If you haven't seen the new HBO show Girls, you're really missing out. Creator/writer/star Lena Dunham is a brilliant and very funny observer of 20-something hipster life (at least it seems that way to me; I'm too old to really know). If you watch the trailer above you might think that Girls is just another show about the life and romantic struggles of young women living in NYC, but the most interesting aspect is Dunham's take on male-female relations. It seems to me she understands Game:
... Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more accurate description of women’s natural inclinations.
... Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.
... “The sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own [hypergamous] utopia, not that of men,” Devlin wrote. Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won’t “commit,” lower their standards, and “settle.” During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. “Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. ...
For watchers of the show: Hannah (Dunham's character) is getting worked over by a beta (Adam) using Game (from the trailer it appears Adam may revert to beta form later in the season, but for the moment their relationship is brutal), Marnie is dating a beta (who she secretly has come to despise) but craves an alpha like the jerk artist character Booth Jonathan, who tells her “I want you to know, the first time I f#ck you, I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do things.”
For potential viewers who have HBO: you can access the show online at hbogo.com. Each episode is only 30 minutes, so you can consume it easily in your downtime :-) [Someone has informed me that you can watch the first episode there for free.]
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