I built an interactive map of male-female single gender ratios using ACS 2007-2011 data. It is broken down county by count. To avoid uncertainty and highlight large communities, I filtered out the counties for which the standard error was more than 5%.
Blue denotes a very high male-female ration with an abundance of single males. Pink denotes a low male-female ratio with a slight abundance of single females.
Click image for interactive map.
In my earlier post on mating environments, I quoted J. D. Unwin on the importance of monogamy to the health of a society. His book, Sex and Culture, clearly identifies how historical societies went through the same pattern that the West is going through today. Unwin looked at many civilizations and saw the same pattern across civilizations, but here I’m going to quote the excerpts about Rome as an example.
At first, the public was highly monogamous, but liberal Boston Roman elites were unhappy with the state of affairs.
By the end of the fourth century the extended populus Romanus was absolutely monogamous, homogeneous, deistic, and extremely energetic. Furthermore, signs of rationalism started to appear. It was at this time that the patricians began to depart from their old customs. There is some evidence that the men had taken advantage of their privileged position at an earlier date; but it is not indisputable. In 295, during the third Samnite War, matrons are said to have been publicly tried for adultery. Ihne remarks: ‘We cannot imagine that immorality . on such a scale. was confined to one year, or to one period. It must have been an evil of long growth before it could reach such dimensions. For moral disease, unlike a physical epidemic, is not capricious and unaccountable in its devastations. It can neither come nor go quickly.’ The plebeians, on the other hand, continued to preserve the ideas which in former times had been exclusively held by the patricians.
Soon, women’s lib happened. Women were no longer as subordinate to their husbands, and had independent identities. Unfortunately, this had the side-effect of weakening the institution of marriage.
It was during the Punic Wars, and in the years after Zama, that the ius gentium took shape.
…
Under the ius gentium Marriage was a union based on the mutual consent of the contracting parties. There was no manus; the wife did not pass into her husband’s family ; she and her children remained under her father’s potestas. At first this ‘free’ marriage was illegal, but the numbers of free marriages increased so rapidly that they compelled recognition, the system of relationship changing from agnatic to cognatic. Soon it became the custom for a man to recognize his children publicly; then they came under his potestas; but the wife ceased to have the status of a filiafamilias, and became an individual on an equality with her spouse. Moreover, by the Maenian law of 168 B.C., the family council was deposed from the position of judge of family conduct, its functions being transferred to a iudicium de moribus.
Along came no-fault divorce.
In the second century confarreatio disappeared, and for no less than seventy-five years it was impossible to find a man qualified to occupy, the priesthood of Jupiter, for the occupier of that office had to be the product of a confarreatio marriage. Free marriages became usual, made and broken by mutual consent. Indeed the will of one party only was sufficient for a divorce, the intention to dissolve being communicated either byword of mouth or by messenger. There was no ceremony, no registration, no formality. Women were free from any trace of marital authority; they could hold property and could- contract in their own name. The tutela remained, but a woman could appoint her own guardian, and the ingenuity of fashionable lawyers assisted them to escape the limitations which a nominal tutelage imposed.
Men went on a marriage strike. Cohabitation became the norm.
Even on these terms marriage became unfashionable, especially among the men—but perhaps it would be more just to say that marriage on these terms was despised, for there seemed to be few advantages to be gained, many to be lost. A large number of leading citizens preferred a mistress (concubina) to a wife. A Roman concubina was not an additional sexual partner; she was a man’s sole female companion, sometimes his life-long associate.
A great and mighty INTJ by the name of Augustus did all he could to bring stability to the society—while preserving women’s equality.
Augustus endeavoured to effect a change by the Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea, but it is doubtful if his efforts to prop up a rotting edifice were successful. It took three years to persuade the people to accept the law, which Muirhead describes as ‘a voluminous matrimonial code, which for two or three centuries exercised such an influence as to be regarded as one of the sources of Roman law almost quite as much as the Twelve Tables’. Certainly the tone of many of its provisions was contrary to the practices of the first century B.C., but the basis of sexual relationships remained the same—mutual consent. The object of the law was not to reintroduce compulsory continence, but to encourage fertility and to restore some order into the existing chaos. marriage with men and women of low character was forbidden; unmarried persons were , not allowed to benefit under a will; married childless people were permitted to inherit only half their legal share; mothers of children were relieved of tutela; concubinage received official sanction; no divorce was valid unless a formal declaration was , made, before witnesses. Such was the tenor of the proposals of the Princeps. Soon the emancipation of women received official sanction. The parental authority also was abolished almost completely.
After Augustus’ brilliant reign, the Roman Empire began its decline, as society resumed its descent into a sex-pozzie’s dreamworld.
Gradually the old forms of government, outwardly preserved, ceased to function. The conzitia lost even the shadow of authority;, it was simply incapable of possessing it. It was the same with the senate. ‘There can be little doubt’, Sir Samuel Dill observes, ‘that there were men who dreamed of a restored senatorial power. It is equally certain that the senate was incapable of asserting it.’ The extension of sexual opportunity had done its work. The -Romans satisfied their sexual desires in a direct manner. Consequently they had no energy for anything else.
In its last dying moments, the Roman empire’s greatest leaders hailed from Utah Roman provinces were traditional values remained in practice.
In some parts of the Empire, however, the old Roman traditions were preserved. In Italy, Gaul, Illyria, and. Spain, the old idea of the family was still put into practice. The ladies even did their hair in the old-fashioned way, long discarded by those who lived in the city. The sons of these women went to Rome, succeeded to high office, and controlled the Empire. They entered the senate and restored some of its old authority. From this provncial stock came Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines.
However, it wasn’t long before these provinces succumbed to liberalism and the Western Roman Empire was doomed for good.
‘Then in their turn the provincials reversed the habits of their fathers by extending their sexual opportunity. Paederasty also was, not unknown. The lack of energy displayed by their sons and grandsons is apparent in the records of the third century.
See also:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/feminism-responsible-for-the-fall-of-rome/
The people alive today are by their very existence descendants of reproductively successful individuals. They will have inherited the biological programming that made their ancestors successful. This programming is especially relevant in an environment like today in which social constraints are removed and people are encouraged to indulge their desires and do what is “natural”.
The key to understanding evolutionary sexuality is to view mating as an economic exchange between members of the two sexes, in terms of what the people have to offer each other. Women have their wombs. These wombs are a scarce resource, as a womb can only create babies at a certain rate. Men can provide high quality genes, allowing women to have healthier children and more attractive sons. However, this is not a scarce resource. Being able to provide provisions such as food, clothing, and shelter, on the other hand, is a scarce resource. So is protection from outside threats. Men are highly adapted, both physically and mentally, to hunt down animals or gather food, and to fight animals or other humans. Women on the other hand, are not well adapted to these tasks either mentally or phsyically, but are adapted to carry an infant to term and then nurse and raise the subsequent child. Thus, men will exchange provisioning and protection for access to a woman’s womb.
Thus for maximum reproductive potential, men must budget their scarce provisioning and protection resources to get maximal access to wombs. Really attractive men get offered big discounts in terms of the provisioning and protection they have to offer in exchange for access to wombs, because of their fit and attractive genes. Because of this, they have little incentive to commit to anybody, and will go around spreading their seed. If the price in resources demanded is high, they will prefer more attractive women, as attractiveness is an indicator of fertility. Other men are better off exchanging all their future provisions and protection for long term exclusive access to one woman’s womb. Because they will rely on this woman for all their future reproduction, not only is attractiveness an important factor, but so is youth. This will allow them to maximize the remaining value of the woman’s womb. The percent of men who choose such long term mating vs. the percent who choose short term mating is dependent on the market prices offered to various men for access to wombs. This depends on womens’ choices.
The quality of genes and provider/protector are both valued by women, and women will try to obtain an optimal combination of the two. The extent to which they value one over the other will largely depend on the the socioeconomic environment. In a K-selected environment, women greatly value provisions and protection, but not gene attractiveness. In an r-selected environment, women value gene attractiveness first and foremost.
When looked at from this standpoint, modern liberalism has waged a multipronged assault on the stable family.
There used to be harsh cultural constraints such as monogamy and opposition to fornication that prevented people from acting out their evolutionary instincts. These constraints were removed through non-judgementalism and sexual liberation. That might not have been a big deal if the socioeconomic environment had remained K-selected, as a K-selected environment is conducive to stable sexuality and child-rearing, though it tends to be somewhat polygynous in nature.
Unfortunately, the environment is not K-selected, as the rise of whole welfare state and affirmative action has devalued provisioning. This has transformed the socioeconomic environment into an r-selected environment.
Finally, LTR-wombs have less value due to the risk of adulteration (or should I say adultery). There used to be constraints in place on female behavior and limitations to divorce that prevented wives from cheating their husbands out of the full value of their womb. Liberalism has removed those constraints, thus reducing the value of married wombs as a commodity. This has created incentives for men to seek short term access over long term access.
In an r-selected environment, men forego focusing on economic provisioning and instead focus on making themselves personally more attractive to women. In contrast, a K-selected environment pushes men to succeed economically, and to create a stable and safe society. This all is a byproduct of their need to acquire provisioning/protection abilities. The importance of monogamy to the success of a society became apparent to Unwin in 1935 after he set out to discredit the institution of marriage:
The evidence was such as to demand a complete revision of my personal philosophy; for the relationship between the factors seemed to be so close, that, if we know what sexual regulations a society has adopted, we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its cultural behavior…
Now it is an extraordinary fact that in the past sexual opportunity has only been reduced to a minimum by the fortuitous adoption of an institution I call absolute monogamy. This type of marriage has been adopted by different societies, in different places, and at different times. Thousands of years and thousands of miles separate the events; and there is no apparent connection between them. In human records, there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great [cultural] energy. I do not know of a case on which great energy has been displayed by a society that has not been absolutely monogamous…
If, during or just after a period of [cultural] expansion, a society modifies its sexual regulations, and a new generation is born into a less rigorous [monogamous] tradition, its energy decreases… If it comes into contact with a more vigorous society, it is deprived of its sovereignty, and possibly conquered in its turn.
It seems to follow that we can make a society behave in any manner we like if we are permitted to give it such sexual regulations as will produce the behavior we desire. The results should begin to emerge in
the third generation.
The de-emphasizing of provisioning and protection is readily observable with the rise of extended adolescence in modern young males.
On the other hand, guys don’t seem to be trying very hard to become attractive to women, even though that is what one would expect. Instead, we hear women constantly complain about how men are too emasculated and don’t initiate much contact with them. One culprit for this is radical feminism, which has pathologized masculinity. In fact, the only exception to liberalism’s removal of cultural constraints is feminism’s creation of cultural constraints against masculinity. However, there is another factor, which is probably even more significant. That factor is pornography. Porn satisfies the desire for sexual variety, which is exactly what males seek in an r-selected environment.
Thus, women have devalued themselves as long term prospects at just the same time that they must face severe competition as short term prospects from highly attractive virtual women.
All the cultural exhortations for men to “man up” aren’t going to be any good as long as men have no incentive to do so. As long as porn is around and women make poor long-term prospects, men in general have no reason to “man up”.
This can end in one of two ways.
On the one hand the deeply entrenched feminine imperative might win out over the equally deeply entrenched ideals of civil liberty and right to privacy, and porn viewing might get criminalized. This seems inconceivable at the moment, but the way things are going, you never know… If that did happen, Western civilization would experience a social collapse into an r-selected cesspool of douchebaggery and sluthood.
On the other hand, the current economic situation could force the dismantling of the welfare state and affirmative action, along with the reinstatement of moral norms. People might realize just how bad society is becoming and try to make marriage prospects more attractive to men. This is what the manosphere is fighting for. It is imperative that this happens as soon as possible, before too much social destruction has occurred.
People online regularly rate female looks on a 1-10 scale. Unfortunately, there are major differences in average and variance between ratings by individual raters. Thus, to facilitate better communication between people, I created a poll for ratings of various pictures I found online. I have then used the median ratings based on hundreds of responses to rate these pictures. There are a couple of borderline cases where the median was extremely close, so I have listed those as 5.5 and 7.5 here. You can now use these pictures and ratings to calibrate assignments of attractiveness.
Girls who complain about shallow guys should take a look at these results and note that by avoiding obesity like the girls in these photos, they can be at least a 5. After that, physical fitness combined with good fashion should make it easy to become a 6-7.
Additionally, while there are clear objective standards of beauty as represented by some photos being rated higher than others, there is also significant subjectivity. A small fraction of guys (~5%) will rate a girl as being two SMV points higher than her average rating. Thus, for every non-obese, non-hideous girl, there is a guy out there who finds her very attractive.
Finally, a short look at the raw survey data suggests that there is geographic differentiation in terms of pickiness of raters. For example, respondents from Japan rated these pictures much more harshly than those from America. I will attempt to map out these differences and post this in a future map.
See also: http://www.betcheslovethis.com/article/propinion-piece-bros-and-your-body
A recent study examined the sex lives of men and women in the Czech Republic aged 35-65. The individuals provided their age, waist size, and their partner’s age. Amongst other things, they answered the widely used 5-item International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF-5).
Under a multiple regression model, 24% of erectile function could be accounted for by the man’s age, 16% by his partner’s age, and 10% by the partner’s waist size (the effect of the man’s waist size was not statistically significant). In other words, the woman’s age and waist size were as important as the man’s age in determining erectile function.
Men’s erectile function scores were independently associated with younger age of self and partner, and
women’s slimmer waist (all factors generally associated with
greater reproductive fitness).
Thus, at least 26% of the variability in erectile function is associated with the female partner’s attractiveness. One should note that age and waist size are not the only components of female attractiveness, so the actual effect is likely much larger than 26%.
Ideally, actual experimental results would be better than broad statistical work of this sort. If a budding researcher wants to do this, this tongue-in-cheek article provides a good model.
This Return of Kings article claims that Tyrion Lannister is a one of the top Alpha Males in Game of Thrones. I think that’s ridiculous. Tyrion Lannister has very good Alpha wit, but at his core he’s a Beta Male through and through.
For one thing, he always acts reasonable. He usually wins arguments because he is reasonable. This is why Lady Olenna Tyrell was able to walk all over him when he discussed wedding expenses with her. He understood that no reasonable man in his position could argue with Lady Olenna’s logic, so he meekly accepted her position. Compare this with a true Alpha Male, Tywin Lannister. Tywin was being quite unreasonable, but kept his frame and forced Lady Olenna to accept the marriage between Cersei and Loras.
In addition, Tyrion white-knights for Sansa. By marrying her, he would be able to establish significant power while at the same time protecting her from harm. Instead of being happy at the prospect, he worries about how she will feel having to marry the brother of her father’s murderer.
At his core, Tyrion is a nice guy. He has a strong wit and a taste for conflict that most nice guys don’t have, but like all nice guys, he always goes out of his way to help others.
Click image for interactive map.
Having made a simple map of the best states for men, I decided to look at which states are best for families. I multiplied total fertility rate for each of the states by the percent of births that occur in wedlock within that state, to get a total marital fertility rate. Having enough in-wedlock birth rates is crucial for the demographic and social success of society.
Looking at the chart, it is clear that West is best. The Northeast isn’t having that many children and the Deep South is having out of wedlock children.
It is no surprise that Utah ranked highest. Thanks to its Mormon influence, Utah manages a whopping total marital fertility rate of ~2.1, which is replacement level!
