patrick.net

I suspect the females crash more in spite of more male risk-taking, but I'm not sure.

I suspect the females crash more in spite of more male risk-taking, but I'm not sure.

Back in the nineties, when guys still thoughts lesbians were sexy and kids still thought campus was fun, there was a running joke you’d see in college movies. Some hapless dweeb would enrol in a women’s studies course, hoping to get laid. The desperate Casanova’s reasoning was that the overwhelmingly female student body would provide a target-rich environment in which he would face no competition. The joke was that it never worked, because the girls gathering to gulp down the gospel of Dworkin were all feminists with hairy armpits and a giant misandrist chip on their mannish shoulders.




There’s a deeper reason that the strategy of entering into a woman’s world doesn’t usually work out romantically, however, one that most men – and most women – understand implicitly, without having to be told. It comes down to human sexual psychology, which differs profoundly between the two sexes.

Sexual psychology is just a ramification of sexual biology. Males of every species produce an unlimited number of mobile gametes; females produce a limited number of immobile gametes; which type of gamete is produced is basically the distinction between male and female. Male investment can be, and usually is, as perfunctory as a few millilitres of ejaculate, of which they have an effectively infinite supply; female investment involves an extended period of gestating the egg or eggs, an energetically expensive process in its own right, which depending on the species may be followed by an extensive period of feeding, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable offspring. Thus men, infamously, are not terribly choosy about their mating partners, at least when it comes to short-term hookups, whereas women are extremely picky. Men want to impregnate as many women as possible, whereas women want to get the highest-quality sperm that they can attract.

For men, attractiveness is defined more or less by youth and health: not too old, not too skinny, not too fat, and a pleasingly symmetrical face indicating a low level of mutational load. Female attraction strategies therefore involve emphasizing their youth and health, through such ploys as exercise, dieting, makeup, flattering fashions, and Instagram filters.

Women, by contrast, are attracted to a man’s social status, this being a proxy for his biological quality as compared to other men. This isn’t the only thing women will look at: appearance isn’t completely irrelevant, since after all the biological quality of a man can be externally evaluated just as easily as that of a woman’s. There are plenty of cases of women spurning a wealthy, but ugly and unpleasant creep, in favour of a handsome but relatively poor young man; then again, there are also many cases of the opposite. Whereas for men appearance is almost the only thing that matters, for women it tends to be just one factor entering into a more complex and holistic calculation – verbal wit, material success, confidence, ambition, and so on.

Just as women compete for male attention by appealing to the male gaze, men compete for female attention by trying to improve their relative standing vis a vis other men according to the metrics women value.

Men could care less about a woman’s accomplishments, save that they are leery of women whose accomplishments outstrip their own, this being a sure sign that she will lose interest and look elsewhere; women care a great deal about a man’s accomplishments, not for their own sake, but as a proxy for his reputation amongst other men.

Competition is really the key word as regards male reproductive strategies. Men have invented innumerable means of competing with one another: athletic competitions, economic competitions, literary competitions, artistic competitions, musical competitions, academic competitions. The goal of any given competitive arena is to determine the relative standing of the competitors according to a certain trait – physical, intellectual, creative, what have you – so that the competitors can be paired off with women whose desirability matches their own.

Men are well-adapted to competition. They have a much better ability to narrow their focus to the specific task at hand, applying themselves with obsessive devotion to mastery of their chosen field. Just because the Darwinian payoff is sexual access doesn’t mean that they’re thinking about sex all the time; cognitive resources spent visualizing tiddies aren’t available to focus on the problem that needs to be solved, whether that problem is a mastodon, an enemy soldier, or the Schrödinger wave equation.

If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee. Iron sharpens iron.

Conversely, if you want reliable mediocrity, then you want women’s work. Women don’t have the same sexual incentive to compete with one another in performance, and so, by and large, don’t (they compete in other ways). Their instinct is to perform to a perfectly acceptable standard, but not, in general, to push themselves to exceed it.

For men, the play-by-play events of a competitive environment are high drama. Not so for women. Women, as the old saying goes, don’t care about the struggles of the competitors: they just wait at the finish line and fuck the winner. The drama women tend to care about focuses more on the heroine’s struggle to distinguish winners from posers, to decide which winner she wants, and/or to stand out from the other girls so she can catch the eye of the winner. “I’m so torn ... do I go with the musky barbarian warlord werewolf rapist, or the the aloof immortal billionaire vampire knight?” the heroine asks herself for three hundred pages. How he became an immortal billionaire vampire knight in the first place is of much less interest than whether or not he’s really interested in her.

Men are constantly on the lookout for arenas in which they can prove their worth, and thereby attract a mate or, more accurately, as many mates as possible. Across the myriad competitive arenas that men have invented, there is one common element shared by all of them, which both men and women are exquisitely sensitive to:

An arena cannot be dominated by women.

The reason for this is obvious. The purpose of the arena, from the male point of view, is to demonstrate his worth relative to other men. To enter an arena filled with women is to engage in a lose/lose proposition: if one does poorly, one has been beaten (up) by girls; if one does well, one has beaten (up) girls. Neither outcome is going to impress the girls. Or, for that matter, the guys.

For this reason, men who enter a social environment in which women predominate will tend to make a hasty exit. There is nothing for them there.

This is not a social construct which can be corrected with sufficient nagging. It is hardwired into human sexual psychology. There is nothing that can be done about it, short of redesigning human beings from their genes on up. At which point you’re not talking about humans anymore.

You might make people pretend that men do not prefer to compete in male-dominated arenas; you might, through sufficient emotional abuse, give them bad consciences about their natural instincts; you will not, not ever, not even once, change those natural instincts. If you ignore those instincts, you will only awaken the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.

The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.

The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.

Occupations seen as a predominantly masculine are almost invariably perceived – by both men and women – as conferring a certain intrinsic status, whether high or low. Garbagemen, oil rig roughnecks, firemen, special forces operators, and private equity sharks are all male-dominated occupations, and each occupies a distinct plane of social status. Conversely, social status being a primary attribute of male sexual allure, a profession in which women predominate is unable to confer status, by definition. To say that female professions are ‘low status’ is a category error; they’re simply outside of the status hierarchy. A kindergarten teacher is not really of higher or lower status than a plumber or a stock broker, because neither the plumber nor the stock broker will care very much about what she does before asking her out on a date; the kindergarten teacher, however, will care a great deal about which man is a plumber, and which a stock broker.

The preceding paragraph implicitly assumed a female kindergarten teacher. There are, of course, a very small number of male kindergarten teachers, may Thor have mercy on their souls. Men who work in occupations perceived as predominantly female pay a steep sexual penalty. Their lifetime odds of marriage decline as compared to men who work in sexually neutral or male-dominated professions; a woman’s success in marriage is wholly unaffected by working in a male-dominant field. This is intuitively obvious, but I was able to dig up a study that apparently quantified this1.

The flood of women into the workforce over the last several generations has led to several professions switching from male-dominated to female-dominated – for example, high school teachers, nurses, and veterinarians were all, almost within living memory, masculine vocations. After becoming feminine occupations, in every single case, those professions immediately plummeted in status. Men who entered them came to be thought of us somehow defective; what else is one to conclude about a man who chooses to compete with women, rather than with his peers? This is certainly not always fair. There is nothing necessarily defective about being a male high school teacher. All of my favourite teachers in high school were men. I have friends who work as high school teachers, whom I respect greatly, not least because someone has to be there to set a good example for our lost and abandoned boys...

Nevertheless, human sexual psychology is supremely indifferent to concepts such as ‘fair’. It does not matter that male teachers do good and essential work2; teaching is coded as a feminine occupation, and they pay a price for that.

An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages ... which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.

To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:




... Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.

This will be a disaster for academia.

Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s. ...

As discussed in this recent article by Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. ...

The abstract reports that men who enter female-dominated majors are significantly more likely to switch majors as compared to their counterparts in male-dominated fields, whereas women who enter male-dominated programs are no more likely to switch majors than anyone else. The sneaky fucker who enrols in Feminist Theory 101 to resolve tfw no gf runs away with his tail between his legs and no gf when he realizes they all assume he must be gay; the tomboy who signs up for aerospace engineering is pleased as a peach to be the central focus of all those attentive males (some of whom do her homework, and others of whom she mates with). The study seems rather inconsistent with the narrative that misogyny in male-dominated spaces is a primary obstacle to female participation, but exactly consistent with the hypothesis that male flight is a major factor discouraging male participation in female-dominated spaces.

Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why...), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).

This seems unlikely to succeed. ...

Richard V Reeves, who has been paying close attention to the issue of plummeting male interest in climbing the ivory tower, has suggested that one way to solve the problem might be to try and recruit more men into HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy) programs, which are currently overwhelmingly dominated by women. This is a bizarre recommendation and seems doomed to failure. Young men will take one look at a program with 85% female enrolment, and instinctively understand that going into that program is the social equivalent of entering the women’s bathroom. ...

The standard feminist response seems to be to challenge norms of traditional masculinity, encouraging men to be less focused on dominance and more quiet and collaborative; this is essentially suggesting that the best way to recruit men into a space everyone perceives as girly is to tell them that it will make them more girly. That seems like it will be counterproductive.

One thing that might succeed in staunching the flood of men out of the academy would be to flip Reeves’ suggestion on its head. The revealed preference of men in a co-ed university is to concentrate within departments in which they have a natural advantage due to disposition and cognitive capabilities: namely, the hard sciences, the applied sciences, and economics. I’ve known many men who shunned the social sciences and humanities in favour of the applied sciences, explicitly because they saw the latter as a refuge from the hersterical5 style in academic politics; I myself began my undergraduate career as a literature major, switching to physics after a couple of years because I found the English program annoyingly dogmatic in its Marxist political subtext and cloyingly effeminate in its discursive norms, whereas by contrast physics seemed pristinely Apollonian in its unsentimental objectivity and blessedly free of sermonizing. ...

Allowing STEM departments to remain male is by far the easiest solution, as it requires universities to do nothing at all. By simply sitting back and allowing nature to take its course, male-dominated departments could persist inside otherwise majority-female universities, providing meaningful arenas for the boys, who would otherwise enjoy rich hunting grounds amongst the girls filling the psychology, literature, education, communications, and biomedical lectures, without the risk of the girls thinking they were weird for walking into their change rooms.

Sadly for the prospects of academia, there is almost no prospect of universities letting well enough be. The persistence of a few small pockets of patriarchy in the midst of the gynocratic hegemony is an affront to everything the longhouse stands for. We endlessly hear about the crisis of female underrepresentation in those departments that have not yet been conquered, principally STEM. There are special recruitment programs for women, special scholarships for women, special mentoring programs for women. STEM departments are under constant internal and external pressure to bring in more women. This has led to a culture inside STEM departments that shows immense favouritism to women, particularly at the student and early career levels (boomer male professors are generally only too happy to shove their younger male colleagues aside in the name of gender equity; they then congratulate themselves for being enlightened). ...

This even reaches down to the elementary school level. My nephew was recently prevented from going to science camp at the local university, because the university was only running a science camp for girls.

University faculties and administrations are packed full of activist girlbosses for whom admitting, mentoring, hiring, and promoting other activist girlbosses is their entire animating purpose in life. Any cessation of programs intended to increase the female fraction in male-dominant disciplines will run full into the snarling teeth of the Future Is Female, which will screech like banshees about it being the resurrection of the patriarchy or whatever.

If academia comes to be seen as a feminine occupation and therefore orthogonal to male status hierarchies, public esteem evaporates, academia’s prestigious halo disappears, and it is reduced to something of purely utilitarian value ... and the practical value of academia is extraordinarily questionable.

Thus, one would predict that in addition to reduced revenue from tuition fees due to the smaller student body, government investment in and private donations to institutions of higher learning would also fall off a cliff, levelling a one-two-three roundhouse punch-headbutt-dropkick combo to the financial viability of universities. ...

Declining enrolment, funding squeezes, and reduced philanthropic donations have already closed something like 25% of American institutions of higher learning in the last decade.




... Yes, of course there are exceptions. I know many exceptions myself: brilliant female scholars who do absolutely fantastic work, and do not match these stereotypes at all. However. Stereotypes exist and persist for good reason: they are generally true.

Just as men outperform women athletically, men have a distinct advantage at the upper end of cognitive ability. The greater male variability hypothesis suggests that nature is more comfortable experimenting with relatively expendable men, leading to women being, on average, much more average – that is, having a reduced variance of numerous traits, IQ among them. The data suggest that women have a slightly higher average IQ than men, but that the greater variance of the male distribution leads to a larger fraction of men on the tails of the IQ Gaussian – there are more deeply stupid men than retarded women, but also more scintillating geniuses among men than there are first-rate intellects among women. It follows from this that a female-dominated academy will simply have a much smaller genius fraction, and therefore, as a body, produce much less intellectually compelling work.

There are salient intellectual differences between the sexes beyond the issue of raw cognitive horsepower. Men are comfortable with, no, they delight in heated arguments, passionately debating the merits and flaws of various ideas, raising doubts as to the veracity of evidence, poking holes in one another’s assertions, and generally questioning the quality of each other’s work. They don’t mind getting in fights, and indeed, often enjoy them. Academic rivalries have been infamously vituperative since the peripatetics were walking circles around the Platonists. A scholar stands out by standing up to the others in his field and surviving their most ruthless assaults. The result of this adversarial approach to the development of ideas is that ideas become stronger over time. The bullshit gets weeded out. It’s also just fun to watch, like an autistic cage fight.

If you attack a woman’s scholarly work head on, she has a tendency to cry. No one likes to see women cry, so as women’s presence in academia has increased, academics have become noticeably more conflict-averse and soft-spoken. ...

‘Extraordinary’ science – the kinds of creative, intuitive leaps that shatter the old wine bottles of exhausted paradigms and lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of nature – are solely the province of a very small number of geniuses. Geniuses are not only intelligent, but are also usually low in the personality trait of conscientiousness (they don’t care about following rules, half-ass their homework assignments when they even bother to turn them in, and cram at the last minute for the exam yet walk away with the top mark in the class anyhow due to sheer brilliance), low in agreeableness (they don’t care if you like them, and often go out of their way to annoy authority figures), and high in openness (fascinated by new ideas to the degree of being actively drawn to the esoteric, unconventional, and forbidden). Geniuses aren’t just smart, they are weird assholes. This personality profile is strongly tilted towards males, just as extremely high outlier IQ is heavily biased towards males. Thus, almost all Nobel prize winners are men. ...

In short order, people will wonder why so much money is being spent paying women administrators to supervise women professors to teach women students the finer points of post-colonial critical anti-whiteness gender theory, and calling it ‘science’.




... In lieu of such infrastructure, ad hoc solutions have self-organized amongst the sensitive young men who no longer feel comfortable in the academic quilting bee. The right-wing anon sphere has essentially become an informal salon in which high-IQ youth7 gather behind anime avatars to discuss thinkers deliberately misrepresented or memory-holed by the DIEvory tower – Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spengler, Evola, Guenon, de Coulanges, and so on. This has not gone unnoticed. Consider this recent Twitter thread, the main author of which is a Temple University geography professor:

gospel of Dworkin

#4B Movement is now trending among American shitlibs. It's a ROK based feminist thing, and ROK has one of the lowest birthrates on the planet.



It's funny, because Korean women 3-4 generations ago had great reputations as wives.