The market works
One of the most important discoveries to find when reviewing the results of the American experiment is that men, when able to chart the courses of their own lives, will gladly focus their efforts on better interfacing with reality. The limits of the physical universe are the ultimate oppressor, but they can be overcome. Our efforts are better spent fighting with the universe rather than with other men’s petty desires for power. Freedom is not just the pinnacle of peace and morality, but it is the only way to ensure that the future of humanity will be better than the bitter struggles of our ancestors and indeed, our own lives.
The economic manifestation of men’s freedom to create, share and trade the resources they acquire and hold ownership of is the free market. The only way a man can gain all the items he needs in his life—or as we all often seek to do, increase his total share of resources—is by peaceably serving his neighbors in ways they find valuable. It sounds great in theory and works far better in reality than anyone has the capacity to predict.
This essay is not primarily about the free market, but it does use it as a basis from which to consider why the sexual ‘free’ market has been such a disaster in the past and in the present. It is assumed that you, the reader, understand the basics of this issue. If not, read a few of the other articles about female sexual preference on A Voice For Men first, with special consideration given to the woefully incomplete Zeta Game series. F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power is supremely indispensable. Generally, if you understand hypergamy—and more importantly, accept it as real—then you are good to go.
The above links are the only explicitly referenced external sources you will find in the entirety of the essay. Distinguished readers are called upon to apply their own experiences and knowledge when viewing this. The purpose is to provide a highly abstract logical analysis of an important aspect in the fundamental ordering of human societies. It is important for men to know how to best go forward when we finally begin to recover from the toils of ‘feminism’ and misandry.
The hypothesis is that any hands-off approach to organizing sexual reproduction defaults to women pursing the low-quality results of hypergamy at any cost—the opposite of what the economic free market accomplishes.
Creation of market mechanisms
If the free market can quickly and efficiently distribute resources and produce ever increasing quality, then could a “sexual free market” be the best way to solve the problem of joining men and women together for the purpose of reproduction? Why not allow men and women to enter and exit relationships at will?
An important difference immediately arises before we bound from the starting gates—truly, before we even walk onto the track. There can only be a sexual ‘free’ market in the sense that there is no human involvement in denying the actors from participating in the manner they choose. To use more familiar terms: there is little regulation from outside the market itself. It does not have the same success because key factors that make the unregulated economic free market work are non-existent in an unregulated sexual ‘free’ market. What would surface from abandoning the previous cultural controls of men and women’s sexuality is not a genuine free market, but an inferior quasi-market that has nature already created through hundreds of millions of years of brutal trial-and-error. The prefix ‘quasi-’ is Latin for “almost, as it were,” and is usually used to describe one thing that has a false appearance of being another.
In any individual transaction, there is a buyer and a seller. Both have something the other wants, so how do we know which is which? We know who the buyer is because he the one with the least to lose by not transacting. For example, the person holding dollars is in a position of strength over the person holding widgets. Dollars can be used to transact with anyone at any time, but widgets can only be traded with people who happen to want widgets right now. If the man with dollars leaves without trading anything, there are still millions of other people he can trade with. This is probably not so for the seller and his widgets.
Nature has rigged the game so that most females are, in the vast majority of their interactions with males, the buyers. This is achieved through the software humans run on, i.e. psychology. The mechanics are that by creating a disparity in what the sexes find attractive, a rudimentary form of competition can be exploited for its quality-increasing benefits. For reference, the most important factors for each—and the qualities they approximate—is, men prefer youth and beauty (fertility), and women prefer markers of fertility as well, but with the added criteria of high relative wealth and social ascendancy (proficiency in dealing with the real world).
The existence of desires, and of people who could potentially fulfill them, creates a quasi-market. Participants attempt to fulfill both their own desires and necessarily also the desires of those they are attracted to.
A contrived market: a quasi-market
What men desire is exhibited to some degree by nearly all women, and this fact puts him at a disadvantage in meeting his needs. Fertility is the simplest and most obvious quality to desire in a mate. It is all that is necessary to successfully mate, but women strongly desire more than that from their suitors. She is unlikely to be interested in a man simply because his testicles work. There is little danger of her not finding an opportunity from another man if she turns one down for not offering her enough. Men have a more powerful drive compelling them to mate because they have to be forced into playing the game even though it is rigged against them. This is necessary to solidify the virtual and elevated value of women so that they will be able to be the choosers in most cases.
This mismatch in interests places women in the position of the buyer. Their fertility is desired by many men. It is her eagerness to tell men “No” that creates a virtual scarcity in an environment where, in truth, there are nearly equal numbers of fertile men and women. This false scarcity allows humanity to benefit from the quasi-market’s competition for reproductive opportunities. Women (in actuality, their limited fertility) are not able or willing to meet the massive sexual demand men are psychologically programmed to have, and so it is men who must go the furthest to meet their own desires.
The whole purpose of the psychologically created sexual quasi-market is exactly the same as the economic free market: to more efficiently and effectively make use of limited resources. The sexual mating dynamic in humans and other species could have easily just been a blind fuck-for-all in which males and females had the same desires and only luck would determine how females’ eggs, energy and time were spent. Unsurprisingly, species that evolved to take advantage of some market-like mechanisms tended to out compete other sexually reproducing species.
Many people in the men’s movement condemn women for their hypergamous desires, but it is that extra requirement they hold for mates that informs how they make decisions in the rigged quasi-market that nature guarantees. As lazy, sickly, and gormless as we may think many people are these days, the state of humanity would be far worse—if it survived at all—absent hundreds of millions of years of hypergamy and females’ ability to make sexual choices based on it.
The quasi-market fails to maintain civilization
With the nature and advantages of hypergamy and the sexual quasi-market stated, it is time to move to the limitations, which are legion. As to its main purpose—facilitating humanity’s survival by improving the gene pool—put simply, hypergamy is obsolete, and has been for quite a while. Using reason and good thinking to manipulate the environment for our purposes fully supersedes basic biological evolution as the driver of human progress.
Civilization has since arisen, providing us solutions to problems that far exceed what rote trial and error through the evolutionary process could ever hope to give. We do not depend on women giving birth to fast runners; we have cars and airplanes. Likewise, we do not depend on women giving birth to children resistant to malaria; we have medications such as Chloroquine.
Moreover, hypergamy is only a rough approximation of what are useful qualities in men. It exists deep within the emotional areas of psychology and is about as accurate at giving good advice as any other emotion.
The strength of humanity is our ability to use reason, a capacity both men and women share. It is certain that accurate, methodological thinking is the way of the future. Reason tells that we must use economic free markets, imperfect as they are, to take advantage of various human weaknesses such as greed and envy, and it also tells us why hypergamy must be similarly redirected to our advantage.
Allowing the primeval sexual quasi-market to operate within our civilization is folly. Civilization is possible because cultures have found more effective ways of organizing reproductive capital than the quasi-market. This newly found efficiency is the basis on which everything else in civilization is possible. Hypergamy is 100 times more effective than all woman being willing to mate with any man, but cultural controls on sexuality that compel mates to stick together and competently raise children are 1,000,000 times better than hypergamy. Replacing them with the quasi-market inevitably leads to significant regression and civilizational collapse.
‘Civilizational collapse’ is used here to describe a receding standard of living, rather than one that is genuinely improving. It does not necessarily mean a total doomsday scenario, though it potentially could.
Male and female power
Most people in western culture would maintain the importance of the ‘feminist’ view that complete sexual autonomy for women is supremely moral and has no failings. To them, it is perfectly acceptable to remove all the social controls that had sustained civilization for thousands of years. Fairness dictates that we must allow women to use their sexuality to its maximum ability to provide her personal pleasure and social benefits, they say. Certainly freedom is moral and coercion usually is not, but this all misses the point. What is actually done with that freedom is of great import.
In truth, there is no removing the controls on female sexuality. Cut out the socialization that previously governed it, and the result is not women who have no longer have any idea how to distribute their sexuality (which is, as always, merely fertility in disguise). Removing the custom settings in a piece of software does not break it; the ‘removed’ settings are simply set back to their defaults. The default for women is not long-term monogamy and it is not “free love,” it is hypergamy and the chaotic quasi-market. Women will be ‘controlled,’ anyway, but by ancient principles less conducive to social order. This results in a massive increase in female power in the short term, which ‘feminists’ of course find desirable, but at the expense of older women, men and especially children. These disadvantaged groups constitute a large portion of the population who is not young and female, hence the massive destabilizing effect to civilization as a whole.
Men’s comparative advantage—size and strength, i.e. more control over the physical world—was nature’s boon to give nearly all men a potential to have a source of value that both complemented and offset women’s sexual power. We learned early that giving men unlimited license to make use of this advantage was not conducive to civilization. Controls were imposed that discouraged and punished using physical prowess, also known as violence, to achieve personal aims. The distributed, cumulative gains peaceful trade and coexistence provided to each individual man far outweighed what he could accomplish on his own through violence, and good men happily adhered to these rules.
The righteousness of doing this is clear and obvious to all, but there is no longer such an understanding as it relates to women’s social and sexual power. Misandrists have sought to completely eliminate this form of male power, but have conducted the exact opposite campaign with regards to women’s power, allowing unlimited license to all powers legal, social, sexual, and indeed, physically violent.
The damage caused by men’s unlimited physical license is immediate, visible, and leaves evidence. The damage of hypergamy is not in what happens and is apparent, but rather in what does not happen and must be imagined and extrapolated. To do one thing is to not do literally thousands of alternative actions, and this is where the primary damage can be found. The inefficient distribution of fertility, though we commonly interpret fertility as sexual intercourse itself, manifests indirectly in various ways. That there are often no instant and obviously visible consequences, such as lightning strikes or atmospheric descents, does not mean that superior alternative opportunities have not been lost. It does not mean that we are forced to pay in other ways.
The most present result is the failure to create stable families in which to optimally raise children. Strong families have been the basis of human progress and undermining them, whether intentionally or not, will set humanity back. Often repeated claims that families are obsolete are being proven wrong by the bankruptcy of the West in its unsuccessful attempt to replace the family with communal services and “safety nets” that seek to minimize the impact of failed cultural practices.
The West has taken on the daunting task of putting massive resources toward forcing unlimited female sexual license to ‘work.’ This is like removing all controls and expectations about violence because we have suddenly decided that it is ‘righteous’ to do so, and then blowing the size of government to massive proportions to deal with the ensuing problems. The people who remain non-violent would be the only ones in society living with a culture capable of producing more than it consumes, and they would be punished through taxation all so we can maintain the ‘right’ of people to pursue the maximum social and personal pleasure violence can afford them. The cultural rot of violence inevitably spreads when the natural and logical regulations dis-incentivizing it are covered up by the ‘safety net.’ Again, civilizational collapse is the result.
The consequences of female promiscuity, and by extension hypergamy, are the same as they have always been for the duration of civilization. The difference now is that governments have bribed women by promising to minimize its effects through various means. Extreme wealth, misandry and a cultural refusal to hold women to account for their actions have all resulted in a situation where hypergamy is able to persist with a purity of execution never before seen. Nearly all the immediate pitfalls have been eliminated, and many of the long term effects are assuaged by many programs that take from productive sectors in an effort to guarantee women’s continual financial solvency.
Male and female relations are already rigged in women’s favor by the sexual quasi-market, but policies that seek to ensure that there is never an experience of substantial loss in either casual relations or in marriage guarantees that quality deteriorates, just as with comparable artificially maintained monopolies in business.
The “dating market” is none other than the sexual quasi-market
Men and women’s psychologies are oriented in such a way that women are the choosers, and they are permanently ensconced in the position of higher virtual value. They will attempt to meet the desires of the few men they are interested in, mainly by flaunting or emulating youth and beauty, but this is not true competition. Nature has assured that most women’s reproductive opportunities are sound regardless of their faults, because there are always a multitude of men willing to overlook those issues. Men get no such reprieve, because women on the whole rarely overlook his material and social failings. Most men are stuck in the risky role of competitor, while women are excused from having to increase their quality in any tangible way. It is cultural artifices that can compel women to become better people—not the sexual quasi-market that actually minimizes women’s need to socially compete in meaningful ways.
Think of all the money, time, and energy spent on dating in our culture which has forgotten how to efficiently or effectively pair men and women. Think of all the resources that are spent on relationships, both ones that bear fruit and those that do not. Surely, there is satisfaction to be had and value to be found. Generally, humans find it important to have relationships with the other sex, but this attitude actually makes the problem worse. For many people, no amount of repeated failure would compel them to stop putting resources into dating because their psychology so strongly compels them to have relations with the other sex.
The American dating situation has been a massive squandering of resources. It produces a big sack of nothing at the hefty cost of 100 sacks of gold. But, this is exactly what one would expect with the resurgence of the sexual quasi-market. Women, the perpetual buyers, expect resources to be put forward as the price of admission. They want men to demonstrate that they have a desired product, or they move on to evaluate his competitors who will.
The quasi-market of yore at least produced children, whether intentionally or not, and hypergamy tended to ensure that there was at least a bit of quality in the father. Contraception gives men and women the opportunity to circumvent the psychological trick designed to give continuance to the species and experience the benefits of the scam without paying the piper, so to speak. As such, there is no hard cap to warn us on how much we can waste doing this before reaching the final limit: drastic civilizational collapse.
The failure of the quasi-market in the United States
The economic degradation that is now coming to a head has actually been ongoing for about 30 years in the United States. It was around 1980 that governments, businesses, and individuals began to reach deep into the future to falsely claim that the economy was still legitimately growing. The paradigm of leaving the world better than we found it for our children was abandoned when they decided to cover up an ever more inefficient culture and economy by promising that the people of the future would pay for current consumption.
Most of the accomplishment of the new science of leftist Keynesian economics has been to find ways to mask the damage caused by how inefficient Americans have become at solving many problems, not least of which is reproduction and child-rearing. They have done a great enough measure of success that not even most conservatives or libertarians have detected what is really going on. Welfare, stimulus, wealth redistribution, government programs, regulations, and the rest have all become necessary to keep this thing limping along—all so we do not have to face the backward slide caused by cultural values and implements that are not successful at dealing with the harsh realities of life on Earth.
The fact is that the only thing we have proof for is that men can drive humanity forward when placed within the framework of a free market. The reasons for this are varied and these aspects of masculinity have been covered in detail by authors on A Voice For Men.
The deal ‘feminists’ originally sold us was that women were just as eager and capable of generating wealth if they were allowed complete cultural freedom. From day one, we have been propping up women at outrageous cost both upfront, and in hidden lost opportunities. All markets only work if people are forced, even against their will, to compete fairly. We will never know how far forward women can take humanity until the economic pedestal is shattered.
It may be impossible to allow women freedom to execute their basic programming of hypergamy, just as it is impossible to allow men the freedom to be violent. The costs to society may forever remain too high in both cases. Or, perhaps with time solutions that are currently unimaginable will be discovered. The only certain thing is that we are all unlucky to be born in a time where we must make such sacrifices for the continued progress of our species. Our own ancestors gave up far more than the future’s unborn progeny are asking of us now.
The original American experiment has been superseded by an experiment in using the previously produced wealth to promote women socially and economically at the expense of all—including men, women and children, both present and future. The misandry bubble is looming over us and its inevitable collapse threatens to ensure a cultural, economic and governmental dislocation whose results may be entirely unpredictable.
