Black-pillers demonise idealisations
Just because a preference is monotonous, that doesn’t mean its limit becomes the criterion.
As a man on the internet, I sometimes come across videos of women saying they would not settle for men who make “under 6 figures” (i.e. <$100k). I would like to expand on that and give the male analogue.
Monotonous preferences
Although every person is different, there are general trends w.r.t. which attributes men and women respectively look towards when choosing a mate, and which way their preference leans in that attribute.
Most famously, men prioritise visual beauty, nurturing ability and purity, whilst paying little to no thought to the career potential of a woman; conversely, women are hypergamous (they look for mates who are more capable at continually generating resources than themselves) whilst being much better at overlooking a lack of aesthetics and a colourful past. As the saying goes: men judge a woman’s past, women judge a man’s future.
In women
The desirability of some of these attributes is a monotonous function of their amount. For example, if a woman had a choice between two men she fancied but one made $100k and the other $200k, then, everything else being equal, the latter would likely be more desirable than the former. Similarly, $500k would win over $200k, and so on. (Yes, these men may have different obligations that may impact the relationship, but again, assume that this has been accounted for.) She’d be happy with the $100k husband, but if given the choice to have her husband make \(5\times\) as much, why not? I am not saying that this is her standard; she’d be happy choosing either. She just wouldn’t mind even more.
Put differently, given the $500k husband, she would definitely not be begging fate to reduce his salary to $100k. Few women would say to themselves: “Man, I just wish he didn’t earn so much money.” (Again, provided that a change in salary wouldn’t cause a change in e.g. time spent together.)
In men
Another example of a monotonous preference is how men view the amount of past sexual partners a woman has. Men don’t generally mind a concise history of 2 or 3 long-term partners. They do mind a history of either many emotionally meaningful relationships or many sexual partners, since both of these point to attachment issues and/or low self-respect and/or poor morals, all to be avoided. (And the threshold for amount of hookups is arguably lower than the threshold for amount of relationships.)
However, it’s hard to imagine a man – except one with a cuckold fetish – who would tell himself: “Man, I just wish more men had had sex with her before I did.” Women with very colourful histories have spread the lie that men desire women who know every trick in the book and bounce off the bedroom walls like a pornstar, but this is merely projection and ultracrepidarian.
Non-monotonous preferences
Not all preferences are monotonous: for example, women may want a man who is sufficiently endowed, but there actually is such a thing as “too big”. Similarly, men who like women with bigger breasts or butts have a limit past which the desirability drops quite fast. There too, there is such a thing as “too big”.
Archetypes
I have discussed some monotonous preferences above. They both have extremes, like all scales. If men wouldn’t mind women with fewer past partners, then in the limit, they would prefer a virgin, ceteris paribus. If women wouldn’t mind men with more money, then in the limit, they would prefer multi-millionaires with private jets and yacht parties.
These are idealisations or archetypes. The archetypally most virtuous woman is, among other things, the most pure. She is perhaps so pure she could even conceive a child without ever having sex – and thus we get the ideal of Mary. Similarly, the archetypally most virtuous man is the most resource-multiplying. He is perhaps so productive that he could turn one fish into two and water into wine – and thus we get the ideal of Jesus.
It should not need to be mentioned that the standard these two ideals set is not asking less of men than of women. It’s very easy for women to get laid. It’s very easy for men to be bums. Living up to the two ideals takes sacrifice. Men sacrifice their minds and bodies to generate resources and attempt to increase the rate at which this happens. Women sacrifice bodily pleasure (which men can’t easily obtain anyway, so they just cope with not having any by default). If you think women are oppressed more by the above standard than men, your worldview is dangerously hedonistic and lacks respect for just how much it takes a man to generate economic upside.
Enter the black pill
Cynical (a.k.a. black-pilled) men and women, respectively incels and femcels, latch onto these idealisations and chastise the other sex with them.
Male black-pillers resent that women value productivity. They claim that women are obsessively looking for men who meet the above idealisation: men who are miraculously rich, with infinite resources to support the women’s bottomless, whimsical materialism. In other words: black-pillers assume all women are gold diggers.
Female black-pillers resent that men value purity. They claim that men are obsessively looking for virgin women, which they accompany with a variety of slanderous charges.
One is that men are sex-obsessed manipulators who want to “catch them when they’re still malleable” so they can mold the naïve woman into doing whatever the man wants, without her realising how wrongfully she is being groomed all along, to be his tailor-made sex slave. (They never say what this would entail exactly, and they also never explain how the non-virgin woman is supposed to lose her virginity in a better way, given that any man who takes it is trying to take advantage of her naiveté. Anyway, the point is that you’re supposed to feel really bad by envisioning the trope of the dainty innocent flower and the ravenous wild beast that violates it.)
Another is that all men are actually secretly pedophilic, because – as so many logical errors go – all (unabused) children are virgins, so having sexual attraction towards virginity means having it towards children. They often back this up with the “evidence” that men generally do not like body hair on women. “Like a child!” they screech. It never dawns on them that it is rather gay for a man to want his wife’s body to resemble his own as much as possible, nor that male body hair is frowned upon by other men in certain high-testosterone environments (the military, bodybuilding communities, law firms, …), nor do they stop to think how this implicates a very large proportion of their fellow sisters who are themselves attracted to men with clean-shaven beards. “Like a child!” a sophist might remark.
Ideals aren’t meant to be real
Naftali Moses recently floated the hypothesis that women’s stated preference for men who are taller than \(\{\)insert round number in your measurement system\(\}\) is actually an archetypal ideal projected into the real world. They want men who are larger-than-life, but they express this as wanting a man who is larger-in-life, since they live in a society where (1) sex is valued over virtue, which reflects in the vocabulary, and (2) masculinity is chastised and hence such men are hard to come by.
Ideals aren’t meant to be real. They’re metaphysical symbols. The human subconscience tracks ideals and evokes a feeling of judgement by an ideal when we don’t properly strive towards it. The fact that men prefer women with fewer partners (and fewer partners translates to better emotional pair-boding) gives rise to an ideal of virginity that judges women. This is very different from men having a strict criterion for virginity.
Similarly, every man can testify to the crippling expectation of financial stability before feeling “allowed” to even date. This is judgement by the ideal of productivity, which does not mean women have a strict criterion for millionaires. Women may say they want men who make “6 or 7 figures” in street interviews, but those same women could that same day be seduced by a charismatic player without a job. Again, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer a millionaire over that guy – because the preference is monotonously upwards – but by their actions, it is clear that their words are actually describing an ideal, not a criterion.
