Forge the Sky:

The heart of all this is: in a woman’s mind, humans have three genders. Women, alphas, and betas. The problem is, it’s difficult to distinguish between the latter two as there are no clear biological markers; a few un-fakeable traits like height and muscularity give an indication, similar to how long hair tends to indicate a woman, but not infallibly so.

But women have different relationships with them. To women, betas are friends, helpers, co-workers, employees, servants; unless related by blood, they are practical beings only. There is no romance to them. They are useful, fun, maybe even someone to be a little affectionate toward so long as they remain useful, but they have no deeper self, no soul, no mystical thing to bind to.

Alphas are something else entirely. They are actually people – people drenched with desire, romance, spirit. Him, she can respect. In greater cases even worship. It matters little how well he performs objectively, so long as he does nothing to make her doubt her assessment of him as alpha. If he does perform, she admires and praises his performance – but she’s doing that about something or another regardless, even if she’s gushing about how he bought her a bag of skittles.

No woman will stand beside a beta as he faces, and succumbs to, death. Not unless it’s convenient, or she would be shamed otherwise. It simply would not make sense for her to do so. Would you hold your employee’s hand as they lay dying? Only if they had a fatal accident right in front of you. Past that, condolences to the kids.

Men see two genders. Men and women. Better and worse, more and less attractive, but no fundamental difference. Without being trained in a (for us) counterintuitive mindset, we will by default project our understanding of gender upon women. And so we try to improve our beta game, instead of flipping the script.

The blue pill is miserable because it is learned helplessness. From within, it is the cracking of an invisible whip, punishment meted capriciously and without time or reason. There is no pattern or method to the blue pill man’s pain.

FTS must’ve been reading my mind this week because his comment made a perfect segue into what I’ve been developing this week. The most salient part of this comment, I thought, was “Without being trained in a (for us) counterintuitive mindset, we will by default project our understanding of gender upon women.”

This was a good observation because there are intrinsic parts of the male psychological firmware that the Feminine Imperative picked up on long ago and deliberately co-opts to better aid in optimizing women’s control of Hypergamy.

From the utility-need side of Hypergamy, this mostly manifests in various forms of serviceable security. The Beta Bucks aspect of Hypergamy can be distilled to a need for security, protection, and a certainty that a woman and her offspring will be insured against any uncertainty. Every psychological and sociological dynamic that contributes to feminine-primacy keys on this need for existential certainty. The War Brides dynamic, the evolution from old-order chivalry to modern feminism, and now the social / legal handicapping of men to ensure that feminine-security certainty above all other considerations are all manifestations of this need.

The Feminine Imperative learned long ago that men’s innate protectorate instinct for the feminine was its second most valuable means of masculine control – the first being men’s ‘always on’ sexual impetus. Thus pairing the two as a means of control is a simple deductive proposition for the imperative. The rudimentary connection being, “protect the woman and I get sex.”

This is the unspoken exchange that’s part of our evolutionary past. Men are nothing if not deductive (yet creative) problem solvers, and women have used this to their hypergamous advantage since our hunter-gatherer beginnings.

This is what confounds modern men under the auspices of our present feminine-primary social order. We’re emphatically told that women “never owe men sex“, yet the latent message is, and has always been, “but, if you perform to her satisfaction, she might be more inclined to give you sex.” Carrot to pull the cart, I know, but this mental algorithm is a sociological buffer for women – exclude the sexually unworthy, but leave an acceptable caveat in order to leverage the possibility of sex with those who are still useful in providing security.

Bear this in mind the next time you read a story about a savior White Knight who was beaten to a bloody pulp for his effort to protect a woman from the “predations” of some Alpha(s) she likely wants to bang anyway. Men will project, by default, our own gender interpretation onto women, and sometimes pay the price for it. Betas believe the feminine-primary, equalist advertising that men and women are functional equals while still force fitting an expected, old-order, male-protectionism (completely based on an unequal state presumption) into that belief – often at their own expense.

Invisible Men

While I disagree that there are no distinct physical and cultural markers that women use (sometimes subconsciously) to distinguish Alpha men from the bulk of Beta men, I strongly agree with the distinction and characterization Forge the Sky makes with how women regard Beta men.

The vast majority of men are sexually invisible to women, but all males are visible in terms of their utility to women and the role those men are expected to play in deference to women’s solipsism.

There’s an important difference in that visibility with respect to men and women we need to consider.

I expect that female readers will trot out the “ooh, ooh, men do it too” counter that women are invisible to men who don’t see them as a sexual prospect. That may be the case, particularly for mature women convinced they should be sexually viable into their 50s, however, those women’s functional utility is never an issue for men. Neither is it an article of attraction for a man. As much as a feminine-centric culture would like to convince women of the opposite, men simply don’t factor a woman’s provisional utility into their attraction equation.

Invisible men never become visible to women until either those men intrude on a woman’s’ awareness or she has a specific utilitarian need of him. At this point, whether due to arousal / attraction awareness or her specific need (usually protection or security insurance), that man must perform to prove his maleness. He must qualify for her visual acknowledgment of him.

Over prolonged periods, this invisibility, and the fear of having his insistence rejected, can influence men’s overall perception of women and their intergender interpretations. Invisible men tend to confuse a woman’s utility interests in him as genuine indicators of interest (IOIs). The Feminine Imperative prepares for this ‘mixed message’ with a constant, self-perpetuating social narrative that tells the invisible men they are never, under any circumstance, owed a woman’s intimacy – it is always a gift, a reward, for her approval.

Despite this aspect of their social conditioning, the Invisibles still read more into those IOIs and perceive that a woman’s attraction is a genuine extension their own serviceability. This is the foundation of the Savior Schema. Much of what the manosphere considers sexual ‘thirst’ is a direct result of the scarcity mentality that results from an Invisible becoming an unexpected service-providing option for a woman.

Invisible men become more compliant when women’s utility needs make them visible. They confuse their use with genuine appreciation and desirability.

If we consider the 80 / 20 rule of the sexual marketplace and figure that 80% of Beta men are sexually invisible to women we get a broader perspective of how the gender landscape has evolved in an era where women’s security-side needs are planned for and met with a relative degree of certainty.

I had a teenage kid I used to consult who related this story about how one of his nerdy friends had somehow spontaneously generated the interest of a girl who was an obvious two points above his SMV. His initial frustration was one of wonderment about how this guy could be ‘dating’ so hot a girl while he wasn’t bumping the needle with even the girls he thought were a point below himself.

His nerdy friend assumed the predictable self-righteous Beta position that some “special” girls just understand and appreciate guys like him in favor of the brutish jocks “society tells them they should like.” All this came two weeks before that year’s homecoming dance (and after-party), where she promptly left him to go dance and party with her girlfriends and their jock guy-friends for the rest of the evening.

This kid had served his utilitarian purpose of fronting the money for the evening, a limo, corsage, photos (of their group) and the bit of risky underage liquor he could manage. In spite of all that he still refused to make the connection of his being used for her purpose. Invisibles feel validated in their own manipulation because that utility made them visible (“do my homework nerd”) even if just momentarily. As bad as that extortion was, that brief moment of visibility implies the prospect that another woman in the future (a really special one) will also appreciate his utility and reward it with her intimacy.

Needless to say, this visibility differential becomes an internalized factor in men’s approach to women. There are ways an invisible man can make himself visible; all require effort and risk. As I stated before, a man remains invisible unless his physical presence and arousal prompts make him unignorable, his performance is outstanding enough to draw attention or he simply asserts his visibility towards that woman. Physical bearing and performance recognition being the Alpha Fucks side of the Hypergamy equation is an easy follow, but a man asserting himself and his personality is where the Red Pill and applied Game come into play. This prospect will always imply risk of rejection until such a time that an Invisible’s confidence supersedes his self-image as an invisible.

We had a long discussion in the last thread about the mindset of the MGTOW contingent of the manosphere and the sentiment of men wishing to remove themselves wholesale from the sexual marketplace. I understand this sentiment and I know men, like Advocatus Diaboli, who have legitimately recused themselves from the SMP, but it seems to me this want is the result of having been invisible to women for so long. They get to a point where they become invisible by choice.

The Third Sex

I can’t finish this essay without drawing attention to FTS’s first observation:

The heart of all this is: in a woman’s mind, humans have three genders. Women, alphas, and betas. The problem is, it’s difficult to distinguish between the latter two as there are no clear biological markers; a few un-fakeable traits like height and muscularity give an indication, similar to how long hair tends to indicate a woman, but not infallibly so.

After I’d reconsidered this I had to dig out my copy of Plato’s Symposium and pore through it to read the part where Aristophanes proposed that there were, in fact, three sexes (in primal times) that their all-male discussion collective ought to consider:

 There were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half male, half female. The males were said to have descended from the sun, the females from the earth and the androgynous couples from the moon.

A lot is being made of transgenderism recently and the fluidity with which people want to arbitrarily “gender-identify” borders on the ridiculous, but FTS’s observation has more implications than I think most are aware of. I’m sorry to go all philosophus on you, but I can definitely see parallels with the symbolism Aristophanes suggests and the female perceptions of the division of maleness FTS brings out here. Although Aristophanes would say that these primal beings split into gays, lesbians and heterosexual beings, I’d suggest that this primal awareness stems from a male understanding of the division of Alpha and Beta men and how women perceive them, visibly and non-visibly.

I covered this a while back in Queens, Workers & Drones:

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.