Gold Boars: The "No-Sex" Class and Wall Street
Photo by Flickr user Jamuudsen. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise points out that the "no-sex" class paradigm intersects the financial meltdown.
Michael Daly of the New York Daily News reports that the financial meltdown is forcing former Wall Street big shots to dump their "high end girlfriends" as a cost cutting measure
"[Charles] Hayes says. 'If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy and you're throwing over a high-quality girlfriend, you're desperate.'
The absolute economic low comes with a realization that Hayes summarizes in a sentence.
'I can't afford her anymore!'"
Girlfriends as disposable accessories, charming.
You know what's really fucking *tragic?* All the people who claim "women are the gatekeepers." Because, s'yeah, those "can't afford her anymore" girlfriends sure are in charge of how those relationships go, mmm-hmmm, you bet.
What else is tragic? That so many people think this is the *only* way relationships work, can work, even *should* work.
Oh yeah, and not to put too fine a point on it, what does one do when one has "thrown over" one's "high end" girlfriend because one can't "afford" her anymore? Go to the "previously owned" section of the girlfriend lot? Put an ad on Craig's list saying "had to dump my old girlfriend because I couldn't afford her, need someone cheaper?"
Also not to put too fine a point on it but... um...
Y'know, if some fellow human being is your actual, y'know, *girlfriend* you could probably, I dunno, *talk* to her about what's going on, let her know you're in trouble, ask what *she* wants to do. But... nah, if you're "a short, ugly 40-year-old guy" no way she'll stay interested.
*And,* while I'm railing on about the "no-sex" class, I'm kind of curious how many of these "high end girlfriends," a.k.a. living human beings, actually *like* their partners, disagree that they're as ugly as the partners themselves claim, don't care for them only for their money as their partners themselves claim. In other words, how many of these guys are "tossing over" their partners not because the partners won't have them but because they feel that, after their fall from wealth, they no longer *deserve* or are otherwise worthy of "high end" partners?
Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty sure some of those men, and women, are every bit as shallow, predatory, ruthless, and as incapable of emotional attachment as advertised. But I'm betting *most* of them aren't. Although some obviously *think* they are. Or, worse, think they're *supposed* to be. Noticing this isn't the same thing as sympathy, necessarily, and real or not real there's really no excusing it. But still, woah, no matter how much we might hold them in contempt, remarks like "If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy..." suggest we can't catch up with the contempt they pretty clearly hold for themselves.
So. What do you think? Any Manhattan-area readers able to offer local perspectives?
My husband and I were JUST talking about this last night, but in regards to sexual prowess. A conversation that stemmed from my last blog post, not the news article you're referring to. He said that when he sees an unattractive man with a beautiful woman, he assumes that the guy must be really good in bed, or the woman wouldn't be with him.
I was shocked. I'm sure some women really are that shallow, but for the most part, we're not. My first husband was neither attractive or great in bed. (He also turned out to be gay and left me for a guy, so perhaps that contributed to the lack of sexual prowess when it came to ME.) I loved him because he was funny, intelligent, kind, and confident. The Big Four. Those are my criteria for men.
[I'd add that men seem to have very different criteria for what they imagine is attractive to women. (For instance forearms don't seem to register for men but really do for women.) Also personality. Also confidence (the type of confidence, not the raw quantity.) Also friends have told me over and over that smell matters a lot, and I don't think men get that so much. Or if we do we think that means after-shave. So even the basic premise may be off. Assuming that "good in bed" is the non-visible criteria sort of begs the question because... if obvious attraction is so critical how does the allegedly unattractive person get a chance to demonstrate it? Oh, also, I had a similar experience to yours with my first fiance. Thanks, Biscuit. --fl]
I can't believe this is happening or more accurately I don't want to.
This disgusts me.
Does it get anymore wrong than this?
Are they talking about actual girlfriends or women that they're cheating on their wives or partners with, but using the term "girlfriend," as people now do because "mistress" seems to have gone out of style?
My brother, who is gay, stayed in the closet for about 20 years, under the cover of the excuse "Women won't be interested in me - I don't have any money." I saw right through it by the time I was 14, but everyone else seemed to keep believing him for at least a decade.
Let's be real.
Pretty much most non-dominant, highly attractive men in NYC with hot G/F's have them because of their money.
If you're a hot looking young actor, model, or whatever, well your girlfriend is probably with you because of your body and high amount of testosterone, assuming you have not reached financial success and fame.
If you are a short, not particularly attractive, and quantitatively intelligent (not highly verbal) man, the only reason a woman would be with you is money. This is just reality.
NYC is filled with alternatives. So many men, high in status and wealth, available. A pretty woman with a trader or I-Banker? Please, those guys are neither highly toned physically nor high in macho testosterone displays (physical risk taking) nor highly verbal. Qualities women if you're being realistic go after like men with T&A.
These guys knew damn well what kind of women they had, and that's why they dumped them. Before they themselves got dumped. Hell, it's why they made the money in the first place -- if they didn't have money they'd be without any female company at all. Just like Stephen Tyler if he wasn't a famous rock star would probably still be a virgin, assuming he'd been a plumber instead.
That's life in a highly anonymous, urban, mobile, and high-cost city like NYC, with nothing but status and power and fashion as people's guidelines. That's why the guys made the money and why the women were with them in the first place.
Gosh, Whiskey, maybe people work differently in the Big City, but around here, some of us actually like our partners. In ways that can't be quantified around any sort of "buying power" analogy but are modeled a lot more like friendship.
Don't kid yourself, Steve Tyler wouldn't have been a virgin no matter what (and I bet you he got laid plenty before he got famous), because the man may not be gorgeous or "alpha" but he's got personality and some of us ladies actually go for that. Seriously. Even the cute ones.
If you expect your sexuality to be bought and sold, earned and competed for, dollars traded for cup sizes, maybe you attract similar people. But a whole lot of the world doesn't work like that at all.
Shorter Whiskey: "In NYC, water is wet."
Shorter Holly: "But on some planets, water is DRY."
Another thing that Whiskey would probably point out (and not too sotto voce) is that (a lot of) the people in large urban areas who DON'T work according to this paradigm might tend to be sub-or-counter-cultural ones: introspective, insular, and (not oddly) thus estranged from conventional ideals of attractiveness, as well as not-exactly embodying those ideals.
The impression I have always gotten from the "it's as easy to love a rich one as a poor one" crowd is that women size up one's billfold from the first meeting, and that while it's not explicitly mercenary, most of the men who don't make the financial cut also don't get a chance to show off their winning personalities. So I really don't have much sympathy, and I'm pretty certain that what we're seeing is just the breakdown of a "social contract" of a certain type.
Yes, Eurosabra, women being emotionally attached to boyfriends despite the fact that these men fail to offer them full market value for their pussy is pretty much as likely as dry water.
We're not all whores, dude. (And saying that women who aren't whores are likely to be outcasts and probably ugly themselves is so very kind of you!) We've got our own jobs and stuff nowadays, and that frees us up to not need to use men for money; when we don't depend on a mate to support us, we can go ahead and date dudes we actually like.
I have to admit, whiskey and Eurosabra have a point. Men who want to date women either have to be sexy (enough) to (enough) women, or have to pay to get women to pretend to like them. (I'm annoyed when people conflate those two properties, but if you don't have one I don't see how you're going to get attention from women if you don't have either.) Forty-something, balding, out-of-shape cubicle-dwellers just don't have mass sex appeal. Plus, these guys seem to be extremely picky about their girlfriends, further narrowing the range of women who are interested. Plus, guys with more money than sex appeal are likely to take the easy route and buy female attention, because it sucks to have other people constantly evaluating your sex appeal.
I'd pick my short, geeky, femme, not-rich boyfriend over a macho frat boy any day (hell, I'd pick chewing my own arm off over a macho frat boy any day), but nobody would mistake me for a high-end Manhattanite girlfriend. Meh. I think heterosexual men and women usually deserve each other.
This has all been based on the possibly dubious assumption that the original article is reporting a real trend.
What I'm getting from Whiskey, Eurosabra and P. Burke is this:
What Holly appears to be saying is that in human relationships, sometimes emotional connection trumps status-symbol potential, and therefore is relevant, and is not a calculated position but a genuine interaction between two people.
I take Holly's argument in this!
God, I hope that's not what I'm saying. I think most women are looking for a partner who is, among other things, sexually attractive to them, and I think that's perfectly reasonable. I also think that men who have a lot of money, but who don't feel like putting in the effort to be sexually attractive and want to date women within a narrow ideal, will try to pay for female company. And there are women who will accept those men's money.
I guess I'm skeptical about situations where gorgeous women pair up with ordinary-looking older banker types in huge numbers. Sure, some gorgeous young women genuinely fall in love with banker types, and I'm sure there are bankers with absolutely gorgeous personalities. But if you've got a pattern of gorgeous women pairing up with ordinary-looking older banker types, I don't think the pattern can be totally explained by true love and coincidence. After all, some non-bankers, and some funny-looking young women, have sterling personalities too.
I guess I object to the idea that mate is all about sterling personality, or even that it ought to be. I'm especially bothered by the idea that it's wrong abnormal for heterosexual women to prefer men based on anything other but the men's sterling moral qualities. Why shouldn't women be allowed to have whimsical sexual preferences? People usually acknowledge that men don't choose women on the basis of their sterling moral qualities, and they usually accept this as OK.
There's also the fact that men will sometimes pay women for sex, and sometimes the dynamics of that are covert and dishonest. I don't think the explanation is "women are evil bitches" (for obvious reasons), but I can't deny that those corrupting dynamics exist. I take back my assertion that heterosexual people deserve each other, though. I'll suspend judgment on that and hope that we can somehow fix the problem.
"Women size up the billfold" isn't something that strikes me as talking about "ordinary-looking banker types". It's talking about women, and making broad-spanning claims about what female attractions are rooted in.
It strikes me as a straightforward women-are-all-golddiggers logic; men have to "make the financial cut" before any of those "whimsical sexual preferences" come into play. Only the wealthy-famous-powerful get "female company".
I've never gotten off on a billfold. I suspect the edges would be uncomfortable.
[*Very* nicely put, Five. That "yeah, men want looks but women want wallets" meme stumbled me for a *very* long time. And around the time I finally registered what I'm calling the no-sex class thing it finally fell into place. Because if women only want wallets then, ta-da, you don't want *sex.* (Sh'yea right.) And it doesn't matter that inside the wallet fantasy only *some* women are straight-up golddiggers -- the fantasy *also* says others... especially "good women," want "security," or "good homes for their babies" or the "freedom" to take care of a house and family without working... in other words anything *but* sex. And don't get me wrong, with the system stacked so heavily against women in earnings terms women, like people, *really do* need money. The mistake, one that's evidently *very* persistent, is that's *only* and *all* you want. Which is why so many of those clowns are paralyzed at the prospect of women having independent and equal incomes: once you *did* have money you'd never want sex and so they'd never get any at all. Um. Right. Or it would be right if your comment was wrong. It's not, though, and it's kind of frustrating how hard it is for some folks to see it and believe it. Thanks, great comment! --fl]
One of the things that the "no-sex" class idea keeps coming up with is the idea that ALL heterosexual interaction is controlled by that dynamic, that isn't the case and even the evo-psych crowd and the MRA crowd and the PUA crowd acknowledge that it isn't the case. What Whiskey (and Roissy, to a greater extent, and in more formal settings, i.e. published social "just-so" science, Dalrymple and Devlin) etc. are complaining about is that women's natural preferences for "Alpha Males" are given free rein by the removal of economic constraints and the anonymity of modern urban life and its dependence on social status signaling, with the result that "soft polygyny" and harem-guarding are now a feature of industrialized Western societies in ways that they previously weren't when stable hetero 1 male+1 female marriages were a more prevalent form of familial organization. That's a HUGE topic with way too much to unpack here, and it would take an army of sociologists, but I can pretty much tell you that there's a gut feeling among young, white middle-class men in large urban areas that high school never ended. Nerd=Fat chick.
What you are reading as "likes like each other" is belied by the fact that physically-unattractive high-rolling men can meet women who are willing to monetize their conventional attractiveness, and there is a softer (because less defined) "sugar momma" market as well. (The difference being that women are less likely to have the very high incomes that make it possible, more likely to be shamed into forgoing that kind of leverage if they do have it, and more likely to be shamed into disavowing sexual interest in man-meat for cash as such, and the few women who do it are so discreet that it's probably untraceable, sociologically speaking.)
I can definitely tell you that the American Jewish community is undergoing a demographic implosion because of hypergamy, since women are remaining unpaired rather than "settle", and it's not the unpaired MEN who are driving that dynamic. A 50% population drop in the next 50 years is a sign of something seriously wrong, and a lot of discursive responses (like Esther Kustanowitz's "What, I should be less smart and less funny to 'stop scaring men away'?") are so oblivious that it's obvious that Della Pergola and the other demographers are going to be joining the "WTF happened?" school of sociology after the crash. But again, I can only speak of what I know.
Look, I have no interest in defending the assertion that "women size up the billfold" when deciding who's sexually attractive. I don't think men paying women for sex is about women's sexuality at all. I'm sorry if I came off as asserting something I do not believe. If I'm failing that drastically to communicate, it's time for me to quit this thread.
[Oh I just totally misread your comment the first time, P. --fl]
There are certainly places where water is dry, as solid ice, and planets where the ice isn't water ice. At least Whiskey & I know that we are speaking of a restricted urban phenomenon, of certain socioeconomic layers speaking a certain sociolect and pursuing certain kinds of relationships, and we've both made that abundantly clear. In fact, Whiskey has broader MRA-lite points about women not wanting what "they should" or "what's good for them" or "what they used to", while I (admittedly at the fringes) see more pseudo-marginal people pairing up. (Pseudo-marginal because they are in fact pretty representative of healthy humanity in a way that the cruel pseudo-eugenics of PUA doesn't allow for. But nerds, grinds, geeks, punks (piercings galore?) and other counter-cultures aren't usually going to embody traditional attractiveness except for the one-in-a-thousand individual or in patriarchy-tweaked, possibly sick ways like the Suicide Girls, which is thin, conventionally-pretty-girl punk porn for SWMs. PUA passes this off as Nerd=Fat Chick, which is pretty disparaging to real human beings.)