Once again, I’ll be adding this post to the top page in a week or so for future reference.
As most of my regular readers are aware, I have a habit of crafting my essays over the course of a week or so, but about 8 months ago I got into the practice of keeping a small ‘scratch’ notebook with me wherever I go now. As an artist I’ve always kept a sketchbook with me to scribble out ideas when the moment strikes, and I find that this is even more necessary to my writing now as ideas or fragments of interesting ‘germs’ of posts often hit me when I’m not at my computer to flesh them out.
This practice has resulted in most of these ‘best of’ essays for 2013-2014. I get asked about my writing process fairly often and the best I can describe it is ‘crafting’ a post. I jot the elements of a topic in this notebook and some just sit there while others kind of snowball and take on a life of their own. I got to a point where I found myself waking up around 2am after a good sleep and having an internal conversation that was really my hashing out concepts and predictable counterarguments for what would be a good topic to address, only to fall back asleep 45 minutes later and wake up at 5 forgetting what it was I was considering.
So I decided to embrace the madness so to speak and simply started getting out of bed writing the basic elements out in my notebook and getting back to them later the next day. I also found I sleep better once I do.
So these are what I thought were my most important concepts in year 3. As far as general topics go I think Open Hypergamy will be something deserving of more attention in the coming year, however, Male Space is my personal favorite for year 3. I’ve chosen this post because I think it most succinctly and accurately describes this social dynamic.
And again, these are all among the best rated posts of The Rational Male for this year, plus a few I thought were important. I’ve deliberately left out the Preventative Medicine series from this lineup because I thought it important enough to dedicate to being the basis of the next installment of the Rational Male book, and I’d rather they be brought to life in that publication than distract from the rest of these posts.
It’s always difficult to consider which of these to include, because I (naturally) think all of my posts have the potential to benefit an individual reader. I always run the risk of having new readers just wind their way through my ‘best of’ without considering the others, but my hope it that these posts will encourage you to read all of my essasy.
Thanks again for another great year, and I’ll continue to write for as long as there are issues to address.
Enjoy!
Communication
Game
Love
Sexual Market Value
Social Conventions
Hypergamy
Positive Masculinity
September 10th, 2014 at 1:33 am
Thank you
September 10th, 2014 at 2:23 am
I was curious if you ever considered changing the page layout of your site?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe
you could a little more in the way of content
so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 pictures.
Maybe you could space it out better?
September 10th, 2014 at 2:46 am
Don’t change a thing Rollo (except maybe add a Year 3 link up the top). Looking forward to Year 4 and beyond – love your work.
September 10th, 2014 at 10:51 am
I am going through a marriage breakdown now; after years of abuse and exploitation I am the one doing the leaving but as many guys here will know, it is still tough, especially if you are a “pleaser/protector” type. Even if the person you were with was a complete vampire you can still feel guilt.
At these times a man needs some support. He needs to keep his head clear and not get sucked back in. What has saved me is that i have, on and off, kept notebooks this last 18 months. The purpose was (a bit like the excel spreadsheet guy) to create a record to prove to my forgiving and easy-going self that “all this” was not just in my imagination but was in fact actually happening in my marriage, and constantly, that afoot was an exhausting and apparently pointless strategy of subtle humiliation and covert challenge that was utterly destructive and counter productive for everybody.
My notes also included grabs from my manosphere readings; insights that helped me understand the psychological dynamic in my marriage, both her role and mine. In the end, the prognosis was bad…for her. Whatever the fuck was wrong with her probably couldnt be fixed and in any case I wasnt interested in taking on the challenge.
So here i am, in a hotel room, and I have felt down, but when i feel some emotional backsliding, i open my notes at random and read.
“She tortures her beta victim and elicits sadistic joy from making her victims miserable…this is the ultimate fate of the beta male: trapped in a depressive woman’s sadistic web”. And “Being beta is about unconditional giving without getting love and respect in return.”
Along with hitting the gym, to have a notebook of this kind really is Rx for that despair you can feel at these times. Fuck, someone should make one of those day desk calendars with a manosphere quote of the day.
So thanks to all of you redpill guys and pua theorists and commentators across the manosphere, everyone from rollo or roissy to blackdragon or roosh or yareally, and including mark minter with his formerly ferocious half-time speech style, you have all worked together and done something difficult but worthy against the slurs of opponents and even the currents of history. And you have done it for the benefit of anonymous others and for little reward beyond your sense of honor and the regard of those you respect. In other words, you are men.
September 10th, 2014 at 11:27 am
Stay on top of it my friend.
September 10th, 2014 at 5:05 pm
You can bet “Open Hypergamy” will become more rampant as the West slowly reverts back into a more primitive sexual mating strategy. I’ve written about the ecological factors before but here’s some more thoughts on the subject, as well as others. Also, since this is a post by Rollo over many topics, I’ll post some material that I’ve mulled over for quite some time as well. I’ll be interested in any comments some of you guys may have:
1) Female domestic authority is associated with female mate preferences more like those typical of males (i.e., based upon the dimension of visual parameters) across a sample of nonindustrial societies, providing further evidence for the contribution of social and economic constraints on women to sex differences in mate preferences. When women are not dominated by their husbands and therefore have greater equality in terms of power in the household, they express more male-typical mate preferences. In societies with high female domestic authority (i.e, Western world) women had mainly stronger preferences for physical attractiveness in a male partner than in those with lower female domestic authority.
2) Kurzban and Weeden (Hurry Date: Mate preferences in action, 2005) document the importance of group size (i.e, modern world: great populations, widespread mobility, communication networks, internet,etc) whereby women, not men, become more selective in larger meetings. Female choices are more skewed than are those of males, indicating greater mate choice agreement and hence greater potential effects of sexual selection at the hands of women as the choosier sex. That is, for humans, the more potential mates available to the chooser (females), the greater the inequality in mating opportunity among the selected (males). In still other words, when top-ranked (on beauty) men are among more competitors, they dominate even more and low-ranked men fare even less well.
3) These findings suggest that mate choice strategies are indeed influenced by the choice environment: As the mate decision becomes more cognitively demanding, people (women are more discriminant) use simplifying heuristics that are likely to ensure that the mate chosen is above-threshold on at least the chooser’s most-important criterion: morphological clues.
4) Moreover there are plenty of analyses that reveal that women are less willing than men to compromise to deviating from their ideal aesthetic standard and accordingly assume the possibility of assortative mating. Most of empirical mating research (i.e., speed dating studies, online dating studies, field studies (where the vast majority of females choice the same top-ranked male targets as potencial partners) are consistent with men, but not women, significantly compromise their mate beauty standards (e.g., attempting to mate using sub-par courtships for casual sex.) because such compromise increases the likelihood of finding some female partner ready to pair off.
5) Women don’t necessarily want to ride the carousel, per se. It is rather a case where they want the most physically attractive males (causation), who – for evolutionary reasons – will tend to be fixtures of the carousel machinery (this is because physically attractive males have a high-rate fitness optima, and thus, evolution will limit the frequency of monogamous-tending deviations accordingly, given the implied fitness handicap).
Men vary in their genetic quality, largely due to mutational pressure in the context of parasite resistance dynamics, which impede allelic fixation. Men with good genes have low levels of developmental instability, and some indicators of developmental instability are detectable. Women prefer men with low levels of developmental instability, and hence such men have more mating opportunities and therefore they can invest less in particular women (eliciting badboy/cad behavior).
September 10th, 2014 at 5:44 pm
Rollo – would be interested in your thoughts on life long ‘red pillers’ like George Clooney or more recently, Paul Janka, getting married.
September 10th, 2014 at 7:57 pm
Still like The Man In The Garage as one of the best. Illustrates the end game, what can ultimately be where all the phases and the nuances of strategy can try to take you.
To Chode: The purpose was (a bit like the excel spreadsheet guy) to create a record to prove to my forgiving and easy-going self that “all this” was not just in my imagination but was in fact actually happening in my marriage, and constantly, that afoot was an exhausting and apparently pointless strategy of subtle humiliation and covert challenge that was utterly destructive and counter productive for everybody.
To say that was an important step in the right direction would be an under statement. Good luck to you.
September 10th, 2014 at 9:03 pm
On Return of Kings they are talking about that guy Paul Janka, who I’ve never heard of, but they credited this statement to him.
The big ruse of monogamous relationships is that women have succeeded in convincing us to voluntarily enter into a situation in which we have no sexual alternatives. Think about that. The way the institution is set up, men willing agree to forgo all the other sexual options so that their woman is happy. If that’s not evidence of a woman’s agenda and her control of the situation, then I don’t know what else is.
That metaphorical house and garage.
September 10th, 2014 at 10:49 pm
@Rollo
Because of you, Robert Greene, and to a lesser extent Roissy, Roosh, etc. I’m on the verge of restoring my relationship with my ex-wife and mother of my three small kids. Typical AFC frivorce with a ton of social pressure from her friends to dump me. And what’s funny is that at this point I could really take it or leave it and be equally happy. Thanks!
September 10th, 2014 at 11:31 pm
google the recent Lockhart shootings in Australia.
Those plugged in are understandably at a loss as to why a seemingly “completely normal” guy killed his own wife a 3 small children.
There is a one line suicide note which may or may not be made public – but readers here know what probably happened and what that note might say.
This is why I believe Rollo’s work is so important.
If this man had of understood Hypergamy / Oneitis / FI – he and his entire family might still be alive.
Hypergamy didn’t care that he sat dutifully by her bedside whilst she recovered from her injuries.
Hypergamy didn’t care that he was a good provider, husband and father.
“But the strain had taken its toll on him and the family. He admitted to local media the year had its “ups and downs” but was full of praise for what his wife had overcome.”
Yeah, ups and downs…
September 11th, 2014 at 6:37 am
Brilliant stuff.
WIll the next book be a new edition of your current book or will it only contain the wrtitings you’ve done after the first edition was published?
September 11th, 2014 at 9:39 am
the chode i live by:
When i read what you wrote, I thought it was me writing it. Worlds apart I’m sure but I’m going through the exact same thing.
I started my Manosphere experience looking for ways to fix my marriage several years ago and found MMSL. It was a jump off point where I eventually found Rollo’s works and others. It’s helped me over the past couple of years and will help me into the future.
I realized that no matter what I did to try and “fix” the relationship, it only works when both parties are willing to let the process work. It simply fails when one person must be the fixer while the fixee refuses the help or most importantly fails to see what they need to fix.
I’m married to a professional victim and there’s no way you can “fix” that.
I had better success in multiple combat tours than I did in my own house.
Stay strong brother.
September 11th, 2014 at 10:26 am
This whole endeavor is very much needed and appreciated.
Many of us have been so preoccupied with “keeping our nose to the grindstone” that we were not as consciously and objectively aware as we should be.
Thank you profusely for all your efforts. The results are absolutely excellent.
September 11th, 2014 at 4:07 pm
“1) Female domestic authority is associated with female mate preferences more like those typical of males (i.e., based upon the dimension of visual parameters) … When women are not dominated by their husbands and therefore have greater equality in terms of power in the household, they express more male-typical mate preferences. In societies with high female domestic authority (i.e, Western world) women had mainly stronger preferences for physical attractiveness in a male partner than in those with lower female domestic authority.” [Siirtyrion, September 10th, 2014 at 5:05 pm]
.
I found this at Heartiste:
“Four experiments examined the relation between behavioral expressions of dominance and the heterosexual attractiveness of males and females. … All four experiments indicated an interaction between dominance and sex of target. Dominance behavior increased the attractiveness of males, but had no effect on the attractiveness of females. The third study indicated that the effect did not depend on the sex of the rater or on the sex of those with whom the dominant target interacted. The fourth study showed that the effect was specific to dominance as an independent variable and did not occur for related constructs (aggressive or domineering). … ”
Sadalla, Edward K.; Kenrick, Douglas T.; Vershure, Beth, “Dominance and heterosexual attraction”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 52(4), Apr 1987, 730-738. [psycnet.apa[]org/journals/psp/52/4/730/]
.
Notice that ” … the effect was specific to dominance as an independent variable and did not occur for related constructs (aggressive or domineering).”
One reason is that “aggressive or domineering” (or both), in this context, are actually signs of weakness, signs that there is fear of resistance.
If you are certain, in your own mind, that you will not back down, then you relax and enjoy the show, which is also “amused mastery”, and the relaxed certainty that women can sense from far away.
Also, for this to work in the long term, the dominance must be consistent and real (actual strength and power), and not a male version of when a woman sobs and then peeks through her fingers to gauge the effect.
September 12th, 2014 at 10:50 am
Have you seen this graph?
September 12th, 2014 at 12:25 pm
Thanks Rollo,
this is the very best use of the internet – the conversations we have here could never take place IRL. Here we can get straight to the point without concern for what women might think of what we have to say. Where else could that be the case?
It’s good to know that women are not the unknowable creatures of myth they would have us believe – but the facts behind the system are akin to up-ending a rock on damp soil, we shouldn’t be surprised if the first reaction is throw it back in disgust at the sight of what’s underneath.
Some of the comments are gold too – in particular the med student pretending to be a grunt so he can get first night sex; her complaint “I never would have slept with you so soon if I’d known!” kind of violently shifted a gear in my head like a good Twilight Zone ending. I can’t search comments so I can’t find it to link to.
Thanks again, great resource – still going through your past posts,
GD
September 13th, 2014 at 12:52 pm
Despite what Siirtyrion, and women, wish to believe, male facial attractiveness is negatively correlated with semen quality. Despite what you might think, there has NEVER been any consistent support found for the hypothesis that ANY *male* physical secondary sexual traits are “honest” indicators of male fertilization efficiency. NEVER. ANY. In many hundreds of published studies over the past century, NEVER, ANY.
C. Soler, J. Kekäläinen, M. Núñez, M. Sancho, J. G. Álvarez, J. Núñez, I. Yaber and R. Gutiérrez. 2014. Male facial attractiveness and masculinity may provide sex- and culture-independent cues to semen quality. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 27(9), 1930–1938.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12446/full
The more general idea is that women have lousy pickers, and have had lousy pickers for millenia at least. This general idea explains a lot, and the contrary idea, i.e. that women have marvelous pickers, is easy to disprove.
September 14th, 2014 at 3:35 am
Further to my earlier post Sept 10 – Lockhart shooting update:
While Jenny will never know exactly what caused her brother-in-law “to snap” she knows better than anyone the pressures the family was under.
“Kim’s accident had put such a strain on their lives that Geoff obviously thought this was the only option open to him. Kim was no longer the woman he had married,” Jenny continued, revealing the extent to which the car accident in July 2012 had changed her sister.
“A brain injury robs a person of empathy and love. Unless you live with someone who’s gone through this you can’t understand – it dulls their emotions.”
Interesting. Seems to tie back into the Empathy post Nov 2013.
September 14th, 2014 at 9:21 am
Dearest Rollo, thank you so much for your continued work and dedication to us budding and enlightened alphas!
I’m nearly six months into the red pill and continue to reap its rewards. However, setbacks happen, and I just wish to share & inspire for a moment.
I’m 43 and have been an avid mtn biker here in nor Cali for over 20 yrs. 3hrs into the start of my vacation I got bucked & launched off of my bike, and fractured my tibia and punched out like 40% of the knee cartilage in one of the two disks.
Being a swinging bachelor and all this is a bit of a challenge. I don’t mean to whine-I’m fortunate enough to have health ins, time on the books, and Aflac! But this is a major delay in my dating and clubbing and other game ventures.
However, I have no doubt that the red pill and game principles are in use & effect during this latest challenge. Positive masculinity I have no doubt has helped me maintain a positive outlook pre and post surgery. I remain eggar to begin the rehab & physical therapy & wt lifting that will get me back on the bike, and hopefully tree-skiing again this winter.
But most importantly, learning game in the last 6 mo has laid a foundation in my social life that has made this difficult situation much more bearable. For one, I simply have more friends! I got a younger girl (who’s cheating w/my friend!) to pick me up from the surgery clinic when I had no other ride available (most people work at 2pm Tuesdays!). Also, reaching out is not a personal strength, but game has given me the inner confidence to reach out and ask for help when needed. All I can say is that I’d hate to imagine facing this challenge in my pre-red pill life!
September 14th, 2014 at 10:45 pm
@jf12:
Conception isn’t a one way effort as it requires both sexes. While a man’s fertility is important, that’s not the complete picture here.
The study below will give you a better idea of what I’m getting at. I will provide some key excerpts.
All taken from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199601/the-orgasm-wars
Kama Sutra practitioners wept. heh.
To wrap this up:
In order to understand the intersexual relations between the sexes, you must take into account the entire picture on human mating. I’ve done this for years and I know when someone nitpicks a study just to sooth their ego and try to “prove” their worldview. Jf12 I suggest you read up some more; you’ll get there eventually.
September 14th, 2014 at 11:18 pm
Lying absolutely still retains sperm much much much much better than orgasming. Female orgasm is vestigial, totally.