This is a message for girls.

With all the advantages given to pretty girls, and also how easy it is to be one, you would think that there would be more pretty girls around. But, unfortunately, the majority of American women today are fat and ugly. Specifically, 70% are obese or overweight, and that does not count those that are ugly for other factors, including bad dress, bad manner and intentional uglification including green hair and noserings.

This is good for those girls that are not fat and ugly, since they face very little competition, and natural beauty is in unnaturally short supply, and the advantages that accrue to beauty are thus increased even more.

I think that nearly any woman age 16-25 can be “beautiful.” Compared to a 35 or 50 year old woman, the advantages of raw youth are so great that you would have to be rather ugly not to be considered “pretty” during these years.

So, this is how to do it:

Basically, you have to be thin and healthy, and have a natural feminine interest in making yourself look good. By this I mean clothing, hairstyle, manner and so forth. You do not need to be a fashion expert or do amazing wizardry with makeup. You just have to master some basic skills, and not intentionally try to make yourself ugly. (Long hair please.)

“Thin and healthy” is the natural state of young women. This requires only two things: good diet, and regular exercise. Unfortunately, this has become rare today. So, you are going to have to do something that is different from what everyone else is doing, which is eating bad food and not exercising adequately.

By “good diet” I mean WHAT you eat, not HOW MUCH. Calorie restriction is generally unproductive. Your body will naturally maintain a healthy equilibrium if it is provided with good food, and you don’t binge.

If you want, you can use moderate calorie restriction during a short “slim-down” phase, and then discard it afterwards. But, you might find that, if your diet is very high in quality, and you are also exercising, you can lose a lot of weight while also eating all that you want. Carol Alt was one of the top models of the 1980s, with over a hundred magazine covers to her name. Playboy magazine called her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Calorie restriction and daily exercise was part of her professional regime. She even made a series of exercise videos. This, she says, was an exhausting process, and left her chronically unhealthy. Later, she cleaned up her diet (going full Raw although including some meat), and found that she got better results while eating all she wanted and also exercising less.

There are, unfortunately today, too many seemingly-contradictory notions of what constitutes a “good diet.” Basically it is: natural, whole foods. Fruits, vegetables, and meats. Avoid all processed foods. Basically, “single ingredient foods” are best. If it has a package or a list of ingredients, avoid it (in principle, with some exceptions). For example: beef does not have a list of ingredients. Neither do pineapples, potatoes, paprika, or beans.

Avoid the Genetically Modified foods. Mostly, this means soy products, and corn products. Wheat has not been “genetically modified” in a laboratory, but it underwent many changes and seems to have developed problems from around 1980. That is the basis for the “gluten-free” (basically, wheat-free) movement today. Wheat today is not what it once was. It has the same name, but it is different.

We rarely eat soy and corn today except in processed foods. So, if you eliminate processed foods, you will also eliminate most soy and corn. If you really want to have something with soy or corn in it (tofu or polenta perhaps), then look for organic alternatives.

Avoid the White Foods. This means foods made from: white flour, white sugar, milk, and salt. Mostly, these are baked goods, and things such as pancakes. I would avoid all dairy, on principle, or at least reduce dairy substantially. Avoid large amounts of vegetable oils. If you are going to use vegetable oils, avoid frying (high heat), and look for raw oils such as olive oil. These are also referred to as “refined foods” (refined flour, refined sugar, refined oils).

Eat a lot of fruits: citrus, apples, pineapples, bananas, berries, grapes, mangoes, dates, figs, melons etc. Most people don’t each much fruit. One thing that is nice about fruit is that you don’t have to cook it. Mostly, you just stick it in your mouth.

Eat a lot of vegetables: potatoes, squash, beans, lentils, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, leafy green vegetables, broccoli, etc. etc. etc.

Eat some meat, if you want to, or go vegan if you want to.

If you are going to get very serious about developing a great body in not much time, I would do a Raw Vegan diet for six months. This means mostly raw fruit, with some other vegetables.

A lot more can be said about what a “good diet” might entail, but all the better proposals typically have these elements.

Now, exercise:

Get regular exercise. This can take many forms, including sports, dance, or hard manual labor. If you don’t know what to do, then consider a video workout program such as those provided by Beachbodyondemand.com. These typically take around 30-45 minutes per day, and are very effective. It costs $99 a year and you can do it in your living room. For maximum results, work out every day (which means six days a week with a recovery day).

That’s it. Good food and exercise.

The average girl today, if she wasn’t fat or intentionally uglified, would probably be about a 7/10, which is a pretty high score. Even a girl who was genetically undergifted would probably be at least a 5/10, which is not bad (“plain, homely”), and could probably move up to a 6/10 if she had a particularly hot body (works out every day) and took some care with hair and clothing.

5/10 to 7/10: A nice girl-nextdoor look, without the flab of the actual girl next door.

5/10 to 8/10: A somewhat average girl, but That Body …

2/10 to 7/10: Awesome accomplishment.

3/10 to 9/10: Maybe more of an 8/10, with a bonus point for presentation.

Maintaining a trim, healthy body with good food and regular exercise does not end after you bag a man on your wedding day. You should consider it a fundamental wifely duty, and also, something that you will teach your children. Probably your husband would get interested as well, which would be very advantageous for you.

Note to girls: Probably any girl who gets regular work as a fashion model should be considered a 10/10. However, in practice, the 10/10 rank is a matter of a man’s personal taste. Every time a man says: “That girl is a 10,” there are three other men, with different tastes, who will say: “That girl? She’s an 8 at best!” For this reason, men almost never use the 10 ranking.

Matriarchy does not exist. Apparently, it has never existed. Anthropologists can’t find a single example of it.

Most anthropologists hold that there are no known anthropological societies that are unambiguously matriarchal, but some authors believe exceptions may exist or may have.

There are very male-dominant patriarchies, where women may be forbidden to vote or own property. And there are situations where women take an almost equal role with men, which is common today. But, there has been no society where women lead and men follow.

Feminists today will no doubt claim: “Because, nobody thought of it!” Oh, in all of the history of civilization, there has never been a woman who seeks power over men? Even when a woman is in power, and in fact rules well, she is something of a caretaker of a patriarchy.

“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

Queen Victoria (1819-1901), ruler of the British Empire at its peak.

Apparently, if there ever was a matriarchy, it collapsed so fast that no historical record of it was left.

There have always ever been good patriarchies, and bad ones.

An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.

Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is considered one of the best operas of all time. At one point, the peasant girl Zerlina is seduced by the licentious nobleman Don Giovanni, but they are interrupted before proceeding. Her (unconsummated) infidelity discovered, she goes to her fiance and begs him to forgive her. Specifically, she requests for him to beat hear. “I am here, meek as a little lamb, awaiting your blows.” The aria is called: “Batti, batti, o bel Masetto,” or “Beat me, beat me, handsome Masetto.”

My reaction is that women are desperate for male discipline. Rules. “Frame.” Basically, patriarchy. By themselves, they are formless and inconstant. She wants to be punished, because that is what the kind of man she wants should do, in this situation. Only a sniveling fool would take back a woman after that kind of transgression without punishment. Then, having been properly punished and thus reconciled, they can get on with some hot forgiveness sex.

Her fiance is here played as a sniveling fool, but that is perhaps a “modern” interpretation.

“Sluts” and “whores” are often words used interchangeably, but to my mind they have rather different meanings.

A “slut” is a woman who is promiscuous for fun. Specifically, I would identify a “slut” as a woman who exceeds a sexual partner count of 15-20 or so where it appears that she becomes incapable of a stable monogamous relationship. I find this boundary pops up again and again. For example, it is about the same as Terrence Popp’s “dick stacking test.” Popp says: take the number of sexual partners a woman has had, multiply by 6″ (the average dick length), and push her off a platform of that height. If she doesn’t get hurt, she’s OK. Obviously, 15-20 dicks would mean 7.5-10 feet, which is about as high a platform as a woman could be pushed from without injury.

But, even sex gets a little boring eventually. A woman becomes a “whore” when she stops having sex for personal enjoyment, and begins to see it as a means to some other end, typically money and status. Around this time, she stops having sex with sexy broke guys, and becomes a gold-digger. A “whore” may be paid by the hour; she may be paid in the form of presents, expensive dinners, weekends out of town or yacht voyages that affluent men often provide; or she may be paid by a multiyear contract (marriage), but in either case, its a sex-for-money transaction. Typically this transition from “slut” to “whore” takes place around age 26-28.

You could argue that any marriage can be a sort of sex-for-money transaction, but what characterizes the whore is that her benefit comes at another’s expense — her husband, children, and those around her. She is inherently destructive and consumptive. It is a negative-sum proposition. The man eventually realizes that he is married to a parasitic predator. A good wife works in cooperation with the husband, and the result is benefit for the husband and children, and also for the wife herself. It is inherently a productive, mutually-beneficial engagement.

Some whores go back to being sluts. If their attempts at gold-digging — or in fact marrying any beta chump who will serve as a meal ticket — fails, or if she blows up her marriage for an exit bonus of cash and prizes, she may go back to having sex for fun. This is typically between age 35-45. Then, she becomes a “cougar,” and goes back to sexy broke guys, typically much younger. She might still be conducting a gold-digging campaign of some sort, but without much success, having aged out of the range where any man with enough cash would be interested.

Tolstoy wrote that arranged marriage was common in Russia before 1800 or so. Typically, the larger the estate, and the more at stake, the less things would be left to a young man or woman’s “feeeelingz.” Mr. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, has an effective arranged marriage with Anne de Bourgh, the heir of a great estate. His refusal (dumb!) to marry Anne (who was sickly but probably a very fine woman otherwise, raised up to her elevated class and station), instead choosing Elizabeth Bennett, makes up the drama of the novel.

To give you an idea, this is the house (“Rosings”) where Anne lived, as represented in the 2005 BBC production, and which she would have inherited along with all of the productive agricultural assets which made this lifestyle possible, and which Darcy would have been master of, if he had married Anne, as both his mother and Anne’s mother wished.

Here is Anne de Bourgh herself, as played in the 2005 BBC production:

I know what you are thinking: “I wouldn’t bang her for a billion dollars!” Obviously, Pride and Prejudice is extreme women’s fantasy, albeit gorgeously written.

OK, girls, here is Mr. Darcy, to whom Anne’s marriage was arranged:

And here is his house (“Pemberly”), a mere rustic shack by comparison:

But the point … oh yes, the point … is that arranged marriage was common in the West, as it is also common in India and East Asia.

Here is a representation of an arranged marriage between two middle-class people, in Tokyo in 1860, from the NHK drama Shinsengumi (2006). (Go to 4:16. For some reason, embedding YT times has been problematic. For a little better view of what she looks like, go to 40:57.)

Conservatives are often called the “brakes on the runaway Progressive train.” They slow down the process of degeneracy caused by Cultural Marxism, but don’t do much to repair it, or reverse the process.

Usually, “conservatives” regard whatever the norms of their youth were as “traditional.” When “dating” (premarital sex in monogamous relationships) became popular in the 1920s, it was considered degenerate compared to the “traditional” practice of Courtship. But, by the 1950s, “dating” (serial monogamy, although with marriage the assumed destination) was the norm. Today, people who grew up with “dating” in the 1950s and 1960s now consider that to be “traditional” or “conservative,” while Courtship is alien and forgotten. In the 1960s, cohabitation before marriage (“shacking up”) was considered degenerate. By the 1990s, when I was young, this had become the norm, although by the 1990s “serial monogamy” did not have the assumption of concluding in marriage, but was more often conceived as a stable state in itself. Hookup culture was spreading but had not become dominant. Today, a monogamous cohabiting young couple is considered to be fairly “traditional,” and on a likely path to formalizing what has effectively already become a marriage. It is getting a little hard today to even imagine a couple that would take the leap to marriage without cohabiting first. Cohabiting is not very compatible with hookups, long-term Friends With Benefits arrangements or polyamory, which is considered degenerate today but is on the now-well-worn path toward normalization.

Thus, the whole process has been one long slide of continuous degeneracy from the original model of Courtship, which proved to be stable and productive for centuries. Today, we can look back on this and say that it does not make much sense to try to recreate the norms of our youth (for me, serial monogamy or “dating” leading to cohabitation), as that was just a transient period in a long path of decay, which has no inherent advantages or evidence of long-term sustainability.

So, we are left with studying patterns that have not existed for about a century. There is nothing within living memory worth “conserving.” We have to build anew, from fresh materials.

I was once in a long conversation with a friend, who was the sole earner in a family of five (three daughters!) with a stay-at-home wife. This ranged over many topics, and was one of my early learning experiences regarding husband/wife relations.

Basically, he had a consistent problem (in my view, and I think he shared this view) of failing to be the leader of the family. Naturally, to keep the ship from running onto the rocks completely, the wife must step into the leadership role, and pretty soon regards her husband as incapable of leadership.

But, this was all very abstract. Finally, it came down to a single, practical topic: Control The Money.

I will highlight this here for those men who didn’t quite hear what I am saying: CONTROL THE MONEY.

When you control the money, you are pretty much the boss. Your wife can blah blah blah all goddamn day, but you CONTROL THE MONEY so you say what’s what, bitch. Since, in this case, he was the sole provider of said money, this was easy to do. Obviously it gets more difficult in a two-income family, which I will discuss at some other point.

What this means is:

The man makes all the major financial decisions. This probably includes:

The house
The cars
Major education expenses, such as private schools or colleges
Other big “infrastructure” payments like health insurance or other forms of insurance
Home renovations
Vacations
All intermittent big-dollar purchases like major appliances or furniture
Savings and investment

Your wife can certainly be involved in this process. You can talk together for months about what kind of house you want, what neighborhood, and so forth. You can even delegate major responsibilities to her. You think we need a new sofa? Go find one you like, and show me. But, in the end, the man gives the thumbs up/thumbs down on the purchase, and writes the check, from the checking account that HE ALONE CONTROLS.

All of his employment income goes into this account. There is no “joint bank account.” He pays for the major expenses directly, including the home mortgage, taxes, and automobiles.

The wife typically gets a monthly budget, which takes care of a multitude of recurring monthly expenses, and childcare items. The man writes a check to his wife each month, and she deposits it in her account which SHE ALONE CONTROLS. The wife may argue that she should have more money, or less. But, in the end, the husband decides what she gets. This monthly budget covers things like groceries, gasoline, possibly monthly utility bills, minor children’s expenses like clothing and school supplies, and some fun money for her to buy nice clothes and go have lunch with her woman friends.

That’s it. Do this and you will be The Boss. Your wife might even get a little tingly as a result.

If courtship is difficult to imagine today, arranged marriage is so totally alien to us that it rarely even crosses people’s minds as a possibility. But — listen up, Disney Princess girls — it was the way actual princesses got married for centuries.

I mention this in respect to the difficulties of constructing a Traditional Courtship model today. If a woman isn’t going to go to college, or have a career, she really, really needs to find a husband. An arranged marriage is much easier to understand than courtship. Basically, parents find an appropriate husband for their daughters. (This implies the willingness of young men to also participate in the process, but I think that this is not necessarily such a big hurdle.) They do all the regular background work. Commonly, the young couple meets at some point, as the marriage is discussed. Mostly, this is a check to see if the proposed match meets some kind of minimum standards — not too fat, ugly or bad-mannered as to be inconceivable. But, often photographs are passed around beforehand anyway. In practice, there was some potential for overlap between an arranged marriage and courtship: an arranged pair could “court” for a month to see if there was compatibility. It is said that a woman decides within one minute whether she is going to sleep with a man. Maybe deciding whether a man is marriageable or not takes about the same amount of time.

Arranged marriages generally have a good track record of success. From the man’s point of view, if a man is interested in marriage (and many are), why not go for a beautiful, innocent young virgin bride, who, at your twenty-year wedding anniversary, is still going to be a sexy 38? And why struggle through all the difficulties of the dysfunctional dating/courtship process, perhaps over a period of years, when you can just raise your hand, say “OK, I’m ready, find me a girl,” and get matched up perhaps within a couple months?

In the era of Courtship (before 1920), young women generally lived at their father’s house until they were married. This produced a desirable wife — young, virginal, innocent, well-trained, well-cared-for, horny as heck and anxious for a home and husband of her own. But, a young man who lived at his father’s house was not exactly prime husband material.

There were some exceptions to this: In general, the eldest son would inherit the family farm/estate/business. As a young man, he would probably be “working” at the farm or business, in preparation to eventually taking it over. (Farming is hard work, and among the Amish today, men commonly step back from hard physical labor around age 50, leaving this to their sons.) These heirs could be desirable husbands, although they typically came with a lot of complications, in particular the mother-in-law who was often a tyrant to a young wife.

But, otherwise, a man would have to go out in the world and establish some kind of career. This took some time, and during that time, the man would often live alone. He might be traveling the world as a soldier, sailor or merchant. He might be moving from city to city, for business, or to build a career. When he got married, he was perhaps age 21-35, commonly 3-10 years older than his wife who married at age 16-25.

During this time, a man might gain some “experience” — that is, he was not a virgin at marriage. Usually this was not talked about much, and it was easiest to just make believe that he was a virgin like his wife. Also, it was, to some degree, a sign that the man was not a complete loser, and could make things happen in the world. A little dalliance was looked over, but debauchery (a “rake”) was not respected. As I noted earlier, it appears that the pair-bonding effect in men declines over a much longer period than for women. While the pair-bonding effect deteriorates with perhaps five partners for women, it takes thirty for men. Most men did not come anywhere near this figure before getting married, so their pair-bonding impulse was largely intact.

I have been enjoying this summary by Sigma Frame about the state of “courtship models” today. But, as I have said, I do not want to repeat this analysis, which has been very well done by others, nor particularly add to it, since I think we have mostly done enough by this point, and what has been done is mostly correct, or functional — not in error.

But, all of this has to be boiled down into some basic structures, or “things to do.” As I have said, it has to be something that a fourteen-year-old girl can understand, and put into practice — and get good results. The most recent attempt to do so, the “purity movement” of the 1990s and 2000s, ran into a surprising number of difficulties. Nevertheless, it was a noble and earnest attempt, which continues today in an evolving form. We should respect all those that participated. It is not easy to be pioneers.

I read the novels of the nineteenth century with interest, because it was the last time that “courtship” worked properly in the West. One of the things you notice is that there is no “dating.” Courting couples do not dress up and go to restaurants. From the highest levels of society (War and Peace) to the lowest (Little House on the Prairie, or Peggotty and Mr. Barkis in David Copperfield), nobody ever goes to a restaurant. They do not seem to exist.

The primary social interactions seem to be social events (particularly dances), and also, visits to a young woman at her father’s home. In practice, in small communities everybody tended to know everyone else from childhood, and would bump into each other while going about their business, or in church (this is perhaps one reason why people made such an effort to dress up for church). Among the leisure class, people made a constant stream of visits to each others’ houses. In those days, there was no television, recorded music, radio, internet, video games or social media. If you were tired of reading, there wasn’t much else to do but talk to your neighbors. People did not suffer from an excess of choice. Your future spouse probably grew up within forty miles of you.

Courtship was not supposed to be “for fun,” but it was supposed to be fun — that is, a woman and a man would enjoy spending time together. If a man showed a heightened level of interests in a woman, and they were understood to be “courting,” it was expected that the man would either propose to the girl, or get lost within a few months. If a woman was expecting a proposal from a man she liked, and planned to accept it, she might refuse the advances of other men during that time. If it turned out that the man was just fooling around and having fun (“having fun” here meaning spending some pleasant time together, probably without getting to the handholding stage), then he would be wasting the woman’s time and she might have turned down some other suitors that were more serious. This is actually a major plot device in some novels. If you were aiming to get married at age 18, you couldn’t dilly-dally with timewasters.

Nevertheless, “courting” was mostly supposed to be light and enjoyable, like “dating” today. Of course there was always the consideration of whether a person (the man, usually) was an appropriate match, but this happened in the background. The purpose of “courting” at all was to develop or explore some connection between the pair that went beyond their “courtship resumes.” It was also to develop the interest and motivation that would lead young people to make a commitment. It was about “soft” aspects — personality, character, physical appearance. If it was only about “courtship resumes,” then you could just have an arranged marriage and forget about “courtship.”

A lot of “courting” was done with the assistance of older adults, particularly a woman’s mother and her matronly friends. It became known that a young woman, or a young man, was serious about finding a spouse, and pretty soon the older women would be involved in matchmaking. This relied, in part, upon a community of older women, which was more common when women were housewives, and weren’t distracted by television. They spent a lot more time chatting together, under one pretense or another.

Courtship could be very brief. In Hermann and Dorothea (1797), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a young man meets the woman of his interest for the first time in the morning. Her background is checked out by some older, wiser friends (a doctor and a priest) in the afternoon. He proposes to her (with some plot complications) that evening, and they are married before midnight.

At times, courtship could be extended for a very long time, but this was really “engagement,” not courtship. The promise to marry was already given (although it could be taken away). The most common reason was that the young man had good prospects (he was in law school for example) but was not yet ready to support a family. Or, perhaps there was some other complication, such as that the woman was in mourning for her father.

Marriage itself was not some drawn-out affair, as it often becomes today, with planning stretching over a year. Once the marriage is agreed to, it could take place three days later, and typically did not cost a lot of money.

Today, we generally do not have the social environment that was common at that time. It is hard to imagine “calling on a woman” at her father’s house today, if you are over the age of sixteen. We do not have the close-knit communities in which everyone knew everyone else. High school and college does create a community of this sort today, but the relationships that are formed there are, in many cases, assumed to be transient. Even among the working classes, who do not expect to go to college and who will probably live near where they went to high school, people today do not seem to find their spouses in high school, as many probably did in the 1950s. The upper classes do not spend their time visiting each other, as they once did. Social dancing, or other such events where some connection could be made between men and women, does not exist anymore. It is hard to imagine any kind of relationship with a woman one meets at a “dance club” today besides a hookup. The workplace serves as a major courting arena in some cultures today (notably Japan), was probably the place that many American men found their wives in 1900-1980, and which even in 1990 was the place that 20% of Americans found their spouses. But, that was down to 10% in 2005-2009, and given all the dangers of such activity today, is probably going to slide towards zero.

This brings us to “traditional dating,” as Thomas Umstattd suggested in Courtship in Crisis. Unfortunately, in the effort to break from “dating,” (premarital monogamous relationships including sex, or pre-sex — First, Second and Third Base — among the very young), many interested in courtship also eliminated dating, which is: going on dates. But, without the infrastructure of alternatives to dating, as a way for young people to spend some time together and make a connection, too often people are left with nothing at all.