A Mate Selection Theory of Feminization

Monogamy and the quality-loyalty tradeoff

In choosing partners, women face one great tradeoff. They want both quality and loyalty. Ideally you hope to get some combination of both. But highly desirable partners always have other options. Losers are probably less likely to stray, but women don’t want to be with losers if they don’t have to be. Individual women seem to differ a great deal in how much they value quality versus loyalty, with some willing to chase around a celebrity in hopes of spending one night with him and others seeking to capture one mediocre guy who will provide long-term stability. Most are somewhere in between, and managing the quality-loyalty tradeoff is one thing that makes finding and maintaining relationships difficult.

Men of course can all promise to be loyal. But how can she know? In our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, once a woman got pregnant and had children, she became vulnerable at the same time her value as a mate decreased. Just as importantly, every day Father Time is chipping away. Men’s options may narrow as they get older too, but the effect is nowhere near as extreme. If a woman partners up with a rich and powerful man, or one who has the potential to become rich and powerful, she has to worry that when her attractiveness declines and his mate value is still high, the temptation to stray will be particularly strong. See Donald Trump, who has traded down for a younger wife twice and might’ve done it a third time by now if he hadn’t become occupied running for and serving as president.

The societal solution here is of course monogamy. Laws and norms often require that even the highest status men remain with their aging wives. Many societies allow concubines, but even in those cases it’s still not considered acceptable to abandon an aging wife. During the Mad Men era, there was widespread acceptance of the idea that powerful men cheat, but they were required to nonetheless preserve the family unit and continue supporting the women they decided to marry. In these ways, society acknowledged the reality of human nature, but still made allowances for men with options to take advantage of them. The system was set up like this because high-status men married high-status women, and the brothers and fathers of those women wanted to make sure that they would be treated well, along with any children they might have.

Eventually, however, divorce began to lose its stigma and the laws were liberalized. What are women to do? The marriage contract isn’t worth all that much. A husband might have to give you half his money if he breaks it, but prenups are now a thing, and even if not, if a man is successful enough he may still find the price of leaving you worth it. Women therefore don’t know who to trust. Men, however, begin to have new intuitions about how to still attract them as mates. They need to signal loyalty in a world where they can’t rely on law and norms to force that virtue upon them.

A man still wants to signal quality, but he tempers this now by signalling he is low testosterone and has a weak libido. If he goes through life with his eyes following every pretty girl who walks by, he sends the message that he might cheat. After universal monogamy, not only does he not objectify women in his life, he finds the whole idea offensive! Their bodies are not something you think about. Women are to be treated as individuals with important non-superficial traits. You show that you are very sensitive to the difficulties women face, particularly when they are the victims of assault or harassment. The idea that a boss would use his position to pressure a young subordinate into sex is horrifying. You support laws and regulations to punish such behavior, and #BelieveAllWomen when they say they have been victimized. Agree with those in your social circle who say that age gaps are “creepy.” It also doesn’t hurt to show some consistency and therefore sympathy towards other vulnerable groups, like immigrants, homosexuals, and racial minorities.

All of this not only signals that a man is likely to be loyal in the short term. He’s sending a signal that he’s even less likely to cheat or leave his wife for a younger woman as he gets older. After all, if a man at 30 averts his eyes when a co-worker wears a low-cut dress, what are the odds that at 50 he’s going to have the libido to seek out new partners? He wants to show he would never consider such a thing for reasons based in both personal disposition and moral values.

What this means is that once laws and norms establishing monogamy break down, males in effect become feminists to signal that they can be trusted. Men could previously behave like slobs and make honking motions with their hands when a big breasted woman walked by in an era where they were prevented from acting on their fantasies. Now they put their hands in their pockets and pretend like they didn’t see anything.

To test this theory, we can look back on our recent cultural and legal history. California was the first state to enact no-fault divorce in 1969. All but a handful of states would follow its lead by the end of the 1970s. It’s hard to trace when our institutions became feminized. But although sex was written into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it wasn’t until Meritor Savings Bank v Vinson (1986) that the Supreme Court decided the law prohibited sexual harassment. I tell the story of the legal developments in this area in The Origins of Woke. Here’s one figure from the book showing the massive uptake in civil rights lawsuits after 1991.

There are no exact breaking points where we can say that norms and laws around divorce became more liberal or that institutions flipped from masculine to feminine, but the general chronology seems to line up with my theory, where practices around monogamy change first and then feminization takes off some time later, perhaps with a delay of a few decades. The height of “raunch culture” in the 1990s and early 2000s was the era between when the norms of monogamy and restraint broke down on one side, and the feminization of our institutions on the other. The courts had already established modern sexual harassment law, but it would take a little longer for norms to trickle down and the standards they set to become widely accepted. For a while, men had their fun as we got cultural products like Howard Stern’s early career and The Man Show, before upper class women were able to reassert some order on society.

The feminization of men and institutions does not occur evenly across all classes. Remember, the temptation to stray from one’s partner is greatest for high status men. The more elite the circle, the more feminization is required. In poorer communities, this dynamic is less significant. Here, I’m assuming that all else equal, women find masculine men to be more attractive, but that preference is reversed or at least mitigated when society doesn’t force men to be monogamous in the long term and abandonment becomes a serious concern. In that case, she wants a man who is successful in traditional ways but without a high libido or high testosterone. Poorer women don’t need such signals of reassurance because they figure no one will want their husbands when they’re old. Moreover, among the lower classes, high time preference dominates and individuals lack impulse control, which is how people get sorted by class in the first place, so finding a man who is going to stay loyal regardless of what his options are seems like a hopeless task anyway.

Some version of this theory has probably been true for a very long time. Even before the 1960s and 1970s, upper class men were considered more refined than the cruder lower classes. But the weaker the norms and laws enforcing monogamy are, the more men must work to show that they’re likely to be loyal, which means that they have to become increasingly feminized for their signals to be credible. You eventually arrive at something like wokeness.

Society therefore ends up divided between two tribes: the first masculine/low class/conservative and the second feminine/high class/liberal. Before we relaxed pressures for monogamy, the left wasn’t seen as necessarily less masculine than the right. Socialism and labor unions were about tough guys banding together to take what was theirs by force. Leftist intellectuals often developed masculine personas. Think of a figure like Jack London (1876-1916), an avowed socialist who worked as a gold prospector in the Klondike and wrote books celebrating the primal instincts. Old Soviet and Chinese communist propaganda displayed beefy steel workers and denounced effeminate bourgeois sensibilities. You’ll often see people joke that if Stalin could see a DSA meeting today with their masking and disputes over gendered language he would send them all to the gulag. But after norms around monogamy have been relaxed, today across much of the world, leftism has become the ideology of the feminine, gay, highly sensitive, and psychologically fragile.

This theory makes a lot of intuitive sense. It simply starts by taking seriously both the male need to win over mates and the female quality/loyalty tradeoff, and then asks what happens when pressure towards monogamy is relaxed. The timing lines up, and the theory provides an explanation as to why our politics now has a masculine/feminine divide when this wasn’t always the case.

It also clarifies something I’ve always found puzzling about Christianity. In terms of its teachings, the faith itself has an extremely feminine orientation with its emphasis on forgiveness and concern for the weakest among us. Nonetheless, Christianity formed the core of the culture of chivalry of the Middle Ages, and even today practicing Christians have a more masculine cultural orientation than non-believers. Under the mate selection theory of feminization, the key here is monogamy, which indirectly allows women to prefer more masculine men and has downstream cultural effects. So in America today, ironically the seemingly pagan culture of status going to the jock and cheerleader is preserved for the most part in communities that maintain Christian traditions.