Call it Marriage

Why can't we square the promiscuity circle with monogamy anymore?

In my most recent podcast, I considered the current TradCon pushback against polygyny. I began with the meme you see here:

You can expect similar memes to crop up in the coming election cycle. This is the inevitable purge of the Red Pill that comes about twelve to eighteen months before every presidential election since Trump. “Reject post-modernism! Return to traditionalism!” is always the mantra of conservatives pivoting from the gender war into the culture war. Like the returning Prodigal Son, it’s time to reject the Dan Bilzerian hedonism that’s been grist for the TradCon mill for so long and embrace the ‘Save the West from moral degeneracy!’ narrative that will carry the faithful into November of 2024. Of course, no one mentions that the fertility rate in the US has been below replacement levels since 1971.

This pivot is an easy sell in the age of social media. Today's average man is overweight, un- or underemployed, less educated, undersexed, unmotivated, and mostly rudderless in directing his life. That’s a popular narrative that conservative pundits believe will position them as moral authorities of proper masculinity in the coming months. TradCons spare no effort to remind us in podcast after podcast how lazy men are today while women are lapping them on the racetrack of life. Achieving the Dan Bilzerian or Andrew Tate ideal is like expecting the average Boomer kid in the sixties to measure up to the lifestyle of Hugh Hefner. At least that Boomer kid could put the ridiculousness of that into perspective.

Even if they are not self-conscious of it, the average Zoomer kid (Generation Z) understands that the burden of performance necessary to live a lifestyle approaching that of Bilzerian is far greater than the hopeful want of marrying a pretty, thin, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christian wife (who apparently loves sex) and having three – soon four – child-clones of herself. The irony is that both ideals are equally fantastic today for the average 18-29-year-old. I wonder if the mother-wife and her three daughters in the TradCon ideal would be as well-loved if she was portrayed as a Hispanic immigrant (with a fourth kid incoming)? 

But an ideal that used to be the correct aspiration just 18 months ago gets replaced by another as social and political climates change. As goes the ideal, so goes the profit model. One aspiration is now the correct “flex” for Real Men® to occupy themselves with. The Great Reset narrative of 2020 is now replaced with the Great Replacement narrative of 2024. The solution? Find a quality woman, church her up, wife her up, absolve her of her sordid past (you’re “insecure in your masculinity” if you don’t), and get busy having babies. Just remember, evolution has never cared how the babies are made, only that the babies are made.

But the clash of ideal masculinity models isn’t one of tradition today. It’s a clash of old order, 20^th-century hopes, and expectations vs. the 21^st-century realities of a global sexual marketplace. Millennials and Zoomers are trying to square a 20^th-century romantic ideal of marriage with the circle of a post-marriage, 21^st-century sexual marketplace. It’s a conflict in the desire for a loving, monogamous marriage like Grandma and Grandpa had and the reassurances of keeping our sexual options open just in case your wife gets fat and frigid or your husband really isn’t the best you could do. And at no other point in human history have those (perceived) options been more ever-present. Women distrust men in meeting their needs over the long term. Men distrust the 20^th-century contract that maintains their “masculine duty” is to bet their futures on a woman remaining sexy, faithful, feminine, nurturing, and sexual while forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, til death do they part.

This old model of marriage is becoming obsolete by the day. I know that’s tough to digest, but we cannot achieve the romanticized goals of a 20^th-century Blue Pill ideal with an unignorable 21^st-century Red Pill awareness. As a society, we collectively know this on some level of consciousness. But we’re not ready to accept it. In evolutionary psychology, there is a concept called Genetic Gap. It describes the mismatch of how human beings struggle with new environments that our technology creates for us. The problem is this technology and the environments it creates happen so rapidly that we are presented with social, psychological, and sometimes survival situations that evolution never prepared us for. To our credit, humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to our environments. But since the turn of the 20th century, our technology has compounded and exponentially outstripped our ability to process, interpret and create best practices to cope with these changes.

When we fail to adapt rapidly enough to these new environments, humans defer to the old protocol until something prompts them or incentivizes them to develop a new set of Best Practices. When we can’t cope with new data effectively, we opt for how we always did things in the past. We look for the wisdom of the ancients to guide us in using modern technology. We complain about how we did things back then were so much better than how we do things today. Hollywood profits from the nostalgia we feel for much the same reasons. We want to return to tradition, but we waste our time trying to convince enough people of a romanticized past (that never existed) that we might be able to swing the pendulum back. We cannot proceed into the future by moving in reverse.

Regarding sexual/reproductive strategies, old-order, 20th-century ideals slam headlong into new-order, 21^st-century realities of the global sexual marketplace. Case in point: Adam 22 of the No Jumper podcast recently bemoaned his decision to allow his porn star wife (of 7 years) to shoot her first solo scene with a black man. Adam hashed out his inner conflict on Twitter and a podcast ironically featuring self-admitted cuckold husband Destiny. Both Adam and Destiny are, ostensibly, in Open Marriage arrangements with their ‘wives.’ Both men had marriage ceremonies, took vows, and, I presume, had some established boundaries for their marriage arrangement. All very traditional and 20^th-century. Except that Adam was a former(?) porn star himself and has done podcasts themed on interviewing and fucking the women interviewed. Destiny is openly bisexual, and his wife’s revenue comes primarily from doing amateur porn on OnlyFans.

Both Adam and Destiny are in what both have called Marriages. Some might call them nontraditional marriages. Some might not acknowledge them as such at all. Their marriage is an, Open on his end, Open on her end arrangement. Considering Adam’s discomfort with having his wife do solo porn on Brazzers, I have to assume there are some agreed limitations to the openness of their marriage. Likewise, I presume Destiny and his wife have some limitations on their sexual involvement with others. However, both of these marriages are essentially nontraditional, unconventional approaches to solving the reproductive problem of monogamy vs. polygamy in the 21st century. 

The 20^th-century ideal for marriage resolved this problem with a simple equation: Closed on his end, Closed on her end. At least, it attempted to, and it was a functional solution for thousands of years until the advent of hormonal birth control and the Sexual Revolution in 1965. In a post-agrarian world where populations exploded, socially enforced monogamy was a stabilizing social norm. As such, human societies mythologized and romanticized the Closed on his end, Closed on her end ideal. Monogamy was a much easier sell to the populace if God or Shakespeare said it was the right thing to do. Monogamy also aligned well with vulnerable women’s long-term needs for protection and provisioning and an evolutionary need for parental investment from both parents to ensure the survival of our delicate offspring.

You might be wondering why I used the term “polygamy” rather than “polygyny,” two paragraphs up. Because: Polygamy refers to a person (male or female) being married to two or more people at the same time. Polygyny refers to a man, in particular, being married to two or more women at the same time. I have to make this distinction to explain the next form of 21^st-century marriage, Open on his end, Closed on her (or hers) end. Up until the beginning of this year, I may have described this as the Andrew Tate / Justin Waller form of marriage. I’m fairly certain it was either Andrew or the late Kevin Samuels who coined that phrase. But like the other forms, this is an adaptation of modern marriage that seeks to resolve the reproductive problem of monogamy vs. polygyny (correct term used). 

Pragmatically, a “high-value man” benefits most, and his women benefit most when his needs are fulfilled, and he can reproduce ‘prolifically.’ This requires his women to sublimate their needs for long-term security, with the tradeoff being his extraordinarily high value. Men’s evolved sexual strategy has always centered on unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Big-brained evolutionary psychologists sugarcoat this fact by calling it “a need for sexual variety,” but that’s the proximate goal. The ultimate goal is unlimited access to reproductive opportunities. Most evo-psych luminaries are too chickenshit to type this out in a major publication. Which is ironic since all you need to do is point to the multi-billion dollar juggernaut that is free online streaming pornography and the rise of OnlyFans since the mid-2000s. In its many forms, pornography has always delivered the virtual experience of unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Yes, porn is sedation. Yes, porn is a pale imitation of the actual experience. But it’s also the logical result of the vast majority of men who will never experience true sexual selectivity.

But this is now the increasingly unpopular Dan Bilzerian model of “marriage,” such as it is. Not only does disavowing the ‘player’ lifestyle satisfy a false sense of self-righteousness, it virtue signals that a guy who never had anything like the selectivity of Dan has ‘seen the truth’ that Dan cannot. It’s the Prodigal Son narrative, only the son never really had the opportunity to leave the fold and spend his inheritance on hookers and blow. Sure, it’s a variation on sour grapes, but it’s one that plays well with the abandonment of the gender war for the culture war narrative.

When I’m asked to debate (insert eye-roll) TradCons and the liberal anti-Red Pillers about whether humans are innately monogamous or ‘pair-bonding,’ I usually decline because they’re fixated on ‘Gotcha!’  moment content that doesn’t ask the right question. When we refer to monogamy, polygamy, polygyny, bigamy, and polyandry, all of these terms have a shared context in their definitions. Each classification presumes a marriage is taking place. Again, Polygyny refers to a man, in particular, being married to two or more women at the same time. The institution of marriage is the commonality that describes the form. 

The real question is whether humans are innately monogamous or promiscuous. The answer to this is both. We can be both and often are. Is it reproductively expedient for men and women to Spin Plates (date non-exclusively) and exercise sexual selectivity? Is it reproductively expedient to reserve oneself for one mate, fall in love with, and pair bond in a way that emphasizes parental investment? These are Best Practices, and both are as correct or as incorrect as our options and environments warrant at any given time. It’s not about the moral implications of whether Dan Bilzerian or TradWife hubby is Best Practices for everyone. The conflict comes from how we struggle to define the formalization of these best practices (marriage) in a post-marriage 21^st-century world that desperately yearns for a 20^th-century romantic ideal they wish was possible.

Adam22’s internal conflict about his wife being railed by another man on video isn’t about him questioning his “secure masculinity.” It’s a conflict of the want for the security of old-order monogamy vs. a want to participate in the new-order opportunities for promiscuity — and then somehow get everyone to call it marriage so we feel better about it.