The Male Brain sent over a link the other day that consists of an article that is about 20 years old by this point, and is apparently somewhat famous in innarwebz circles. This article here was written by a guy who wanted to rationalise away his inability to get a woman:

Why don’t I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: “Is it because I’m too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?” When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honoured conclusion that “there must be Something Wrong™ with me” before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.

Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I’ll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age—let’s say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent—she doesn’t have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are—three simple demands, which I’m sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.

That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible—in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend.

The article’s author, one Tristan Miller, then proceeded to go into considerable detail by crunching a bunch of numbers to arrive at nearly 19,000 women in his potential dating pool.

He then proceeded to argue that the probability of finding the woman of his dreams – someone who is young, beautiful, and intelligent, and is attracted to him – was tiny because it would take him 67 years to get through that entire dating pool.

Obviously, the entire analysis was utter and total nonsense.

We’ll start with the fact that he insists that he isn’t the problem. The fact that he spent so much time working through a mathematical proof of why he won’t get a girlfriend – which is to say, he tried to prove a negative – indicates that he ABSOLUTELY IS the problem. After all, you cannot prove a negative. You can only infer that a hypothesis is false based on lack of available data to support it, up to a reasonable confidence level.

So now let’s get started on the mathematics, which is both sloppy and stupid.

Before I continue, I’d like to make it clear that I am NOT picking on Mr. Miller himself. I hope, but am not sure, that this article of his – again, written 20 years ago – was in the spirit of satire, because even given how blue-pilled I once was, I have a hard time believing that any man is that pathetic in real life. However, his work serves as an object lesson to young men these days who are psyching themselves out from finding good women and creating strong relationships.

So. Mr. Miller started by taking the total number of people on Earth, which at the time was about 5.6 billion. Today it’s more like 7.7 billion. He then calculated the total number of women, which is naively computed by dividing that number by 2; that used to be about 2.8 billion and today is about 3.85 billion.

He then looked only at women in Western countries, because those are the women that he prefers. Let’s be honest and admit that this is code for: “I want a fair-skinned woman”. There is nothing wrong with this. Most people specifically prefer to have relationships with members of the opposite sex who are similar to them. If we go by publicly available data from dating sites, Asian and white women are the most desirable across all races of men, and white men are the most desirable across all races of women.

(Contrary to the breathless exclamations of RACISSSSSS!!! that the mainstream media issued in response to these findings a few years, ago, there is nothing racist about it. These are innate preferences that are true across multiple populations, so racism cannot be the problem. As I’ve said before, facts don’t give a damn about your feelings.)

But then it all starts to go a bit wrong.

He starts by looking at women in the age range of 18 to 24, because he was 21 at the time and wanted to date a woman within 3 years of his age. That is stupid. Men who value themselves will generally not be interested in dating women older than themselves. (There are some exceptions but they are precisely that – exceptional.)

The reason for this is simple. Men value youth, beauty, and fertility. Women value wealth, power, and experience. By definition, that means that men in general value younger women, and women in general value older men. There is nothing wrong with this either. That is how the world is supposed to work.

Mr. Miller also made a couple of major, and flawed, assumptions about age distributions. He assumed that women are uniformly distributed by age group. This is simply not true. Age distributions are not uniform. That is why we have population pyramids, not population columns.

Things got worse when Mr. Miller basically assumed a normal distribution for beauty, and aimed for women 2 standard deviations above normal.

There are at least three huge problems with this approach.

First, beauty is extremely subjective, as any of my readers will tell you. One of my readers is an absolute sucker for redheads with C-cups; I, on the other hand, do not find redheads to be particularly noteworthy.

(An example of the breed, because reasons.)

Other readers consider Colombian women to be the most beautiful in the world, whereas I find their fiery tempers and demanding personalities rather off-putting.

(Also because reasons.)

As for me, personally, well, I have a pronounced preference for white women with blonde, brunette, or black hair – especially from Eastern Europe – or from East Asia, and with athletic figures and nice boobs. What can I say, I have a type, as anyone who pages through my Friday T&A segments knows perfectly well by now.

(Because more reasons.)

To each his own, basically.

Second, feminine beauty does not follow a normal distribution, certainly not in Western countries where obesity rates are skyrocketing. Female beauty, if it follows a distribution at all, is almost surely skewed left, which is to say that there are LOTS of uggos and hambeasts crowded to the left of “average”, and very “thin-tailed”, which is to say that the number of women at the extreme end of the distribution are far fewer than a Gaussian bell-curve distribution would normally allow for.

And third, and most importantly, even if female beauty follows a normal distribution – which I don’t believe it does and I’ve never seen any evidence whatsoever that it does – a two-standard-deviation cutoff point, on the right end, rules out 95% of all women.

It should be plain to anyone paying attention that this is a spectacularly stupid metric to use – as well as, once again, an incredibly subjective one. A girl who is “hotter than 95% of all the rest” to one man is not going to be hotter than the rest to another.

So that dispenses with the “attractiveness” aspect. Now we get to the absolute worst part of Mr. Miller’s analysis, which is shot through with self-contradiction.

For starters, Mr. Miller computes the number of women from the available pool who would be interested in him by chucking out 50% of single women. I have no idea where he comes up with the idea that only 50% of single women in his age and beauty range would be attracted to him – based on the data above, I’d estimate that probability at less than ten percent.

And then, Mr. Miller then argues that the pool of women would be so large that he wouldn’t have time to get through them all to find his dream girl.

This is downright stupid. Let’s put aside the fact that his mathematical calculations are stupid. He’s seriously arguing that, out of nearly NINETEEN THOUSAND possible partners, not a single one is likely to meet ALL of his requirements.

There is nothing logical or mathematical about this. It is purely a self-limiting emotional problem, not a quantitative one. If you go on dates with over a hundred women in any given area and cannot find a single one that is even remotely acceptable as a girlfriend, the problem isn’t with the ladies – it’s with you.

Note, I am not saying that you will easily or quickly find a wife. The criteria for wives are much stricter than for girlfriends. But if you just want a girlfriend, then going on cheap, fast, simple dates with a handful of women will give you an idea of what you want and what to look for. If you don’t like one particular woman, fine – plenty more on the woman tree.

The root of the problem faced by Mr. Miller and other men like him is simple. It really is them, not the women.

Here is the real reason that men like Mr. Miller will never have a girlfriend:

They are PATHETIC.

That’s really all it comes down to. Such men rationalise their failures in life by attempting to come up with mathematical post hoc ergo propter hoc justifications for their inability to get what they want.

Listen, are you one of those men who, like Mr. Miller, thinks that you will never have a girlfriend?

Do you want to know the real secret to getting what you want?

Are you sure?

Really?

OK, come over here, and I’ll whisper it in your ear.

The real, true, 100% guaranteed secret to success in getting whatever you want, is…

TO DEFINE WHAT YOU WANT AND THEN GO OUT AND DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GET IT, YOU WHINY PATHETIC LITTLE PUSSY!!!

Look, you have to be realistic about your goals in life. There are a number of factors that will stop you from getting the women that you want, and you have to live with them and find ways to work around them.

If you are shorter than average…

Or more introverted than average…

Or overweight or, God help you, obese…

Or living in a really small town of less than 1,000 people…

Or living in a horrible Western large metropolis full of ugly women, hambeasts, and tattooed SJWs…

Or living in a Dirt World shithole…

Or a virgin at the age of 30…

Or facially ugly or disfigured in some way…

Or poor…

Then, yeah, your life is going to be more difficult. That’s life. Suck it up, buttercup, and get used to it.

Here’s the reality that men like Mr. Miller – it’s actually somewhat insulting to real men to call such pussies “men” – need to understand.

Every single thing in your life that is not exactly the way that you want it to be, is YOUR FAULT.

You, and you alone, are responsible for fixing that shit, especially after the age of 18. It’s ALL on you, and if you’re too much of a pussy to fix it, then you aren’t going to get where you want.

But if you’re willing to put in some hard work and make some changes to yourself – if you’re willing to make a man out of yourself – then there isn’t anything stopping you from getting what you want.

If you are short – learn how to tell jokes well.

If you are introverted – learn how to get out of your own shell. It’s hard. I know. I am extremely introverted and find most people anywhere from annoying to unbearable. But I can be quite charming in real life if I have to be. If you have to get a bit of therapy to learn how to remove your social anxieties, go do it.

If you are overweight – get your ass into the gym and start lifting. Or go to a martial arts school or boxing gym and get in shape. Preferably do both.

If you are in a small town with very few women, move. Go to a place with a larger dating pool. If that isn’t an option, stay where you are and talk to your friends and people in your community that you trust – your pastor, the elder wives at your church, and so on – about setting you up with a girl that they think is right for you. In such communities the bonds of trust are far stronger, and those bonds apply serious brakes on female promiscuity and hamster-wheel-spinning, so the odds of a successful relationship and eventual marriage will be much higher.

If you are living in a Western dump like Toronto or New York or San Francisco or London, then you definitely need to move. Get out of there, travel a bit, and find someplace quieter and less stupid that you would like to settle down. Or, better yet, travel outside the West and see what women are really like in places like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

If you are from a Dirt World shithole – well, you’ve got bigger problems than almost everyone else put together. But you still have options. Learn how to be a gentleman by Western standards – which is to say, DON’T act like this with Western women. Lift and get ripped. Travel and see the world a bit if you can afford it. Broaden your horizons by reading books and learning things about the world around you. Learn a new language. If you are brown-skinned and want to get started with learning some game, try going to the Philippines or Thailand and see what happens.

If you are a virgin at the age of 30 – you are likely to be crippled by terrible sexual insecurity and anxiety. There are cures for that. Since I am a Christian, I do not advocate for or recommend them, I’m simply saying that they are there. IF that is what you decide, just to get that monkey off your back, well, hey, that’s up to you. But you need to deal with that shit and either accept it or square it away, because it will damage your ability to form a relationship with a woman. You will be so insecure and anxious that you will come across as desperately needy and pathetic, and that stink of desperation will repel any girl with even a modicum of self-respect.

If you are facially disfigured – learn to compensate for that by dressing well or adding a beard or changing your look. You can even make scars look sexy if you know how to pull it off.

If you are poor – start a business and make serious money.

The common theme running through all of these recommendations should be clear to you. As my friend and fellow shitlord Adam Piggott, the Gentleman Adventurer, has said time and again, men do not find ourselves, we make ourselves.

You have to make a man out of yourself. Sitting around rationalising your failures through mathematical calculations does not change the fact that you are a pathetic loser.

In fact, here’s a great example of a guy who started out with all sorts of disadvantages. He is extremely short – a dwarf, in fact. He has a weird-looking face. He wasn’t rich early in life. I know someone who went to college with him. He was hugely popular with girls because he had tremendous natural charisma and learned how to make people laugh.

Yep. Tyrion Lannister himself. And look at him now. Happily married with a child, and one of the biggest and most bankable voice and short-person stars in the world.

I want to finish off here with one more important point about the ladies. You see, women are flawed, imperfect, demanding, and difficult. They will constantly test you and push you and bitch at you and try to undercut your authority. These are not bugs, these are features, and the sooner that you realise this, the better. You will never find the perfect woman.

If you put in the hard work to make yourself a man, and you put yourself out there and are willing to get your heart broken from time to time, then you will merely find a woman who is “good enough”.

That is exactly what most men should look for.

Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you find a woman whose flaws you can accept and tolerate, and who accepts and tolerates yours, and hose life goals align with yours, and you really enjoy spending time with her, then to Beelzebub with the mathematics of it – take the plunge and wife her up. Ensure that you have taken precautions, of course – get a prenup, keep separate bank accounts, make sure that all property is in your name and not jointly owned, at least for the first 5 years of marriage, and so on – but don’t wait around for the impossible to happen.

Mr. Miller’s 20-year-old article was, I hope, written tongue-in-cheek. But if it wasn’t, then the resulting mathematics are really little more than an applied form of the Drake Equation, which supposedly gives you the total number of planets in the Universe capable of supporting human life. Leaving aside that many of the variables in both equations are highly suspect and logically insupportable, both Mr. Miller’s “Incel Equation” and the Drake Equation share one particular fundamental flaw of logic:

They are rationalisations of phenomena that are actually due almost entirely to the peculiarities of the observer.

In closing, if you want to be an incel for the rest of your life, by all means, confine yourself to the realms of mathematical canoodling like Mr. Miller did in his paper. But if you want to make a man out of yourself and go and get what you really want, then put the paper down and start doing something good with your life.