Sexual Violence and Sexual Poverty

The recent murder of Anne Le is tragic beyond belief, especially in view of her beauty, intelligence, youth, and charm. In every picture of her I've seen, she looks absolutely gorgeous. Whoever killed her deserves to die.

Forgive me if this is the wrong time to raise the issue, but the question must be asked –To what extent is violence, particularly sexual violence, due to sexual poverty?

Despite its economic wealth, America is sexually poor. And despite the constant saturation of the media with sex, sex, sex, creating the impression that living in the US is one big non-stop orgy, America is the sexual equivalent of Calcutta.

Sexual poverty leads to violence. If a man steals food, it's reasonable to conclude that he's hungry. If a man steals drugs, he may very well be trying to feed an addiction. And if a man rapes a woman, it is probably due to a lack of sex (i.e., sexual poverty).

Feminists have been very successful in propagating the myth that rape is not a sexual crime. I have had college professors repeat this nonsense to me. Yet there are studies that show this isn't the case (1). For instance, it must be asked, if rape is not intended to satisfy sexual urges, then why are the vast majority of victims sexually attractive?

It stands to reason that some men who are sexually frustrated will resort to rape. Even if we concede that power and control are the principal motivators of sexual crimes, what man feels more powerless than the man who can't get a date, and is constantly rejected by women?

In the Philippines I heard a heart-breaking case of several pedicab drivers who kidnapped, raped and murdered a young girl. These sorts of stories are depressingly all too common. A pedicab driver is one of the poorest of men in an already very poor country. His chances of having a fulfilling sex life are almost nil. Although sexual violence is never justified, it should not shock us when it occurs in conditions of sexual poverty.

Marriage creates sexual poverty. If a woman marries and becomes the exclusive partner of one man, then other men lose. If Donald Trump marries her and has her exclusively during her most fertile and attractive years, and then dumps her once she is past her prime and marries another woman, thus denying other men sexual access, then Donald makes the situation even worse. Multiply this by all of the wealthy men who marry multiple women in succession, and it exacerbates the problem of sexual poverty.

Like the time I saw a very attractive soccer mom at the pizza parlor. She was attractive to me, but she was the exclusive partner of another man. Perhaps this man might have found my wife attractive, but she was off the market. We were both sexually bored with our wives (who probably felt the same way), yet we were all trapped in a stalemate, an exclusive, yet unfulfilling relationship. I would have been excited beyond belief to have slept with that guy's wife, but we were all stuck in the same dead status quo. And the status quo is sexual anorexia.

Marriage not only creates sexual poverty, but violence as well. There was speculation by a TV commentator that the murder of Anne Le occurred so close to her marriage because her killer knew that he would lose any chance of having her once she got married. Perhaps the thinking was, “If I can't have her, no one can.”

Think about it: If you find your girlfriend in bed with another man, you leave. If you find your wife in bed with another man, you kill him, and possibly her, too.

Human beings once lived in paradise (2). Paradise was not Adam and Eve in the garden, but humans in a cave, in which everyone mated freely. Why does a man produce millions of sperm, when only a few are necessary for conception? If you sleep with Eve, and then I sleep with Eve, whichever one of us has the largest number of sperm wins in the struggle to procreate. Sperm competition, in which penis size, ejaculate volume, and numbers of sperm increase, soon follows.

Every night in the cave is an orgy. Children are raised by the tribe, and resources are shared.

At some point an evil idea occurs to someone. “I can have a woman all to myself.” It is about this same time that humans transition from being gatherers and diggers into being hunters –and killers. The Bible allegory of Cain and Abel is a profound insight into human nature –we are fratricidal killers descended from a man who killed his brother. Only it is more likely that one brother murdered the other not over religious practices, but over exclusive sexual access to a woman.

We must recognize that no matter how sexually wealthy any society is, there will always be evil in the form of murder and sexual violence, but we must not kid ourselves and pretend that sexual poverty does not lead to desperate --and violent--attempts to gain sexual satisfaction and a feeling of power.

1. Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C. T. (2000). Why men rape. Sciences, 40(1), 30-36.

2. The early human paradise/orgy scenario is from the writings of Desmond Morris.

Beauty Rears Its Ugly Head

Can you find the attractive woman in the pictures above?

Feminists have long been pushing the idea that beauty is subjective (i.e., "in the eye of the beholder"), when research shows it is not the case (1). An example of this fallacy is "The Beauty Myth," by Naomi Wolf, which contends that women are judged by arbitrary standards of beauty.

I believe that many liberals would be aghast to find out just how much they have in common with evangelical Christians, and vice versa. When I was a serial church attender in my youth I was told the women in Playboy magazine were “artificial,” and were not really attractive. Naomi Wolf would agree. However, if you think Lisa Bonet isn't really attractive, get yourself to an optometrist, and please don't drive yourself there.

If you as a man are attracted to women in the media, it's not accidental, and it's not artificially created. Every man since Adam who ever trod the planet would find these women (e.g. Halle Berry, Salma Hayek, Heidi Klum) gorgeous.

What is artificial and contrived is a feminist attempt, aided and abetted by political correctness, to make certain women look beautiful. If beauty is arbitrary, and if women in Playboy are beautiful only because they're airbrushed, then it stands to reason that any, and I mean ANY, woman can be made attractive with enough effort. And in the case of Caster Semenya, the South African runner with the most Freudian name since Oral Roberts, we're not even talking about a woman.

You see, some people were upset that IAFF wanted to have Caster undergo genetic testing to see if she was actually a woman. Even a three year old watching the freakish athlete would jump up and shout like Austin Powers, “That's a man, baby!”

In the politically correct world, it looked as if uptight white judges subscribing to arbitrary and shallow standards of beauty were oppressing both a woman and a “person of color” (like I don't have any color?). So “You” magazine featured Caster on its cover and on four pages inside with a “sexy” photoshoot.

The only problem is that Caster is a hermaphrodite. This very “sexy woman” has no womb , but does have internal testes. So whose standard of beauty is artificial?

1. Langlois, Kalakanis, and Rubebnstein, 2000. Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytical and theoretical view. Psychological Bulletin, 126 (3)

Cleaned Out

I shared some Zacapa rum with a friend last night, and we talked about work and retirement. (By the way, Zacapa is the world's best rum. It is dark, flavorful, and exceptionally smooth.)

I told my friend I plan on retiring in the Philippines, and he has similar plans. But the catch is that he's married to a Filipina. I warned him that anything he buys in the Philippines (and you can't really buy land, just lease it) can get taken from you. I've seen it happen time after time, and have heard the terrifying stories of guys who have lost houses, land, businesses, life savings, and sometimes, their lives.

Just this summer I heard of assets being frozen in Filipino banks. And the guy who is trapped in the Philippines. He owes his wife a million pesos (about $20,000 US), and can't leave until he comes up with the money. He can't come up with the money, so he can't leave the Philippines.

Well, my friend agreed. He realizes that in his late 50's he doesn't have the chance to get back on his feet financially if he gets divorced a third time. Yes, you read that right, a third time.

My friend got cleaned out in his first two marriages. I collect these stories because they are so common, yet totally unknown to men.

“You should have seen the shop I had,” he told me. “It was so clean you could eat in it. If I still had it we'd be in there right now. I lost it.”

“Excuse me if I'm prying, but how much did you lose in your last divorce, say a ballpark figure?”

“I declared bankruptcy.”

How many men are aware of how common these stories are? Yet I continually read how marriage is the surest route to wealth, how marriage boosts your assets, how getting married is a surefire financial strategy. But time after time I meet guys who have lost everything in the aftermath of a divorce, and are financially devastated.

Look, if getting married makes a guy wealthy, then marrying two women should make him twice as wealthy.

Of course, if you studied men with multiple wives, you would find that the men with the greatest number of wives are the wealthiest. (Keep in mind that this is in societies where women cannot divorce men and take half their property as well as making additional claims on men's income.) But are these men wealthy because they had multiple wives, or do they have multiple wives because they can afford them? I think we understand that any man of ordinary income with two wives would soon be broke. Whether you're married to both at once, or marry and divorce them sequentially, the bottom line is that you are stripped of any accumulated wealth.

Those who say that marriage makes men wealthy have cause and effect reversed. Marriage doesn't turn poor men into millionaires –it's that women marry money. It's like saying that best way for a woman to become young, thin, and good looking is to marry a Hollywood director. It's obvious that marrying a director doesn't improve a woman's looks, the association between directors and hot women is because powerful directors choose to marry beautiful women.

A man becoming wealthy by getting married is about as likely as an old crone becoming a beautiful starlet by marrying a director.

Purpose and Foreigner Alcoholic Syndrome

I just got back from the Philippines, and it had to be one of my best trips. I was with a girl I met via the Internet, in her early 20's and slim. We went out to Malapascua Island, with the most beautiful white sand beaches. We spent most of our nights having sex.

(By the way, a tip I picked up from a mentor of mine is to have sex without orgasming. If you orgasm, you get tired, and pretty soon you can't perform. On the other hand, if you don't orgasm, you can go all night. Rather than become more tired, you become more energized, and your sex drive grows even stronger.

It may seem like not orgasming is a let down, but if you stop before orgasm, you will have the same sort of feelings as if you orgasmed –elevated heartbeat, flushing of the skin, a feeling of relaxation, etc. Only you won't be totally exhausted. And you still have orgasms, only once a day, or every other day.)

We rented a boat for the day to Carnassa Island, which is an hour north of Malapascua. The island is remote, sparsely populated, with white sand beaches and clear, sapphire water. I learned to snorkel, and was amazed to see the colorful little fish and to hear the crackling of anchovies in the water. We explored a cave that was said to be a secret meeting place of very powerful Filipinos. I drank cold beer as we ate barbecue on the beach.

As we came back, we passed through the village that is the main population center of the island. Our guide steered us away from one small house that had some sort of commotion going on, with an assortment of gawkers loitering at the gate.

He explained that the guy who lived there was a foreigner who had just finished drinking himself to death that afternoon.

As I thought about it, I couldn't believe the insanity of the world. I had just had one of the best days of my life, and I would kill to live on Malapascua like that guy, but he couldn't find anything worth living for.

When I first saw the syndrome I was incredulous. You have guys living in the Philippines, sleeping with beautiful women, and yet they are full blown alcoholics.

Last summer I met an American guy who is an out-of-control alcoholic. This year he was even worse. He would be at the bar at nine o'clock in the morning drinking his first beer. (In fact, he had switched from beer to malt liquor because beer wasn't strong enough.) At eight o'clock in the evening he would still be there, having drunk all day. He might drift off to sleep for an hour or two, then resume drinking throughout most of the night. He might get two or three hours of sleep a night.

The raging alcoholic foreigner syndrome didn't seem possible. You had guys who didn't have to work, who had plenty of leisure, who were freed from the slavery of marriage, who were sexually wealthy, and yet had nothing better to do than get bombed.

And so I stumbled on the missing element in their lives –purpose. There has to be something that animates you, that gives you a reason to get up in the morning. I believe that as a man that reason needs to be larger than earning a living or raising a family. What is your life's purpose?

Rick Warren in The Purpose-Filled Life stumbles onto a great truth, that you need a purpose in life. But then he cops out. What is your purpose? To give your life to God, who has a purpose for you.

Well, like Rick, I can't tell you what your purpose is, but I do know that your purpose is unique to you. It is about you and your life. God doesn't need your purpose, and he doesn't want your life. You have to think about what makes you happy, about those things that drive you, even when money isn't involved. If there is something you'd like to have written on your tombstone, that thing that you would like to be remembered for may be your purpose.

As I've thought about it, I know that one of my missions in life is to empower men.

Will the Real Elizabeth Edwards Please Shut Up?

Why John Edwards Is a Tool

The reason why John Edwards is a low-life has little to do with his affair. John is an ambulance chasing lawyer who made millions alleging that doctors delivering babies caused those children to be born with cerebral palsy, even though studies show this is not true.

It also takes a brazenness born of stupidity to stand in court in front of a jury, channeling the plaintive cries of an unborn child, when at the same time you are perfectly content with having that child hacked to pieces.

Johnny Boy, who is worth 29.5 million dollars, made as a central focus of his campaign “Two Americas,” pointing out how awful it was that some Americans were rich, while the rest of the country lives in squalor. Nobody is forcing Johnny to hoard all of his money and to get $400 haircuts. He could always try leading by example, say by getting a $50 haircut and donating the other $350 to charity.

The Way the World Works

Now Elizabeth Edwards is touring every media outlet in the country as part of her Wondrous Traveling Pity Party and Medicine Show, reenacting her humiliation at the hands of her husband, who had an affair. The whole ordeal was so traumatizing and humiliating that the only way she could cope was to write a book about it and go on a nationwide publicity tour.

Elizabeth, look in the mirror. In her wedding photo Elizabeth is attractive. To look at her now, let me just say that there has been a precipitous decline in her attractiveness. John Edwards found himself in the same predicament that every married man finds himself in, saddled with a wife that an observer would have a difficult time recognizing from her wedding picture. John Edwards looking at his wife is a sort of transgender picture of Dorian Gray –Johnny remains eternally young and handsome, while she turns into an old hag reflecting all of his moral decay.

Elizabeth's age and her cancer mean that she is less fertile at best, or infertile. It is natural for a man to be attracted to younger, more fertile women. This doesn't mean it's pretty. It would be reassuring to all of us if the crippled boy were just as likely to get the promqueen as the captain of the football team, but it's just not the way the world works.

If that sounds callous, there is another way for Elizabeth to play the hand she's been dealt. I know of one elderly guy who married a much younger Filipina. It reached a point where he was in poor health and couldn't get out of the house. At that point she was dating another, younger man. When the old man found out, (and he could see where things were going, since he was incapacitated and she was younger) he dealt with it graciously, saying that he seemed like a nice young man and that he's the type of son-in-law he'd like to have. The wife even brought her “friend” to the house. Rather than blow up and furiously rail against the inevitable, the old man had accepted it, and lived out the little time he had left in peace, without bitterness and recrimination.

Get a Job, Elizabeth

The women (and I use the term “women” loosely) on The View were very unsympathetic to Elizabeth. She must have known she was marrying a grasping ambulance chaser. And despite all of the pain she has endured, she is married to a multi-millionaire. If Johnny is such a cad, and marital life is so miserable, why doesn't she just walk, and take 14 million and change with her?

She is now facing the Hillary Dilemma. If she divorces her wandering husband now, what are the odds of her marrying another multi-millionaire? Sure, she could leave, but the ride on Johnny's Italian handmade coattails would come to an end. Elizabeth might have to live in that horrifying other America, where people drive their own cars, drink beer, do their own housework, and –gasp-- go to work.

Seduction Tip: Be Rough around the Edges

A new study shows that women prefer men with facial scars for short-term flings.

There is a theory in sleight of hand magic called the “too perfect theory.” The idea is that some tricks are “too perfect,” and either seem implausible or lead the spectator toward figuring out the secret. As an example, in the effect cigarette through coin, if a cigarette passes through a flat piece of metal, spectators’ thinking may lead them toward the secret. But suppose a small hole is drilled in the coin. Admittedly, a cigarette through a tiny hole isn’t as miraculous as a cigarette through a solid piece of metal, but the effect seems more likely.

Another example is a prediction effect. If a spectator is given a free choice of any word in a dictionary and chooses “consternation,” and my prediction is “consternation,” something seems fishy. The prediction is too exact. If on the other hand my prediction is “concentration,” or “constellation,” it seems believable.

The main idea of the too perfect theory is that things can be too neat and tidy for their own good –there is a certain appeal in roughness.

This applies to seduction in that men can be too clean, too nice, too polite. This is easy to do in a culture in which men are raised to repress their natures. Think how often we are told that “violence solves nothing,” and how easily flirting, telling a joke, or saying the wrong word can result in charges of harassment and insensitivity.

Men are also raised to be the fall guy, the upright citizen, the hard-working, self-effacing nice guy who will put in long hours and ask little in return. When a woman has her fling and ends up pregnant, or suddenly realizes she is not as attractive as she used to be and now needs to settle down, she turns to the fall guy, who will raise another man’s child as his own and spend his whole life supporting a woman and her children (which may or may not be his).

Seduction guru Paul Janka observes that he does better with women when he doesn’t shave. A couple of days’ growth of beard is ideal. We know that women who are ovulating prefer men with darker faces, which may explain the greater success of the “scruffy” look.

For years I suffered from being too neat, wearing ties when going out, or a suit and tie. Of course I was excessively polite and sensitive.

When I was a school teacher in Fresno the lady who taught next door to me was a very attractive woman. I was stunned to learned that she had screwed the Larry the janitor, who was loud, rude, vulgar, unshaven, and a smoker. The affair mystified me. Given my understanding of women and my philosophy at the time, it made absolutely no sense.

Only now does it make sense to me. Larry was rough around the edges, reveled in it, and was sexually aggressive. And it paid off.

The Go-To Guy and Beta Male Slavery

The following is a post from Perry Marshall. It outlines how the Bet Male schmuck is the world's ass, bearing the load and doing everyone's work.

The Go-To Guy Gets Educated:

How Business Really Works on Planet Earth

Start with about 300 million people in the United States . Consider that half of ‘em are retired or in school or on welfare, a fourth of ‘em are taking care of the retired ones and the ones in school, you've got 75 million left. But 29 million work for the Federal Government which means there's only 46 million left to bring home the bacon.

Ah, but then there's the 15 million who work for the local government, so they're only marginally more worthwhile than the feds. We're down to 31 million now. 80% of the 31 million are either lazy, apathetic and mostly unproductive, or they're busy undoing the damage done by the dufuses every day. So in fact there's only six million people doing real, actual, productive, innovative hard work.

Those 6 million people are not only feeding 300 million, but providing them with warm homes in the winter and quality television programming. The comfort food and Seinfeld reruns keep the unproductive, roiling masses from rioting.

(Karl Marx was wrong: Religion is not the opiate of the people, television is.)

That explains why you feel like, in any room full of 20 people, you're the only one getting anything done. It's because you ARE the only one getting anything done. The rest are mostly dead weight, playing a zero sum game.

That's a fact. Get used to it. Always been that way, always will be that way. What matters is that you understand this is your role as an actually productive person in the world.

But there's still another part of this that most people don't perceive.

Of the six million people who do the actual work, one million are company presidents and big-time managers. The other 5 million are the Worker Bees.

Most company presidents and big-time managers, truth be told, are pretty productive people. They are worker-bees too. But the biggest part of their job is to keep the other worker-bees with heads down, working. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground. (Uncomfortable position, that.) The stability of the modern world rests on the loyalty and commitment of those 5 million worker-bees. They need to not look up.

I'm wicked serious. You take a company like General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of employees, all that company's real productivity and competitive edge rests on the shoulders of about 5% of them, people who take complete ownership of their jobs. They come early, stay late, skip lunch when necessary (about half the time). They know the answers to important questions. They know how things work.

They know the password to the server. They happen to have a backup copy when the hard drive crashes – yes, it's three weeks old and unfortunately not all the data is recovered. But they happened to make a backup one day… well, just in case, and… because they want to make sure the machine stays running. They were too smart to count on the IT guy. Sometimes they spend their own money and/or take personal vacation days to go get edumacated about something.

They know how many hubcaps were made on the last shift. They know Karen at the chrome supplier who can occasionally work a miracle if FEDEX loses a shipment.

They take everything about their jobs they very, very personally. Very seriously.

Everybody else is interchangeable. But not them. If all those people suddenly left, GM would be in big, big trouble. The whole company would tank and the stock market and the prognosticators wouldn't have the slightest clue why.

These people are the Go-To guys (and gals). The real ones.

Company presidents and shareholders, consciously or unconsciously, must keep the Go-To guys from ever discovering their own value, their importance, their true levels of talent. The Go-To guys must stay muzzled. Because losing a Go-To guy is very, very costly. Genuine Go-To guys are exceedingly difficult to replace.

Corporate America 's formula for getting and keeping Go-To guys:

• It's almost impossible to identify them before you hire them, and HR departments usually screen them out. It takes a Go-To guy to know a Go-To guy, and Go-To guys rarely work in HR departments.

• You find them by accident, and when you discover them, you give them more and more work to do, supplemented with dainty morsels of guilt. Every time something is amiss, like sales are a bit off this month or the excel spreadsheet forecast was done sloppily on Friday, you call him at home on Sunday afternoon and express to him how concerned you are about his performance lately. You explain that you're afraid he's not keeping the eye on the ball and you don't want this to ever happen again.

• It's vitally important that your Go-To guy have between $25,000 and $65,000 of student loans. It also helps if he has two car payments and a balloon mortgage on his house that's really a bit rich for his income. That way he's freakin' terrified of missing even one paycheck. He knows that a layoff or firing would bring certain financial doom. That fear never vacates the back of his worried mind.

• His compensation for the 55 hour work weeks, the unceasing stress, the lack of appreciation, the complete absence of opportunities to influence really important strategic decisions, the vacations interrupted by cell phone calls and impromptu meetings, is those two cars and the house that's a bit rich for his income. During your fireside chats, you counsel him that he deserves these things because he works so hard, and maybe he should even treat himself to a boat. Aunt Visa and Uncle Mastercard and Madison Avenue do their part to reinforce this, ensuring that he never has enough money to take any business risks, ever.

• Stroke his ego with things that cost the company very little. Plastic plants, corner offices, fancy titles (“Vice President of Manufacturing Technology” is a good one), and when you're together at client meetings, whisper to the client, just loud enough for Go-To guy to overhear, that Go-To Guy graduated from MIT with a 3.6 GPA. Maintain a big long list of things Go-To guy can't take to the bank, but which still make him feel proud of his accomplishments.

• You pilfer money from his 401K program and limit it to extraordinarily conservative investments (while talking about the 401K program in such delightful, embellished terms that he never visits a financial planner and considers saving up his own nest egg) so your Go-To guy will actually never have enough money to retire. He'll still be your Go-To guy when he's 83 and has a colostomy bag strapped to his leg.

• If you don't want to keep him until 83, fire him four months before his 20 year company anniversary, just before his pension vests. Oh yeah, and if you really want to stick the knife in deep, fire him on his wedding anniversary. Send him home to his sweetheart in tears and shame. It'll sweeten their weekend, the one with the steak dinner and red roses at the Radisson. Oh, and whenever you bump into him around town, tell him to be sure and tell her ‘hi' for you.

• Tell the Board Of Directors meeting that the company lost the 3½ million dollar account with Starbucks because of Go-To guy's inattention to detail and lack of maturity. Tell them you'd already been concerned about his performance for quite some time, and you solemnly accept a share of the blame for not dismissing him as soon as you saw the warning signs. This will ensure that they never suspect it was actually your fault – you hacked off their purchasing manager for trying to cut your own distributor's throat to keep some more margin. He knew right then you were a blood sucker and he nixed the deal.

Now you know why you always hated corporate politics, eh?

A key element here that goes unmentioned is that the enslaved go-to guy is married. Between marriage and debt, he must constantly work his ass off in order to stay afloat.

I should also add that these dynamics at the workplace occur at the church, too. Most people are casual attenders. Those at the top, the Rick Warrens and his associate pastors, get the money and the prestige. The church depends on the go-to guys, the "5% Chumps," who are constantly to the heavy lifting while receiving very little in return. They are constantly manipulated by guilt and a sense of duty.