So Drew Barrymore files for divorce from husband Will Kopelman. They then issue a media release announcing "Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family."
I asked my readers what could lie behind the seemingly odd view that divorce "does not take away from us being a family". I received several excellent replies, but I'd like to focus on the first one, which argued that it was a classic case of women pursuing a strategy of alpha sex and "betabux".
These are red pill concepts, and I think there's something to it, though I'd modify the argument. The idea is that it is in the nature of women to want sex with alpha men but then to want provisioning and security from beta men, i.e. alpha sex and beta money. At red pill sites it is often argued that women will purse alpha sex until they are near to "hitting the wall" at which point they will settle and seek to marry a beta man for his money.
The connection to Drew Barrymore is the suggestion that she is trying to have it both ways: that she wants to do the family thing with beta man Will Kopelman, whilst still being free to pursue sex with alpha males.
What is true in this, from what I can tell anyway, is that women are strongly conflicted between their sexual drives and their desire for family and security. Their sexual drives flow most freely with men who are perceived to be untamed, undomesticated, fun (or perhaps dangerous) types who are there just for sex. The men they want for family duty are the stable, loving, trustworthy, reliable types, but with these men sex is for leverage (it is transactional) and sometimes women will not have sexual feelings towards these men (or worse yet they may feel repulsion). And yet women do want these men, at a particular point in their lives, for establishing a family.
It's a pity, I think, that the red pill sites use the terms alpha and beta the way they do. It assumes that the player type men, the ones women identify as being there just for sex, are the superior men. But that's not always so. A woman might see a psychologically muddled no-hoper as being a man she would never consider as a beta provisioner, but if he can thug it up a bit (even in looks), or appear a little cool, or even come across as risky and dramatic, she might see put him in the "there for sex" category. On the other hand, the man who is emotionally open to a loving relationship, able to hold down a good job, good father material, and loyal might objectively be superior in character but the very fact that he presents himself for the domestic role can flick a "beta switch" in women from which there is no coming back.
I have no idea of what Will Kopelman is like as a person, but if you look at photos he is tall and handsome and fashionably dressed, and he has a high status job (art consultant), is wealthy and comes from a high social class. And yet in red pill terms he is "beta". I suspect that once he is divorced he will suddenly look very alpha to a lot of women.
At red pill sites there is a term "alpha widow". It refers to a woman who has bedded many men (the alpha men) and who then settles for a beta provisioner (betabux) but can't form a loyal attachment to him because she still pines for one of her past alpha lovers. The thing is, though, that I have known women whom you might term "beta widows" - they divorce a husband and after a relatively short period of time try to replace him with a replica of what they once had. They were not attracted to him for the reason that they were married to him not because he lacked attractive qualities as a man.
Marriage, it seems, puts men at a great disadvantage when it comes to holding the attraction of women. It means that men have given away all the commitment they have to offer; that they cannot appear attractively aloof when they have so much to lose in the event of the wife leaving; that they will appear unattractively domesticated; that they will have to offer comfort and security rather than danger, fun and risk; and that just by virtue of being the loyal provisioner they will be cast in the beta role in their wife's mind.
A society that values marriage is going to have to bolster the position of married men. It is going to have to give married men a boost to their power and status compared to the unmarried guy in the band. It is going to have to grant to married men resources that a woman cannot get anywhere else except by being married (or perhaps through her own hard, lifelong labour).
I'm not sure, but it is possible that marriage can only survive in a patriarchal culture, by which I mean a culture in which fathers are the spiritual, moral and legal heads of the family, and in which this paternal leadership and authority is felt within the daily life and culture of the family. If not, women will tend to identify married men with a powerlessness that they can live with platonically happily enough, and will sometimes endure for the sake of the children, but that will have them looking elsewhere for sexual fulfilment.
Good post. I agree, my personal experience as a natural beta was that I happily gave my wife everything (joint bank account etc) which she happily banked - the problem being that she then looked for more when there was no more to give. I think natural beta/provider men need to learn to maintain a level of aloofness & dignity if they are to be successful in married life - a form of roleplay, just as it helps to roleplay more assured alpha to get women in the first place. This isn't deceit - you're not trying to actually fool the woman (logically she'll know fine well if you are a provider type), simply give her subconscious brain permission to see you as desirable.
ReplyDeleteUltimately society can prioritise family stability or romance. The two cannot be equated as this sad, yet common, example so clearly illustrates. Societies which make family stability the rule require that marriage be routed in truth and reason and not thoughts and feelings. The emphasis of the husband and wife is on raising the children soundly, caring for the elderly and preserving the values and traditions of society, family wealth and passing this on to offspring.
ReplyDeleteSocieties which prioritise romance create a narcissistic focus of husband and wife on each other and their emotional lives and sexual fulfilment are of prime concern, raising expectations which cannot be realistically fulfilled. The result of this is a formation of marriage based upon feelings and thoughts in which truth and reason are deemed unimportant. This leads to widespread neglect of children and the elderly who are an impediment to the pursuit of sexual and emotional gratification.
Truth has a habit of rearing its head, however, and in the case of Kopelman and Barrymore, an objective assessment of the couple finds no basis for a marriage between the two. The strong emotions which drove the impetus to marry have been crashed against the firm wall of reason. Kopelman is a Jew and Barrymore a gentile. The differences in ethnicity, religion, background, culture and world view make successful family formation impossible. After the initial emotional states subside, these differences become insurmountable obstacles.
Their divorce is the inevitable consequence of emotion taking precedence over truth and reason. When the heart overrules the head, disaster quickly follows. All humans have emotions but major life decisions cannot be based upon them.
This celebrity example is in reality a reflection of Western society. Many, perhaps the majority, of marriages are instigated on emotional grounds with no analysis of the factors required for sustainable family formation. A society which has rejected objective truth and reason cannot survive.
Anon, I half agree with you. I do believe that marriage will never return to being a more stable institution unless individuals see it as being not just a "wanting to be together" of two adults, but in its larger aspect, as an institution that exists for the raising of children, the transmission of culture through the generations, the care of relatives including the elderly and so on. The family needs to be seen as something that draws our sense of duty to our culture, tradition and society (something, of course, that cannot happen in advanced liberal societies).
DeleteHowever, I disagree with you that the family cannot also be understood in terms of human love. Of course, we need to make clear that we don't mean a Disney kind of love, or a rom-com love, but something that is a settled commitment in our will, i.e. that we recognise that the circle of family is not just something good, but something Good - a precious expression of something akin to a transcendent love - with each member - father, mother, children - making up a necessary part of this circle of life.
We have to fight liberalism on both fronts - the social aspect of family but also on what love really means - that love truly understood contains within it both purity and fidelity.
" I disagree with you that the family cannot also be understood in terms of human love. "
DeleteDefine what you mean by love.
The Christian is expected to love all people, love being a behaviour which encourages the other to the path of salvation. It is a given that the family is to exhibit this behaviour of concern. However this behaviour is impossible in families where the marriage is not based upon truth but shallow upon emotional infatuations. Regrettably the latter is strongly encouraged by the prevailing culture and responsible for the widespread social breakdown and fragmentation.
Liberalism can be fought on one front only, and with one weapon, the truth. Love is not about purity, no human being pure, all are sinners.
Anon, it is a question of what people are oriented to. You can experience the goodness of fidelity or purity and take it to be a moral standard you try to follow, even if you are inevitably flawed in your nature.
DeletePerhaps the simple perspective on Will Kopelman is that he is not a beta male, but there are web sites where all present can only see life in such terms. He is getting divorced, so he must be a beta male.
ReplyDeleteThe ideologue has one Grand Idea, and everything has to be seen through the lens of that Idea. Empirical evidence that threatens the Idea must be ignored or rejected, because it threatens the entire thinking paradigm of the ideologue. For the liberal ideologue, Equality is the Grand Idea, while for the libertarian ideologue, Maximizing Liberty is the Grand Idea. For the Gamer/PUA crowd, their simplistic view of male-female relations, the division of all males into alpha and beta, and the claim that all women think alike, is the paradigm that cannot be challenged by empirical evidence. We don't know the inside story of this divorce, or what Drew Barrymore intends to do next, which means that ideologues can speculate about exactly what she is thinking, exactly what Will Kopelman is like, and other things of which they know nothing, in a manner that conforms to their ideology.
The ideologue has one Grand Idea, and everything has to be seen through the lens of that Idea. Empirical evidence that threatens the Idea must be ignored or rejected
DeleteThat's well put. I'd add that red pill types are sometimes "scientistic" in the negative sense that they want to reduce the understanding of social life to formulas that work in a similar way to scientific formulas.
Despite this, I do find it interesting to visit red pill sites, as they are unusual in not seeking to enable the worst sort of female behaviours.
The way I see it, Western society was successful in the past in repressing the worst sort of female behaviours, to the point that we forgot that there were things that needed to be repressed, and so blithely assumed that women could be let loose to do their own thing and everything would be alright.
It's not working out, making excuses for women and blaming men for everything won't work out in the long run, nor will "tweaks" in the way men relate to women ("do this to seem more alpha").
Traditional societies were as they were for a reason. To give just one example, it is now crystal clear why traditional societies did not allow young women to experience the "abundance" in the "sexual market place" that the young women of today experience - as it ruins so many women for pair bonding and marriage.
At any rate, the lesson I have learned from modern times is that only a minority of women are naturally fit for marriage (i.e. will make moral choices that preference marriage ahead of coarser hedonistic or materialistic choices).
I could not say exactly what the percentage is, but if we want to return to a situation in which most people are able to marry successfully, then you have to change the cultural, social, spiritual and economic influences on women in quite a radical way, so that positive external influences start to outweigh weaker or short-sighted or distorted internal ones.
Mark's comment is a prime example of an idealogue with a "grand idea". The grand idea here is that women and "feminism" (whatever that means) are the cause of the fall of Western civilisation. Totally ignored is the fact that "feminism" is the creation of men and its is men who played the largest and most crucial role in the civilisational collapse. "The worst sort of female behaviours" are very moderate compared to the worst sort of male behaviours.
DeleteTraditional societies do not allow dating as it ruins both sexes for marriage and by and large there are considerably more women who are suitable for marriage than men, the majority of whom are morally and spiritually degenerate with a declining percentage actually heterosexual.
Anon, I disagree. It is likely that suitability for marriage has declined amongst both men and women, but I think the female decline stands out more. You have to remember that women experience abundance a long time before men do, and are therefore influenced in a negative way early on. The pattern of party girl in your 20s, hit your wall, marry a beta provider, have your two kids, tire of your beta provider, and then divorce is an all too common pattern in modern times. Only a relatively small percentage of men experience abundance in their 20s the way that many women do.
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