SnapSlav

Welcome! I wouldn't worry about the mod stuff for long. I'm in the same boat as you, and I'm quite sure it's just a matter of posting 5 approved posts before they stop monitoring you for being a-okay. It's not the worst system by a long-shot. The last forum I was in got flooded by spam accounts advertising digital cameras or cell phones or whatever, and they usually only ever made that one post, so a buffer as small as 5 to prevent that kind of flooding goes a LONG way... Grats on having been on the podcast, that's pretty sweet! =D

Right, I DID respond to your "common denominator" logic; that's what my argument was ABOUT. Also, let's not play this petty game of your being passive aggressive, shall we? I'm not interested in insults and slights. I'm responding to something you said, we disagree, I'm addressing that disagreement, it was you who first dismissed me, not the other way around. I've taken the time, I only ask you the common decency to do the same, or if you really don't want to, at least just own up to that. Don't pretend you've refuted me by referring to a previous comment of yours. That's not how rebuttals work, and you know that, I know that, and I'm sure you know that I know that. My point was to illustrate, as I understand the matter of hypergamy, that your "common denominator" argument is funamentally flawed for the reasons of my illustrated "relative to what" explanation. The flaw isn't the concept of common denominators itself, nor how you're using it to dismantle the concept of both sexes being defined by hypergamy. The problem is your over-narrow criteria. Both sexes DO share a common denominator. The definition of hypergamy doesn't specify that the act is about money (although one could be forgiven for seeing it that way, when one reads "caste or class"). The key defining feature is the matter of "trading up", moving from an inferior choice to a superior choice, an improvement. Both sexes ARE doing that when one goes for a spouse with more resources and the other goes for a spouse who is younger and hotter. The first "traded up" for more resources, the second "traded up" for more fertility. But both traded up; they shared that common denominator. So they DO share a common denominator in that they are both making an exchange in preferable partners for a better option, even if what constitutes "better" differs from one sex and the other.

Quotations were not the source of my argument. Quotations were used to attribute a concept to a closed group of words that on their own do not mean a specific concept. Then I went on to illustrate what I was talking about. THAT was the argument. You'd know that if you actually read my post with any intellectual honesty, rather than your curt dismissal. Secondly, I'd posit you DID NOT address my "relative to what" point, because my point was illustrating that both sexes ARE hypergamous (because they're trading up according to their own relative interests), whereas you're laboring that they aren't... for the same reason. So if the same evidence leads one to a certain conclusion and yet another to a different conclusion, then the other attempts to explain to the first why that different conclusion is made, clearly the first did not previously "address" that point at all.

I believe you're missing the salient point of "relative to what". Namely, male resources are to women as female fertility is to men. That they do not seek the exact same element in their counterparts is NOT illustrative that they do not seek "the same thing". They're both "trading up", however you split it. It's simply WHAT they're trading up for which differs by the subject. So, it's still hypergamy in either scenario. Hypergamy doesn't stipulate that what one seeks must be strength or protection. It's just "trading up". The peahen chooses the peacock with the most illustrious feathers because he demonstrates that he is SO capable with his detrimental and costly feathers that he can survive in spite on this handicapping attribute; the peacock is offering survival guarantee, the peahen is offering fertility. If there wasn't a biological constant in what the sexes desired from each other, but the hypergamous drive still remained, then we'd see the same thing split across all individuals. An individual who seeks a more eloquent speaker would seek that out in his/her mate, and their counterpart might be one who embodies these qualities, yet THEY seek out one with long and sturdy hair and they themselves don't care about speech skills... just throwing out random elements to illustrate the point, not that these are actual sexual selectors. Regardless of what one side pursues, both sides are "trading up". That being said, I still consider the topic question to be moot. Just because both sexes are hypergamous doesn't mean we can't call women hypergamous. They are. That's like saying just because we all get hungry we shouldn't say that some people are going hungry. That kinda misses the point of descriptive explanations, don't you think?

...That is to say, Southern California. Okay, so maybe it's not Hell itself... that would be NORTHERN California. But we're not too far off down here, these days. But enough about that... I've been indulging in Stef's work for a couple years. I was an avid member of another forum that was technically about a certain game franchise, but which just so happened to have encouraged a lively general discussion board, where I got a wonderful opportunity to clash with like and unalike minds with little censorship. I'd moved from forum to forum over the years when the mods would get too domineering, a trend which would always seem to replicate wherever I went, and it seemed like this site was spared that gruesome fate. Then GamerGate happened... Overnight the mods made their white knighting intentions clear by pseudo-banning most posts that had anything to do with the subject. Many of us were on the front lines of the movement, seeing as it WAS a gaming forum to begin with, so GamerGate was going to be very personal to many of us, so seeing the site mutate from this anything-goes wild west of intellectual warfare into a police state of "you shall not be misogynist, and WE decide if you're misogynist" was very disheartening. Then I started getting serious about my career and I just stopped visiting the place. Studies beckoned, and I had better things to do with my time than waste it arguing against intellectually dishonest assholes. (I would later learn from Stef that the apt name for them was sophists.) Almost 2 years later and the itch for some good debate got stronger and stronger. Well a user on that forum had posted a video of Stef's (I can't remember what it was about) roughly 3 or 4 years ago, and from that point I was exposed to his work. So when I could stand no longer NOT being on a forum where I could throw my ideas against (potentially very robust) opposition to get refined into glittering gems, joining FDR seems like the natural chocie! There's much more I'm sure I could say, but I'll leave it at that for now. One word of warning, however: I'm a very verbose SOB. I gotta hold myself back from churning out volumes of text, so I ain't for the "tl;dr or bust" faint of heart. ^_~ -SnapSlav