Insight into AA and scarcity

[iceberg slim]

Yo - recently there was a question about why all guys aren't obsessed with cold approach. My response was that the reason is AA--which is based on a very deep fear built into mens brains via evolution. I speculated that this fear is related to fear of public speaking, which is essentially fear of embarrassment. Why is embarrassment so scary? Because if our ancestors did something really embarassing and got kicked out of their tribe, they were basically dead. Another hypothesis is that romantically approaching a woman you don't know triggers fear of incurring the wrath of other men who lay claim to her, which could also result in death. I thought this second hypothesis seemed less likely, but I recently read something that has me second guessing that.

From the book "The Marriage Problem" by James Wilson:

Moreover, there are some important differences in how the sex ratio affects behavior, differences that have a large cultural component. Consider the case of very high sex ratios-lots of men, few women. They have existed in old California gold mining towns, among Chinese laborers brought to this country to build the railroads, and in the southern colonies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Southern and gold rush Americans elevated decent women onto a pedestal, defending their honor and attacking their detractors with grim determination. In Yellowstone City, the law once imposed the death sentence on anyone insulting a respectable woman. Some cowboys were even afraid to talk to decent women for fear of getting into trouble. As late as the 1910s, David Courtwright reports, Wyoming ranch hands would call out, "Church time!" when a mar- ried woman approached and then lapse into an awkwardly respectful silence. In the violent mining town of Bodie, California, respect for married women was enforced by a resort to sudden death for any detractor.

So, yes, even in somewhat recent history approaching a woman romantically could result in very serious consequences, including death. I remember reading a long time ago that some scholars think that female scarcity is the true theme underlying Homer's Iliad. The war between the Greeks and Trojans was over Helen, but it represents the fact that tribes of that era often went to war for the purpose of taking women from each other.

Another concept of note from the book is that when a given society has more men than women, women have more bargaining power, and consequently more men get married and stay married, and more children are born in wedlock and are raised by both parents, which is better for the children. When there are more women than men, the opposite of all those things is true, and children do worse. So from the perspective of reproduction and the well being of children, who are the future of our species, it could be argued that men being in scarcity is better than men being in abundance. I hope that it's possible for there to be a higher paradigm where men can be in abundance, and CHOOSE to reproduce and stay with their wives to raise the kids, as opposed to feeling trapped based on scarcity. It certainly is interesting to consider how this idea interfaces with pickup.

What do ya'll think?