True, and better have a woman handy when imbibing.

Because absinthe makes the heart grow fonder…

(Cough, cough, swoon, fall over, pass out,)

Yes, it was quite a “et tu Brute” moment.

So glad you stopped by. I’ve always loved that gravatar image of yours.

I do think there’s a major value boost to quality alcohol after college – I’d expect most college kids would just think you were a square if you were shaking up cocktails at uni parties. I’m curious how it went over in your college days if you were doing it back then.

There was no backfire. Not every conversation with a woman is about getting laid.

She wasn’t intellectually inferior. She just couldn’t think straight when the topic was the sexual marketplace – all of her logic and rhetoric converged on her pre-conceived conclusion that women were higher value than men and any portrayal to the contrary was offensive to her entire gender. She was smart, but one of her key flaws was that she wasn’t really interested in living an intellectual life; seeking sensual stimulation was more of her thing, and far less of mine, at least less enough to make it a long-term compatibility problem.

However, your comment does bring up another good point. Let me turn your argument into a syllogism: if a woman was intellectually weak, and I invested in dating her, then I made a bad dating decision. IOW, it should be a standing aim to mate at my intellectual level (whatever that may be – I make no claims on my own cognitive prowess that you can’t read in my posts).

Somehow “intellectual equality” has been raised into some kind of holy immutable relationship requirement.

I happen to enjoy dating intellectually active women (see above), but I know men who have placed that below other relationship requirements including mutual attraction and combined life purpose.

I have dated some women who were “nexted” for a lack of brainpower or an inability to think straight and make good judgments. For some of these guys, that wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
But in other cases, these men have given up on angling for “the total package” – some of my more intelligent male friends are quite disappointed by the statistical fact that as unusually smart men, there is by definition a very small pool of people who can give them the cranial stimulation they crave, and so their mating prospects are quite limited if they are holding out for for that in a partner.

I think the most lucid thing I’ve heard from one of those guys is that of all the things a relationship can give him, intellectual exchange is the most replaceable – he can get that from friends, relatives, coworkers or on the Internet, none of which can offer him affection, comfort and love.

Needless to say, these men have been accused of various nefarious aims or of not properly appreciating intellect in a woman. College-educated women in particular tend to bristle at hearing a man say that other things are more important to his romantic choices, defaulting to shaming language about guys trying to pick up on “dumb, submissive, easily-impressed” girls.

Again going back to my girlfriend’s ego-protecting thought process, there’s a certain degree of marketplace protection going on, of women trying to create a submarket in which their particular traits are advantageous, to “stack the deck” in the race to grab top men.

A curious analogy you could make is to height. Tall girls curse short girls who date tall men, because a short girl who could date any man asymmetrically takes away a tall guy from the tall girl’s pool. Likewise I’ve heard “smart girls” curse “dumb girls” from taking a smart man off the market, as discussed above.

And then it becomes clear – it’s a hypergamy thing, he needs to be better than her in her eyes.

You must be new here (or were when you left this comment). The shame game is long over – men are getting tired of it, many of those men having grown up in the religious communities of which you speak but were not taught, nor did they see, an environment of “brotherhood, humility and love” – but rather an environment of simony and craven political empire-building masquerading as religious structure.