The Evolution of the Sexual Marketplace
I always say that I find East Asians to be much more realistic in general. They're less likely to comment about what they know nothing about, less likely to engage in empty virtue signaling, less likely to make up stuff in general. Less full of shit. Of course this is a relative term, there's plenty of Asians which are full of it, especially those in the media, politica or academia. But the amount of shit in circulation is an order of magnitude smaller than in the West.
Personally I believe that is because of the lack of organized religion for centuries, and because of widespread poverty up until very recently. Life in Asia has always been harsh. Every few decades you got a widespread famine. And lacking a religious establishment, being holier-than-thou didn't get you fed. So the penalties for noticing things were much smaller than in the West. This has changed a bit since the late 19th century, when European empires invaded the area. Democratic politics and mass media by definition promote form over substance. But the lack of a general tradition of generating feel-good nonsense has limited the damage.
See this very nice graph that is going around the Japanese internet. How the Sexual Marketplace has evolved since the 1950s. Forgive the awkward captions, but I'm busy with the book.
So in the old days, the top 80% of men and women got married, the rest became omegas and spinsters, and that was it. Then Free Love (the Japanese term for what we call the Sexual Revolution) happened. The top 40% of men started dating the 80% of women, leaving the rest of men shafted, but in the end women got bored of the carousel and ended up marrying men of their league, so 80% of men kept getting married, as well as 80% of women. Today, though, 20% of men fuck 60% of women. The rest of men occasionally date the 40 to 60 percentile of attractiveness (4s to 6s in redpill speech), but mostly subsist on a date of free and high quality porn, idols and romance videogames. 40% of women also get no action whatsoever.
Note that Japan has had no Roissy. No manosphere. No red pill. These people can't read English nor are interested in the American blogosphere. This is just regular Japanese people noticing things and discussing them freely on the internet. And the conclusion is accurate, concise, and very fair. Note how there's no attempt at blaming women for being all bitches, or blaming men for being all children. They understand that it's both. Men are so addicted to porn that it has raised the floor of minimum beauty that women need to have to get men interested. And that social media has made women expand their areas of gossip, so are know subject to attack by more vain women, making them insist in only fucking the top men, lest they get shunned out of female society by fucking normal men. I like the idea of the vanity spiral.
The analysis isn't perfect; e.g. no mention of the effect of women's entering the labor market. And some factors are peculiarly Japanese, in particular the "idol" market and the pervasive romance videogames and comics. But the general situation isn't that different from Western countries. There's lots of articules and TV programs about how the Japanese "aren't interested in sex". Like the West isn't fully packed and bursting with incels of every sex and color. Again, the difference is that the Japanese notice, and talk about it, while in the West no one is allowed to notice anything that contradicts the narrative that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and we are making progress at every front. The few that do notice that something wrong end up forming internet groups blaming 100% of the problem on a single sex, as if the whole society wasn't rotten from the root.
46 comments
"less likely to comment about what they don’t know anything about"
I had a friend come back on a short visit, he lives in Japan and is married to a Japanese woman, we went drinking with the old gang of friends and he commented how good it is to hear people discussing politics again, apparently it is not something people do in Japan. He is a leftist thou, but not going full sjw.
I must admit I miss it too, but generally speaking it's for the best. If you wanna signal you buy a better car or go fishing.
It's not just porn. What does the book say about prostitution, hostess bars, massage parlours, etc.? That sort of thing couldn't possibly be more popular out here. (Well, right now I'm in Juso, Osaka, so I suppose the fact that every other business is a den of prostitution is to be expected. But even very small cities have popular red light districts...) That the Japanese "aren’t interested in sex" is, of course, false.
That has always been common, yet didn't stop people from marrying. Porn and eroge really are making lots of men not bothering with women at all.
This can actually be framed from an economics perspective (and I can't resist doing it). After feminism came to Japan and women were "liberated" from male control, this essentially raised the cost of "bothering with women" for men. Suddenly women are not just allowed, but even to an extent encouraged to not obey men, male authority is lost and it becomes much harder to control women (since it has been basically outlawed). This makes submissive women who are good wife material a rarity and in fact if you want to get any woman at all, you have to try much harder than before, because of women's hypergamous nature. When women are allowed to have any say in the selection of their partners, this skews the sexual marketplace in favor of the alpha males and makes effective polygamy more widespread. For everyone who is not an alpha (the majority of the population) the cost of acquiring a female partner is now greater than ever. This problem isn't that obvious until you get cheap replacements for female companionship, like porn and the like. And the reason why porn and all the weird stuff japanese omegas are into became so big is precisely because this increase in the cost of acquiring a wife increased so dramatically in the few decades after WWII. When the price of one good goes up, this creates incentives for innovation of substitutes which were previously not viable when the good was cheaper. So suddenly you have this huge market for porn appearing because most men are no longer getting any action, or at least it is much more difficult for them to get any than it was before. And after a substitute such as porn appears, which is substantially cheaper to acquire than the real thing is nowadays, more and more people don't even bother with the real thing. Now, I am not sure agree that porn leads to rising standards for men. I think in a post-sexual liberation society, even though you can fap to hot women in videos, you'd still go for a real woman (even an unattractive one) if the cost of acquiring her isn't very high (compared to porn). This is because in a society where the top men get multiple women, getting any woman at all actually raises your status more than it did in a pre-sexual liberation society. After all, back then as long as your life wasn't a total trainwreck you were pretty certain to get a wife, while today it is much, much harder. The main factor which disincentivizes beta males from going for unattractive women is that those women are allowed to exercise their hypergamy. So they naturally always want to go for the alpha males, even if they are way out of their league, which makes them neglect beta males (as any woman is naturally prone to, unless forced by the social framework). This makes it harder for beta males to get even unattractive women, thus they don't bother, basically I am repeating myself at this point. You get the idea.
I do like the social aspect that the Japanese emphasize in here. So you got arranged marriages until 1950 or so. Alphas have mistresses, even married ones, but overtly there's a sense of balance, and everyone can get married, even if their partners aren't very exciting. Then people start dating and getting married by their own account. Women compete for alphas, and the fact that women are competing for alphas makes other women also want to compete for alphas, even if they're not that into alphas themselves; but at any rate going for a beta makes you lose status in female society. Beta men start to find that women are more trouble to get than they thought; a market of virtual romance provides cheap and easy subsitutes; beta men find it even harder to bother attracting women. Virtual romance provides incredibly hot girls so going for a homely one makes you lose status with your friends, even if your standards are even that high. And so every sex is signaling itself into extinction; while third worlders force their children to marry their cousins and that's the end of it.
"That has always been common, yet didn’t stop people from marrying. Porn and eroge really are making lots of men not bothering with women at all. " If your wife obeys you, cooks for you, mops the floor, is your companion and help, and is always sexually available - that is something porn and brothels cannot provide. If your wife is a pain, who wants a pain hanging around? I find it hard to believe that women compete for status by fucking alphas. Ninety percent of the time, they are keeping it secret that they are fucking the alpha, because they supposedly have a boyfriend, and they know the alpha has a regular girl and a couple of back up girls that are way ahead of them in his booty call list Women just like to fuck alphas. Fucking is way better than status. It is way better than anything.. Trouble is that if a woman fucks an alpha, it makes her not want to fuck a regular guy. Nothing to do with status, she just does not wanna. That is why male misbehavior manifests as polygyny, while female misbehavior manifests as serial monogamy.
Complaining with buddies about one's wife being a pain is an old-age tradition. Although they did cook; but I'm not sure women today are more of a pain than the women decades ago. The time they spend on facebook is time they don't spend nagging over every little thing. It's not that women are bragging to each other about being the booty call of some alpha, although that does happen. The idea is that women who (e.g. not being that greedy or into sex at all) may be more or less willing to compromise and marry a beta end up not doing so to avoid losing status among their friends. Everybody is out there chasing alphas so female comformity forces many to do so. You see many articles about women admitting not actually enjoying the carousel, and not even enjoying sex with alphas (or with anyone really) that much; but chasing alphas is what women do, and so they do it. You and others keep saying that all women are uncontrollably lustful, but that's nonsense. Of course many are, and we all know some; but most women don't care, unlike alphas spend effort in seducing them, which most don't.
I agree that rising cost and dropping reward is the main reason men giving up women. In old time: You get arranged to marry a virgin in her early 20s. You own the house, the wife and the kids. The wife generally works hard. You work hard enough to support the family, but otherwise free to pursue other activities. Now: You spend a decade chasing girls. Then marry a women near 30 who has been used by a dozen chads and rich boys. You don't own anything. Legally she can leave you any time taking the house, the kids and assets. Though she may not divorce you, her legal leverage changes the whole power dynamic. The wife generally doesn't work hard. You cannot stop gaming her and satisfying her. It is a massive energy drain that leaves you little room for freedom. The only positive of modern marriage for a red-pilled man is for having kids [the blue-pilled men can at least be encouraged by their fantasy]. But is it worth it? And do the man want his boys to live in such a disadvantaged society and prolong the suffering of himself? Given the current sexual market, it is a natural and rational reaction that a lot of men are checking out. It is a period of big correction due to a big shift in socio-economic environment. Eventually there will be a rebalance of power. But we won't return to the old marriage model. I think the marriage institution is gonna dissolute, replaced by more fluid contracts.
People have been talking about "more fluid contracts" since Bertrand Russell, and yet here we are. All we have is old marriage reformed so as to advantage women, little by little. The "rebalance" will happen when people start breeding again. The new marriage model will be the one used by people who have more than 2 children by women.
Today's marriage contract is more fluid than the old model. What I'm saying is that I don't think we can go back, rather it will become even more fluid in future.
If we cannot go back to the old marriage model, we cannot reproduce. We will vanish, to be replaced by people who one way or another way do implement the old marriage model. Muslims may not be reproducing, but I am pretty sure Islamic state and Boko Haram are reproducing. This is the solution that we do not want.
Muslims are reproducing alright. Iran TFR is at 1.85, the rest are all over 2.
If history is of any guide, it is things never go back as they were. Yes there are overall cycles, but each cycle is different. All cultural institutions and behaviors are adaptations to the environment. Given how different modern society is from the ancient one, the change in life span and reproduction/upbringing pattern, and how rapidly technology is changing everything, I just don't see how human will revert to marriage 1.0. Yes there is Amish. But Amish cannot exist as a nation by itself, and it has a scalability limit. It needs the larger nation to filter, protect and support its culture. At best it become a version of old China, a society that is good at breeding but totally stagnating and boring, and everyone is a beta slave. Or there is radical Islam. But really do we want such a "solution"? On the brighter side, remember that "the market is always right". The sexual market is tumultuous now. But men are not stupid. Eventually we are gonna settle to a sustainable market price.
It doesn't matter what we want. If you don't have children, and Ahmed has 5 children, in 50 years your line is extinct, and the world has 25 Ahmeds in your place.
As long as you keep the Ahmeds out of the door it isn't a problem. Just let the Ahmeds kill themselves from overpopulation. If you inviting them in...
Solid thinking throughout the thread by Baker.
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I am seeing in the west a lot more serial monogamy than polygyny. Maybe it is different in Japan. But to the extent that serial monogamy outweighs polygyny, female misbehavior outweights male misbehavior.
Divorce rates are very low. Divorce of couples with children is very rare. If you have a family and want action on the side you get a mistress.
Sounds like in Japan, female misbehavior is lower, male misbehavior higher, than in the west.
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Is there any *evidence* for any of this?
No, it's all made up by an international conspiracy of white patriarchical slave-owners. Actually Japan's marriage rate is in at an all-time high, and Japanese men love having the chance of helping mop the floor and change diapers of the 5 babies they have on average.
"Japan has a low birthrate" and the specific numbers in the post being true are completely different things
Nobody's saying those specific numbers are exact; if they were they'd be writing books and making money instead of posting it online for lulz. But if you insist: http://news.mynavi.jp/news/2014/07/11/081/ That's a survey by a major insurance company in Japan. Blue is men, pink is women, 20, 30, 40 means people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The question is: singles who have a romantic partner. Only 22% of single men in their 20s have a girlfriend! Numbers of women are all double those of men. Either women are more likely to brag than men (unlikely), or they're sharing some men.
"Only 22% of single men in their 20s have a girlfriend! Numbers of women are all double those of men. Either women are more likely to brag than men (unlikely), or they’re sharing some men." Almost certainly sharing some men, which may be more socially acceptable in Japan. In the west also sharing some men, but less likely to describe themselves as having a boyfriend in that situation.
The least immoral scenario consistent with those numbers is that the overwhelming majority of Japanese men have no sex life, but every male with a girlfriend has two girlfriends, and every girl with a boyfriend accepts being part of a two girl harem and regularly give their man a threesome. Of course a more likely scenario is that four fifths of males with a girlfriend have only one girlfriend, but one male in five of those with girlfriends, which is to say one twenty fifth of all single males, has ten girlfriends, and about half of females with boyfriends accept being one member of a quite large harem. This is not hugely different from observed western behavior, but western girls in a large harem probably have a substantially higher rate of movement from harem to harem and so are less likely to say they have a boyfriend.
That analysis makes the assumption that girls that describe themselves as not having a boyfriend are chaste virgins with no sex life. In the west, almost all fertile age girls that describe themselves as having no boyfriend have a very active sex life. I would be surprised if Japan was entirely different.
I know plenty fertile age girls who get no action at all. Not that they are virgins (although there's no shortage of those), but Japanese men just don't bother to court <6s.
I thought about this piece and the correlation between identity and status. The gypsies of continental Europe don’t really regard themselves as low status contra the Europeans. Most people want to regard themselves as high-status, even thou they are not properly recognized as such, which they of course will be one day. Marginalized middle-easterners in Europe that can’t compete with the natives in the labour market and achieve status in that way, instead they seek to be holier than the Europeans by embracing Islam or/and crime, and many seek to be more Islamic than everyone else in their community and become islamists. Kill to party wrote about men and women embracing a new persona, which gives them an alternative ladder where they can assert status. White knights and “cool girls” are the personas of people unable to compete in the conventional status/looks race, but since low status women can sleep with high status men they can rationalize their failures as men being assholes, just as men can rationalize their failures as “all women are whores that only desire assholes”, instead of recognizing that they are unable to compete in the traditional game of male status and that women aren't men with different plumbing. I do think that men are punished much harder for believing in nonsense while many women can hold onto their delusions for longer. I guess the real thing at fault is the belief that historical proven and functional family patterns like that one of west of the Hajnal line can function in a laissez-faire sexual market. It probably "kinda" worked for the boomers because older social norms were still recognized back then.
Japan lost its religion, and is now dying. Porn's role is secondary, though important. Plenty of materially successful societies lost their faith and then will to live without porn being available. For instance, Athens. On the other hand, plenty of places which have non-reproductive sexual degeneracy galore also have high birthrates. Afghanistan comes to mind. In general, the role of sex in Western thought is both under- and over-rated. On one hand, nothing physiological will happen to you if you abstain from sex and masturbation for years. You won't go crazy and you won't explode. On the other hand, things will happen to you if you are removed from human intimacy and affection, and sex is a major way of expressing these. Note that bad things will also happen to you if you remove intimacy and affection from sex (this goes for males as well, by the way-note Roissy's transformation into a hetero faggot and Roosh's disaffection.) The idea that people simply must, must, must have sex at all times or their heads will explode, and therefore any non-attached fertile-aged non-disfigured woman must be having sex with an alpha in secret where we can't see it is pathologically wrong. What actually happens is that the majority of single people in these societies, male and female, are not having sex with anyone. Probably this is the only thing keeping these societies somewhat functional.
Cut the crap about religion. Japan didn't have one, hasn't had one for centuries. Muslims have lived around godless idolatrous Chinese for a thousand years and they never outbred them. Athens was conquered. It didn't stop having babies. The Greeks are still around, although at this rate won't be for much longer. Modern women are (for modern men at least) annoying, there's little incentive for a man to marry. But there was always the sex drive. A healthy men desires woman, intensely, at least once a day. Porn has killed that. You can get rid of the only drive that made you put up with woman at all. Imagine if women had some mechanism to instantly satisfy their desire for children. The birth rate would plummet even further. Somebody may genetically engineer a kitten that babbles and never grows up.
Japan didn't have religion for centuries? What about Buddhism and Shinto? There was no moral system there? Muslims outbreed Hindus today, by not having their kids die off en masse from not washing their hands. Muslims were also able to wield influence out of all proportion to their numbers when China went through its last period of lawlessness: check out the number of warlords and generals named Ma. Athens stopped having babies and believing in anything during that golden age between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, Sparta also went through a similar decline. They'd rotted from the inside out. A healthy man occasionally craves sex, but so what? Practically all civilized societies had whores available. Masturbation was not invented in 1990. A healthy man in a healthy society craves children, heirs, a family. Sex is a part of having a family, and a crucial part-but it's not the major part. In fact, given unlimited sexual access to their wives, men quickly grow bored and their frequency of mating drops off; why is that? According to the steam engine theory of the human mind and body, this should not happen. Personally, even in my wilder period I did not find my women particularly annoying. They make great pets if you don't take them seriously. Women have small dogs and kittens. Incidentally, hipster males have larger dogs and cats as well. But everyone understands that these are not substitutes for the real thing any more than porn and vibrators substitute for a husband or wife.
I've written enough about Shinto and I won't repeat myself. Shinto didn't really exist. Buddhism is most certainly not a moral code. So no. Muslims in China rebelled in the 19th century twice. They were so utterly crushed that they disappeared from much of Southern China. You don't get to tell me to check about Muslim warlords in China. I know about that much better than you do. That wasn't about Muslims outbreeding the Han. It was about Muslims being pretty good soldiers and better organized by virtue of being a minority and having a religion which tells them that killing infidels is an honorable thing to do. Contrast that with the Chinese saying: 好男不当兵，好鐵不打釘
>Shinto didn’t really exist. Buddhism is most certainly not a moral code. So slutting around by women and sexual dissolution by men didn't carry a moral onus? >Muslims in China rebelled in the 19th century twice. They were so utterly crushed that they disappeared from much of Southern China. 1-2% of Chinese are Muslim. How many were Muslim 500 years ago?
Of course sexual dissolution wasn't tolerated, but not because of what a priest says. There wasn't any. You don't do things that bring dishonor to the family. What will people say! An honest appraisal of the likely consequences of any immoral act is enough to justify not doing something. The Qing court in China used to build arches to celebrate chaste women, especially widows. The Chinese equivalent of "having a cake and eat it too" is "to want to be a hooker and also want an arch built." The Hui are 10 million, less than 1%, the 8 million Uyghurs are a different thing, and they hate each other. I don't think the Ming Dynasty had stats for their Muslim population. The Muslims used to run the bureaucracy of the Mongol state in China, so the Ming weren't very kind to them, but they hang around. The Panthay and Dungan revolts in the late 19th century are an interesting example of how to deal with uppity Muslims. Chinese Nationalists revere Zuo Zongtang to this day.
> You don’t do things that bring dishonor to the family. What will people say! An honest appraisal of the likely consequences of any immoral act is enough to justify not doing something. And why is it that people would say something? Why were there social moral standards and now there aren't?
Nobody cares about why. People will say something and if you "lose face", your fellow villagers will ostracize you and bully you for kicks until your whole family is dead. If some elite bookworm really insists in asking "why" there's always some Confucian classic making the argument. As for why people obey the Confucian classics... don't go there. This is Chinatown. You can and will be arrested if you are found to disagree with them.
Weak sauce. Obviously people used to believe in something and now they don't. Because now you will not "lose face".
Gnon's laws held in Malthusian times. Religion becomes increasingly important as technology allows us to ignore natural law. There was a more immediate feedback loop in place in Japan ~150 years ago. I found Jim's explanation for diminishing Japanese fertility compelling (feminism did it, basically), but to expound on that I would argue that women need to gain status from fertility, and that both successful religions, and successful cultures do this well.
Confucian classics made appeal to gods and spirits (Confucius admired Duke Zhou for holding filial rites for his elder King Wen and his ancestor Hou Ji as the corollaries of Heaven and the "Lord on High") even though the arguments and principles Confucius expounded were secular in nature. All ancient East Asian cultures believed in a variety of gods* and generally speaking were favorably inclined to Buddhist moral principles. The idea that East Asians do things "just because Confucius said so" reflects the modern atheist understandings promoted by the communist Chinese regime and the preferences of left-leaning scholars. *= In China the worship of folk gods and philosophy behind spiritual cultivation is Daoism or "following the Way," which is pretty much the same in conception to "shinto," the "Way of the Gods," in Japan. Neither existed before semi-modern times, but it's not like the traditions popped up out of nowhere .
What porn does do is to train the viewers to be cuckolds, in other words, to enjoy watching the penetration of a female they find desirable by a stranger. It also raises the threshold of sexual stimulation, to the point where normal human sexual behavior is no longer interesting (I'll spare examples.) Finally, it acclimates users to self-contempt. All of this adds up to mass dysfunction.
"The idea that people simply must, must, must have sex at all times or their heads will explode, and therefore any non-attached fertile-aged non-disfigured woman must be having sex with an alpha in secret where we can’t see it is pathologically wrong" I am pretty sure it is an accurate description of most fertile age women.
[…] features a Japanese graphical breakdown of the new sexual market. I lived there for years and it is true: a few cool guys root all the girls and the other fellas […]