One day, I happened to see a WeChat Offical account post a matchmaking ad for a young woman. For various reasons of relevance, I clicked in with interest. Three things caught my eye: first, she required the man to provide a marital home in Shanghai; second, she refused premarital sex. Let’s pause there for a moment.
I sent the ad to a friend and asked why this woman would write “no premarital sex,” since that demand is, by rights, quite rare today. My friend’s answer made everything click for me. He initially said he respected the request—after all, some women do worry it’ll be harder to find a partner later, because some men really do have a “virgin complex.” But after reading the whole ad, he changed his mind: “I get the feeling it’s because she’s commodified herself. Otherwise she won’t be able to get a house.”
Next, let’s discuss the third noteworthy item. She wrote that she is proficient in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It’s important to stress that she studies the humanities; she’s not a clinical counselor.
I’ve previously expressed my distaste for the current glut of psychoanalysis—especially Lacanian—across the humanities and social sciences. I’ve also noticed how China’s contemporary feminist circles treat feminist books like a kind of circulating currency, and I’ve analyzed Chizuko Ueno’s traits as a kind of “spiritual nouveau riche.” I’m not here to vent again. I want to examine, in detail, why this woman would highlight her proficiency in Lacanian psychoanalysis in a matchmaking ad openly pitched to the marriage market—and why so many women online take pride in mastering feminist jargon. Only recently did I figure this out.
In evolutionary physiology and evolutionary psychology there’s a theory called “costly signaling.” It says that individuals or groups adopt behaviors or traits that are expensive to produce in order to signal underlying qualities such as ability, commitment, or status. These signals are reliable because they impose heavy costs, making them hard for less qualified or less committed individuals to fake. In the language of information economics, a signal is information voluntarily emitted by the party with private information to indicate its characteristics or intentions, with the goal of shaping the other party’s judgment.
When people bring up costly signals, they often cite a classic example from the animal world: the peacock’s tail. To attract peahens, the peacock displays a huge, colorful, intricate tail. But that tail costs a lot of energy to grow and maintain; it also makes the peacock more visible to predators and hampers movement. The peacock’s tail is a costly signal—flashy but functionally useless; yet as a mating signal it works because it showcases physiological health and reproductive fitness.
In human affairs, diamonds are a textbook costly signal. They’re flashy but functionally useless; it’s said that wearing one on your hand is literally a burden for women, and it costs men a fair bit of money. A six-pack is also a costly signal: the effort required to carve it out goes far beyond ordinary exercise for basic health. Tattoos likewise: people get them to flaunt some ideological commitment, at the cost of permanent damage to the skin.
Costly signals impose costs—and precisely because of those costs, the signals are reliable and useful. A diamond strongly indicates a man isn’t broke; a six-pack strongly indicates someone loves training; a tattoo strongly indicates the person truly believes in that ideological thing. All of this helps raise one’s social standing and mate value.
So, can mere ideas also function as costly signals? What do they signal? And what costs do people pay to emit them?
Some scholars have recently proposed that postmodernism is itself a costly signal. For instance, Edward Dutton and Dimitri van der Linden explicitly argue:
Adherents to these clever silly ideas can also compete in terms of intelligence precisely because postmodernism is logically flawed and the ability to defend it would require the kind of intellectual gymnastics that would be aided by high intelligence. The verbose nature of postmodern writing is also a means of showing-off ones verbal intelligence. In addition, it has been suggested that the advocacy of such ideologies performs the same function as a peacock’s tail, a kind of “costly signaling” (Woodley, 2010). Adopting a highly complex idea, even if it is wrong, showcases the intelligence necessary to adopt such an idea at all in a way that espousing a simpler (though correct) idea does not. Accordingly, a person strongly focused on his own status (which would be predicted by the selfishness inherent in low Agreeableness) would be attracted to seemingly complex ideas, especially if he does not want to bear the possible costs (e.g. ostracism) of publicly announcing the silliness of such ideas or if he lacks sufficient intelligence to see through them.
Postmodernism does fit the profile of a costly signal. It’s highly complex, opaque, and esoteric, and it even comes with a certain aesthetic of the exotic—all of which demand considerable intelligence and effort to understand. That’s enough; it’s sufficient to entice many humanities students whose mental energy has no practical outlet to pay the cost. The works of Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Beauvoir, Lacan, and Althusser are notorious for being obscure and contrived. Whether these writings have genuine intellectual merit or make the world any better is beside the point. As long as they raise the cognitive entry barrier and let their followers preen about having crossed it, that’s enough. In this way, they’ve acquired the peacock’s splendid tail.
That, I think, is why Lacan shows up in a matchmaking ad: the advertiser wants to signal not only that she earned a degree from a prestigious university, but also—through Lacan’s theory—that she’s a truly thoughtful person with above-average intelligence, because she has the brains to understand, research, and tinker with something guarded by a high cognitive barrier.
What she may not realize is this: she might have spent vast amounts of time reading and researching Lacan, perhaps even writing a thesis that applies Lacanian theory to a literary text—but all that effort has been consumed by showy intellectual exercises, rather than invested in real intellectual combat. Did she offer people a new interpretation of that text? Certainly. But that interpretation carries no objective significance; it contributes nothing of substance to the world or to the development of the humanities. It’s like the fragmented images in dreams—rich, colorful, wildly imaginative. You wake and strain to retain them, yet they have no concrete bearing on life. So taking postmodernism as a costly signal doesn’t just exact a cost from oneself; it exacts a cost from the humanities and from the world.
As for writing down one’s intellectual preferences in a matchmaking ad, the motivation is plain as day—by flaunting her intellect and interests, she flaunts her social status, thereby raising her mate value. True, only people like me, who know what the name “Lacan” signifies, can grasp what she’s doing; 99% of men on the marriage market have no idea who Lacan is. But as long as it gives them that “I don’t understand it, but it seems impressive” feeling, it suffices.
Postmodernism demands a higher level of intelligence; feminism does not demand quite as much. If postmodernism is a costly signal chosen by people with comparatively higher intelligence, then those who take feminism as a costly signal—not all feminists, to stress, but the show-boating kind—tend to be people with more middling intelligence. In other words, defending the feminist system doesn’t require especially high intelligence, so it isn’t enough for smart people who need to prove their value; it mainly attracts people of more average intelligence seeking to display theirs. This helps explain why many radical feminists are often recent converts (the smart ones depart not long after), and why some clever feminists forcibly yoke feminism to postmodernism—because backing feminism alone doesn’t sufficiently showcase their IQ.
As someone who studies intellectual history and human reasoning, I want to study ideas for the sake of ideas themselves, and I’m highly alert to using ideas as mere tools to achieve other ends. Universities should not award degrees to those engaged in pure intellectual peacocking. To some extent, of course, talking about certain ideas as a way of signaling social status or IQ is unavoidable. But I believe we should strive to connect that subjective meaning to objective meaning; only then will our actions carry true significance for ourselves and for the world. A truly intelligent person ought to do something that genuinely benefits this world.
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