I don’t know if that is being alpha-male or just being an asshole. I’m willing to bet that the men who fall into that category also have room temperature IQ’s, same with the women who admire them. Also, it should be noted this is not women’s fault. If the rule applies that men are that way because of a biological desire for mating success, the women attracted to them would follow the same principle.
Can we not turn this into the whole “men have all the power and wealth” and “women get paid less than men” thing? It’ll just muddy up the actual debate here… Please?
That could possibly work.
Your observation correctly notes the difficulty in ascertaining exact causes of the world’s “becoming better.” I pointed this out in the latter part of my second question in reply to Wesley Clark:
“Are we judging the world to be better than it was before the pro-social act was performed, or better than it would be had it not been performed? Further, how do we ascertain the effects of an individual human action, when the state of the world results from the complex sum total of all actions?”
As I mentioned, the questions in my reply to him are highly technical. They are not likely to be solved in a few posts. But they are the natural starting point if we are determined to eliminate the suffering we associate with man’s aggressive instincts.
Not only must we learn to work outside our simplistic notions of cause and effect, but we must also ask in what sense the world is made “better” by a medical invention or a record of basketball feats – whether in terms of temporal comparison (is it better off than it had been before?) or counterfactual comparison (is it better off than it would have been?).
That is not a fair representation of Stringbean’s post. Our culture has a serious problem with fetishizing the “bad boy.” To suggest that women play some kind of part in remedying the problem is not to scapegoat women on the effects of male aggression. Strictly speaking, you are right: to put the blame entirely on women is a fallacy of reasoning. But women are not perfect angels. They are capable of acting malevolently just as men are, as when they play the role of “heartbreaker” (something I personally dislike) but also, as others noted, in assisting in the propagation of aggressive genes over “nice” genes – something that is extremely evolutionarily dangerous.
As for how women become attracted to bad boys, we aren’t denying that instincts play a role. I’ve asked women about this myself. They told me they associate the “nice guy” with weakness and the “bad boy” with power. This is understandable given that we tend to mate with stronger, fitter members of the opposite sex (“alpha males,” etc.) but the real interesting element is how the word “bad” sneaks into the foreground. My current hypothesis is that America is simply an evil country. More evidence is lent by the recent election of our new president. By being, at the top of our chain of command, a bad country, our concept of being “alpha” becomes inextricably woven with being bad. Conversely, those who revolt against an evil system (the “nice” ones) are more likely to be the ones who suffered setbacks on account of their weakness. It would be interesting to look at other cultures (as I have not) and examine how the bad boy fetish translates depending on the other cultures’ ideals and customs.
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Yes, it’s true. In every country outside the US you can go to bars, gyms and coffeehouses and see groups of handsome cocksure charming rogues lamenting how they can’t get any dates because all the single women are being snapped up by milquetoasts.
Parthenogenesis.
Why is that surprising? Do you think it is just dumb luck that men are more prone to end up in prison than women, and that women invest more in procreation than men?
The OP didn’t ask about interfemale violence, and there is a reason. interfemale violence isn’t as common as intermale violence. The majority of murders are males killing males.
I think you’re conflating “polygamous” with “polygynous”. Polygamy could be reciprocal, although within patriarchal societies it has not tended to be. At any rate, a world with polygamy in which women could marry multiple men just as men would marry multiple women should not lock any additional males out of the mating game. If anything, I’d think the guys who would otherwise get locked out would have opportunities to be some woman’s (or some women’s) “one among many” – i.e., even if he’s not enough fun in enough ways to be worth committing to as a gal’s one and only, he’d find some women who would find him appealing in one sense or another, perhaps hot even if stupid or cute even if annoyingly impractical or nice & kind even if fat and dumpy, etc.
Not that I myself have ever wanted to get married, polygamously or otherwise… just sayin’.
You’re correct, I misspoke. Societies where men monopolize all the women are polygynous. A society where the gender ratios are 1:1 and the top 5% of men end up with 50%+ of the women means the majority of men end up empty handed. Those men now have nothing to lose since their DNA is going to get extinguished and are prone to violence.
I quite assume you’re being sarcastic, but I would like to see scientists conduct a study upon the “bad boy” – it would be interesting to see how much culture invariance lies in this sociological phenomenon.
You say that men excluded from the sex scene have “nothing to lose” and that they’re prone to violence. Do you mean more prone to violence than those who get to have sex?
Based on my personal experience as a virgin and also on an informal survey I conducted on a forum for involuntary celibates – a survey in which the percentage of respondents who reported feeling distress at the sight of others’ affection rose sharply from bachelor respondents to complete virgins – I would not be surprised if you are correct about a link between sexual deprivation and violence. But it would be nice to see a study conducted in this area, as so far no scientist seems to have taken the problem seriously.
However, arguments have been put forth that dying without children does not amount to complete evolutionary failure, as the childless male could still contribute to the propagation of his gene pool – and even of his own genes – by assisting his family and his other conspecifics. This seems to go against what you’re saying. Based on your comment here and on your previous reply in which you state that intermale aggression is “about finding mates,” do you view sex as somehow the goal of life for an animal creature guided by the pressures of natural selection? For human beings in particular, is sex a “need” without which we are involuntarily injected with violent feelings and incapable of living in a contented state?
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With all due respect your baseline assumptions are sophomoric as are your attempts to parse this out into some meta theory paradigm of human behavior. There is not a single “culture” of any size on this planet where the majority of human females of that culture are not differentially more attracted to aggressively confident men. These drives are wired in. Some women may not prefer this type of man, but the majority do and as long as that is the case this drive will persist in the genome.
How these drives are expressed is a function of culture and social options. The notion that you are going to fix these innate male and female predispositions short of some eugenics scenario is absurd. These drives are innate for both males and females. The best any culture can do is have strong ethical and moral guidelines for how these drives can be expressed and have options to channel those impulses in a socially positive direction.
I suspect this ‘‘bad boy’’ theory is less sociological phenomenon and more confirmation bias. We all know the girls who are addicted to the bad boys, and we know them because they stand out as unusual.
I don’t equate economic or career success with ‘‘aggressively confident’’ men, as astro put it. I would describe them more as ‘‘responsible and intelligent,’’ which has nothing to do with intermale aggression. When I was looking for a mate, I wanted one who was just as responsible and career-oriented as I was. If I were part of a study that asked about my preference in men, it would be concluded that I wanted a high-achieving man, but it would probably fail to control for the fact that I am a high-achieving woman. I think the idea of women seeking power through relationships might have some validity today but is largely a social phenomenon and an increasingly more archaic one.
This is my main problem with evolutionary psychology. It makes an observation about current behavior and then embraces only one possible explanation for that observation, eschewing the others for no good reason. My theory is that its adherents are mainly people who adhere to those stereotypes and believing their natures are biologically ingrained excuses them (in their mind) from changing whatever problematic behavior they might have. Just a theory. Untested.
Male “confidence” is absolutely one form of preliminary aggression, a subtle point where assertion manifests and aggression may begin. You don’t have to scream and shout to assert “I do not fear you and I control my position in this space”. It is a definitive signal that shit will not be taken and if it must be taken it will be handled. It says “respect me or step off”. It’s a slippery slope but confident male assertion is absolutely a marker for potential aggression.
But do you think that is really the purview of men?
I know plenty of women who exhibit this ‘‘confidence’’ characteristic. It doesn’t really seem that endemic to maleness in the genealogical sense, so much as it has been devalued among women for a long, long time. That is something I have seen change, perhaps even in my generation. But the way I was raised, it never even occurred to me there was any other way to be. (I am specifically talking academic and career achievement, here.) The idea that I should be dumber or less ambitious for the sake of some man’s ego is laughable, as it is for many successful women today.
I guess my point is, who* doesn’t* want a confident person as their mate? If we assume for a second that you’re correct, and that women want a confident man more than vice-versa, that seems to say less about women’s preferences and more about men’s preferences. It’s weirder to want someone weak than to want someone strong. Is it not?
To be clear, I’m not disputing that men are predisposed to aggression more than women. Testosterone and statistics and all that. I’m disputing that being economically or personally successful is a marker of intermale aggression and that women’s attraction to economically or personally successful men indicates they love aggression in men. I am married to an extremely gentle, highly competent man who has a high degree of internal confidence but not a single aggressive bone in his body. If you define aggression as like, sticking with a degree program and looking for a job, then I really don’t see what that has to do with instrinsic maleness.
Manifestation of “assertion - aggression” in human social interaction need not be exclusively male or female or physical at all and 99% of the time it is not physical. Women do not want an overtly brutal man, but they most certainly want a man who has the willingness and inclination to step up if required and handle things. Most women want a man who has the potential to step up for them and their offspring if the situation requires it. It times past it might have been an attacking tribe or hunting an animal now it’s handling an illness in the family, a huge unexpected bill, an asshole relative etc. Women want men who look like they can handle the situation. A confident man gives that signal but that signal always has a definite “I take no shit” aggressive component.
A man signals this potential by being assertively confident. In modern society a highly trained, well regarded, intelligent man can be supremely confident even if he is not large, powerful or physically dominant.
And yes just to be clear this is not a male thing women can be very aggressive in multiple ways.
Do you think that most men don’t want confident women?
I guess that’s where I’m getting stuck. I’m guessing your response (based on past interactions) would be that men like confidence in a woman but place a higher value on physical attractiveness and maybe maternal instinct, and I just find it all really hard to swallow. Several years ago you gave me the terrible advice to leave my husband because he was too busy earning a Ph.D. to handle having children. You made an assumption that deep down, I valued having children more than I valued that relationship, and you told me that he didn’t want to have children with me at all so I’d better leave. You called me abnormal for wanting to work it out. You were wrong. You seem to be working with a set of assumptions about men and women that seem utterly foreign to me, which is part of the understanding problem.
We are in the midst of, shall we say, a pioneering time for redefining gender roles in US society. We’ve established now that women can do a majority of the things that men can do, and well-educated women in particular are expected to have careers in addition to child-rearing (which actually adds to a woman’s burden, IMO, since men aren’t exactly taking up 50% of the child-rearing slack, but that’s another discussion.) Because of all this, I think people (men and woman alike) are being more thoughtful about what they want and expect from a partner, and about what they are willing to give in return. It has become more and more a choice than a default assumption, which is buttressed by the evidence of declining marriage rates and people marrying later in life, when they have both established themselves independently.
This pioneering period is an excellent time for us to consider which gender-based assumptions are socialized and which can be attributed to differences in physical characteristics. The declining birthrate may give us a clue about what women actually want to be doing vs. what they have been socialized to do for centuries. We can also make similar examinations of what men are actually doing (although I would argue that it’s harder for men to break out of traditional gender roles than it is for women. While economic barriers affect the freedom of both men and women, there is still a significant societal barrier impeding men from making real choices about what they want to do.)
While the male disposition toward violent behavior is well-established, it usually pops up in pretty specific contexts, i.e. poverty, unemployment, violent socialization, and periods of high stress. This suggests to me that our perceived agency, the relative safety of our environment, and our quality of life has a lot to do with the choices we make, whether we are men or women.
Given all this, I’m not going to look at a handful of snapshots of current trends in gender roles in Western civilization and conclude it’s all deeply ingrained in our biology.
The personal part I noted, I hope it didn’t feel like an attack on you, astro, because it’s not intended in a bitter way, more of a ‘‘you really need to question your assumptions more,’’ kind of way. You couldn’t have been more off about the dynamics of that situation if you had tried. Most of my life I have observed people, men and women alike, trying to cram themselves into gender roles that don’t fit them while others insist that is just the natural way of things. In the worst cases, I’ve seen them rejected by their parents, ridiculed, physically assaulted because they don’t fit. And I’ve seen those that appear to fit, externally, completely fall apart on the inside because in adhering to those stereotypes they are forced to deny some core part of themselves. I think this is bad.
My mother completely eschewed traditional feminine roles as a mechanical engineer in the 80s, in fact the reason she quit her job was related to pressure at work for her to be more feminine, i.e. less competence, more makeup. She was also full of the rage and violence so commonly attributed to men. I am admittedly more feminine than her in both my chosen career path and how I present externally, though I’m still the household handyperson so the engineering gene is in me somewhere. She demonstrated, nonetheless, that I could be any damned thing I wanted to be, and I never felt held back career-wise by my gender. Ever. I did encounter sexism occasionally but it was like brushing off a mosquito because I absolutely dominated in my fields of interest, and I never had any sort of desperation to diminish myself for the sake of having a partner. I have always felt that I would rather be alone than with the wrong person.
So right off the bat, all these assumptions about what women want, they never applied to me or even most of the women in my family. When all these other ladies were socialized to have children and be homemakers, we were socialized to cut our own path in the world, and the result is a pretty diverse group of women with different priorities and interests. When I entered college, I was 100% about my career, and had no plans on getting into a serious relationship until at least grad school.
Of course, that’s not what happened. I found someone who met my ridiculously high standards at the age of 19, I fell in love with him, and I have worshiped the ground he walks on ever since. We could say it happened because I’m a woman, but that wouldn’t explain how the exact same thing happened to him. The timing with regard to our plans to have children (a conflict that occurred eight years later) was entirely a function of my education wrapping up long before his did, and nothing whatever to do with his feelings about me or his own desire to have children.
And that’s basically why I find these gender stereotypes pretty asinine.
Re your personal scenario and my past advice to leave if you’re going to reference that re-post a link to your OP detailing the situation so I can see the context the advice was given in and I’ll see if my response (in context) was wrong or skewed. If your upshot is now “we’ll we worked all that drama out so you were wrong” that’s great, but all we can respond to is the words someone is typing on a page and the contextual picture they paint. Post it for reference.
With respect to the whole man woman thing I think women can and should do whatever they wish lifestyle wise or vocationally. I also believe that men and women in general have innate predispositions that are complementary and somewhat different. In this thread I have not (so far) referenced female confidence being attractive or unattractive because the topic at hand is what are we to do with all these violent aggressive males, and somehow you have woven this into some kind of implied diss of female assertiveness because I have not spoken, in this thread, to that topic. Confidence is attractive in men and women it always has been and always will be
Re “So right off the bat, all these assumptions about what women want…”. I have made one main assertion in this thread and that is most** (not all) women (and not you necessarily) differentially favor confident, assertive men as being attractive and that being confident and assertive is on the continuum of aggressive/dominance behavior. I believe these preferences are cross cultural and to the extent any tendencies can said to be “wired in” they are. You are welcome to disagree.
I’m not entirely sure. I did find this study, but how do you prove causation. Does marriage make men more mellow, or is it that men who are prone to acting responsible are more likely to get married? The article attempts to isolate factors like that.
Looking online, the evidence for unmarried men causing violence is inconclusive.
I did find this.
I believe the evidentiary basis for making this claim is weak. That was my entire point. By talking about my relationship and my background I’m trying to give you a snapshot of a world in which these bullshit expectations don’t encumber us and how we may make different choices when we have the freedom to do so. I have a tendency to ramble, so I’ll try to make it more clear henceforth.
Nope, not even. I was responding to the unsubstantiated notion that there is some instrinsic thing about women that leads them to chose so-called ‘‘aggressively assertive’’ men, beyond people just liking confidence in general. Assuming you can even operationally define ‘‘aggressively assertive,’’ how can you prove it is intrinsic?
An assertion you’ve provided no evidence for being intrinsically motivated. I am well-aware that some generalizations can be made about the behavior of men and women. What’s at issue is where that behavior comes from. This is why I don’t consider evolutionary psychology a science. It’s one thing to describe an existing pattern, it’s another thing entirely to prove its cause.