No, it's not. A 20 year old has less resources than a 40 year. That tells us very little about their respective genetic quality. 20 year olds deserve a handicap.
Setting that aside, is it the case that teen girls select inferior men compared to others? It seems like teen girls lust after the same things as young women above the age of consent: fame, looks, money, power. I don’t think they find middle age janitors attractive. Perhaps there is more randomness in the process with teen girls, which sounds right.
I'd say more randomness, also teen girls (below 16) have lower IQ than adults, and people are homophilic with respect to IQ. I think teen girls are more impressed by basic things like "having a car, having a job, having a pad" than adult women. Obviously there's significant overlap in selectivity between adults and teens, but I think adult women are more confident and thus more willing to raise their standards, while teen girls have lower self esteem and more easily overlook loser qualities.
First Sectionalism Archive, then Joseph Bronski, now DeepLeftAnalysis. I am feeling very sad right now. My top three creators have let me down. Hanania is the only one left to carry the flame... stay strong soldier!
Preface: This is about age-gap relationships after the age of consent and is mainly referring to prime-age men, not old guys.
I agree with you, but I think the competitive mechanism works on the opposite side of the market. Discouraging age-gaps nullifies the ability of young women to use their beauty and youth to compete for the most competent and desirable males who are mainly in their 30's to early 40s. This forces those men to choose from a group of their peers from whom they select for cognitive compatibility and more economically valuable traits. This follows directly from the reduction in women's absolute physical desirability making other attributes more salient. It of course also allows the more discerning older women to exercise their choices because of the lack of competition.
I’m skeptical of the direction you lay out here because (1) every man ages and so would eventually have the same opportunity to compete with the advantages of time, and (2) surely actual performance in one’s thirties is a much better indicator of genetic fitness than unrealized potential at 20.
Your argument for the dysgenic effects of young women making systematically worse choices or having less capacity to choose is definitely correct; however, the latter point is more relevant for illiberal societies or for very young girls. In a modern, liberated society with reasonable guardrails, young women are not particularly lacking for choice. If anything, limiting them to only age-matched males—who are much less suited to be long-term partners—during the peak of their sexual desirability dramatically reduces their overall market power.
Once again, this is good: we cannot let hot bimbos breed with our fittest men. Attraction to those traits is a vestige from a more primitive time and will produce children suboptimally matched for modern symbolic labor. If we are only concerned about fitness, we should raise the age of consent to 32 and ideally require a college degree. Men should also have a minimum capital requirement.
Also, as a general comment, the main point of age-gap taboos in liberal feminism is not to grind down low status men but to insulate women from the dating market consequences of choosing to delay pairing to pursue a career. By shaming men into not dating younger they are boxing out women who prioritize finding a partner first.
Using biotechnology to increase women's fertility as they age seems like it should be a very high priority. Such technology will allow more high-IQ bossbabes to reproduce. It's very politically correct to increase reproductive choice for mature women. And it seems intuitively possible, given that females of other species do not see the dramatic drop in fertility with age that human women see.
If accomplished via anti-aging technology, this could also have the advantages of helping her regain her youthful beauty, and extending human lifespans more generally. In fact, this seems like an ideal commercial application for anti-aging technology, since bossbabes have a lot of money and some of them want kids (and even more want to look young and beautiful). I wonder what aging factors affect female fertility/beauty the most.
I completely agree! Preternaturally nubile and fertile bossbabes would solve multiple societal problems at once. It would relieve much of the gendered tension that comes from the misalignment between our biological desires and liberal goals as well help reverse course on our dismal demographic dynamics.
Very interesting point about how other mammals do not enter menopause or experience fertility declines. It seems natural that we could produce a similar result in humans. I've seen some research showing growth hormone can increase fertility in older women and it would also have beneficial anti-aging effects.
What do you mean by "dysgenic"? If she wants to marry a tall, handsome high earner with a postgraduate degree (factors associated with matches for men in dating app studies), how is that supposed to degrade the gene pool exactly?
If you look at fertility data, it’s not high-IQ agentic men having the most babies, it’s dysfunctional idiots. This is specifically why I said “breeding preferences” and not something else. The most eugenic periods of human history did have small degrees of female agency in mate choice but not nearly what we have now.
I don't think looking at the guys who have the most babies is sufficient to understand women's overall preferences. Those dysfunctional idiots are probably having kids with other dysfunctional idiots. She might be screwing a gutter punk, but at least he's not a gutter punk who's incarcerated.
I think looking at fertility data is the best way to estimate women’s breeding preferences as a class. It really doesn’t matter if upper class women are attracted to eugenic traits if they don’t have enough babies with them to make the difference. Unfortunately for women, retarded women count towards their overall breeding preferences as they still are a reproductive bottleneck.
Like yes, I get your point. Assortative mating is real. If you’re successful your spouse will also be successful and all those other good traits etc. This is different than my initial point about breeding preferences writ large.
Maybe if you're not smart enough (eugenic enough) to have it “figured out” (have a high IQ, get a job, have independent living space) you aren’t “eugenic” at all. Being young doesn’t make you “eugenic”, it just makes you young. Hating olds is a cope for young losers who couldn’t figure it out (plenty of eugenic youth have no problems).
Today's teenagers -- by every index we can assemble from crime, drug/alcohol abuse, and suicide to forward-facing political attitudes, etc. -- are not just more mature than today's 25-64 year-old adults, but FAR more mature. This despite the fact that older-age hoarding still renders young people the poorest of our age groups, exposing them to more risks. The problem is not that teenagers cannot cognitively assess risks of things like sex and alcohol use -- again, teens are far more responsible today than adults are. The problem is that teens are forcibly deprived of resources and power necessary to control their lives. No sane person would argue Epstein and his elite colleagues are more mature than the teen girls he victimized. The victimization was founded in the vast power imbalance between rich older men and impoverished, abused young girls. The phony "teen brain" argument has been debunked for a decade, and we need to look now at how to give adolescents more power and resources to protect themselves.
Mike I follow your work but I am not arguing that teen girls are "dumb" or "irresponsible," I am arguing that they have lower self-esteem and lower standards than adult women. I am in favor of giving teens more power and resources -- what I am not ok with is normalizing relationships between young teens and adults 10 years their senior. Your point about wealth and power is acknowledged as well, and I explore that dynamic as a factor in our "gerontocratic" society.
Not sure what you mean by "lower standards." For what? Any comparison is complex, but has to start with the fact that teen girls (despite having grown up with lower poverty rates and lead levels than their mothers did as teens 30 years ago) now are much poorer on average than women their mother's age, say 45. Nearly all criticism of teen girls centers on Black, Hispanic, and Native girls, often without acknowledging serious poverty and discrimination. While 17-year-olds are poorer, they have much lower crime rates than 45-year-old women -- that's new -- as well as much lower rates of suicide, overdose, etc. Gen Z women also are much higher achieving educationally than their mothers were at the same age, which doesn't square with low self-esteem.
When I first documented the fact that 6 in 10 "teen pregnancies" involve male partners 21 and older back in 1992, I got a lot of pushback -- from liberal groups like Planned Parenthood and Urban Institute, defending the adult men! Having testified in "statutory rape" cases many times, I can firmly say (along with prosecutors) that the big courtroom problem was that the teen girls, though nearly all from disadvantaged backgrounds always came across as more mature than the older men.
The reason I also generally oppose relationships with huge age gaps is not a maturity gap or low-standards issue (these girls had few options), but the power, rights, resources gap society awards older men solely because of their age. Society has made it clear it will not protect girls and will make their situations worse. I honestly don't see a solution other than to equalize rights between teens and adults as an admittedly incomplete start.
I'm not criticizing teen girls, I'm saying that they have lower self-esteem than adult woman, and this causes them to accept low-quality partners. By low-quality, I mean moral character and personality traits. As girls age, they gain experience and self-esteem which helps them avoid these men. If you like we can talk exclusively about white women.
That was the view 30 years ago, when studies and Clinton/Gingrich officialdom accused teen girls of ruining the country by having babies. Then, a stack of more nuanced studies, including by the Clinton administration's top expert, showed that all of the problems attributed to teen motherhood resulted from their prior poverty (teen mothers overwhelmingly are Black, Hispanic, and Native), not young age.
Now, if someone wants to argue poor women choose "lower quality" male partners of worse moral character and personality traits than richer women do, that is a whole different argument. But we should stop using "teen" as a euphemism for "poor" or "of color."
I'm not accusing anyone of ruining anything. I'm not using teen woman as euphemism for anything. I'm simply saying that a 14 year old girl has lower self esteem than a 24 year old woman, and low self-esteem causes women to choose worse quality partners.
But a man's material wealth and status are determined by his genetic quality. To have earned that wealth and status, a man must have good genes and memes.
Not sure I follow the logic that old men are infertile or that sex with them is dysgenic. Very old men are still capable of producing viable sperm, and the quality isn't sufficiently worse to justify the dynamic. More likely, this is aimed at the nurture aspect: societies that allow too many infirm men who'll die soon to make the babies have too many children growing up without fathers who can protect and provide for them.
After repeated efforts, this just strikes me as a pointless non-point. You present zero evidence, and I have no idea why you single out age as the key variable (why not gender? race? SES? individuality? stock portfolio? state of residence? religious denomination?). Given that Gen Z teenagers make provably better choices than adults across a broad spectrum of behaviors today, I don't see why speculations like this have any relevance.
I think the agency/power structures point is more "Adults who are in a position of weakness w.r.t. their partner are responsible for this, while minors are not, because they are actually barred from attaining a higher position by the state"
Unless you’re leaning heavily into mutational load theory, someone’s accumulated resources and status is a good proxy for “genetic quality”
No, it's not. A 20 year old has less resources than a 40 year. That tells us very little about their respective genetic quality. 20 year olds deserve a handicap.
If resources are acquired via resourcefulness and intelligence (and other traits) then yes it does actually.
No, you’re not understanding.
It’s not fair to compare the strength of a strong 6 year old with the strength of a weak 20 year old.
It’s not fair to compare the resources of a 20 year old with a 40 year old.
Yes. But resources are still a good indicator even if you can’t compare across ages.
yes controlling for age, they are. That’s why I advocate against age gap relationships.
Including in relation to longevity/capacity to survive
I don’t understand the “welfare” point.
Setting that aside, is it the case that teen girls select inferior men compared to others? It seems like teen girls lust after the same things as young women above the age of consent: fame, looks, money, power. I don’t think they find middle age janitors attractive. Perhaps there is more randomness in the process with teen girls, which sounds right.
I'd say more randomness, also teen girls (below 16) have lower IQ than adults, and people are homophilic with respect to IQ. I think teen girls are more impressed by basic things like "having a car, having a job, having a pad" than adult women. Obviously there's significant overlap in selectivity between adults and teens, but I think adult women are more confident and thus more willing to raise their standards, while teen girls have lower self esteem and more easily overlook loser qualities.
First Sectionalism Archive, then Joseph Bronski, now DeepLeftAnalysis. I am feeling very sad right now. My top three creators have let me down. Hanania is the only one left to carry the flame... stay strong soldier!
I thought Joseph Bronski was still a teen-wife supporter, this is news to me
I regret to inform https://www.leonvoss.com/p/what-is-the-ideal-age-of-consent
he changed his name?
Yeah, just another pseudonym. He has good posts though still
Preface: This is about age-gap relationships after the age of consent and is mainly referring to prime-age men, not old guys.
I agree with you, but I think the competitive mechanism works on the opposite side of the market. Discouraging age-gaps nullifies the ability of young women to use their beauty and youth to compete for the most competent and desirable males who are mainly in their 30's to early 40s. This forces those men to choose from a group of their peers from whom they select for cognitive compatibility and more economically valuable traits. This follows directly from the reduction in women's absolute physical desirability making other attributes more salient. It of course also allows the more discerning older women to exercise their choices because of the lack of competition.
I’m skeptical of the direction you lay out here because (1) every man ages and so would eventually have the same opportunity to compete with the advantages of time, and (2) surely actual performance in one’s thirties is a much better indicator of genetic fitness than unrealized potential at 20.
Your argument for the dysgenic effects of young women making systematically worse choices or having less capacity to choose is definitely correct; however, the latter point is more relevant for illiberal societies or for very young girls. In a modern, liberated society with reasonable guardrails, young women are not particularly lacking for choice. If anything, limiting them to only age-matched males—who are much less suited to be long-term partners—during the peak of their sexual desirability dramatically reduces their overall market power.
Once again, this is good: we cannot let hot bimbos breed with our fittest men. Attraction to those traits is a vestige from a more primitive time and will produce children suboptimally matched for modern symbolic labor. If we are only concerned about fitness, we should raise the age of consent to 32 and ideally require a college degree. Men should also have a minimum capital requirement.
Also, as a general comment, the main point of age-gap taboos in liberal feminism is not to grind down low status men but to insulate women from the dating market consequences of choosing to delay pairing to pursue a career. By shaming men into not dating younger they are boxing out women who prioritize finding a partner first.
Using biotechnology to increase women's fertility as they age seems like it should be a very high priority. Such technology will allow more high-IQ bossbabes to reproduce. It's very politically correct to increase reproductive choice for mature women. And it seems intuitively possible, given that females of other species do not see the dramatic drop in fertility with age that human women see.
If accomplished via anti-aging technology, this could also have the advantages of helping her regain her youthful beauty, and extending human lifespans more generally. In fact, this seems like an ideal commercial application for anti-aging technology, since bossbabes have a lot of money and some of them want kids (and even more want to look young and beautiful). I wonder what aging factors affect female fertility/beauty the most.
I completely agree! Preternaturally nubile and fertile bossbabes would solve multiple societal problems at once. It would relieve much of the gendered tension that comes from the misalignment between our biological desires and liberal goals as well help reverse course on our dismal demographic dynamics.
Very interesting point about how other mammals do not enter menopause or experience fertility declines. It seems natural that we could produce a similar result in humans. I've seen some research showing growth hormone can increase fertility in older women and it would also have beneficial anti-aging effects.
After 25 I don't think there's any advantage to "protecting women from older predators," except, as you note, to enable careerism.
Pretty much agree here and will add that women’s breeding preferences are already naturally dysgenic by any reasonable definition.
What do you mean by "dysgenic"? If she wants to marry a tall, handsome high earner with a postgraduate degree (factors associated with matches for men in dating app studies), how is that supposed to degrade the gene pool exactly?
If you look at fertility data, it’s not high-IQ agentic men having the most babies, it’s dysfunctional idiots. This is specifically why I said “breeding preferences” and not something else. The most eugenic periods of human history did have small degrees of female agency in mate choice but not nearly what we have now.
I don't think looking at the guys who have the most babies is sufficient to understand women's overall preferences. Those dysfunctional idiots are probably having kids with other dysfunctional idiots. She might be screwing a gutter punk, but at least he's not a gutter punk who's incarcerated.
I think looking at fertility data is the best way to estimate women’s breeding preferences as a class. It really doesn’t matter if upper class women are attracted to eugenic traits if they don’t have enough babies with them to make the difference. Unfortunately for women, retarded women count towards their overall breeding preferences as they still are a reproductive bottleneck.
Like yes, I get your point. Assortative mating is real. If you’re successful your spouse will also be successful and all those other good traits etc. This is different than my initial point about breeding preferences writ large.
Excellent writing.
I like it, but I don't agree with it(I hope that's actually a "language barrier" issue and I actually agree with it but it doesn't seem like it)
Edit needed: “NIMYism is dysgenic because it forces young people to live with their parents, which reduces their mating opportunities.”
thanks for catching the mispelling
Maybe if you're not smart enough (eugenic enough) to have it “figured out” (have a high IQ, get a job, have independent living space) you aren’t “eugenic” at all. Being young doesn’t make you “eugenic”, it just makes you young. Hating olds is a cope for young losers who couldn’t figure it out (plenty of eugenic youth have no problems).
no true scotsman
Edit needed: “This indicates than “understanding sex” is not the key factor in determining its traumatic impact, which leads us to the power model:…”
Today's teenagers -- by every index we can assemble from crime, drug/alcohol abuse, and suicide to forward-facing political attitudes, etc. -- are not just more mature than today's 25-64 year-old adults, but FAR more mature. This despite the fact that older-age hoarding still renders young people the poorest of our age groups, exposing them to more risks. The problem is not that teenagers cannot cognitively assess risks of things like sex and alcohol use -- again, teens are far more responsible today than adults are. The problem is that teens are forcibly deprived of resources and power necessary to control their lives. No sane person would argue Epstein and his elite colleagues are more mature than the teen girls he victimized. The victimization was founded in the vast power imbalance between rich older men and impoverished, abused young girls. The phony "teen brain" argument has been debunked for a decade, and we need to look now at how to give adolescents more power and resources to protect themselves.
Mike I follow your work but I am not arguing that teen girls are "dumb" or "irresponsible," I am arguing that they have lower self-esteem and lower standards than adult women. I am in favor of giving teens more power and resources -- what I am not ok with is normalizing relationships between young teens and adults 10 years their senior. Your point about wealth and power is acknowledged as well, and I explore that dynamic as a factor in our "gerontocratic" society.
Not sure what you mean by "lower standards." For what? Any comparison is complex, but has to start with the fact that teen girls (despite having grown up with lower poverty rates and lead levels than their mothers did as teens 30 years ago) now are much poorer on average than women their mother's age, say 45. Nearly all criticism of teen girls centers on Black, Hispanic, and Native girls, often without acknowledging serious poverty and discrimination. While 17-year-olds are poorer, they have much lower crime rates than 45-year-old women -- that's new -- as well as much lower rates of suicide, overdose, etc. Gen Z women also are much higher achieving educationally than their mothers were at the same age, which doesn't square with low self-esteem.
When I first documented the fact that 6 in 10 "teen pregnancies" involve male partners 21 and older back in 1992, I got a lot of pushback -- from liberal groups like Planned Parenthood and Urban Institute, defending the adult men! Having testified in "statutory rape" cases many times, I can firmly say (along with prosecutors) that the big courtroom problem was that the teen girls, though nearly all from disadvantaged backgrounds always came across as more mature than the older men.
The reason I also generally oppose relationships with huge age gaps is not a maturity gap or low-standards issue (these girls had few options), but the power, rights, resources gap society awards older men solely because of their age. Society has made it clear it will not protect girls and will make their situations worse. I honestly don't see a solution other than to equalize rights between teens and adults as an admittedly incomplete start.
I'm not criticizing teen girls, I'm saying that they have lower self-esteem than adult woman, and this causes them to accept low-quality partners. By low-quality, I mean moral character and personality traits. As girls age, they gain experience and self-esteem which helps them avoid these men. If you like we can talk exclusively about white women.
That was the view 30 years ago, when studies and Clinton/Gingrich officialdom accused teen girls of ruining the country by having babies. Then, a stack of more nuanced studies, including by the Clinton administration's top expert, showed that all of the problems attributed to teen motherhood resulted from their prior poverty (teen mothers overwhelmingly are Black, Hispanic, and Native), not young age.
Now, if someone wants to argue poor women choose "lower quality" male partners of worse moral character and personality traits than richer women do, that is a whole different argument. But we should stop using "teen" as a euphemism for "poor" or "of color."
I'm not accusing anyone of ruining anything. I'm not using teen woman as euphemism for anything. I'm simply saying that a 14 year old girl has lower self esteem than a 24 year old woman, and low self-esteem causes women to choose worse quality partners.
Where's the debunking please I need it
The "teen brain" nonsense has been debunked for years: https://www.cjcj.org/news/blog/teen-brain-non-science-debunked
I have lots of subtacks on the declines in teen crime, etc. https://mikemales.substack.com/publish/posts/published One example: https://mikemales.substack.com/p/generation-z-is-not-bringing-some
But a man's material wealth and status are determined by his genetic quality. To have earned that wealth and status, a man must have good genes and memes.
Not sure I follow the logic that old men are infertile or that sex with them is dysgenic. Very old men are still capable of producing viable sperm, and the quality isn't sufficiently worse to justify the dynamic. More likely, this is aimed at the nurture aspect: societies that allow too many infirm men who'll die soon to make the babies have too many children growing up without fathers who can protect and provide for them.
After repeated efforts, this just strikes me as a pointless non-point. You present zero evidence, and I have no idea why you single out age as the key variable (why not gender? race? SES? individuality? stock portfolio? state of residence? religious denomination?). Given that Gen Z teenagers make provably better choices than adults across a broad spectrum of behaviors today, I don't see why speculations like this have any relevance.
Deep throat analysis
I think the agency/power structures point is more "Adults who are in a position of weakness w.r.t. their partner are responsible for this, while minors are not, because they are actually barred from attaining a higher position by the state"