I last wrote about F. Roger Devlin in “Hypergamy and the Early Manosphere.” I didn’t find his pseudonymous Magnum Opus to be particularly amazing, to put it mildly. Well, Devlin (or someone claiming to be the person claiming to be Devlin) is back…. on Substack. So I thought I’d delve in and see if the “co-founder” (heh…) of the Manosphere has changed in 17 years.
I hope you enjoy it. It’s going to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek than my normal writings.
Women’s greater power over human mating is the reason sexual self-control has always been prized as an essential feminine virtue. It is, of course, also good for men to be continent, but the human race has always understood that the most practical way to enforce monogamy is to concentrate on getting women, specifically, to practice it, since this forces men to practice it as well.
Well, he isn’t starting well. Women have a market advantage when it comes to reproduction, as the scarce resource is the tiny resource known as a baby. Thanks to modern technology, when it comes to mating men and women are on equal footing.
At this point in history, with fertility at critical lows, focusing on the behavior of women over the behavior of men is…. rather stupid and archaic. Devlin must be more than 120 years old if he still thinks this.
Discouraging any undesirable practice must focus on cutting off the supply rather than the demand.
This was a dumb idea 17 years ago, and it is still a dumb idea today.
According to Devlin’s theory of hypergamy, most women are chasing a small number of men. Yeah, I know we refuted that belief, but bear with me. We’re just trying to point out the error in his reasoning.
If a large number of women are chasing a small number of men, then he’s completely reversed the supply/demand analogy. Top men are in high demand and women are in low demand (and non-elite men are effectively not market participants, so they are irrelevant to the supply/demand equation). If you want to solve the problem of hypergamy, you have to cut off the supply of high-tier men.
Logically, it’s much, much easier to alter the behavior of a relatively small number of high-tier men than the vastly huge numbers of low- to high-tier women.
But you and I both know that high-tier men can’t be controlled. There is no way to change their behavior. That’s the real reason Devlin wants to focus on women: deep down he knows that the high-tier men that women are going after have no character to speak of and are, essentially, irredeemable.
It’s far easier to try to change 80% of women than it is to change 20% of men. That’s how far gone modern men are. If only Devlin could be honest about how he is actually blaming men for the problem. His writings would be far more honest without all the smoke and mirrors if he stopped trying to argue that hypergamous women—that is, every last one of them—are the primary problem.
In any case, whoever fails to understand the fundamental reality that women represent the supply of sex while men represent the demand is bound to get everything else about sex wrong.
Hahahahahaha! Snort. Hahahahahaha!
And the common narrative that men have been freed to take advantage of helpless women represents a failure to grasp this basic biological fact about sex.
Oh, birth control is “a basic biological fact” now. Wait. Hold up a second. Does Devlin even know about birth control (and abortion, and “third car seat” contraception)? Is it possible that nobody told him? This could explain why he seems to be stuck 120 years in the past.
So what does happen when socially enforced monogamy breaks down? First of all, the result is never “promiscuity.” Promiscuity literally means a lack of discrimination, or random mating. Human mating can never be truly promiscuous or random because of a second unchangeable biological fact of life: Some people are more attractive than others.
Oh, my sweet summer child. If there is one thing that my series on Hypergamy showed, it was that promiscuity is absolutely a thing. The statistics we examined in the series on Hypergamy completely refute Devlin’s claim. No one seriously thinks that women are only hypergamous in practice. Well, except for the clueless 80/20 folk.
This serves a eugenic function. A good-looking young woman with clear skin and symmetrical features is likely to be low in mutational load, and therefore more likely to produce a lot of healthy, fertile offspring.
Actual human breeding has be dysgenic, not eugenic, for a century or two now. Maybe Devlin is actually 220 years old!
Woman may have harmful mutations that are undetectable in their pretty faces, while jet-setting men may not always make the best fathers. But other things being equal, this is how sexual selection works.
No, this is not how sexual selection actually works. This is what someone says who has only read about sexual selection in a biology textbook.
As Ed Dutton often points out, the highest human fertility is among those with the highest mutational load. The ugliest and “least” fit are having the most babies. Except that “fitness” is a descriptive term, so, by definition, the least pretty and worst quality men and women with the highest mutational load are the most genetically fit.
<insert chortle here>
Because of differential attractiveness, the pattern that emerges following the breakdown of monogamy is never random, but instead Darwinian.
This is mostly false.
Devlin doesn’t know what Darwinian means.
Mating is always Darwinian, by definition. No matter what happens, it is Darwinian. Whether monogamy breaks down or not, it is Darwinian. Whether sexual selection is based on attractiveness or its inverse, it is still Darwinian.
Whatever leads to sexual selection, that is Darwinian. It doesn’t matter what that selection actually is, as the selection is always for something, and that something need not—and cannot—be constant over time. It could be monogamy today or polygamy tomorrow, but it is still Darwinian.
It is essentially identical to what we observe in primate packs, where females compete to mate with the most dominant males, while males compete for dominance partly to get access to more females.
Oh dear. I feel bad for Devlin. He really does get his notions of sexuality from a biology textbook. I’ll make this simple: what primate packs do is not applicable to human mating. Humans are not primates, because when primates mate, they breed out the undesirable mutations. Human populations are doing the opposite.
Why? Because humans have agency and primates do not. Humans can choose and they are exercising their agency to do so.
If you want to compare humans to the animal kingdom, the better analogy is the Mouse Utopia.
A Darwinian mating system does not increase the total amount of sex available to men over what it is under monogamy. It merely distributes it differently, concentrating it heavily at the top of the hierarchy.
Over the last 17 years, the total amount of human sexual activity has measurably changed. It has declined. The current mating system has, in fact, altered the total amount of sex available. The decrease coincides precisely with the decline in monogamy, ergo, monogamy leads to an increase.
Meanwhile, the mating system has been, by definition, 100% Darwinian the whole time.
The Sexual Revolution did not, then, remove the constraints on male sexuality, as most traditionalists imagine. For most men, it made those constraints more onerous. Instead, it liberated female sexuality, freeing more women to pursue the highest-status men.
Except that women ultimately don’t pursue the highest-status men, so, sorry Devlin, you got this wrong. It’s time to move on to some other theory.
The idea that a woman who mates with three different men—a high-status man, a low-status man, and a matched-status man—would have been fine if only she hadn’t had the high-status man…. is absurd.
The obvious result of such freedom is the situation we have heard women complaining about for the past 50 years or more: the alleged impossibility of getting men to “commit.”
I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is because of promiscuity, not hypergamy (which is a myth).
Indeed, one of the most important functions of monogamy is to allow men with no understanding of female sexuality to find wives. In the absence of socially-enforced monogamy, men have to know how to seduce women, and most simply do not. This is another mistake the moralistic traditionalists make: portraying ordinary young men as master seducers. Most young men have no idea what they are doing with women.
Devlin is sooooo close, and yet sooooo far away. It isn’t monogamy, but arranged marriage, that accounts for this. That’s because both men and women are bad at finding mates. They have evolved, through natural Darwinian processes, to have no instincts for how to pick a mate. They need their mates to be picked for them by people who know what they are doing. This is true even in polygamous societies!
Hypergamy—or more properly promiscuity—is just assortative mating by trial-and-error rather than by arrangement.
Other things being equal, a monogamous tribe is likely to defeat a polygynous tribe on the battlefield.
…
And it creates stable family relations, which provide the healthiest and most predictable environment for children to grow up in.
Brother (or is it Sister?), that’s mistaking correlation for causation. Monogamous societies are better at selecting for intelligence because polygamous societies tend to involve cousin marriage (which suppresses intelligence). It has nothing to do with monogamy or polygamy itself.
As for stable family relations, polygamous societies have always had stronger family relations than monogamous societies, in large part because of all the inbreeding.
Normal women tend to be happiest when behaving in evolutionarily adaptive ways: marrying in their late teens or early twenties, bearing children, and devoting themselves to the well-being of their families. This is also, obviously, best for their children and the future of society as a whole. But the institutions that encouraged and supported such behavior have broken down. I understand that the average age of a Swedish woman at her first marriage is now over 30, and it is similarly high in much of northern Europe. Most of these women do not practice chastity before marriage, with the result that they fail to bond properly with their husbands once they do marry, and that is one reason divorce is so common.
We could quibble, but this is close enough.
The best way to conclude a talk about sexual dysfunction would be to tell you how to cure it, but this is not easy. In America, as I mentioned, critics of the Sexual Revolution usually have nothing better to propose than a religious revival. But this is not likely to work in a country whose Church is governed by lesbian bishops. The most recent news story I read about Christianity in Sweden involved such a bishop calling for the removal of crosses from Christian churches so as not to offend Muslim immigrants.
Accurate.
I do not have a cure for the Sexual Revolution, but I can make an educated guess as to how it will play out. In the long run, maladaptive behavior always comes to an end because it is maladaptive. Those who postpone marriage for too long or devote themselves to sterile sexual practices will fail to pass on their genes. The future belongs to those who procreate and raise children. They will be the founders of the civilization that replaces today’s exhausted and decadent world.
Accurate.
I might even be inclined to look toward the future with confidence if it were not for the fact of demographic replacement. Adaptive sexuality will return one way or another, because that is nature’s way. But there are no guarantees that our own descendants will be the ones practicing it. And I don’t care very much what sexual or family practices prevail in a future Muslim Swedistan. My concern is with my own people and civilization, of which the Swedish people are a part.
I have bad news for confident readers. The future will be more like the movie Idiocracy than anything else. It will be like the fall of the Roman Empire. It already is. There is no going back, and won’t be for a few hundred years at least.
The solution is actually quite simple. It does not require any effort, because like assortative mating, people do it automatically and instinctively: self-segregation. You’ll find a place and a group of people who match you, and you’ll experience the change with them.
Anyway, Devlin is back and he still doesn’t have much to offer.
Somewhat aside from the above – a general comment on the Manosphere.
It suddenly struck me the other day how much the Manosphere operates in accordance with the overarching PSYOPS of the past forty years – since the 80s especially, e.g. “second wave” feminism – of promoting inter-sex hatred, fear, and resentment.
In other words; psychologically, the Manosphere is a mirror of the Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood kind of stuff – as seen in the Very high proportion of movies, TV programmes and “news” stories that are continually sustaining the “Men are pigs” agenda, as Miles W Mathis terms it.
Of course, because men are different from women, the motivators are different; but it is obvious that those who engage with the Manosphere develop an “instrumental” attitude to women – ceasing to regard them as fellow humans, and instead regarding them as a group to be manipulated.
This is 100% in line with what the global totalitarians want – which suggests to me that, in various ways, and at various levels – both directly and by unwitting manipulation (“They” have become very good at this), it is near certain that the Manosphere is being promoted by the Establishment.
What do you think?
Sorry to interrupt. Back to topic!
Bruce,
It’s a small world. I was just thinking about that yesterday, because it was Mother’s Day.
The vilification of men (and fathers in particular) has been a trope for some time now. On Father’s Day here in America, pastors across the country praise single mothers and blame men. Once my wife asked me why I didn’t want to go to church on Father’s Day and I told her because they’ll praise single mothers and blame fathers. She was incredulous. Then we went to church and, lo, it came to pass. Sitting in the pews, she looked at me and we exchanged a knowing glance. I didn’t need to say a word.
(Whenever I consider switching to another church, I listen to the Father’s Day sermons in their archives: it’s the Litmus test for American churches)
All the Manosphere did was replace the villification of men with the vilification of women.
Your writings on negatively-defined ethics capture this. The Manosphere is fundamentally negatively defined, not positively. It’s about fighting evil, not doing good.
I see the Manosphere as just one part of the whole system. The end result of “fighting evil” is the same, no matter what “evil” is being fought, because it isn’t truly virtuous.
Peace,
DR
At our last assignment, we had a chaplain and the base chapel who was really good.
Great speaker, and he had 3 sons (a bit younger than ours).
On Father’s Day, he actually had a wonderful sermon celebrating fatherhood, and he distributed mugs at the end of the service in honor of fathers.
I took an image and put it on Twitter a while back.
Quote on the front was:
“”Justice, Kindness, Humility…it’s a guy thing”
This is rare in my experience with today’s churches.
My current church is one of those Father’s Day agnostic churches. It doesn’t attack men but it also doesn’t really dedicate a day to praising and uplifting them. Father’s Day is mostly a day to continue to the ongoing sermon series.
I live in an area surrounded by churches that I’m not enthusiastic about. It’s too far of a drive to find one I really want to go to.
In “Today’s Churches,” this is what passes for “Mennonite” these days (outside the split-off Lancaster Mennonite Conference).