If you don't know what "Waifu" is, that's alright. It means you're normal and frankly avoided a sad aspect of humanity. But while it originally meant "favorite female Japanese anime character," (and there's nothing wrong with that) it has also morphed in some circles to mean where men have actually formed imaginary relationships with these fictitious characters, some times even marrying them. This not only explains the inside joke on Archer where Krieger has a pink-haired hologram for a girlfriend, but also explains the existence of "Waifu dolls/pillows."
My initial reaction to all of this was "thank god I'm dying in 30 years," but that annoying part of my brain dedicated to economics wouldn't turn off. It just "had to" do some research, and look into what possible incentives existed for this to even be a thing. And the observations were very interesting.
First, economically speaking, the only way a boy/man would choose to date/court/marry a fictional girl instead of a real one is because the costs required to get a real one is just too high. At first you may scoff at this (and I surely did), but upon running some numbers and thinking about, it IS a very expensive endeavor. If you think back to when you hit puberty on, precisely how much have you spent in terms of
Time
Money
Labor
Effort
Mentality
Stress
Strife
Fear
Regret
and plain ole other sources of calories of energy dealing with women?
My figures are of course HIGHLY subjective and up for debate, but if you take into consideration direct financial expenses, mental costs, and opportunity costs, the total costs to find a wife ever so roughly hover around $720,000. Enough for most single people to retire on.
These costs are not insignificant, and only certainly higher for less social or good looking men who (likely) populate the "Waifu Community." So even though they are very UNLIKELY to run and crunch the numbers I did above, intuitively their brain does some kind of cost benefit analysis and concludes it's not worth the $700,000+ in life expense to chase after a real girl. Not entirely irrational.
However, enter in the concept of substitute and inferior goods.
Just because a young man decides it's not worth the total expense to get a girl in the real world, doesn't mean he can't (albeit delusionally) satisfy some of his romantic desires with non-human substitute goods. Sex can be more than adequately (though inferiorly) be replaced with porn. A loving relationship can be replaced with one's imagination (think Wilson in "Castaway"). And a marriage or confirmation of a relationship can be replaced by fake ceremony where you marry a video game character (or in the case of an increasing # of American women, marrying yourself). And so instead of becoming a hermit or a virgin "MGTOW" where you have no relationship with women, some men escape into a fantasy world where they get themselves a Waifu.
Now naturally everybody's mind is focusing on the delusional aspect of this mentality. However, I want to again reiterate and refocus our attention to the economic aspect of this. Whether you agree with them or not, whether you find them sane or not, they are at least being RATIONAL to a certain extent. And we can't deny the fact that they've made the conscious choice to choose a fake girlfriend over a real one. But the fact ANYBODY is making this choice consciously speaks volumes as to the price and costs of finding a real woman today.
Consider not just the various financial, time, labor, and opportunity costs associated with finding a quality real world girl. Consider the lack of drama and the mental pain associated with having an "imaginary girlfriend." Not only do you save yourself $700,000 in explicit and implicit costs, you also save yourself;
Being stood up
Being shot down
Drama
Temper tantrums
Girls cheating on you
Girls leading you on
Bi-polar freaks
Feminism
Blue balls
and every other form of scourge and fire-laden hurdles you and every other man had to jump through during his teens and 20's.
Additionally, though it isn't real and it IS delusional, imagine what nice, kind, compliant, and supporting personalities Waifu's have. She isn't a single mom. She isn't demanding you gotta do this and that. She isn't going to cheat on you. She's always happy to see you. She's PRECISELY at your EXACT same intelligence level (because she is you), etc. etc. It's a trait the inferior good has that is superior to the real thing. So when you consider all these factors through the lens of a (likely) unattractive male, you can start to see why they choose to be delusional instead of live in the real world.
The sad point I'm trying to make is that if men are willing to be irrational in the real world by choosing to live in a delusional one, the economics of having a Waifu make complete sense. What's even sadder, however, is that the cost differential between having a real girlfriend and a fake one is so huge in the real world, the concept of having a Waifu (or marrying yourself in women's cases) is actually becoming a real thing.
Enjoy that decline!
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Milk and a slice of pizza, how romantic...
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've noticed is that in general, female anime characters are way more feminine than the typical American woman. It's what sells, which should tell you something.
You think its crazy now?
ReplyDeleteGive robotics another five years. Make a robot that can bow and speak, wears clothes, and do even just one useful domestic task like working a vacuum, and these guys are gone. Just gone. Nothing short of legally enshrined slavery will bring them back.
Au contraire. Your figures are fromage au cottage, HAR HAR HAR! I yam a sophisticted bilingual savant dontchya know.
ReplyDeleteLook - in a good classical marriage, you pool resources and divide labour. In classical marriage you marry, assume a mortgage on a home and by the time the fuggin kids move out everything is paid off and you can retire to 'Freedom 55'.
Being single, the net effect is that your costs double and your income is cut in half. You pay rent or the mortgage by yourself, you pay for the utilities, maintenance and other monthly expenses yourself, you make the car payment by yourself. For most of us these days - all that precludes setting any money aside for savings or investment. It is all too easy to get mired in monthly payments and debt.
Yes, I know that roughly 50% of north American women are bat shit friggin crazy and unfit to be wives, never mind mothers or daughters or sisters. But 50% of them are good, wholesome women that an enterprising man can team up with for mutual gain. The secret to finding them is cheap and easy too: long, drawn out classical courtships - same as our grandparents used to do! You need a woman that you don't have to entertain 24/7/365. She needs to be able to entertain herself as often as not. You need one that is a warm, amicable companion for long walks, helping with housework or just bumming around. Real women can live well on the cheap, same as us guys do! Modern sluts aren't worth the time of day.
By the grace of God I did it. I made some great investments. I have a woman who is high speed, low drag and very low maintenance. The house and cars are paid off. Things are slowing down at work, which had the CFO ranting and threatening us in the branches. I sent him a rude e-mail and told that asshole he needs me a helluva lot more than I need him, and to take his histrionics and FOAD. If I don't have a job tomorrow I don't care. I can be a semi-retired old fart and work at Walmart and still make ends meet.
If you are spending 3/4 of a million dollars on women...you ain't doing it right.
"Being single, the net effect is that your costs double and your income is cut in half. You pay rent or the mortgage by yourself, you pay for the utilities, maintenance and other monthly expenses yourself, you make the car payment by yourself. For most of us these days - all that precludes setting any money aside for savings or investment. It is all too easy to get mired in monthly payments and debt."
DeleteMost single men opt for minimalism, it's amazing how not buying sh!t you don't need saves you stacks of cash. 😁💵
you can get this 23 foot long waifu pillow http://goboiano.com/news/3183-top-ecchi-anime-monster-musume-gets-23-foot-long-body-pillow
ReplyDeleteFor Waifu, do you actually mean WTF?
ReplyDeleteOddly enough I agree with your premise - people are not irrational (unless total whack jobs) and whatever they do that doesn't make sense to you, actually does have an inner coherence and makes sense to them (although they may not be able to explain it).
But wasting perfectly good pizza on a cloth girlfriend is odd to say the least ...
Phil B
This was a great read Aaron..I found it ironic because I just read an article where Obama and government officials argue "pornography is making people 'lazy', in ways that they rather watch pornography than actually get the real deal." If the real deal includes $720,000, plus a ton of negative emotional drama along side of that - I count myself out because I want no part of it. Maybe a Waifu is my future wife...I always did admire Yuna from Final Fantasy X back in my RPG days lol
ReplyDeleteAnyways greta article...and the article about Obama trying to ban porn is here if your intrested:
http://huzlers.com/obama-announces-ban-pornography-united-states/
Just wait until this trend gets amped up by cheap, mass market VR rigs (Oculus) powered by cloud based AI. Goodbye marriage.
ReplyDeleteI am one of your fans and don't mean this in a critical way, but that may not be the cost of wife-hunting. It may be the cost of going outside the marriage system. Meaning, the cost of playing husband without being one, to see if marriage can be made to result from acting married. Going outside the marriage system means sleeping with somebody to whom one is not married. Once you do that, you get the results you describe. Marriage exists, or existed, to protect people from exactly this.
ReplyDeleteIf your parents, or a matchmaker, had found suitable women for you to meet, but only a few times, to choose among, but without extensive dating or physical involvement, you could have had a wife and kids. The woman would have been in that system too, and felt constrained, both before and after marrying you.
There could certainly still have been problems. There is no magic system that eliminates all problems. But your chances of happiness would have been better under a restrained system.
You describe the very high price of the system of being able to do anything one wants. The price of the Sixties, if you will.
There's no free lunch, and apparently there is no free love either. Free Love isn't free. You document what it costs. A lot.
Of course when you were young, the old system was no longer available, anyway. You had no choice but to be hammered under the new system.
Today only the quite religious escape the penalties of the new system.
However even the not-so-religious can make some of the old dynamics happen again. But that would involve admiring a woman who didn't permit herself to be road-tested before marrying.
I never understood the terror of ending up with someone physically inadequate or incompatible. That is a nonsensical fear, in my view.
A man who insists on the Three Date Rule and scorns or won't marry a woman who confines herself to married sex can hardly complain in divorce court that life is unfair and there aren't any rules in life. Which ones was he following back when they met? None. No, there is no honor among thieves. If you scorn rules, you can't invoke them later when it suddenly becomes convenient to mention How One Ought To Behave Dagnabit.
It's sad and it's not your fault. You were born to late to be blamed for any of this.
I still maintain you are not too old to get your vasectomy reversed, and to find a woman to get a family going with. It's not as if there are no women who buy your books and agree with your views.
Good luck.
The costs that you list are rock solid. The part you may make a Part Two out of is that the benefits are built on a foundation of sand. I know of TWO couples (both cases married young, and none of them played the field beforehand, near innocents marrying near innocents, might be the key?). Everyone else, divorced or otherwise split. I've seen 20-30 year marriages end, so the "if you don't marry you'll be alone in old age" doesn't ring true to me - I may find myself cast off when I expected company, which would be worse than going old single. You can't count on a wife to make a home for you, or stand with you raising the kids without thinking she'll poormouth you and take them away, or spend a life until the end when you lay side by side in the earth, or be robbed in divorce court.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't alive in 1954, but I bet the cost was the same (the rest of your income and time belong to your family, forever), but men dropped into marriage feet first because the benefit was darn near guaranteed. Divorce was rare in ALL races/ethnicities, you were a father every day and not just every other weekend, forever, as a head of household you were respected more than single guys instead of derided as today, and as long as you didn't beat your wife or kick the kids, you'd be hailed as a noble man at your wake, even if you spent a little more time/money on past times like ball games or tinkering on junker cars or dialing in the Azores on your ham radio. Even if you didn't have that much love hopefully you at least could get used to each other. Thinking of the couples I grew up around, that was probably the default setting - they seemed used to each other enough to let perpetual motion and of course society's support for intact couples keep them thinking I got a good thing here vs. blowing it up in search for a better that may not be out there.
A man would emigrate rather than be drafted to fight and die in a senseless war. You can't recruit the troops fast enough as they rush the army center to volunteer when you have a meaningful one.
Oh yes, one last thing.
ReplyDeleteYou keep complaining against ugly people who are too "lazy" to make themselves look good.
But ugly can also be genetics, when it's not a matter of body fat and muscle fitness but a matter of difformity etc.
Do you really want ugly people to reproduce and spread their genes ?
I think those Waifu people are doing a public service by not spreading ugliness. Leave them alone already.
Let the beautiful people with plenty of cash reproduce. Why should ugly people reproduce ?
And by not reproducing, they have a very low carbon footprint because they are not leaving behind descendents that will pollute and consume resources.
Don't you find the world overcrowded already ?
And finally, Japan is uber socialist with social security and innumerable other programs. It's a lot worse than the USA. The Waifu crowd might not want to breed future slave workers that will have to pay for this ponzi scheme.
Come on Captain, sharpen up already.
You smoke and you drink, I think this is absolutely irrational considering that you know the dangers it poses to your health and that you are supposedly a smart person who always makes the right decision.
At least cartoon pillows don't poison your lungs nor kill your brain cells.
I'm out at sea right now. My son calls me out of the blue about an hour ago (he's 12), asks if he can use my hand tools for a project. After I get the details and say yes, he signs off, just saying 'Ok, love you, bye'
ReplyDeleterational or not, giving up the potential to ever experience that feeling runs counter to biology, and comes at a cost. I suspect that someone by rubbing his parts against a pillow full time probably isn't doing so as a cost-savings measure.
Good article Cappie. Terrence Popp of redonkulas.com did a video with a similar subject called (I believe) The Cost to be the Boss.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you could do a followup article about how things have changed since the 50s regarding the costs it requires to find and wife up women.
Things to consider and include might be:
-Relative value of money between then and now. (and over the course of time. Graphs :) )
-Relative length of courtship between then and now. People married earlier then and stayed married longer.
-Relative incomes between men and women then and now. This probably doesn't come into play much until the 70s, but it is useful because women only care about relative income, i.e., you must make substantially more than they do, or they aren't interested.
Another way to say it is, how much more difficult is it now to earn enough money to attract and marry a woman than it was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s.
Women are only expensive because they insist on working. A woman who is willing to not work doesn't cost more than her food and clothes. It's when you have to pay for child care and private school that you are poor. It's paying others to REPLACE her that's expensive. If she watched her own children, and taught them at home, it's all doable. Yes, anybody can home school. It's a national movement and there is a lot of help and support.
ReplyDeleteA man should place an ad explaining in the ad what he wants. It is not efficient or fun to try to talk people out of their ideas, so only have coffee with women who are already on board with your ideas.
Which should be: "I am looking for a wife to stay home, not work at all, and home-school our children. I can't afford any other kind of wife. Only phone me if that describes you. Have this education___ and be in this age range ___. My height is this ___, my weight is this ___. My financial situation is______ . "
Use a phone that can't be traced by women you reject. You don't want to be stalked. Meet only in a public place, for coffee mid-morning, not dinner, and don't exchange personal information until after three dates. She must call back, not you: don't you chase anybody. And no touching, not even a handshake. After three dates, instead of the usual Three Date Rule, it's: fine, we are getting married. Just a different Three Date Rule, and no more dangerous than the other kind. Less, actually. A woman who won't marry you after three dates doesn't feel enough for you to get a fourth date with you. Go on to the next.
A man must wait for a non-verbal acceptance signal before offering anything, or suggesting anything. You cannot convince people of anything. They have to decide. A book on body language will explain how to read these signals. No matter how nicely someone is talking to you, if you see no non-verbal signals of a certain kind, make no move.
The ones who will want you will probably be shorter than you are. Sorry. It's like that. They like to look up, when they talk.
It was Terrence Popp who did the video "The Cost to be the Boss" - very good cost-analysis breakdown. Well worth the watching.
ReplyDeleteI ran across something a while back and posted it - because women are losing the only value they ever had.
I have only one thing to say:
ReplyDeleteROBOT MAN by Connie Francis (early-1960s song). Sort of the "same thing" in reverse.
That $719,000 reinvested wisely could double or tripple.
ReplyDeleteSo in reality, wife hunting costs a lot of money making opportunities. You need capital to invest in order to make more capital.
Over time, wife hunting is totally financially insane, even for good looking men who want to maximize their profits.
Just move to Philippines. Do your due diligence, find YOUR special LBFM and enjoy her and the freedom of PH. Many wortyhwhile, honest expat blogs to peruse. Done had it with Korean crazy women, US Feminazi and the PC surge we have to negotiate. Look at PH for beautiful loving sweet women of all ages for your satisfaction. No. I am NOT a pimp; no I get NO kick backs; no I am NOT a shill; YES, I am happily married to a lovely Filipina. Hey, Bro! You could do worse. Think about it. Bob
ReplyDeleteYou did not mention the fact that Feminists have basically destroyed "female virtues". Women today pretend they are men, who wants to be seen with a woman sporting a crew cut, breast tied down and wearing baggy jean shorts? Other lesbians that's who.
ReplyDeleteWomen have lost the war of the sexes and have adopted the male psyche. We Won!.
The problem is, even if you get the perfect woman, even if she's willing to fill her belly with your babies, even if she's this super-devout Christian girl who sees it as her duty to make you smile and be happy, raising a kid, let alone owning a home, is a very expensive endeavor. So both the male and the female would rather go to get waifus or husbandos at a time like this. It is a sad, sad day when porn becomes a means of survival, but that is the world we live in today. Unless you and this impossibly perfect girl already have jobs lined up and homes ready to be bought, along with schools you can trust for your kids and tax plans that won't strangle you, then yes, it is kinder, although sadder, that the better way out is to look up images of anime characters and write fanfiction about them to satisfy your urges. Women happen to be doing the same thing with Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey anyways.
ReplyDeleteAs for female anime characters, yeah, a great strength of their appeal is their beautiful demeanor. How they actually appreciate being around the men they love. How they actually CARE for him and give a damn about his needs. I actually remember this one part in a cartoon called G Gundam, where the main hero and his girlfriend fight this British guy whose wife runs all sorts of programs to rig the match to the British fighter's favor. She runs all sorts of traps, has extra robots running around helping their mian robot fighter her husband is in, and she even has him popping pills in order to keep his combat strength up to max. She doesn't like it-in fact, nothing would make her feel better than for him to retire. But his decision was to keep fighting. He thinks that him being a three-time champion, his country needs him as a hero in order to lift his nation's spirit. And she still supports him despite the fact that he disobeys her and keeps fighting against her wishes. Because she is her husband's wife. It's funny when a cartoon that has a robot fighting tournament as its main plot so that it can sell robot toys has a better grasp of marriage than most marriage counselors these days.......