The pool of data linked in the Future Pundit post refutes a number of notions I had had about relationships and so forth. I was interested in the studies, which focus on the way in which people adjust their partnering strategies as a result of altered environments. The articles include some remarks I found questionable—one is that men are less likely to be never married or recently divorced; this contradicts US census data which implies that men are 60% or so more likely to be divorced or single than women (in the 20-40 cohort). Men are more numerous in most societies, including the USA, except for the older cohorts; the US has a slight majority female population because of the large gap in male-female life expectancy.

Bear in mind that, for anyone in the market for anything, there will always be a dearth of the thing one wants. Even information on the Internet is scarce, in the sense that you need to sort through irrelevant information to get what you need. A lonely man surrounded by beautiful women who need something from him may appear to be in paradise, until—on closer scrutiny—it materializes that their interest in him is a menace to his own mental health. A Central European damsel keen on emigrating, who isn't to scrupulous about how she does it, may have various degrees of strategy with her homely American target:

• At the bottom, complete bluntness (you may be a repellent piece of shit, but I'll pretend to be your girlfriend for the minimum amount of time required to get a green card);
• Midway, a feeble appeal to the man's vanity
• At the top, a brilliantly executed method to simulate love and devotion until such time as egress is safe..which may deceive the woman herself until she gets totally sick of the relationship

So while many men think that the ideal world would be one in which there are vast numbers of women and few men, women often complain to me that the men available might as well be solid waste. They tend to be more mindful of the search costs associated with undesirable men, which may explain the apparent misandrism of Western women: most men are "no use," and in a society of "market relationships," that means people are more likely to be judged by their usefulness.

The articles linked above explain that usually people (focus on men, here) tend to derive a strategy of pursuing and selecting partners based on plausible outcomes. If a man gets used to the idea that an ordinary woman looks like Jennifer Anniston, then he alters his strategy to pursue "hot" women more aggressively while being far less interested in women who actually are comparable to himself in attractiveness.¹ Different readers will harbor their own opinions of how women differ from men in personality or character, but both men and women are identical in a matter of massive importance: they can form goals and strategies to achieve those goals. And as a result of this, women can fall into the same strategic traps that the men in these studies did: they can devolop minimal standards of personal success that are immoderate. It's impossible for most men to have incomes above average (or even above the median!), and an average income is far lower than most people suppose it is.

It was suggested that major improvements in medical technology could lead to most humans being so much better looking that men recover their normal partnering strategies. But no technology improvement is going to help women, because no amount of GDP growth will alter the fact that the majority of available partners have income below the average. I suspect this is not terribly clear thinking. First, the authors of the study argue that humans are hardwired to recognize physical beauty—beautiful women are healthy and well-suited for bearing children. So the much-maligned media is only supplying the market with what it wants. This may explain why we favor women with symmetric features or prominent cheekbones, but there are a host of other attiributes that single out the look of the hour—that's why so many beauty fads are unhealthy. Readers are invited to read theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen (online text; see esp "Pecuniary Emulation"), who explains the ways in which tastes evolve to redound to the maximum honor of the possessor of the thing; so actors cultivate trophy looks. Had Veblen lived today, he would probably write that tastes in women as objects of pecuniary emulation have not at all subsided with "women's liberation," but have merely adapted to the fact that a growing number of actual women belong to the leisure class themselves.

If I ever write about this, it shall probably be anonymously. But I suspect that this explains that if we were ever to invent a time machine, the immediate effect would be outsourcing of labor to the past (wages in China are low; wages in Medieval Russia are really low), and the leakage of income into parallel universes would cause the economy to plunge into a depression. The jobs of male actors would be jeopardize d; I think Mel Gibson could be replaced by a lower-paid Kirk Douglas. But Julia Roberts' would probably be safe from the likes of Mae West.

(A little more seriously—I dare say a lot of the taste in beauty comes from our winner-take-all culture; Julia Roberts looks different, she's risen to the top, and now she's the standard of beauty. There is no reason why our society picked her; the industry picked her, over hundreds of thousands of aspirants to her position, and until she's overtaken by somebody else. Whoever it is, she'll also have prominent cheekbones, symmetric features, an upturned nose, eyes placed far apart, and full lips, but millions of other women do as well.)

On the other hand, as women really do enter the leisure class in larger numbers, success will be a weaker criterion in chosing a partner. Women will probably make more selection errors like those of men if they occupy similar social roles. Or, conversely, it could transpire that the long era of market relations reverses itself and we move away from a winner-take-all society. I certainly don't think cosmetic surgery or gene alteration will eversignificantly raise the threshhold of median human beauty; I think major shifts away from self-destructive habits will, just as most affluent human societies have drastically reduced their consumption of booze and cigarettes. Ensha'allah.