Sunshine Mary had an interesting insight about some of my analysis of Soft Dread:
It may come as a comfort for a guy who’s unused to sentimental declarations of appreciation, but it’s important to remember the why in that declaration, rather than the who in that declaration.
Although it seems mercenary, there is some truth to that. However, we are grateful because our husbands have saved us from spinsterhood. So it’s not a “rather than” situation, it’s that we are grateful to him because of what he has done…it’s both the who and the why. I wouldn’t have wanted to be saved from spinsterhood by just any man, ya know?
Mary knows I love her, and this is in no way a cut on her, but here’s a new item to add to the Hypergamy doesn’t care list:
Hypergamy doesn’t care about who you are, it only cares about what you are.
Your awesome personality, charm and any number of ingratiating personal traits are all perks – value added – that contribute to what you might consider Relational Equity, but as we’ve already observed, Hypergamy doesn’t care about Relational Equity. The problem with Mary’s estimation here is she hasn’t considered women’s Hypergamic capacity to make any man into a special man so long as he meets her Hypergamic criteria.
Chick Logic
In the past I’ve described the female sexual strategy as schizophrenic, but what it really is is pluralistic. All the jokes you read as 4Chan memes about ‘chick logic’ are only funny because we all have an intrinsic, largely unspoken, understanding of this sexual pluralism. The female sexual response is characterized by a dual nature, Alpha fucks and Beta bucks.
That’s the simplistic, distilled version ready for easy consumption and understanding, but the feminine sexual response is much more detailed on an individual level, and much more significant on a social level than just this jargon. Every stimulus bearing on the feminine, from how she’ll explain her girl’s night out to her LTR Beta, to how women in the workplace can rejigger legislature to create a society directed by the feminine imperative, all come back to the Alpha fucks / Beta bucks equation for optimizing Hypergamy.
Alpha fucks and Beta bucks is literally a biological imperative for women. I wrote in Balancing Sexual Pluralism about this pluralism describing the desire for that perfect balance of Alpha sexuality when ovulatory impulse predisposes women to it, as well as Beta comfort and security when her cycle predisposes her to it. This isn’t just my speculations, it’s a scientifically documented phenomenon common to all women. Yes, in this instance, all women are like this. It is literally in their DNA.
Hypergamy is the constant striving for an optimization of a woman’s sexual plurality. Although there may be behavioral permutations that women will use to achieve it, or the imitation of it, the underlying motivation of Hypergamy is the same for all women. It’s a hard-coded psychological survival script that’s benefitted the human race since our tribalist beginnings.
The War Brides Effect
Recently there’s been a lot of discussion on the forums I frequent about Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus being held captive by Ariel Castro for a decade. Let that sink in a minute, a decade. That’s 10 years. That’s a lot of life to live. That’s a lot of normal to get used to. There are other cases like this; Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart come to mind, but are all of these instances the results of a hard-wired Stockholm Syndrome in women?
As it applies to women, I think Stockholm Syndrome is a convenient term for psychology to a give a name to what really amounts to adaptive hypergamy. Granted, due to media sensationalism we may not hear about incidents where men have been taken captive for as long, but this identifying with one’s captor is far more prevalent in women than men.
Primarily I attribute this to the War Bride effect, wherein evolution selected-for women with a psychological facility to adapt to a new dominant male captor as a species-beneficial survival trait. Have a read of War Brides for the full theory, but the short version is essentially this: in early tribal societies, women evolved a capacity to accept new out-tribe (presumptively Alpha) conquering men as their masters after the fathers of their children were killed or otherwise defeated and neutralized.
This is not unfounded historically. There are documented tribal traditions in cross-culture societies where it was not only accepted, but expected of a man who’d defeated another in a challenge to assume responsibility of the slain man’s children and wife(ves). In terms of inter-tribal warring, it was common practice for the conquering tribe’s men to take (and often rape) the defeated tribe’s women. Another, more humane, version of this War Bride effect is found in Old Testament Jewish law where a dead man’s brother was expected to take his wife to bear children irrespective of the woman’s interest.
I originally went into detail in War Brides about this dynamic due to men’s observing women’s ease of transitioning romantically from one lover to another. That facility is a vestige of a psychology evolved to ensure Hypergamy is optimized with the best mate a woman’s environment (and her own physical conditions for attraction) will allow her. More often than not, in our evolutionary past, a woman’s conditions and environment were not of her own choosing, thus psychological contingencies had to evolve in order for women to maintain a mental and emotional dissonance while still ensuring as Hypergamously optimal a situation as she could.
Women lacking the mental capacity for selective, impersonal indifference to men would’ve been selected-out, either by debilitating emotional breakdown or by her new captor’s disregard for her provisioning. We can draw modern day parallels to the latter situation when we hear about how a woman might divorce her previous Beta provider husband for an Alpha lover only to regret having done so. It’s not the emotional consideration she regrets, but rather the loss of provisioning when her Alpha pumps and dumps her. Hypergamy is sated from one side of her sexual pluralism (Alpha fucks), only to create a deficit on the other side (Beta bucks).
War Brides vs. Alpha Widows
Where all this gets interesting is in considering the Alpha Widow dynamic;
These are the Alpha Widows – women so significantly impacted by a former Alpha (or perceptually so) lover that she’s left with an emotional imprint that even the most dutiful, loving beta-provider can never compete with. A woman doesn’t have to have been an archetypal slut in order to have difficulty in pair bonded monogamy.
On the surface of it, it may appear that the Alpha Widow dynamic contradicts the War Brides dynamic, but if we dig deeper we find that they are both mutually reinforcing principles, and both are expressions of Hypergamy attempting solve the problem of women’s plural sexual strategy.
It is actually a woman’s capacity for selective indifference that predisposes her to an Alpha Widow state because the Alpha(s) she “can’t get over” imprinted an idealized state of an optimized Hypergamy for her. So the guy she banged in high school or college (the one with enough Alpha impression to take her virginity) is the idealization she harbors while married to the dutiful Beta. Even the abusive lout that a battered wife keeps returning to and refuses to press charges on, still represents that Hypergamous ideal to her.
Women will pine for the most significant Alpha they’ve experienced in life. It’s not who the Alpha was it was what he represented to her in terms of an idealized Hypergamy. That’s not to delegitimize women’s genuine feelings of love, respect and devotion for that Man, but it is to say that all of those feelings are consequences of her impression of an idealized Hypergamy.
There’s a lot being made about how women should or shouldn’t settle for ‘Mr. Good Enough’ before it’s too late. Granted, much of women’s indignation about settling for less than they deserve stems from an overly exaggerated appreciation of their true (and decaying) SMV courtesy of social media and social conventions intended to alleviate the anxiety of the approaching Wall. However, the underlying psychology of that indignation is rooted in women being forced to acknowledge that they’ve reached a point in their lives where they can no longer achieve an idealized Hypergamy.
So the stress responses are social variations of “Don’t tell me I can’t have it all”, “I deserve better than ‘good enough’” or, “Look at (insert aging celebrity’s name), she’s proof that you don’t have to settle.” All of these are pleas for a recognition of an imperfect ability to balance her sexual pluralism.
