Thursday, 24 January 2013

Evo-Psycho vs Economics As Explanation: Part One

The Manosphere loves Evo-Psycho. I don't. It's unfalsifiable to the N-th degree, pseudo-science right up there with psychoanalysis and String Theory. It's an ideology, an interpretive framework within which one can make sense of seemingly random events and outcomes. It makes no predictions, but it's damn good, in skilled hands, at making anything seem as if it was the most obvious and natural thing to happen. That's why it seems so hard to actually refute it. Evo-psychos never make predictions, they only explain.

When it comes to stuff like this, I'm with the old school guys. Follow the money, follow the power, follow the twisting curves that is the development of Capitalism. Look for the expression of class interest and at the logic of the relevant social structures and institutions, and at the influences of pop culture (itself a product of Capital) as well as those Four Horsemen of Social Apocalypse: Church, State, School and Parents. Regard people as problem-solvers making use of these institutions to advance their self-interest within whatever random rules they have picked up, and with whatever random talents, gifts and advantages they may have been born with or into. Also I hold that inter-sexual differences are smaller than intra-sexual differences, mod reproduction-related issues. In other words, given any asshole-like behaviour by men, you can find a woman who's a bigger asshole, and given any saintly behaviour by women, you can find a man who's a better saint.

So here's my version. Economic development in Western Capitalism reached a stage around the late 1960-s where there was not enough labour to do all the work that could be done, and that many of the jobs being created were not congenial to most men and didn't quite add enough value to justify a full male salary. In addition, the State - even in America - was creating a large number of welfare-related social services jobs that definitely did not add a male salary's value, and so both the State and Capital needed more women in the workforce. Hence the changes in employment legislation in the 1970's. In a very short time, basically between 1970 and 1979 in the large towns, girls went from seeking marriage to seeking A Flat Of Their Own.

They did so for three reasons. Girls aren't stupid. They can see when their parents aren't happy, and they could figure out that it was being forced to live together well after the initial attraction had faded that was the cause. It's men who bang on about the Old Days when Gramma and Gramps Toughed It Out and Stayed Together, not women. Women don't want to live like that for a moment longer than they need to, as they proved when no-fault divorce was introduced. So a lot of girls simply don't have the stars in their eyes in the first place.

Pop-culture hyped the benefits and joys of independence. It did so because it saw girls going into jobs rather than marriages when they left university, realised that there was a market there - all the single ladies spend, spend, spend, a value second only to the Pink Pound - and mirrored those girls back to themselves. Other girls read the same magazines, thought it looked like fun, and followed on. In case you guys think that's an unrealistic assumption of naivety and influence, where did your friends get their Blue-pill ideas from?

Third, who the heck said that women ever wanted to be married and raise children? It just looks that way because it worked out that way before The Pill. Gramma just wanted to fool around, did so for a while, and then the inevitable happened and Gramps did the right thing and married her. What we know from the introduction of no-fault divorce and reasonably well-paid jobs for women after the 1970's is that it isn't men who want to live alone with their cats, it's women. It isn't men who set up impossible ideals for a potential partner as a way of hiding the fact they don't really want one, it's women. And it's both sexes who are happy to screw around, especially if there's no chance of pregnancy.

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