This continues my discussion from Part 1, reviewing Thinking-Ape’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes. You’ll need to read that to understand what’s going on here. Because there I surveyed important background facts about human biology and culture and the problems with biological determinism as a hypothesis, particularly in the hands of the delusional ideologues of the manosphere. I also covered the introductory first two minutes of that video in Part 1.
Let’s Pause to Put a Pin in Polyamory
One point I must bracket now is that I shall assume throughout my analysis the cultural default of monogamy. But as many know, I am polyamorous. And I am quite certain monogamy as a norm is a dysfunctional invention and not only contrary to human biology, but harmful to enforce. It’s an even worse idea than our toxic gender constructs. Cultural systems do need to improve on nature, and do better, but they must do that by rolling with it (per my Judo analogy from Part 1), not endlessly butting against it.
If we looked at this whole question from the perspective of a culture that no longer expected or enforced monogamy, a lot of what Stardusk is going on about becomes ridiculous. We would no longer care that much whose children we were teaming up to raise, or whom our partners had sex with. There would also be a substantial increase in the availability of sex, as well as resource-sharing. Men and women would no longer be siloed but have more real-world experience with each other. And we would be far more open and explicit in negotiating what each of our relationships shall involve in terms of commitment and exchange.
But I’m not here to demonstrate that today. Here I am simply analyzing Stardusk’s arguments in the context of the current majority norms and systems of civilization, since that is what he claims to be doing. So let’s here assume monogamy is natural for some reason, just for simplicity’s sake.
Now Let’s Talk about Actual Relationships
Last time, I got to what is “true” in Stardusk’s hodgepodge of dubious premises and fallacious conclusions, which is that one actual biological thing: the muscularity-violence dimorphism between male-sexed and female-sexed bodies. Which would, by the way, transfer by hormone regime, e.g. if a transboy was allowed to begin a male hormone regime from puberty, they would develop a fully male-sexed body in the same way someone with AIS develops a fully female body; and vice versa, which is why it is grossly ironic that transphobes contradictorily oppose both transwomen in sports and allowing transgirls to transition hormonally at puberty, when in fact accepting the latter would remove all their material objections to the former. In any event, the difference tracks hormonal changes from puberty. Before that, human boys and girls are effectively identical physically and mentally.
What is “false” however is that this dictates anything about how people should be. Yes, primitive, superstitious, ignorant humans developed some mate competition around displays of violence. That is not rational. And it becomes the more dysfunctional, the more we build a more rational way to live. This is why the invention of civilization unleashed such an unnatural scale of violence and fascism, which was an irrational and self-destructive response to that change of environment. This is in turn why the arc of human progress ever since has become the effort to steer us back to more rational and productive ways to live in that environment. What Stardusk is selling is the worst idea ever: to go back to being primitive, superstitious, ignorant humans, who react entirely self-destructively to the wonders of civilization.
What we should be building and advocating instead is a more rational way to employ our ancient and now-obsolete dimorphism. What Stardusk is doing is instead complaining about the fact that that’s what we should do. And then blaming women for it all, when they have literally nothing to do with it. This is all on him (and all men who think like him). It is not the job of men to be the protector of women. It is the job of people to protect each other. And it is not the job of women to have men take care of them. It is the job of people to take care of each other. This reality was not created by women. It was created by common sense. One can say it was also advanced by the progress of technology equalizing the sexes, but contrary to Stardusk, almost all of that difference happened after the 18th century, not the dawn of civilization. Automatic weapons, computers, servo-mechanisms, and the pill did not meaningfully exist before then.
Stardusk does waffle on this, switching at random between the word “civilization” and “modernity” (those are not the same things), and so his narrative is a muddle. But if we steel man his argument to just “modernity” we still don’t get his results, which is (and this is a direct quote, circa minute 3):
The coming of modernity has allowed for somewhat paradoxical instincts in the modern female, although her sexual urges remain much the same, the typical modern male provider is not violent by his nature, he is a worker, and he offers his labour and money in exchange for access to female sex and reproduction. This is of course prostitution, since virtually every relationship based solely on provision is simply an exchange of resources, money for sex.
But…that would mean the primitive exchanging of sex for “protection” and “provision” that he likes was also prostitution. By Stardusk’s definition, anyone a woman ever voluntarily has sex with for any reason is “prostitution.” So it makes no coherent sense for him to blame this on “modernity.” What he is talking about was always true in his version of history, so there is nothing “paradoxical” about it. Why, then, does it matter what the currency of exchange now is? Why harken back to when it was supposedly “violence and labor” for sex? And how then is there any mismatch between a woman’s “sexual urges” and what she now pursues?
So his theory is totally incoherent. But Stardusk’s facts are also wrong. Men have always been workers. As have women. Violence has always been rare and often shared by women. And almost no one (except actual courtesans) is having sex “based solely” on some pragmatic trade agreement. If you actually talk to women (it is evident Stardusk rarely if ever does) you’d discover that many of them have sex for fun and not trade, and those that seek relationships for sex do so for a partnership, not mere trade. The difference is significant. Women who do this need someone they can count on, someone they can share life with emotionally, someone they feel safe with, and someone they can share the burdens of life with equitably.
For example, if a woman decides to be a homemaker, what she is trading is her nonsexual labor (housework and child rearing constitutes a full-time job; never mind relationship management, such as all the emotional labor women are expected to provide their husbands). That is what she trades for what the man brings home in income. And increasingly now, as gender fascism declines, these roles are free to reverse: many men are homemakers funded by women earning at work. But either way, their actual labor is comparable. Sex is barely even measurable in this trade agreement; and indeed, it would rarely fly as compensation. A typical courtesan will run you hundreds to even thousands of dollars an hour—and they won’t be doing your laundry. Add up what it would actually cost you to hire all the housekeepers and nannies and drivers and executive assistants it would take to replace a spouse—and therapists, because again, in a straight relationship exchange, even a woman’s emotional labor will be more valued than sex. For example, how many men do you know pay for all that—all the housekeepers and nannies and assistants and therapists—in exchange for a weekly visit for some sex, while the woman lives elsewhere and never otherwise interacts with him? Needless to say, there is no “trend” toward this kind of travesty. Almost no relationships are like this. And those that are are honest contracts with professionals.
Likewise for women who don’t want children or to be homemakers. They have sex with men in exchange for an equal cost-and-labor partnership (sharing expenses like rent and vacation). Which is still not prostitution, since they are not simply offering sex for this: they are offering a partnership for this. They are providing income and resources, they are providing emotional labor and support, they are providing insurance and comfort, they are providing safety and friendship. In exchange for which they expect the same. They could, after all, have sex with whoever they want—like the Mosuo people of China, where a woman raises her kids in a de facto marriage with her brother(s), while she can go out and sleep with anyone she wants. Clearly she is not selling sex for anything. Walking marriages don’t involve sex, other than the woman’s sexual freedom. This makes perfectly clear that when women enter relationships (as the Mosuo women do with their brothers) it’s an exchange of labor, not sex. In other cultures, sex may be involved, but clearly so is all the rest, which is far more central to the contract. Which is why you don’t see many “relationships” where a woman only shows up briefly to have sex with a man on occasion, interacts with him in no other way, and just gets paid for it. That is a respectable profession. It is what the rest of us usually mean by “prostitution.” But proportionally, hardly any women are in that trade.
So there is no way to get to Stardusk’s construction of “women” as a quasi-species here. He wants “professional courtesan” to be what most women are doing, when in fact it’s what almost no women are doing, in order to pretend that what most women are doing doesn’t involve any other kind of labor or exchange. But in reality, it does. Women seek relationships not for “money” but for a whole slew of advantages that are mutually shared: she gets sex, and so does he, they both have fun, and so the exchange is mutual; she provides labor (whether housework he pays for, or money-earning work she adds to their till), and he provides labor (whether money-earning work he adds to their till, or housework she pays for), and so the exchange is mutual; she provides emotional support for him, and he provides emotional support for her; she is there for him, and he for her; she has fun with him, he with her; and so on. Relationships break down when these exchanges become imbalanced.
Ignoring all of these facts, researching nothing pertinent, Stardusk instead digs up a completely unrelated scientific study (not of humans but a completely different species of primate) and claims that it proves humans are naturally prostitutes—because in a large study of food-currency exchange in capuchin monkeys, one single instance of trading a grape for sex was observed. One. What this has to do with sentient people having emotionally fulfilling relationships escapes any intelligent viewer. Monkeys don’t even have conscious thought. How can their animalistic behavior inform that of fully cognitive agents like human adults? Monkeys don’t form relationships in any relevant sense, either. They aren’t trading physical and emotional labor in mutual partnerships; they aren’t earning incomes and sharing it to pay rent and utilities; they aren’t delegating household chores; there’s no cuddling to watch shows. But on top of that, how can a fringe case inform a society anyway? We can easily find a respectable human woman working as a courtesan. But still almost no women are working as courtesans.
Such a wildly illogical generalization fallacy does not evince a rational mind. Insentient monkeys cannot be generalized to sentient humans (we’re literally tens of millions of years apart biologically; diverging nine million years ago entails eighteen million years of distance). And rare behavior cannot be generalized into standard behavior (almost all of the coin exchanges observed in those monkeys didn’t involve sex). So, why did Stardusk do this? Why that illogical irrelevancy, instead of actually checking the abundant science on human relationships (their motivations and economics, their historical evolution and ethnographic diversity)? I suspect because he is irrational: he read that study and it triggered his entire delusional worldview to make a video accusing all human women of being hookers because one monkey one time got some in exchange for a grape. He thereby omitted mention of almost the entire content of human relationships…in a video boldly claiming to have the skinny on human relationships.
Stardusk also here repeated that error I mentioned earlier: he read a bad paraphrase of a scientific study, and not the actual study. Which never mentions this prostitution thing. To learn about that, you would have had to track down an interview with the scientists. But then you’d learn only one instance of the behavior occurred (Stardusk exaggerated that into a plural, and then sold it as a general finding, of a study that never found any such thing). And even that was vague (which is why it wasn’t in the official paper). Those same monkeys often gave coins for random reasons (throwing them out of the cage, handing them back to the experimenter, throwing them on the ground, passing them between each other—you know, like monkeys). We therefore cannot even tell that there was any awareness by either monkey that that one token “earned” sex. All we observed is that the female monkey thought to trade the token for a grape. We have no idea what the male monkey was thinking, or whether sex only occurred because of this. So, there’s actually no science here (literally: remember, the observation was too isolated and vague to even count as science).
Stardusk then conflates that one instance that didn’t even make it into a currency exchange study on capuchin monkeys with an unrelated non-monetary study of macaque monkeys linking male grooming of females for sex, but that isn’t what Stardusk is talking about: this was not a fungible currency exchange but simply foreplay. It would be like claiming men exchange cuddling for sex, and then calling it prostitution. Quite a lot has to have happened before the cuddling part; this is not a trade (“cuddling for sex”), but a flirtation. And we can be quite certain the monkeys are not engaged in a rational calculation. If the female macaque voluntarily has sex with someone who physically grooms her (a behavior signaling that that guy is good company), it’s because she thinks it will be fun (that is in fact why sex evolved to be fun). She has no comprehension of reproductive biology or household economics. Her male sex partner isn’t working a 9-to-5 to pay the bills. But, oddly, these analogies fail to cross Stardusk’s mind. That women have sex because they like to does not seem to be in his worldview at all, which is weird given how solidly proven that is as an evolved biological fact about women. But it is evident that biological facts that don’t fit his worldview don’t exist in it.
From all these failures, Stardusk then leaps to the conclusion that human (!) woman all (!) have sex only (!) for “goods and services” and for “very little to do with the attraction felt by said females to the males” (!). His words. Notice that even his completely incorrect description of the only two scientific studies his video will ever mention does not even get to these wild conclusions. Where is any study connecting this to human behavior? Where is any study showing this specific claim is true of all or even most women? How does he know the one single capuchin monkey who might have accepted a grape-token for sex didn’t find its offerer attractive? How does he know macaque monkeys who have sex with their groomers don’t find their groomers attractive? His own quoted statistics from that same study indicate the macaques were having sex with the same guys even without grooming; grooming only increased the frequency of that sex, which is not easy to explain if they weren’t already attracted to them. So if you make out with the woman you already occasionally have sex with, she might have even more sex with you; “therefore” all women are prostitutes?
With that tinfoil hat well folded into origami, Stardusk then goes on to insist all wives are just dishonest prostitutes who never really find their husbands sexually attractive (that’s almost verbatim, in minute 7). No evidence offered (and none so far offered even pertaining). Indeed, he tries to defend this with the bizarre assertion that if a woman does not benefit from sex, she will not have sex. Which is just a tautology for all human interaction. “If men get no benefit from interacting with other people, they will never interact with other people.” Yeah. So? Stardusk here is assuming (again without any evidence, and against vast actual scientific evidence) that women do not enjoy sex and do not classify pleasure as a benefit. “If someone doesn’t get any enjoyment out of sex, they will not have sex” is not some dark revelation. But his entire thesis is predicated on there being no such benefit to sex, and thus no such reason for women to have sex.
Stardusk’s strange worldview is also again weirdly binary (that same black-or-white fallacy I noticed last time comes up in his video again and again). Because it is also predicated on the assumption that either a man is absolutely smoking hot or he is not at all sexually attractive, as if sexual attraction does not exist by degrees. I find most women sexually attractive. I do not find many women absolutely smoking hot. It is a scientific fact that the same is true for every woman who is attracted to men. Enjoying sex with someone, and finding someone sexy or fetching, never requires that they be the sexiest man or woman alive. But once you grant that, Stardusk’s thesis collapses all over again. He wants it to be the case that “beta males” (by which he simply means “not paragons of muscular manhood”) are never attractive to women. But he has presented no evidence of that. Any study you look at finds the opposite. Even his monkey studies refute it.
To illustrate what I mean: when you look at the actual data tables of this study (Sell et al., “Cues of Upper Body Strength Account for Most of the Variance in Men’s Bodily Attractiveness,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B), which found that perceived strength correlates with men’s sexual attractiveness to women, exactly average men often get positive attraction ratings, and even some men rated weak score positive attraction ratings (Figure 2). Yes, stronger men tend to be seen as more attractive; but that does not simply translate to average or weak mean being seen as unattractive. Moreover, this is just the physical side of the equation. It’s also a scientific fact that personality accounts for a substantial proportion of perceived sexual attractiveness (as this scientific study and this scientific study and this micro-experiment on Jubilee all demonstrate).
All of which disproves Stardusk’s ridiculous “women are only attracted to brutes” theory that he winges on about (in minute 10). For example, it is typically assumed that everyone ends up with someone of comparable attractiveness to their own (an example of what is called assortative mating). But this turns out not to be true when couples are given sufficient information about each other before dating (a phenomenon that also shows up in that Jubilee micro-experiment). For example, Hunt at al. (“Leveling the Playing Field: Longer Acquaintance Predicts Reduced Assortative Mating on Attractiveness,” Psychological Science) found that if couples “knew each other for about 9 months or more before they started dating” then “assortative mating based on physical attractiveness was modest in magnitude and not significantly different from zero.” Not significantly different from zero. Think that through. In other words, even when people of similar attractiveness end up together, that is often the happenstance of how they started dating—based on sight rather than personality. They would have just as readily ended up with someone of different attractiveness but for that purely transient selection effect.
Note that nothing in that study supports anything Stardusk is saying. Women are not actually selecting mates based on attractiveness. They might choose whom to sample at sight, which may lock-in who they end up with by accident. But change the conditions—give them months of lead-in information on whom to partner with—and they could have chosen differently. This also means women are not selecting mates based on “wealth” or any other materialities. For if that were the case, then this study should have found no difference between the two groups (those who started dating at sight and those who started dating after a long acquaintance). It is not as if there is a 1:1 correlation between male attractiveness and wealth (indeed Stardusk’s entire rant is based on his assumption that there is not); so why would the started-at-sight group sort themselves by attractiveness? Evidently those women are disregarding wealth as their primary selection characteristic. One might ask if the started-after-acquaintance group was wealth-sorting, but none of the data support that, either. The study found this effect increased by length of acquaintance (up to that maximum at nine months); but one’s wealth or status is ascertainable almost immediately. Likewise, women who start dating equally-attractive men will soon learn their wealth or status; yet are evidently disregarding it when deciding to start a relationship with them. The Hunt study also found no difference in satisfaction within those relationships between either group; and the average length of relationship was over eight years.
Another study (Dunkel et al. “Cross-trait Assortment for Intelligence and Physical Attractiveness in a Long-term Mating Context,” Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences), which tested the hypothesis that “more physically attractive women would have more intelligent husbands, but that a man’s physical attractiveness would not predict his wife’s intelligence,” found the hypothesis was technically true, but “the effect sizes were small.” In fact, the effect size was barely ten percentiles, which means a lot of women weren’t sorting themselves this way, and those who were, only barely were.
Which illustrates another common problem: even when trends match an intuition, we often find the effect size is weak—there is far too much variation in how women behave to “predict” how all women will behave. Just as with height: you cannot know from the mere datum that someone is a woman, how tall they will be. Women’s heights vary considerably, and vary more among each other than their average varies from men. So, it is true that some smart men are getting more attractive wives, and more attractive women are marrying smarter but less attractive men than vice versa; but overall, not a lot. Plenty of couples end up the other way around. You therefore cannot say “women” prefer intelligence to handsomeness in their man; nor can you say they don’t. Some are. Some aren’t. There is a slight trend in one direction. But it’s small.
The Effect of Ignoring What Is Actually Being Exchanged
The effect of Stardusk ignoring all the actual exchanged goods in a relationship comes to the fore when he tries to use Briffault’s Law to “prove” that all women are whor*s. The name makes it sound like science, but it isn’t. It’s just the conjecture of an early twentieth-century amateur that failed to ever find sufficient proof to become any part of biological, sociological, or ethological science today. It can be phrased as simply “women don’t have relationships they don’t believe they can benefit from” which is just as true of men, who also don’t have relationships they don’t believe they can benefit from.
Hence, because the word “benefit” is undefined, it’s simply a tautological description of all human interaction. A benefit can be pleasure, comfort, anything at all. Obviously no one hangs out with people they do not even enjoy hanging out with; while lots of folks hang out with people they only get enjoyment from hanging out with. So there is no way to leverage Briffault’s vacuous statement into any conclusion about, for example, the necessity of material exchange. Rephrase it that specifically and it is demonstrably false: tons of women hang out with men solely because they enjoy their company and for no other benefit. It is, however, typical of misogynists to not comprehend this because they themselves cannot comprehend hanging out with a woman solely because they enjoy their company and for no other benefit. Their cynical employment of Briffault’s Law is really a Freudian description of themselves, projected onto women, whom they hate. Sex is literally the only interaction with women they can comprehend bothering with.
Fortunately, here Stardusk is on the wrong side of even his peers in the manosphere, who have trashed his employment of this pseudolaw from even within their own worldview, which is amusing (for example, see “Briffault’s Law: A Classic Example Of Reductionist Categorical Thinking” by Peter Ryan, and this video by none other than Paul Elam—although both are tedious to get through and still not well in contact with reality). Where it all goes wrong is the insistence that men have no role to play in mate selection or cross-gender interaction, which is demonstrably false. Men make exactly the same calculations as women when deciding whom to befriend, hang out with, or build a partnership with. And like men, women rarely seek relationships out of mere transactionalism, but to build comfortable, enjoyable, and successful spaces in their life. Obviously, relationships should be mutual (each partner should receive as much as they give), but that mutuality includes not just material goods but human emotional currency (like “friendship”), and includes all sorts of relationships (you give more to those who give more back, and thus you devote more time to your closest friends than to your most distant ones). There is no way to get from “all relationships are cooperative enterprises” to “all relationships are prostitution.”
I suspect Stardusk is actually thinking from the misogynistic perspective that women are sex vending machines, such that you should be able to input enough coins (drinks, dinners, favors, vacations) and sex pops out (you’ll definitely get this sense, for example, from his “investment” and “slot machine” analogies across minutes 20 and 21). But that isn’t how sex works (except in the honest fringe case of actual courtesans; and they prefer cash, and they will quote you a straight-up rate, and you won’t be paying for nothing). And it certainly isn’t how relationships work; Stardusk just has no conception of relationships apart from sex.
Speaking now from my own direct and extensive experience, a woman pursuing sex for fun is not looking for side bennies but mitigated risk: she wants men who are safe to be around, reliable and trustworthy enough to be physically vulnerable with, and directly enjoyable (admirable, personable, etc.). Yes, she will also pursue an attraction gradient, but women’s evaluation of attractiveness is significantly more variable than men’s (study, study, study). As we just saw, many women will still rate average or weak men as attractive, even as many women don’t: so there are a large number of outliers to any observed trendline. And when we look at women having sex within or in exploration of a relationship, we find they have similar but even more numerous concerns. For example, their partners need to be long-term-tolerable (and not someone they will grow annoyed with over time, for example), which definitely implicates personality traits (like agreeableness and conscientiousness) as well as qualities of character (like responsibility and industriousness) and interests, politics, lifestyle, and worldview.
The point being: women are not sex vending machines. They do not simply put out after enough coins are inserted. You do actually have to earn their affection by being a good, trustworthy, and enjoyable person, and the more so the more relationship intent you are pursuing. And their interest in you will always be mediated by factors you cannot control, like sexual chemistry, availability, and idiosyncratic or individual preferences. This entirely destroys Stardusk’s economic model of sex. Things he brings up like temporal discounting and “resource access” don’t actually factor that much here, because women’s sexual decisions don’t actually track economic interests. They aren’t counting coins. Their concerns are more substantial (qualities over things), are not fungible (“trustworthiness” and “chemistry,” for example, cannot be replaced with “money”), and are generally immediate and not delayed (women rarely have sex for some delayed future reward but for things already immediately present).
All of this is actually true of mature men, too—which is why men for whom all this is not true tend to be immature, more boys than men. Women prefer men.
The Effect of Going Off the Rails at Step One
Stardusk thus is entirely off the rails by minutes 7 and 8 of his video, blowing entirely past all the actual things being exchanged in a relationship, and delusionally focused on it being only sex that is supposedly being exchanged, and supposedly only for material resources (and not everything else relationships are actually about). Thus all his discussion of contract law in respect to relationships is entirely impertinent. For a pertinent application of contract law to relationships, see Fair Play or Marriage of Equals or Equal Partners. Those books can be critiqued in their own ways, but they at least are dealing with the actual reality of what is being expected and exchanged in relationships, and propose healthy rather than misogynistically toxic ways of making those social contracts more transparent and consensually negotiated. Those authors are in contact with reality. Stardusk is not.
This is how we get to the absurd outcome in minute 9 of Stardusk complaining that alimony (which he tellingly conflates with child support) is unfair because it makes a man continue paying for sex he is not getting. This is an absolute reduction of relationships to sex. He has thus gotten here by ignoring literally almost the entire content of reality. But even apart from what he is ignoring, he doesn’t seem to have a coherent notion of even what he is talking about. Alimony is not always paid by the ex-husband; ex-wives can sometimes be on the hook for it instead. And alimony is rarely awarded anyway (more on that in a moment). I suspect Stardusk is confusing alimony with child support. Alimony is an insurance payout for dissolving a previous agreement; but child support is an ongoing debt. Unlike alimony, child support is not a product of dissolving an agreement, but is the continuance of a still-ongoing agreement: to raise children.
I don’t know how Stardusk forgot that child support is for the purpose of raising children—it derives from a contract with the children, not a sex contract between their mother and father. Legally it varies depending on decisions regarding the childrens’ colocality (“custody”), which the manosphere has its own bitchlists about, but Stardusk is here only talking about the monetary content of child support. He’s completely oblivious to the fact that this is an obligation generated by having the child, which entails a commitment to that child’s support. Who “gets” that monetary support is then a function of simple economics, e.g. if a woman is saddled with all the costs and work (actually raising the kids), then the man has to compensate her for that work and expense, because of an outstanding and still-ongoing obligation he has to the child, not to her.
Where Stardusk is really irked is when there appears to be an imbalance between what is owed and what was supposedly being bought. He goes into no details, so there is no way to vet any complaint he has about this with respect to child support. So let’s suppose he meant alimony. Alimony is money tendered by one spouse to another not for childcare (it can be owed even when no kids exist, and it can be owed in addition to the expensing of kids) but simply as a consequence of dissolving the marriage contract. This is actually a modernization of what used to be called a dowry (or in some cultures a brideprice), which would be tendered back to the bride once widowed, divorced, or abandoned. The basic principle was this: for a woman to enter marriage she was taking a financial risk (her husband might ditch her or die); so a pot of money would be dedicated (negotiated by the parents in extended family societies; negotiated by the spouses in individualistic societies) as an insurance fund to cover her losses in the event of such outcomes. It is, literally, an insurance contract.
In modern terms (now that we have more equality, freedom, and rationality), this simply means: insofar as a partner to a marriage contract is taking a financial risk, the other partner agrees to cover that risk. Which is objectively fair (they should come out of any fair negotiation mutually protected; neither partner should be saddled with more risk—which is a cost—than the other). This is a contract agreement made upon marriage. That Stardusk did not read the terms of any contract he might swear himself into is no defense. In most modern societies, marriage contracts are writ: they are codified in law. But they can be modified by prenuptial contract. This is, BTW, almost identical to real estate law, where the standard contract of sale for a home has been legislated, but one can opt out of those terms or into new ones with riders; the only difference is that they make you read that contract before signing it, which IMO anyone getting married should also be compelled to do. But everyone knows the terms Stardusk is complaining about, so he cannot act surprised by them. And everyone knows how to opt out of them, so he cannot claim his failure to do that is “unfair.” (Which also demonstrates that all his wingeing about how “only the female” knows what these terms are is bullsh*t.)
We can put this in plain, hard-ass “libertarian” terms: if Stardusk does not like this insurance clause in his marriage contracts, then he should negotiate its exclusion by prenuptial; if no woman will marry him without it, then that might (?) be fair terms for himself, but it won’t be for them, so they have no good reason to marry him. Which is entirely fair. At no point in any of this does he have a right to “complain” about any of it. If women want insurance, that’s their call. If he doesn’t want to agree to give them insurance, he should not get married (and thus not agree to that contract). And that’s that. And yet, when objectively measured, what Stardusk wants is itself unfair. He wants a woman to marry him and assume a risk he himself is not assuming: he wants an unfair trade. He is thus ironically labeling what is in fact a fair trade as being unfair. But it’s the other way around.
It’s even more absurd when we look at the actual facts. Almost no one pays alimony. Almost all divorces are free and clear of it. Which is why I think Stardusk is confusing alimony with child support, which is far more common, but is not a contract for sex but an ongoing obligation created by having a child, and literally pays for ongoing costs and labor: the care of the child. So in no way is that an “unfair” continuing of payment for sex he is no longer receiving. It is a fair continuing payment for labor and expenses he is still receiving: childcare. No one will receive child support who isn’t assuming the costs and obligations of raising a child he bound himself to by contract in the very act of creating that child (and hence creating that obligation) in the first place. He could perhaps get a more coherent complaint if he ditched this false notion of sex ever having anything to do with this and just slagged off children, trying to argue he should be free of liability for liabilities he participated in creating (which makes no sense even on libertarian theory, so I don’t know on what model of justice he could defend this position).
As for alimony, in the very rare occasion of it even being awarded, it is a contractually agreed insurance payout. It is indeed very similar to severance pay: when someone opts to take a job, they are foregoing other job opportunities, and thus taking a risk. For example, it takes time (often months) to get a new job, and a new job hunt (starting all over) entails a lot of labor, and all the time spent towards advancement in their old is now lost (they have to start all over). Therefore, some contracts of hire include a severance package, which operates as insurance against the employee being unexpectedly dismissed. The employer then must pay out the amount, sometimes over a period of time. It does not matter that “the employer is no longer getting labor from that employee.” It therefore it is not “unfair” payment for services not being received. It is in fact payment for services received. A fair contract would not saddle one party with more risks than the other. The other must offer something to balance the risk. The employer thus assumes a risk (of paying severance) in exchange for the employee assuming a commensurate risk (of being unexpectedly dismissed). The math in the end should work out so that each is paying the same effective cost—each is bearing a commensurate risk.
This means that even within Stardusk’s own twisted worldview he is still wrong about the unfairness of alimony. Even if all that was at issue was a contract for sex—for example, suppose instead of marriage (which is a relationship far more substantive than sexual), we were talking about a straight-up sex contract (like existed in ancient Rome where prostitution was legal and almost libertarian). Here, he literally just contracts with a woman to have sex once a week, exclusively. She does not live with him. She does not talk to him. She shares nothing with him. She does nothing else for him. She just shows up once a week for an hour’s service and bails. But she has agreed to have no sex with anyone else; just him. Your typical courtesan is unlikely to undertake this contract without insurance. Not only must the pay be good enough to cover all her opportunity costs (all the other clients she could be working), it also must include a severance package: if the contract is suddenly terminated, she has to assume the costs (in expenses and labor) of finding a new client or rebuilding a new customer base. So she will require that cost be offset by the contract she is taking now. Otherwise, the contract would be unfair (she would be assuming risks and costs that her client would not).
So even if marriage was “just” a sex contract, it would still be fair for a man to agree to a severance package when that contract dissolves. Even if he didn’t want to, he can still opt out of that agreement with a prenuptial contract rider; and then he still couldn’t complain that no one will enter that contract with him, because the imbalanced contract he is then offering would be objectively unfair to them and thus not rational to undertake. But marriage isn’t “just” a sex contract. A lot of other services and exchanges are involved. So alimony takes into account the whole shebang. For example, check out this summary of the legal principles involved in my current state of Georgia. The principles described there are extremely sensible. When you look that over, it will start to become clear that what Stardusk is going on about is patently stupid, and completely out of touch with reality.
But it is entirely in line with the Standard Delusional Misogyny of the manosphere.
Enter Godwin’s Law
Eventually we get to Nazis. That’s right. Stardusk ties in Nazis. Around the end of minute 10 he claims he can prove that women (as in, all women) have no real sexual interest in their husbands, by consulting records of women jumping into bed with Nazis in occupied territories. And I assume he means husbands, although his cited records don’t seem to specify married women. But his theory has to hold for boyfriends, too. And yet nonmarital relationships seem to confound his theory, where there is no contract or children involved, and women seem to have quite a variable sexual preference in mates—but we’ll let that go for now; as also women who are gay, which I guess he rules out as too fringe to be pertinent, yet they are still, you know, women.
But here we see all the same mistakes from Stardusk: relying on misrepresentations of paraphrases of sources he isn’t actually reading, conflating his own armchair theories with what his sources say (and what they say with facts they actually document, which any critical thinker will note are also not the same thing), and riding right over matters of numeracy (such as taking fringe cases and treating them as normal or widespread) and logic (circular argument, self-contradiction, and implicit equivocation fallacies). For example, he cites one study of one region (The German Norwegian War Children of World War II), and a Daily Mail puff piece about the book 1940–1945: Années érotiques by a right-wing historian, Patrick Buisson. Those two sources don’t discuss the same thing; nor do they support any point Stardusk is trying to make.
For example, the Norwegian study isn’t about women who cheated on their husbands. All the births it discusses, and their actual parents, were publicly recorded, and were part of a deliberate Nazi program (the Lebensborn initiative) to ‘strengthen the Aryan race’, which “in contrast to other occupied countries…was a success in Norway.” Note. It was not a success in other occupied territories. It had peculiar success in Norway because of a minority of real ideological support for Nazis in Norway (though still to the outrage of the majority), a situation completely different from Vichy France (Stardusk’s only other example). For example, more Norwegian men (more than 15,000) joined the Nazi army than Norwegian women participated in the Lebensborn initiative (fewer than 12,000). Most of those women were not married (and of those married, some were or became married to the Nazis they had children to). And even after adding up all of the women who participated, it amounts to less than one percent of Norwegian women. Indeed there would have been more lesbians in Norway than Lebensborn moms! How, then, does this tell us anything about “women”? It seems what Stardusk is citing is an extremely rare phenomenon among women, not something typical.
Which alone tanks Stardusk’s argument. But there is also no data supporting its supposed premise that these Nazi fathers were “more attractive” (in whatever hyperspecific way Stardusk imagines). Maybe they were the same as Norwegian men and just had money to spend. Stardusk’s argument requires that these women did this in defiance of the “money for sex” ideology he is trying to defend, because this is supposed to prove that women will flock to sexy brutes as soon as they get the chance, abandoning their existing cash-for-sex contracts. But there is no evidence here that this wasn’t just another cash-for-sex contract. The entire Lebensborn program was built around providing support for its Aryan mothers. And Nazis were flush with cash, and as occupiers, were in positions of power, influence, and resource control. If fewer than one percent of women go for a straight cash-for-sex contract, that would explain this entire data set—and still disprove Stardusk’s entire argument, by documenting almost no women do this, and none at all for the reasons he claims.
And that’s if we just look at the data superficially. What if we actually ask, “Who were these highly unusual women, and why did they do that?” The results don’t go well for Stardusk. Which is why the first rule of critical thinking should always be: check. The Lebensborn women were part of a public program and so were easily rounded up into camps by outraged Norwegians after the war—along with thousands more women merely accused of such dalliances on little evidence. Many were subsequently documented to be mentally incompetent, and thus were prey to the Nazis, not consenting participants. Many were already Nazi sympathizers. Most were single and thus not “in a contract” to abandon or defy. We can expect that, after subtracting all those, some yet were Stardusk’s imagined unfaithful mercenary sex purveyors, but that would leave us at less than a fifth of one percent of women in Norway. So there is nothing to learn here about women.
Okay. So what about France? The situation there was radically different, as is the source Stardusk is citing: not a study, but an ideologically biased history. One needs to check diverse sources of information in a case like that, and not just “trust” what one biased source says. But one also needs to actually read the source. I expect Stardusk can’t read French so he trusted the Daily Mail instead. Bad idea. I can read French. But I also know how to look up academic book reviews in English. Like this one. From both it is clear Buisson is talking about greed, not sexual selection: his entire thesis is based on documentation that men and women collaborated with the Nazis for financial and material reward. This contradicts Stardusk’s argument, whereby women are supposed to be having sex with Nazis not for that reason, but because those Nazis were “hot” or something.
For example, one of Buisson’s prime data-points was not wives cheating on their husbands but literal prostitutes (pp. 126, 161). For example, conflict arose over Germans ordering brothels to serve only German clients. But that hardly fits any point Stardusk is making. These French women weren’t even free, but being compelled to service Germans. And any who may have freely done so were doing so because it is their profession; not because “Nazis are hot.” No conclusion can be drawn from this about women outside that rarefied profession. Another example is how data is being skewed with tricks of numeracy. For instance, Stardusk’s Daily Mail article cites two statistics: “the birth rate boomed in 1942 with an estimated 200,000 children born to Franco-German couples” and “30 per cent of births were illegitimate in some parts of Paris.”
Read carefully: 30 percent (so, another minority of women) in some parts of Paris. So, we are cherry picking statistical anomalies within the city rather than simply stating the percent in Paris (already just a single city). I’d also question if this is even an anomaly; I wonder whether some hospitals were favored by collaborators, being in “safer” neighborhoods for them, clustering their births there. But either way, this is a tactic designed to inflate the number to make it look scary when the real statistic isn’t. Likewise, that “200,000 children” statistic is the top margin of a confidence interval (an error margin); the lower margin is just 75,000. So statistics are being manipulated here to exaggerate numbers as well. Likewise, that statistic is also not for “1942” but the entire war; and not for Paris but the entirety of France.
Moreover, in the period relevant there were almost 4 million births. So we’re talking about only two to five percent of all children born. Note that the population of France was then around 41 million, which entails around 20 million women, and of childbearing age, probably over 8 million. Even if we assume that none of those babies shared a mother, that means only one to two percent of women of childbearing age are even implicated here. Once again, hardly a metric for “all women.” And this total includes coerced and raped women (including prisoners), women impregnated while forced to work Germans in brothels, women impelled to have sex with Nazis to survive, or even alleviate the fate of their imprisoned husbands, and women working for the Resistance sleeping with Nazis for intel, and mostly consisted of single women (and even women who married occupiers). Which must leave qualifying examples for Stardusk’s argument (actual cheating wives who were simply pursuing Hot Nazis) at less than a percent of qualifying women. There were probably eight times more lesbians than that. Stardusk’s argument is therefore bollocks.
Always check these things. Always look for falsifying evidence. Always test alternative theories of the evidence. Always get the facts right. These are basic tools of critical thinking the manosphere generally lacks. Which is why anyone is in that sphere at all: like Christians, they “believe” their delusions because they are irrational, emotionally-driven, incompetent thinkers. If they were good at this, they’d end up somewhere else. Incompetence at numeracy and statistics, and at detecting error and rhetoric, are particularly pronounced problems that lie at the root of all false worldviews. They never ask the central questions at the core of all sound epistemology: “Could I be wrong? And how would I know it?”
Confusing Actual with Mythological Hypergamy
Stardusk then builds on those falsehoods to defend his appeal to what the manosphere calls “hypergamy” in support of his delusional thesis. He bridges to that, however, with a couple of face-palming moments:
- First he claims (in minute 12) that there was no feminism in France in WW2. Um. Dude. First-wave feminism began as a global movement before the 20th century and had considerable impact on pre-war France, producing one of the most renowned feminist philosophers of the 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir, who during that very war started writing one of the most seminal feminist treatises of that century, The Second Sex, published in 1949. Stardusk must be thinking of second-wave feminism (or maybe third or fourth), but it is difficult to ascertain what difference could support any point he was making. The first sexual revolution, for example, was completed before even the first world war. Has Stardusk never heard of the Roaring Twenties?
- Then he complains (in minute 13) about the fact that women who were accused (not all of whom were even guilty) of having sex with Nazis in France only had their head shaved, while men, who were actual material collaborators, were executed. But that difference has nothing to do with being soft on women, as Stardusk avers; it had to do with commensurate justice: these women simply had sex. They didn’t kill people or advance enemy war objectives. Many men guilty of those far more serious crimes weren’t executed either. Whereas those actually executed or imprisoned included women (like Violette Morris). Execution was thus reserved for actual collaborators, whose actions actually contributed to the Nazi suppression of France. It was not delegated by gender. The French were long noted for their ruthlessly egalitarian execution of women, particularly in similar purges. So what is Stardusk talking about?
These errors then lead in to Stardusk’s standard wingeing about “hypergamy,” a manosphere lift from ethology, a term there used to describe societies with a greater or lesser tend of women marrying up and men down (relative to wealth, education, or social status), which they “black-or-white” into a universal biological law of female behavior, which the ethnographic record proves isn’t. Hypergamy is a metric that varies by degrees, varies across societies, and varies even within a society (trends are an average, not a universal description of all or often even a plurality of women). The degree of hypergamy varies considerably by society; and hypogamous societies (having a measured trend of men marrying up and women down) are not only documented, but the most developed nations are approaching that now. hom*ogamy is also ethnographically common (a marriage of equals), and of course is where all societies trend the more equality is achieved (since fewer mates of disparate status entails more marriages of equal status). Indeed we can see this trend happening in real time (a third of American women are no longer hypergamous) and in the actual numbers (hypergamy in Sweden prevails but is actually extremely slight, with average variances in income between partners of just ten percentiles).
Notably one of the measured causes of decreased hypergamy and increased hypogamy is liberation from parental interference in spousal selection—in other words, hypergamy has not simply been a trend driven by women, but by their parents. When women are left to make their own decisions, hypergamy declines—exactly the opposite of Stardusk’s entire thesis. Another measured cause is urbanization: being exposed to more choices of partner, women become more egalitarian in choosing. The other three measured causes are even more obvious: increased empowerment of women (access to wealth, education, and independence, which liberates their choices further); greater social acceptance (women are allowed to choose partners as they please now rather than as society expects); and the shrinking divergence of male privilege (men used to have such patriarchal advantages that they were more likely to be wealthy or educated, thus numerically forcing hypergamy onto women, a point often central to the novels of Jane Austen). When you dig all this out, it becomes clear that “widespread” hypergamy was never natural. It was always a forced outcome of patriarchal cultural systems.
What Stardusk wants to argue is that women (all women) are “biologically determined” to be hypergamous, but toward “brutes” (muscly man monsters, the original “caveman warrior-providers”), not “wealth” (since it is genetically impossible to produce a heritable neural coding program capable of even detecting such a complex abstract concept); but now “wealth” is being distributed irrespective of being “brutes” (because we’re civilized now, and not ignorant cavemen), creating a “mismatch” between what women “really want” (Hot Nazis) and what they are supposed to want (access to resources). But simultaneously (and contradictorily) this is both what should be the case and is bad, and therefore all women should be loathed because of it (for, reasons). And simultaneously (and contradictorily) women have been biologically determined to pursue Hot Nazis and not Tubby Bankers, so therefore they are biologically determined to pursue Tubby Bankers (walk that around a few times in your head and you’ll get dizzy). And somehow this is all true—even though it’s not: plenty of women are marrying Tubby Bankers and not Hot Nazis, and the more women are freed from artificial constraints on mate choice (like poverty, parental interference, social pressure, and the like) the more they don’t even choose based on maximizing resources at all, but start selecting men who are their equals or even status inferiors.
So no version of Stardusk’s hypergamy model fits the evidence: women are actually less into hot guys than men are into hot women; and women are less naturally interested in maximizing their wealth and status, and more naturally interested in pursuing independence and equality. “But there are still a lot of ladies marrying up” doesn’t rescue the thesis. Biological determinism simply cannot explain these trends, which show hypergamy to be a forced and not a natural outcome. Whereas “progress delay” does explain it all: statistics show women becoming less hypergamous; and the only reason a majority still are is that a majority of women are still constrained (they are not, on average, wealth-equals to men nor completely free to choose a partner). The correlation with lower hypergamy is always greater access to the natural state: the more women’s choices become free, the less they become hypergamous. This is exactly the opposite of what Stardusk’s model predicts. There will of course always be some hypergamy, because it is in fact men who are more rigidly interested in “attractive mates,” and thus keen to use wealth to obtain one. But when those “hot women” are all just as wealthy, that won’t work anymore. Women will then choose mates based on what they actually want.
So the problem I think Stardusk has is: he doesn’t have that. He is not a particularly smart or kind person; he does not evoke feelings of safety or equality; he is misogynistic and delusional; and not even funny or creative. So it is hard to discern what any women would want in him—but this is not because he lacks muscles or money. It’s because he lacks character and personality. Which he should want to develop—not “to get laid” but, rather, because he wants to be a person of character and personality. He should desire this for himself (the very attribute women actually like), and not complain that it fails to produce sex. His inability to see or accept that is probably his most unattractive feature. It may well be the reason he’s complaining about not getting laid or whatever.
This is the problem with men like Stardusk generally: everything exists solely to get sex, and if it doesn’t get that, they don’t understand why it is important or of any use to them.
The result is a very unattractive person.
Attempting to Wriggle Out
That all pretty much dooms the entire thesis of Stardusk’s video. But he does try to rescue it from what he describes as two common arguments against him. He does not give us any examples of anyone actually making those arguments, so we cannot check to see if he has straw-manned them or left anything out or gotten the arguments wrong. Which is a problem because, by now, I no longer trust his judgment; and this is a fundamental of critical thinking: always start with real-world particulars. But let’s play along.
Stardusk proposes two rebuttals to his position (in minute 14). Only one of them does he explain or discuss. The other he describes only as “the other less common deflection,” which he says “is that hypergamy is akin to feminist patriarchy theory and this belongs to the realm of the chimera.” Which is exactly as unintelligible a sentence as that sounds. He later “refutes” this unexplained gobbledygook with the equally unintelligible sentence, “patriarchy theory” has “no data whatsoever, just the chimera of the fanciful” (minute 18). He never mentions or addresses this “argument” again. He never explains what he even thinks “feminist patriarchy theory” is, or how it is supposed to rebut his argument, or what he thinks a “chimera” is, or how “feminist patriarchy theory” is one. I’m sure whatever he mistakenly thinks “feminist patriarchy theory” is is indeed mythical. But the real one is not; it is well in evidence (example, example, example). And I can only guess at what argument he is describing and responding to here. Maybe he means the argument that hypergamy is a product of patriarchy and not women’s biology; though if so, he never describes that argument or any evidence offered for it, nor ever responds to it. And yet the evidence actually does support it (as you may have started noticing by now).
The only “rebuttal” Stardusk actually addresses is that hypergamy is just about “wanting a better life” and thus no different than men who, also, want a better life and take steps to that end, too. This is a lame rebuttal, since it’s a softball: Stardusk’s point is that hypergamy is “unique to the human female” (in minute 14), insofar as it trades sex specifically for a better life. That’s false. Relationships exchange a lot more than sex. And this isn’t entirely unique to women (cougars are a thing—in fact, age disparity in modern marriages are pretty close on either side). Likewise, as we observed, the opposite model, of hypogamy and hom*ogamy, are also common and rising. But what Stardusk wants to argue is that it is sex that is on trade, and for women it’s a seller’s market. And he wants this to explain why is it that women tend more often to be the one to marry up. Stardusk’s answer is “they control the sex market.” But he doesn’t even have a coherent model of that (he can’t decide whether women are naturally hypergamous to physical hotness or to abstract concepts of wealth; and he can’t decide which is supposed to be right or good). And the data don’t support any universal answer for women as a whole either way.
Rather, as I just went over, a better answer to why it is more often women marrying up is not sex but constraint: women tend more often to not have access to the same wealth and freedom of choosing as men do. That is why when those constraints are removed, hypergamy declines, exposing what women’s natural selection trends actually are. It appears rather that it is men whose sexual selection is more focused on physical attraction and are culturally hostile to inverted wealth matches: toxic male culture denigrates and belittles men who “earn less” than their female partners (designating this as unmanly), which disincentivizes them from pursuing such arrangements. As usual, men are doing this to themselves. Meanwhile, women are actually less interested in physical attractiveness because they have a more sensible and mature interest in quality (like reliability, personability, empathy, and stability). Men need to get with the same program.
Hence the steel man of the argument Stardusk is trying to dismiss doesn’t succumb to his point: all marriages are resource gains (unless one partner has negative or net zero wealth, e.g. is in massive debt or a total deadbeat); so all genders (men and women) are “marrying up” in totum. That is, every man who marries ends up with a net gain in resources (either his wife’s income or her labor, or both, are now added to his). Indeed, this is pretty much the only reason men marry at all; likewise, women. Stardusk’s focus on hypergamy avoids attention to this fact. He has thus conflated hypergamy (a woman more than doubling her resources) with advancement (a woman increasing her resources). So imagine a world in which women have no constraints in partner choice: women are not disadvantaged in access to wealth (they all get great jobs and make the same average income as men), they are not pressured by family or society, they have lots of available men to choose from, and men don’t interfere with their choices (men are not obsessed with looks, and have no issue with being economic or social equals or inferiors). How much hypergamy will be observed in that world? Almost none, I wager.
This is the argument Stardusk cannot rebut. Men and women pursue advantage. The only reason women can trade up more often is that there is a gendered disparity in resource-access that forces them to. So for them, the easiest gradient of selection is to pursue equality through a higher status mate, since the alternative gradients are steeper. By contrast, men can easily marry down, because they are already well situated, and society and culture supports that. Add the fact that men are obsessed with looks, and you get men searching for women willing to trade attractiveness for advancement. But such mercenary arrangements are not going to be normal (Stardusk’s own data suggest it is less then one percent of the population actually doing this). Statistically, sex (and thus looks) isn’t what is being traded on this market. It is bundled in there but it’s not actually “the thing” that is deciding who marries whom. This is illustrated in the data for Sweden (as linked earlier): on average, educated women who “marry up” still provide 46% of their income—almost the same amount as their husband (54%). Swedish women are thus not “maximizing” resource access with sex. They are tending to choose partners relatively close to their economic station. The best explanation why is that they can.
Stardusk then goes on a rant about the apex fallacy (in minute 15) which is really just a bunch of misogynistic assertions that aren’t backed by any data, yet which ironically is his own fallacy (he is the one treating an exceptional one percent of women as definitive of all women). I won’t fisk that. It’s the 21st century. You can go and read what women and scientists actually have to say about gendered income and power inequalities in various countries and you’ll find it does not track anything Stardusk is saying here. But as just one example, notice that fourth-wave Feminism is based on abandoning the very view Stardusk is trying to credit to women today, by recognizing the intersectional role of poverty and disempowerment among even majoritarian groups (like men who are poor, disempowered, and/or otherwise disadvantaged). See my articles Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed and Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases.
Stardusk then naively uses this fallacy to argue that because divorce rates decline with age, that therefore this proves women ditch men only for sexual reasons. His correlation fallacy is that “the trend in divorce correlates almost to a tee with female peak sexual marketplace value and declines after that.” He cites no studies confirming that explanation. He doesn’t even show us any data regarding who initiated any of these divorces (the husband or the wife), or their reasons (like, say, “he cheated on me” or “he beats me” or “he is intolerable to live with”). He doesn’t even show us a graph of the divorce rate by age of the man. Guess what. It’s pretty much the same. He also just shows the rate for one region in one year. Ooops. The data are quite different in other times and places.
So much for his biological determinism. You’ll notice the age at marriage is also the same curve, and also the same trend for both men and women. So there is no evidence for Stardusk’s explanation for the curve. The most one could say is that people tend to get married when having children makes sense, but since that’s practically a tautology and true of both men and women, it can’t inform any point Stardusk wants to make. Meanwhile, since over time there are fewer new marriages, all that Stardusk’s divorce rate curve might show is that the more years a couple endures being together, the more likely it is they will continue. In other words, the reason the divorce rate is so low for people in their 60s is that those are the people left after the winnowing. If you enjoy being with someone for twenty years, you’re more likely to enjoy being with them another twenty. Because otherwise you probably will have divorced them already. This is basic natural selection theory: the marriages still around by then have survived all the slings and arrows; they are therefore the hardiest marriages. The rest died off. A contributing explanation (as some data also suggest) is that older people come from a generation more disapproving of divorce; younger people are freer to divorce. This would explain why divorce rates among the elderly are increasing.
Note the difference in methodology: instead of just grabbing a graph and never checking any other data or even what the data in the graph means, and then just armchair-interpreting it in support of one’s ideology, like a Catholic interprets the Bible to get it to say and mean things it never originally did, we should actually check things, like: is the curve any different for men; has the curve changed over time or does it vary by nation; what has science actually checked regarding the actual statistical and demographic causes of that curve; are generational differences in assumptions about marriage and divorce responsible; are selection effects responsible; what are the actual statistical causes of divorce; how often are women initiating these divorces; is there any science backing any particular causal theory. And so on. In other words, a critical thinker doesn’t just resort to a correlation fallacy, cherry picking data and inventing a just-so story to explain it, but actually makes an effort to avoid that fallacy and to look for specific evidence of the causes of any observed correlation. For instance, look at some real data and actual studies, and you’ll find the main causes of divorce don’t match Stardusk’s thesis at all.
For example, Stardusk does at least say one true thing here (in minute 17): the assumption that men tend to discard aging wives for “a younger model” is not supported by the data. That is actually statistically rare (barely three percent of divorced men marry their mistress, for example). But since this has nothing to do with his thesis, it’s not of much use. He wants to spin this into an argument that women initiate most divorces, and “therefore” (handwave handwave handwave) “hypergamy.” But just compare his armchair amateur spin-doctoring with a real, critical approach to answering why two thirds of divorces are initiated by women. You get very different results. But my point here is: compare not just the results, but the methods. Observe how theories are advanced in each case (what theories are considered and why), who is advancing them (amateurs or actual experts in relevant fields of study), and what they are based on (what actual evidence and data is brought to bear). Then think: which of these analyses is more likely to be correct?
Also notice how the various kinds of data a real analysis presents actually undermines Stardusk’s amateur theory, creating unusual correlations that his theory neither predicts nor explains (such as “if a close friend gets divorced, people’s own chances of divorcing rise by 75%,” which can’t be explained with Stardusk’s theory). And take note of the absence of the data his theory entails. For example, Stardusk’s theory requires women to be divorcing for advantage (to marry up); none of the data support that (Ape doesn’t even try to present any). By contrast, data indicate that women do initiate formal divorce proceedings more often but are not actually breaking up more often. The disparity appears to consist of “women who didn’t choose to end their relationship, but want or need to formalise the split nonetheless.” In other words, men and women actually end marriages at the same rate—but men tend to be too deadbeat to formalize it. By not checking details like this, Stardusk was fooled by a ghost statistic, which completely undermines his entire argument.
In the end, the data do not support Stardusk’s claim (in minute 18) that “the likelihood of a couple divorcing in any given year tracks very strongly with whether the wife feels it would be to her advantage not to keep her promise.” His only evidence for that is all that bullsh*t about the divorce rate curve. But in reality, terminal separations (the real ending of marriages) are gender equalized (men initiate as often as the woman), and literally all the data on the causes of this indicate real failures of the partner: they break promises first (through sexual or other partnership infidelities).
Dissolution of marriage is almost always a last option, occurring only after persistent unresolved failures to meet the terms of the relationship. And the causes tend to be the same. For example, around a fifth of divorces are caused by sexual infidelity, and though men cheat more often than women, the difference is now slight (again around ten percentiles). Other leading causes, like “growing apart,” lack of communication, mishandling money, drinking or drug use, too much conflict or arguing (and these, with infidelity, are the actual documented top six causes), also occur at similarly close rates between men and women. So there is no distinct lesson about “women” here. Their reasons for divorcing are pretty much always the same as men’s; and it’s never because they just “find it advantageous.”
Conclusion
Stardusk rounds out his thesis toward the end of minute 18:
[Note] the natural and uniquely female attribute of hypergamy, her preference for domineering, brutish men in her mate selection, and the modern state—which, in a way, is the ultimate alpha-male brute using coercive force to extract wealth from men, primarily providers, fulfilling virtually every wish of the female.
In other words, your standard delusional misogynistic worldview. Stardusk didn’t present any evidence of any of these things; and only tried to present evidence for one of them (a supposed biological preference in women to mate with “domineering, brutish men”), but all that evidence was bollocks, as was all his reasoning.
In the real world, women are very diverse in mate selection, and hypergamy is in decline. Women are increasingly providers now (indeed, a third of married women provide more than their husbands); and let’s remember: women’s labor is providing (including emotional labor). Stardusk ignores women’s labor, falsely valuing it at zero, in order to claim men in traditionally gendered households “provide everything.” But that’s not true. Nor is it true anymore that even a majority of society consists of “traditionally gendered households.” And given all the things women justifiably complain about, it is not clear how any rational person in contact with reality can think “virtually every wish” women have is being fulfilled. All that money Stardusk is claiming the (American?) state is coercing out of him is mostly being spent on him (infrastructure, a justice and emergency system, his social security check); and the rest is being spent on guns and bombs. I don’t see any woman’s wishlist here.
The best I can tell is that Stardusk has some irrational complaints about how marital contracts work in Western societies (such as when he apes the myth of a universal plague of “men being soaked by divorcees”), but literally nothing he says about how those contracts work or why is true. He’s the one complaining about a fantastical chimera. As one ex-MGTOWer in the know observed of several TouTubers like Stardusk, “the true forebears of MGTOW were divorced men who got burned.” Which would explain both subtexts of this video: its poorly rationalized focus on divorce, and its even less rationalized hints at anarcholibertarianism, i.e. democraphobia (more on that in a moment). But the ensuing misogyny is quite pervasive. Stardusk will say such easily refutable yet extraordinarily bigoted howlers about women like “their egos prevent them from accepting that they, just as men, are flawed by nature” (in minute 22). So, all (!) women are not only hopelessly arrogant, they are so arrogant that they never accept their having any human flaws. Anyone who believes that may as well don a tinfoil hat, being so divorced from reality it would be more logical if they were arguing all women were secretly a cabal of alien lizard people.
Which gets us to that other subtext. There is also some lizard-peopleness in Stardusk’s bizarre attempts to equate physical brutes (men with visible upper body strength) with “the state.” He handwaves the hell out of this with a completely bonkers political theory about how “the state,” literally all nations ever (whether its the Assyrian, Hun, Persian, or Roman Empires, North Korea, Japan, the United States, China, Canada, or Sweden) is “itself ultimately derivative of nature, being essentially socialized natural urges and tendencies in the form of a superstructure” (in minute 19). Which is of course absolutely refuted by the massive differences between the Assyrian, Hun, Persian, and Roman Empires, North Korea, Japan, the United States, China, Canada, and Sweden. There is no logical sense in which any “state” is simply “socialized natural urges.” Clearly states are complex products of creative social engineering, highly variable and thus experimental in nature, all of which were built for the entire purpose of regulating rather than codifying “natural urges.” So Stardusk’s entire worldview is crazytime.
But you’ll get to the heart of the crazy when he gets to the pitch—the snake-oil he’s selling, for which this entire video was just a documercial: men should “avoid the doubly entangling alliance with both women and our alpha male brute, the state.” Alpha male brute state? When did he ever demonstrate any such concept here? Do states have sexy chests and well-cut jawlines? Are women marrying states? What the f*ck does this have to do with literally any f*cking thing he has been arguing for this entire half-hour? He clearly has some sort of twisted “sovereign citizen” nuttiness going on here. Men should cut themselves off from women…and the state! So…no civilization for you. No teams. No laws. No division of labor. No love. No joint enterprises of any kind. Because all women on Earth are conniving Jews coldhearted whor*s. “Because my wife left me for a hotter or maybe ugly rich guy (I can’t decide and that probably wasn’t really the reason).”
This is honestly just crayoned dribble on a lunatic’s cell wall.
