In the real world, assortative mating is routine. At least when it comes to marriage, people tend to marry others who are similar on a wide variety of traits. The empirical reality of that statement has been established for a long time, beginning with Steven Vandenberg’s review of the early literature in 1972.
Since then, extensive additional research has documented assortative mating for education, intelligence, political affiliation, mental illness, substance abuse, aggressive behavior, and criminal behavior. Often these correlations are substantial, in the region of +.4 to +.5.
Part of it is you settle for whoever will have you. Part of it is you’re comfortable with what you’re used to, even if it’s toxic. The devil you know.
Examination of who doesn’t wind up breeding might be illuminating.
We know that 80% or so of all the males who’ve lived have failed to pass on their genes. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that there is something going on, in terms of selection. Why are those genes not present? Were the males sacrificed on the altar of altruism, or were they unfit to reproduce?
Alternatively, dare I suggest that the females just didn’t like them enough? Is there an element of favoritism going on, with the female mind? What have they chosen to select for?
In a rational world, which we manifestly don’t live in, the males who contributed the most to civilization/culture/society would be the most successful at breeding. Yet… Look around you: Who’s got the most kids? By sheer numbers, it’s the love-em-and-leave-em members of the underclass, who have multiple children running around with multiple females, and who are being paid for not by the sweat of their brows, but by everyone else’s taxes. This is, I would suggest, not a a sustainable model for a civilization–On several levels. For one, it rewards negative behaviors in both the successful breeders, and it discourages positive behaviors in the people whose taxes are leached away to pay for more and more dysfunction.
At some point, this has to stop, or it will choke the life out of civilization itself. The human cruft will build up until things no longer function, and then we’ll have to deal with the consequences. You’re not going to see net positive contributions coming out of the underclass that’s been bred up out of successive generations of failures, especially since the system rewards that failure with more resources. It’s basically a reverse eugenics system, one operating independently of any human intervention, and it’s self-perpetuating. The only way out of the death-spiral is to break the cycle.
The difficulty is that nobody is going to want to “bell the cat”, because that means they’d have to be big meanies, and enforce some standards. Won’t happen in our society, ever, but what comes after may have taken up some lessons from our many and sundry failures in this regard. Not too sure what that’s going to look like, but I wager that a lot of folks aren’t going to like what it looks like. At. All.
Civilization either enforces patriarchy or it collapses into barbarism. Patriarchy means that all women and girls are closely watched by an interlocking network of family and neighbors to make sure they have no sex outside of marriage, they are not allowed to marry men who lack the means to support a family, and once they marry, their children and all their assets become property of the husband. Any females who fall out of this system are locked up in nunneries so they don’t accidentally get pregnant.
The street urchins depicted in Oliver Twist (1839) did not come into existence until patriarchy had weakened enough that women were breaking free and breeding out of wedlock.
Monogamy is best, so that every man who is not a cripple or an imbecile can have a young virgin wife. Unless your country is surrounded by weak, decadent nations ripe for plunder, having large numbers of unmarried able-bodied men around is not going to end well.
Barbarians got no patriarchy? Patriarchs are never barbarous?
How does the culture of Afghani tribesmen fit into all this?
I would suggest that barbarism is what makes patriarchy, not the other way around. What Dave is decrying isn’t a product of either civilization or barbarism, nor is it the product of patriarchy or the absence thereof.
The really laughable thing about most of this crap is that the people who really do more to enforce the sort of thing that Dave is holding up as an exemplar aren’t the men–They want to do whatever they like, screw everything in sight. Whose interest is it, do you suppose, that is served by locking up all them young hoors, and constraining the men? It ain’t the men’s benefit being served, here–It’s the old women in the tribe.
Dave doesn’t think past the first layer, which is why he’s doomed to be a victim of all this. The real beneficiaries of the supposed “patriarchy” aren’t the men, nor are they the young women–It is the old biddies, the “first wives”, the grand dams of the society. They benefit by regulating the hoors, and keeping the scam going. Men sure as hell don’t, that’s for sure–Who controls the family, who gets laid, who reproduces? Under the ancien regime, it ain’t the men. It’s the old bitches running everything behind the scenes, who’ve successfully conditioned all the “patriarchs” into letting them have their way. You have a lifetime of putting up with the old biddy, and thinking in terms of keeping her happy to get access to that sweet, sweet poon, well… Yeah. She can parlay that into a rather nice position once she’s all dried up and no longer attractive. That’s how the game was played–The supposed “patriarchy” was never that, never run for the benefit of the men, but for the old biddy bitches running things behind the scenes, whose primary concern was continuity of the lineage, and ensuring that any potential daughters-in-law weren’t going to upset the applecart.
I laugh every damn time I hear some idjit, male or female, go on and on and on about the “patriarchy”. Sweeties, you have no f**king idea, whatsoever. The supposed “patriarchy” you babble on about never existed as anything other than a massive front, just like the supposed peacefulness and non-aggression of the wimmenfolk of elder times. Bullshit–Nine-tenths of that crap we think of as “endemic tribal warfare” was started by the women, whispering in the ears of the men they were f**king. Women are flat-out evil and manipulative, when unconstrained by custom or sane women. Who’re in the minority, I’m afraid.
If you doubt me, take a look at just who is behind most of the “honor killings” in Muslim society. It ain’t the men, in all too many cases. Many of them get pushed into it by the women, who can’t afford to allow any “non-union” pussy to play the game outside the rules. If they did, then their own positions would be forfeit to the younger, prettier models that their husbands would bring in to replace them under any other regime.
You want to know who is behind the patriarchy? It ain’t males, but females. Male reproductive strategies would better be served by screwing everything in sight, not locking things down.
Kirk,
Pre- and post-menopausal women are very different animals. You should probably ask why this striking biological phenomenon exists at all. Could it have anything to do with that antecedent to rational government, the elder circle?
Someone is going to make the mate choices for the virgins of the land. Who do you trust more, your wise old granny, or your dumb slut sister?
“….If you doubt me, take a look at just who is behind most of the “honor killings” in Muslim society. It ain’t the men, in all too many cases. Many of them get pushed into it by the women, who can’t afford to allow any “non-union” pussy to play the game outside the rules.”….
Similarly, if you look into FGM, you will often find the perpetrators and advocates of same are the older women. Some of this may be simply resentment and ensuring that their daughters/granddaughters don’t escape from what was inescapable for them, but some of it is as Kirk says, keeping up the “union rules”.
“Male reproductive strategies would better be served by screwing everything in sight, not locking things down.”
Only for the 20% of men, who monopolize the attractive women, not for the 80% of men, who end up alone or with a single mom
I have lived both situations. When I was young, I lived in Europe and was part of the 80% (I am kind of Asperger-y). I was virgin at the age of 27. Not only virgin, I hadn’t even had a kiss with a woman.
When I was 27, I moved to Central America, where I was part of the 20%, because of being foreigner and white. In the following 10 years, my number of couples got higher than 50. Now, 23 years later, I am married to a pleasant woman 20 years my junior, who adores me and treats me like a king.
(I don’t say this to brag. It is not because I am better than anybody. I took advantage of a niche, that’s all.)
I am satisfied but this is a recipe for societal disaster. Monogamy gives a woman for each man and this is the best for the stability and productivity of society. Removing restrictions favors young women and 20% of men. This is a society where a minority lives in a sexual paradise and the majority do not get anything. It’s the society we are transitioning to, which means the society will decline and be conquered by other (patriarchal) societies.
What you think of as “patriarchal”…? Isn’t.
The vast majority of what people call “patriarchal” societies are set up not to benefit the males involved in them, but to stabilize, regulate, and benefit the older females who are actually running things behind the scenes. They’ve got kids, skin in the game, and they sacrificed their looks and efforts on the altar of going after the most successful males, and locking them into supportive relationships. Those are the ones who’ve got the most to lose from a “weapons free” male sexual-needs oriented society, and they’re also why we don’t have them. At least, until lately, when the idjit classes went for the “feminist” ideology.
People continually make these mistakes, thinking that what they see and perceive as the outward form reflects the true inward nature of things, or that the stated sales points of various things are what they’re actually buying.
Traditional “patriarchies” all have one common feature: They regulate access to successful males by the females. In a state of nature, you’d see what you see in things like primate bands or herds of ungulates; one successful/dominant male, rotating cast of females being serviced by that male, with a bunch of hangers-on roaming the periphery. That’s the ideal situation for a successful male to pass on his genes, and you’ll note that the females who’re not fertile and producing young have limited to no role in it all. They can’t drop a new member of the band/herd? They’re pretty much done for–The male won’t defend them, and they’re going to wind up outcast and abandoned.
The supposed “patriarchal” structure of traditional human societies don’t do this–All of them strictly regulate young, fertile females, and restrict access to them by the older males, enforced by the older females–Who are looking out for their own benefit, because if “their” males could trade them in on a younger, prettier, more fertile version…? Yeah; older female needs to put a stop to that shit, and keep it stopped, or she’s out of luck (along with her not-yet-mature kids).
These supposed “patriarchal” societies? They’re really anything but; they’re actually better viewed not in sexual terms, but in terms of lineage–Properly managed (by the older females–The males are simply not hep to this sort of thing…) the traditional society keeps everything ticking over, keeping the younger hos and ho-seekers under control until they can take a properly locked-down role in the lineage, and then contribute to its perpetuation. It’s not that someone ever set things up to benefit any one specific group in the whole mess, but simply but that’s the most efficient way to manage the whole cluster-fark that is human sexuality/society. Everybody gets screwed-over by it, in some way–The “patriarchs” are locked into their roles just as much as the lithe young things are, or the young up-and-coming males. Has nothing to do with anyone exploiting anyone else unfairly–Everybody got screwed, equally. Just in different ways.
Then came slightly changed conditions, and a bunch of spoiled brats who didn’t want to play the game by the old rules, and here we are. Thing that annoys the shit out of me the most about the whole thing is that the feminists all wanted to glom onto the imaginary “privilege” of the males, whilst keeping their own as women and abandoning their former responsibilities. And, because the males in society were conditioned to cater to their every whim, they let them get away with it all. Which is a large part of the reason we have the dysfunction we have in society around us today…
Well, I never managed it for a whole load of reasons, but I managed to scandalize a colleague with this set of propositions:
1. [caveat] Obviously, no man is obliged to reproduce unless he has dynastic obligations of some kind. Then he is. Barring enemy action.
2. A man who reproduces 1+ times, more the better, without necessarily giving those kids a name or fathering them or even knowing them, has accomplished something of value for himself and his genetic posterity. And gained some peculiarly low cost personal gratifications both physical and emotional.
3. For most values of society and human satisfaction, yes, a man who has fewer kids and claims them with his name, or equivalent societal practice, is accomplishing something of greater value for his society and himself, at least for many male personality types.
4. Similarly, a man who actively fathers his child is doing something more for them, society, and himself, for most male personality types.
I acknowledge the many social problems of the way of life in point 2, if not supplemented by the others, albeit depending on socioeconomic conditions.
Still I do consider that projecting oneself into the future is step one, and it is not a defeat if it goes no farther, at least not for him who is projecting. The more the numbers, the more its has its virtues.
The attitude one has towards one’s society plays a big role in this.
It also depends on whether or not that society might have uses for large numbers of kids in its labour and military forces, or is in peril of disappearing for failure of reproduction. It could be pro-social even at that.
Kirk had an excellent point about it being grandmothers who rule, and sometimes the role of elderly women in society as chief powerbrokers holds true in both “barbarian” and civilized societies.
I am not sure at the moment which type is more influenced by the role of older women, actually. Probably too many variations.
Ontario’s former premier Kathleen Wynne and her deputy Deb Mathews used to prattle about how wonderful it was that Ontario was led by two grandmothers. I believe I have made this point before not necessarily to Kirk’s agreement but, again, I thought that idea was almost uniquely terrifying.
I don’t intend it as an insult to the elderly women I’ve known in my life, to be sure. THough I don’t think I’d have wanted any of them in power.
Paul,
Excellent observations on FGM and honour killings. The role of female authority figures or rivals is almost proverbial in these things.