Welcome to the Harem

Does anyone really get it? Even the young people who are engaged in the courtship dance called dating are often dazed and confused. Those of us who offer relationship coaching know how to help people find their footing in its shifting sands, but still, as a sociocultural phenomenon, the modern dating scene is chaotic.

Since I like simple explanations, I was drawn to Alex Williams' New York Times article about the gender imbalance on many college campuses. Link here.

If the ratio of women to men is 60%/40% this will obviously have an effect on dating and relationship behavior. One effect, as Williams points out, is that with men in such short supply those few remaining men have become empowered.

They can do what they want, when they want, with whom they want... and women, unhappy about being alone, go along because they feel that they have no other choice. If the choice is between hooking up with an anonymous male and going home alone, no small number of women are choosing the former, on the grounds that something is better than nothing.

In a related article, Charlotte Allen writes in The Weekly Standard that there is: "a buyer's market in women who are up for just about anything." Link here.

This feels crass and slightly exaggerated, but if Williams is correct, then it appears that on many college campuses and large cities there is simply "a buyer's market for women."

How did things get to the point where women have been disempowered in relationships, to the point where they are being induced to act out adolescent male fantasies, regardless of their wishes or needs?

Of course, it is reasonable to cast some responsibility in the direction of feminist thinkers like Naomi Wolf who told young women that they should explore their sexuality fully, because promiscuity was a concept invented by the patriarchy to control women and to keep them in their place.

And let us not forget Carol Gilligan and her effort to make schools into places that would enhance girls' self-esteem, even at the expense of boys. Gilligan's plan has been so successful that colleges are now suffering a severe gender imbalance.

Irony of ironies, these fully self-confident females are obliged to act desperate if they want to have dates or relationships.

The gender disparity has granted men so much power that women's voices, their needs, their interests become trivial psychocultural excrescences.

Of course, neither Gilligan nor anyone else in the self-esteem enhancement movement ever said that girls should be glorified at the expense of boys. Reality, however, said otherwise.

If girls and boys excel at different skills and if you want to enhance the self-esteem of girls in a competitive environment you need merely reinvent the curriculum to favor skills in which girls excel.

The more you value touchy-feely confessional exercises, the more you will grant girls a certain type of self-esteem. If you rewrite history to diminish warfare, competition, and heroics you will find that boys feel increasingly alienated from school. And alienated boys do not do as well as their fathers and grandfathers.

Boys retreat into their video games, sports, and fight clubs. In North Carolina, as the Times reports, they often forgo college to join the military, the one place where they will have a chance to become men.

Meanwhile back in college girls are learning to hook up. But, as Charlotte Allen points out, they are not hooking up with just anyone. Not just any man is going to succeed at the hook-up game.

A group of ersatz alpha males seems to have garnered a disproportionate number of women, while the beta and gamma males, nice guys, guys who would make good husbands or boy friends, are left out of the game.

Naturally, they want to be in the game. They do not esteem themselves and are not esteemed by women for their good qualities, so they decide that they want to become pick-up artists. Much of Allen's article is about how normal men, seeing women blithely go home with pick-up artists, decide that they must devalue their good qualities and emulate these ersatz alpha males.

The interesting part of all this is that a woman who engages in a casual sexual encounter with an ersatz alpha male, only to return to the comfort of the sisterhood, is acting like she is part of a harem.

What else does it mean to be one of many members of a pasha's harem?

This explains some of the peculiar aspects of the current hook-up scene.

Women are attracted to men who seem to have had many women, because that is a sign of being an alpha male. Inexperienced men, who who are awkward and shy around women, need not apply for pick-up artist or alpha male status.

Many of these men are not especially good lovers. This also becomes a sign of alpha maledom. If you are a pasha and can have any woman you want you do not need to be especially attentive to the woman's needs. You are not going to see her in the morning anyway.

Women learn to tolerate men who never call them again, because that too is a sign that he's an alpha male, that he is never going to be hers, but that she belongs to his harem.

Of course, as Charlotte Allen points out, these pick-up artists are not really alpha males; they are ersatz. They are playing roles; they are imitation alpha males; they are most often gamma or delta males whose special skill is acting out a woman'a fantasy.

The dating scene is an enacted fiction; it is about men pretending to be alpha males and women pretending to be part of a harem. Talk all you want about female empowerment, the consequence of the reforms that feminists promoted has been female disempowerment and female desperation.

Because women would not be acting this way if they were not desperate about their chances of having boyfriends. Worse yet, under the aegis of Naomi Wolf and her ilk, they mistake their desperation for desire and feel that they must act on what they believe is their heart's desire.

Sadly, they will often discover that they have not been liberated, but have been gotten so involved in living a myth that their sexual desires are no longer real.