Men on Strike. Helen Smith
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Vox Day is a blogger who runs the Alpha Game blog that is summed up with the following caption across the top: “Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.”35 He is also a game designer and author who is interested in the plight of the modern male. His site is a place for guys to discuss the difficulties of modern relationships, video games and just general guy stuff. Although not all of the men who go on the site are gamers—those who play video games—a number of them are, and it’s a good place to gather information on how gamers think in terms of marriage.
Before I turn to the marriage information, let’s learn a few important terms that will help add perspective to the data. Much of the conversation on the Alpha Game blog and many others that are interested in “pickup-artist theory”36 is about hypergamy, which is a term used for females’ tendency to want to “marry up.” James Taranto, in a Wall Street Journal article on American women, says that hypergamy “more broadly defined as the female tendency to mate with dominant or high-status males or to be selective about one’s choice of mate—is also widely observed in other species.”37
Vox Day, like so many of the pickup artist bloggers, has a male socio-sexual hierarchy that he uses to classify men. Here are a few of his classifications and their characteristics:
Alphas—the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust.
Betas—the lieutenants, the petty aristocracy. They’re popular, they do well with women, they’re pretty successful in life, and they may even be exceptionally good-looking. But they lack the Alpha’s natural self-confidence and strength of character.
Deltas—the normal guys. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can’t attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league. This is ironic, because Deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a Delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing of attendance upon her. In a social setting, the Deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man rhapsodizes about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he is almost certainly a Delta. Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.
Gammas—the obsequious ones, the posterior puckerers, the nice guys who attempt to score through white-knighting, faux-chivalry, flattery, and omnipresence. All men except true Alphas will occasionally fall into Gamma behavior from time to time . . .
Sigmas—the lone wolves. Occasionally mistaken for Alphas, particularly by women and Alphas, they are not leaders and will actively resist the attempt of others to draft them. Alphas instinctively view them as challenges and either dislike or warily respect them.
Omegas—the losers. Even the Gamma males despise them. That which doesn’t kill them can make them stronger, but most never surmount the desperate need to belong caused by their social rejection. Omegas can be the most dangerous of men because the pain of their constant rejection renders the suffering of others completely meaningless in their eyes.38
Hypergamy and the classifications are important to understand as we look at the world of gamers and men who are not the alphas of the male world: Think of The Big Bang Theory characters who would be seen as Gammas or Omegas, who are are the men on the lower end of the dating pool. Do the least and most desirable men avoid marriage? Let’s see.
Vox Day put up a request on his site for readers to reveal their demographic information and gathered general information about their marital status, desire for marriage and their self-perceived classification such as Alpha, Beta and so on. Here is what he found:
There were 141 male responses and 14 female responses. In order to more meaningfully calculate the income and partner averages, I threw out the top five and bottom five male outliers and the top and bottom female outliers.
First, the men. Their average age is 37.8 years (median 37) with an average annual income of $74.8 ([median is] $65k) and 7 ([median is] 3) lifetime sexual partners. 76% are religious, 24% are not. 49% are married, 51% are unmarried, and 14% have been divorced. Most of the divorced men remain unmarried.
The 80/20 rule is largely substantiated. Even if the outliers aren’t included, the 20% (27) most sexually successful men had sex with 617 of the 921 women involved, or 67% of them. But since the Alphas and Sigmas by definition, [are] outliers, it’s necessary to include them here even though we didn’t in attempting to determine what is average. Including all 10 outliers meant that the 28 most sexually successful men had sex with 1099 of the 1447 women, or 76%. So, in the interest of precision, it should probably henceforth be described as the 75/20 rule, wherein 20 percent of the men are having 75% of the sexual encounters.
Women were significantly more pro-marriage than men. 86% of women were either satisfied with their marriage or interested in getting married versus 63% of men. In general, divorced and irreligious men were the most likely to be anti-marriage. Younger men were very slightly less likely to be pro-marriage, but the average difference between the pro- and anti-marriage camps was only one year. To the extent that the “marriage strike” exists, it appears to cover the full range of male ages.
Monetary success does tend to correlate with sexual success for men. The average income of the 28 ALPHAs, who had an average age of 38, was 50% higher than the average at $112k. The average income of the male virgins, whose average age was 31, was 16% lower than the norm at $63k. Now, obviously the additional seven years was an advantage in providing more time to increase income and gain sexual experience, though not enough to account for the full disparity. And yet, money is clearly not the only determinant since there are ALPHAs with no income and virgins with very high incomes. Still, throwing out just one outlier on both ends would make the correlation even stronger.
There is a noticeable difference between the Alphas and the High Alpha players. The obvious dividing line there is around 40+ partners. So, there is the all-important distinction many women have requested. Any man with more than 30+ historical partners should probably be assumed to be a ruthless player intrinsically unfit for a long-term relationship as 62% of the men in this category were anti-marriage. Only the male virgins, at 66%, were more strongly anti-marriage. Compare to this the 80% of Alphas in the 15–30 partner category who were pro-marriage; all of those in this category who were anti-marriage were irreligious and most were divorced.39
So what does all of this mean as far as sex, marriage and gamers are concerned? Some interesting tidbits arise. It seems that men who have had more than thirty partners are less interested in marriage, as are men who are virgins, who are the most anti-marriage. The High Alpha men with numerous partners might be players and just enjoy being that way. But, female readers, take note: Those Alpha men with fifteen to thirty partners are the most marriage-minded. Perhaps if an Alpha is not an all-out player, he is more likely to have the confidence and prior positive experience to believe he can make a marriage work and is confident enough to feel that nothing will go wrong legally or otherwise.
However, the non-Alphas tell a different story. For those men who are not Alphas, many fewer women are available. If 24 percent of the men are sharing 76 percent of the women, the sexual prospects are poor for the 76 percent of men who are sharing the other 24 percent of women. Perhaps of those 76 percent, some are the virgins who are the most anti-marriage or are less marriage-minded because they have fewer women to choose from or feel socially rejected. It would be interesting to see if the men who are more in the Beta and lower classifications are playing more video games. Vox Day had this to say about the younger gamers with whom he has had contact:
I