Status and the One Simple Trick
There is no one-time fix for male status
A recent discussion of the problem of how young women have perceived college and career as the higher-status path for them in comparison with marriage and motherhood went so far off the rails that it was as comical as it was predictable. One gentleman even resorted to an AI to get the machine perspective on it.
Would openly mocking women for going into debt to get useless basket-weaving degrees and getting make-work adult daycare jobs that are going to be replaced by AI create intrigue in women and make the man come across as a bad boy?
(thought for 5s)
No, openly mocking women this way would rarely crate genuine intrigue or “bad boy” appeal for most women. It would more likely come across as bitter, condescending, or low-status resentment than confident, edgy dominance.
First, let me point out the absurdity of asking an AI about female behavior. The only thing more likely to produce a false and misleading take would be asking women about it. Remember, AIs are trained on predominantly Gamma behavior, so their advice about women is predictably terrible.
Second, the entire context of the discussion was the need to convince young women that prioritizing university degrees and professional careers is a mistake due to three important factors:
Birth rates are sub-replacement level across the entire developed world.
University degrees require an astronomical level of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
The vast majority of white collar corporate jobs that women with college credentials presently hold are the very jobs that are a) the least productive, b) the least necessary, and c) the most likely to be replaced by AI in the near future.
Now these are very difficult points to dispute, but since the average young girl of 16-18 knows nothing about the corporate world, has time-preferences measured in nanoseconds, and has not devoted any thought whatsoever to the practical realities of the future objectives that have been implanted in her mind by her parents, her peers, her teachers, and social media since the age of five, the dialectical approach of pointing out the obvious is going to bounce right off her like a rubber bullet bouncing off Superman’s chest.
Hence the suggestion of the rhetorical approach, which has reliably proven to be the most effective method of changing female perspectives. And when someone pointed out that young women were likely to find the rhetorical argument unconvincing and contentious when presented by an average or low-status man, I simply observed that his concerns about presenting an argument that would be seen as contentious were conflict-avoidant, tended to code as low-status cowardice, and that he’d be better off taking the chance of being seen as a bad boy for his consensus-violating opinion than meekly refraining from taking the risk of upsetting a college-bound young woman dreaming of a high-flying career of wearing pencil skirts while making Powerpoint slides for high-status men in suits.
None of this had anything to do with a man trying to elevate his own status this way. The objective was to figure out how to communicate a dialectical point in a rhetorical manner capable of inverting the perceptions of young women regarding their future prospects. It’s really remarkable how, no matter what the topic or context, low-status men manage to somehow make it all about their own potential self-improvement.
