A vulgar retort to hoe_math and his ilk
A vulgar image for a vulgar essay
by Tom Amarque
I find the content by hoemath—that is, his brand specifically, but also him as a stand-in for culture critics focusing on the male & dating crisis—quite entertaining. Especially in a time when everybody is confused about the dating rules in a quasi (post-)feminist internet age, hoe_math provides an interesting take. He is very well versed in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, and he lays out in detail a sort of all-quadrant explanation of why feminism did not have only good consequences and led to a societal structures that seemingly benefits women more than men—but in the end also takes its toll on women too. It’s an argument that does make sense.
More concretely, he argues that the game is not only stacked against men on a superficial level (because women now look for high-value guys, completely ignoring 90% of the male dating pool), but, on deeper analysis, also against women—because feminism has betrayed its main target group. While the costs for men are more visible, the costs for women are more pernicious and not so easy to spot since these policies that favour women lead men to opt out of the game—meaning, in effect, that everybody loses. hoe_math focuses extensively on the gold-double standard of feminism: that women want equality but still secretly desire the alpha “Chad” who has more resources—resulting in him drowning in pussy without ever having the need to commit to a relationship.
For women, who have a more pressing biological imperative to create offspring until they are forty, this is especially harrowing, because feminism leads them to believe that they can have it all without sacrificing anything. This is the so-called “table argument.” In the end, they have nothing, except a few cats.
There are many culture critics who follow this line of reasoning, and on a surface level it does make sense. You find variations of this thinking with critics like Hannah Pearl Davis and Anna Khachiyan, two women I would love to see become more prominent role models for women today. I think these culture critics are important, because a good part of their argument is that we can’t have relationships without sacrifice. That is an eternal truth. Your life gets better the more you are able to sacrifice. You can’t go wrong with that one. Yet their overall argument is fundamentally flawed.
The problem starts with the somewhat ironic obfuscation that their analysis of culture obscures a deeper truth—namely, that culture is stacked on top of biology. Culture doesn’t exist independently of biology; it necessarily plays by the same rules, even if that isn’t easily discernible. The point of biology in general—and of the selfish gene in particular—is that it acts out sheer self-preservation. You could say that this is its biological imperative: its only goal is offspring and reproduction. Nothing else.
Culture is informed by this. It neither makes sense intuitively nor scientifically that culture would engage in games that run contrary to biological programs. Which means, contrary to hoe_math’s argument, culture now is not stacked against males (nor females). Quite the opposite. Biology and culture do all they can to stack the deck in your favour. It might not look that way, but it is.
Sure, culturally speaking, sometimes things get worse fast or incrementally, but things also get better fast and incrementally. That’s normal system-behaviour (aphanipoiesis, as systems theorist Nora Bateson would say). The tricky thing is to sort out what’s happening on what level. For example, the beginning of the 20th century was characterized by two horrifying world wars, an epidemic, and a grave economic crisis. Yet much of our modern technology, art, philosophy, and science originated in that era. These were expressions of a sort of paradoxical vitality that followed very distinct biological and cultural rules. Yes, it would have been great if we hadn’t had two world wars—but then we also wouldn’t have nuclear energy, the space program, Teflon pans, the Frankfurt School, the internet, a global sort of postmodern consciousness, the ‘greene meme’, psychoanalysis, New Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll, feminism, and so on. There’s also an argument to be made for gene drift and a revitalization of the gene pool that operates behind the curtains of tribes and cultures going to war – but we’re not ready to have that discussion yet.
Anyway, the problem of dating (in any era) is that it is supposed to be complicated. If hoe_math had read any novel from before the 20th century, he would find that the vast majority deal with the problem of finding a mate in a time of basically forced monogamy, where everybody dated within their social strata. Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are just a few examples of authors exploring the woes and tribulations of finding love in their respective eras. Even Raskolnikov (the pre-incel, basically) wouldn’t have bashed his landlady’s head in if Sonya had given him some.
And dating is complicated exactly because—as a short look at the animal kingdom shows—the female needs to be in heat. And with ‘in heat’ in terms of humans I mean that mysterious moment when the stars of her biology, sociology and psychology align. There is a time and energy differential in the sexual mating process that extends from the animal kingdom into our culture. There is also an investment differential, meaning that sperm is cheap but eggs are hugely expensive, which means that women (or females) have to be the selectors of their proper mate specifically, and of our evolutionary future in general. This selection process takes time—much to the detriment of ever-horny males. And that’s okay.
My point is this: hoe_math is right and wrong at the same time. There is a good chunk of truth to his cultural analysis—something similar to what Anna Khachiyan highlighted when she said:
“The problem we face today is that the ‘unofficial style’ of females (that is, secrecy and avoiding responsibility) is now embedded into society. The most problematic aspect of feminism is that it made topping-from-the-bottom the top-down procedural thing—with the result that it captured the institutions of academia, media, and so on. We know what happens when women become the managers and planners of society: they administrate the decline of the civilization that men built.”(1)
Yet both lack the understanding that a complete analysis must integrate biology, which leads to the insight that feminism and the gender-culture war do not hinder but actually enable dating and mating. Everybody is still concerned about dating, everybody still suffers, people still fuck (move to Berlin, mate!) and get engaged, people still separate or divorce—it’s all as it has ever been, only supercharged through the internet, which offers more possibilities but also requires more selection time in the process. Sometimes we therefore have to re-adjust the (cultural) terms under which mating happens – that’s our (post-) feminist internet age. But its still the same (biological) game. It´s like tennis, where the rules develop over the decades, even centuries. But its still tennis that we are playing.
Or, to expand on our metaphor: she still needs to be in heat, but not only in terms of her biology, sociology and psychology, also digitally, by which I mean the sum total of his and her digital presence from WhatsApp to Instagram.
What hoe_math is engaging in is a kind of culturally self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you engage with critics like that, the harder the dating process becomes. As a marketing strategy, this is obviously quite genius. But the opposite is also true: the less you problematize it, the better it goes. There are things you can change and things that you can´t, and one thing you can´t change is that nature wants you to mate. Biology—and culture—is rigged in your favour in every possible way. If it weren’t, we practically wouldn’t be here. It’s supposed to work for the dumbest of us. There’s nothing to understand. Even if we overthink it, we are still subject to the imperatives of our genes. It’s just dating in the internet age.
Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’.
Check out his upcomming online-course on will
He founded the German publishing house Phänomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de