It’s been a little while since my last post. My apologies for that.
Last week I saw an article that requires a response from women everywhere, especially women who are independent, educated, and hold strong opinions. In a piece decrying the nature of “hookup culture,” conservative writer Charlotte Allen makes an extreme claim that as women get older, their intrinsic stock goes down.
In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Our ancestors probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted no more than a few days. . . . Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. . . . Males may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended them from other men, but . . . anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as courtship effort than paternal investment.
That’s a pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is us.
Living in the New Paleolithic can be hard on women, many of whom party on merrily until they reach age 30 and then panic. “They’re at the peak of their beauty in their early 20s—they’re luscious—but the guys their age don’t look as good, so they say to themselves: ‘Why do I want to get married?,’ ” notes Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, who is writing a book about the singles crisis. “Then they get to age 28, 29, and their fertility goes down and they’re not quite so luscious. But the guys their age are starting to make money, they look better, they’ve got self-assurance, and they’ve also got the pick of the 23-year-olds.”
She has a degree, but does she have a man?
The “new paleolithic” that Ms. Allen describes is the growing trend of women to delay settling down and getting married. I do not have any statistics on the subject but I would like to assume that the sort of woman who waits to find a potential partner until her late twenties is quite possibly busy improving other aspects of her life. Perhaps this woman attended graduate school, perhaps she spent her 20’s traveling or volunteering. By blaming the Pill and other methods of contraception as the cause of a “prolonged singles scene,” Allen is vastly underestimating the single woman. If a woman takes the Pill, she is not doing so to avoid settling down. It could be for any number of reasons. Here it seems that Allen is measuring a woman’s value by the number of eggs she has left – what about accomplishments that would otherwise go unfulfilled if she had simply settled for the first man who came along?
A silly claim Allen makes is that “beta” men are those suffering in today’s dating scene:
it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.
In other words, these beta men, whom one can presume are beta either due to a lack of traditional good looks or a lack of a college degree, are suffering because of feminism! God forbid that a woman go off and get a college education! What about the beer-bellied, couch-ridden men of America? Someone help these men!
Worst of all is Allen’s insistence that a woman generally loses her desirability by the age of 28. When a woman reaches this magical number while still single, she is forced to settle for a dreaded “beta”. So ladies, if you have a college degree and you’re headed toward 28, be prepared to spend the rest of your days a sad and lonely specimen, a dusty relic of “hookup culture”.
Fixed Air 