Category Archives: The Feminine Imperative

February 26, 2013

The Crying Game

By Rollo Tomassi

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA

Not Carrie Bradshaw (?) made an observation in last week’s post I wanted to riff on a bit:

…..A conclusion I’ve come to in the past couple years is: a woman crying gets support while a man crying gets shunned.

Only to an extent. A crying women will elicit support and sympathy from men only if she is young and beautiful. Otherwise she is just an irritation that needs to be shut up,

A crying woman will elicit support and sympathy from women only if she belongs to the same “tribe” as the woman offering support and sympathy. Will a crying old black woman get any sympathy from a young white chick ? Not so much.

Men are not biologically pre-disposed to crying (not as much as women anyway) so when they do, no one really knows how to respond. Particularly if it is in front of strangers and the reason for his tears is not clear at all. Admittedly this is a very very rare occurance – usually when a man has mental issues or is having a mental breakdown.

Normally men cry in front of family, very close friends, people whom they trust implicitly or in front of medical emergency personnel so I don’t think he will be shunned in those circumstances, especially if it involves death or loss of something very very important to him.

Since 2010 I can think of only three instances when I broke down and cried – my father’s death, my wife’s younger brother dying suddenly at 39 and the loss of one of my best dogs. It’s not because I’m some unfeeling badass that nothing affects, but I think it’s more about what moves me, or any guy, beyond that threshold. I’m pretty good at holding back that lump in my throat from crossing the line.

Since its inception, part of the of the package feminization sold men about “getting in touch with their feminine sides®” included the encouragement of boys learning to be in touch with their emotions and cry more often. It was part of their ‘sensitivity training’, and they were acculturated to believe that women would appreciate them more for their honest tears. You’d think guys who’d learn to cry on demand would have it made, right?

Vestiges Revisited

NCB’s comment was in response to Hero’s observation from that same thread:

A conclusion I’ve come to in the past couple years is: a woman crying gets support while a man crying gets shunned.

A woman crying is still biologically valuable. She still has a vagina and a uterus. She could still successfully carry and care for a child. Thus she is embraced and supported by the tribe.

A man crying is a liability. His crying will alert the predatory animals and invading gangs to his position. His distress is actually a problem for the tribe.

It is a blatant lie that feminism is about creating equality. We have been misled into thinking that men should emote and talk about their feelings. Very few people in a man’s life will give a shit when he is going through a rough time in his life.

Women are afforded vast support and provisions that men will never know.

One of the most annoying sounds for me, and if the studies are accurate all human beings in general, is the sound of a crying infant. It was a species survival trait that this sound psychologically evolved to prompt such an irritated response in humans. No matter who’s child was doing the crying, you damn well couldn’t ignore the distress coming from the baby.

It’s easy to make the association of how this ‘check-the-baby’ dynamic is a vestige of what evolved to make our species so successful; if it didn’t annoy us, more distressed babies wouldn’t have made it to semi-adulthood. However once we pass a certain stage of development, overt emotional displays (the most obvious being crying) diverge drastically for us by gender. As Hero observes, graphic displays of emotionalism were a sign of weakness to protohuman tribal societies. Women generally took care of crying infants and the association of infantile helplessness, in addition to being a general annoyance,  would necessarily be a liability to the group’s survival integrity. From a male-only perspective we can see the implications of this, but expand that to the social cohesion of the tribal unit and you can see that overt displays of emotionalism from men would also be associated as signs of implicit weakness for tribal women. Thus a rational control of emotion became hardwired into men’s psyches.

So you see when the feminine imperative makes attempts to feminize men, as with all of feminization’s efforts, it struggles against thousands of years of species-valuable, in-bred psychology.

She Cries

The parallel to this dynamic is women’s crying. Have a listen to the interplay of emotionalism in the woman’s voice in this radio bit and article.

White Knights will come out of the woodwork to defend the indefensible in spite of the circumstance responding viscerally to a woman weeping. How did you feel when you heard the girl cry?

Once again, as Hero points out, the sound of a woman crying elicits the innate protector response for men, but as NCB examines, only insofar as that woman presents a viable reproductive prospect. Since this woman’s vocal intonation is within a feminine pitch as she weeps and pleads her case we’re more predisposed to sympathy for her, even in light of her redhanded betrayal of trust. Imagine this woman’s voice being raspy from years of smoking, lower from a higher testosterone  level or chordless like an old woman’s. Our male reflexive response, while still humanistically sympathetic as manageable, would be far different than what a young and associatively breed-worthy woman’s vocal intonations would cue us in to.

Again, we’re seeing hearing a species-valuable evolutionary vestige in the reflex men experience when they hear a reproduction-viable woman cry. To a degree it overrides even our rational capacity to separate the implications of her behavior with the empathy we want to establish with a woman we perceive as being a potential mating opportunity. It’s not that men can’t resist this empathy and apply a rational solution to a problem, it’s that it requires an effort for a man to do so.

It comes back to the Cap N Save a Ho dynamic and the Savior Schema. Empathize, protect and bond with a woman in distress (particularly emotional distress) and the potential payoff will be sexual intercourse.

Men’s effort to sublimate this empathetic sexual opportunism in favor of rational action has not gone unexploited by the feminine imperative. Thus you have women’s facility to cry (even under conditions of culpability) in order to provoke that male protector response. It’s like the crying baby example, stimuli and response.

Also, it’s important to mention women’s preferred method of communication, that is to say covert. When a woman cries she’s moving into an overt form of communication she knows will register with men, and this is usually the result of her having exhausted all her covert utilities. When women opt for overt communication it generally means one or two things have occurred: 1) she has reached the point of exasperation using covert means to convey her message, or 2) she has reached a point of desperation in her condition and needs the visceral response men will react to in order to defend and/or empathize with her (often in spite of herself).

32 comments | posted in Inter-gender Communication, Psychology, The Feminine Imperative

February 18, 2013

Taming the Beast

By Rollo Tomassi

beast

Sunshine Mary proposed an interesting question in a comment thread last week:

Knowing what we know about hypergamy – that it’s inborn and does not give a crap – and also what we know about women’s attraction cues swaying toward much more alpha men during ovulation…can men deal with the thought of living with someone who is having to fight against (presuming she’s fighting against it) a general innate desire to trade up and a specific desire to stray with an alpha male during ovulation?

The short answer to this is yes, in fact men have socially and psychologically evolved contingencies to mitigate hypergamy since our hunter-gatherer beginnings. You could even argue that much of our cultural and species-level achievements were the result of men’s latent drives to deal with women’s innate hypergamy.

The common mistake Mary is making here is to presume that hypergamy’s natural state is in a vacuum. Hypergamy is not static. The capacity an individual woman possesses to optimize hypergamy is specific to that woman. There are many complex variables that affect what contributes to a woman’s self-perception of her sexual market valuation.

For a general instance, a hot 22 y.o. coed will generally be more predisposed to her hypergamous impulses because she has the capacity to capitalize on it better than a 44 y.o. divorced mother of two. Too many guys think that hypergamy requires this endless attending to, but with the exception of outlying women, women will should regulate their hypergamy based on their self-perceived capacity to optimize it.

Simply because a woman’s natural state is hypergamy doesn’t mean she is able to optimize it. She may lack opportunity (i.e no Alpha men in the right place or at the right time), she may lack the physical appeal, she may have internalized beliefs that cause her to be more self-conscious, she may have self-esteem issues (over and under inflated), or she may simply be acculturated in a society that enforces limits upon her capacity to optimize hypergamy. All of these limiting conditions contend with her innate hypergamous impulse.

This is the primary struggle women face; managing these limiting factors in the face of a hardwired hypergamy, while facing the constant, inevitable, progression towards the Wall.  Cash in too early and face the nagging doubt she could’ve consolidated with a better man’s commitment. Cash in too late and live with the consequences of settling for the man her looks, personal conditions and societal influences allowed her to consolidate on (Alpha Widows). Remember, all of this occurs within the framework of the varying personal limitations (or benefits) she has a capacity for.

Hypergamy Unbound

One common misunderstanding I think most guys have about hypergamy is that it requires a constant attention. Most MGTOWs follow this logic to some degree, thinking that the effort necessary to contain women’s hypergamy means this endless mindreading and jumping through vaginal hoops in order to maintain some balance and harmony in any relationship with a woman. They think the pay off isn’t worth the effort, and by their individual case they may be correct, but what they don’t account for is the natural balance between the genders that is already existent. Hypergamy is far easier to contain the less a woman is able to capitalize on it.

Imposing limitations on women’s hypergamy is really a matter of application. Why is our reflexive response to label possessive men as ‘insecure’? Because underneath his overt controlling we believe a man lacks the capacity to inspire genuine desire in his woman, thus prompting her to self-regulate her own hypergamy. Yet, we still consider Mate Guarding to be wise in a measured application. So there you have the line in controlling hypergamy – like virtually anything else in Game, apply it overtly and you appear ‘insecure’, apply it covertly and you seem confident and in control.

To really grasp this you have to also take into account the Alpha/Beta response dynamic. Women’s hypergamy will predispose even the woman with the most secure attachement to her mate to shit test him. When men become aware of this their rational minds see it as insecurity and a nuisance that they will constantly have to deal with. However, nature has engineered into our own psyches the means to deal with these tests in ways we’re not really aware of. I’ve experienced even the most beta of men put their foot down after a particularly mean shit test and basically tell their wives or GFs to STFU. It came from exasperation, but that provokation and the response their woman got for it was exactly passing the test. They didn’t realize they were doing it, they were just pissed, lost their temper and later maybe apologized for acting so brash, but this was exactly what their women’s hypergamy needed to confirm that he isn’t a pushover.

Mate guarding is another of these subliminal efforts to contain hypergamy. Most (generally beta) men don’t realize that they are manifesting mate guarding behaviors at exactly the time his woman is ovulating and more aroused by the sperm of the unfamiliar Alpha. Her disposition manifests in behavioral cues that his evolved psyche registers and reflexively triggers his own subconscious mate guarding behaviors – all in a naturalized effort to contain her innate hypergamy. Nature is already aware of hypergamy and has evolved contingencies to limit it.

Another aspect of limiting hypergamy is the inter-sexual competition women subject each other to in the sexual marketplace. Amongst women, hypergamy is essentially a race to the top. The higher value resources (high SMV men) drive down the cost (effort) for the lower value ones. The highest value men cascade down in value by the frequency of lower value men, but hypergamy doesn’t seek its own level, it always defaults to a better optimization. For a woman, the biological jackpot is to secure a commitment of genetics and resources from a mate who registers higher than herself in SMV valuation.

The very nature of hypergamy has a culling effect amongst women. As if the pressures to optimize hypergamy weren’t urgent enough in the light of her personal conditions and the impending Wall, add to this an unforgiving inter-sexual competition that mitigates hypergamy.

Thwarting Nature

If a guy swings drastically toward the beta chump side of the bell curve, this may well trigger a new self-perception for a woman and reinvigorate her hypergamous impulse. Likewise social media is contributing to new generations of women who lack a realistic self-image with regard to SMV and thus a false perception of their capacity to optimize their hypergamy. Women’s overinflated sense of SMV and all the contributing factors to it is a manosphere meme now. All of these factors and more upset the balance of the feminine imperative with the masculine and demand new social and psychological adaptations

Many a manosphere commenter will tell you how unbound women’s hypergamous nature has become since the rise of feminism, fem-centrism and the multi-generational push to feminize every aspect of western culture. While it’s true that hypergamy doesn’t care, and many a man suffers the unprepared consequences of outdated expectations of relational equity, I don’t believe the cultural shift towards the primacy of the feminine imperative is the doom of modern society.

To be sure the sexual revolution and feminine-ubiquitous hormonal birth control has radically shifted primacy to the feminine imperative and its prime directive of hypergamy, but what this means is a readjustment of the masculine imperative is now necessary. With the rise of the internet and the meta Game that is the manosphere I think we’re seeing this adjustment in its beginnings. In our past, society and nature evolved ways to contain hypergamy in ways we’re only peripherally aware of today, but they were serviceable contingencies that kept hypergamy in check. That balance will return eventually, either by men opting out of the traditional measures or women coming to a generational realization of the predicament unbridled hypergamy and the consequences of the falsehoods fem-centrism has brought to their mothers and grandmothers.

64 comments | posted in Alpha, Hypergamy, The Feminine Imperative

February 12, 2013

The Mother of (Re)Invention

By Rollo Tomassi

invention

Blog status update: I apologize for the infrequency of my posts of late. I’ve been in the Netherlands and Belgium doing distillery stuff most of last week, but I’ve used my downtime to finish the final draft stages of the book which (I hope) should be on Amazon and other self-publishing venues about mid-March. I’ve never published anything before so it’s a learning process to be sure.

Reader Eric, again, made a revelatory observation in Soldiers:

I get the feminine imperative is what it is. I’m still coming to grips with it on a gut level, but I understand the concept. What I meant with ‘parasitic on masculine values’ was less about judging the nature of FI and more about the extent of its reach into our domain.

Robert highlighted the stark difference. Where I see the military as a repository of masculine values and culture that should be paired with the red pill, he sees a prime example of FI control of men.

The topic du jour at Dalrock’s blog this week is (yet again) the validity of the feminine imperative as a concept. What I find exceptionally ironic about the conveniently christianizing manosphere is this ceaseless droning from holier than thou white knights bemoaning how the feminine imperative is corrupting what the church traditionally should be, but are unable to look beyond how it affects what used to be their comfortable domain.

For all their kvetching they refuse to accept the feminine imperative as a concept. I realize the importance they put on having to reconcile a red pill reality with their faith, but they refuse to look beyond the narrow scope of the effect of the FI on their solitary religious institution. The Soldiers comment thread is an excellent example of another, and much broader, social institution, the military, the FI has both projected feminine primacy on, while ensuring that the beta chumps it depends on stay pliable, ignorant of, and useful to, the feminine imperative.

Reinvention

In Dal’s post Rebuilding the Mound he takes to task a commenter on his blog and deconstructs her reframing of his argument to better align with her feminine-primary interpretation of the feminine imperative. One of the prime successes of the feminine imperative is its ability to reinvent itself to jive with the present environment it finds itself in. The FI has a refined ability to evolve around not only changes in cultural shifts, but also around the the resulting failures it was responsible for.

There are many illustrations of the self-correcting, revisionism of the feminine imperative. Post-Wall spinsters re-imagine the desperation they often find themselves in by making men the culprit of their condition; never is the feminine imperative considered to be the cause. Sexual fluidity is another revisioning that absolves the FI from being the source of a woman’s condition:

The advent of embracing sexual fluidity in women is an attempt by feminized culture to put a bandaid on a lingering problem. As western feminized culture progresses onward from the late 60s, more and more women are awakening to the disillusionment that the choice they made to participate as an ‘equal’ in a masculine world required sacrifices of her femininity. Sacrifices that most come to regret later in life. Between 35 and 45 women are increasingly feeling the repercussions of their attempts to ‘have it all’ or have HAD it all, yet are left wondering why they’re not satisfied in sublimating their expectations – betraying their uniquely female biomechanics – to play the role of the New Woman.

That consensus is growing, even in Oprah-world, so what to do? What feminism has always done, move the goalposts and redefine the game. Men, for any variety of shameful reasonings, are cast as incapable of living up to the standards of being powerful, accomplished, and appealing, but even if you regret having married one, and possibly brought children into the world, you can still have a second chance at ‘having it all’ thanks to sexual fluidity. It’s not him, it’s the undiscovered homosexual you that’s been repressed all this time. Never mind that those infantile men are too preoccupied with youthful sexuality to appreciate your post-wall physique, there’s a world of lesbian women out there ready to deliver on the promise of powerful, accomplished, and appealing masculinity that your man is incapable of. It’s not that neo-feminism was wrong in promising you a satisfying life, it’s just that you were really a lesbian all this time and either didn’t know it, or were a victim of the Patriarchy and were repressed from it.

This is an excellent example of the FI’s unique capacity to morph itself to accommodate changes in culture, even when it was responsible for the negative outcomes. Another example is in Diane Mapes retrofitting her Choreplay message to align with the negative outcomes of a feminine imperative social push that it created for itself only five years earlier:

I can’t end this article without drawing attention to what I’m sure most of my readers are getting about the 5 year shift in attitude with regards to these articles. It’s easy to pass these off as some flighty progression in feminine self-understanding, but remember Diane Mapes draws a paycheck for writing these articles in well read media sources. She’s a media arm of the feminine imperative.

What we’re graphically witnessing is the fluidity with which the feminine imperative can realign itself socially to better effect its propagation. You see in 2008 the message to men (that resonated with women) was Fem-Up; stop being so insecure in your masculinity and do the dishes and laundry – the payoff will be more sexual access. In 2013 the message to men (again resonating with women) is Man-Up; stop being such a house frau and get out int the yard and mow – the payoff will be more sexual access.

In Choreplay the feminine imperative exercised a self-correction for a deleterious outcome of its own creation. Feminism, as a social impulse of the FI, is always a work in progress; it’s always a social experiment, but the Feminine Imperative being the socially correct default gradually evolves the failures of the feminist experiment into revised, intended successes.

People who can’t wrap their heads around the totality of the feminine imperative often conflate it with feminism. This is an easy mistake in light of the social upheaval that feminism has been responsible for since the sexual revolution. It’s easy to point to the glaring evidence that an acculturated feminization has worked into our collective consciousness, but I would argue that feminism is simply the latest, and most aggressive, social effort the feminine imperative has put forth in the last millenium. Feminism is the latest result of an ever reinventing, ever evolving feminine imperative.

If traditional femininity better served the feminine imperative (as it has in past generations) we would see a return to that social paradigm. As it stands in our contemporary conditions, a hybrid social utility of traditional femininity and aggressive feminism are now interchangeable to serve the FI. If gentille charms and a pandering to masculine courtesies serve best, that will be the expectation; if conditioned feminist social doctrines work better, that is what will be employed.

Further reading: The Feminine Reality and Fem-Centrism.

104 comments   |  tags: | posted in Idealizations, Operative Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative

February 1, 2013

Male Sexual Response

By Rollo Tomassi

This now cancelled show was the brainchild of the creators of Mate Check.

The short version of this is basically this is a “service” that tests (attorneys call this entrapment) a man’s fidelity by setting up an encounter with an attractive woman who approaches them in an effort to see if the man will ‘bite’ and seek out more intimate contact with her. Generally this service is paid for by insecure women involved in LTRs. I should also add that 100% of men so tested fail the test and pursue the attractive woman.

Salacious, stupid, and basically everything you’d expect from a FOX reality show, but also a very interesting social experiment. This is Social Matching Theory in practice. If you’re approached by a woman obviously not in (what you believe) is your “league” and she’s expressing blatant IOIs and approaches you, it’s much the same as the ‘Stripper Effect.’ Men are so accustomed to having to be the initiators and dealing with rejection (and potential rejection) that they’ll willingly pay for the attentions of an attractive woman giving them a $20 lap dance and this becomes physically and psychologically gratifying.

In this scenario, the element of plausibility is introduced (as a bait). You can say that these guys took the bait because they were already predisposed to do so because of their foundering relationships, but I’d argue that few men (if any according to the stats on this site) would turn down an exceptionally attractive and visibly sexually available woman if she were inclined to be as forward as to actively seek out a man and pursue him.

I’ve read psych experiments where attractive college age women approached men they’d never met on campus and proposed having sex with them after 20 minutes of converstaion. Close to 100% of the men accepted the offer (much like this service), but when an attractive college age man performed a similar experiment with women the acceptance rate was around 60%. I think that this service is playing to this very dynamic.

Now here’s a thought, do you suppose the ‘investigators’ at Mate Check get a picture of their mark and match him up with a girl they think he will believe he could get? I would think they’d have to have a variety of women “investigators” of varying levels of attractivness in order to allay suspicion. For instance, a hugely overweight guy (unless he’s very stupid, despreate or both) would be skeptical (at first) to believe that a stripper grade woman would thorw herself at him voluntarily. So I wonder if Mate Check matches like for like in attractiveness when running their scam?

Disinfecting Sunshine

Sunshine Mary think’s she’s busted some manosphere myth today in asserting (with entirely anecdotal points) that men don’t necessarily have to be hitched to a frigid or obese woman to be moved to cheat. I’m inclined to agree, however, those factors are what behavioral psychologists term Establishing Operations:

Establishing operations work by changing the reinforcement properties of a reinforcer. If a reinforcer is made to be more reinforcing, the consequence will be more desirable which should have a greater effect on eliciting the target behavior. Establishing operations for reinforcers make us want something more that we might have.

Ergo, hunger, thirst, and yes, sexual deprivation can be considered establishing operations, thus making satisfaction of those operation much more potent reinforcers.

For her part, I’m afraid that Mary’s isn’t going to like what crawls out from under the rock she’s just turned over. What she’s digging at here is the nature of the male sexual response, and as with most women, she expects that response to align with a feminine-centric interpretation of it. Women’s solipsistic nature predisposes them to define the male sexual response in ways that make sense to what their own response is.

As I stated in Women & Sex, until a woman lives in 12.5 to 17 times her present testosterone levels 24/7 she cannot ever understand male sexuality. And since she lives in a fem-centric reality (both personally and socially) her awareness and expectations of male sexuality is defined by the only terms she has a frame of reference for – female sexuality.

So it should come as no shock that women are bewildered (and disgusted) by a male sexual response that is incongruent with their own. They want to force fit it. In the Feminine Reality I stated:

For one gender to realize their sexual imperative the other must sacrifice their own. This is the root source of power the feminine imperative uses to establish its own reality as the normative one.

One of the reasons I repeatedly assert that women lack a fundamental appreciation for the sacrifices men make to facilitate their reality finds its roots in women’s lacking a male frame of reference. In general, Men are far more self-controlled than any woman can realistically understand. When we analyze the realities of the male sex response and the underlying biology that contributes to it, the control men exert over it is actually a triumph of evolved psychology and social directive.

As Men we take this control for granted because (for most) it’s a living state for us – even we don’t apprciate how controlled we really are over our sexual impulse. We live in a condition of controlling this drive, but the drive still motivates us.

Women are shocked that men are literally, neurologically wired to see them as sex objects. The parts of our brains that are attuned to using tools is stimulated when we see scantily dressed women. Women may be horrified by this, but one thing you will never hear them utter is a word of how astounding it is that men (largely) have such psychological self-control over it.

56 comments   |  tags: | posted in Biomechanics, Psychology, The Feminine Imperative

January 30, 2013

Choreplay

By Rollo Tomassi

Gardening

One of the more entertaining debates I’ve had in my post-red pill awareness has been discussing the issue of men doing more “chores around the house” so as to more equitably distribute domestic duties amongst couples. The operative beneath this canard is that a more idealized state of gender neutralized bliss can be attained in a couple if only the male partner would feel it incumbent upon himself to assume chores that the female partner feels she’s entirely overburdened with.

Hmmm,..this presents a quandary for the Feminine Imperative; how would a Strong Independent Woman® motivate her live-in lover (sometimes known as ‘husbands’) to pick up the domestic job slack? Why of course, resort to the strategy that worked so well in convincing him to monogamous commitment – bait him with the obligation promise of unrestricted less restricted sex! It’s so simple in its form, so elegant in its function,..enter Diane Mapes’ Choreplay.

Gals make passes at guys who wash glasses.

I had a party not too long ago where a funny thing happened. One of the guests — a 30-something, single straight guy — came out to the kitchen and volunteered to do my dishes. “That way you won’t be stuck with a huge mess after everyone leaves,” he said, filling the sink with hot, soapy water.

As he started scrubbing wine glasses, I glanced over at my guests. Every woman in the room was staring at him with what can only be described as pure, unadulterated lust.

Behold the appeal of the dishy man.

Yes, that’s right gentlemen, Roissy had it all wrong, in girl-world washing the dishes is the undiscovered catalyst for ‘gina tingles. Athol Kay and his MAP? Get the fuck outta here, it’s vacuuming and dusting that inspire “what can only be described as pure, unadulterated lust.”

Side Note: Have a look at the date this article was published (2/13/2008, just before Valentines day) it’ll be important when we get to today’s bonus round.

Are there any benefits, aside from soulful glances and the satisfaction of a sparkling clean floor, that exist for men who share the load (laundry and otherwise)?

That’s hard to say, although there are some interesting indicators. A recent survey by Parenting Magazine found that “choreplay,” i.e., husbands pitching in around the house, was what put 15 percent of moms in the mood.

Ooh, a whole 15%?! Would this mean the other 85% were turned off?

You know, I’ve been married for over 16 years now and in that time, on occasion, I’ve performed many domestic duties for no other reason than it was a necessity. I have changed my daughter’s diaper, I have cleaned toilets, I’ve done laundry, I’ve vacuumed, etc. However, in 16 years never have I had my wife be consumed with an uncontrollable lust to give me a spontaneous blow job or pin me down on the kitchen floor, tear my pants off and ride me to glory after my having put away the dishes. Neither have I ever heard the words, “damn, you looked so hot ironing my blouse yesterday, fuck me you stud, fuuuuhhck MEEE!!” proceed from her lips while in the throes of passion.

And in the interest of being fair, I’ve never been turned on, nor do I consider it foreplay with my wife, when she’s the one doing the chores. I have been greatly turned on by the sight of her in lingerie; sweat pants, a t-shirt and a toilet bowl brush in hand? Not so much.

However some of the most memorable sexual experiences I’ve had with her (and other women in my sexual past) have come after I’ve done something particularly masculine or I performed well doing something that benefitted me with a lot of social proof. For instance, my wife seems to like sex after I’ve had a good heavy lifting day at the gym. She also seems very amorous after social engagements I bring her along to for my work.

So the moral of this story is, as always, base your assessments on a woman’s behavior – NEVER on her words. Any woman telling you you look hot in an apron or she loves how you pee sitting down is selling you something. It’s up to you to determine what she’s selling.

Ah, but what is she selling?

Research conducted by Laurie A. Rudman, a psychologist at Rutgers University, also seems to point to a hot soapy love connection. Her study, recently published in the journal Sex Roles, looked at feminism’s impact on romantic relationships. Among other things, she found that men with feminist partners reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction.

“We didn’t ask who was doing the dishes or taking care of the kids,” says Rudman. “We asked broadly about the quality of the relationship and about the agreement of gender roles in the relationship. But we did find that if men were with a feminist woman, they had more sexual satisfaction and their relationship was more stable. Men benefit from having a feminist partner.”

Oh ho ho, that’s it! Feminist women get hot seeing their men in an apron, and boy dothey ever benefit. So you see guys, you’re going about this all wrong; you benefit from locking down a feminist woman and embracing the gender neutral sexiness of traditionally feminine household chores.

Back to the Future!

Ah, 2008 what heady time it was, but unfortunately I need to step back into my phone booth DeLorean time machine and fast-forward to January 30th, 2013 where, not to be outdone by her 2008 assertions of Choreplay, the exact same media has a new take on intergender chore assignments. Take it away 2013 feminine imperative Diane Mapes:

Hey, fellas, put down those vacuum cleaners and pull out the lawn mowers.

Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and sex.

“Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher sexual frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor,” says Sabino Kornrich, lead author of a study that appears in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. “Housework is something that people use as a very important way to express gender, masculinity and femininity. We weren’t surprised to think that sex might be more tied to this type of gender expression.”

So, let me get this straight, the yard work, manual labor, auto maintenance, home remodeling and pressure washing hotness that I replaced with soapy dish washing, ironing boards and laundry detergent was actually what inspired ”what can only be described as pure, unadulterated lust?” Whoda thunk?

You mean to tell me all that shit I ate in 2008 about being a neanderthal 50′s throwback for expressing that Men’s work is what women really find sexy was all just horse shit slung from the feminine imperative?

I realize I’m goofing on this, but I remember reading Mapes’ first article in 2008 and started thinking about why a man doing “woman’s work” would be in any way sexy or at all arousing for a woman. As usual it’s always a good start to reverse gender roles in order to get a better understanding of any social contrivance or perceived “double standard”. The equalist mindset can never logically stand up against this reversal.

Would a guy get sexually excited to see a woman doing traditionally masculine housework? In 16 years of marriage I’ve never had my wife do, much less offer to do, things around the house (on a regular basis) that I assumed as a husband from day one. I get the dirty jobs. I mow the lawn, clean up the dog shit in the back yard, I have trash duty, clean the pool/spa, install the nice new acrylic sinks and marble countertops she picks out, plunge the toilets when they back up, install the garbage disposal, fix what I can on her car, wash the cars,…you get the idea. And of all those (with the exception of maybe seeing her wash my car in a thong bikini) I can’t say as I’d get turned on by seeing my wife do any of that. So what is the intrinsic appeal of seeing a guy doing the dishes Mr. & Mrs. Gender Equalist?

The role reversal of putting a man into a traditionally feminine role doesn’t have real arousal value. It has a power value for sure, in that it temporarily casts a man in a submissive role, but after the novelty of having a guy perform those behaviors repeatedly wears off, does it still have that arousal value? My wife doesn’t wear lingerie for me every night, but she does so often enough that the arousal value of it still turns me on. However doing the dishes is something so mundane and so monotonous that any thrill that might be associated with it wears thin in a month.

The Mapes Effect

I can’t end this article without drawing attention to what I’m sure most of my readers are getting about the 5 year shift in attitude with regards to these articles. It’s easy to pass these off as some flighty progression in feminine self-understanding, but remember Diane Mapes draws a paycheck for writing these articles in well read media sources. She’s a media arm of the feminine imperative.

What we’re graphically witnessing is the fluidity with which the feminine imperative can realign itself socially to better affect its propagation. You see in 2008 the message to men (that resonated with women) was Fem-Up; stop being so insecure in your masculinity and do the dishes and laundry – the payoff will be more sexual access. In 2013 the message to men (again resonating with women) is Man-Up; stop being such a house frau and get out int the yard and mow – the payoff will be more sexual access.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is just another example of women’s fickle duplicity. A lot has happened socially in the five years between these articles; the End of Men, Kate Bolick, feminine triumphalism, men “checking out”, kidults, ‘late term’ spinsters unable to find “acceptable” men, etc. and a whole slew of other gender shifts occurred between both these articles. What Mapes’ most recent article represents is the feminine imperative reworking an outdated feminine social convention to accommodate women’s Man-Up needs in 2013 that it actively extinguished itself in the Fem-Up years leading up to 2008.

56 comments | posted in Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative

January 9, 2013

Nice Like Me

By Rollo Tomassi

NGOKC

Lib Arts Major:

“Generation AFC” has done a great job of producing Brevik, Cho, Laughner, Sodini, Holmes, and now recently Lanza among scores of others who never got a bodycount high enough to make the news.

Here’s to a new generation of defects.

Or should I say products working as intended?

Furious Ferret:

This is just standard way of tearing down beta males. Most of the guys that are nice are geniuely nice guys but being guys they still want to fuck. They were taught by women that being nice and respectful lead to being attractive so they were brought up to behave this way. It’s no uniqueness or virtue for a woman to call ‘nice guys’ as really horrible digusting perverts while rewarding the bad boy.

Mumtaz elaborates in response to a female commenter:

‘ From my own personal experiences, I’ve found that being nice does not equate to attraction from men. ‘
Actually, it’s being nice man that doesn’t equate to attraction from women. Nice woman means sweet and pleasant , that is attractive.

‘ Nice is boring. ‘
That’s exactly what women think.

‘ And the average person appears to NEED drama or kaybe just more vivacity. ‘
No , it’s average WOMAN who seeks drama . For a man , coming home after day of hard work , drama is the LAST thing he wants…

‘ It seems that a lot of men look to women for something akin to entertainment ‘
Again, swap sexes and it rings true.
Also notice anecdotal evidence…

When I wrote Play Nice I elaborated upon the recent fem-centric trend of ridiculing self-professed Nice Guys. The notion of Nice Guys only using the monicker as a ruse for an assholish reality has been a staple response for Alpha-burned women for decades now. However, an interesting threshold is being crossed when a globalized internet society begins a campaign of mass ridicule of Nice Guys.

Nice Guys of OK Cupid is one such effort.

While I’ve come to expect women’s rationalizations about Nice Guys as foils for their attention needs, what NGOKC illustrates is an escalation in beta male in-fighting. Some have called this ridicule cyber-bullying on a global scale, but there’s more to this than that. The progression from rebuking forum white knight to online attack blogger is evidence of a new comfort level the femosphere has in sowing discord amongst the beta orbiters they rely on for fem-centric male affirmation.

NGOKC is really a clever new twist on Dalrock’s proposition of “lets you and him fight.” In viscerally exposing OKC Nice Guy profile pictures and pairing them up with subjectively contradicting statements about being ‘nice guys’, NGOKC is (perhaps unwittingly) attempting to define what makes a guy genuinely “nice” based on the terms that indicate feminine supremacy.

If you peruse the sampling of ‘nice guy’ case subjects on the blog you’ll begin to see a pattern form. A, most likely out of context, declaration of ‘Nice Guy-ness’ paired with some horribly incongruent statement about expectations of women’s legs being shaved or men being the head of the household. The social experiment that NGOKC is involved in starts with its efforts in qualifying ‘Nice’ as being compliant with what best serves the feminine imperative. Do you like the feel of a woman’s smooth legs that she painstakingly shaves 7 times a week? You’re not a Nice Guy. Do you believe that men should be confident, decisive, heads of the household? You’re not a Nice Guy either. In fact if you indicate on your profile any belief that is inconsistent with absolute, equalitarian gender neutrality, you’re not a nice guy.

For all the semantics debates the manosphere gets into over the proper usage of “Nice” for men, the binary nature of the femosphere is definitive; if a belief is contradictory to the feminine imperative, it is decidedly “not nice”.

Beta Fights

Being that beta men constitute the vast majority of men in modern society, one of the larger problems of being an abject beta is the sheer volume of sexual competition they experience from other betas. When a beta chumps is AMOG’d by an Alpha there’s an almost tacit understanding by the beta that the Alpha held an advantage over him. The Alpha had the physical, Game and status tools the beta does not. However, put two (or more) betas in contention with each other and they will resort to ever escalating feats of greater beta qualification amongst each other. When all you know is Beta Game, only more intense applications of that game is the natural response to competition within Beta Game.

NGOKC is one such escalation in the Beta Game arms race. From Enter White Knight:

Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism.

By essentially doxxing the Nice Guys on OKC, NGOKC is a blog dedicated to beta white knights attempting AMOG other betas while the women of the femosphere egg them on. The social impetus behind the blog is one of beta men jockeying for feminine approval by ever increasing declarations of being more suitable, more feminine identifying betas, than the so-called fraudulent Nice Guys they hope to expose. They’ve made a game of qualifying for the approval of the femosphere by looking for chinks in their competitor’s beta armor:

“I’m a nice guy,..”

“Charlatan! You want to oppress women by expecting to be the head of the household! I’m the real nice guy,..”

“STFU rape apologist, says here you’re open to first date sex, and what type of guy has tats and piercings like that? Rapists, that’s who! I’m the real nice guy,..”

“Misogynist, looks like you expect women to shave their legs,…FOR YOU!,..only fucking patriarchs think women should make themselves ‘acceptable’ for men,..I’m the real nice guy,..”

The feminine influence naturally loves the beta dystopia between guys they’d never want to fuck otherwise because it primes their need for indignation while simultaneously satisfying a woman’s need for attention and affirmation of her own imperative.

Obligation

One of the things that solidified this beta in-fighting for me was reading Hugo Schwyzer’s Jezebel endorsement of NGOKC.

Hugo Schwyzer has a rightly earned reputation in the manosphere for being a manboobed captain amongst the vichy males feminization has made so common through its selective breeding efforts . The lengths to which he’s ego-invested his life, career and personality into a feminine identification schema is truly grandiose. Hugo’s gender self-loathing is a monument to the dictates of the feminine imperative – he is what feminized men would ultimately become in a society defined by the feminine imperative.

While I have patience for the likes of Manboobz and even the information deficient members of the PUA Hate forums, Hugo is a step beyond their simple mockery.

What’s on offer isn’t just an opportunity to snort derisively at the socially awkward; it’s a chance to talk about the very real problem of male sexual entitlement. The great unifying theme of the curated profiles is indignation. These are young men who were told that if they were nice, then, as Laurie Penny puts it, they feel that women “must be obliged to have sex with them.” The subtext of virtually all of their profiles, the mournful and the bilious alike, is that these young men feel cheated. Raised to believe in a perverse social/sexual contract that promised access to women’s bodies in exchange for rote expressions of kindness, these boys have at least begun to learn that there is no Magic Sex Fairy. And while they’re still hopeful enough to put up a dating profile in the first place, the Nice Guys sabotage their chances of ever getting laid with their inability to conceal their own aggrieved self-righteousness.

Nice Guys of OkCupid provides an excellent opportunity to reiterate a basic truth: there is no right to have sex.

This represents the basic disconnect that a feminine conditioned male like Schwyzer can’t grasp. He’s very concerned that self-avowed Nice Guys harbor this endemic, deep expectation of obligatory sex in lieu of ‘being nice’, yet remains willfully ignorant of the nature of exchange inherent in the sexual marketplace. Of the hundreds of self-professed nice guys I’ve known or counseled, not one of them expressed an expectation of reciprocal sex. In fact the genuine ‘nice guys’ are so self-sacrificing that the idea of a social contract of reciprocal sex is alien to them.

The new popularity of Nice Guy demonization that Hugo and the predictable, gender trend vultures piling on at The Atlantic isn’t about expectations or entitlements it’s about the underlying and unspoken reciprocal nature of the sexual marketplace being exposed. When a ‘nice guy’ does express some angst over his sexless and solitary life, or does bring his Savior Schema to the surface in a public fashion it becomes an ugly reminder for the feminine that the SMP is actually that, a marketplace. A fem-centric society doesn’t like the idea of a visceral resource exchange, because it ruins its humanist/equalist social pretense. Solution? Ridicule and marginalize the one doing the exposing.

Besides the near-universal sense that they’ve been unjustly defrauded, the great commonality among these Nice Guys is their contempt for women’s non-sexual friendship. They rage about being “friendzoned,” and complain about the hours spent listening to women without being given so much as a hand job in return for their investment.

Because Hugo has been so well conditioned by his feminization he lacks any frame of reference to understand the reflexive rage these “false-flag nice guys” experience. This rage response isn’t the disappointment of some societal masculine influence convincing these guys of a sex-debt obligation, it was the entirely feminized influence which convince them of myth of Relational Equity:

…I’ve repeatedly read men relate to me when they say how unbelievable their breakups were. As if all of the investment, emotional, physical, financial, familial, etc. would be rationally appreciated as a buffer against hypergamy. The reason for their shock and disbelief is that their mental state originates in the assumption that women are perfectly rational agents and should take all of their efforts, all of their personal strengths, all of the involvement in their women’s lives into account before trading up to a better prospective male. There is a prevailing belief that all of their merits, if sufficient, should be proof against her hypergamous considerations.

For men, this is a logically sound idea. All of that investment adds up to their concept of relationship equity. So it’s particularly jarring for men to consider that all of that equity becomes effectively worthless to a woman presented with a sufficiently better prospect as per the dictates of her hypergamy.

Hugo’s preoccupation with the sex-debt obligations for being ‘nice’ is a convenience for his inability to address the concept of relational equity. In a sense he’s correct, men should never presume that anything they do, any personal sacrifice, any emotional investment they make for a woman will EVER be appreciated, much less reciprocated, because hypergamy doesn’t care about any of it.

If these ‘nice guys’ are guilty of anything, it’s in their ego-investment in the lie that any woman might have the capacity to appreciate his investments in them. That rage isn’t about the disappointment of not getting an expected lay, it’s the self-rage associated with the disillusionment of a belief in a relational equity that women (often times the same women they want to become intimate with) continue to convince them of. It’s a rage that comes from the loss of investment and being ridiculed for ever having invested by the same women who convinced them to invest.

So thank you Hugo, you’ve unwittingly made the manosphere, Game and red pill wisdom all the more attractive for ‘nice guys’ with your exposé. The obvious moral to this story is to drop the pretense of being a ‘nice guy’ and embrace a self-concerned Game perspective. In other words, unplug. Drop any expectations of a mutual respect, shared purpose or infantile visions of an idealistic love – because you have no ‘right’ to something women fundamentally lack the capacity to reciprocate. Your idealized relationship doesn’t exist in a feminine frame, it only exists in a positive masculine frame of your making. The only thing ‘nice guys’ have to lament is not embracing these truths before they posted their profile pic on OK Cupid.

142 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, Positive Masculinity, Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

January 7, 2013

Queens, Workers & Drones

By Rollo Tomassi

mount

As I’ve stated in many prior posts, it is Men, not women who are the True Romantics. It is actually Men who will more readily alter their lives in the most radical of ways to achieve what they think is an idyllic state of monogamy with their ‘Woman of Quality’. I understand how this statement may conflict with women’s (and mangina symp’s) characterizations of ‘typical guys’ just wanting to fuck anything that smiles at them, but this sentiment is only designed to maintain the feminine as the victimized gender.

It is in fact Men who are more prone to wanting commitment from a woman. The operative word here is “wanting” commitment.

Men are now also just as likely to want to get married as women and more likely to fall in love at first sight.

Experts said that the results were evidence of ‘gender blurring’ in which women have become more like men and men have taken on the characteristics usually associated with women.

I doubt that last quote from this article will shock my regular readers. Considering that the overwhelming majority of men are corn-fed betas, raised from birth to be devoted, “supportive”, wives to their masculinized fem-husbands, it’s really no surprise that men would be the ones seeking solace in a monogamy they’ve been conditioned to believe should be their goal-state for so long.

While betas are concerned with qualifying for an idyllic monogamy, Alphas tend to focus more on fidelity – their women’s fidelity, not necessarily their own.

Feminized Commitment

One very effective meme the feminine imperative has cunningly inserted into our social awareness is the feminine ownership of the term ‘commitment’. Calling a guy a ‘commitment-phobe’ is really a 90′s shaming cliché that’s been a retread for the Man Up! generation. There are different variation of this shaming – a guy can be ‘phobic’ because he lacks maturity, or because he’s become bitter and burned by a spurned woman, but underneath all that is the association that the concept of commitment uniquely applies to a man committing to monogamy with a woman.

From the Paradox of Commitment:

The idea is that commitment should only have meaning in a feminine defined reality. Ironically, it’s Men who commit far more readily to ideals, family, military, business ventures or partnerships, and servitude than women have the capacity to appreciate, because recognizing this doesn’t serve their imperative. In other words, a commitment to anything that doesn’t directly benefit the feminine isn’t commitment; answer? Redefine commitment to reflect feminine interests.

One thing that needs to be understood about women’s innate feminine solipsism is how it’s expressed on a meta-scale. It’s very easy to observe and consider individual examples of women’s subconscious sense of self-importance (read any comment from women on a manosphere blog) , but what most men aware of this phenomenon don’t consider is how this solipsism scales up to the larger social narrative.

I’ve written extensively about the Feminine Reality and Feminine Social Primacy, but these have been ‘top down’ assessments with regard to how society follows a feminine primary narrative as the correct premise of origin. Put simply, if it benefits women, it benefits society – society is better when benefiting women’s imperatives are its focus.

However, from a ‘bottom up’ perspective it is this proclivity for solipsism in women that collectively becomes the social narrative (or paradigm if you prefer). Millions of women solipsistically expressing the demands that would ensure a secure hypergamy for themselves makes for a fem-centric social narrative. And from this develops an expectation of, and entitlement to a default, secured commitment to satisfying women’s hypergamic impulses.

Selective Breeding

So powerful is this sense of entitlement, so consuming and convinced of the correctness of their purpose is the feminine that women will literally breed and raise generations of men to better satisfy it. Hypergamy is cruel, but nowhere more so than in the relationship between a mother overtly raising and conditioning a son to be a better servant of the feminine imperative.

But to breed a better worker, the feminine imperative’s queens can’t afford to have any corrupting, masculine, outside influence. On a societal scale this might mean removal (either by disincentives or forcibly) of a father from the family unit, but this is the easy, extreme illustration. There are far more subtle social and psychological means that the imperative uses to effect this filtering – via mass media, social doctrines, appeals to (feminized) morality, the feminine is placed as the correct imperative while the masculine is filtered out or apologetically tolerated as vestiges of an immature and crude reminder of masculinity’s incorrectness.

Yet for all of this social engineering Hypergamy still demands satisfaction of women’s most base imperative, Alpha seed. The queens need physically / psychologically dominant drones – if just for a season and at their ovulatory pleasure. While beta workers are endlessly vetted in sisyphean tasks of qualifying for the acceptance of the feminine imperative, the Alpha drones live outside this shell; their qualifications only based on how well they satisfy the feminine’s visceral side of  hypergamy.

The great irony of this social solution to hypergamy and long term parental investment is that the vast majority of the offspring of this arrangement would be raised to be better workers. Those betas-to-be boys must be insulated from the corrupting influence of the drones lest they devolve into the Alphas they crave yet cannot control. It may seem counterintuitive, to raise what should ostensibly be optimized genetic stock as a cowed, sometimes medically restrained, feminized beta males. However it is through this harsh conditioning that truly dominant Alphas must rise above. Essentially the genetic lottery isn’t won by women in such a social environment – it’s men, or the ones who rise above in spite of the conditioning efforts of the feminine imperative.

Generation AFC

We’re just now seeing the results of almost three generations of this selective breeding effort. While women bleat and bemoan, “Man Up!” over the lack of suitable men to meet both their hypergamy and their provisioning, they only grind their teeth at the results of a social momentum set in motion by women two or three generations before them. While more boys are raised to pee sitting down by women concerned that their sons’ testosterone poisoning will make him a potential rapist, the fewer and fewer “suitable” males present themselves 20 years later.

A lot has been made about men just checking out or giving up on themselves as they reach a projected notion of maturity. The feminine complains about them not living up to the standard set before them by the feminine imperative – women are owed reverence and tribute of an enduring security, why are men not sacrificing themselves on the altar of the goddess? In the face of all the so called social advancements in women’s independence over the past 50 years we still hear a deafening cry for ‘real men’ to measure up, to qualify themselves for acceptance, to be worthy of providing for her and (her) offspring. Despite the refutations of masculinity and claims of independence, women still want Men.

In the manosphere it’s been argued that the reason for this sexual disparity and men’s ambivalence is due to some new awareness among men of the way the Game has been rigged against them. It’s been argued that men are consciously opting out – going their own way – in some new social movement causing a de facto ‘marriage strike’. I think this estimation is greatly exaggerated.

The male crisis of this generation isn’t the result of men’s conscious decision to opt out, but rather due to being forced out by this selective breeding. As exampled in my first link, men want to get married. It’s part of their feminized conditioning to view long term monogamy as a goal state. No, the men that women want to “man up” are the ones they’re already married to, or the ones they’d consider worthy if only they acted (not actually became) more like drones and less like dutiful workers.

It’s not that the vast majority of men wouldn’t eagerly bind themselves to women in monogamy, it’s that they’ve been bred in grand proportions to be ‘less-than-men’ by the feminine imperative.

130 comments   |  tags: , | posted in Biomechanics, Hypergamy, Idealizations, The Feminine Imperative

January 2, 2013

The Feminine Imperative – Circa 1300

By Rollo Tomassi

chivalry

A lot of shit got slung at me last week about making comparisons of chivalry being an antiquated social extension of the Feminine Imperative. I’ve written about the concept of chivalry and its impact on the intergender landscape of today, but as I read through certain select comments in Sanitizing the Imperative and after reading the misconception about chivalry on other blogs I felt the idea of chivalry deserved a bit more attention.

Over the course of my travails in the manosphere one common misperception I read a lot coming from well meaning red pill men, as well as the predictable blue pill white knight is this broken and romanticized notion of what chivalry means to them and should mean for everyone else expected to “play by the rules.” I originally touched upon the convenient use the modern Feminine Imperative has made in making appeals to anachronistic idealisms like chivalry and honor in The Honor System. I then revisited this in a bit more detail after the Concordia shipwreck with the women and children first debate even staunch jezebelers couldn’t resist in Chivalry vs. Altruism:

Chivalry is simply one of many ideologies that was subsumed by westernized romanticism. Chivalry also applied toward things such as not hitting a man while he wasn’t looking or attacking a blatantly undefendable, inferior or even a respected foe. It was originally intended as a code of etheics determined by the Roman Catholic church to control the otherwise lawless and violent natures of soldiers and knights who, understandably, had a tendency for brigandism in the middle ages. What passes for most people’s understanding of chivalry is actually a classic interpretation and bastardization of western romanticisim and the ideologies of ‘courtly love’, which ironically enough was also an effort by the women of the period intended to better control the men of the early and high Renaissance. Essentially it amounted to a taming of the over-dominating masculine influence of the time by laying out a system of prescribed appropriate conditions necessary to satisfy a womans access to her intimacy.

You’ll have to forgive me for indulging in a history lesson for today’s post, but it is necessary. What I find most common in men’s interpretation of chivalry is an almost Disneyesque mental return to knightly virtues of the past that only ever existed in films like Excalibur. My first amazement is that concept of romanticized chivalry have endured as long as they have. This is not due to some provable merit, but rather that the expectations of the more useful aspects of chivalry have benefitted the Feminine Imperative for so long that they’ve become ubiquitous expectations of men – even while coexisting beside a feminism that actively derides them.

So  bear with me while we return to the foggy days of medieval Western Europe to search for the true roots of chivalry.

Origins of Chivalry

The year is around 1060 and over the last 100 years or so (i.e. the ‘dark ages’) a feudal system of moneyed landowners and their personal militias have made a mess of things. In spite of the best efforts of containment and control by the Holy Roman Empire, constant violence and sporadic wars amongst these small states have led to a breakdown in the fabric of society. Brigandism and outright barbarism are common amongst these militias – what they lacked was a common enemy, and what the church lacked was resources.

The Holy Roman Empire would provide that common enemy in the form of the Muslim (Moors) infidels to the south and a series of bloody crusades ensued. The Moors of course possessed the resources the church was desirous of, but the church lacked a cohesive social / religious order under which to unite the various militias they needed to process their crusades. Thus was born the code of chivalry.

This code appealed well to the martial pride of the evolving noble class, but further cemented the ideology into the commoners by pairing it with the religious doctrine of the era. The code was thus described as the Ten Commandments of chivalry:

  • Believe the Church’s teachings and observe all the Church’s directions.
  • Defend the Church.
  • Respect and defend all weaknesses.
  • Love your country.
  • Do not recoil before an enemy.
  • Show no mercy to the Infidel. Do not hesitate to make war with them.
  • Perform all duties that agree with the laws of God.
  • Never lie or go back on one’s word.
  • Be generous to everyone.
  • Always and everywhere be right and good against evil and injustice.

Not a bad code of ethics under which to unite factions who previously had little better to do than smash each other with maces and steal each other’s resources. It’s a difficult task to get a man to die for another man, but give him an ideology, and that he’ll die for.

The chivalric code worked surprisingly well for over three centuries and was instrumental in consolidating most of the countries that evolved into the Western Europe we know today. However, as with most ‘well intentioned’ social contracts, what originated as a simplistic set of absolute rules was progressively distorted by countervailing influences as time, affluence and imperatives shifted and jockeyed for control.

Courtly Love

For all of the influence that the church exerted in using chivalry as a social contract, it was primarily a contract played out amongst men. With the notable exceptions of a few select Queens and Jeanne d’Arc, it was only men who had any true social input either publicly or privately during this time. It wasn’t until the mid-thirteenth century that (noble) women would insert their own imperative into the concept of chivalry.

At the time, chivalry was a mans’ club, and unless she was a widow, women were more or less insignificant in the scope of chivalry. A nobleman might take a wife, but rarely were these marriages romantic in nature. Rather they served as political alliances between states (and often consolidating church control) and a man’s romantic and sexual interests were served by mistresses or the spoils of his conquests. In fidelity was expected in noble marriages.

Enter the French noblewomen Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne. Both of these Ladys were instrumental in attaching the concept of courtly love and romance to the chivalric code that we (somewhat) know today. The wealth and affluence that Western Europe enjoyed from the late medieval to the high renaissance provided the perfect environment into which high-born women were feeling more comfortable inserting their imperative.

Both of these noble women had a love for the traveling troubadours of the time, espousing acts of love and devotion as merits for a new aristocracy. Originally courtly love was a much more pagan ideal, but like the church had done centuries before, when ideologically fused to the chivalric code it gradually proved to be an amazingly effective source of social control over men.

In it’s earliest form, courtly love was much more salacious than the socially controlling device it evolved into:

Properly applied, the phrase l’amour courtois identified an extravagantly artificial and stylized relationship–a forbidden affair that was characterized by five main attributes. In essence, the relationship was

  • Aristocratic. As its name implies, courtly love was practiced by noble lords and ladies; its proper milieu was the royal palace or court.
  • Ritualistic. Couples engaged in a courtly relationship conventionally exchanged gifts and tokens of their affair. The lady was wooed according to elaborate conventions of etiquette (cf. “courtship” and “courtesy”) and was the constant recipient of songs, poems, bouquets, sweet favors, and ceremonial gestures. For all these gentle and painstaking attentions on the part of her lover, she need only return a short hint of approval, a mere shadow of affection. After all, she was the exalted domina–the commanding “mistress” of the affair; he was but her servus–a lowly but faithful servant.
  • Secret. Courtly lovers were pledged to strict secrecy. The foundation for their affair–indeed the source of its special aura and electricity–was that the rest of the world (except for a few confidantes or go-betweens) was excluded. In effect, the lovers composed a universe unto themselves–a special world with its own places (e.g., the secret rendezvous), rules, codes, and commandments.
  • Adulterous. ”Fine love”–almost by definition–was extramarital. Indeed one of its principle attractions was that it offered an escape from the dull routines and boring confinements of noble marriage (which was typically little more than a political or economic alliance for the purpose of producing royal offspring). The troubadours themselves scoffed at marriage, regarding it as a glorified religious swindle. In its place they exalted their own ideal of a disciplined and decorous carnal relationship whose ultimate objective was not crude physical satisfaction, but a sublime and sensual intimacy.
  • Literary. Before it established itself as a popular real-life activity, courtly love first gained attention as a subject and theme in imaginative literature. Ardent knights, that is to say, and their passionately adored ladies were already popular figures in song and fable before they began spawning a host of real-life imitators in the palace halls and boudoirs of medieval Europe. (Note: Even the word “romance”–from Old French romanz–began life as the name for a narrative poem about chivalric heroes. Only later was the term applied to the distinctive  love relationship commonly featured in such poems.)

Last week Dalrock had an outstanding summation of romantic love – Feral Love – that got lost amongst his other posts. This is unfortunate because virtually every thing he brings to light here finds its roots in exactly the romanticized courtly love rituals outlined above. What we consider acts of romance today, what we consider our chivalric duties to uphold in their regard, are all the results of a 13th century feminine imperative’s attempts to better effect women’s innate (and socially repressed) hypergamy. When we think of noble acts of self-sacrifice for women this is where the origins are. One of the more cruel acts of devotion a ‘lover’ may ask of her paramours was to bleed themselves for her; capturing the blood in a vessel after slicing his foram and comparing the amount therein.

In the doldrums of a well provided-for existence, women will actively create the elusive indignation they need to feel alive. The women of the early courts were effectively perfecting the art of maintaining a bullpen of beta orbiters willing to address all of her unmet emotionalism while being fucked raw by their badboy knights to sire royal Alpha children when they returned from campaigns. The courtly love practices of the 13th century served the same purpose for women as Facebook does today –attention – balancing the Alpha seed with the beta need.

Feminism 1.0

As I wrote in last week’s installment, while the Feminine Imperative remains the same, its social extensions for exerting itself change with conditions and environment it finds itself in. There’s been some recent discussion in the manosphere that feminism can only exist in an affluent society that provides sufficient internal social controls to protect the extensions of the Feminine Imperative. For instance, while Slut Walks may be encouraged in Sweden, there are very few in Egypt at the moment. One socioeconomic environment supports the expresion of the imperative, the other does not.

The concept of chivalry, in its original, intent was the result of a social control in an otherwise lawless environment. Later, when affluence accumulated and an upper class evolved, so too do the social extensions of the Feminine Imperative.

Fusing the philosophy and rituals of courtly love with the chivalric code was one such extension of the time – and a more enduring one I’ll add. The major failing most White Knights and moralistically leaning red pill men have today is understanding that the modern concept of chivalry, and all their feel-good Arthurian idealism bastardized for the last millennia, sprang from the want of a  more exercisable hypergamy for the women of the era.

It should then come as no shock that the old model of romanticized chivalry would conflict with the more overt social extension of today’s feminism. A want for that old, socially coerced, masculine devotion clashes with the ‘do-it-yourself’ feminism of today.

100 comments | posted in Hypergamy, Idealizations, Romance, The Feminine Imperative

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