compelled me initially to create an account and comment. He, nor any commentator here, has conclusive evidence that it does not exist; yet several in the comments have used such matter-of-fact language and tone that in turn read to me as projections of their own individual experiences and the contents of their own individual brains onto what is possible for anyone.

Separately, if I follow correctly, when addressing my assertions about the future, you're likely referring to how I said that nothing could possibly change my acceptance of my wife. To get super technical, yes, if some forces were to somehow gain or exhibit the capability of facilitating such a change of direction, or if we were to discover we're actually in a giant simulation with less free will than previously enjoyed, or if we both were to contract some level of dementia and didn't recognize each other etc., then sure, in that type of way I don't know the future and what such unlikely but technically possible things would mean for my relationship. I acknowledge that and perhaps hadn't yet. Those kinds of factors, in my view, fall outside the realm of what I'm talking about. Perhaps I should have introduced the entire discussion with the caveat that I'm referring to things within our mutual control.

And regarding "a higher plane," whether I'd use that exact language or not, I have genuinely wondered if it's at least related to a previously untapped part of the brain (as I alluded to earlier without explanation). Just an example, but I once was on an exceptionally strong edible in a sensory deprivation float tank, to the point where I hallucinated a little and clearly "expanded my mind." I interpreted as maybe accessing a higher percentage of my brain than I can typically access (though I'm no neuroscientist). During that experience I was thoroughly amazed at how concepts were making sense to me that I could never fully wrap my head around using my normal, sober mind. I believe I most likely accessed parts of my brain (or an amount of it) that is typically unreachable. I suspect that the mutual "energy" (for lack of a better term, but not in the same mystical way this is sometimes used - likely physical, possibly something else but no evidence to think it wouldn't have a physical basis) of a mutual "just knowing" situation - still on the foundation of deeply shared conscious knowledge of each other's deep essence - may activate something, which may explain aspects of how I and others who have reported "just knowing" experiences know that we could not even have conceptualized what we've experienced prior to experiencing it, even if we previously thought we "knew" about some past relationship that didn't work out (which is how I read it when people here are saying they "just knew" about exes).

This probably sounds mystical AF to some, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. I don't assume it goes beyond anything physical. (I don't assume the physical is necessarily the only dimension that exists, but that's just based on respecting the limits of the human mind; I don't concretely believe in anything specific beyond the physical. I am not a religious mystic as someone surmised.)

All of this is just speculative; I don't feel I know how it works. I do know that my brain was not capable of grasping my current situation in the way I now view it before I experienced it, no matter how sure I was previously that something would go on for life (e.g., my first marriage). The color analogy by AWS was probably a good one. Therefore, to use another drug reference, I'm colorblind, and through tripping on mushrooms I have seen colors in ways I normally can't. Prior to ever taking shrooms I could not have grasped the way that colors could look to me, and nobody could have gotten me to see it that way. I would not have been convinced that that specific view of the world was possible for anyone if it had been described for me, but (to come full circle in this comment) I would not have been 100% sure that it was not, either. That's the type of perspective I had hoped and sought to facilitate by commenting on this column - recognize that this just might possibly exist for some people, even if it doesn't align with relatable personal experience.

The hypergamy MRA bullshit could only have been created by antisocial boys isolated and alienated, probably in suburbs. I don't understand at all how it accounts for all the young men in low income areas, in poor neighborhoods, who do in fact get laid rather a lot despite having never had a job nor income nor social status. I've seen it argued that there are all sorts of explanations of what "social status" or "protection" could mean that include things like bad boys, musicians, tough neighborhood guys, nerds, etc until all the explanations seem meaningless. I think it's far more likely that men with social skills who get outside and interact with people in their various communities a lot are more likely to get laid than those who sit at home reading reddit looking for explanations why the hot women they see in public won't fuck them.

And one of the things that annoys me about this idea that women chose mates based on the need for protection, etc, is that it pretends that throughout history individuals generally were out making individual choices about mates- this is not even the case in modern times in traditional society, and even a quick glance at firsthand accounts (letters, diaries and such) not to mention the world of literature and theater, will show that love matches like this were hardly ever the norm anywhere- marriage was almost always based on community/family considerations while love affairs have almost always been limited by social status in the first place- men rarely being allowed to seek women above their station at risk of violence from other men (not women) but having nearly free reign of the women in stations below them. If we are to blame those women for accepting what came down from above, I suppose that's typical.

What has changed in modern times in nontraditional societies is that these social structures have broken down and individuals now have choices, and the reason for this rests upon the ability of people to control (to a certain extent) their reproductive systems. Yes, this means that some men don't get laid because their families/communities no longer assign them brides, and the wealthier among them can no longer go fuck the peasantry or the slave as he likes. It likewise means some women are lonely as well, but they don't go about blaming feminism or neuroanatomy or some such nonsense.

The most annoying thing to me about all the MRA incel crap is that they want the sort of sexual liberation that comes from birth control and feminism (including women who enjoy sex and the ability to have sex without becoming a father) without the natural side effect of women being free to reject men as well which is why they are increasingly obsessed with monogamy, controlling the women in their relationships and changing the laws of consent.

Also no one fucking knows about prehistory- there is no consensus even in one location at one time period much less among all the human populations all over the world for thousands of years- it's exactly this obscurity that allows people to project whatever bullshit claim they want onto "human nature". We do know quite a bit about societies around the world for the past few thousands of years after humans settled down into civilizations, and the idea of men providing while women raised kids (division of labor as going out to work or staying home) is a pretty modern construction, and a capitalist and Western one at that. Women have always worked, most of human history did not include wage labor as a separate thing from domestic labor, and the rearing of children was done within families and communities, not from individual couples- that's entirely the point of the construction of marriage as something that unites families/communities, not individuals necessarily, because so many people- men and women- needed so much cooperation to get on, due to pregnancy/nursing, childrearing and also elder care. Thinking of this in terms as one supporting the other is a modern way of considering things, another projection of your own MRA bullshit.

(meant to say changing the "legal age" of consent, not "laws of")

Thank you, Scum @140, for providing the context that Dadddy declined to give in response to Fubar @125's request. Yes, women tend to choose mates with a somewhat higher income and educational level than their own. (Just as men tend to choose mates who are somewhat more attractive than themselves.) This is not new; this corresponds to the respective values society has placed on each gender. It's a shame Dadddy had to discredit his point by couching it in incel terminology. I would still dispute it in part: Because men have relatively higher incomes, and until recently, education levels than women, a woman who chooses a spouse whose income is 16% higher than her own has really just picked someone at the same level as herself relative to each of their genders.

Now, why this phenomenon is an indictment of "human females" as a whole, and more pertinently what it has to do with WAH's issue, eludes me, and perhaps Dadddy can clarify. Are you suggesting that WAH is a virgin because there are no "females" out there with less income or education than he has? Bear in mind that "hypergamy" would seem to refer to one's choice of whom to marry, not whom to bonk, which we all know are only occasionally the same person. Or are you suggesting that WAH is a virgin because he has consistently approached only women who are, in more commonly understood terms, "out of his league"? If so, the solution seems obvious: be more realistic about the sort of woman who would be interested.

@143 Spf85
"expanded my mind"

With that, now that I know you better, I'm a bit less skeptical. (I was writing here just last week about the potential of altered states to do more good than harm to one's potential.)

"I'm colorblind, and through tripping on mushrooms I have seen colors in ways I normally can't"

Very interesting, I didn't know that happened. I have loved the way pot and shrooms expand the potential for visual input and experience.

But BDF, perhaps I missed it upthread, but I don't know that women do tend to pick mates with a higher income and/or education than themselves. Is there some research showing this? There's a lot going on here which stinks of bullshit to me. Just off the cuff here, but what does "choosing mates" mean? Are we talking about who a woman sleeps with, who she has children with, who she marries, or all of the above? Because Daddy's statement is that men are going to be left out of the sexual market altogether, so I'm assuming that he's discussing sex here, and so you'd expect to find that poor men or men without high social status would get laid less? I can't be the only person here who grew up poor enough to know what bullshit this is. And so if we are talking about parenting or marriage- I just don't know that this is true either. Women are far more likely to be in poverty than men and the main determinant is if she has children, part of the reason why abortion access is so important especially to working class women- if hypergamy were a real thing, surely a faster route would be to avoid altogether, and how can you explain this away with the reality of men who skip out on their responsibilities. That leaves us with marriage which is not the same thing as sex so I don't see why men would be left out of the sexual market in the first place, but let's roll with it- are there studies that women mostly marry men who make more money or have higher social status? I know that men make more money than women in general and women are more likley to have reduced income after giving birth, but both of these things are true of single women as well so we'd need a study that shows some sort of social climbing. And even if you could find that a certain percentage of women married for money, what would this have to do with men getting laid?

Anyway, the whole thing is bullshit and if you spend any time reading about these theories on any of their various websites, you'll find that their theories have to get more and more elaborate to account for the variations in human sexuality and culture until any rational person would call bullshit resentment or else conspiracy theory or- and this is what I suspect- fundamentalist brainwashing which combines that resentment and explains it away with conspiracy theories for the purpose of radicalising people. Of course grasping the simpler explanation of the liberation of birth control and the capitalist alienation of individuals would require letting go of resentments and entitlements- no, no it's the fault of feminists I'm sure.

@BiDanFan: I think you mostly misunderstand Dadddy's position. "Hypergamy" is a term the Pick-Up Artist/"Red Pill" community use all the time. AFAIK it's not used by the Incels(?) So a completely different group of misogynists. And you're clearly getting the two groups mixed up. If for some reason you want to understand either, you need to recognize them as different. The PUA's don't "blame women for not being interested in them": they think that if women aren't interested in a man it's because the man doesn't have his shit together. But they don't think that for positive reasons. They have a completely cynical view of women as interchangable amoral backstabbing sluts who are controlled by their emotions, in contrast to men, who are all about logical thought. Hence any man who has his shit together should be able to manipulate women. (I think that feminists use the term "misogynist" far too casually, but this is one of very few groups of people where I consider it amply justified.)

This has nothing to do with the MRA's, EmmaLiz - they're a third group of people, and the PUA's have only contempt for them.

On a more casual note, BiDanFan's analysis of the numbers @117 is also IMO incorrect. Yes, there's roughly similar numbers of unattached men and women in the world. But men are much more interested in the age of potential partners than women, while women are much more interested in the confidence and ambition/success of potential partners than men are. As a result, there are many more men interested in women in their 20's than the actual number of women in their twenties. To some extent the women reciprocate that, and so there are substantially more single men in their 20's than single women in their 20's. That's not the moral fault of anyone, that's just human nature. The other side of that coin is that among people in their fifties and older there are many more single women than single men. Being in my fifties myself I know a fair number of such women. They're usually mothers or grandmothers who were married for a long time before being widowed or divorced. They take pleasure in their families, and while they certainly wouldn't object to a good relationship, they'd rather be single than in a poor relationship, something that's also true for most men in their 50's! I don't think that men in their 20's are any more "entitled" when they want to be in relationships with women in their 20's, or, as you put it, "young, beautiful, and virginal", than women in their fifties are "entitled" when they want to be in relationships with men who are confident and employed. I don't think there's anyone to blame for that. Sometimes the world just doesn't work out as you'd like it to. (Now, if a man in his fifties insists on dating women much younger than him or not dating at all, that's his life, his choice, and his consequences. But I get the impression that most of the Incels are in their twenties.)

@149 Old Crow
FWIW when I did the quick bit of googling I mentioned @122, it was simply at the unauthoritative https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hypergamy that I saw it claimed that the term is in use by "MRA, MGTOW and incel communities".

It sounds like you know a lot more that I (could stand to find out) about those various groups of totally fucked up men than I do, so I'll take your word for it that "Hypergamy" is used the PUA's and not the Incels.

Anyway, ANY of those misogynist groups are nothing a healthy person wants to be influenced by, and make me want ralph on Brett Kavanaugh.

@EmmaLiz 149: I've never looked at the academic literature, but OKCupid published a blog article showing that how many messages men get from women are very much impacted by how much money the men represent themselves as earning. Old enough to have graduated from college? Make a minimum of 40-50k or you're wasting your time on the site. I've also read articles in the Atlantic magazine reporting on academic papers that showed that women whose potential partners don't earn enough to be a net asset to the family budget tend to decide, given the choice, to be single mothers while women whose potential partners are a financial asset tend to choose to marry.

I wasn't aware that there was any controversy about women preferring men who make more money than them. As someone who's been identifying and presenting as male for many years, it's been my impression that making decent money (however a particular woman requires "decent money") is a minimum requirement for a relationship. It's certainly not the only requirement, a man needs to also have social skills and attractive qualities and what those attractive qualities are will depend on the woman, but not having enough money is three strikes against him. This just does not apply when men are evaluating potential female mates.

The PUA's talk about hypergamy with respect to both sex and long-term relationships such as marriage, but it's really negative shit and I don't want to go into it right now.

BTW, it's my understanding that while single women have traditionally earned less money than single men, never-married women make more money than never-married men in the same age brackets.

Old Crow,

I use MRA and red piller interchangeably as sort of an umbrella term for the groups you describe- the incels, volcels, MGTOWs, MRAs, etc. I spent a bit time on those forums and on those websites back when the Gamergate thing was starting up, and then I revisited again when the shooting sprees occurred. I know they are all slightly different and have different goals, but they use the same terminology and after a while, I don't really give a shit about the various distinctions.

When I was a teenager I was heavily into the punk scene of the day- all the big time punk fans had their own little in-group distinction of their particular flavor and subgenre, and they'd argue about this and categorize it endlessly. I had my own feelings on those matters as well, but really couldn't be bothered to develop a particular punk ideology as it was the music and the larger gist of the culture that I cared about. This little lesson served me well when I later recognized the same tendency among lefties once I started to become involved in activist movements- I've mostly steered clear of those squabbles (maoists vs marxist leninists and all other historical and theoretical minutia). So I approach the new online misogynists in the same way- I know they have their own categories and terminologies and subgroups. Lately I've wondered if this is a distinctly male tendency- this obsession with creating categories and hierarchies to classify everything. I have some gay friends who talk endlessly of different categories of men, based on age and income and appearance and preferred sexual position, but that's another topic.

My point is that just like I feel fine calling all the different nationalists and supremacists and race scientists and various other hate groups "nazis" even though I know there is in fact differences in both theory and practice, I feel fine also calling all the various online misogynists MRAs or red-pillers.

Right, Old Crow, hence why I opened with that speculation about the suburbs- the whole thing has a very middle class stink to the analysis, which is not applicable to the majority of people, male or female. I would assume that for a person to be an upwardly mobile sort in the first place, we'd already be selecting for people who have those sorts of values, which again is neither inherent to women in a biological or historical sense nor even a descriptor of the actual real experiences of most women currently. Who are the people setting up OK Cupid profiles, who are the people responding to them, and what are they looking for in those forums? Then how is this applicable to women in general, what does this have to do with who gets laid, and what does it have to do with the real life choices of people when determining who to marry or if to become a parent? If we are making claims about neurology and biology and the like, then we can't look at the contemporary dating habits of middle class Americans with online dating profiles. And even if we do, then we have to take those influences into account- being that in the first place we live in a culture that prioritizes commodities and competition, and in the second place we live in a culture in which men make more money than women already and one in which parenthood negatively affects a woman's income. Then taken these factors, no one is disputing that men are likely to have more money than the women they date and marry- it seems obvious. But a) what does this have to do with who gets laid? which is an altogether different thing, b) what does this have to do with social climbing being a motivation for women's decisions to marry or stay single or have sex with another man?, c) what does this have to do with human nature in the first place?, d) how does the bullshit around hypergamy explain away the very obvious fact of poor men with no social status who in fact get a lot of game, and e) how does the same explain away the fact if women were motivated by increasing their social standing, they'd do best to avoid pregnancy, if not marriage, altogether (see the stats on women who are at the highest levels of their fields, etc)- which is actually a trend that plenty of people (male and female) in modern capitalist societies are increasingly choosing.

Of course I'm not saying you should answer these questions as I see you are not an advocate for this bullshit in the first place, just carrying on as we do here.

quick edit, meant to say: I use MRA and red piller interchangeably as sort of an umbrella term for the groups you describe- the incels, volcels, MGTOWs, PUAs, etc.

M?? Harriet -

I shall not aid your War on Gay or swap a single "one" for "they".

Ms Fan - Perhaps you should be locked in a room with bisexual FeMRA Karen Straughan until conversion or some other form of armistice occurs.

It's so annoying that I can devise many interesting potential conversations, but none of them would ever actually come about.

Mizz Liz - I know or at least knew (being no longer socially active) some lesbians (genuine Ls; I'm not sure how loosely you use the G) who do the same thing with classification, but I don't think it's exclusively homo/SS or male. Now, I know I could explain this phenomenon in some contexts, but I doubt it would apply to your acquaintances, as I can't really get any sort of cohesive vision of them.

@88 if he's rubbing his ass and balls on shit, then yes, that should not be happening and he should do that to his own belongings. If he's standing over a hobby horse or wearing a backpack on his unshirted back, I don't see anything wrong with that either.

It's the context that makes the objects sexual, the objects don't absorb sexualness and then retransmit it like an STD to the kid. Do you believe the camera is infected somehow? If pops is using and SLR to take those photos, should he refuse to lend the camera for his kids first photography class (sans the photos, of course)? Nothing happened to the camera even though it witnessed... some sick and perverted... cross-dressing? C'mon now. This ain't the 80s, we're not worried about getting aids from a fucking toilet seat. And we're certainly not worried about getting psychic cooties.

@101 refer to me at 160, but is he actually putting his dick on the horse? My reading is that it was a "suggestive pose" rather than something that explicit (ie, his dick near the mouth or something, or forced perspective to make it look like it is, and so on. I'm imagining a lot of campiness)

I wish Dan wouldn’t keep trotting out there is no ‘the one’ or ‘you just know’. I realise it’s meant reassure the people writing in but as someone who did find the one, love at first sight, it’s extremely frustrating. Just cos it never happened for you Dan, doesn’t mean it applies to other people.

@Venn I was poking fun, mostly. I'm sure women do similar things, but at the moment I fail to think up any examples. It does seem that men are very concerned about hierarchies and classifications and their ranking among their peers in a way that women are not- not that women don't judge or shame or try to impress one another as well (mean girls, cliches, mommy wars, etc) just that I can't think of the emphasis on classifying everything into categories and then ranking them and building elaborate theories around them the way it seems (some) men do- the explanations for dating you find among men as well as socialization of men with each other. I just can't think of a female equivalent. You know, all the Chads and Staceys and the PUA steps to get with different girls who want this or that thing, and then even among themselves all the shit about alphas and betas, the male mentor relationship, etc.

And so I was sitting around chatting with friends- a group that included a handful of gay men but I should've clarified it was a mixed crowd- and the gay guys were talking about gay dating in the city near us since two of them were visiting from out of town. They had loads of generalizations about the distribution of tops and bottoms in the city near our town according to the ages of the potentials and their various body shapes- the bears, the twins, the grey foxes etc.- and about how certain kinds of guys get laid all the time while others have trouble. As to specifics, one of my friends who is an older man with a decent amount of financial security (not rich but comfortable) was complaining about his inability to find a guy his own age- I took this as a humble brag (poor me, I'd like to settle down with an old man like myself but the only attention I get is from hot young things) and another complained about the lack of tops, that sort of thing. And I thought to myself, OH men do this to one another as well- it's not a response to women! Now of course straight women sit around and bitch about their dating prospects as well- I'm certainly not claiming that we are any less petty or selfish or picky, only that I have not known women to categorize men in this way. In fact, I can't even think of any categories or classifications that straight women have for men though admittedly I really have not thought hard about it and there might be obvious ones that haven't occurred to me.

Whether or not lesbians do this with one another, I have no idea as I'm not often around lesbians who are actively dating. My best friend who is bi does mention some women as being more butch and others being more femme, but I've never heard her say anything about those descriptors having anything more to do with their behaviors or potential partners or sexual positions or whatever.

@Daddy I can't see anything new in what you wrote or how it responds to the things I said. I'd add only that poor people around the world fuck a lot, as do most people, and in my experience this usually has more to do with being more social and living closer together and in tighter communities- whether or not they get pregnant more often might have more to do with all sorts of other factors but that is another conversation. By some theory of hypergamy, you'd find that women living in and socialising in low income areas would tend to seek men from a higher background and therefore poorer men would have more difficulty getting laid than their peers in the suburbs for example, and that is absolutely not the case- in fact it's the opposite. This is before we consider the phenomena of slumming it as well which is again a different story- and at this point your theory would have to take so many "well that's because ofs" that it stops being cohesive even as foolishness.

As for men only being able to get laid in marriage, this is less true right now for most men than it has ever been at any time in history. A far more obvious explanation to explain this is simply that rich men have always been able to fuck a lot without taking responsibility for any consequences (social, health or resulting children), and while that is still true today, it is less true since there are fewer consequences as women can control pregnancy. If men have a harder time today getting into LTRs than they did in the past, that is only because they no longer have brides assigned to them, and my heart is not hardened if I think this is an improvement. The best way to get laid in this day and age is to go out and learn social skills and be in community with others- and social skills is not the same as middle class manners or professional success. The fact that success is another route of increasing your chances of getting laid does not prove that female humans tend toward hypergamy- if your theory is a bunch of bullshit without evidence I can likewise dismiss it without evidence, though a quick perusal of the thread will show that I've provided quite a bit more than you have.

As for being Asian, yes as most people date within their race and Asians are a minority in the US and as there are racist stereotypes associated with Asians as there are with other races, Asians will have a harder time dating than will white men. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, certainly not with ideas of female hypergamy.

Venn autocorrect, twins = twinks and cliches = cliques and if there were other typos too, I'm sure, then sorry those are my fault and not the autocorrect.

By the way, Daddy I just reread to see if I misunderstood because it all seemed so absurd, and I have to laugh now that I even bothered responding. Your definition of elevating perceived status basically means to develop a personality or social skills that are valued in a peer group. Well duh. The more personable you are, the more characteristics that you have which are amenable and valuable to people around you, the more success you will have with getting both friends and lovers. To twist this basic fact of human interactions into an idea that female humans tend towards hypergamy is fucking hilarious and only reinforces my opinion that most of the people on those red pill websites are in fact antisocial men in the suburbs who have no idea how to interact with others. And as an aside, I am extremely concerned about alienation and its harmful effects on individuals, male and female, in modern life. I'm just frustrated by the resentment that causes people to blame others for this- it's not feminism or women generally or immigrants or welfare recipients or any of the other scapegoats that are keeping people atomized and relating to one another like commodities.

True EmmaLiz, no point in blaming others for lack of intimacy skills. Best to find ways to develop those skills in order to gain intimacy. And this is where it appears men can’t make that leap. There are gender problems re masculinity, we all see it, causing so much anger towards others and self.. so why don’t more men do something about it. Talk to each other. Run support groups. Write books.

@100 BiDanFan: Congrats on scoring this week's Hashtag HUnsky Award! May abundant riches come your way and your fondest, dearest fantasy come true.
@113: BiDanFan: I looked up hypergamy on Google, confirming you definition given and called Dadddy on his bullshit, too. See my comment to Dadddy (@94).

Anyone up for a Two HUnsky Award?

LavaGirl @167: The lack of intimacy skills has to be blamed on someone. Perhaps Da3dy has an empirical fact or two to explain it.

Masculinity has been a topic of discussion amongst men for decades. Many of us have talked to one another, run (or participated in) support groups, and so on. There are a few good books too... I recommend Iron John as a starting point. Not as sexy as Wuthering Heights, but still a good read for a man who wants to explore masculinity.

All of that said... don't ask me to explain why we don't seem to be making progress. Perhaps it's because we didn't factor hypergamy into the equation.

Griz @168: the next award really should be 181 which is the cousin of 69.

@169 fubar, Actually---Congratulations to YOU for hitting a double whammy--the HUnksy plus 69--THe coveted Lucky @169 Award! May good fortune smile upon you in more ways than one.

Hi EmmaLiz,

Regarding the differences between MRA's, PUA's, etc. For context, about 3 months ago I realized I'm trans. Or perhaps I just stopped denying I'm trans. Or to put it a third way, I've always known I'd walk barefoot over broken glass to be a woman, and three months ago I realized that there actually is a glass-strewn path I can walk on. But I still present as male. For the time being.

These days, most people seem to be OK with trans women (touch wood), but those people who aren't OK with us REALLY don't like us. So it's become important to me to accurately assess whether people are transphobic or not. It's not some trivial detail to me. And I think the MRA's, PUA's etc. are quite different in this regard. Before I had any thought of transitioning, I saw a group of MRA's interact with another trans woman, and they acknowledged and treated her as a woman. It was clear that they, as a group, did not consider transphobia acceptable. Which isn't that surprising considering that the MRA movement has its origin in the theory that men as well as women suffer from Patriarchy. On the other hand, while I've never seen a Red Pill guy talk about trans women, and I'm afraid to look, but I'm guessing they'd see us as extreme examples of "Blue-pill" men. (And they regard believing in Patriarchy as a delusion. Only people who take the Blue Pill believe in Patriarchy.) On yet another hand, Incels would probably be too busy naval-gazing and moaning about how unfair to them the world is to notice that I'm trans.

I like to stick up for people who have my back, and I know MRA's would stick up for me if I asked them for help. (Especially compared to TERF's LOL!!) So I'm doing what I can to put in a good word for them here.

Fubar @169, congrats: Iron John was written decades ago, before the internet. It was written about men as they were then, my peers. Men as they were before internet mainstream porn.
Let’s take mainstream porn, as a subject, because as I read here many many women feel very ambivalent about their men watching it. If my husband watched it he did it very quietly and as I said, the men I dated before marriage, it was before the internet. And yes, still pictures were around. Videos are not comparable to stills.
So here’s a good subject for men to look at, in order to hear women and investigate what they are saying. Not indulge them, to listen and check.
Not on Dan Savage’s watch. For him
and his crew of men here, women are shamed for speaking out. No room for discussion when that’s the start off position.
There’s work to be done around men’s expressions of masculinity, and it’s their work not women’s.

Old Crow, I get what you are saying, but it bothers me that as a woman, trans or not, you would need to distinguish between the people who hate you because you are trans and the people who hate you because you are a woman. I fall into several categories that a certain groups of people hate- I'm not Christian, of an immigrant family, biracial, bicultural, female, etc- it is slightly interesting to me in some ways to figure out which of these things make people hate me, but for the sorts of technicalities that you are getting into are not relevant.

Also, I've noticed a lot lately that people seem to think that a thing must apply to them before they can dismiss it. I'm a US citizen by birth, there's no question about that, and no one is going to challenge my right to hold US passport by any reason. It still disturbs me to no end that the Trump administration is taking US passports from other citizens in my state- and not because I know any of them or fear it will happen to me. And I don't feel the need to determine if this is the nationalist element or the zenophobic element or the white supremacist element or simple voter suppression that's behind it. It all serves the same master.

I know very well that there are plenty of misogynists and racists who are totally cool with gay men and trans men. Many of them are also fine with lesbians and with trans women. It really makes no difference to me- I don't think you should waste your time forming alliances or looking for the good in people who would throw cis women under the bus simply because they are accepting of you. In fact, there's nothing I detest more than people who should be allies taking advantage of oppressive structures when it's convenient. I've interacted with you a couple of times and I know that's not exactly what you are saying, but let me give you an analogy.

There are plenty of differences between white nationalists and white supremacists, I won't get into all of them as I said, they are all nazis to me, but I do tend to be pedantic and do bother myself about things like this out of curiosity. Imagine for a moment now that you are black (which means both groups would like to determine your worth and position in society) but I, as an Asian, explained to you that the difference actually matters because one of those groups accepts me as intellectually superior. Don't you see, it matters to me.

Fubar, the problem isn't masculinity any more than it is femininity, the problem is structural. I think we've made a ton of progress, but the rate of change is slow. But none of it matters on an individual level if the structures remain in place- you just change out your scapegoats and diversify the ruling class a bit. Thanks for the rec, I've never heard about Iron John.

Also let's keep in mind, Old Crow, that as a male presenting transwoman who has been socialized as a male, albeit a gender nonconforming man uncomfortable with his maleness who has always really been a trans woman, most of the problems with PUAs will not touch you or concern you, their tactics and tropes have not been a part of your socialization, their theories and dehumanizations have not been about you. So fine, you defend them, they have your back, and as such you put yourself on their side against women, even as you are discovering you are one. Think on that a bit, yeah?

For example, I could say the same about TERFs- while they certainly have issues with transwomen, they have no problems with cis women, and therefore as a woman, it's important for me to distinguish between them and conservative Christian women who want to take away my reproductive rights and health care. The TERFs at least have my back.

But I don't. For two reasons. First off, I think it actually matters to side with the oppressed- for selfish and ethical reasons, I think it makes my feminism better to include all women, I think it makes women's rights stronger if we don't compromise and fight each other (there has been enough of that along racial lines) and finally because it's not a choice about which gradation of bigots I'm going to defend. There's no rule that I have to defend ANY sort of bigotry or defend any of them, regardless of if they have my back or not. Seriously. I mean, I know I'm getting worked up a bit, but you basically just said that you defend these misogynists because they have YOUR back, regardless of the fact that they don't have mine.

I disagree EmmaLiz @175, it is masculinity in as much as it’s how a male expresses himself. I’m talking a cis male here specifically relating to cis women.
I don’t want to see men tie themselves in knots trying not to be, it’s a matter of looking at how that being affects others.
Yes, it’s structural as well.

Well said EmmaLiz. It’s simple really, be kind to each other.

Masculinity itself- what does that mean? Traits that are inherent to men, such as testosterone and what this does to sex drive and muscle tone and physical strength, etc? Even within our culture, masculinity taking on many of the various things it means for cis men here in modern Western culture, it's not inherently negative, hence why the phrase toxic masculinity has the descriptor "toxic", it's not all masculinity, even in our cultural construction, it's when those elements are taken to serve an existing power structure, to the detriment of both men and women in different ways. But I'm tired now, too late here to get into it, good night.

Wow, one quip by one misogynist and this thread has really blown up!

Emma @148: Oh, I would join you in disputing "research" that universalises any claim about "women" generally, though Scum @140 discusses some. Even Dadddy himself used the word "tend." That means that in 30 years of sexual availability, WAH MUST have encountered some women (I'm assuming, as the premise of @92 does, that he is straight) who don't care about socioeconomic status. Really, to rephrase @92, Dadddy is claiming "WAH has never been laid because he's a loser, so he may as well just give up and hate women." Which is neither constructive nor instructive. Better advice is to make oneself more desirable -- as you say, get hobbies that get him out of the house, read more, pay attention to his appearance, whatever he isn't doing now.

I agree with your challenging of this "choose mates" concept too. These incels/Red Pillers/MRAs/whatever you call them seem to have no experience of love, so they compare it to economics, which it really isn't. To tie the two threads together, women (and men) do not "seek mates" by conducting a thorough interview process and asking for references. Many of us do nothing of the sort; we meet someone, we feel a spark, we "just know." Sometimes these sparks lead to long-term relationships, if compatibility is there too, and compatibility often includes being at similar socioeconomic levels. But not always. People "choose mates" based on whether they like them. The romantics among us would say we have little choice; love chooses us!

Old Crow @149: Thanks, I'll try to use the correct terms. I do tend to lump all online misogynists in together. The post brought incels to mind because it was blaming women for WAH's virginity, which is the incel philosophy, in my understanding.

As for your theories on age and preferences, this makes sense, and again the answer is obvious: incels in their 20s should stop moaning and open their minds to women in their 30s (or even above, depending on their relationship goals).

Old Crow @151: Strange, I'm on OKCupid and there are no fields to enter for income. Age, height, body type, sure, but not income. If higher income men are being more proactive due to having more confidence, it does not follow that women are rejecting lower income men.

Having made the mistake myself, it is nothing but sensible to tie oneself financially only to someone who is fiscally responsible. That goes for any gender. Marriage means their finances are now your finances, and if theirs are mess, don't screw up your own too! As I've said before, maybe we shouldn't be questioning why women want a mate who is financially stable; maybe we should question why men don't.

Sporty @160/@161: All we know is that "He even had the horse eating his 'carrot'." Does this mean his penis was in the horse's mouth or just near it? To me, it doesn't matter. If I'd seen that photo of MY FATHER with his penis in the vicinity of one of my toys, I'd never be able to play with that toy without thinking of my father's penis, which is something few kids (or adults) want to think about. YMMV.

Emma @163: "It does seem that men are very concerned about hierarchies and classifications and their ranking among their peers in a way that women are not" -- Yes, this. Red Pillers: your theories are off because women simply do not think this way. "Free sexual market." "Status." "Alphas and betas." These are not concepts we even think about and that's why we find it so ridiculous when you allege them. In fact, I'm just going to take a shortcut and say that I agree with everything you've said here, bravo.

Lava @167: That's the problem... these frustrated, resentful men ARE starting "support groups" (4Chan, Reddit) and writing books (Elliot Rodger's manifesto) to try to do something about the problem (sharing their hatred of women, PUA techniques). Unfortunately all of this is making things worse, as these men encourage each other to see women as the enemy, dehumanising them ("females") and blaming them. Nothing good can come of this. They need to get out of the house and spend more time in coed groups. Women are PEOPLE, individuals, with varying preferences, all of which they are entitled to. Become (genuine) friends with a dozen women and one of them may grow to like you as more than that.

@112. Antiserumite. I feel sorry for incels. I think the vast majority of them have been led astray.

@156. Venn. I am not conducting any war on gay. This is in your own mind. It's not a war not to be a definitional or normative instance of the non-normative kind. If anything, I'm conducting a war on 'heteronomative'.

BDF @182 I don't think the "evopsych" theories claim that women consciously think of "status" etc., but that this is mostly subconscious, meaning that from the POV of the woman she simply "felt a spark" , "just knew" , or whatever, but that in practice it's the high status men who cause sparks to be felt.

Not saying that these theories are right, just clarifiying what they are claiming (AFAIK)

@134. Dadddy. I hope no one is casting any sort of aspersions on you for looking for women attracted to men embodying or advertising certain 'masculinity signifiers'. This is just a taste.

Personally I look for people, friends, sexual partners (inc. women) repelled by characteristic masculinity signifiers. I walk out the room whenever I see any man wearing a pair of Aviator sunglasses. Or grimace or laugh nervously. Both of us, I hope, have a lot to offer women / people / female sexual partners.

@143. EmmaLiz. Yes. Another very good and forthright treatment of the worst of the men's movement.

Thank you, Harriet!
FWIW, from observation, the largest slice of the bell curve of all genders "tend" to gravitate towards partners in similar socioeconomic circumstances as themselves. This is simply due to having more opportunities to meet people from one's own walk of life, and greater potential to forge connections due to similar experiences. Also, if one person is considerably wealthier than the other, a power imbalance -- actual or perceived -- may occur, which can discourage such pairings. This is why, as Emma says, you find poor dudes who do very well among the women in their trailer parks or housing estates. Money may be a factor, but it's one of many factors, and varies in importance with each individual.

@149. Old Crow. I think your remarks make sense only when we see the relations between the sexes (the two main genders) as antagonistic, as 'the sex war'. E.g. in the sex war, women in their 40s and 50s weaponize their needing sex less than men (or, rather, its being more culturally current for them to be thought to crave sex less) into a power of resistance to say 'no' to crummy men. Yes, there is something in what you say in these terms; but suppose dating and sex to be about reciprocity and mutual satisfaction, then women are (in general) just looking for more humanity, for more kindness and love, in men than men predominantly oriented to sex (conquest and gratification) are offering.

They not the sort of books or groups I was referring to Fan. I use the word female as did EmmaLiz in one of her posts. As did Harriet. Nobody told me it was a word with issues.
I hope to never live in a world you invisage Harriet. And what’s wrong with aviator glasses. Brad Pitt wears them.

Lava @180: Go back to the original post @92. It's MRA/Red Pill/etc types who use the term "females" instead of "women" to dehumanise them. Of course "female" is not a slur depending on the context. Generally, if you're using "female" as an adjective, you're probably not being sexist; if you're using it as a noun, there's a good chance you are.

I know those weren't the sort of groups or books you were talking about. Sadly, they're the sorts of groups and books that exist.

How would you know what all women are looking for in men Harriet @185? Few women want a guy who can’t carry his own financially, and many may only fall in love with rich men.

I see, thanks Fan. ‘Free sexual market’, that’s funny. Does this mean women have choice and they choose men who attract them rather than men who have been arranged for them. It’s all very disturbing and sad, this incel stuff.

Many people are fine to live in a man/ woman gendered world Harriet, because we don’t panic about the differences or the similarities. It’s the toxic qualities that can develop, these are the problems.

@190 BiDanFan
I guess I shouldn't, but I've sometimes here used the word "females" here as an umbrella term to cover all people of dating age (both girls and women).

I thought this followed from that it seems to me more common to call teenage males boys. I'm guessing the suggestion isn't that I should start referring to 16-year olds as men and women (I'm happy to if that's what's right, but it's unfamiliar usage), but simply to use "men and women" as the umbrella term that includes "boys and girls"?

It never occurred to me to avoid "males and females" because I'm used to hearing these in an academic context, and I don't expose myself to people with toxic prejudices (and live in a place where I enjoy that they are relatively rare).

LavaGirl @173: I'm not sure that Internet (or any other kind of) porn should get full credit for crafting masculinity. There are lots of other inputs, and women (as mothers, or teachers, for example) do have an important role in some of them.

Before internet porn (the internet's raison d'être), there was video tape porn (quite possibly video's raison d'être). I have little experience with either. Men of my generation learned to objectify women via the words and images in Playboy and Hustler magazines. (Personally, I find that words are more powerful than images, but I suppose that internet porn, being uncurated and openly available, is likely more impactful, and maybe even toxic.)

Harriet @186: These misogynist groups are not part of the "men's movement". That movement has a long and decent history.

Curious2 @194: Again, it's about context. If you were to say "males and females" it would be clear you were not being derogatory towards one of the genders included, similarly if you were referring to something biological, ie "most females release an ovum each month." To avoid sounding like an MRA, you could refer to female teenagers as young women, or girls, again depending on context. As I say, it's not that the word female is a slur, but the use of the terms "adult females" and "free sexual market" in the context of post @92 are dead giveaways as to the views of the speaker and the source of the terminology for those views.

Dadddy @155: "He swipes right on everyone and very rarely gets matches."

I doubt that's a sound approach for anyone. Better to figure out what quirky aspects of a person tend to set him aflame; look for those quirks in profiles or real life, and put some effort into getting to know those people and seeing if a connection emerges.

EricaP @197: Yes, that's a good point. Just knowing that someone "swipes right on everyone" would be enough to put me off. Does the rest of his profile reveal that he's desperate? Perhaps that's what's putting people off, not his race.
(And actually, that would seem to disprove this "hypergamy" hypothesis, because aren't most Asians better educated and paid than average? Hmm.)

@196 BiDanFsn
"young women" does sound better.

"adult females" instead of "women" would give me the willies unless I was watching a nature documentary.

A search for "adult females" in this thread yields no results. @92 Dadddy said "Human females"; I think the biggest problem with that phrase was it being in the same sentence with "hypergamy".

(Does the next person to post really get good luck or something?)

M?? Harriet - I can accept the sincerity of your intentions. You've described your ideal world sufficiently for me to know that real gays would suffer to a considerable extent. Is there anywhere to go from there?

Mizz Liz/Ms Fan - Now I'm tempted to do a lengthy comparison between Mr Murray and Ms Halep. This also made me think of the old board game Mystery Date, which will perhaps raise various memories (one hopes they will be pleasant) for Ms Grizelda. I'm afraid I don't have an instinctive understanding of tops and bottoms, but I could guess that the sort of thing you describe is more common among gay men than bi men and stems in part from wanting an illusion of choice. This is probably another brick in the great Straight/Gay Divide, but I lack the time at present to puzzle it all out.

Sporty @ 160
I think it’s time to acknowledge the failure of SPRED, the Lava-sponsored SPorty Re-EDucation program launched over a year ago.
For those who haven’t read the book nor watched the movie, mission statement read something like, “Confused young man asking questions in order to be a better man.” By own admission confused young man was at least 38 at the time.

One can still hope that equipped with such poor judgment, confused young man will never be a parent.

@172. Old Crow. Why as a trans woman would you want to hang with MRAs?

I think most everybody is transphobic. Some of this is on the level of explicit belief, viz. you ask the average person, 'is a pre-op or electively non-bottom-surgery trans woman a woman? Or a man?', and most people will say, 'hmm, that's a man'. But beyond this, there is the degree to which people engage with GQ / trans folk. Say something insightful or well-informed (or funny, often) and it will drop like a stone ... because why should a not-on-my-radar person know anything about football or straight dating or mutual funds or psephology or Mexican cookery? Or crack a joke? (They joke? The trans? Joke?). Then there's not figuring as a person erotically or romantically.

Congratulations Mr Venn. The double hunsky.
Funar @185, did I say internet porn crafted masculinity? I do think it has greatly influenced hetro men re their expectations of sex and how they treat women. And I am meaning mainstream porn, not ‘ethical’ porn. Boys learn their moves re the internet rather than with a real girl in the flesh.
And how many of these sad young or old men who can’t find female company, irl, constantly watch these videos of women being force fucked and humiliated and go yeah, treat those bitches like the dirt they are.. feeding their rage at women for not being available to them.
Yes, we do have to look to women’s involvement here as mothers/ relatives/ teachers etc. As a mother of sons, I have lots of theories. Be interesting to see what relationships these incel boys/ can’t think of them as men/ have or had with their mothers.

@176. EmmaLiz. Here you make a good point (about the behavior and socialization of misogynists posing more of a threat to, and more thoroughly conditioning the lives of, lifelong cis than transwomen).

I don't follow Lava's line of thought in the remark where she brings me up. I have no problem living in a world where (overwhelmingly) most adults are cismen or ciswomen. Nor any expectation that the world will stop being like that. Equally, it can be oppressive (sometimes mildly, sometimes severely) to try to make me be something I'm not.

Fubar.. these phones are like two yrs olds, as soon as your back is turned.
I don’t want to make you anything Harriet, it’s you banging on all the time about a genderless world. Trying to impose your vision into others. Fine, be genderless. Nobody is taking that away from you or others.
Just not sure why you are here, because here we talk sometimes proudly as gendered people. The questions we answer are from gendered people.

Calling myself a woman and feeling proud of that, because it’s a fucking crazy path of blood flows and sometimes babies, doesn’t mean I follow others’ notions of how a woman is. That’s why I step away from the whole non binary movement. For one it sounds like really boring, and it looks exhausting to maintain. I respect people’s positions, and I expect they will respect mine.

@200. Venn. I'm at a loss to understand how I've told you enough of the world I want to live in for you to find it intolerable. Or at the least inhospitable to gay men. I don't want to meet bigots, first of all. People personally hostile to me. I don't care what gender someone is. In doing virtually anything in life, I'm tired of the hypervisibility of my gender and sexuality. Of course, there are sexual cultures. But for me personally, what gender someone is doesn't play a thoroughly determining role in whether I think they're hot. But that's just me.

I was saying, in general, that straight women want to date men who are kind, respectful, maybe loving. Anyone disagreeing with that (or doubting my title to say it) would have to think women are (generally) looking for something else in men, e.g. status or security. I think my remarks are uncontroversial i.e. more uncontroversial than this.

Brad Pitt? I rest my case. And this from the person circumspect, at best, about men's strops.

Lava, I am a bigendered person. That's twice as gendered as you! :)

I don't know where you're got the idea from that I dispute ANY woman's right to feel proud of her gender. Or her biology. A cis woman's especially. I think you know that this forum is not just for cis people. There are discussion and agony aunt/uncle forums where the presupposition is much more pervasively of binary gender and the conventional genders' supposed behaviors. If you are more at home here than there, it must be because you are comfortable with, interested in, a wider range of Savagistas e.g. people like me, not just e.g. married cisfolk.

Read thru your comments Harriet. Constant attacks on gender, trying to sameness us all. So don’t try to deny what I know I’ve read. Don’t try and trump me.
No idea what you talking about calling yourself bigendered and being twice as gendered as me. That bullshit makes me think I’ll return to not reading your bs.

And your notion of gender and mine Harriet, are very different. Maybe if you’d bled every month, except for the six times you were pregnant/ breastfeeding, for forty five years, then like me, you’d proudly call yourself, Woman.

And why you calling yourself bigendered Harriet when you’re wishing for a genderless world? Mind fuck mate.

I can not get a sense of you Harriet, of a whole person. So many bits get added on.. Thought I’d give you another try, still feel you are fake.