The Female Imperative in publishing

It's not your imagination. The reason you have no interest in reading the vast majority of books on the shelf is because they are not written with you in mind, published with you in mind, marketed with you in mind, or sold with you in mind. And yet, the publishing industry affects to be surprised that you do not buy their products.

This NPR piece three years ago came to the conclusion that women read more fiction than men by a 4-1 margin. Articles like this madden me because I think they miss the big picture, or perhaps are even ignoring it purposefully. It's like discussing global warming, while completely ignoring the fact that hey, maybe we have something to do with it.

Nobody can deny the fact that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women. Saying the ratio is 75/25 is not overstating things. So needless to say when a male editor pitches a book aimed at men, there are perilously few men to read it and give their opinions. Not to mention that, because there are so few men, the competition to buy books aimed at men is astronomical. I was once shot down in an effort to buy a sports humor book because I couldn't get the support of a senior editor. The reason? This editor had written a similar book proposal on submission and didn't want to hurt his chances of selling it.

Men read. Tons of them do. But they are not marketed to, not targeted, and often totally dismissed.

There is, of course, one other factor that may prove to be at least somewhat significant now that ebooks are so popular. Men tend to know how to pirate things. I buy a fair amount of books because I like being surrounded by real books on bookshelves. But I don't actually need to buy most of those books, I only choose to buy them in order to support the author and encourage the publisher.

Alpha Mail: cracks in the marriage

TO wonders what to do about a marriage that appears to be breaking down:

You gave me good advice 4yrs ago so I am writing again. I am having major problems with my wife due to the drop in my SMV. I went from owning a commodity firm to being in nursing school while my wife works paying the bills. She now constantly talks about divorce and how she hates where she lives and wants to move back to NY. An additional factor is she hasn't found a church she is 100% comfortable with. It is only my strong frame and the fact I keep the firm open on the side giving her hope has keep us together these past few months. My other concern is I have to spend a lot of energy gaming her and end up reading games sites at 2am when I need to be studying.

To complicate matters when we first got married she was violent and ended up seeing a shrink. She is better now, but she really damaged the emotional connection we have and I worry she will revert to previous behaviors in times of stress.

The plan was for her to homeschool our kids so when I graduate she would be quitting her job and hopefully all would return to normal SMV wise. Of course I am also christian and don't believe in divorce. On the other hand if I fail out due to all the drama she will be gone anyway plus my SMV could be damaged severely.  In addition there  are plenty of 18-22yr olds (less pretty, but better SMV ratio) who have expressed interest in me at school. My wife is 27 and I am 30 (look 25). I graduate in May 2015. Any advice would be appreciated, really feel like starting over at this point.

My advice is as follows:

• Get your act together and graduate on time.
• Get off the Internet in the evening. You're hiding from her. If you're not studying, you should be engaging her in one form or another.
• The next time she brings up either divorce or New York, tell her to knock it off. She made her choices, this is the life she is living, and that's that. This isn't a game with some sort of reset button.
• Stop flirting with your fellow students. You've made your choices too. Live your life, stop fantasizing about a do-over.

The problem is the reduction of his SMV due to his loss of income and status. He has to get over his understandable feelings of betrayal; her lack of attraction to him and confidence in him is no more surprising under the circumstances than his would be if she suddenly gained 30 pounds.

It was a dumb idea to think that he could live off her job for a while, as women always want to leave whenever they find themselves forced to act as the breadwinner. So, the answer is easy. Focus like a laser on increasing income and status, become the breadwinner, and most of the problems will resolve themselves, so long as new ones aren't introduced in the meantime.

Of math and stuff

Morpheus responds to Susan Walsh and her attempt to defend her assertion that the idea female SMV declines with age is a myth:

Let’s walk through Susan’s post here.  First, let me give credit where credit is due.  Susan is quite articulate, and has a masterful command of rhetoric.  No doubt, she would have been a successful lawyer.  I’m sure she is very persuasive to those without a sufficient IQ and critical thinking skills to see all the holes in her Swiss cheese arguments.  When it comes to basic logic though, she often stumbles in contradictions and non sequiturs.  I believe this is because she often starts with what *feels right* to her and then tries to fit the data and construct arguments to support that feeling.  As a side point, I think many intelligent women struggle with the battle between their emotions and feelings versus their intellect.  Most often, emotions and “what feels” right is the master, and the intellect becomes the servant.

Let’s start with the title of the post.  Note the use of the word “Conclusive” in the title.  This is a rhetorical gimmick.  If something really is conclusive, then the data and analysis can stand on its own.  The reader does not need to be told what follows is “conclusive”.  The word is simply there to plant in the minds of less discerning readers a false sense of authority.  This is the sort of thing that does work on most people to set the tone.  The Game parallel to this technique is what is called Frame Control.

She goes on to state: “was apparently incensed by her argument, emailing me this vaguely ominous message:”

Actually I was not incensed…perhaps that is projection on her part but I was a different “i” word.  I was incredulous that she was making the foundation of a post a random commenter claiming to be a PhD, and clearly not even understanding the details of the mathematical argument.  It is understandable that Susan might have some trouble with the math here.  In a recent comment, she made the statement that men over 35 lose 7 pounds of muscle a year.  Clearly, if one stopped to think about that point for even one second before making it, one would realize the basic arithmetic is absurd as you would lose 210 pounds of muscle by age 65.  To her credit, she did correct this egregious error, but it does point out that perhaps she has some difficulty with “math and stuff”.

She goes on to say: “but he is correct IF AND ONLY IF you believe that the homo sapien male is inherently more valuable sexually than the homo sapien female.”

Ahhhh.  Note the use of the CAPS and the emphatic IF AND ONLY IF which excludes all other possibilities.  She is so sure of herself.  Of course, this is demonstrably false.  If we assume for the sake of argument that this “area under the curve” notion has any meaning, then the OTHER POSSIBILITY where the areas could NOT be equal is if the “homo sapien female is inherently more valuable sexually than the homo sapien male”.  To be clear, I’m not outright rejecting that possibility.  One logical possibility is that the peak value of a typical female is orders of magnitude higher than the peak value of the male, but that the value decreases at a much more accelerated rate.  The key is that whether you start the top of the Y-axis from 10 or 100, that represents the peak value for each sex, not an absolute number you can compare between the sexes.  When dealing with “math and stuff” and comparing different data sets with different value ranges, this is called normalization of the data:

    In the simplest cases, normalization of ratings means adjusting values measured on different scales to a notionally common scale,

So conceivably, the 10 or 100 for a guy could be a lower absolute value compared to the 10 or 100 for a girl.  It is an interesting question.  Who has a higher absolute sexual value?  The 23-year Sports Illustrated swimsuit model with 36″ legs, a perfect body, and face of an angel, or the 38-year old tall, charismatic, handsome, wealthy hedge fund manager?  But they both could be at their respective peak values of 10 or 100 or whatever scale you normalize to.  What I’ve described here with normalizing the data is yet another reason this whole “area under the curve” business is just gibberish.

Let’s hit this from yet another angle.  When we depict SMV on a chart like this, we are essentially showing a price path or trajectory in value.  The path of the line over time and the corresponding Y-axis value is the informational content, not the cumulative area under the line.  If a woman was super-fit then gained 50 pounds, then lost it, the path of that line would show a sudden collapse and rebound.  It would be nonsensical to start analyzing the area under her particular SMV value line.  In a sense, this is basically just like plotting a stock price over time.  It is the stock price at a particular point in time that matters, not how much area is under the stock price line.  This whole “area under the curve” business is almost as nonsensical if I grabbed two random stock tickers, plotted them and then stated that somehow the areas under the curves must equal.

In general, responding to rhetoric with dialectic in this manner amounts to little more than casting pearls before swine, but not when the rhetoric is fake dialectic. In such cases, exposing it for the nonsense that it is is extremely effective, and Morpheus has done a competent job of demonstrating why Susan's reliance upon an incompetent authority was unwise.

Top 10 Game blogs Q3-13

Here is the quarterly report on the Top 10 Game blogs for the third quarter of 2013. What is most interesting about it is the way it shows considerable growth across the board, in line with the widespread expectations that the Androsphere would begin garnering more mainstream attention this year.

1. Return of Kings: 19,257 (+23,568)
2. Roissy: 35,799 (+19,649)
3. Roosh:  40,281 (+22,711)
4. Rollo:   156,390 (+6,244), 230,395
5. Alpha Game: 183,840 (+23,086), 349,623 (+8.2%) 
6. Dalrock:  190,532 (+60,558)
7. Just4Guys: 221,248 (+486,446)
8. MMSL:    286,495 (+57,471)
9. Keoni Galt: 468,052 (175,049)

The first number is the current Alexa ranking, the number in parentheses is the change in that ranking since the posting of the previous list. The bold number is the three-month average in actual traffic over the quarter, as measured in Google Pageviews. Although my previous estimates were fairly accurate, I am no longer going to calculate them, so if you are a blogger on this list, please send me your three-month average for July, August, and September and I will add it here.

I have removed Hooking Up Smart from the list as a result of Susan Walsh's explicit realignment of her blog. If there are any other Game-related blogs anyone feels merits inclusion on this list, please let me know.

Perhaps because the problem of feminism is most acute in the USA, Game blogs are disproportionately popular there. The top-ranking Game blog, RoK, is 6,323 in the USA. By way of comparison, two outspoken gamma males who consistently attempt to assert that Game bloggers are outliers and outcasts, Manboobz and John Scalzi, come in at 37,268 and 46,650, respectively.

Alpha Mail: the case of the reluctant spinster

PS writes on behalf of a female relative:

I wonder if you'd do a post on a conundrum I have, to get your take and the readers input. I'm sure other women have this predicament. I have a relative that is a 37 year old female virgin who has finally begrudgingly and tearfully admitted that she would like to be married, problem is she is overweight (though not ugly, SMV 4-5 and has flattering curves) and lacks any understanding of how to deal with the opposite sex.

She is a primary school teacher and has primarily associated with older women and overweight female friends her entire life. The family has left that part of her life alone and was pretty much resigned to her being a spinster.

Thanks to game blogs I probed her constantly and eventually she cracked and admitted the truth, she has preserved a stoic exterior but deep down there is a massive well of disappointment, sadness and regret. She isn't a feminist but the older women in her life (mother, aunts and family friends) failed her miserably (they basically avoided the topic) and she imbibed the independent lifestyle (travel, expensive trinkets etc).

What advice would you give to help her find a husband? I'm willing to pound the pavement and introduce her to guys.

First, I would inform her that all hope is not lost, not yet. Many men value a lack of a carousel history, and some place particular value on virginity. She is in much better POTENTIAL shape than the average 40 year-old with an N over 20 and a pair of ill-behaved brats.

Second, I would go over her diet and lack of exercise with her. Get her to the gym! She should be lifting free weights as well as doing cardio; let her know that she can be in good and relatively slender shape by Halloween next year if she is willing to work at it. It won't be easy, but it is entirely doable.

Third, get her away from the den of sloth that is her social circle. All peer groups tend to influence their members for either good or evil, but few are as pernicious as the slovenly coven of the sort PS describes here. The moment she starts showing signs of raising her SMV, and concomitantly, her status within the social circle, her friends are going to turn on her with a fury that will have to be seen to be believed. Fat women HATE slender women, particularly slender women who used to be fat women. She needs to be prepared for that and reminded that "friends" who oppose her self-improvement are no true friends.

Fourth, encourage her to be looking for men who are 45+. I don't think she'll be inclined to any alpha-chasing, but as we know from our early teenage years, sexual power in the hands of women who have never had it before tends to go to their heads. She should cast aside any notion of making up for lost time and focus on the mission of finding the right man to marry. She has time, but she doesn't have a lot of time.

Fifth, protect her as she transforms and gradually becomes desirable to the deltas and bangable to the betas and lesser alphas. She likely has no means of discerning the predators from the potential husbands, so PS must get her to accept the idea of using him as a filter to separate the wheat from the chaff before she appears on their radar.

Susan Walsh was entirely wrong when she posited that men want women to lose their SMV. Quite the opposite, we want to see all women maximize it. It is women who aren't always so keen on the idea that other women might rise in value. So, I'm sure that all the men here will wish PS and his relative good luck in their mutual project, assuming they both decide to embark on Operation Ring-on-the-Finger.

Even old women hate gammas

What we have here is a failure of observation:

The single women I know often seem better equipped than their male peers to lead a fulfilling solo life.... single middle-aged men often seem to lack the va-va-voom of female peers. I told Saturday’s audience that, as far as I could see, the main reason so many middle-aged women remained solo was that they’d rather be on their own than bed down with males so unkempt their jumpers had their own ecosystems. I also recounted how a beautiful, talented friend of mine – then in her late fifties – once had a date with a man who bought a sandwich from Boots for lunch and offered her half.

I thought (and rather hoped) that the men in the audience would stage a rebellion and protest. Instead, they all nodded. A chap in his late forties said that at his lonely hearts dining society the women were sexy and savvy, while the men lacked social graces and were inclined to be “a bit odd”. Bridget Jones’s famous fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later, “half-eaten by an Alsatian”, has begun to seem more applicable to male singletons.

Note that "the men in the audience" refers to the 7 men in an audience of over 200 at a discussion panel entitled "How to be a Single Woman in 2013". And we know exactly what sort of scalzied manboobs attend that kind of event.

The reason that all the aging single men who socialize with her aging single friends are so unkempt and undesirable is because older single men who keep up with their appearances don't date women their own age. They date and marry women who are younger, usually between 5 to 15 years younger. This is the result of the sexual difference in declining SMV and MMV.

And it's fascinating to observe that whether they are young women in college or old women approaching retirement age, most women would rather be alone than settle for a gamma or low delta. What this means in practical terms is that playing a long game, being yourself, and expecting post-Wall women to settle for you once they descend from the carousel or end their marriages and belatedly discover their lack of options will not necessarily work for those who are omegas and lower gammas.

"Rape" is often post-sex regret

It appears the feminist meme of "women never lie about rape" has been put to rest for good:

A young mother has been jailed for making two false rape claims within hours of drunkenly sleeping with a friend’s partner. Ashleigh Loder, 25, wasted at least 100 hours of police time by inventing the assaults. She first told officers she had been attacked by two strangers in an alley before changing her story to say a man she knew had forced her to have sex in her home.

However the friend she had accused was able to prove his innocence because he had filmed the sexual encounter on his mobile phone.

The footage showed Loder, a mother-of-two from Bideford, Devon, was a willing and active sexual participant. She was drunk on vodka and invented her story because the partner of the man with whom she’d had sex was a friend. She feared the consequences of the other woman finding out what they had done.

This incident underlines what I noted last week, which is that most reported rape is nothing more than post-sex regret. It doesn't matter if the encounter is described "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" or "marital rape" or "near rape", if there is an adjective before the noun, it transforms the noun. Just as "social justice" is not justice, "date rape" is not rape.

In fact, it is readily apparent that if alcohol is involved in any way, that should be considered an important indicator that regret, and not rape, is involved. Many women intentionally get drunk in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for their subsequent actions, and in certain mixed-sex environments, one could make a very strong case for the mere fact of getting drunk equating to consent, given the fact that implicit consent is the controlling factor in the complete absence of formal written and notarized consent.