Self-Inflicting Prophecies
There's a common refrain amongst a certain type of anti-feminist that complete gender equality would ruin the chances of "low status" men to find partners, because they'd all be drawn to the higher status men and... I guess... what?... remain celibate if they couldn't find a high-status partner? Meh.
Anyway, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon points out that a) it's already that way *without* gender equality and b) it's self-humiliating to make that claim in the first place.
Interestingly, male dominance actually has a positive sexual value for ugly men, one that even the worst chauvinist will admit -- when women are dependent on men for our financial and social survival, we have to value things like men’s jobs, salaries, and connections more and their physical attractiveness less when deciding on mates. Ugly dudes would see their stock devalued on the sexual market in a equal society. They’d face the same obstacles women who don’t fit our social beauty standards face.
With this in mind, I have to conclude that the “feminists are just ugly women” argument is a combination of projection of anxieties and self-flattery---it’s tempting to think that Gloria Steinem just really wants your cock and can’t have it, so she’s forced to be a feminist. That anyone can hold such a ridiculous fantasy without immediately dying from shame is one of the many benefits of male privilege.
In other words *if* one believes the sexual scarcity model for "low-achievement" men (as opposed to the pickiness model) then those "low-status" men will lose out whether or not we have social, political, economic, and power equilibrium between men and women. So anti-feminist arguments to the contrary aren't just invalid they're the... um... opposite of self-serving.
But then the value of a beautiful man's beauty would rise.
[True but here's the kicker: as we approached parity women's *earning power* would also rise (to an average normal "sea level") while men's would also tend to equalize. Same, incidentally, I think, for the emphasis on women's vs. men's beauty. In other words wealth, or looks, would be something more like *one more dimension* of preferability rather than such disproportionately (and gender-dimorphously) critical ones. Thanks, Ivan. --fl]
Assuming it's anything resembling the truth, the "anti-feminist" argument would seem to work fine for ugly guys with money. In addition, if women are dependent on men for money, then it's probably because men are making more money on the average, so "ugly poor guys" will at least have more of a chance to get a high-paying job in the future if women aren't taking up very many of them. (Especially since, in this country, there's the myth that anyone can get rich if they try hard enough.)
While I obviously don't agree with the sentiments behind the argument, I don't see how it's "the opposite of self-serving". Unless there's something here I'm not getting.
[It's the opposite of self-serving because a man using it is claiming he's so ugly that one couldn't find a partner unless society is deliberately warped to disadvantage women. Not so great for the self-esteem! And in any case, any advocacy of social justice based on appeal to pity is inherently invalid. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]
There's a common refrain amongst a certain type of anti-feminist that complete gender equality would ruin the chances of "low status" men to find partners, because they'd all be drawn to the higher status men and... I guess... what?... remain celibate if they couldn't find a high-status partner?
No, the theory is that the higher-status men would have sex with all the bazillions of women who are drawn to them, because even high-status men will bonk anything that's bonkable.
I know someone who sincerely believes that this is already happening.
[I dunno. I still think that *if* high-status men have bazillions of women throwing themselves at them *and* they're sexually as superficial as theory advertises then... they're going to stick with the highest-status women leaving everybody else pretty much were we all are now. So I repeat it's more of an issue for claimants' expectations rather than one with reality. Thanks, Zeborah. --fl]
I think you are confusing the idea that the decline of marriage and the rise of "soft polygamy" with the idea that low-status men NEEDED economic coercion to guarantee them mates. What really IS happening is apparently that women are willing to be #2 or #3 for an alpha male for a decade or so rather than settle down with an unexciting worker bee, then settle into happy Stuff White People Like in vitro single motherhood. Certainly most of the "right-leaning" bloggers who love this topic are really discussing the behavior of educated white women in their 20s/30s in the newly-gentrified (or old money) areas around the urban core. (Adams Morgan, Georgetown in DC, NYC Upper East/West Side, Greenwich Village, 3rd St. in West Los Angeles). Part of it obscures the fact that less-successful men in some REAL societies with "hard" polygamy (Iran, Saudi, etc) do have the option of (at least in Shia Iran) institutions like mut'aa marriage, while the usual shaming discourse (as above) argues that these permanently-unpaired men don't have enough other redeeming qualities anyway to deserve mates. One of the most interesting social studies you can never do would be to see if muta'a in Iran was simply a form of woman-hoarding by already-successful men, or if it could be used as a buy-in into the marriage market by men without the resources for a traditional arranged marriage. But that would make Shia Islam look really bad, so while I could find Farsi-fluent sociologists capable of doing the study, it would never be allowed.
[The issue with "hard polygamist" cultures, though, is they're not very, um, feminist. Call me a radical but it seems to me that *if* Iranian women were to have the same overall economic, social, political, and personal clout as Iranian men then there probably wouldn't be a whole lot of "woman hording" because, well, by every account I've ever heard life as a horded (i.e. cloistered) woman is boring, restrictive, and next to celibate. Which sounds like the ideal *anti-feminist* rather than feminist relationships. Thanks, ES. --fl]