As most readers will know, I have a deep and abiding interest in Game. Sex is just about the only positive engagement men enjoy with women, so such discussions usually draw a wealth of interest and commentary. Writers like Roissy in DC seem fiercely insistent that women are attracted to 'alpha' virtues such as confidence and high social status. However, it would be interesting to see what they make of the following case - a British 'omega male' who enjoys not only sexual but a great deal of reproductive success:
He has fathered seven children by seven women in just seven years and abandoned each and every one. Dressed in a tracksuit, jobless 24-year-old Keith MacDonald is enough to put women off men for life. Yet, despite his appalling track record, the man dubbed Britain's worst dad is to marry. And, naturally, the happy couple have already started trying for their first baby.
The binman's son, who lives on £44 ($60) a week income support, has never paid a penny towards the upbringing of his children. Nor does he see them. Apparently it is 'too much of a hassle'. But bride-to-be Clare Bryant, 20, is convinced he has changed and says they plan to have two children together.
'Some people say he's a bad dad - and, as he doesn't see his children, for all I know he might be,' she said yesterday. 'But I think he'd be brilliant with our child.'
They first started dating in March when MacDonald bumped into her at Sunderland bus station and asked her out.
'He was drunk, but knew what he was doing, so I said 'yes',' she said.
Three days later the couple boarded a bus and headed to Middlesborough for their first date. He didn't have any money after walking out on his trolley-collecting job in January, so I got us lunch from Greggs (the bakers),' she added. 'He told me he didn't see any of his kids any more, but I wasn't bothered. I was more concerned about the drinking or if he might cheat. Keith said he was a new man though, and I thought he deserved a chance. My mum and stepdad told me I was an idiot. They didn't think he'd change and told me not to let him get me pregnant. After a few months I decided I'd like to have his babies, so there's no point in using condoms now.'
MacDonald proposed in June after buying a £30 ($50) ring she had previously seen in a shop window.
'He said: 'So, do you fancy it? I agreed right away,' added Miss Bryant. 'I want two or three bridesmaids, and I'd love a honeymoon too.'
The couple have since moved in together in a two bedroom council (Housing Project) house in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, and are applying for joint benefits of around £100 ($150) a week - leaving the taxpayer to pick up the £60,000 ($100,000) bill for his seven children.
'I can keep an eye on him now,' said Miss Bryant, who is also unemployed. 'We only go out to the pub twice a week, and Keith only has one or two pints. Every morning, I watch a few hours of telly, while Keith surfs the web. Then we go around town, and every now and then pop into the JobCentre, but there's never anything going. We'll keep going though, because we want to save for our wedding.'
MacDonald first had sex at the age of 10 and boasts that he has since slept with 40 women - even claiming to be 'a sex god on £40 ($60) a week'. He first became a father at the age of 15 when his then girlfriend, Michelle Purvis, now 31, gave birth to his now nine-year-old daughter, Jamie Leigh. When they split up he met Charlotte Anderson, now 24, who fell pregnant with daughter, Kady, now seven.
MacDonald then met Jordan Banks who was just 15 when he got her pregnant. They had a son together, Angelis, who is now six years old. June Garrick, now 25, gave birth to his fourth child, Brandon, in October 2003 - just a month after Angelis was born. Then, in 2006, he met 17 year old Stephanie Jubb at a bus stop. She gave birth to their son Matt, who is now three.
When their short-lived romance came to an end he started dating Stacey Barker, now 21, who fell pregnant and gave birth to his third daughter, Emily, now two. His seventh child was born after a brief romance with Bec Wright, now 21, who gave birth to Clio, now one. By the time all of the children are 16 the total bill to the taxpayer will be in excess of £1 ($1.5) million.
MacDonald told Closer magazine: 'When I got with Clare I was downing 12 cans of lager a day. Now I've quit booze and I'm looking for a job. I'll never stray again. Clare says if I go out with my mates I'll just get myself into trouble, so I don't mind staying in with her.'
So - what is the secret of MacDonald's romantic success? Is it his good looks and buffed physique that is generating all these conquests? No - unless the camera is a pathological liar, I don't think so. Could he be the master of some field of science, philosophy or the fine arts, whose dazzling repartee is winning all these female hearts? Well, considering he has no qualifications of any kind, that is decidedly unlikely. Is it sheer wealth - the dazzle of his sequinned lifestyle -that is turning their heads? The fact that he lives on the desultory sum of 60 dollars a week tends to refute that interpretation. Is it his animal confidence on the Serengeti of life that wins womanly approval? Aye, even the coldest woman's heart is often won by the sight of raw courage - surely that's the answer? Hmmm, he looks like he has never thrown a punch in anger, so probably not. Is it his steely self-possession that draws admiring eyes? Considering he drinks twelve cans of beer a day and has never held a serious job, that is also most unlikely.
I recall an interesting discussion on Scarecrow's blog, wherein a Roissy-inspired American PUA took him to task for questioning whether Charles Manson was an alpha in any shape, sense or form. The Gamester's general argument seemed to be that, because Manson somehow garnered a harem of adoring females who were prepared to kill for him, he must automatically be an alpha. I suspect that many PUA's parrot this line without really thinking about it too deeply. By their reckoning, MacDonald - a jobless, ugly, ignorant, inbred bum - is also an alpha.
Let's start thinking outside the box for a moment. The 'alpha' theory of Game takes its cue from the quasi-science of evolutionary psychology. Nothing wrong in that - the Darwinian paradigm is supported by a good deal of tangential evidence. However, it assumes (without warrant) that female preference had a large part to play in shaping male behaviours during human biological history, and that female preference has been shaped by evolutionary necessity. In this view, all men have to do is mimic the 'alpha' archetype embedded in female preference and they will get sex. However, it is quite possible that the well-attested evidence for unequal male reproductive success in pre-civilized eras might derive from intra-male competition and subsequent sexual coercion of unwilling females rather than females selecting males as reproductive partners, as such. If this coercive theory were true, there would be little reason for women to 'evolve' any such 'alpha' archetype, since their views would have counted for little in intra-male struggles for sex. Further, we might expect women to have rather limited sexual drives and interests, since their evolution would be pointless - their preferences would be entirely obviated by the fact of post-conquest sexual coercion.
And frankly, this is what we tend to find (or rather, what serious researchers tend to find). Professor Glenn Wilson of the University of London opines in The Great Sex Divide that female sexual drives are, at their strongest, merely equivalent to those of males in a non-aroused state. That is, 'sexy' women just feel what men feel on a near continual basis. American sexual research indicates that only a quarter of women enjoy sex, and that three quarters have no sexual feelings. Professor Wilson alludes to research indicating that rural women in Ireland (notably ignorant of Cosmo, Sex and the City and other feminist media) have no concept of sexual pleasure whatsoever. So, far from the 'Gina Tingles' beloved of American PUAs, a reasonably strong case can be made out for women never having 'evolved' a sexual preference, never having had to. And if women never evolved a sexual preference for an ideal male sexual archetype, post-Darwinian 'alpha' Game techniques are probably ineffectual, too.
In short, women don't know what they want. Sex is largely meaningless to them at any deep level, and their aversion/attraction to it the product of rational (i.e. material/cultural) considerations. This would explain the well-worn dictum that sex is the only thing men are completely irrational about, and the only thing women are completely rational about. It also explains why so many women fall prey to gamma/omega males such as Manson or MacDonald. In short, they are not unsung, socially dominant 'alphas' at all, merely 'chancers' with little to lose in today's 'post-marriage' moral climate.
Finally, this 'sexless female' interpretation of gender-relations lends much strength to the Anglobitch Thesis and other 'cultural' interpretations of gender relations. If women in general harbour no deep sexual instincts, how they relate to men becomes crucially determined by the cultural values around them. In the case of Anglo-American women, the repressive, puritanical nature of Anglo-Saxon culture explains far more about their casual misandry than any biologically-ingrained psycho-sexual preference - since the latter does not exist, as such.