September 2, 2009

African Cougars

Maureen Dowd's pal Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times:
Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. ...

Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.

Note that the first characteristic of "high quality" wife is not "most beautiful" or "most faithful" or "kindest" but "hardest working." This is common in Africa, where women do most of the work of keeping children fed, so men have less incentive to be jealous of their straying wives since they aren't going to invest much in their wives' kids even if they are the fathers.

Let me make a surmise here about Pimbwe women with five or more husbands and about Pimbwe men with five or more wives. In a society in which men don't produce much, the women who marry the most are the women who can afford to marry the most. The harder working women are using their greater income to afford the company of the sexy but unproductive men who catch their fancies. Eventually, much as the industrious wives enjoy their decorative husbands' skills at singing, dancing, fighting, and the like, they tire of subsidizing these drunken gigolos and kick them out. Only to wind up married to somebody similar.
“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”

The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”

... The Pimbwe live in small villages, have few possessions and eke out a subsistence living farming, fishing, hunting and gathering.

Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “The men will cook, do a lot with the kids.”

Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa, where a woman is entirely dependent on the wealth of her husband and in divorce is not entitled to so much as a gimpy goat, Pimbwe women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.

... The goose, like the gander, may find it tempting to wander if it means that her goslings will fly.

Okay, but, let's be frank, not many Pimbwe fly very high at all. They're dirt poor. And one big reason for that might very well be a social structure that selects women for productivity and men for sexiness. You wind up a lot poorer than when it's the other way around. A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't.

The Pimbwe are the anti-Finns. What's the old joke? How can a woman tell when a Finnish man is interested in her? He looks at her shoes rather than his own shoes. The Finns don't make good gigolos. But they do make good cell phones.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

75 comments:

  1. What about cuckoldry in western cultures? I remember someone mentioning a study that asserted a very high level of cuckoldry (generally among the later births in a marriage) but I don't remember any scrutiny applied to it. Cuckoldry late in marriage would seem a good way for women to maximize fitness within monogamy.

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  2. Doesn't this also play out in urban North American Environments? One mother with numerous baby daddies who do not contribute materially to child-raising?

    Perhaps there is an HBD explanation for this. Assume that men and women have similar average intelligence, but that the men's curve has a higher standard deviation. That means that on the left hand side of the curve, there is a population of women who have to choose from men who are overall less intelligent and less responsible than the women are.

    I suspect this may explain the tendency toward matriarchy in such societies, as well as behaviour explained in the article.

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  3. Arrrgh, you really opened the door for testy here, didn't you?

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  4. It's too late for the West. We wouldn't follow the Bonobos' example, we won't follow the Pimbwes'. We are too bound to the carbon-dependent patriarchy construct.

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  5. It is all so very clear to me now. Based on one woman's (no doubt methodical) data on the Pibwe, a tribe no one has ever heard of, we should cast aside our equations and our Anglo-Saxon hangups and let it all hangout.

    Amirite, Natalie? The Pibwe are where it's at. Never mind Western Civilization.

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  6. Natalie Angier is the same credulous reporter who wrote "Is Race In the Genes? Not Really, Science Shows" back in 2002 or 2003, basically stovepiping raw quotes from Venter and Collins.

    Today very few people in population genetics still take that hard line...

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  7. >one woman making the most of multiple mates<

    Very old news. Happens everywhere. The pre-marriage pattern of one girl sleeping around with different guys who provide her with different services (laundry, dinner, popularity, sexual satisfaction, etc.) is common, and has been common, post-marriage as well. In the past such women were looked down upon as "sluts," but the modern attitude is more understanding. Many girls now are "sluts." And women, yes even here in the patriotic god-fearing deeply religious USA (laugh), don't divorce in order to make a worse match. I know one woman whose story is fairly common in 2009. She cheated on her husband with a married-with-children man, broke up his marriage, divorced her husband and went with the man whose previous family she destroyed. Why? He was her boss at work. A better match!

    >A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't.<

    Welcome to America...the Third-World status merely hasn't kicked in yet.

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  8. rightsaidfred9/2/09, 5:24 AM

    let's be frank

    Steve Sailer, once again calling it like it is.

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  9. "while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family."


    What a bunch of BS!!

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  10. Women HATE HATE HATE BETAS. You are very welcome testing99. Take this post off.

    Hopefully studies like this will kill off the universal personality faction of evolutionary psychology.

    There are two basic possibilities. All women would act like the Pimbwe if they were in the situation. That is, mating behavior is conditional. The second is that people vary, at least a little in preference and abilities.

    The first option is unlikely: Pimbwe women vary amongst themselves. There is raw material for selection. Many social structures, which are themselves emergent from human interaction with each other and the natural world, select for other traits.

    A neutral observer would note that by historical white standards, a huge fraction of black men even in 1st world countries are losers. They don't have careers, or even seem interested in them. The extent black men are into anything but socializing it seems to be bling-related. Black men don't save money, invest, or plan ahead.

    When I visited the fam back in Virginia, I saw young, attractive black men being chauferred by obese women, both black and white. Sometimes by women 10-20 years older. I may be going out on a limb, but I doubt many 20 or 30 year old handsome white guys are sleeping with unattractive 40 year old women to avoid getting a job.

    I think a major racial difference is sexual standards: blacks want to be gigalos. White men can't/won't have sex with women they aren't attracted to.

    Selection for provisioning women made white men pickier and less sexy. Being sexually selected made white women more attractive and not lazier, but much less likely to engage in male-typical activities. With blacks, the opposite happened. Relative to whites, Black women are less attractive, less choosy and more hard-working. Black men are more attractive, lazier, shorter-sighted, and more likely to do female-typical activities like dancing.

    A small fraction of skin color variation may be accounted for by differential sexual selection. I think Peter Frost covered it, maybe even before I had the idea.

    I've put this several places, but I like pretending people care what I think.

    The gay uncle theory of homosexuality gets trashed by reality. Gay men don't invest much in their relatives. As a side-effect of men being selected for appealing to women, male homosexuality makes more sense. An overdose of genes that make men appealing to women by a mix of feminine and hypermasculine traits, my Gay Cad theory explains male homosexuality better, and makes a couple of predictions.

    First, gay men have some feminine traits. But not randomly. They have feminine traits that appeal to women for short term relationships and females investing in men. They sing, they dance, they gossip.

    Second, gay men have hypermasculine traits that should appeal to women: they have larger penises, tend to be muscular. The appeal should be obvious.

    Gay men seem(maybe I'm wrong) more promiscuous than straight men would be without women gatekeeping. Gay men even form daddy/boytoy relationships.

    Interestingly, Gay Cad predicts that populations where men are selected to invest(dads) will have fewer homosexual men that populations where men are more selected to be cads. Boys born in urban areas are more likely to be gay. If I'm right, a larger percentage of black men than white men are gay. And white men are more likely to be gay than Asian men. It should follow Rushton's rule. Also, I predict that brothers of gay men will have had more sex partners than men without gay brothers. Bastards. Oops, sons of single mothers, will be more likely to be gay than sons of married women.

    Gay Cad isn't perfect, and could very well be wrong. But it is largely consistent with how gay men actually behave.

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  11. "Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her."

    And this scholarly article is supposed to revealing a great discovery? I read about this on isteve five years ago, and I think it is a fact generally known to people who know Africa.

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  12. Oh, I should add that understanding African sexual behavior matters for several reasons.

    Looser women helps explain the sex difference in HIV infections amongst blacks: 2-3 times as many women as men infected.

    Less choosy men helps explain why so many black men in prison (and possibly the military) have sex with men, when whites in those situations are far more likely to be abstitent by choice.

    'No account' black men contributes to the sex difference in success. Many more black women in the US manage to be employed than black men.

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  13. In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly.

    I know a whole bunch of men who would disagree with that statement.

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  14. Henry Canaday9/2/09, 7:13 AM

    Elsewhere on the diversity front, Christopher Caldwell, who on Muslim immigration to Europe is kind of Mark Steyn Lite and Polite, spoke at our Local Lefty Bookstore last night. The LLB audience was remarkably receptive, as I do not think it might have been a couple of years ago. Caldwell contrasted Europe’s very limited and recent experience with mass immigration with that of the United States, which he said had integrated the mass of new peoples from the mid-19th Century until the mid-1920s. I was not entirely reassured, although Caldwell made many good points, cautiously and calmly.

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  15. I see where you are going with this, Steve, but your causal story is a bit prematurely determined, at least near the end. You state that this lifestyle of female serial monogomy--> societal poverty, when it is probably a little more complicated. Poverty itself could very well select for female serial monogamy.

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  16. What exactly is sexy about a drunk?

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  17. As a long time student of world poverty levels, I'd say the people of Pimbwe are no poorer than many a village in India, Kurdistan, Sudan, China (esp. pre-modern). The difference is, those cultures that developed literacy and built lasting edifices, codified their rules and government, at least seemed to offer something more to life than food and sex.
    There's a Sudanese joke about a Sudanese asking God when his country will become as rich as other countries and God answering, "Not in My lifetime."
    While many people in this cultures--that have writing, history, links to world religions, codified behavior, etc., are proud to be Kurds, or Pashtuns, or whatever, I suspect many, many of the women would prefer the life of the Pimbwe. They are no better off physically in their circumstances, and at least the Pimbwe seem to have some control over their immediate destinies. The depression one sees in third world countries (among both genders, but esp. among females) is related to a sense of total lack of control.
    The vast majority of people in poor, 3rd world places work as hard as the Pimbwe, and get no more out of it. I'd say many a female would be prepared to swap places, and probably a few of the men too.

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  18. "A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't."

    And you surmise this from one totally obscure tribe in the middle of nowhere-Africa?

    Explain this to me; why is it that during revolutionary times...and even 50 years ago, women were expected to get married young and could be killed for adultery, while now there is a whole cottage industry devoted toward (white, American) women acting like sluts, but there is so much more money in the economy now?

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  19. You might be interested in this two-part clip by an odd black religious group ... despite their strange theology, they show a perfectly clear-eyed and sociobiological understanding of the "harem" problem.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjV7bLgrde4

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  20. Chief Seattle9/2/09, 9:27 AM

    I read that article a couple of days ago and thought it was straight out of iSteve - plus of course the New York Feminist gloss that explains the behavior as empowerment of women and a potentially attractive model for the West.

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  21. OT

    Posted by Karl Denninger in Housing at 09:53

    McStupid: Mortgage Banker's Association


    If the MBA wants "sound underwriting" there are simple ways to guarantee it and no government backstop is required.

    Simply put, credit risk is controlled by imposing leverage limits on buyers. This is done by requiring down payments. A 20% down payment requirement limits leverage to 5:1, and unlike a political process it requires no regulation - you simply make it unlawful to give out mortgage money without 20% in cash on the barrel. Presto: credit risk problem solved.

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  22. Is there really any great difference between a 'subsistence' and a 'renewable' economy?

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  23. Women preferring sexy men and men having to rely on their sexiness for survival are not natural inclinations. More like the sad, fall back position of a society where shiftless men who have nothing to offer but their penises are used by women; and women, who are forced to fend for themselves, use the men for the only thing they are good for.

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  24. A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't.

    The thing is, guys have no motive to support the wife if she's simply going to fool around. Hell, how does he even know the children are his?

    Without the motivation provided by a dutiful, faithful wife, most guys simply won't bother being all that productive.

    I think it's time people started looking at Africa's problems (and those in our own ghettos) as at least as much the result of female misbehavior as male.

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  25. Good Lovin Babby Daddy9/2/09, 10:50 AM

    If Angier is looking for an example of wonders of polyandry for women, she needn't scour the earth for an obscure corner of Uganda that bears no relation to modern first world life here in the USA.

    A growing number of American women have children by more than one baby daddy. Just like Uganda, the woman (or her family) is generally left to do most of the work raising the children fathered by her various lotharios. Unlike Uganda, America women get a great deal in the extensive tax support for her fatherless children.

    Angier extolls polyandry to expose the double standard of our patriarchy. If so, the more appropriate model for her is the American single mother with multiple baby daddies gorging on our extensive welfare system.

    I'd call it "Jerry Springer Cougars". You go girl; what is good for the goose is good for the gander. However, I doubt the gooselings will do anything but suffer in the process.

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  26. EXACTLY Steve.

    And that is where we are headed.

    Western women today, as a group, in the younger cohorts 20-35, enjoy what Kay Hymnowitz of City Journal called "the New Girl Order" where fashionably dressed young gym toned women sip fashionable coffee drinks (or after hours, alcoholic ones) and work in marketing, finance, real estate, advertising, health, education and welfare (government) human resources and the like. These are needed, but not jobs that add wealth.

    Increasingly, these women are selecting men based on their "singing, fighting, and dancing skills" because they can afford to. It's great for women -- they get as much Alpha Testosterone as they can handle, and have as many different guys in that class as they can. For example the tawdry example in the British tabloids where a soccer player was stabbed repeatedly in his legs by his sister's boyfriend and entourage, to the point where his legs might be amputated.

    The kicker -- the woman is pregnant with the man's child, got a black eye from him (he also stabbed her mother) and mouthed "I love you" to him at his arraignment. She had a child by another man who abandoned her and hooked up with another woman and a pal for a robbery spree targeting British supermarkets.

    The Pimbwe are Chav Britain, or the Black Ghetto (which was always mean, but never this violent -- read Louis Armstrong's memoirs of tough Black New Orleans or the recently issued Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton on the same) -- writ large.

    [Jelly Roll Morton was cruelly libeled by playwright August Wilson. Morton never "passed for White" and was always self-identified as Black. He just lived in New Orleans, which was always complicated wrt race.]

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  27. Steve,
    would it be racist to skip this posting?

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  28. Roissy call your office!:) BTW,the SunTimes is carrying a story today about one DeKalb Walcott,a CFD battalion chief,who slept thru a fire recently. This story is hopefully being relayed to Sonia Sottomayer...

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  29. David Davenport9/2/09, 12:50 PM

    ... The postAmericans live in large cities, own few possessions and eke out a subsistence living cubicle farming and hunting and gathering government aid.

    Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of cubicle farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Buggerhoff Mulderbug said. “The metrosexual men will cook, do a lot with the kids, as long as there's no rough play.”

    Unlike in old America, where men controlled a far greater share of resources than women did, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa... postAmerican women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.

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  30. Matriarchy is the ultimate Patriarchy.

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  31. victorian dance hall?

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  32. Notice the model here is a lose-lose game. A society that can't even meet its own needs in the short or long term and has contributed nothing of significant value to humanity.

    Perfect example of how not to organize a society for success.

    Perfect example of how to be a loser society where everyone suffers equally. Swell.

    If your goal is to live like the Pimbwe, be my guest.

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  33. I love how liberal feminists always ignore the most successful cultures (Europe & Asia)...and instead extract role models from the most dysfunctional society on Earth (Africa) for us to emulate.

    Where the more we Africanize, the more we will end up like Africa. Maybe these womyn should just move to Africa and save us the pain?

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  34. "Second, gay men have hypermasculine traits that should appeal to women: they have larger penises, tend to be muscular. "

    While your Gay Cad theory is certainly interesting reading, do you have any data to back up your "large penises" assertion?
    Do you have any data showing that gay men tend to be more muscular naturally? I recall either watching a tv program or reading a news article once where it was explained that gay muscles and the predilection for the gym was a result not of nature, but the AIDS epidemic. With AIDS leaving so many gay men emaciated and scrawny looking in the 1980s, healthy gays hit the gym to bulk up and show off how fit they were.

    -Vanilla Thunder

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  35. "Explain this to me; why is it that during revolutionary times...and even 50 years ago, women were expected to get married young and could be killed for adultery, while now there is a whole cottage industry devoted toward (white, American) women acting like sluts, but there is so much more money in the economy now?"

    So much more money? In case you haven't been following the news we're going broke.

    -Vanilla Thunder

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  36. Oh shit, another NYT writer getting in touch with her freak. Hahahaha, build a barrier around the continent and check back in 200 years.

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  37. "So much more money? In case you haven't been following the news we're going broke."


    No, you're going broke. If you don't believe me, take a drive through Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Scottsdale, Boulder, or whatever the nice neighborhood in your town is (hint: probably the one with the golf course you've never played) and you'll see plenty of (white) people with money.

    As a matter of fact, because of the people YOU have decided to electe (any democrat or republican running for the Senate or the Presidency), the hobbies YOU have decided to take on (emasculated whining for one)and the so called problems that YOU feel are worth your time (this silly racist nonsense) they probably have takes some of your money over the past couple of years.

    And if they never get around to thanking you for it, allow me to do it in absentia.

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  38. Truth Said:
    Explain this to me

    Explain this to me:

    Your ideology (forced integration of the races) creates your problem (whites complaining about blacks); why do you never address this point?

    That's just the finale, the whole conversation's here:

    Tangled Up in Blue

    And here:

    I, for one, welcome our new blue-eyed overlords

    You're a hard guy to pin down, Truth!

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  39. Polyandry is the opposite of polygny. This story does not help support the notion that SSA males are particularly highly sexually selected -- just the opposite. The practice of polyandry by some SSA tribes (along with low paternal certainty among polygynous SSAs) is consistent with genetic evidence showing higher breeding sex ratios in Europe than in sub-Saharan Africa,

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  40. "I see where you are going with this, Steve, but your causal story is a bit prematurely determined, at least near the end. You state that this lifestyle of female serial monogomy--> societal poverty, when it is probably a little more complicated. Poverty itself could very well select for female serial monogamy."

    Uh, huh. Well my Norwegian great great grand parents lived in a sod hut in the Dakotas. They were poor and patriarchal, hard working and frugal. Their kids were able to move to Washington state during the Depression and buy a good farm. No divorces. Hard working farm folk that saved their money. Their grandson, my grandfather. became a pilot when he was drafted into WWII and died in the 60's worth half a million from farming. We great great grandkids are all middle class and college educated.

    But hey, I am sure it would have worked out just the same if way back in the Dakotas ole granny and grampy would have split up and she had run around the county and he had hung around at the local tavern.

    Yeah, right.

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  41. "No, you're going broke. If you don't believe me, take a drive through Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Scottsdale, Boulder, or whatever the nice neighborhood in your town is (hint: probably the one with the golf course you've never played) and you'll see plenty of (white) people with money."

    And the point is..?

    What, we are a really great civilization?

    Yup.

    And the patriarchal structure built it?

    Yup.

    And the parasites haven't destroyed it, yet?

    Yup.

    And we want this civilization to continue?

    Yup.

    And the people who buy, build and pay for cool stuff like to enjoy it?

    Yup.

    I guess we agree.

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  42. Rob plenty of European women worked hard on the farm or small craft industry, in fact that was the general pattern in both European farming and American Western settlement.

    We know in fact what creates wealth in a society: parental investment by BOTH biological parents, emphasis on education, training, delayed gratification, and capital investment instead of cheap labor. This is what allowed America to put men on the moon. Ann Coulter has written a book discussing the abundant research of how the traditional dual-parent family, biological mother and father, have better outcomes in delayed child sexual activity, grades, substance abuse, etc. which The Heritage Foundation backs up (as well as the negative impacts of single motherhood models).

    Svigor -- Cuckoldry is around 10-15% of births, no data on racial breakdowns or age-group/socio-economic status breakdowns. It's called "non-paternal births."

    We are eating our seed-corn of productivity, with men defaulting in younger cohorts to the "sing/dance/fight" mode of behaving.

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  43. This article sounds like it was written by that idiot Sharon Begley.

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  44. Rushton is simply right. In a just world he would win the Nobel Prize for his work.

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  45. "What, we are a really great civilization?

    Yup. ..."

    And a good portion of those women who live in those houses are sluts who are banging the pool boys in total opposition to Mr. Sailer's original thesis>

    Yup.

    "You're a hard guy to pin down, Truth!"

    Well, I've responded to you twice but we'll give it the short version here:

    My ideology is not "forced integration of the races." That would be a little like saying that my ideology is "business should be conducted between 9 and 6."

    Get it Sviggey? No, OK then we'll try again:

    The former cannot be considered "my ideology" because it was in process at the start of the 16th century. That is roughly 465 years before I was born. What I feel about this, is, well, about as relevant as what you feel about the earth being round.

    Continually, my "problem" is not "white's complaining about blacks." No Svig, that's your problem. It may be forward of me to presume, but this is probably the reason your life is what it is today. Now I don't know who you are or what you do for a living, but from reading your posts I would surmise that your achivement in life at this point is pretty average. If you are really Donald Trump, I apologize.

    No Svigor, my problem is that people like yourself who spend your lives complaining about blacks are causing the deterioration of MY civil rights, you are, for the most part, mindless automatons who are going to get me hauled off to a fucking internment camp with you; there are too many of me who think, discern, look their own problems in the face and diagnose what the real problems are in this world and use a dialectic thought process to come up with solutions. Conversely, there are too many of you who believe 90% of what you are told, then beleive the perfect inverse of the other 10% which is what "they" expect you to do anyway. That's the game chief, keep the sheep looking at each other so they won't see the wolf. That Svigor is my "problem."

    No Svigor, if you want to understand the complexity of the race "problem" in America, I advise you to two quarts of Ben and Jerry's tonight, one chocolate, one vanilla, leave them on the counter until they are nice and soft, then take a heaping spoonful of each and mix vigorously for 15 minutes.

    After you have done that, remove the vanilla, and place the two back in their original cartons just as you bought them.

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  46. "Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do .."

    Another Feminist Lie debunked ...

    Women make over 85% of the consumer purchases in the United States.

    http://dontmarry.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/women-make-over-85-of-the-consumer-purchases-in-the-united-states/

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  47. Finland is BORING.

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  48. People, people. Let's listen to Megan Fox on who runs the show:
    http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b141951_megan_fox_talks_boys_not_guys_vagina.html

    Not only is she beautiful but she speaks her mind. Grrowl.

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  49. I was speaking to a Lutheran missionary in South Africa when I lived there during the Apartheid era. He mentioned how frustrating it was teaching the black youths to follow a modicum of sexual restraint. The way things work is that black girls are expected to be faithful once married but can mess around as much as they like before that. Black boys just mess around all the time, which has long been known to be a major cause of disease proliferation in Africa.
    What's new is that people in the West, encouraged by liberals and even churches, are immitating this destructive behaviour and think it's progress. But the end-result should be obvious to all.

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  50. This article sounds like it was written by that idiot Sharon Begley.

    She's not an idiot. She's wrong, but she's not completely wrong. Genes allow for just a tad more wiggle room than HBDers are wont to permit, probably for fear that their plans would be doomed by the concession. Not so.

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  51. >The way things work is that black girls are expected to be faithful once married but can mess around as much as they like before that. Black boys just mess around all the time,<

    Maybe I'm missing something, but this is how many people have have behaved during the past 30 years, black or white. Steve claims it was different 100 years ago, but such a state of affairs seems literally fantastic to me. Gentlemen, I may be wrong, but I fear that it may be later than we all think.

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  52. >Looser women helps explain the sex difference in HIV infections amongst blacks: 2-3 times as many women as men infected.<

    But according to Obama (...Axelrod, Rahm...), it's that damned foreskin causing most of dis problem! See, America already IS Africa.

    Instead of cutting the budget...

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  53. Truth asked:
    "Why is it that during revolutionary times...and even 50 years ago, women were expected to get married young and could be killed for adultery, while now there is a whole cottage industry devoted toward (white, American) women acting like sluts, but there is so much more money in the economy now?"

    It's questionable whether wealth per capita has increased since the mid-1970s. What little increase we've had is due to women's work being monetized, i.e., many women have migrated from the family economy of unpaid housework to the cash economy outside the home.

    As another commenter noted, there has also been an increase in economic equality. There certainly are more of the super rich, but that doesn't mean we're all better off.

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  54. Whiskey said...
    Rob plenty of European women worked hard on the farm or small craft industry, in fact that was the general pattern in both European farming and American Western settlement.


    Well that's fascinating, you lying, warmongering POS. It's hard to forget that you are the only person who ever advocated genocide on iSteve.

    White women likely never worked as hard relative to white men as black women did relative to black men.

    Vanilla Thunder,
    Evidence for Gay Cad

    Digit ratio, indicative of prenatal testosterone exposure,

    ...study of 720 people, Breedlove found higher levels of androgens can create a greater than normal tendency for both males and females to develop a homosexual orientation.[1] But some gay men show more or less than average testosterone exposure.

    On all fivemeasures, homosexual men reported larger penises thandid heterosexual men.[2] Self reported though, and gay men probably care more about penis size than straight men.

    I remember reading somewhere that gay men had slightly worse hearing than straight men, and the researchers said it was to higher testosterone.

    I thought inductivist or audacious epigone has GSS data showing that gay men had brothers who had more premarital sex than average. A quick googling didn't turn it up.

    1 http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/03/29/gay.fingers/

    [2]http://www.springerlink.com/content/j517r35408304087/

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  55. It would be interesting to see what differences there are between husband #1, 2, 3, ... When we think of men doing this, #1 is the high school sweetheart. They are close in age socioeconomic background. #2 is much younger and probably from a lower socioeconomic background. #3 is a bar girl from the philipines who is 25 years younger and cannot speak a lickin of english. The children from each relationship the man had will be quite different perhaps. For the women choice of mates, who knows?

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  56. Normally I would be skeptical of the observations made by an anthropologist, who probably has an agenda, about a remote tribe with fewer than 40,000 members.

    But here, the observations are completely consistent with stuff we already know: (1) black women are smarter and more industrious than black men; (2) black women can and do slut out.

    Actually, I am reminded of the mating habits of African Lions. Apparently all the hunting and raising of young is done by females. The males just fight among themselves for dominance.

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  57. "Finland is BORING."

    ----

    Is Africa exciting?

    Personally, I like boring. Boring means nothing bad is happening. Personally, I don't suffer from boredom because I can read and think. I bet the Finns can, too.

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  58. "There certainly are more of the super rich, but that doesn't mean we're all better off."

    So we'd be better off raising our 5 children in 500 sq. foot log cabins?

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  59. "A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't.
    "

    Hey Steve, you ever heard of HBD?

    Why do you assume that female sexual whims are universal to all populations?

    Where the Pwinmbe are from, the environment seems to have rewarded women that choose lazy men as partners. Maybe diligent men are more likely to get eaten by lions so they offspring die off quicker.

    But for the rest of us non Pwimbe, "fickle sexual whims" probably doesn't mean lazy sexy drunkard. People in Europe evolved in an environment which rewarded women that chose highly capable male partners and male partners who invested in their children for life. A lot of white and Asian women don't even experience fickle sexual whims and when they do, it's for a James Bond type- a man with enough comptetence to outweigh his lack of commitment.

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  60. "A lot of white and Asian women don't even experience fickle sexual whims..."

    My first reaction to this was "what planet does this broad live on?" Then I read your bio and it said that you were 26, and I said "Oh, that planet."

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  61. "She's not an idiot. She's wrong, but she's not completely wrong."

    No she's not completely wrong,even a broken clock is right twice a day. Maybe tool would be a better description. People like her and Natalie Angier distort HBD to try to justify their liberal/progressive agenda, and make it palable to the NY Times/Newsweek readership. It makes smug SWPL readers feel superior because they think their beliefs are justified by "science", unlike those knuckle dragging conservatives.

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  62. Rob,
    Thank you for replying. Especially interesting was your comment that that you read gay men tend to have slightly worse hearing compared to straights. I remember a year or two ago an iSteve reader emailed Steve saying he used to tend bar at gay bars and it seemed to him gay men had a disproportionately higher rate of deafness.

    -Vanilla Thunder

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  63. David sez:
    Maybe I'm missing something, but this is how many people have have behaved during the past 30 years, black or white

    David, I grew up under Apartheid. Whilst there was some frolicking in secret, most whites I knew, especially Afrikaners, kept to the Christian concept of fidelity both before and after marriage. It was encouraged by the state, the church and educational institutions. The contrast to both traditional and urban African sexuality was stark, perhaps THE defining difference, more so than colour. When I came to Europe I was shocked by sexual behavior I associated with blacks. If anything, the 68-movement transported traditional black sexual mores to white society, with all the destruction that entails. In traditional African society the village elders have the right to initiate young girls into sexuality. This is the reason for the bizarre child-rape epidemic in South Africa, which is not bizarre by African standards. What changed was that Apartheid forced that back to the local villages where such behavior was not reported to the police and white children were not in danger of being “initiated”. Now with the new black rule, this has gone mainstream and many white children are being raped in the cities. So of course more is reported and everybody acts shocked about something which is ancient and an integral part of Africa. This casual attitude towards sexuality in my view is the main reason for the backwardness of Africa. It feeds into everything from witchcraft, general morality, the value of life, apathy, sloth, and hygiene. As the West indulges in this behavior, with the MSM waving the flags, it can look to end up similar to Africa.

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  64. Maybe diligent men are more likely to get eaten by lions so they offspring die off quicker.


    Uh, seems like a backward argument. When whites came to Africa they used rifles against lions and hyenas. That was much more effective than spears or pangas and mostly cleared urban environments of wild and dangerous animals. I guess whites used to be more dilligent than Africans so that simple observation already cancels your argument.

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  65. Vanilla Thunder said

    >it seemed to him gay men had a disproportionately higher rate of deafness. <

    It's a minuscule data point but I once worked with a young homosexual man who was going rapidly, unaccountably deaf.

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  66. http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b141951_megan_fox_talks_boys_not_guys_vagina.html

    Sight unseen (because every neuron I don't fill with memories of what useless people say is another neuron I can fill with something worthwhile), lemme guess: "I'm a psycho bastard child"? Am I close? Do I get a prize?

    We should have a rule, no bastard children in high office. Clueless actresses? Okay, sure. But not the president (Clinton & Obama).

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  67. For the women choice of mates, who knows?

    Probably roughly the opposite of your 1,2,3 for males; IME women tend to increasingly select for security and stability as they age.

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  68. "I guess whites used to be more dilligent than Africans so that simple observation already cancels your argument."

    It doesn't cancel it at all. If whites are more dilligent than Africans, then whites must have evolved in an environment where dillegent people produced more surviving offspring and where females that preferred dilligent males were reproductively favored.

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  69. Anon said

    >David, I grew up under Apartheid.<

    Sincere thanks for your observations.

    I grew up in the American South; adolescence in the 1980s. Sexual behavior among, for example, white high school students differed very markedly from what was preached in church. My parents' generation (adolescence in 1950s) had sexual outlooks very different from those of us kids. When we heard of such things as "no sex out of wedlock" and "no abortion" and "no contraception" and "no homosexuality" - or such words as "disgrace" and "shame" - we rolled our eyes incredulously: such things seemed to come from the Victorian age, or more precisely from an alien civilization. I sympathized with them, though, instinctively shuddering at the hi-jinks of my confreres.

    I can conclude either a. it was a rotten, atypical, trashy area; or b. the rot set in generally, earlier than some of you fellows realize; or c. a good number of commenters on iSteve are older people. Irrational regional pride and natural politeness inclines me to B.

    Another explanation is possible: hypocrisy. Their blood much increased in viscosity, older people tend to tsk like preachers...while buried memories of their hot youths haunt their consciences.

    In any case, the current situation is dyseugenic.

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  70. I don't think there's anything surprising going on here. The situation is very simple: There are two types of layabout drunk men. One type is a complete loser, the other type is a Big Man, or aristocrat, or alpha of some type. (The fact that in our society people have to work to achieve status is historically not typical, I think.)

    Women will tend to select for Big Man characteristics, but in impoverished societies, there aren't any Big Men. So the women select losers as these most approximate Big Men.

    From a social perspective, the presence of male cheating or of cuckoldry (which is age-old, I'm sure) is not equivalent to serial monogamy. The important thing is that parents continue to pool their resources and uphold the norms.

    For people who think that sexual behavior is qualitatively different now and who can't imagine that there was a lot of hanky panky going on in the old days, I would suggest that you consider the difference between guilty sex and emancipated sex. People who believed in the old social norms still cheated, they just felt very bad about it the whole time and stayed married, whereas now they need to be "fulfilled" by divorce and re-marriage.

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  71. It doesn't cancel it at all. If whites are more dilligent than Africans, then whites must have evolved in an environment where dillegent people produced more surviving offspring and where females that preferred dilligent males were reproductively favored.


    eh? when u travel through Africa you see that the poorer people are the more kids they have, because nobody feels compelled to look after the kids or invest in them. They can have quick sex without being socially compelled to take care of the after-effects. whites usually try to feed their kids, give them education, dress them properly and send them to youth groups. all of this costs money and time. so obviously whites try to limit the number of children because they associate costs and effort with each child, and this factors into their family planning, another element mostly missing in African society.

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  72. David,
    valid points. Like I said, I'm sure there were illicit things going on the shadows, but I never bought into the line of argumentation that because enough people were sinning, we should abolish the moral laws against sin. The next step is what's on the table now: because many people murder others, we should not punish murder so harshly and let them out sooner. It had to come to this and is a direct result of the loosening of the sexual mores which existed pre-60's. Even if everybody messes around, it's an advantage when society publicly professes and legislates against sexual immorality. In general, it encouraged many ordinary people back then to be more careful in their private lives, which helped them and society in the long run. Sexual looseness has only encouraged even more perversion, which was the argument of conservatives back then and they were proven right. Nowadays we are openly discussing the legalization of polygamy and pedophilia. These things are a perversion and a direct result of tolerating pre-marital sex. They also have enormous spiritual, psychological, social, legal and financial consequences which liberals never want to talk about.

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  73. And so what you are saying is that because job prospects are bleak, and there is very little money, (of which condoms cost) Africans shoud simply sign an oath at birth never to have sex and die virgins...as poor whites do?

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  74. Whilst there was some frolicking in secret, most whites I knew, especially Afrikaners, kept to the Christian concept of fidelity both before and after marriage.

    You mean pagan Greco-Roman.

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  75. "Looser women helps explain the sex difference in HIV infections amongst blacks: 2-3 times as many women as men infected."

    No, it's because women can't transmit AIDS to men. Virtually all AIDS cases in first world nations are male--> male--> female, i.e. male bisexuality.

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