Old-school readers of Hit Coffee and associated blogs will remember Sheila Tone’s “Prole Test.” Originally posted on Vikram’s old blog, it went down when his old site did. However, as Charles Murray causes a wave with his Bubble Thickness Test, I thought that it was high-time to reproduce it.

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A few weeks back, Vikram wrote a sweet little post about how people should be more sympathetic to my woes. (sniff) But he gives me too much credit, saying I was poor. I wasn’t. Not by any government definition anyway.

But I wasn’t middle-class, either. So what am I talking about? I hope the little quiz below helps clarify things.

The best term I’ve been able to come up with is working-class, which leaves some loopholes. How about semi-prolehood? Whatever it is, it describes an important difference. It means you’re not poor, but there’s still a big difference in what you get to do for a living, where you get to go to school, and how you live.

Remember, this isn’t about being in the underclass. That’s why many serious hardships aren’t scored. It’s about how you might eventually graduate from college, but you’ll never get to work for the New York Times. You could maybe be a lawyer, but you’ll never work for one of those big firms. Definitely a schoolteacher, but probably not a professor. And for God’s sake, don’t try to get into screenwriting or directing. Yes, I know about Quentin Tarantino, but name three others who are under 60. Finance or politics will also be rough (but good luck, Dizzy).

The following are a few telltale characteristics of the non-middle-class:

1. Military service.

This obviously only applies at times your family was in the United States, so apologies to recent immigrants. Did anyone in your family serve? As an enlisted person? No points for officers. One prole point for each grandparent, uncle or cousin. Two for each parent. Three for each sibling or yourself.

2. Professions.

Is anyone in your family a medical doctor? Minus three points for the first, one point for each additional. Minus two for the first lawyer or university professor (must be an accredited university), one for each additional. Either parent work for the government in a non-management, non-elected position? One prole point — unless it’s your mom and she was a teacher. Then no points, because women from higher classes often become teachers.

3. Education.

How many people from your graduating high school class went to an Ivy League university? Any? Minus one point for each, up to a maximum 3 points. Edit: Add one point if you had to travel more than 30 minutes to get to that high school.*

How many people in your immediate family (counting grandparents, parents, siblings and spouses) have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited, non-online institution? Minus one point for each — but only if they got the degree prior to age 24. Minus two points for each USNWR first-tier. Don’t count anyone you already counted as a professional in Number 2.

Two prole points if no for both parents and all grandparents. Three prole points if your answer is zero for all immediate family besides yourself, and you have at least one sibling.

Minus one if you graduated from any accredited college before the age of 24. Minus one more if it was a USNWR first-tier.

Notice there are no points assigned based upon who paid for your education. This is not an oversight. Many non-middle-class parents and grandparents — cops, aerospace workers — proudly pay for their descendants’ attendance at USC, Loyola Marymount, University of LaVerne, and Cal State whatever.

4. Health Insurance.

Growing up, was your health insurance HMO or private? One prole point for HMO or none.

I remember in a political science class, we were going on a class trip and needed to provide our medical insurance carrier. A list was passed around. I was last to sign. I saw that every other student had either Blue Cross or Blue Shield. And that was even at my crappy state school. (The polisci kids tended to be future lawyers, and seemed younger and wealthier than the general student population.)

5. Travel.

Prior to age 24, how many times did you travel outside the continental United States by airplane or boat? Minus one point for each time — but no points if it was to visit relatives. One prole point if your answer is never.

6. Discipline.

Did your parents physically discipline you after the age of 7? One prole point. Three points for after the age of 12. Minus one if your answer is never — unless you’re Jewish, then no deduction. My understanding is that Jewish people in the United States never physically discipline regardless of their economic status.

7. Inheritance.

Prior to age 30, did you inherit money? If so, minus one.

Yes, choosing 30 is a bit arbitrary. It’s an age when you’re still in the youth demographic and at least one parent is usually still alive. How much you got doesn’t matter. You’re either from the type of family that does that, or you’re not. A semi-prole could easily have a parent die prior to 30, but the parent either would have died with no money or left all assets to the other parent, probably passing by intestacy. If both your parents died I’ll let you decide if the point is fair.

More likely scenario is that your grandparents left you money. That kind of estate planning is for the upper classes.

8. Traditional family.

Were your parents divorced or estranged prior to your entry into high school? If so, one prole point. Same if they weren’t married at the time of your birth. This does not apply if at the time of your birth, your parents lived in either California or New York and were working in entertainment or the arts. Those people live by different rules.

One point if a parent died prior to your entry into high school and the surviving parent failed to remarry within five years (speaks to economic problems and lack of social ties).

Do you know the full names and maiden names of your grandparents? If not, plus one. Great-grandparents? Minus one. Got any pictures of the greats? Minus one. Edit: Unless they’re still alive, then plus one. OK, no points either way if they’re over 100.

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If you ended up with any points, you’re on Sheila’s side of the wall. Sorry. Have a Happy Meal, it always makes me feel better.
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* Like in Half Sigma’s high school, probably half the class went to Ivies, but he had to take a boat every morning to get there. That should count for something.
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Clarification: If you are married, include your spouse and his family in your the answers to 1, 2, 3, and 7. Those are about current status. Don’t count your spouse in 4, 5, 6, and 8. Those refer to your individual background.
______________________________

Addendum: Earn up to six additional points for Native American heritage!

The dynamics of predicted attractedness:

The researchers asked each of their subjects to rate their own attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 7. The students then had three-minute one-on-one conversations with five members of the opposite sex, a setup the scientists describe as “speed meeting.” (The goal wasn’t to get a date, because some of the participants already were involved with people outside the study.) After each conversation, they rated the other person’s attractiveness and sexual interest.
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The more attractive the woman was to the guy, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest in him, researchers found. And it turns out, the less attractive men (who believed they were better looking than the women rated them) were more likely to think beautiful women were hot for them. But the more attractive guys tended to have a more realistic assessment.

And the women? Perilloux and her coauthors found that women underestimated men’s sexual interest.

This doesn’t actually surprise me much in any event. It punctures part of the ideology that women have a higher estimation of their romantic prospects because they conflate sleeping with a man with the same sort of romantic possibility as entering a monogamous relationship with them.

But beyond that, the fact that less attractive men have “higher standards” is unsurprising not only by reading Roissy’s peanut gallery, but also from my own experience. Less attractive men tend to have less romantic experience. It’s through romantic experiences that we figure out where exactly we stand in the pecking order. I know that before I actually started dating, I had an inflated idea of what the possibilities were if I could just get from Point A to Point B. As I started getting more and more exposure to women, I started learning where I fit into things. This was a positive development and not just because I “lowered my standards.” It meant, among other things, that I started actually noticing my female counterparts.

For guys, that’s a big part of things. Hit Coffee friend Bob commented that unattractive women are, to men, background furniture. We see attractive women on TV; we notice the attractive women around us. We get a misguided sense of what “normal” is. And, along with the male tendency to view ourselves as normal, associate ourselves with women that are out of our league if we are not careful. I had every incentive not to do this, did not at all do this consciously, but it ended up happening anyway. Of course, I finally determined “my place” shortly before I lost weight, and then when I lost weight (and became more socially acclimated), my self-perception didn’t change with it. So it can absolutely work in reverse and we can become more female-like in our self-assessments.

Missing from all of this, of course, are the non-physical attributes of dateability. We tend to take for granted that men are physically-obsessed. Some men assume too much that women don’t care about looks (it’s all about “status” or alphahood or something else). Other men, though, tend to view all relationships the same way that we view women. Or, perhaps more accurately, the way we think we view women. The way that guys without romantic opportunities often do (because they don’t understand the difference between a plain or chubby girl we actually get along with and an attractive woman that we don’t). So, for instance, when we get rejected, we often think that it’s because the woman is acting on the basis that they are better than us rather than that they don’t see compatibility. This is especially the case among guys with scant dating experience. I remember when I asked out and was rejected by a chubby girl that I only asked out because I thought we were in the same ballpark (we were close). But we weren’t in the same place at all. That she was socially “better” than me was true, actually, but even if you overlook that, you still had an overall lack of compatibility. Along these lines, if nothing else:

I remember Eva saying that she and a previous boyfriend were having a hard time relating to one another because he was super-popular in school and she wasn’t. It sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Yet I am not sure it is.

There is also the issue of aspirational dating, wherein we try to define who we are by who we are with. The notion that being with an attractive woman means that we are inherently more attractive. The same goes to a lesser extent with popularity. Even with cliches. I had an attraction to flighty, gregarious sorts. In part it was a response to my discomfort with my more quiet, introspective manner. But when I was left to actually spend time with one, I discovered that even in the best of circumstances it was kind of hard to actually get along. Of course, I am not an “opposites attract” sort of person, on the whole. And sometimes it clearly does work. But whether it works or not, I think there is the tendency, among guys and girls, to sort of see ourselves in the person we are with. For less attractive or popular guys (in particular) and less attractive or popular girls (to a degree), I think it often results a repulsion for our “equals” if it means conceding where we are in the pecking order. This, combined with the overall lack of experience and increased likelihood of social isolation, contributes significantly to the inflated sense of attractiveness by guys.

But not so much for girls. I wonder why that is? I think that, to some extent, it is related to overall relationship dynamics. The guy is expected to ask the girl out. Therefore, if a guy does not regularly ask girls out, he is more free to dream of where he might be if he did. On the other side of the table, a girl who is not asked out is more likely to be confronted with where she happens to be. She might be able to get one night stands, but I don’t think she is likely to conflate that into something more the same way that a lot of guys do. The burden of doing the asking falls to the guys, but it also gives guys a greater sense of self-control. And the ability to tell themselves that they could do better than they can, if they would only press it (or figure out how).

A while back, in response to responses to the Anthony Weiner scandal, Megan McArdle wrote:

Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages. Strong marriages support a strong society. And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises. One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don’t keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity. I’m a big fan of sexual privacy. But you cannot have a public institution that rests in part on fidelity, and also complete privacy on those matters.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things. Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don’t say, “Awesome, is he hot?” but “How could you do that to Jason?” Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with. Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous “What the hell is wrong with you?”, not “Yeah, I couldn’t handle that either.” Of course it would be nicer if we didn’t need this sort of help. But we are a flawed species.

This is, to be sure, a bit trickier in an era when people like me and Andrew accept that there can be healthy non-monagamous marriages. Maybe, folks have suggested, she was totally okay with this! This seems possible, but not really very likely. I know a decent number of people in open marriages, but they are very far from the majority of the people I know. Looking at what polls and research we have on this sort of thing, plus an unscientific survey of my friends and the women who have written me, I’m going to go out on a limb here and speak for heterosexual married women as a class: I’m pretty sure that most of us are not okay with our husbands sending racy photos to strangers, or engaging in phone sex with same within weeks of our wedding day. And if she’s totally okay with this, how come she hasn’t said so?

To some, marriage is a covenant with God. To others, it’s an agreement with the state. And others, it’s merely an arrangement between two people. I fall into the view that it is a covenant with society. As such, I agree with McArdle on the lack of complete unimportance of Weiner’s infidelity. Society is conferring benefits – tangible and intangible – to married couples, and I believe that married couple in turn should meet some rather basic expectations.

I believe this enough that I am uncomfortable with the notion of “non-monogamous marriages.” Not that I don’t think they can ever work. Not even that I disapprove of non-monogamy. But rather, that I think what is being described is something other than marriage. I don’t think that these people should be prevented from being married, but rather that individuals in society, as well as society as a whole, can pass judgment.

Except, of course, that there is not typically a way of getting marital benefits without it being called marriage. This is where I think the concept of Civil Unions can be rather helpful, for straights and gays alike. On the other end, I am actually sympathetic to the notion of “covenant marriages”, the marriage-plus deal that some states have tried to institute. By and large I would have the law look at all three in the same way, except for making it easier to get in and out of some than others, but a clearer outlining of expectations would ultimately be helpful, in my view. Before asking “Will you marry me?” I wish that more couples had a clearer idea of a fundamental pre-requisite question: “What does marriage mean to you?”

I am, to some degree, skeptical of the notion that we should always approach these questions individually. Without common definitions, and common expectations, society lacks a structure that is ultimately beneficial. Legislating morality is tough, and often undesirable. It’s social norms, and social expectations, that remain the best tool to make it largely unnecessary. And so when Anthony Weiner introduces his wife, I should have the reasonable expectation that they are monogamous. Even if his wife is okay with what he did, you still have a situation where Weiner sold us on one persona “Happily married man!” while in fact being another “Someone with looser notions of marriage than you!”

In response to a quote suggesting that men should never wear shorts, Drew Magary writes:

Then I have The Awl bitching at me about it too (“Men should not wear shorts. That is all.”). You listen to me, you anti-shorts gay mobsters: I WILL WEAR SHORTS IF I GODDAMN WANT TO.

I don’t give a shit what you deem appropriate or tasteful. I live in Maryland and for the next four months it will be 50,000 fucking degrees outside, and it’ll be so goddamn humid I’ll have to wear flippers to swim through the air. It’s HOT. It’s fucking deathly hot already. They don’t even have spring here anymore. There’s winter, then it rains a for a couple weeks, and then the entire landscape turns into A FIERY PIT OF HOT LAVA. There are elephants basting themselves with rain puddle water down my block. It is hot as shit.

Tom Ford, who is the guy staking out the anti-shorts position, would go crazy in the south or southwest. It seems that everyone wears shorts there for most of the year. And flip-flops, for that matter. Aesthetically, I actually agree with Ford. I think that men look better in long pants and consider flip-flops to be a little too casual. But the utilitarian in me does respect the fact that people who buck this preference are not frying in the heat. Which is pretty much what I do. I have finally given in and wear shorts in some circumstances. Limited mostly to expressly casual events, such as barbeques and family get-togethers at the Corrigan Compound or Shell Beach. But I’m never comfortable doing it.

Much to Clancy’s lament. She very much likes me in shorts. I have rather substantial legs (and did even when I was bone thin).

I am, of course, entirely double-standard on the issue. When i first met Clancy, she was wearing shorts and her marvelous legs were the first thing I noticed about her. She had a big bruise on one of the legs. Not only did that not deter my admiration, but it gave me an excuse to look at them. Though even with women, my feelings are mixed. Most of the time, I think that women look better in long pants (and full-on shoes). But as a “leg guy”, it seems partially tragic that they should cover them up.

On a sidenote, Redstone High School apparently does not have a minimum pant-length on shorts. For girls. They really, really should. Guys, meanwhile, are not allowed to wear shorts at all.

Meanwhile, some folks think that guys shouldn’t tuck their shirts in:

Pete has everything going for him. Including all of his aforementioned attributes, he’s a funny, gregarious, likeable guy. Pete’s makin’ it happen. Except for one thing. Pete tucks his shirt in too tight.

So what?… you say. Big deal. So Pete’s neat. He wants to be presentable. Look his best. Clean cut. Professional. An upstanding citizen. He should tuck his shirt in, and as tight as the lug nuts on his truck too. Right? Wrong.

And let me make this clear, I’m focusing on the social aspect of shirt tucking, at work, tuck to your hearts content. I’m not the boss. Maybe he likes it that way. They’re usually ‘tight tuckers’ too.

Socially, it never fails. I’ll step out with my buddies – and one of them (sometimes more… unfortunately) has their shirt jacked in so tight it looks as if it was painted on. It also never fails that when they make their approach (some are better than others) the first thing a woman notices is the ultra tight tuck. It’s never good, regardless of shirt type. Here’s why…

Bah. Just as pants (with beltloops) ought to have belts in them, shirts should be tucked in. Everything should be fastened, buckled, and tied. That’s just… the way it should be, dag nabbit. In addition to that, I typically tuck in my shirts because I wear the belts and without tucking in my shirt, the belt buckle can make contact with my skin, which is a sort of uncomfortable feeling. Clancy thinks I should almost always leave my shirts untucked (and thinks that of most men), but I just have trouble with it. I have trouble with things not being in their rightful place, and a shirt tail’s rightful place is tucked in. I actually take it to very unfashionable extremes, tucking in Hawaiian shirts and sports jerseys some of the time. Both are no-nos. And I recognize that it looks a little goofy, but that’s society’s problem. There is a practical element to it, too. I keep my phone on a belt holster (another fashion no-no, actually) and it’s more accessible when my shirt is tucked in.

The article mentions four things in particular that shouldn’t be tucked in and I actually agree with one of them. Sweaters should not be tucked in. It also mentions jerseys, which I agree is the norm but am iffy about myself. He’s wrong on button-downs and t-shirts, though.

The only real exception are for people who are overweight or have really odd body shapes. The only time I stopped tucking in my shirts was when I hit my peak weight. I bit the bullet, got a ton of undershirts (intentionally too small, though now they’re too big), and let the shirts hang. When the weight came off, that bow to aestheticism came to an abrupt end.

Incidentally, they also have an article on belts, which I actually agree with (for the most part)! Especially the parts about belts and shoes matching. Despite my devil-may-care attitude towards phone holsters and the like, I am meticulous about this. My boots, belt, and watch all need to match. I keep brown and black variations of each and, unless I’m off my game, all three are brown or black. When these three things don’t match, it just feels wrong.

All of which is to say that there are reasons why I had trouble with the ladies prior to meeting my wife.

I discovered a long-time acquaintance is a red diaper baby. Her parents are bona fide Communists, as were her grandparents. The sort that hoped that we would lose the Cold War. This actually explains a great deal. She’s one of the most conservative people I know, in the traditional sense of the word. And her mannerisms really strike one as a fundamentalist Christian or something. She’s been mistaken for right-wing by mutual acquaintances. It’s the lifestyle that she leads. And yet her politics were way out in left field. Why?

Well, if you’re a real traditionalist, and you were born into a family where the family tradition is Communism. You keep up the fight. You honor your family’s heritage and accept the wisdom handed down from one generation to the next. Their good guys are your good guys. Their bad guys are your bad guys. Your tribe is the USSR, defunct or not, and not the nation in which you were born and raised.

Pterodactyl wrote a post I commented on a little while back. She clarified her meaning in the comments:

The post also considers the parallel case of hypergamy on the part of men, both in culture and history. The observation is that while male hypergamy has the element of the aspirational (seeking to date/marry up), it also has a strong element of the aspersional (casting aspersions and worse, e.g. ill-treatment, on lower-economic-status females).

For men and women both, the nature of what we are attracted to can be mysterious. I’ve often stated that the degree to which looks matter is understated in women and overstated in men. I was going to elaborate on that, but apparently I already have. And I can definitely buy that economic status is something that is understated in male preference. I do have a couple of caveats on that, though. First, while it’s understated for men I don’t think – for reasons that could be purely social conditioning – it is as big an issue for men as it is for women. I know, I know, I’m a guy married to a doctor. And I’m a guy that broke the heart of a girl who spent her first fourteen years in a trailer park. But I’m not a typical guy. And, if we’re willing to use education as a proxy for status, there is some backing on this*:

Our results show that educational homophily is the dominant mechanism in online mate choice. Similarity in education significantly increases the rate of both sending and replying to initial contacts. After controlling for the opportunity structure on the platform, the preference for similar educated others is the most important factor, particularly among women. Our results also support the exchange theoretical idea that homophily increases with educational level. If dissimilarity contacting patterns are found, women are highly reluctant to contact partners with lower educational qualifications. Men, in contrast, do not have any problems to contact lower-qualified women. Studies of educational homogamy generally show that couples where women have a higher level of education are rare. Our study demonstrates that this is mainly the result of women’s reluctance to contact lower qualified men.

This also has ramifications for how women blame male bias against intelligence for their dating woes the same way that guys blame female bias against niceness. But anyway…

This is one of those things where I suspect that the filtering against women of lower economic status happens for ostensibly other reasons. I didn’t care that Julianne was raised in a trailer park. I did care, though, that neither she nor her family had an iota of fiscal responsibility. But the two were probably not unrelated. There have been other cases where I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason, but it turned out to be a basic incompatibility (not wholly unrelated to the different environments in which we grew up) or intelligence (which links to other things).

Of course, I speak of this as a male from the “upper middle class.” Sheila, who comes at this as a woman from the working class, has an entirely different perspective. So there is, at least, a contingent of guys that are looking to really trade up even at the expense of things that guys are “supposed” to be interested in. It’s possible that it’s something that women of means run into above and beyond whistling construction workers.

Of course, perhaps the most important thing from the Bakadesuyo cite is the fact that educational homophily is preferred across the board. This suggests that at least as far as education goes (and likely, by extension, social class) most people are most comfortable where they are. This makes sense to me. I never really got the sense that my education and my job were a real selling point among women that I would have thought it might be since it would be a chance at a middle class life and all. In a vacuum, maybe it would be so, but in the real life the end result is different interest, different ways of communicating, and overall incompatibility. What would Cinderella and the Prince really have to talk about?

On a sidenote, this all refers to traditional hypergamy, which is in reference to socio-economic status. A lot of what Alpha Theorists are talking about involves something somewhat different, which is sexual status, which is determined by such factors as testosterone and sexual worldliness. And the type of hypergamy that Ptero points to with regard to men has as much to do with sexual status as well, specifically in the domain of looks and non-single-motherhood.

Related link.

* – I hate to blockquote nearly the whole post, but it’s kind of necessary for context. If you’re not reading Bakadesuyo, you should be. I have to prevent myself from simply linking to what he writes every day.

Phi looks back, with some regret, on foregoing a relationship in his youth on the basis that the relationship had a sell-by date on it:

Question: would my present self counsel a different course of action to my past self?

Sadly, yes. I say sadly, because I still think my reasoning then was conscientious (or at least, that variety of conscientious that mothers tend to approve of). But I now know the alternative sucks too.

So my present self would say to my past self: go for it! Be honest with her about what your plans are, but if she’s still game for a date-stamped relationship, well then: she’s cute, and she’s making it easy! And face facts: alpha girl isn’t available, especially to your nerdy ass.

And believe me, you really, really don’t want to get to be 23 without having had a girlfriend, without having been kissed, on the grounds that you weren’t ready to get married the next day. Because when you’re 23, the girls, even (or especially) the girls at church, will expect you to have already done those things, and they’ll hold your lack of experience against you. A lot.

I half-agree with Phi on this. I agree with his advice, but I don’t think the new advice is worthy of sadness. Experience is a good thing. I specifically mean relationship experience and not (just) sexual experience. There comes a point of diminishing returns (and, perhaps, negative returns) with a lot of experience. But if you, like Phi and myself, are hardly in danger of becoming jaded and numbed by excessive experience, I believe that you take experience where you can get it.

It’s not just that future partners might “hold [it] against you,” but that experience breeds knowledge. Knowledge of yourself and knowledge of how relationships work. My road with Julianne was rocky early on and barely survived our first year for no other reason than I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what reasonable expectations were. I didn’t know the line between being consciously non-obsessive over a relationship and not taking it seriously enough. I didn’t have a clear idea of the distinction between “we’re having a fight” and “we’re breaking up.” Granted, some of these things vary greatly (and all of them vary a little) from partner to partner, but there are certain baselines.

More than that, though, you learn what your baselines are. I had to learn that the “girl of [my] dreams” isn’t worth it if I am miserable throughout. I had to learn what expectations I was willing to commit to and what was just “too much.” And a lot of this relates back to having to learn what kind of girl I wanted to spend my time with. There is the tendency at least among some guys to underestimate (in some ways) and overestimate (in others) what they want. Prior to Julianne, I really thought just about any girl who fit a certain criteria would do. She fit all of them and more. But I discovered, along the way, that there were scores of things that I had never contemplated. That I could be with a woman that was beautiful, smart, loving, and that still wouldn’t be enough because – much to my shock – I need a particular kind of these things to settle in for life. That some of the things that I thought were really important turned out not to be.*

My relationship with her failed anyway, of course, but for much better reasons. And, of course, every relationship failed until I met my wife. But they all failed for different reasons. I can’t say that I learned something from them all (I can be kind of dim sometimes), but I learned a lot.

Like Phi, I was pretty serious-minded growing up. Starting with a girl named Tracey, I immediately measured up every girl I dated for long-term prospects. Sometimes I knew it wasn’t there. Sometimes I chose not to care. Sometimes I cared when I probably shouldn’t have in part because I feared they were looking at forever. But particularly in a case like Phi’s, where everyone knows the score, I really don’t see much harm in plowing forward. Don’t do anything you will regret, knowing what you do about the finite nature of the relationship, but experience what you can. For guys like Phi (and, probably to a lesser extent, myself), you only get so many opportunities.

* – Which is why a girl holding it against you is not entirely unreasonable. Unfair to you, perhaps, but reasonable for them. If you had the opportunity to enter a relationship with someone that was clueless about relationships, or with someone that knows what they’re doing, you go with the latter. Clancy has benefited immensely from the fact that Julianne and Evangeline and a others came before her. The fact that her romantic history was more restricted was, if not a problem, something we had to work with in the early stages.

This article from The Frisky has gotten attention, where the writer takes a women’s group to task for putting Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow on a sexiest list:

But Tebow has one major problem in my book: he’s openly and loudly very anti-choice, to the tune of taking out an ad during the Super Bowl in order to share his pro-life views with the world. Why, for the love of Ryan Gosling, would a major woman’s website feel the need to laud a man like that? I mean, after all, it’s not like a woman’s right to choose has been in any way compromised this year or anything. Luckily, their other 24 picks are decidedly less lame.

Abortion politics aside from the moment, this is an extraordinarily narrow way to look at it. First, a crush is not a declaration of loyalty to everything about a person. I’ve had crushes on some of the most inappropriate people over the years. It’s daydreaming of a sort. But if we’re going to take this more seriously, Tebow’s position on abortion is part of a much larger picture. He’s a fundamentalist Christian. There are aspects of this that even a liberal can appreciate, like when he entered the BCS national championship game carrying flowers to give to his mother (not a Christian thing, per se, but part of the family-is-all-important-bundle). But there are aspects that (secular) liberals can’t. Abortion is only one of it.

Perhaps the strongest argument against dating someone with different views on abortion than your own are the practical implications. From a man’s perspective: if she gets pregnant, will she abort? Some will hope so, others will hope not. From a woman’s perspective: if I choose to abort, will he be supportive? The asymmetry of this question actually makes the question more important for men than for women. Since, legally speaking, he has to live with whatever her choice is. But for Tebow, and regarding relationships with people like him, it’s at least somewhat off the table unless (a) you don’t want children after you’re married or (b) you would be willing to abort – within the context of marriage – because the timing – or the baby – isn’t right.

I say “after you’re married” because, if Tebow is sincere in his beliefs (and all indications are that he is), there is no sex prior to marriage anyway. The second is a bigger factor. But, again, it’s all part of a bigger picture. Tebow likely has very traditional attitudes towards male-female relations and these are guided by his Christian values. Even if abortion isn’t an issue (say, one of them is infertile), it seems doubtful that this Frisky writer would be on board with the larger context through which Tebow sees marriage.

But practical implications aside, to what extent should we consider the other’s views on this contentious issue? I take a pretty laid back attitude towards such things. I’ve dated everyone from birthers to card-carrying members of the Green Party, from pro-life to having had 3.5* abortions. Perhaps it’s because I don’t fit precisely into a liberal or conservative mold that I don’t have a particular tribe to choose from. So to me, I guess, it almost always comes down to practical implications. Almost, anyway. I would have had a hard time marrying Clancy if she had been an abortion doc. So in that sense, I can understand where the author is coming from, given how strong her views are on the subject.

It doesn’t strike me as reasonable, though, to expect everyone in your gender to share not only your views on abortion, but also to feel so strongly about it as to refrain from crushing or fantasizing about someone with differing views.

On the other hand, Tim Tebow for President does represent an ideological unseriousness (or a right-wing bent from a site where you wouldn’t expect it). I find it bizarre that the Frisky author found the inclusion on the list objectionable rather than the pseudo-endorsement.

* – The .5 is a miscarriage that probably would have been aborted.

“One of the most powerful feelings I came back {from his first trip to Europe} with was a feeling of anger at the fact that if I had been born into almost any other time or place in history, I would’ve been screwed over for life. Sometimes I don’t know how to deal with that.” –Samson’s Jawbone

The following are a couple of arguments for and against state lotteries. I often find that the best way to explore issues is to create arguments from the perspective of characters in my novel-writing. So that’s what I’ve done here. Neither BC nor RK are straight-line partisans, though they each have their histories and backstories. BC is coming from a more liberal perspective (particularly economics, he considers himself socially liberal but has a stubborn conservative streak on some issues). He comes from a Catholic, blue collar background, though he himself has gone to college and “made good”, so to speak, with a career in computers. RK comes from a thoroughly white-collar, WASP family. He went to law school, but is among those that had difficulty converting that into a sustainable legal career and instead works as a security/investigations consultant for a Pinkerton-like organization. He is a soft libertarian, but breaks to the right on some cultural issues.

The role of a government in society is a subject of constant debate. Some believe that it is the role of society, through its government, to protect the least among us. Others believe that doing that interferes with the free market, which ultimately helps everybody or if not is otherwise more just. Whether we believe in the redistribution of wealth or not, one thing we should all agree on is that it should not be the business of the government to specifically target the poor and working classes for the benefit of the middle class and beyond. Ultimately, however, that’s precisely what lotteries do.

One of the jobs I had in college was working at a gas station and truck stop on the edge of town, right beside an industrial park. With the manufacturing sector struggling, I spent a lot of time serving people with generally poor economic prospects. Some of them worked in the industrial park, some stopped by just to go place to place in search for a job. Some worked part time. Some worked off the books for a meager income. One of my job functions was to cash checks. Often, very meager checks. Some days I would think that it is the responsibility of the government to help these people out. Other days I would think that the government already is often helping these people out and subsidizing self-destructive behavior. But even apart from the welfare quandary, the government already assists in their counterproductive behavior. Every Thursday and Friday, generally paydays, they would cash their checks and spend the first of their newfound money on three things: cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets.

There aren’t any easy answers on what to do about cigarettes and alcohol. We could criminalize them, but that hasn’t really worked historically. We can tax them, but in addition to providing a (maybe needed) disincentive, it is also regressive. The end result isn’t that my patrons would buy less, but rather they would just end up spending that much more. But the third item – the lottery – is really extremely easy. Gambling is illegal in {BC’s home state}. While it still goes on, I’m sure, it’s made inconvenient enough that those that want to destroy their lives gambling will go to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or Louisiana. The fact that they can instead gamble at any local convenience store creates demand. Markets tend to do that, and for some things (like the City of Las Vegas) perhaps it is the free market at work. But state run lotteries are not. They are run by the state. The enemy isn’t some marketing guru in a Vegas high-rise that has determined that if you add this smell and take away the windows and clocks people will piss away more and more of their income. It’s the state. It’s us.

Lotteries are popular because they are generally instituted to pay for things that people like, such as education. Others like it because it “taxes stupid.” But aren’t the stupid taxed enough already? Not in the literal sense, but they will live their lives stupid. I have no delusions that my former customers would be a-ok but for the state lottery. They were often alcoholics or worse. Some of them maybe just need a good job to get back on their feet, but others would screw it up even if they had it. Their position in life is the result of their screwups. Due, in large part, to the fact that they are stupid. They lack impulse control. The odds against winning the lottery as so high that they can’t even wrap their heads around the numbers. They are (usually) the products of our public school system. It is the height of irony that our system takes money from the ill-educated to put right back into the system that failed to educate them in the first place. But even if the system can’t educate them, their own limitations mean that they will likely live their lives without financial or physical security. They will never be able to afford the lifestyle of the smart. They’ll never be able to achieve it. They’ll never be able to plan for it. While it may give us satisfaction to tax this, we’re aiming our barrels at people that cannot really take care of themselves or we’re contributing to the decisions that make it so they will not. One way or another, the state will end up taking care of them anyway.

Whether gambling itself should be legal is a difficult question. But even if we agree that it should, it shouldn’t be the government doing it. The only reason we might want the government to do it is if we believe that they will do it more ethically. But they see the same dollar signs that private industry does. {BC’s home state} recently fiddled with the rules to make already long odds of winning even more long. Because they, like any good marketing company, recognize that sales go up as jackpots rise. And jackpots rise when people don’t win. So less winners equals more money. They’ve essentially discovered the same scent that Las Vegas casinos push through their vents.

It’s a fact of life that very, very few of us will grow up to be rich. The more you redistribute income, the more you’re preventing people from becoming wealthy in the first place. The less you redistribute income, you’re supporting a status quo in which the wealthy get wealthier while the rest of us get by. Sure, there are people that find the magic formula to become the new rich, but that is exceedingly rare. It requires risks that few want to take. It requires smarts that few have. So you have those that already have money – and lots of it. You have those that have the smarts and gumption to risk it all to become rich. But that’s not most people. Most people just want enough money to get by and a savings to retire on. That’s hard enough. Making millions? That’s for other people. It may be a depressing thought, but it’s true.

Lotteries circumvent that. They provide a way for anybody with a dollar in their pocket to become wealthy. Almost none of them will, of course. The numbers are out there for everyone to see. And even the innumerate among us know that the odds are longer than we can possibly imagine. But as they say, you can’t win if you don’t play. And if you can’t win, you can’t dream of becoming a millionaire. When you buy a lottery ticket, you’re buying more the long odds at a jackpot. You’re buying a ticket to dream.

This is particularly true when it comes to the working class and below. Not only will these people never be wealthy, but they will probably never be comfortable. They’ll likely never have a comfortable retirement. They’ll probably always be living from one paycheck to the next. The lottery doesn’t change this. This is the way of the world. But the lottery provides them the ability to imagine a different life. A better one. We’re talking about a lot of people who don’t have anything to look forward to. Even if it’s almost entirely illusory (and even if winners lives don’t actually improve), the lottery is a little, quiet voice that says “it could happen to you.” It’s a reason to get up in the morning. It’s a form of entertainment. We spent all kinds of money watching people throw balls of various sizes and shapes around. That’s a game we have no stake in. If our team wins, we don’t materially benefit. There is no material benefit at all, no matter what happens.

If you look at the lottery in this way, it’s no less counterproductive productive than paying $3 to drink a beer so that you can watch the game on the bigscreen or spending $50 a month for cable so you can watch a game on TV. Most members of society have their basic material needs met. Even the losers who used to come to BC’s convenience store most likely had a roof over their heads and were (statistically) more likely to be overweight than not eating enough. So what do you do with the rest of that money? There’s really no right answer. But the lottery is, itself, not really the wrong one. I remember reading a comic strip once that said “Leo forgot to buy his lottery ticket, so he decided to play the home version” and shows him burning a $1. But isn’t it worth something to have that ticket in your pocket, to turn on the TV and watch the news for the winning numbers, and for some portion of the day to imagine how life could be if you won? But almost nobody expects to win. It’s all part of a carnival roller coaster. It’s living.

And if we’re going to allow for this sort of thing, then why not have the state do it? The state may be no more responsible than private industry (something “my side” has been saying for years). But it’s profits to the state that would otherwise go to someone else. And, though this argument doesn’t appeal all that much to me, if you’re concerned about gambling, it makes the state less likely to legalize it writ-large, because it would cut into the state’s profits. Allow people to bet on horse-races or drop their quarters in casinos, then they will will devote less money to the system that the state profits from. And given the short time horizon on horserace bets and slot machines (which don’t even make you pull down a lever anymore), you run the risk of the dumb population throwing a whole lot more money a whole lot more quickly with just about any major form of gambling than a daily lottery outside of the stock market.