The Less Desired

Men and women that the Unfairness Industry forgets.

First off: A warm welcome to my new subscribers. Last month (I post once a month) I mentioned that Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a line from a famous W B Yeats poem. The same line was also chosen by Joan Didion in 1968 as the title of the seminal collection of essays that launched her career as one of America’s great late 20^th century writers. I would recommend her essays to anyone who wants to understand the 1960s roots of our 21^st century zeitgeist.

The Rejected Lover by Vincenzo Irolli (1860-1949)...

The title of this month’s post borrows from that of another famous book The Less Deceived; Philip Larkin’s first collection of poems. Under this title I explore a theme that gets very little attention in journalism about romantic and sexual pair bonding – the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Opinion pieces, sometimes serious and sometimes coy, on the subject of unfair sex are to be found in abundance. What always strikes me when I read this kind of journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. The most common perspective is a female one – ‘Women’ getting cheated on by ‘Men’; ‘Women’ always being viewed as sex objects’ by ‘Men’ etc. Occasionally there will be a male perspective – getting blamed by ‘Women’ for playing the field…. as all ‘Men’ do etc. The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered.

[Much of the text is from an article I wrote in 2021 for Quadrant Magazine. Published in the wake of a horrific mass shooting that had recently occurred in the city of Plymouth, England - it took its cue from the media frenzy surrounding the perpetrator’s online search-history of ‘Incel’ social media websites.]

Unfair Sex ?

The world is full of lovelorn people. Thankfully those with murderous urges are a rarity but very many are capable of feeling that the sex and romance cards are stacked against them. Others are prettier, richer, smarter - or just luckier - than you. Sometimes it’s the opposite sex per se that is seen as having an unfair advantage. Most of us will probably at some time or another have entertained an opinion on some or all of this, albeit not likely a scrupulously objective one.

These inequities can be looked at through a number of different frames:

·         They are one of the great themes of literature, movie and song; a vast creative oeuvre which – to be reductive if one may - amounts to a kind of Bayeux Tapestry tale of how some get to be luckier in love than others.

·         They have been studied in the discipline of Evolutionary Psychology

·         And now in our age of online-dating, sexology and digitally enhanced statistical number-crunching, a considerable body of research data has been accumulating that sheds another kind of light on all of this.   

·         Finally there’s 20^th/21^st century feminism, much of which tends towards a narrower narrative of men’s perennial mistreatment of women.

Combining these various strands into a coherent thread is my purpose here.

First a brief digression to note certain sex-based asymmetries on a broader historical canvas. There have always been female goddesses and monarchs but until the 20^th century West, it seems to have been a given across virtually all cultures that women-in-general were deemed of less value than men-in-general and history records rather little in the way of challenges to this (to our modern sensibilities) grossly unfair ordering of society. Deeper into human history there were practices of almost incomprehensible devaluation – like the ritual slaughter of the harems of dead rulers and the Hindu practice of widow burning. But then again the mass castration of those rulers’ courtiers (something particularly cringe-worthy to the modern male conception of The Good Life) can have been no picnic either. Some strands of radical feminism can almost give the impression that not much has changed. But most people would view it as perverse not to acknowledge that, in the liberal democracies, things have changed enormously.

Let’s now return to those various ways listed above of viewing fairness and unfairness in relation to the complexities of boy-meets-girl. It has long been understood that male desire for a woman tends to be driven primarily by her physical attractiveness whereas women place much greater value on personality traits like confidence and ‘charm’ – especially when they have led to social success and/or wealth. There have been attempts recently to try and quantify these tendencies using various online dating metrics.

Others are prettier, richer, smarter - or just luckier - than you.

Nature is very unfair in its distribution of physical comeliness. This is something that will always cause disappointment and resentment in the less lucky ones. In the words of this Unherd article by a feminist writer: “we are all still pitted against each other in the great hotness contest, measured by others and ourselves against the fuckability standard”. But what then of the distribution of those ‘attractive’ male personality traits? A study on the dating app Tinder found that men “liked” more than 60 percent of the female profiles they viewed, while women “liked” only 4.5 percent of male profiles. So Nature it would seem is also unfair in its distribution of this rare 4.5% of male animal magnetism. There is, in other words, ‘unfairness’ in the mating experience for both sexes.

The differing nature of male and female sexual desire has been the subject of much empirical research in recent times. Some of it is buried away as dry academic research papers, some has found its way into book form  and some into journalism (both broadsheet and pop magazine). “Certain traits associated with masculinity seem to be attractive to women on average: dominance, confidence, assertiveness, and extraversion”. Numerous studies of sexual desire have reached the same (broad-brush) conclusion that male sexuality is primarily about desiring whereas women’s is more about the desire to be desired. This, it is argued, accounts for the particular attractiveness of men with an insistent, confident ‘charm’ – one that makes the woman feel that it must be her and no one else will do.

Research has tended to confirm yet another piece of folklore. Behaviour that sometimes gets labelled as ‘toxic’ is most typical of the kind of male to whom a very lot of women (and especially young women) are most sexually attracted - at least in the short term. This is an elephant in the feminist room but is revealed in abundance in story form. The handsome (or sometimes not so handsome) bad guy always with a pretty girl in tow is the stuff of every tv soap opera ever made. Then there were “Oh you [delicious] brute!” fantasies of 19^th century novelists like Edith Hull. And then there are the “more disconcerting research findings that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not.....[and men] ...high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.”  (One thinks here of those gut-wrenching stories of women who, escaping one violent, abusive relationship, head straight for similar in the choice of their next partner.)

The handsome bad guy always with a pretty girl in tow is the stuff of every tv soap opera ever made.

And what of another oft heard charge of sexual unfairness from a certain sort of pop-feminist journalism: the charge of women being viewed as “sex objects”? This is a notion freighted with pejorative connotations but, if defined simply as ‘being desired for one’s physical appearance,’ it is surely something that everyone wants (but not everyone gets) particularly when young. A look through Pinterest, Instagram etc can leave no doubt about the truth of this for anyone with eyes to see. And physical adornment - particularly female adornment – clothing, fashion, cosmetics, bodily manicuring etc etc - is a multi-trillion dollar industry. The sexual attraction business, broadly defined, is quite possibly the biggest industry in the world. There can be no denying either that above average physical attractiveness puts those lucky enough to have it at a huge advantage. A more common sense view would be to acknowledge it but with the caveat that most people – even the beautiful ones - do not want to be valued exclusively as objects of physical desire.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to support another common-sense intuition - that men tend, as a whole, to be more naturally sexually promiscuous and voracious than women. The predatory male looms large in scandal-type journalism, especially if they are famous. Stories of male sexual infidelity, exploitation and harassment abound and the behaviour exposed is indeed unedifying – ranging from the hurtful to the criminal. But the predatory male has tended also to become the archetype of males per se in feminist discourse, particularly among the kind who like to talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ But this narrative is somewhat skewed; at least with respect to infidelity. In a world of 50% males and 50% females, for every ‘alpha’ male with multiple mistresses there must logically be several ‘beta’ males either cuckolded, thrown-over or otherwise disadvantaged. Also the focus in recent years on calling out sexual harassment (although broadly a positive thing) can, if taken to excess, create a new kind of unfairness. Now, a perfectly decent young man hungry for romance can find himself in Catch 22: he knows from ancient folklore that faint heart never won fair lady but he also knows that - in lore of feminist-chic – one definition of sexual harassment is merely being hit on by someone other than the one that you had secretly been wanting it to be.

calling out sexual harassment can, if taken to excess, create a new kind of unfairness

Men are partly themselves to blame for the skewed nature of the story because they rarely choose to go there. The vast majority of commentary about sexual relations is written by women and from a female point of view. Part of the reason is probably that most ‘thinking’ males view crying “unfair” about the dominant narrative as a hiding to nothing.

We can see then that the empirical evidence seems to confirm what most people might think of as blindingly obvious - that some men and some women are much luckier (or savvier) in love than others. Of course most people do - in the course of a lifetime – experience some kind of reasonably long-term relationship anyway so one might say it all works out in the end. But some evolutionary psychologists - like Professor David Buss – believe that modernity is possibly creating a runaway form of sexual competition that is actually exacerbating disadvantage to the less-lucky-in-love.

Yes but what about.......?

My feminist reader (only kidding) would take me to task if i did not at least touch on the dominant narrative amongst the progressive intelligentsia - that society still has a way to go before it corrects a ‘systemic unfairness’ to women – economically, legally, culturally and sexually. A more nuanced perspective on the balance of advantage would be full of “Well it depends”. That balance can even tilt quite rapidly in certain circumstances: as for example between 1916 for the young men serving in the trenches and 1920 for the 'surplus two million' women whose prospects for married life and motherhood died alongside the men. And in our own time? Women are more likely to go to university but also still more likely to do the domestic chores. Economically independent women are more likely to be the leavers than the left in a relationship but also more likely to suffer physical violence whilst in it. Women are more at risk walking home alone at night but men are more likely to be murdered (by other men). Yes, it’s complicated.

One kind of unfairness that all can agree on is that men are capable of physical and sexual violence against which women have, at best, only a limited defence. Masculinity can indeed be ‘toxic’; men can be rapists, gang rapists and wife-beaters. This, in my view, is the greatest single failure in the entire history of civilisation; one that Western liberalism has only mitigated, not eradicated. But middle-class feminism can be justly criticised for having so much more to say about it as it relates to its own back yard than about the hugely greater violence and oppression faced by millions of women beyond the (at least partial) protection of liberal mores. In many parts of the world, absolute horrors of the devaluing of women are still rife; like blaming them for being raped. There is, of course, little that Western liberals can do about these horrors but one gets a sense that even thinking much about them can get crowded-out by intra-metropolitan middle class preoccupations. (They could, for instance, direct more political firepower to issues like forced marriage which remains a scourge in all parts of the world - even in the West.)

More on this can be found in my post: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo

And here is the link to my 2021 essay mentioned above: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/10/some-thoughts-on-life-love-and-lust/