Challenging the “Evolutionary Psychology” of PUA and MGTOW: the absurd Alpha-Beta paradigm
Dean Esmay
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I’ve spent the last few years trying to be nice to people spreading what I consider pernicious anti-male attitudes about sex and reproduction throughout the “manosphere.” As feminism is increasingly culturally on the defensive, and even conservatives are starting to notice men need to have reasons other than “duty” to want to be with women, and as the concept of “Men’s Rights” becomes increasingly mainstream despite the screams of our cultural elites, it’s probably a good time to start looking at the issue of Manospherian Misinformation more closely; giving men, young men in particular, bad information about human psychology and sexuality can’t be good for anyone.
Most of the misinformation I speak of is around a notion derived from what certain people call “evolutionary psychology.” Those who produce bad “evopsych” nonsense work from a small handful of studies that in isolation suggest that humans are somehow tournament maters, with “Alpha” and “Beta” males competing for access to females. This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin–and the ramifications of getting this issue wrong are huge long-term, so we really should talk about it.
I spent a lot of time over the last few years gathering references for various points on bogus “evopsych,” but every time I would offer them in the spirit of intellectual discussion or scholarly debate and discussion, I was attacked instead, mostly by “manospherians,” and accused of having an ideological agenda. So what I’m going to do is brain dump a few dozen paragraphs on human mating, reproduction, and parenting behavior. And then if people want references for specific points, I will upon polite request provide references. If you’re going to snark and sneer I will respond with same; if you want to talk about this like a civilized adult, I will also respond with same.
As you read the below model of how human mating and reproduction and parenting works, notice how much it flies in the face of the ideological “women just use men/men just want pussy” model that seems to be so pervasive among some (not all) MRA, PUA, and MGTOW thinkers. The misinformation looks something like this:
Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Males are therefore disposable. The female brain has evolved to where it pretends to love males, but really does not; females will happily throw their men overboard once the male is no longer perceived as useful, because hypergamy drives her to always find males who can give her more resources and more status, and if another male will give her these things she will leave. She will never be grateful for anything any man really did for her, in any tangible way, except by mouthing platitudes. Ultimately, meanwhile, men are consumed by an illusion that women are capable of love the way men love women. In reality, men’s biological nature drives them to simply sleep with as many women as they can until they die.
Yes, the above is really the way some guys think. And with one or two exceptions, most of it is garbage. And even the parts that may be true are being used to draw irresponsible conclusions that the scientific record (and common sense) do not support.
One of the dumber things running around, which I’ve heard from multiple supposedly “rational” sources, is that women don’t really love men because, after all, if a man is not perceived as useful to women they do not find him attractive for long.
What’s wrong with this assertion is that anyone, male or female, needs reasons to love someone. Furthermore, what makes a woman love a man and what makes a man love a woman is not fundamentally different, because both men and women look for pretty much the same exact things. Men and women almost always have the same list of priorities they seek in a mate, they just rank them differently in importance: Money, power, status, stability, good looks, a good sex life, physical security, emotional security, affection, nurturing, raising children: men and women both look for all these things, consciously and unconsciously. Men tend to prioritize the physical a bit higher than women, women things like the financial, but in the end, everybody looks at all these things, especially when looking for more than a casual fling.
Women may be a bit more pragmatic and utilitarian about love; there’s evidence that most romantics are men not women. But saying women value men only for utility is exactly like saying men truly only value tits and ass. It’s a bullshit statement in both cases. Do women recover from widowhood or breakups quicker? Maybe. Do they prioritize the practical in relationships somewhat more than men? Probably. But if you look at what men and women really find attractive in the opposite sex, you almost invariably find that their lists are identical, just prioritized differently.
Males exhibit hypergamy just as females do by the way, which is why the man who dumps his spouse for a younger hotter chick is a real thing—although that’s less common in this society, which has jiggered divorce laws to ridiculously lopsided female-favoring circumstances. But the reality is some men’s pathological hypergamy does lead them to being wildly unfaithful boyfriends or spouses. Just as it does in women.
Pathological hypergamy–that’s a good term. Because hypergamy is a normal, natural, healthy trait that both (yes both) sexes possess. It’s pathological when it starts to cause major problems.
The world is full of women who were so wounded after their men left or died that they could never even think of being with anyone else again, and never do. So don’t tell me about women not loving because a part of them values utilitarianism in a mate a little more than men. I have seen women sacrifice for men my entire life, although I admit that those women tend to be older and the behavior seems rarer these days than when I was a child.
Furthermore, males value utility in a mate. They always have. Just look at centuries of literature advising men on how to pick a good wife. Look at what women actually had to do that was hard work back centuries ago, work so hard few reading this would be willing to do it daily. Unless you’re an exercise freak or one of those idiots playing with hormonal supplements, what women of history had to do was often backbreakingly difficult even if it didn’t require massive muscle strength, just endurance–being able to lift more weight doesn’t really make you a better cotton picker except certain specific contexts, now does it?
On to our mating strategies and what some PUA and MGTOW get dead wrong: We evolved away from being tournament maters and became pairbonders upwards of a million years ago, or at least a few hundred thousand. Paternal investment in children started around that time, and it was paternal investment in their own children not the pack’s children. This changed everything; indeed, this appears to be the primary thing that set us apart from all other primates. And by the way, it’s much harder to fool a man into thinking he’s the father when he isn’t than most people think–if you’re in a small community with people who see each other daily and know each other very well. The modern world has changed that, with women now able to use tricks that wouldn’t have been so easy centuries ago; this is not to say paternity fraud hasn’t been a problem forever–it’s a challenge faced by males of all pairbonding species–but the modern world has made it easier to get away with. Only genetic testing helps men avoid the fraud (and even now the laws are frequently horrifically unfair to men in this area).
We furthermore now know the biochemical tale that we did not know just a decade or two ago: men change physically when they learn they’ve impregnated a female. The ramifications of that are enormous: it means that before we were even really human, we had already evolved away from the tournament mating model. We retain traits of it. But we are pairbonders through and through, and the key is to see what fathers actually are: a biochoemical, physical reality, not an idea or an ideology.
Fatherhood isn’t an idea. It’s a biological state. One that alters your brain forever. The history of war suggests pair bonding is the best survival strategy for both men and women – women have a man willing to protect them at all costs, and men have something to live for and yes, someone to take care of them and meet their emotional and physical needs. Take away their women and kids and except for a few who go berzerk most will lose all will to fight and pretty much all will to live. He is bonded to that woman and those children, and they to him. And if he dies, their odds of dying goes up dramatically. If you doubt it, look to the laws through countless civilizations for thousands of years: that woman and her kids were fucked if no family would take them in, most of the time. Beggars or dead on the street was–and still is, in much of the world–the most frequent result.
Who do you think was in those orphanages portrayed by Charles Dickens in tales like Oliver Twist? Mostly, it as fatherless children whose mothers could or would not care for them. Now ask yourself: what were the average odds of survival of the kids in those orphanages?
Love of fathers is at the heart of some of the very most popular (and reviled) religions in the world. I don’t care if you like those religions or what they did or not; just don’t buy the feminist bullshit that Christianity imposed the idea of fatherhood. Christianity TOOK the idea of fatherhood and OFFERED it to people who YEARNED for it. Call it a false promise if you want, but it was always one of its biggest selling points. The religions weren’t teaching fatherhood. They were offering us a love most people instinctively crave our entire lives: the love of a father.
Even if you’re an atheist you should recognize that the father figure is wildly important in the biggest religions in the world, and it should give you pause: why would that be so if the father does not loom large in the subconscious of most people in most cultures?
You can call that love of the father an illusion, but if so it’s an illusion deeply craved as a near universal human experience and yearning–and no, you don’t get to scream “but I hate my father!” as a rebuttal. No one said everybody has the same exact feelings, just as nobody said that every guy loves titties in the same way (some like them a little, some a lot, some hardly at all). What few tournament mating traits homo sapiens have are leftovers from literally about a million years ago, although sure, just like all pairbonding species (ALL OF THEM) we cheat, and yes there’s funny things in our anatomy that reflect that, like penis size and whatnot.
Indeed, Homo Sapiens almost certainly “cheat” far more more than tournament maters do. This should be self-evident in fact. By comparison to the tournament mating primates, Homo Sapiens only rarely kill male competitors, and not because civilization tells them not to. Human males have a strong instinctive built-in aversion to killing other males except in very specific circumstances. That’s part of our biological heritage. That aversion to killing each other has to be trained out of us; killing other males is not natural to us except in very specific circumstances. Indeed, most human males are so averse to seriously harming another male that military studies in the 20th Century showed most soldiers would not shoot enemy soldiers unless strongly driven to do so by various psychological training methodologies.
Furthermore, it is universal in human experience, with only the occasional odd duck sociopath, for human males to be psychologically tormented and sometimes even destroyed just from the experience of killing another man, even if it was 100% justified in his mind–and never mind what it will do to him if he has even a sliver of doubt that it was the right thing to do. That’s not because religion or society taught him that. That’s because it’s his built-in biology. Indeed, he will probably keep that sliver of doubt as a point of pain for the rest of his life, unless he is driven to near (or total) psychopathy by a brutal environment.
Indeed, human males are so deeply averse to killing or even grievously wounding another male, every society has sports and rules for honorable combat. And what the idiots think is, “Aha, see, men are violent!” Bah. That’s getting it completely backwards, exactly (and I do mean exactly) like a feminist. Societies universally set up rules which lessen the odds of serious injury or death among men who are fighting because at least in this one area they want their men safe. When you see that in practically every culture, either shunning or outright forbidding males to kill or seriously wound, you have to think: wait, if every civilization feels that way, that must be a natural instinct in most humans, with a need to punish those oddball rarities who don’t understand the rules and just waste other men. This is also why every society punishes murderers, by the way. Fuck, it’s the reason every society even has a concept of murder; if men were naturally prone to crippling or killing each other, why the fuck would men ever support laws to limit their ability to destroy their fellow men and then rape those men’s women and kill those other men’s children, just like tournament maters typically do?
And indeed, pre-civilizationally, if you look at hunter/gatherers what’s most remarkable is how seldom the men kill each other compared to how tournament maters operate. Human males appear to have a natural in-built sportsmanship in even the most primitive cultures, a certain “off” button that says “OK you’ve made your point, stop hitting now.” Human males also have that magnificent, “OK, argument over” instinct, which only a few women seem to possess, wherein they can frequently have screaming matches, even occasionally exchanging blows, then when it’s over, go work on a project together or get drunk together. It’s traits like that which built civilization, not hypercompetitive bullshit “Alpha Male” posing. (Which is all that Alpha/Beta crap is anyway: posing.)
Universally it may well be that human males preferentially kill each other rather than women or children if they must kill, but it’s also universally true that most men never kill other men even during the most brutal mating competitions—the old phrase “All’s fair in love and war” almost never counted murdering as “fair,” it was always a sardonic joke. Even in societies where men who kill over women are more accepted, men who kill during mating competitions are universally marked as different and someone everyone–men women and children–is a little afraid of. At best. More likely he’ll be killed or driven away for being a dangerous lunatic, in most human tribes.
And by the way, human females kill each other in the mating game too. I have no idea how often females kill each other over a man by comparison to men, but it’s not relevant: as usual, when males have a trait, so do females, and vice versa, usually just varying in extremes. Females killing for their mates is a thing, and guess what? It’s another trait of the pairbonder, not a trait of the tournament mater, where females compete far less; females in tournament mating systems mostly only compete over who gets to have sex with the victorious male first.
War is brutal on children because children are biochemically harmed by the absence of the father. Male disposability to the extent that it exists is an emergency escape hatch for the worst possible circumstances, not the default of how we work as a species. Accelerated male disposability is pretty new, something that only started happening the last few thousand years in most of the world and steadily accelerated in the 19th and 20th centuries due to social and technological factors primarily.
The wrenching changes of civilization were most costly to our men. And these guys, these MGTOW and PUA and even a few MRAs who should know better, who keep looking at mating, mating, mating, mating, mating, mating, and trying to apply their primitive mating lessons to life in general: they are getting it so wrong because they’re seeing how we choose mates when we’re young and are defining our entire existence that way when, biologically we’re all pretty much supposed to be parents in a more or less stable pairbond by our early 20s. Not because religion taught us this but because it is the near-universal pattern in most of humanity, and the anthropological record strongly suggests it has been the basis of the human family for at least one hundred thousand years and more likely at least 250 thousand years and very possibly as much as a million years.
Let me get this clear: “Game,” when it works, is an effective form of flirting and, occasionally, seduction, although you can rarely seduce someone who doesn’t want to be. But what they’re doing is playing with some of our most primitive wetware, and ignoring a lot of other wetware in the process, which is probably why “Game” only works sometimes, and why it’s really silly to try to spin these tricks for getting a girl’s attention and getting her to think you may be sexy after all are no more than a small slice of who we are as Homo Sapiens.
Those who insist that the family unit is a creation of civilization using what they call “evolutionary psychology” are oblivious to the reality of the human family for the MUCH longer span of human history than this tiny little blink of an eye we call civilization; “civilization” as we understand it is only 10,000 years old, and in some parts of the world it’s a lot less old than that.
So let’s get something straight: Fatherhood and the family precede civilization by tens if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Let me say it one more time: Fatherhood. And the family. Precede. Civilization. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of years.
This is why broken homes are so fucked up pretty much everywhere you go in the world and look pretty much the same with only minor variations on things like their level of violence or drug addiction or crime or just how entrenched the financial problems are. Yes some come out of broken homes to do fantastic and some come from the best of families and wind up dead after trying to rob a liquor store, but unless you are really unschooled you know exactly where the odds lie and it is not with the kids from broken families.
Because fatherhood. Precedes. Civilization. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of years.
And fathers are as biochemically tied to their children as mothers are, which is why when a man is certain he has impregnated a female he biochemically changes, and when he is uncertain he generally does not.
This documented scientific reality that men change biochemically when their mate becomes pregnant appears to have been something Western scientists discarded decades ago, ignoring it when primitive peoples would talk to them about it. The primitives knew it but our scientists thought until recently that it was just primitive superstition. Only recently did researchers get interested in it again as they found that yes, all that stuff about “sympathetic pregnancy” that many males experience? Yeah: it’s biochemical, not just them being cute or silly. Indeed, mocking men for having “sympathetic pregnancy” is pretty juvenile, since it’s a natural biological state for men. It’s like mocking them for going into puberty. Fathers-to-be change hormonally and in brain structure, in ways that can’t be undone (not that we know of anyway), and those changes are even greater after the child is born.
Many primitive societies have always known about this. Men really do become pregnant, and if paternity was in question it was usually because a man was not showing the signs: in his heart, he didn’t believe, and he didn’t change either physically or in attitude.
The actual mating pattern for pre-civilizational humans is for youngsters to find mates somewhere in their mid-teens, and have a child together with the help of extended family. Then when that child is weaned, usually around the age of 4 to 7 or so (yes, pre-civilizational humans breastfed WAY longer than is now the norm), then maybe the couple goes off to find other mates or maybe they decide to stick together because they still get along and liked each other and seem to make great kids together.
You might want to circle that last paragraph because what I just described is both the most common pattern among primitive hunter/gatherers still putting bones through their noses and probably most other intact couples you know who have kids. Because that’s our evolved pattern, you numbskulls who keep talking about this nebulous thing in your head you call “evopsych” without ever seeing that your obsession on courtship behavior is blinding you to countless evolutionary realities.
Some men are obsessed with the 5% of us that’s still got that ancient tournament mating drive in us. They are sadly ignoring upwards of a million years of evolution taking us away from that model. Further, what leads up to courtship and mating is one thing, what happens afterwards is quite another, and most of these “women just want men’s resources/men just want pussy pussy pussy!” people seem to have forgotten that pregnancy was non-optional for most sexually active people only half a century ago. And pregnancy is the biological purpose of mating, and most males do not discard their children after fucking the mother; if they learn the female is pregnant the vast majority automatically, instinctively stay around. You can hardly stop them from doing so, they’ll do it even if the female throws things at them and tries driving them away.
As always, there are exceptions. You don’t get to scream that you’re different so there’s no truth in what I’m saying here. We’re all different in some way or another.
Let me stop here and point something else out: what I describe as the natural, biologically evolved human family for at least a hundred thousand years before civilization and possibly more than a million years before civilization? Let’s say you think I made that all up. I didn’t, but just pretend I did, because of my religion or my ideology or my secret agenda or whatever. Did it sound at least scientifically plausible? If so, you just identified the main problem with what manospherians sometimes call “Evolutionary Psychology”: working in a vacuum, or with only limited data, you can make huge generalizations about any species, including Homo Sapiens, that sound both utterly plausible and also turn out to be complete bullshit. If I describe humans as routinely walking on their hands, I can make up a million “EvoPsych” reasons for that as an evolved trait that conveys significant reproductive advantage, regardless of the fact that humans don’t actually do that most of the time.
So please, for the love of God, please stop declaring something is “Evopsych” as if that makes your argument automatically correct. For that matter, please stop pretending that if an evolutionary psychologist says something, that is to be taken as true Ex Cathedra. Hell, there are even feminist Evolutionary Psychologists applying “EvoPsych” principles to the completely fictional Patriarchy for fuck’s sake. Calling something Evolutionary Psychology at this point is like calling something British: it may be right or may be wrong but calling it British, Buddhist, or EvoPsych will not automatically make it right.
Now, going back to the mating game: Of course human females slightly value utility more than males do, but males value utility in their mates as workers and partners in crime and have for all of human history and, indeed, from what I’ve seen of the evolutionary record, for about a million plus years now, since before we were even strictly human. Indeed, I put it to you that most men find ballsy brassy women who can take care of themselves an absolute treasure. They admire them–at least most men do. If our natural instinct was to view females mostly just as cuddle-and-fuck toys and baby breeders, why have men admired female warriors and badass female characters in fiction for so long? Why does virtually every polytheist religion include female warrior goddesses for that matter?
Men have always admired tough, ballsy broads, always. I put it to you that this is because whatever they think of physical beauty–it probably is more important to males than it is to most females–a useless wife is fucking useless, and one who won’t at least try to have your back when you’re in a fight is probably an outright hazard not just to you but also to your children. Which means guess what? Men are utilitarian in their choice of mates too. Seriously, what man would want to stay with a woman who gave him nothing but sex and babies? Yes yes, there’s the occasional man who talks that way, but even that’s mostly bravado in my experience, and a pretty fucking miserable life most likely, unless you’re the rare independently wealthy sociopath.
Sometimes, like most pairbonding species, humans mate for life. Sometimes, like most pairbonding species, they do not mate for life. Much of the “controversy” over humans’ incontestable status as pairbonders is the stupid notion that pairbonding means “lifelong monogamy.” It does not mean that in any species anywhere on the planet that I can detect, with humans no exception. Pairbonders frequently just stay around long enough for the infants to be able to walk talk and eat on their own. Once again, that is not the pattern just for humans, it’s the pairbonder pattern in general.
At least that was the standard pattern for humans before we started making laws to stop fathers from being with their children. But even then, most people recognize that it is innately wrong–in most cases–to keep fathers from their children. It’s taken a vast industry worth billions to hide the reality of the Family Court system from most people until they’re trapped in it.
In any case, as regards to fathers and for that matter stepfathers: Speaking anthropologically, stepfathers and fathers sometimes hate each other but just as commonly find friendship together instead, since they live in close proximity and there was no massive fight in the breakup—oh by the way did I just describe hunter/gatherers or something pretty close to what an awful lot of families look like now, at least the ones who have kept their sanity and stayed near each other to form something semi-functional? Yeah, I just described the human family of people living in jungles who’ve never worn shoes and quite a few people I know in the United States too.
And that extended family structure includes things like grandparents, aunts, uncles. The Arabs still adhere most closely to this model (more than others I know of anyway) but if you look around the world this is actually the pattern for most of humanity outside of comfortable American suburbia or certain upper class areas around the world. Or where government pays for women to throw their men out.
The whole Alpha Male/Beta Male thing? It’s bullshit on so many levels. It was invented decades ago to describe wolf behavior. It was later found to be totally insufficient for wolves, only really describing wolves in captivity, i.e. wolves in prison forced together and more or less driven crazy.
Comparisons between wolves and humans are not out of line, however, because primates have evolved wildly different mating patterns from each other, including tournament mater, promiscuous mating, and of course that unusual trait of Homo Sapiens: the pair-bond, which is actually how canines work too. It appears that one of the reasons humans and dogs have an affinity for each other is because the canine pack structure in reality in most cases is this: Mama wolf, Papa wolf, brother sister wolves, aunt and uncle wolves, and so on.
And by the way, there’s a common myth that the “alpha” male and “alpha” female in canines do not allow the other males and females to mate. It is based again on early misunderstandings of wolf behavior, particularly in captivity. What appears to be more typical is that Mama and Papa wolf try to dictate when and with whom the youngsters may mate, and try to stop them fooling with sex before they seem ready to be parents. Yes I just described both wolves and the old fashioned human family. Like I said: canine pack structure and human pack structure are startlingly similar. We’re more like wolves in our mating habits than we are like other primates, and dogs and wolves are more like homo sapiens than they are other canidae.
And by the way, again, please don’t be a juvenile and say “I don’t like dogs!” In point of fact, for the most part, I don’t like them either. That’s not the point. Dogs have been universally the one of the most popular work animals, as well as companion animals, in human history and indeed far longer than history, pretty much globally, with rare exception. Even societies that don’t view dogs as suitable pets still use them for work, because they’re easier for humans to train and understand than most other animals.
Whether partly co-evolution or partly happy circumstance, human and wolf pack structure are remarkably similar, and neither has an “Alpha Male” mating model. We are both pairbonders, which sets us aside from other primates and also most other canines. What that pairbonding nature means is that our males and our females do compete, differently but just as fiercely, then when we’ve done all that and we’ve mated we settle down and try to work together with the other males and females form a safe stable community where we live together for mutual protection and companionship–what is otherwise known as forming a pack. Pack formation is what homo sapiens do, along with certain other primates but unlike other primates.
That’s not communism, although I suppose you could call it some sort of communitarianism. No matter, it’s not an “ism.” It’s the human pack structure, i.e. our tribal structure, at its most fundamental and most prevalent form around the world and throughout what appears to be everything we know going back to before we were even Homo Sapiens.
By the way, one of a dozen reasons why people are psychologically biochemically fucked up these days is not just the environment we live in, it’s the fact that literally we, male and female alike, change biochemically when we become parents, in permanent, inalterable ways, and biologically we are all supposed to be doing that somewhere around the age of 16 or 17, plus or minus a few years, and if we do not, we inevitably are different, not just in how we live but at a deep psychological level.
Furthermore, until recently in our evolutionary heritage, females rarely got pregnant while lactating. That appears to have been something that happened to us when we became “civilized.” Agriculturalists appear to have overrun Hunter/Gatherers not because they were more successful or more warlike, but because they reproduced like jackrabbits compared to the Hunter/Gatherers, who were otherwise demonstrably stronger, taller, faster, healthier, and longer-lived than the agriculturalists. They just didn’t make babies as fast. When we became civilized, our women became a lot more fertile, did so earlier in life, and began to commonly get pregnant only a year or two after their last one, even if still lactating. Lactation used to be terrific birth control for most women, and now no longer is very reliable for most. When we started farming, it stopped working so well. The strongest theory on why that is in my view is the dietary change, but even if that theory is wrong, everything else I just said in this paragraph is demonstrable fact, and very important so I again suggest circling it.
Add the aforementioned biochemical changes humans underwent about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture to the fact that in the last 100-200 years we’ve changed even more. Then we invented birth control a half-century or so ago and that didn’t just change the game, it upended the fucking table and threw all the pieces in the air; we’re still trying to come to grips with how much that’s changed us.
The fact that we aren’t reproducing the way we were evolved to reproduce, and are waiting so late in life to reproduce, or choosing not to reproduce in greater numbers than ever before, may even make us less mature in many ways than our ancestors. Even if that Alpha/Beta Male bullshit were true–and it isn’t–it’s all supposed to be mostly done with by the time we’re entering our second decade and surely by the time we’re approaching our third. With only occasional fights breaking out–usually because someone got caught cheating.
Yes of course there’s cheating: pairbonders cheat. In fact, it should not take a whole lot of brainpower to realize that pairbonders will cheat more than tournament maters. This would be a natural thing: in tournament mating species, cheaters often get murdered, male or female. Whereas among pairbonders, who generally don’t fight to the death just to mate (i.e. that happens only occasionally), more opportunities to cheat will present, and cheating will be safer and there will be more opportunities to do it than in a pack with a giant male ready to cripple or murder any males caught sniffing around their harem.
I cannot find a single example anywhere of a pairbonding species that does not cheat. If you can find one, I’d like to read more about it, because I suspect that the only non-cheating pairbonders in the world are unicorns and elves. Concentrating on cheating misses the forest for the trees: every society in every era from the most modern to the most primitive recognizes what cuckolding is. And if cuckolding is universally recognized as a thing, and is subject to scorn and ridicule if not outright shunning and ostracizing, in almost every society with only rare exception? That means my dear fellows that BIOLOGICALLY we have a bad reaction to it when we spot it. Because men know who their own children are, instinctively, most of the time, and when they aren’t sure they feel massively insecure. Grandparents tend to feel the same way.
Also by the way, most of the evidence suggests women cheat as much as men, they just lie more about it. Sorry you guys who so wrongly that men naturally cheat and women don’t. Jeez, don’t you science?
Also by the way, human males mate-guard for each other, as do human females, which is yet again another feature of the pack-oriented pairbonder, not the tournament mater. Also, if we were tournament maters, the “wing man” would not even be a thing. As opposed to the reality of the “wing man”: he’s in practically every civilization, with only rare exception.
Indeed, human males, far from constantly competing, tend to crave each other’s company and enjoy working on shared projects and goals together. And the pedagogical role of older more mature males? Not just in every fucking civilization that respects males, but appears also to be the pattern that marked fatherhood starting about a million or so years ago.
Pedagogy: an actual patriarchal thing. And a beautiful thing. Feminists helped destroy that too by the way, and look how fucked up the education system is as a result.
I love my son. Not because he is my “genetic progeny” but because he is my blood, my kin, I was bonded to him before he was born, while he was still inside his mother, who I am divorced from but who is my friend still, as is her new husband. Which by the way isn’t a “cool arrangement,” it’s a natural one, or was until civilization came along and told us that was a bad idea.
Oh, and for the last fucking time, those of you who keep repeating the myth that mitochondrial DNA indicates an 80:40 reproductive advantage to females over males over the last couple of hundred thousand years? Debunked. Myth. Not true. Wrong. False to fact. Scientifically demolished. Invalid. If you are repeating the claim that female humans have a 2:1 reproductive advantage over male humans, you are repeating something as blatantly untrue as phrenology. It is false, no matter how provocative or interesting you find the concept.
The actual reproductive difference between females and males is real but small, and appears to be easily explained by the simple fact that a universal human pattern is that males tend to reproduce later in life than females on average.
There may also be something to the fact that exclusive same-sex attraction leaves males less likely to reproduce than females who are exclusively same-sex attracted. In any case the reproductive advantage females possess among humans is quite minor and not the outlandish 2:1 female advantage that has been scientifically debunked but which still has common currency in the manosphere. Those “thinkers” who continue to spout and repeat this myth of the 2:1 female reproductive advantage are often even people who’ve been given the documentation debunking it, and in my personal experience a few of them actually grow angry and start name-calling and other childish, feministlike responses. Why? Because they can’t refute it. There is no 2:1 reproductive advantage for females, and anyone who tells you otherwise today, in 2015, is full of shit. We can make excuses for the original researchers’ findings, as they were cautious and did not extrapolate too much from the data–and thus those researchers were in no way embarrassed when subsequent findings showed that they had wildly overestimated.
But look out, those of you following “MGTOW” (and also many PUAs): many “thinkers” in those arenas are selling you a toxic message about how men just want to fuck beautiful women and women just want to suck men’s resources dry. That’s misandrist garbage, and it’s pseudoscience no better than astrology.
Given the long history of antagonism between MGTOW and PUA, how ironic is it that they both share a “red pill” that’s laced with ideological poison. Alpha Male/Beta male is pseudoscientific bunk, period. The notion that we’re tournament maters is also ideological bunk. The notion that pairbonding means lifelong monagamy or just a psychological trick of civilization or religion? Laughable bunk.
Yes, the PUAs have some neat tricks that work in the mating game, a “game” that is supposed to encompass a very brief period biologically in anyone’s life (possibly something you do only once and then you’re mated for life, sometimes something you have to do a few times due to death or tragedy or a wandering lust, but that’s about it). Our natural mating and living pattern has been artificially changed by many factors in the last few centuries, of which feminism is but one.
Yes, MGTOW are right, society is so gynocentric it’s pretty much ruined marriage or almost any form of mating as extremely dangerous for males, and males are well-advised to avoid it. But that doesn’t excuse the pseudoscience some of them peddle while drawing that conclusion.
And yes, some of the more dim views of females are right, women can be a little more cold and a little more pragmatic and utilitarian, and can be cold and calculating by instinct in certain areas that can make men very uncomfortable. But men can be cold calculating and utilitarian in ways women find uncomfortable too. So, blowing up those sometimes uncomfortable realities to a psychotic extreme, using this weird thing you call “evopsych” which doesn’t actually match the evolutionary record? Stop it. You don’t need such phony pseudoscience to notice that society still treats its males like disposable commodities whose needs and feelings must always take a back seat to women’s.
Fair disclosure: If I believed what some of these “manospherian” thinkers believe, I would kill myself. I just would. And I’d hate myself for having brought male children into this world. Fortunately, they’re not correct. They’re spouting distorted science that the actual scientific record frequently does not support, and they turn into screaming babies or snarky children when challenged on their claims rather than addressing those challenges like mature men.
I seriously put it to you: the very idea that human society could fool men into wanting a mate and children, when hundreds of things in biology and evolution point to the fact that this is what most men want about as much as most women do, is self-evidently stupid. It’s what pairbonders do, and it is our evolutionary heritage. It’s not just about who gets to squirt what into whom – it really is about who gets to be a father and a mother to build a family and a tribe together because we don’t want “genetic legacy,” we want children and we want family and we want tribe. That’s our actual evolutionary heritage. We are not solitary animals who only get together occasionally to mate like bears or badgers. We’re pairbonders, with all that goes with pairbonding, whether we’re avian or mammalian, primate or canine. And we’re pack animals, which is what allowed men working in cooperation with each other to build the civilization we have today.
We love our children, and are programmed to want them and love them just like women. Ask a father who’s lost his kids what he’s so upset about. His genes were passed on, right? Why does he care if his kids are now being taken care of by someone else, isn’t that a big relief for him? No, it isn’t, not most of the time. It’s a wrenching pain in most fathers’ souls, so damaging to him that it could well kill him, and it damages his children. That’s why sane people increasingly recognize that Parental Alienation is an insidious and disgusting form of child abuse.
Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” hypothesis is Kindergarten simple on human biology. Lynn Margulis was right: evolution is as much about synergy and cooperation as it is about competition, and both of those are found in wonderful abundance in humans. BOTH competition and cooperation. Both between men and women, and between men and men, and between women and women. In. Various. Contexts.
All that, my friends, is not a neat idea. It’s the norm in human packs, tribes, and civilizations, most places, throughout most of history, and pretty much for the last million years or so I think.
I will entertain requests for specific references where you can go do some reading on various points but I’m not compiling a bibliography. This is grownup stuff and Google isn’t going to give you your answers. This is about the model of how human families, packs, tribes, and most civilizations works. It IS our evolutionary heritage, mostly, in broad terms. You guys off on the Alpha/Beta bullshit and the phony-baloney “Briffault’s Law” and garbage about how women don’t really love men and fatherhood is just a trick of the mind: Christ, your view isn’t just nihilistic. It’s childish pseudoscience no better than phrenology.
The manosphere, and the status of males in our culture in general, cannot be strengthened with pseudoscientific lies and bunk. Human beings are pairbonding pack animals, and have been since long before we had this thing called “civilization.” The human family, far from being a neat idea, is in reality our most important evolutionary legacy. Men are not well-served by teaching them dodgy pseudoscience and outright misinformation.
