This implies societies all have some deliberate plan of maximizing reproduction. Do they? Also a lot of societies have historically treated a lot of women as worthless. And a lot of “women’s work” was actually pretty dangerous.
So it’s definitely debateable the degree to which societies shelter women.
I would say broadly, yes, as socially unacceptable as it is to suggest this.
But it’s just in a relative sense. Being young and handsome makes a big difference to how successful a guy is likely to be in attracting women.
It’s just somewhat less important than with genders flipped.
And as a final point, slightly off-topic, it’s just not helpful to see social relationships in this way. Even if it’s true that social status is more important for guys thinking like that puts many guys in a weird place where they are evaluating interactions in a transactional way that is very unattractive.
And the idea that self-confidence is important is also true, but trying to appear confident is often the fast path to being a jerk.
Honestly, the little time I’ve spent browsing incel forums and MRA subreddits leads me to believe the real problem with these guys is that their standards are just way too high. They don’t just think society owes them a girlfriend. They think society owes them a Victoria’s Secret model. If you’re a spiteful, barely employed misfit who always looks like you just rolled out of bed, most women are going to be out of your league. Unfortunately, rather than improve themselves or just be realistic and settle for a woman that’s more on their level, they just stew about how terribly unfair it is that the most desirable women have the nerve to date desirable men. Then they use the rudimentary principles of evolutionary psychology listed in the OP - which are basically true in the aggregate but don’t tell anything like the whole story - to justify not bothering to make themselves more attractive.
To summarize is acknowledging that human behavior is function of evolution, physics, and biology wrong? Not factually. Don’t know if that really matters.
There’s a pretty big difference between, “Is human behavior a function of evolution, physics, and biology?” and “Does evolution explain why I don’t want to fuck fat chicks?”
Sure, which is why people evolved so that lactation has a suppressive effect on ovulation, and mobile, hunter-gatherer cultures evolved things like infanticide. But the ability of a woman to successfully get pregnant, bring a child to term, survive childbirth, and nurse successfully, is a sine qua non of reproduction. Better that she gets pregnant too easily than not at all. Hence the evolved preference for the easily visible marks of youth and good health, like the 1:3 waist to hip ratio, clear skin, glossy hair, etc. A fifty year old hunter can impregnate a twenty year old woman much more easily than vice versa.
Sure, there’s pressure for that. Overall, however, pregnancy and lactation/child care are a disadvantage - pregnant women can’t run as fast, as you mention lactating women have to carry the baby as well as the tent/tools/whatever, and childbirth is risky because human infants are born with unusually large heads compared to other mammals, and have a longer period of dependency. So women need larger hips, and are tied down longer. So, overall, it makes “sense” evolutionarily to mate with a higher-status male, because he is more likely to have access to resources that maximize your child’s chance of survival.
Sure - there is such a thing as a high-status woman. Historically, this translated into “this woman is a member of a higher-status family with more access to resources”. Why? Because men are bigger and meaner - if a woman produced something, they can just take it. As long as she doesn’t have a family or social group of men to protect her from other men.
When females are at a surplus, they tend to come with dowries. When they are at a premium, the groom tends to have to pay a bride price.
I think that if Pickup artists - NOT incels - help male marginalized misfits from feeling like marginalized misfits, they’re performing sort of a useful function, because God knows we have enough problems with marginalized male misfits erupting in violence. Or, I’ll just put it this way. If a genie appeared and said, “I have control over the destiny of 25,000 men and random men, and you can choose whether I turn them into pickup artists or into incels”, then for fuck’s sake I’d say ANYTHING BUT INCELS!!
The thing is, I have a feeling that a lot of incels ARE guys who are failed pickup artists. Or that the existence of pickup artists is part of what causes incels or something…they provide a tangible subculture of people for incels to hate, and that hatred boils over and results in shit like the Isla Vista shooting whose perpetrator -I don’t even want to say his name - was a member of a forum called “PUAhate” and, I think would fit anyone’s definition of an incel, an EXTREME incel. This guy wrote a manifesto which came out after that shooting, and in my morbid curiosity I read it. It’s horrifying. The guy did have some major clinical OCD in addition to the obsession and anger at being a virgin, but the two fueled each other.
Here’s an observation in general about this from a mental health perspective: I do think that a huge, huge component of the whole incel subculture is OCD. They’re popularly and maybe erroneously linked to autism-spectrum disorders, and maybe high-functioning autism involves a degree of OCD, but severe OCD is treatable. In the sense that it can be channeled into something productive.
The obsession with looks-rating and physical self-scrutiny and talking about height and all the alpha and beta and whatever classifications, that I know are a part of incel “culture”, absolutely SCREAM “CLINICAL OCD.”
My big takeaway from Incel in terms of “what can society do to help these guys” - and yes, they need to be helped, because they are ticking time bombs - is to encourage them to seek treatment for OCD. It should be encouraged in a compassionate, not snarky, way. They should know that it is OK to have OCD, that it can help them be really good at something if they’re able to channel it into some skill or productive interest, and that doing so will help them relate to people and that this would improve their romantic prospects, because the fact is, it will.
Part of the women’s equality movement is claiming the right for women to take hazardous jobs and to enter the military. And quite a few women do so; despite there still being significant societal obstructions put in the way.
Selective service registration in the USA is a hangover that hasn’t been changed – or used – since the 1970’s. If they ever start actually drafting people, you can bet your bippy they’ll have to draft women as well as men, or else be immediately sued in court. And the fact that they’d almost certainly win in court is due to the women’s movement.
Exactly this. (And I was going to include this in my response before I saw AHunter’s later grumble.) There may be overall tendencies, whether for evolutionary or for current reasons (and it’s almost certainly a mix of both); but there are large numbers of outliers going against any of those tendencies. Nobody in the world is a preferred mate for everybody. Nobody (possibly short of a person sure to murder their partner on the first night) is a disfavored mate for everybody. Some people like tall, some like short, some don’t care. Some like fat, some like skinny, some don’t care. Some like rich, others run from it. Some like competence, some like helplessness. (Personally, I’d run from those who like helplessness; but there are relatively benign forms of this.) People looking for partners, whether for the night or for their life, should be looking for people for whom their particular qualities are the desired ones, sufficiently so to overwhelm – for that particular partner – any undesired ones. This is especially true for the qualities they can’t change; if they themselves are unhappy with qualities they can change, then they ought to change them.
Exactly this, also. The evolutionary prize doesn’t go to the ones who start the most babies; it goes to the ones who continue to have descendents many generations down the road.
And humans don’t use the technique of ‘have huge numbers of progeny and put as little as possible into each one.’ We’re not African driver ants, or even mice. We’re way out on the other end of the reproductive strategy technique: have a few kids and put a whole lot into them. Humans need not only nine months of pregnancy to produce in most cases only one infant, but our children need years of care before they stand any chance at all of surviving without parental care – and during the first several years they need to be carried if the group moves any distance; which, as Manda JO says, means that hunter-gatherer societies can’t have more young children at once than can easily be carried, along with everything else that needs to be carried, and without slowing the group down.
It’s true that there’s some difference between male and female in this, in that men can duck the pregnancy and nursing and stand a better chance at ducking the rest of the care than women do; but throughout human history and prehistory nearly all men have had little or no chance of producing hundreds of pregnancies, let alone thousands. Men as well as women need to have some significant percentage of their children survive. So to the extent that there are evolved preferences, they should be for both men and women not only for healthy physical appearance, but also for competence in finding food, willingness to share it at least with one’s own kids, and competence in caring for children. Preferences for status would apply to all genders – and children of high-status females have a better chance in non-human primate troops, also; agricultural societies didn’t invent female status. Preferences for strength in order to protect the children also make sense – but only if that strength is balanced with being unlikely to kill or significantly damage one’s partner. And, in humans, intelligence may be more useful than strength for protecting and feeding children; which may be why one of the most attractive qualities for so many is the ability to tell/sing a good story.
In addition to all this: the entire theory that preferences in modern humans are overwhelmingly determined by evolutionary forces is massively undercut by the current social preference for thin women. Through most of human evolution, ‘thin’ meant ‘is having trouble getting food’. ‘Fat’ as in ‘so fat as to be unable to get around’ would have been too rare to bother selecting against. ‘Moderately fat’ meant ‘is really good at getting food’ – either because the person was a really good hunter/gatherer, or because they were really good at getting others to feed them. And in societies subject to frequent food shortages, ‘fatter’ meant ‘has reserves enough to be able to sustain a pregnancy through the next shortage’. So obviously even average overall societal preferences in humans aren’t determined overwhelmingly by evolutionary forces.
Sure, but the vast majority of women can get pregnant easily enough and often enough that a baby every three years or so is going to occur. But all this EvPsych shit depends on the idea that determining the slightest differences in fertility overwhelmingly dominate what men find attractive. But I just don’t see any actual evidence that a woman who had a 90% chance of getting pregnant in a given year provided any actual reproductive advantage over a woman who had an 85% chance–both are going to have the same number of babies over 30 years.
But pregnancy and lactation don’t reduce a woman to the point that she’s useless for anything else. Woman produce massive amounts of resources in primitive cultures. Evolutionarily, it makes sense to mate with an intelligent, creative woman because that maximizes your children’s chance of survival, as well. It doesn’t do any good to have a baby every 10 months if they all die because she can’t provide calories and shelter and education. What evidence is there that those factors are trivial but having a man who can bring home big chunks of meat makes a dramatic difference?
My point is that everything men and women find desirable in each other can be explained by cultural constructs. It doesn’t have to be explained by evolutionary psychology, and the idea that the picture you’ve drawn–that women select men based on ability to provide resources and men with immediate fertility–is far from settled fact. It’s accepted like settled fact, but it’s about as supported as phrenology.
From what I know, evolutionary psychologists like David Buss make the same claim. And he is not motivated by a hatred of women because he can’t get laid.
So yeah I’d say there is some validity to it. However these are general rules of thumbs, not guarantees.
As a general rule of thumb, men care about looks more than women. As a general rule of thumb, women care about status and resources more than men. As a general rule of thumb women want to wait longer to have sex than men when meeting someone new.
But its not applicable in all situations, and sometimes the differences are minor. I saw one study where people were making a big deal out of the fact that thinner women had fewer sex partners and handsome men had more sex partners. They felt it validated evolutionary psychology. Which I’m sure it did in a way, but the differences were minor. It was something like 6 partners for ugly men, 7 for average or semi-attractive men and 10 for extremely good looking men. The differences for women were something like 6 vs 8 partners based on fat levels. Pretty minor differences even if they do validate evo psych teachings.
Plus there is short term vs long term mating and the strategies can be opposite. What men look for in short term mating can be the opposite of what htey want in long term mating, same with women.
That is essentially what they think. Not the whiny part, which is a personality trait that people can actually change. But incels generally believe they are doomed. That’s what they call “the black pill.”
Again it’s useful to compare it to doomsday cults or religious fanatics who believe the entire WORLD is doomed. Look at a major thing they have in common: obsessive compulsion about various facts and figures. Look at sovereign citizens and their Kabbalistic reading of arcane legal codes. I’m telling you, it’s influenced in large part by clinical OCD.