I was shocked and amazed to read Charlotte Allen’s long cover story for the February 15 edition of the Weekly Standard, entitled “The New Dating Game.” It is an exploration of the sexual mores of contemporary American society, either as they actually exist or as they are being imagined and described in a range of sex commentary blogs, which the author surveys with great interest and precision. Either way, Ms. Allen’s article is a fine piece of social science, and seldom is social science so arresting. At any rate, it sure beats Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf for late-night reading.
If Ms. Allen is anywhere near correct in her account, I gather that we are no longer living in Jane Austen’s world. True, beneath the surface, there are some alpha males lurking in Ms. Austen’s society, and one can detect in some of her females incipient cougar leanings. But all these things are partly channeled and controlled by the weight of convention and by the consequences of sexuality in a different technological era. Well we have broken through, for better or for worse. A pincer movement of advanced technology (birth control devices, new antibiotics) and a new morality of a male-style feminism have breached the walls of convention, which are tumbling rapidly, even since the recent and more halcyon days of the hook-up culture. Ms. Allen describes the return of a Paleolithic age that has none of the grace found in the Flintstones and none of the agonizing sensitivity of the cavemen of the Geico ads (these last, as Rousseau said of the men Hobbes described in his state of nature, only place modern man into a fictive primitive setting). It’s quite a world out there now, best accounted for in Allen’s speculation by Darwinian evolutionary models. George Gilder had seen this all before, a long time ago, even before he had all the biological studies that the modern analyst can cite. And it seems to be ending just where he thought it would.
There is much room for commentary from our esteemed stable of writers, whom I invite to weigh in, along with the deeper thoughts still of Pomocon readers. Besides, it will boost our circulation hits beyond those of the Porch.
February 17th, 2010 | 6:29 pm
Gosh, that’s enough to coax me out of occlusion (like the twelfth Imam, I’m just waiting for the right moment). So here’s what I think:
1. Most of the piece is prurient trash. And I can say this without risk of causing offence to Ms. Allen, because she does little more than reproduce the prurient trash peddled by Tucker Max, “Mystery”, et. al. They say the dating scene is paleolithic, and they’re the gorillas who know how to survive in the jungle, baby. But of course they say that–because that’s how they appear to make their livings. I would no more trust such people for a unbiased reflection on Sex in America than I’d ask G. Gordon Liddy whether gold is a wise investment.
2. Not all Allen’s sources have a direct financial interest in the account she passes on. But the rest seem to come from…the internet. But swingers blogs, like blogs about say, golf, tend to attract people who are more active in their particular area of focus than others. Suppose everything Roissy and his commentators say is true in their experience. The real question is, how representative is it? Earlier in the article, Allen actually presents some statistical evidence that the sexual free-for-all is limited to a few big cities with high concentrations of young people, and where women outnumber men (NY, DC, etc.). She can’t really have it both ways: either Americans have broadly adopted the mores of Caligula, or they haven’t.
3. So what does that leave us with? The argument that women like alpha males and dislike wimps. Which is almost certainly true–and I’m a certified B-minus man. But I’m not sure that it isn’t also tautological. Women are attracted to the men they’re attracted to, and not attracted to those they aren’t. What Allen really objects to, it appears, is that women used to want John Wayne in The Longest Day, and now want Mystery. But since the source for this conclusion is the “seduction community itself”, and she hasn’t shown that the taste is particularly widespread, I’m not sure what we learn from this. Remember that Liberace was also once a heartthrob.
4. Then there’s the Darwin stuff. Of which I can only say, who the hell knows?
5. So what we’re left with, in the end, is the old argument that people don’t get married the way they used to. Which is true, and serious, and has almost nothing to do with Tucker Max. If you need bedtime reading, Jim, try Houllebecq, who’s much funnier. Or just watch some Girls Gone Wild.
February 17th, 2010 | 6:49 pm
George Gilder had an extremely naive view of sexual relationships for which he was rightly ripped to shreds in Daniel Amneus’ book The Garbage Generation. Female sexuality as much or more than male sexuality needs to be contained by monogamy.
See my piece here. Slumlord replies here.
February 18th, 2010 | 3:40 am
Regarding Ms. Allen’s take on contemporary sexo-lovie life, Mr Ceaser gave a caveat with his remark–”It is an exploration of the sexual mores of contemporary American society, either as they actually exist or as they are being imagined and described in a range of sex commentary blogs, which the author surveys with great interest and precision.” e allows for the fact that she as been reading too many bizarre websights of sexually frustrated males. Yes these guys get laid, and yes they give you the “Getting Laid For Dummies” 123 textbook rules. But these guys have no purpose other than getting laid, and strangely enough Ms. Allen applauds his fact. She sees no “employment” (to use a Harvey Mansfield trope) other than some penetration of some diddle-headed bimbo of the likes of Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton.
Let me be a feminist here and assert that women should not follow the model of Lohan or Hilton. Women will retain respect as well as get men who are worthwhile getting without the ready “hey let’s film a sex tape” asininity.
I’d never heard of Mr. Max Hardon (or whatever his name is) until reading this piece in the Weekly Standard. I suppose there are guys who want to emphasize their “A-Ness” in order that the “ladies” see them demonstrate their manliness. They do this in order that the “ladies,” aka, the girls gone wild bitches, swoon over their mystery and cheap card tricks.
At the end of the day one must ask “When has this not been not case?” It may be more shocking these days, but the idea that one “hooks up” let alone “falls in love” without some stupid ritual regarding some shameless exhibition of what would ordinarily be kept to oneself is hardly novel. The problem is the rhetoric of frankness–to borrow Stanley Rosen’s description of Friedrich Nieztsche’s rhetorical technique. How does one deal with “Girls Gone Wild”"?
Concern over the erotic life of the youth has noble intentions, in that it worries about maintaining the family unit as a place in which children can be raised in ways whereby they can become individuals capable of self-government. It also presents a concern for the family as a place where one can find satisfaction in terms of a loved one–a love that cannot be met in terms of the public, professional, business life that all educated folk are condemned to live. How does one translate the most unruly and fierce sexual passions into something that is not merely useful, but fulfilling of the very longings from which one’s own unruliness springs? Ceaphalus’ account of old age will not do. One wishes to be with Socrates’ questions.
It’s a tough nut.
February 18th, 2010 | 9:31 am
I take much satisfaction from awakening our German Romantic from his prolonged slumber. It must have been that he was reading the blog all along, awaiting in silence for an opportunity to pounce. With prurience as the bait, he came out of his den and struck a lethal blow. I now back track from my assessment and will go back to Weber. And happily so, as Ms. Allen’s portrait of modern mores, as she no doubt intended, offends both sense and sensibility. In the interests of real social science, we need a larger sample…and of course a control group on which to test our hypotheses. Since Sam has now become expert in social scientific methods, he might perhaps consider directing future experiments.
For the second comment, the author’s article does not come up on line. And I wish to read it. Can we have the URL?
February 18th, 2010 | 10:39 am
So when it comes to SEX and how to treat WOMEN generally, the PORCHERS case is pretty strong. People have to be raised right, after all. And that’s about impossible to do in a world that’s become too MIDDLE CLASS or BOURGEOIS BOHEMIAN, as ours has. Where I dissent from the Porchers in some measure, I guess, is by remembering that manners are always somewhat ARISTOCRATIC, and our stoic southerners did provide us manners and morals, if also injustice (as did the old WASP ESTABLISHMENT). I would also add some praise here to our EVANGELICAL and ORTHODOX and even MORMON believers for paying serious attention to virtues like CHASTITY these days. They are our counterculture, to the extent we have one
February 18th, 2010 | 11:39 am
Well, it hard not to agree with Sam, both on the substance of his criticism of the article and on Girls Gone Wild. Allen’s mistake is to the take the worst cases and simply assert that they’re now generally representative. Still, there’s something to learn from those worst cases, and the way folks candidly talk about (or profit from) the worst cases regarding our shifting sexual mores. So Wolf’s account in Charlotte of the sexual Hobbesianism on college campuses today is an exaggeration and it’s not the case that universities are just stages for endless predatory bacchanalia but there is some of that, much more than there should be, and the way our students think about this stuff, maybe especially the ones who don’t actually participate in it, is very illuminating. And Sam, in our increasingly knowledge based economy, you should really selll yourself as at least a B+.
February 18th, 2010 | 12:39 pm
Ivan, thanks for the compliment. But I think underselling is one the definitive characteristics of the beta male. Jim, it’s not a den–it’s a second cave, or something like that. We don’t have to do experiments, because we can intuit the Absolute. (A new vodka ad campaign? Intuit the Asbolut!)
On the substantive issue, I think there’s something to the idea that the change in sex/gender mores, at least since ’60s, has more do with norms of speech than actual behavior. I suspect that people sound coarser than they did thirty years ago.
I wouldn’t remember myself. But does Allen really describe anything we didn’t see, at least in the background, in The Last Days of Disco–the case for whose superiority to Metropolitan I still await from Peter.
February 18th, 2010 | 2:37 pm
“Where I dissent from the Porchers in some measure, I guess, is by remembering that manners are always somewhat ARISTOCRATIC, and our stoic southerners did provide us manners and morals, if also injustice (as did the old WASP ESTABLISHMENT).”
Well, Peter, I darn near choked on my peanut butter and jelly sammich. Those “stoic southerners” did pretty darn well considering the cultural milieu and acceptance of the status of African chattel slavery.
RE: the question, I’m not sure about how sexually active kids are today. You’d think given the proclivity of STD’s, pregnancy, and what’s left of our cultural prohibitions that teen (or younger) sexual activity would be in decline. Then there’s the NEW goodnight kiss!
February 18th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
Bob, I thought I was praising the stoic southerners while acknowledging that their fatalistic acceptance of slavery and later segregation was unjust.
I also agree that young people sound coarser but maybe don’t act that much differently than the decadent Disco days of Stillman. But it’s still really bad that what used to be background has become foreground, and was used to be subtext has become really gross text.
February 18th, 2010 | 6:15 pm
Peter,…oh! You know I’m always on guard to defend the beloved South, warts and all!
Re: Dr. Ceaser’s blog, you make a good point of foreground/background. I just wonder about the pernicious effects of the ‘women’s lib’ movement, the acceptance of abortion, and the effort to eclipse the differences between little boys and little girls e.g. the idiot Left in general.
Philosopher’s in general have let us down in the past fifty years or so, but not you and your colleagues writing here.
February 18th, 2010 | 8:37 pm
I’ve kept an eye on the sites she mentions recently, ones associated with the HBD/Sailer/Mangan crowd. I’m 24, recently out of college, and, though I can’t compare to the Disco era, the article’s portrayal does seem more accurate than not in urban anonymity, certainly the bar scene. I’ve lived in LA, where it’s quite evident, and Houston, where it’s tamer but noticeable. And those from small towns usually find no problems fitting in. Obviously our inherent temptations are the same as before, only now, and from an early age, it’s assumed, even encouraged, that they’re “perfectly normal, natural and healthy,” w/restraint being repressively naive. Christian churchgoers usually assume the same attitude, maybe drawing the line at intercourse or insisting it’s long-term. (Of two female youth ministers I know, one’s very promiscuous, the other – the most devout – doing “everything but.”) And their rationale is almost always rooted in the merely practical, eg: reputation. I’ve not met one person opposed to contraception.
Most “gamers” use evolutionary psychology and tend to reduce everyone to his animal nature by suggestion. For these materialist reductionists, to understand a woman’s instinctual (fallen) bio nature is tantamount to understanding women per se. Transcendence is eliminated from the start, so their cynicism merits no surprise. Many complain of being lied to about female sexuality, probably when their virgin/whore dualism is invalidated.
Inevitably, you get hedonistic nihilism, and “let’s manipulate nature toward our own ends.” It works, because of either widespread materialism or dualism. The latter especially embraces a distinction made between Alpha and Beta, both corresponding to a woman’s dualistic attractions, which are viewed as contradictory. A girl goes for a Beta possibly only in a purely mental (thus non-existent or weakened) manner; she only truly wants the Alpha, since her strictly instinctual sexuality must be running the show. Most guys then believe they must be one of two exclusive disjuncts (obvious choice for secularists: moral-free, weak, approval-seeking kindness or loud, proud, pleasurable disrespect; either/or despair for Christians: neutered egalitarianism or “misogynistic” promiscuity). Allegedly, the girl confusedly tries to use an alpha for a beta’s job or else lets the government replace beta. Liberal feminists help her.
The Game Movement is viewed as a counter-attack on feminists, who essentially attempt to deny natural biological reality, or separate the rational and the natural to reform the second with their own ideas in the first. (Re-)formalists v. materialists, rationalists v. empiricists. Game is more like a radical, reductionist refutation of rationalists.
It seems every time you divorce the rational from the material, the irrational material wins, getting all the cheapened belongings of the now seemingly useless rational-formal. (Hm, apparently the sexes follow respectively.) As always, we need more Aristotle and Thomas to help bridge the “gap” and solve the problem of male/female interaction.
February 18th, 2010 | 10:03 pm
If the links aren’t coming up, my blog is at:
manwhoisthursday.blogspot.com
The article is:
How Social Conservatives and Traditionalists Got It Wrong About Female Sexuality
Slumlord is at:
socialpathology.blogspot.com
His article is:
Traditionalism and Female Sexuality
February 18th, 2010 | 10:49 pm
Commentators here appear to have missed, not the point, but the essence, of Ms Allen’s article.
The fact is that fewer people marry today than was typical during earlier periods in American history, and they have fewer children. Upper-middle-class women enjoy a period of sowing wild oats before marriage, and the kind of men they choose during this phase of their lives are usually not the ones likely to make good husbands.
That is where Game comes in. Men find that they need to develop a certain kind of manner – let’s call it cocky indifference rather than talking about alphas here – in order to sell themselves in this sexual market. Those who fail to do so become spiteful and frustrated; those who succeed become cynical about female nature. This trend is as yet too recent to have had much impact on marriage patterns – the urban middle classes still get married eventually, and their divorce rates are actually down – but that may change.
As for people outside the big cities, they may have fewer sexual partners than in NYC, but that doesn’t mean that women in smaller or less sophisticated communities aren’t choosing exciting men over good husband material, while their male counterparts choose “Girls Gone Wild” over women who could make good wives. Worse, their children, especially at lower social levels, are more likely to be born out of wedlock. So it’s quite possible that here, too, the “alpha” male is the more sexually successful, even if these women have 3.3 sexual partners rather than 20 over the course of a lifetime.
The social, economic, and even spiritual implications of these facts are not good.
Full disclosure: Charlotte Allen cites me in her article.
February 18th, 2010 | 11:23 pm
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was “shocked” by CA’s article — and living here in my still pretty chaste religious enclave, I was glad to hear some of you “say it ain’t so.” It can’t be as bad as what Allen portrays, I suppose. But even if the utterly thoughtless promiscuity remains very much the exception, is it not undeniable that “the dating game” has broken down to a critical degree, that men and women no longer know what to ask of each other and thus how to educate each other in manhood and womanhood? Even among very chaste and very traditional youth, the negotiation between the sexes has become so wide open that the chances of finding even a somewhat harmonious accommodation have become more and more remote. And the separation of child-bearing from marriage is deeply alarming. I remember a conversation some good religious young women let me overhear at a conference, in which they deplored the sexual economy in which the availability of promiscuous girls made it very difficult for good girls to retain the interest of boys and induce them to become men. So we may not have descended to the Cro-Magnon, but something is deeply awry. I wonder if we’ve crossed a point of no return as concerns transmitting a minimal degree of virtue to the next generation.
February 19th, 2010 | 8:44 am
Yes, I think the real problem, at least for most people, is more confusion than depravity. Lack of standards and cues, etc. Also, the young often take their bearings by extreme cases, which seem more exciting and authentic. So in that respect, bad examples like those Allen reports are significant even if not exactly representative.
The other important fact, which Allen mentions, is that the upper classes nevertheless get married and have children at something resembling 1950s rates. So where’s their virtue coming from? On the other hand, it’s the middle class and the poor whose sexual/family structures have collapsed. Which suggests that there’s more to the problem than “culture”.
February 24th, 2010 | 2:09 am
The rock band Sonic Youth has an album called Confusion Is Sex. That statement is probably truer than most are willing to admit these days–even though the record came out nearly 25 years ago.
April 19th, 2010 | 9:13 pm
[...] Commenting on the Postmodern Conservative blog, Samuel Goldman writes: [...]
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