Rollo Tomassi + Michael Sartain Red Pill Debate

Goals

  • Factually destroy Rollo + Michael on prior (and any current) claims they make in regards to their ideologies foundations.
  • Maintain emotional and rhetorical control throughout the conversation.
  • Focus on research and broad Red Pill claims.

Strategy

  • Remain calm/appeal to moderators for interjection at all times if needed.
  • Be explicit about cited research, be familiar enough to talk about any study mentioned.
  • Require exact quotes or citations if there are underlying factual disagreements.
  • Aggressively explore lines of questioning, do not let interlocutors pivot or distract.
  • Never raise voice, always maintain questioning/socratic demeanor.
  • Limit body language.

This conversation will only be effective if a number of ground rules can be established early on. It benefits me, optically and factually, to establish these in the beginning. These should be agreeable to all parties involved.

Ground Rules

  1. All of us are here to approach some notion of “truth,” and all of our statements and arguments should be in service to that.
  2. We should move through our arguments point by point, if possible, rather than going on long diatribes, so we can give the other side time to respond to specific claims.
  3. If either side feels like a “debate tactic” is being employed, it should be called out and addressed, ideally by the moderators, immediately.
  4. Words have meaning. It is fair to ask for a relatively stable definition for a term. Without definitions, our conversation will be absurd.
  5. We should try our best to stay scientific, and to broadly appeal to research. We may have personal anecdotes, or maybe have seen something on Instagram or Twitter, but that may not necessarily be reflective of reality.
  6. If one side feels like they’re not being understood, they should ask the other to restate their argument to check for congruence between both sides.

Q1. What is an Alpha Male?

  • (Personal note: It feels as though there is no consistent definition of what an “alpha male” or “high value male” actually is. It’s essential to nail this down, because an “alpha male” is going to be playing the “alpha” side of the “Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks” dual-mating strategy that Rollo claims women employ. It’s also reasonable to assume that men are going to want to strive to become an “alpha male” and avoid being a “beta male” in the Red Pill space.)
  • Alphas are not “bad boys” in any kingdom that has an actual alpha hierarchy. They display lots of prosocial behavior, almost necessarily, in wolves and in primates.
  • “Interestingly, while advocates for acting dominant often point to chimps as proof of the exclusivity of this route to male status, recent research has shown that even among primates, alpha male status can be achieved not only through size and strength but through adept sociability and the grooming of others as well.” - Scott Barry Kaufman article from 2015 from the Greater Good Science Center.
  • “With most mammals, the biggest and most aggressive male claims the alpha male role and gets his choice of food and females. But a new study suggests that at least among chimpanzees, smaller, more mild-mannered males can also use political behavior to secure the top position.” - Mark Foster, Small Male Chimps Use Politics, Rather Than Aggression, To Lead The Pack (2009), American Journal of Primatology
  • “I conclude that the typical wolf pack is a family, with the adult parents guiding the activities of the group in a division-of-labor system in which the female predominates primarily in such activities as pup care and defense and the male primarily during foraging and food-provisioning and the travels associated with them.” By David Mech, Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs (1999), Canadian Journal of Zoology.
  • “They identified one chimp, Foudouko, as the alpha leader. Two years later he fell from power, overthrown by a group of younger males. He lived on the outskirts of the group for years before attempting to return in mid-2013. He was killed by his former followers, a rare instance in which a chimp was killed within its own community.” By Michael Greshko, “In Rare Killing, Chimpanzees Cannibalize Former Leader”(2017), National Geographic.

Q2. If “Alpha Fucks, and Beta Bucks,” then how is the alpha an actual alpha?

  • If a man is the “beta bucks,” it sounds as though he’s able to procure enough resources to be considered a “provider.” He’s also probably displaying lots of prosocial behavior, which is also “alpha” in nature. What kind of evolutionary model of the world associates someone who can adapt to an environment and provide resources as a “beta”? Why would women be drawn to anti-social men who provide fewer resources?
  • No one seems to be utilizing this strategy, as evidenced from studying extra-partner pairings.
  1. “A common urban myth is that many fathers are cuckolded into raising children that genetically are not their own. This fear is fuelled not just by the paternity tests that have become a standard staple of gossip magazines, talk shows, and TV series but also by the biological fact that in many socially monogamous species, females appear to regularly engage in mating outside the long-term pair bond…The surprising result of these new studies is that human EPP rates have stayed near-constant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years. This poses an immediate puzzle for behavioural scientists, who estimated that without the availability of modern contraceptives the historical EPP rates should have been much higher, in the range of 10–20%, based on present behavioural measures of EPCs and observed kin investments of matri- and patrilineal family members, which are known to be inversely related to EPP [13].” Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, Koen Matthijs, Tom Wenseleers (2016), Cuckolded Fathers Rare in Human Populations, Trends in Ecology & Evolution
  2. “Using patrilineal genealogies from the Low Countries spanning a period of over 500 years and Y chromosome genotyping of living descendants, our analysis reveals that historical EPP rates, while low overall, were strongly impacted by socioeconomic and demographic factors. Specifically, we observe that estimated EPP rates among married couples varied by more than an order of magnitude, from 0.4% to 5.9%, and peaked among families with a low socioeconomic background living in densely populated cities of the late 19th century.” Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, Pieter van den Berg, Sofie Claerhout, ..., Kelly Nivelle, Ronny Decorte, Tom Wenseleers.(2019)  A Historical-Genetic Reconstruction of Human Extra-Pair Paternity. Current Biology, 29, 4102–4107
  • 1%-6% at its highest shows that monogamy is the dominant mating strategy.
  1. Population-wide research of modern Europeans shows very low rates of extra-pair paternity, between 1-2% (Anderson, 2006 & Wolf et al., 2012, as cited in Larmuseau). Y-chromosome research indicating historical trends shows a similarly low rate between 1-2% for non-Western populations (Strassmann et al., 2012, as cited in Larmuseau) and for historical Western populations (Larmuseau, 2012; Greef & Erasmus, 2015; Boattini et al., 2015; Solé-Morata et al., 2015, as cited in Larmuseau 2016).
  • If he’s married, he’s probably already at the top of society and passes a ton of markers for being an “alpha.”
  • They make more money.
  1. “Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it is found that married men enjoy a wage premium even after controlling for self-selection into marriage. In contrast to the popular household specialization hypothesis, men do not substantially reduce their housework time following marriage; neither does the housework time significantly affect the wage rate. This finding contrasts the prevailing view that the wage differential between married and single men results from the division of labour within the household. However, men married to non-working partners receive a larger wage premium than men married to full-time working wives. It is further shown that married men feel less satisfied with their financial situation as compared to their single counterparts. These results indicate that a lower level of pay satisfaction induce married men to put more effort into their work, which leads to higher wages.” Matthias Pollmann-Schult, Marriage and Earnings: Why Do Married Men Earn More than Single Men? (2011), European Sociological Review.
  • They live longer and enjoy better physical health.
  1. “A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers.” Harvard medical school article, Marriage and men’s health, June 5th, 2019
  • They have more children.
  1. “The present findings from a nationally representative sample of Americans living in the late 20th century support the hypothesis that serial monogamy is positively associated with reproductive success in men.” Jokela, M., Rotkirch, A., Rickard, I. J., Pettay, J., & Lummaa, V. (2010). Serial monogamy increases reproductive success in men but not in women. Behavioral Ecology, 21(5), 906–912.
  2. Serial monogamy is the primary reproductive strategy, not polygamy or “alpha fucks” everyone.
  • Rollo regularly has referenced “the pool boy” in various tweets and writings for over a decade. What makes the Pool Boy an alpha male? He provides no resources, is not at the top of any social hierarchy, does not engage in prosocial behavior, etc…

Random Factoid

  • Rollo has claimed that “a woman’s female ovum will select between competing male’s sperm at the site of conception, meaning that adaptation had to have become useful because there were multiple men’s sperm at the site of conception.”
  • Why does Rollo believe multiple men’s sperm are necessary for ovum to engage in discriminatory behavior of different sperm? Does he believe every single male sperm is identical?
  • Actual answer: women's eggs release a chemoattractant that is selecting for major histocompatibility complex, or a set of genetic factors that are responsible for immune system response and fighting infections. It has nothing to do with selecting for “alpha” or “beta” partners and only attempts to ensure a strong immune profile, especially in cases of preventing low genetic diversity among people who may be attempting to inbreed.

Q3. Do you still believe in Pair Bonding? Why would women’s sexual strategy of simultaneously having sex with a beta and an alpha play contrary to their built in desires to pair with only a single person?

  • Pair bonding is largely a myth.
  • Pair bonding occurs when two animals form life-long connections with each other, rarely, if ever, cheat, and do not take new partners once the other is dead.
  • No primates found in nature form life-long pair bonds.
  • Less than 3% of mammals form pair bonds.
  • Humans practice “serial monogamy” reproductive strategy, which is advantageous for men, regarding number of offspring.
  • Oxytocin time.
  • Oxytocin is released in both men and women during many social activities where bonding occurs. Oxytocin nasal sprays have shown an increase in empathetic responses to perceived “in-group” members. Many different studies around the world show that oxytocin can be administered to increase protective and preferential feelings towards “in-group” members.

Q4. While you eager to initially accept findings from evolutionary psychology, why do you run away from them now that the field is turning away from strategic pluralism, or “alpha fucks, beta bucks”? Do you at least recognize that your position is no longer scientific?

  • “Comparatively, the fact that women lack sexual swellings or ritualized behavioral cues overlapping with the conceptive phase is revealing about the potential function of their extended sexuality. It likely has not been shaped to facilitate paternity confusion. Strassmann's (1981) explanation of concealed ovulation, broadened to include extended sexuality, may offer one plausible scenario for the evolution of women's extended sexuality. Strassmann argued that, in a species in which males may potentially engage in true paternal care, males most likely to benefit from caring are non-dominant males. Following successful reproduction, males can choose to invest in care or re-enter the mating market to compete for another fertilization (or some combination of these two). The benefits of engaging in care partly depend on the net benefits (e.g., the rate of success) of competing for mating (e.g., Kokko and Jennions, 2008). Non-dominant males benefit less from competing and, therefore, are most likely to benefit from investment in care. As a result, females evolved to prefer non-dominant males as sires for the benefits of paternal care. Accordingly, concealing their conceptive status prevented dominant males from systematically monopolizing conceptive matings through intrasexual competition against non-dominant males (for a discussion of potential contributions of female-female intrasexual competition to the evolution of undisclosed conceptive status in humans, see Krems et al., 2021). As Kokko and Jennions (2008) emphasize, male benefits to investment in care also crucially depend on paternity assurance. In Strassmann's scenario, the concealment of ovulation permits non-dominant males to become sires but also limits their access to cues to conceptive status. Hence, males do not attain paternity assurance through detection of fertility cues. Rather, paternity assurance is achieved through regular sexual access throughout the cycle of a target female (some portion of which is conceptive), in conjunction with reasonable confidence that other males have not engaged in sex with that female during the cycle.”
  • Since women do not go “in heat” and give no external sexual cues to her fertility, “alpha” men would have no way to swoop in and impregnate the woman during her fertile cycle. Men who engage in such behavior, rather than men who continuously mate for extended periods of time, are less likely to find success reproducing. Men are therefore selected to be non-dominant, and women are therefore selecting non-dominant men as they are more likely to remain as primary caretakers.
  • “In our recently collected dataset of 181 women, we examined moderating impacts of ovarian hormone levels on the association between male partners' attractiveness and women's extra-pair sexual interests (Dinh et al., 2022a). Analyses found that when women's progesterone levels were low—characteristic of the follicular and peri-ovulatory phase—partner attractiveness more strongly predicted extra-pair interest in a negative direction, consistent with previous effects. However, some preregistered effects examined were near-zero. All in all, the null hypothesis that there exist no effects is a very poor explanation of the overall pattern of results, even if we currently do not fully understand the reasons for variable effects (Dinh et al., 2022a,b)10. This moderation effect, if robust, begs a question. This effect assumes that women differentially value sexually attractive features across conceptive versus non-conceptive phases. Yet, as we discussed above, large-scale replication studies have not found strong, compelling evidence for hormonal moderation of mate preferences (e.g., for muscular bodies). Durante et al. (2016) suggested one possible resolution. Perhaps mate preference shifts are moderated. For instance, women who are strongly attached to partners may express relatively little interest in extra-pair men when conceptive. It may make sense that these women also show little evidence of increased interest in, say, muscular men when conceptive. The same may apply for women with attractive partners—or, more generally, women who show relatively little interest in extra-pair men during conceptive phases for other reasons. By contrast, when women do express interest in extra-pair men when conceptive, they may be particularly interested in muscular men. This may be one reason why preference shifts are weak overall and not consistently detected. It also remains untested to date.”
  • Essentially, even if women’s interests are changing slightly due to hormone cycles, no study has shown that a woman is more willing to “cheat” or engage in extra-pair sexual activity.
  • Dixson et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2018c,d; Jünger et al., 2018a,b; Marcinkowska et al., 2018; Stern et al., 2019, 2020, 2021)
  • All failed to find women choosing different mates based on their ovulation cycle.

Q5. What is hypergamy?

  • “Using evidence from more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England and Wales 1837-2022 we show that there was never within this era any period of significant hypergamous marriage by women. The average status of women’s fathers was always close to that of their husbands’ fathers. Consistent with this there was no differential tendency in England of men and women to marry by social status. The evidence is of strong symmetry in marital behaviors between men and women throughout. There is also ancillary evidence that physical attraction cannot have been a very significant factor in marriages in any period 1837-2021, based on the correlation observed in underlying social abilities.”
  • “There is good evidence that women value status more, and physical appearance less, than do men in forming marriages. Yet the popular belief that this produces significant female hypergamy in marriage is incorrect. In England all the way from 1837 to 2021 we find that female marital hypergamy was extremely modest. The average difference between men and women in marriage in terms of their family status was modest and at times non-existent. In terms of family status, matching in marriage was nearly symmetrical between men and women. The male preference for physical attraction would be predicted to reduce the correlation between marital partners in family status. But this was the same effect for women as compared to men.”

Q6. If women are hypergamous, why do men cheat more?

  • Men still report cheating in a 2022 YouGov poll 2x as much as women in the US, even though they consider fewer things to be “cheating” than women do. A 2018 study by the Institute of Family Studies researcher Wendy Wang reports similarly that 20% of men and 10% of women have cheated in a marriage.
  • Rollo tweeted in 2018 “Guys will berate other guys for cheating. We tell him, at least be a Man and break up with her first. Girls don’t do this. They believe it’s a woman’s prerogative to cheat and keep their LTR in the dark if it means optimizing Hypergamy. The Sisterhood has no code like men do.”
  • Men’s reported rates of cheating is almost 2x as much as women, and this holds true across almost all cultures.
  • If women have unprecedented access to “alphas” via Tinder and IG, and social encouragement to cheat, and biological imperative to cheat, shouldn’t women be cheating far, far more than men?
  • In 2018, Rollo wrote: “Hypergamy is an evolved social dynamic. That is to say it is the behavioral extension of biological factors; most notably Ovulatory Shift.” Since there is no research supporting this idea of the “dual-mating” hypothesis, is Rollo prepared to walk back the idea of women being hypergamous?
  • In a 2021 YouTube video, Rollo brought up the 17 women for every 1 man hypothesis.
  • This comes from a 2015 study
  • “Researchers discovered a dramatic decline in genetic diversity in male lineages 4,000 to 8,000 years ago – likely the result of the accumulation of material wealth, while in contrast, female genetic diversity was on the rise. This male-specific decline occurred during the mid- to late-Neolithic period. “Instead of ‘survival of the fittest’ in a biological sense, the accumulation of wealth and power may have increased the reproductive success of a limited number of ‘socially fit’ males and their sons,” said Melissa Wilson Sayres, a leading author and assistant professor with ASU’s School of Life Sciences.”
  • Stanford researches respond in 2018
  • “Certainly, the researchers point out, social structures were changing. After the onset of farming and herding around 12,000 years ago, societies grew increasingly organized around extended kinship groups, many of them patrilineal clans – a cultural fact with potentially significant biological consequences. The key is how clan members are related to each other. While women may have married into a clan, men in such clans are all related through male ancestors and therefore tend to have the same Y chromosomes. From the point of view of those chromosomes at least, it’s almost as if everyone in a clan has the same father.”
  • Researchers respond on Reddit with even more precision
  • “(A) for the ratio effective population sizes among males and females to have stayed around approximately 1:17 across much of the Old World for approximately 1500 years requires an implausible level of polygamy and hereditary inequality. Extreme polygamy, with more than say 3 wives to a man, or highly transmissible differences in reproductive success due to extreme wealth distributions are characteristic of large-scale complex societies or “civilisations”; they are unlikely to be sustained in a small-scale society that we see just after the Neolithic transition to farming and herding. Such small-scale societies still exist in Amazonia and in Papua New Guinea, and until recently in India, Africa, some parts of Southwest China and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. From ethnography, we know that rates of polygamous marriage in small-scale societies rarely exceed 15%, and usually with at most two wives.”
  • “(B) In every part of the Old World, the bottleneck lifts approximately 5000-4000 years ago. This is precisely the period when chiefdoms and states first emerge, often associated with extreme inequality. Mass human sacrifice, for example, is commonly seen in the first states. However the emergence of chiefdoms and states is associated with the lifting of the bottleneck, not its intensification.”
  • “Because patrilineal social organisation sorts males into groups with identical or closely related Y-chromosomes, wars and feuds between such groups, even if it leads to a low level of group extinction per generation, strongly depresses diversity over 60 generations (~1500 years). Put differently, entire branches of the Y-chromosomal genetic tree may become extinct when social groups go extinct. Up to twentyfold reductions in diversity are possible with very little or no change in male population size over 60 generations. On the other hand, women tend to marry between kinship groups in patrilineal societies, and so diversity in mtDNA will be spared. These observations are confirmed by our simulation outputs, which can be found in the Supplementary Material. Fig 5 of our paper also shows a series of graphs corresponding to one set of simulations. Our model shows that up to a twenty-fold reduction Y-chromosome diversity can be produced without fluctuations in total male population size provided that the population was organised into patrilineal kinship groups that were, so to speak, the relevant "units of conflict" at the time.”
  • “Our hypothesis regarding the bottleneck also conforms with historical and anthropological data. Before the Neolithic and prior to the bottleneck, i.e. before the spread of farming and herding, all our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and hunter-gatherers tend not to be organised into purely kinship-based social groups. Most hunter-gatherer bands contain large fractions of nonkin. With the rise of states and chiefdoms after the bottleneck, large political units integrating many kinship groups also comprise a new form of society, and the defeat of political units, i.e. other states or chiefdoms, was less or not associated with the extinction of kinship groups. So the bottleneck took place after the Neolithic but before the rise of states and chiefdoms, when the "units of conflict" among the small scale societies at the time were still kinship-based small-scale societies, commonly patrilineal tribes. Therefore, a Y-chromosome bottleneck at 5k-7k BP.”

Q7. If women are hypergamous, how do you explain their attractions to pool boys and gang members?

  • It seems as though “pool boys” and “gangsters” represent the bottom of society in several ways, but, most importantly, they lack the ability to provision resources, which is arguably the key feature of an alpha.
  • It’s not clear that having these “alpha traits” even gets men more play, for example:
  • In a 2015 study published in Evolutionary Psychology by Frederick and Jenkins, 60,058 heterosexual participants, in which 52% were men, were surveyed on average sexual partners, with height and BMI being two factors they looked at.
  • Height
  • very short (5′2″–5′4″; 1%): 9.4 partners
  • short (5′5″–5′7″; 9%): 11.0 partners
  • average (5′8″–5′10″; 33%): 11.7 partners
  • tall (5′11″–6′1″; 40%): 12.0 partners
  • very tall (6′2″–6′4″; 15%): 12.1 partners
  • extremely tall (6′5″+; 2%): 12.3 partners
  • BMI
  • Underweight: 8.2
  • Normal Weight: 10.9
  • Overweight: 12
  • Obese: 11.7
  • Obese III: 9.3
  • “ Interestingly, however, men’s reported sexual behavior only partially reinforced the preference data. Consistent with the idea that women prefer relatively tall men, the shortest men in the sample reported fewer partners than other men. These findings confirm that height is relevant on the mating market. Across most of the height continuum, however, there was little variation in mean or median number of reported sex partners. Further, men between 5′7″ and 6′3″ (170–191 cm) varied little in whether they had more than 5 partners, had more than 14 partners, engaged in extra-pair sex, or were currently single.”
  • Even in the celebrity world, plenty of women “date down.”
  • Meryl Streep and Don Gummer
  • He’s a sculptor.
  • Anne Hathaway and Adam Shulman
  • He’s a random businessman.
  • Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth
  • He’s a talent agent.
  • Jennifer Lawrence and Cooke Maroney
  • He’s an art dealer.
  • Amy Schumer and Chris Fischer.
  • He’s a chef.
  • There’s a whole list of singers who date/hook-up with back-up dancers, even.
  • Madonna, Britney Spears, Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice), LeAnn Rimes, Melanie B (another Spice Girl), Ashley Tisdale (from High School Musical), Christina Aguilera.
  • Jennifer Lopez literally split with her husband, Marc Anthony, and started dating a back-up dancer, Casper Smart.

Random other topics

The Donovan/Aba&Preach Drama

  • In February, this year, you claimed that Anthony Johnson was feeding information to Alex from Playing With Fire and Aba and Preach and was paying them money to create the videos. Do you have any evidence of this, or are you prepared to rescind those claims?
  • “I’ll be happy to release all the screenshots I have of you cyber-stalking my daughter.”
  • “You know damn well you took money.” about Aba & Preach’s video about Donovan Sharpe.
  • “You have no reason” to make those videos. Yet Donovan Sharpe did a 5 hour live-stream dragging someone he thought was Preach’s wife.
  • You claimed in the same video that a big hit piece was coming from Donovan Sharpe to Aba and Preach. This was 3 months ago, where is the hit piece?
  • Donovan Sharpe said that Preach’s wife was a “fucking fatass,” and his information eventually came out as incorrect. Why did you defend him when he was attacking the wrong woman?

“The Tweet”

  • You said on the Whatever podcast this month that that tweet was “tongue in cheek,” then asked “if I told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” Are you saying your advice was the equivalent of asking your fans to jump off a bridge?
  • You also said “the point of the tweet was to show what makes a high value guy.” What makes a high value man, then? Why do Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos not qualify?
  • It feels Rollo didn’t follow hardly any of this advice
  • 1. Do not get married
  • 2. Avoid family creation
  • 3. Vasectomy in your 20s
  • 4. Lift consistently
  • 5. Eliminate all sedations
  • 6. Learn Game & Networking
  • 7.  Play to your strengths, build wealth
  • 8. Resist easing up on your focus

Divorce

  • Men fare better than women after divorce.
  • They make more money.
  • “Despite the common perception that women make out better than men in divorce proceedings, women who worked before, during, or after their marriages see a 20 percent decline in income when their marriages end, according to Stephen Jenkins, a professor at the London School of Economics. His research found that men, meanwhile, tend to see their incomes rise more than 30 percent post-divorce. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for separated women is 27 percent, nearly triple the figure for separated men.”
  • They are more likely to remarry.
  • “64% of divorced or widowed men have remarried, compared with 52% of previously married women.”
  • 30% of men say they don’t want to get remarried, compared with 54% of women.
  • They don’t have the responsibilities of caregiving.
  • Quoting from legaljobs blog that sources several studies
  • 90% of parents settle custody disputes without a judge.
  • They earn, on average, $286/month from child support.
  • 79.9% of custodial parents in the US are mothers, though that’s down about 3 points from 2014, so the trend is slowly reversing.
  • Only 4% of child custody cases require a trial.
  • These are very, very, very rare things that the manosphere seem to base their entire understanding of “divorce” around!
  • In 2017, full child support payments were received by 46.4% and 43.1% of custodial mothers and fathers, respectively.
  • They win custody if they fight for it.
  • “We began our investigation of child custody aware of a common perception that there is a bias in favor of women in these decisions. Our research contradicted this perception. Although mothers more frequently get primary physical custody of children following divorce, this practice does not reflect bias but rather the agreement of the parties and the fact that, in most families, mothers have been the primary  [*748]  caretakers of children. Fathers who actively seek custody obtain either primary or joint physical custody over 70% of the time. Reports indicate, however, that in some cases perceptions of gender bias may discourage fathers from seeking custody and stereotypes about fathers may sometimes affect case outcomes. In general, our evidence suggests that the courts hold higher standards for mothers than fathers in custody determinations.”
  • Alimony is rare.
  • “Today, it is far less common for anybody, male or female, to receive alimony after divorce than it was in the past. In the 1960s, 25 percent of divorce settlements included alimony orders. Now, this figure is closer to 10 percent. Women are still the primary alimony recipients, but the number of men who receive alimony from their former spouses is increasing. According to the 2000 census, 0.5 percent of alimony recipients in the United States were male. By 2010, 3 percent of the 400,000 alimony recipients in the country were male.
  • The divorce rate has been falling since the 90’s, from 4.8/1,000 to 3.2/1,000.

I am the only person here with flexibility to change their beliefs. I have no book, no ideology, no community built around a specific purpose.

Vasectomy reversals

  • Typically cost between $5k-$15k, not covered by insurance.
  • Success rate anywhere from 80%-90%
  • “A total of 8305 patients were included by 25 studies. Descriptive analysis showed higher post-operative patency (80.5% vs 91.4%) and pregnancy rates (47.7% vs 73.3%) after microscopic vasovasostomy.”