Having addressed yesterday, at least preliminarily and somewhat tentatively, the issue of terminology (which I will agree is important, as irritating as that may be at this stage of the conversation), I am going to move into the substance of the ideas that underlie the super-norm.
There have been a significant number of different iterations of what the super-norm is or might be. In light of that, I think it will be useful to have one post dedicated to laying out the main interpretations and theories, so that we can have them on the table in order to examine, compare, critique and refine them more fully in subsequent posts. I realize that this methodology may seem tiresome to some, but I think it’s critical to be more organized and systematic in how we approach this conflux of issues from the analytical perspective. I am not going to spend much time critiquing each perspective in this note — I intend to do so in later entries — but rather my intention here is to place the main perspectives on the table in one place so that we can examine each of them a bit more systematically in the context of each other in subsequent entries.
The “Feminine Imperative” (Rollo) — Rollo’s earliest articulations of the idea identified it as the “feminine reality”, describing it in this way:
Everything a man experiences, every social conditioning he receives from the earliest age, every accepted social norm and every expectation of him to qualify as the definition of a mature adult Man in contemporary society is designed to serve the female imperative. Moralist wallow in it, absolutists and defeated white knights existentially depend upon it, and even the better part of relativists still (often unwittingly) feed and serve the feminine purpose. In fact, so all encompassing is this reality that we define our masculinity in the terms of how well we can accommodate that feminine influence.
Note that the articulation of this is as social conditioning which molds behavioral expectations of men around the interests of women. Rollo cites the basis for this as the underlying female sexual strategy, hypergamy:
For one gender to realize their sexual imperative the other must sacrifice their own. This is the root source of power the feminine imperative uses to establish its own reality as the normative one. From this flows the rules of engagement for dating / mating, operative social conventions used to maintain cognitive dominance, and laws and legalities that bind society to the benefit of the feminine. From this is derived men’s default status as the ‘disposable’ sex, while women are the protected sex.
From this I think one can conclude that, for Rollo, the super-norm is comprised of the social conventions, rules of engagement for male/female interaction, expected life scripts, moral rules and the like which serve the female reproductive interest of hypergamy. From Rollo’s perspective, even the system we know as “patriarchy” is essentially a construct that serves the female interest predominantly, in reproductive terms:
The crowning irony of the feminine reality is that men should be accused of patriarchy while enabling the very framework of the feminine imperative. The feminine sexual strategy is victorious because even under the contrived auspices of male oppression, it’s still the female goal-state that is agreed upon as the correct effort. Satisfying the feminine imperative, achieving the ends of the feminine sexual strategy is still the normative condition. Men’s goals are aberrant, women’s are beatific.
Note that Rollo is not speaking about the specific imperative of any individual woman, or even of any collective, but rather about the scripts, norms, expectations and rules that enmesh social interaction between men and women, and their respective life paths.
The Moral Warp (Dalrock) — Dalrock has taken the basic ideas expressed by Rollo and repackaged them in a way that emphasizes the moral warping that happens when the super-norm is engaged:
The problem is the feminine imperative is much more insidious than simple moral indulgence. The feminine imperative has warped our very ability to think morally. For example, a recent commenter at Dr Helen’s blog offered the following helpful dating advice for men looking for good women:
…I have found that when men “go there too soon,” a woman feels regretful or in some cases objectified… Whether or not they were they said “no.”
So, if you are looking for “the one,” patience is the best. “Getting women in bed quickl” is the fastest way to get a woman out of your life, if you ask me. A good woman wants to wait, and you want a good woman for the long haul, I would think…
I guess I can only offer the “good-girl, looking for life-long partner” perspective. They are out there, maybe fewere and fewer?
How many even inside of the manosphere can spot this for what it really is? Most will mistake it for Christian sexual morality or at least something along those lines, instead of what it really is, the cuckoo chick which pushed Christian sexual morality out of the nest when no one was looking. Modern Christians can’t spot this for what it is so they nourish it as if it were their own. It takes a vigilant eye to spot this parasitic imposter as the feminine imperative masquerading as sexual morality. The beauty of it is even the woman writing this likely has no idea of what she is actually doing.
Where I think many are getting hung up is in the explanation of the mechanics of how all of this happens. This is certainly a valid and interesting discussion, but whether or not you agree with Rollo on the mechanism doesn’t invalidate the phenomenon. Something very real is happening, and it follows what is generally a distinct and recognizable pattern once you understand what a feral woman’s mating script actually looks like. In essence, what Rollo has done for us is both point out the pattern and offer an explanation at the same time. He may or may not be right about the explanation, but the pattern is as undeniable as iron shavings surrounding a magnet. We don’t have to know the mechanics of electromagnetic fields to see that there is a pattern there, and those who are objecting to the concept of the feminine imperative should take the same approach. While the mechanics may be in question, the result is undeniable.
For Dalrock, the traces of some kind of warping are present in what is almost universally accepted as a more moral, more right mating script — one which just so happens to match the hypergamic script, but which is packaged as being moral and pure and right and just in an objective moral sense. This disturbs him (rightly in my view) because it is not consonant with Biblical moral norms, yet it is peddled as moral and is widely assumed to be such even by “Bible Christians”. He notes this discordance and then posits the super-norm as a plausible explanation, while leaving open the “mechanics of how it happens” (i.e., how it came to be, how it becomes entrenched in society and in individual motives and so on). That is, Dalrock is observing a moral phenomenon and finding the super-norm as a plausible explanation for this widespread moral delusion. As he describes even more explicitly in a comment on his own post:
What she is describing is the script 90%+ of Christians have today. The path for a Christian woman to marriage is to practice serial monogamy until she finds “the one”, at which time she hands him an official man up card. Generally there is a wink and a nod pretending that this series of premarital boyfriends are chaste relationships, but 1) There is no biblical model of non sexual romantic relationships. This is a thoroughly modern invention. and 2) The vast majority of the time sex is involved and is merely overlooked.
For Dalrock, then, the super-norm is the underlying phenomenon that causes the moral distortion he observes — a distortion which has replaced biblical moral norms around the mating script (which can be described as hard monogamy) with the new norm of serial monogamy, which Dalrock himself has famously described as the female version of promiscuity. He leaves open for further discussion the specific ways and means by which this super-norm may operate (which likely led to much of the discussion in that specific thread), and opens the door to the idea that we may be speaking of two different things (i.e., one thing may be the pattern or manifestation which is observed and the other thing may be the underlying mechanic which brings the pattern or manifestation into being) but concludes that there must be something involved, apart from general feminism and general moral decay, because this behavior is not being presented as transgressive, but rather as good, and in a de facto way as “as moral as we can reasonably be today” by Christians as well.
Biology vs Culture and “Feminist” vs “Feminine” Imperatives (SunshineMary, James, other commenters) — This perspective is that anything comprising the super-norm is cultural and is to be distinguished from any underlying biological drives, which are cross-cultural. So, according to this perspective:
The masculine and feminine imperatives come from the reptilian hindbrain, and are the same in all places and all times. Matthew is right to suggest we distinguish this from “imperatives” that are specific to our place, time, and culture.
This perspective distinguishes between reproduction drives, on the one hand, and cultura developments, on the other, and tends to see the latter as being best described by some combination of: recent, aberrational, specifically tied to specific historical events, and not closely tied to underlying reproductive motives.
A related and similar perspective, articulated perhaps best by SunshineMary, draws a distinction between “the feminine imperative” (which is seen as good) and the “feminist imperative” (which is seen as bad):
This is why I have been teasing apart what I perceive as being two distinct concepts: the feminine versus the feminist imperative. I think moral Christians will probably still choose to follow the feminine imperative (the amoral, biological tendency to prioritize female well-being, which ends up being advantageous for both sexes), but they very much ought not to be following the feminist imperative (the immoral social construct which insists that men sacrifice for women but receive no benefits in return at all).
In this view, the biologically-based social tilt towards women is admitted, but is seen as a social good that is beneficial for everyone, while the cultural tilt towards women today is based on ideology and is pathological for everyone. This perspective would presumably see the trend towards serial monogamy being broadly morally endorsed as a manifestation of the latter rather than the former, but that is a topic I would like to address more fully in a subsequent note.
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There have been, of course, other articulations of the phenomenon made in various threads and comment boxes over the past few months, but as far as I can tell they mostly are riffs on one of the above perspectives, either agreeing with them, or critiquing them, or refining them. I will address some of these when I examine each of the three general perspectives above critically in the next series of posts on this topic.
“This perspective would presumably see the trend towards serial monogamy being broadly morally endorsed as a manifestation of the latter rather than the former, but that is a topic I would like to address more fully in a subsequent note.”
Great, I would really like to hear what you have to say about that. I got so much crap for my posts on this that it left a bad taste in my mouth, but I’m still really interested in these concepts.
A post is in the works — likely published over the weekend or early next week — that discusses that aspect of things.
You did get a lot of crap for your posts, but so did Dalrock — it’s a controversial issue and one that is still in the developmental stages. It is good that you blogged about it, I think.
[…] Lounge: Approaching the Super-Norm: Identifying Perspectives – Novaseeker summarizes Rollo’s concept of the Feminine Imperative, Dalrock’s idea of […]
I have to go with “feminist imperative.” “Feminine” suggests it’s something that serves being a woman. “Feminist” suggests trying to tilt everything to serve women.
Being the science geek that I am, I picture it like the Einsteinian view of gravity. A bowling ball on a mattress makes a depression, and a marble rolling along the mattress follow the curvature as if attracted to the bowling ball. A gravity well, such as a black hole, curves space to such a degree that it bends, or even sucks in, light. It can’t be observed directly, and its existence can only be deduced by observing its effects on the environment around it.
Replace “black hole” with “feminist imperative” and “light” with “society.”
The issue with that, I think, is that it suggests that it is relatively new, like feminism is considered to be. That’s something that gets to the heart of the concept, and which I will try to address when I finish the post on that aspect of the discussion.
The more I think about it, the more I think that “serial monogamy” is just no-fault divorce without court enforced property settlements. (And, as/if the definition of “common law wife” expands, that distinction may disappear.)
Susan Walsh and others like to say that LTRs are good “training” for marriage. I don’t think so. Devlin (her bete noir) makes the point that what LTRs really do is inculcate the expectation that love and all relationships are impermanent, to be ended at any time by one party for any reason. They nurture a kind of cynicism and defensiveness. Then along comes marriage, with the dress, the ceremony and the piece of paper and that’s supposed to override all this at a stroke.
But, borrowing from Madison, it’s just a “parchment barrier.” People’s outlook and expectations have already been set, even if only subconsciously.
I pointed this out to Susan once (without mentioning Sauron) and she admitted it was a danger but then went right back to selling LTRs as “training” for marriage.
True enough, Escoffier.
But Susan may be right, albeit not in a way she likely thinks she is: LTRs *are* training for Marriage 2.0, which, by law and social convention, really is only as durable as the heart’s desire, just as the case with an LTR. It’s like “an LTR with benefits (for the wife, primarily)”, so perhaps she’s simply quite right that serial LTRing is good training for Marriage 2.0.
This is where Dalrock’s insight (i.e., LTRs are the female form of promiscuity, at least in moral terms) combines with the idea of the Super-Norm (i.e., this female-advantaging mating script will be held up as not only acceptable but desirable and moral) in an interesting way with at least some apparent explanatory heft at first blush.
Well, this may be inconsistent, if so, so be it, I may talk myself out of it later but …
In certain respects I agree with Susan over Dalrock. That is, I think D takes a very hard line that N>1=slut, which seems very harsh to me. It makes sense for him because he wants to hold to a strict “Biblical frame” as he calls it. For myself, coming at it from a different perspective, agree that N=1 ought to be the norm for society and we were a lot better off when it was. But even then, you had lots of women who failed to meet the standard who turned out to be very fine wives. Just as today the % of wedding day virgins in the UMC approaches zero, yet they have the most successful marriages and lowest divorce rate of any socio-economic class.
The problem with deviating from the standard is that such “little” deviations from strict morality will always work out better for those who are more intelligent, more educated and just generally have better upbringing and impulse control. For everyone else, it leads to disaster. So, since Susan’s focus is almost exclusively on the UMC, she is not so concerned about a small number of LTRs prior to marriage. It works out for the girls she knows.
However, to your point, she is willing to say that marriage 2.0 is unjust and should be reformed. She will not, however, say that the LTR (plus one or two “mistakes”) mating script needs any reform. In fact, she bristles at the suggestion on the ground that moralizing will turn away her intended audience.
What I have tried to say is, OK, maybe that’s true, but couldn’t the UMC at least revert to hypocrisy? Preach traditional marriage even as they discretely fail to live up to its standards in their 20s. This is what they used to do. In a way, it’s what certain kids still do, when they conscientiously decline to rub mom & dad’s nose in the fact that they are having sex with their SOs. (Funny how the UMC will not be “judgmental” about sex but neither do they want to imagine what their own kids are up to. They demand at a minimum behavior that maintains plausible deniability.)
Anyway, it’s ironic that this is at once one of society’s easiest and most difficult problems to solve. It’s easy because, on an individual level, all one has to do is not indulge oneself. Just stop. The solution is within every person’s power. The fatalistic attitude prevalent today implicitly assumes that we are animals lacking free will, which is bunk. But it’s hard because when you have to think of ways to get the majority of people to start thinking and acting this way, everyone comes up blank.
I wouldn’t say that N>1=slut, but that doesn’t mean that engaging in serial LTRs is not equivalent to promiscuity, but just on the terms of the woman and not the man. The reason is that she is getting commitment-lite, but not really committing herself either, other than for as long as she feels like it. As I see it, this really is training wheels for Marriage 2.0, because that’s what Marriage 2.0 is, as I have personally experienced it myself. So she’s right, in my view, but in being right, she is wrong about this being good.
UMCs have low divorce rates for various reasons, most of them relating to greater future time orientation, greater focus on bad outcomes for kids, and greater stigma in the UMC community for divorcees. But none of that really means they have great marriages. Many of them don’t. They stay together when those “below” them don’t, because they emphasize the above factors more than those “below” them do. And, as you say, they then turn around and conclude that serial LTRs prior to marriage don’t impact divorce rates, when in reality it’s that they don’t impact divorce rates when the above factors are in place and people accept it (as well as accept a decent amount of adultery happening in these marriages without dissolving them).
So, I agree that N>1 isn’t equivalent to a slut. But serial monogamy prior to marriage is going in the same direction but just in female terms. If one disagrees, the question becomes “what N is the threshold?” and the answer usually is “none, as long as they were meaningful, deep and ‘committed’ (in a faux sense of course)”, which kind of underscores Dalrock’s point.
That’s a good point that it works for “the girls she knows.” I think a lot of older people — even if they know better — tend to think of LTRs the way it was when they grew up. As you say, many women didn’t come pure to their wedding night in the past. But in the 50s, say, she might have gone too far in the back seat that one time, or even several times with a couple different boyfriends, if her parents were out of town a lot. Then she gets married — maybe to the guy she gave it up to — and moves out of her parents’ house, and now it’s a completely different thing, because they can have sex whenever they want and present themselves as man and wife to society.
That’s very different from today’s serial-LTR paradigm. Now she has a series of boyfriends, never going without one for long, and most of the relationships involve sex. This goes on through college and her 20s, so she has her own place and no need to sneak around. In most families, she can even shack up with a guy and bring him home for Christmas, and no one complains too much. So with each guy, she can have all the sex she wants — no more furtive quickies in the back seat — and they can experiment, wake up together, spend time with each other’s families, watch porn together, whatever. The bonding that happens is bound to go a lot deeper, and likewise the jadedness that develops after a few of these.
So it’s not just that yesterday’s N=1 is today’s N=5, but that most of those 5 were like short marriages and divorces, with most of the same emotional ups and downs and resulting baggage. That seems to me what a lot of people like Susan are missing in this. I understand why she doesn’t want to say N>1=slut, and I tend to agree, because then what do we call N>20? But I do think it’s fair to differentiate between the girl who made a mistake (or a couple of mistakes) and realized it and tried to do better, versus the ones who have been pseudo-married for several years.
Well, I wonder if serial monogamy is such a lopsided benefit to women. Seems to me that either party can benefit, and what that means in practice is that whoever is least invested “wins.” Is that the woman in the majority of cases? Not sure, but I have never thought it through.
Perhaps I come at this from a skewed perspective having never having been “dumped” per se. The two longest relationships I had before marriage I walked away from because I knew in both cases she was not “the one.” Then as now, the culture said there was nothing wrong with what I had done. In fact, I told one of the stories at HUS in order to illustrate the danger to women. My college GF absolutely wanted to get married and I wanted to go to grad school, move around to various jobs, get to NY/DC, etc. She was quite upset about the ending.
Susan did not interpret that story the way I intended. To her, as long as no lies were told, nothing was “wrong.” My point was, this regime does not always work out well for young women. To be brutally blunt, I got what I wanted out of the situation and the GF didn’t. The “system” failed her. As did all her family and friends who were perfectly fine with the situation while it lasted.
I sort of disagree with your point about SM being training for marriage 2.0, in that I still think that when people get married, they think “this time it’s different.” This is a REAL commitment. We’ve formalized everything so there’s no just “breaking up.”
Now, in many cases they are deluding themselves. Plus, they don’t realize that they’ve already been trained by SM to take marriage less seriously. They think that by going through with all the solemnization rituals they have somehow fundamentally changed the nature of what they are doing. But what they haven’t changed is themselves.
On a side note, I wonder how many of the UMC marriages are either unhappy or drab. All the ones I can observe, which is a lot, seem very good from the outside.
On the marriages, I suppose we see different things, or just may know different people. The UMC marriages I know seem good “fron the outside”, but in observing some of them over a very long term (10+ years), and knowing where to look for the fault lines, I can see otherwise. They hide it well, generally, like most people hide things on Facebook, except this is of course real life (and most of these people are far, far more skilled at projection than the average Facebook user).
As for SM, I don’t think that it’s so much that it’s a lopsided benefit to women as much that it is preferable to them for a kinda-sorta-not-really-but-I-can-say-it’s-kinda-committed-to-my-girlfriends-and-the-sex-is-good-and-he’s-so-cuuute!- kind of thing. It’s preferable for women as a casual relationship as compared to a ONS for those (and probably others I am not identifying) reasons. ONSs also backfire sometimes on men (falls in love with her, last thing he wanted). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference between the sexes in terms of how they prefer to carry out casual sex (i.e., sex without a real commitment).
And, as you say, if people are deluding themselves about the “training” aspects of LTRs, that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t “training”. I think you are referring to “training” as meaning “preparing to succeed in”, whereas for me “training” could (and does) just as easily mean “conditioning to fail in”.
I am probably not that good at spotting the fault lines. Not on Facebook either, last person alive who isn’t.
I definetely agree that the vast majority of women vastly prefer LTRs to ONSs. In that sense it is the “female’s prefered form of promiscuity.” However, I still think that LTRs/SM basically benefit whoever is least interested. I don’t know how that breaks down, men v. women, and I really don’t even have a guess.
Yes, I meant “training” as in “preparing to succeed,” which is how Susan means it in this context.
I’d agree that ultimately every encounter in 2013 that is something other than a very chaste, Christian type of one (and even many of those) operates under the “one who if the least interested is in control and has the most to gain” principle. I suspect its breakdown on a sex basis is that men gain more from ONSs and women gain more, on average (not in every case, as it is also not in every case for ONSs) from serial LTRs. But I don’t know that — I suspect it from observation, but that is anecdote.
Regarding peer opinion and reputation, I think it breaks down this way:
Men: mostly get validation/kudos from their friends for ONSs. LTRs are tolerated or better, except if the girl is particulary unattractive and/or the guy’s peer group is a bunch of players.
Women: get lots of validation from girlfriends for LTRs. Mostly are stigmatized for ONSs, unless they mostly hang out with other sluts.
So, women have much to lose from ONSs in a way that men don’t have much to lose from LTRs. Women definitely gain more validation for LTRs than men do, but do they gain more validation from LTRs than men gain from ONSs? Not sure about that.
Okay.
To me, it’s about which method of having casual sex is preferred by each sex.
In my experience, women gain a lot of kudos socially from their peers by being in a “LTR-relationship-pseudo-prep-marriage-unless-Im-too-young” type of thing. Men gain kudos for having a GF, and for having sex (presumably), because it is rare for most young men. It is less kudos than having sex on demand, of course, because guys know that you are not having options (they know if you do — when I was 20 I know we differentiated in that way, regardless of how we described it in words). So women lose more from ONSs, socially among their peers, men gain from having any access at all to women — which means in a woman-centric system it would be focused on serial monogamy/LTRs, coupled with opportunistic (and hopefully quiet and overseas) ONSs. In a man-centric system it would be focused on ONSs, which demonstrate more sexual access than having to commit to an LTR does.
Now I know you will object and say that a ONS system doesn’t favor most men but only favors the alphas. That’s true — my ideal proposition was concerning a man who would have access under either means. But it’s also the case that for LTRs most men have no greater access than they do to ONSs. Women are as picky, and even pickier, for LTRs than they are for ONSs, and so it isn’t a huge access benefit for men — in fact it’s flat.
B, are you saying that it’s easier for a guy today to get a ONS than a LTR? I’m not saying you’re wrong–I honestly have no idea–but if that is correct, it’s 180 degrees different than what I remember and experienced. The world has changed a lot in a very short time.
I suppose you’re write that in a man-centric system the focus would be more on ONSs. That just puts me on the left tail, though, because I think whatever “system” I lived under I would still prefer LTRs. Then again, until one is presented with realistic possiblities, one never knows how one will respond.
[…] my previous post about the super-norm, I identified three main strands of thinking which have arisen in response to the constellation of […]