Wasteful Wealth as Seduction and the Permanent Negation of Choice and Suffering for Women
The first time I started making what I considered to be decent money as a young man, I was looking forward to my general appeal with women increasing as a direct result of being materially wealthier. I had been told by every reliable source that women were attracted to men with money. Of course, I had already done pretty well for myself with women, even without much income, due to my natural intrigue and charm as a penniless world traveler. So, adding greater financial means should only have increased my already respectable appeal to women.
But as my monthly income increased, I saw no obvious effects on my dating life. The paychecks got higher and higher. My bank account filled to a comfortable level. Yet, nothing changed with women. I was confused. Shouldn’t I at least have been getting more attention from shallow golddiggers, even if they weren’t the kind of women I’d be interested in building relationships with? Shouldn’t they have been drawn to me because I was now a man of means and potentially a good provider?
I eventually realized the crucial fact I had overlooked: Women aren’t attracted to men with money; they are attracted to men who spend money in a particularly showy kind of way. It’s about vanity more than anything else. Even as my income grew, I made few visible changes to how I lived my life or spent my money. I didn’t buy more expensive clothes or eat at nicer restaurants. I had no desire to impress others with my appearance or social stature. So, women generally had no way of differentiating me from my previously poorer state of existence. My material wants remained low no matter how much I earned. To the golddiggers, I was still the same penniless loser they had no reason to pine after.
I once courted a woman at a time when most of my income was spent refurbishing an old house in a scenic rural area. It was part of a long-term plan to create a safe, comfortable place away from city life, somewhere I could raise kids someday the way I would want and enjoy my life with my future family on my own terms. It was the best, most practical way I could think to invest my income at the time. Though my girlfriend was impressed with what I had accomplished with the property, she confessed that she was confused by my choice to spend my disposable income, tens of thousands of dollars at this point, in such an unconventional way. “Yeah, it’s very nice. This just isn’t how most people spend their money,” she said.
I thought for a long time about what she meant by “how most people spend their money.” What did she perceive would be a better way for me to exchange my income for goods and services than how I was doing it? What would serve me better in the long run than what I was doing by securing a place to live and enjoy my life the way I wanted with minimal recurring expenses? Should I have been investing in the stock market instead? Or starting a risky business venture? Is that what “most people” did when their cost of living was significantly lower than their earning capacity?
I finally realized that my naïve partner, a woman who could barely make enough money on her own to support her meager lifestyle in the city, was making the same mistake the golddiggers had by associating wealth with flash instead of substance. It wasn’t about having money and the opportunities it brings as a medium of exchange. It was about displaying the willingness to waste money on frivolous short-term sources of excitement and social status. The right clothes and car. Expensive weekends in prestigious bars and clubs. A well-known brand of smartphone that costs far more than it needs to if your only goal is to make calls, surf the web, and take a few selfies. Brands of alcohol with high price tags and prestigious brands but that will be quickly quaffed by people who lack the palate to appreciate them.
People who have never had enough money and people who have always had more money than they know what to do with have something in common: They seek to spend more than they need to as a form of self-indulgent recreation. That’s what attracts shallow women. Not the skill that it took to produce wealth or the responsible mindset of spending and investing it wisely. Shallow women want a man willing to waste hundreds or thousands of dollars buying them drinks at a bar or showering them with shiny trinkets in an effort to win their attention. The willingness to waste is valuable to them. It makes them feel like a prize to be won.
Every dollar spent on something that brings no long-term, meaningful value to life is a dollar that could have been spent on something that would have accomplished greater good for oneself or the world. It could have been used to acquire education, tools, and resources that would have made you and your partner more capable of expressing yourselves as the people you wish to be. It could have been an investment in the pairing that will define your shared future. What could possibly be more romantic than that? Men who grow aware of gold-digging by shallow women now often want to marry before they ever make a lot of money so that they can be more confident that the women they choose love them for reasons other than easy money.
Now imagine how much power men would lose in the dating and marriage scene if women understood even the basic principles of applying their knowledge and skills in an economically optimal way. It’s not rocket science. It’s not particularly difficult to participate meaningfully in the economy and exchange basic goods and services for currency, at least enough to provide for the bare necessities of life. Exchanging knowledge, skills, and resources for currency is not a gendered concept.
Yet, we have accepted and insisted that the powerful role of economic provider is something men are far more capable of than women without any reasonable cause. Nothing about the natural differences of the sexes makes men fundamentally better at economic exchange. Men and women might naturally specialize in different types of productive output. Still, there is nothing to keep women from capitalizing on what they produce like we expect men to.
Around the world, women have commonly been indoctrinated into believing that they are economically incapable on their own. Confirmation bias will stop them from processing simple, obvious ways to increase their earning capacity because they have already categorized themselves as non-earners who must depend on a masculine partner to earn for them and impress them primarily with his material wealth. That is why wasteful wealth is so attractive to shallow, incapacitated women. They crudely interpret it as life’s only form of security. It’s as if the wasteful spender is shouting to the world, “Look how much money I have! I have so much, in fact, that I don’t mind throwing it away on bullshit just to impress you and make you forget about how empty your life is for a while! There’s plenty more where that comes from.”
Women who seek to be materially spoiled have fallen for the infantilization gambit men pull over their eyes. They have been told their whole lives that taking care of themselves and being meaningfully productive in the world is impossible. The alternative they accept is that the greatest good they can do is simply to exist in a largely unconscious, non-participatory role in life, to have all their choices passed down from a higher authority: their breadwinning husband, the natural head of the household.
In religious cultures, the husband’s authority to make conscious choices for the rest of the family (with wife and children usually lumped together into the same incapable category or the wife only marginally above the children) comes from the perception of a masculine deity that holds ultimate conscious authority over everyone. The husband acts as God Daddy’s human ambassador for women and children here on Earth, imbued with a small amount of His power to be conscious and choose. Women and children are only the beneficiaries of that choice. To be a good wife is to submit to your husband’s will for you and, by extension, his God’s.
Even when an attractive young woman is promoted from a simple, empty-headed beautiful object to a nurturing wife and mother, her role is still largely passive and decided for her. She is a machine that produces babies and breastmilk to keep the young alive on her authoritarian husband’s behalf. She has been training all her life for this role by taking instruction from her father and brothers and watching her mother and sisters proudly do the same.
Submission and passivity are not feminine virtues. Men who seek them in a partner are admitting that they do not see women as fully human because humanity is defined by the capacity for consciousness and choice. They will try their darndest to keep the women they pursue from ever realizing everything they are capable of. It’s easy to woo a childish, insecure mind by showering it with treasures that superficially represent wealth and security. A real woman with a mature and active mind requires so much more to be turned on by a man and seek his complementary partnership. That’s simply not a task most men are up to, and they feel existentially threatened by the mere idea of it.
That’s why I’ve even received death threats from some particularly fragile men who thought I was robbing them of their natural, God-given right to a submissive wife by speaking out to empower women in some places where they are most culturally subjugated. These are the same men who are even intimidated by women who make more money than they do. They are intimidated by women who are taller than them, physically stronger than them, more assertive than them, more independent than them, and even who have had more sexual experience than them. All of these are signs that it will be more difficult for them to exert control over her and fit her into the box they and society have prepared for her.
The most vulnerable women seek an instant solution to the problems inherent to consciously participating in life. They are attracted to men of means because they see them as easy “off” buttons to the struggles of daily life. They learn early on that if they are attractive and submissive enough, the right man, a veritable Prince Charming, will ride in on a white horse and spare them from a life of toil. It’s the opposite of a mature man who seeks a woman who will enliven him with her beautiful, motivating influence. She helps him become more of himself, just as he does the same for her. He does not seek to nullify her identity.
Non-participation in conscious life is how we interpret the epitome of luxury and lavish recreation: an existence tailored to the immediate nullification of problems to solve and choices to make. This is the illusion of security: a permanent state of non-action while the world turns around you without you as a conscious participant. It is spiritual suicide for women.