I’ve written previously about choice addiction, and how this is a very common theme in entertainment targeted to women. This fits fairly closely with the game concept of hypergamy; women have a primal fear that by committing to one man they will lose the potential of finding a better man.
But in looking at recent movies targeted towards women and thinking about how this relates to topics of discussion on this blog, I’m convinced that there is a counterpart to the fear that drives choice addiction; the primal fear women have of losing the opportunity to choose and ending up alone.
I think Haley hit on this basic fear when explaining why women enjoy reading widow/remarriage stories:
“Widow falls in love again” stories are appealing to women because women want to be assured that they are still attractive and that they will be able to find someone to love and care for them if the worst happened to them. That life isn’t over if their husband dies and that they aren’t sentenced to loneliness for the next 20 years.
This fear is the reason (or part of the reason) why:
- Marcos’ con is so effective.
- Marcos’ con is so infuriating to many of our female commenters.
- The term spinster has so much emotional power.
- Many women aggressively defend what they feel is their right to marry a man they don’t love, and why this theme is found in women’s literature.
- Books like Marry Him create such a stir despite lack of an actual marriage strike.
- Divorce fantasies like EPL and Stella as well as widow fantasy stories ultimately involve either remarriage or finding a stable relationship with another man who is invested in them, not just endless hookups with alphas.
From a biological programming perspective all of this makes sense. You need a counterbalancing force over hypergamy otherwise women would always sleep around and never create a stable environment to provide for and protect her children. Something stops most women from becoming either partially or fully addicted to choice. I think these two primal fears are designed to work together and counterbalance each other. The primal equivalent of fearing you forgot to pack something vs fearing you will be late to the airport.
As I discussed in The whispers, feminism has modified our culture to greatly amplify the fear of not being choosy enough. At the same time, it has done everything it can to mute the counterbalancing fear of spinsterhood. The very idea that women need investment from men is downright offensive to feminists. They have been successful to a degree, and have been able to change the decisions many women make on the margins either to marry later or divorce frivolously. But they can’t make it go away entirely, which is why just in the last year or so we have seen multiple movies with the fantasy of the forced choice:
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