Tag Archives: feminine psyche

March 20, 2015

Idealism

When Neil Strauss was writing The Game there was an interesting side topic he explored towards the end of the book. He became concerned that the guys who were learning PUA skills and experiencing such success with women of a calibre they’d never experienced before would turn into what he called “Social Robots.” The idea was one that these formerly Game-less guys would become Game automatons; mouthing the scripts, acting out the behaviors and meeting any countermanding behaviors or scripts from women with calculated and planned “if then” contingencies.

The fear was that these Social Robots “weren’t themselves”, they were what Mystery Method, Real Social Dynamics, etc. were programing them to be and the relative success they experienced only reinforces that “robot-ness”. My experience with guys from this blog, SoSuave and other forums has been entirely different. If anything most men transitioning to a Red Pill mindset tenaciously cling to the ‘Just Be Yourself and the right girl will come along’ mentality.

A strong resistance guys have to Red Pill awareness will always be the “faking it” and keeping it up effort they believe is necessary to perpetuate some nominal success with women. They don’t want to indefinitely be someone they’re not. It’s not genuine to them and either they feel slighted for having to be an acceptable character for women’s intimate attention or they come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain ‘the act’ indefinitely. Either way there’s a resentment that stems from needing to change themselves for a woman’s acceptance – who they truly are should be enough for the right woman.

I’ve written more than a few essays about this dynamic and the process of internalizing Red Pill awareness and Game, but what I want to explore here is the root idealism men retain and rely on when it comes to their unconditioned Game. In truth this Game is very much the result of the conditioning of the Feminine Imperative, but the idealistic concept of love that men hold fast to is what makes that conditioning so effective.

What’s Your Game?

I’ve written before that every man has a Game. No matter who the guy is, no matter what his culture or background, every guy has some concept of what he believes is the best, most appropriate, most effective way to approach, interact with and progress to intimacy with a woman. How effective that “Game” really is is subjective, but if you asked any guy you know how best to go about getting a girlfriend he’ll explain his Game to you.

Men in a Blue Pill mindset will likely parrot back what their feminine-primary conditioning had him internalize. Just Be Yourself, treat her with respect, don’t objectify her, don’t try to be someone you’re not, are just a few of the conventions you’ll get from a Blue Pill guy who is oblivious to the influence the Feminine Imperative has had on what he believes are his own ideas about how best to come to intimacy with a woman.

For the most part his beliefs in his methodology are really the deductive conclusions he’s made by listening to the advice women have told him about how best to “treat a woman” if he wants to get with her. A Blue Pill mindset is characterized by identifying with the feminine, so being false is equated with anything counter to that identification.

When you dissect it, that conditioned Blue Pill / Beta Game is dictated by the need for accurate evaluation of men’s Hypergamous potential for women. Anything that aids in women’s evaluating a man’s hypergamous potential to her is a tool for optimizing Hypergamy. The dynamics of social proof and pre-selection are essentially shortcuts women’s subconscious uses to consider men’s value to her. Likewise the emphasis Blue Pill Game places on men’s ‘genuineness’ is a feminine conditioning that serves much the same purpose – better hypergamous evaluation. If men can be conditioned to be up front about who they are and what they are, if they internalize a mental point of origin that defers by default to feminine primacy, and if they can be socially expected to default to full and honest disclosure with women by just being themselves, this then makes a woman’s hypergamous evaluation of him that much more efficient.

This is where most Blue Pill men fail in their Game; who they are is no mystery, their deference and respect is worthless because it’s common and unmerited, and just who he is isn’t the character she wants him to play with her.

So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is. However, it’s important to consider that this genuineness is still rooted in his idealistic concept of a mutual and reciprocal love.

From Of Love and War:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

In The Burden of Performance I made the case for men’s need to perform for feminine acceptance and how men’s idealistic concept of love centers not on a want for unconditional love, but rather a love free from the performance requirements women’s opportunistic, Hypergamous, concept of love demands of him. This quote sums up that idealistic want for rest from having to perform to earn a woman’s love and acceptance.

The problem of course is the supposition that a performanceless love would ever really be love, but men’s idealistic nature still believes that the state is realizable. On a social scale the Feminine Imperative sees the resource utility in this and so encourages the idea that both men and women mutually share his concept of idealized love. Thus men, unaware of the respective differences in concepts both sexes hold with regard to love, enter into a perpetual state of qualifying for a love they believe women should be capable of. Men will work hard, build empires and amass fortunes to come to that state of performanceless rest they idealize should be possible with a woman.

The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism

About two weeks ago I was called to the carpet in the commentary by George Meeks (one of many aliases) for what he believes was an inconsistency in my assessment of men’s idealistic concept of love and how that idealism is really symbiotic with women’s opportunistic concept of love. I’ll spare you his autistic attention trolling, but he did raise a few points I do need to clarify about how men and women’s separate, but purpose driven, concepts of love developed.

From Intersexual Hierarchies:

In the beginning of this series I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can really see how the two dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two come together.

When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.

From Heartiste’s post:

7. Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance were highest in couples where the woman made all or most of the decisions. Female decision-making status was an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.

8. Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers. Lesson for men: You can have a happy relationship with a woman who makes more than you as long as you remain the dominant force in her non-work life. Or: GAME SAVES MARRIAGES.

When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.

This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.

In and of itself, a man’s idealism can be a source of strength or his greatest weakness. And while unfettered Hypergamic opportunism has been responsible for many of women’s worst atrocities to men, in and of itself Hypergamy is the framework in which the human species has evolved. Neither is good nor bad, but become so in how they are considered and how they are applied.

Men’s idealistic concept of love is a buffer against women’s opportunistic concept of love. When that idealism is expressed from a Beta mindset women’s opportunism dominates him and it’s debilitating. When it’s expressed from an Alpha mindset it supersedes her opportunism to the relationship’s benefit.

Conditioned Idealism

If you want to use Blue Valentine (the movie) as an example, the guy in the relationship abdicates all authority and ambition over to his wife’s opportunism. He idealistically believes “love is all that matters” and has no greater ambition than to please her and ‘just be himself’, because his conditioning has taught him that should be enough. His Beta conditioning convinced his idealism that his wife would shared in that idealistic concept of love in spite of his absence of performance. Consequently she despises him for it. She’s the de facto authority in the relationship and he slips into the subdominant (another child to care for) role.

Now if a man’s Alpha, willful, idealism propels him to greater ambition, and to prioritize his concept of love as the dominant, and places himself as his mental point of origin for which a woman accepts you can see how this leads to the conventional model. His idealism is enforced by how he considers it and how he applies it.

Men’s idealistic concept of love can be the worst debilitation in a man’s life when that idealistic nature is expressed from a supplicating Beta mentality. It will crush him when that idealism is all about a bill of goods he idealistically hopes a woman shares and will reciprocate with. This is predominantly how we experience idealism in our present cultural environment of feminized social primacy.

From an Alpha perspective that idealism is a necessary buffer against that same feminine opportunistic concept of love that would otherwise tear a Beta apart.

There was a time when men’s idealistic concept of love was respected above the opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love. I explored this social control of Hypergamy in Women Behaving Badly.

Under the old set of books, when men’s attractiveness (if not arousal) was based on his primary provisioning role his love-idealism defined the intergender relationship. Thus, we still have notions of chivalry, traditional romance, conventional models of a love hierarchy, etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this love-idealism.

There was a time when men’s idealistic love concept pushed him to achievements that had social merit and were appreciated. Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles would not be the human icons they are if that idealism weren’t a driving force in men and society. Likewise, women’s opportunistic, hypergamy-based concept of love, while cruel in its extreme, has nonetheless been a driving motivation for men’s idealistic love as well as a filter for sexual selection.

Under the new set of books, in a feminine-centric social order, the strengths of that male idealism, love honor and integrity are made to serve the purpose of the Feminine Imperative. Men’s idealistic love becomes a liability when he’s conditioned to believe that women share that same idealism, rather than hold to an opportunistic standard. This is what we have today with generations of men conditioned and feminized for identifying with the feminine. These are the generations of men who were conditioned to internalize the equalist lie that men and women are the same and all is relative. From that perspective it should follow that both sexes would share a mutual concept of love – this is the misunderstanding that leads men to expect their idealism to be reciprocated and thus leads to their exploitation and self-abuse.

A man’s idealism becomes his liability when he enters a woman’s opportunistic frame still believing they both share a mutual concept of love.

208 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, idealism, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, social proof, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Love, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

March 16, 2015

Making Up for Missing Out

By Rollo Tomassi

Back in February I had an interesting exchange with commenter TuffLove. The conversation focused on his recent singleness due to his wife of 20-some years feeling the call of the Alpha and decided cheat on him, later divorce him and then take up with an even more Beta fellow not long after her ‘fling’ (his story). You can read the whole exchange here if you like, but what TuffLove describes is a textbook example of the Alpha re-interest impulse that defines the Development and Redevelopment/Reinsurance phases I outlined in the Preventative Medicine Series.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but you and your ex’s story is a cliché now. It’s the “making up for missing out” story. Woman marries early, cashes her chips in before she knows better, lives vicariously through her single girlfriends until such time that the “Alpha” she knew at 20 is the hapless Beta she’s saddled with at 39.

Divorce porn media convinces her to bail out and get with the Alpha she’s always missed for all that time. She did everything in reverse – Beta comfort and dependability through her party years, to be traded for Alpha excitement before it’s too late.

I was inspired to sift back through my comments for this conversation, because I was also made aware of a new example of both this phase’s dynamic and the divorce-porn industry that will inevitably find some very fertile soil to plant itself in.

This example comes to us courtesy of Robin Rinaldi, author of The Wild Oats Project. This book and the “experiment in cuckoldry” such as it was, centers on, you guessed it, a 40-something woman who abandons her marriage for one year to bang the random men she was prevented from fucking by being married to her dependable, unexciting Beta husband. Granted, the husband didn’t want children and this contention resulted in him getting a vasectomy – his only act of Alpha with her as far as I know. Her childlessness is of course her go-to victimization card she hopes will endear feminine sympathy for her taking matters into her own hands for a year.

The de rigueur rationalizations and appeals to womanly “self-discovery” are handed out like the M&Ms any Red Pill man will come to expect, but I’m drawing attention to this book because it has the potential to be the next step in the 50 Shades of Grey evolution of Open Hypergamy:

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project.” And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

On a social scale it seem like the next deductive next step – blend a justifiable Eat Pray Love narrative with the more visceral (yet unignorable) sexuality of 50 Shades and women will readily consume it. I expect there will be the same hamster spinnings of NAWALT and most women respect their marriage vows, but it still wont wash with the overwhelming ‘guilty pleasure’ popularity that 50 Shades exposed on a large scale.

Writers like Rinaldi and E.L. James have tapped into the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks anxiety rooted in women’s primal insecurity inherent in doubting their optimization of Hypergamy. If appealing to visceral sex sells products to men, appealing to the inherent ‘you-only-live-once’ insecurity of feminine Hypergamy sells to women – and women being the primary consumers in western society, sell it does.

Commenter jf12 related something Ballista posted on his blog recently:

Ballista asks, on his site, “why is divornography (divorce pornography) marketed exclusively to women? Why are there articles in women’s magazines and romance novels for women like Eat Pray Love that glamorize divorce, but nothing of the sort exists or is marketed to men? Why is there no male divorce porn, no stories of men divorcing their obese, aging harpy wives, liberating themselves from their marriage vows, and ending up living happily ever after banging large-breasted 21 year-old lingerie models?”

Can you imagine the uproar? Can you feel the Love yet?

Since the start of the sexual revolution there’s been a social undercurrent of excusable, justifiable comeuppance for any gender related imbalance women have been taught to believe that men are enjoying or benefitting from. Whatever male-specific indignation that would reflect negatively on men becomes a form of empowerment for women – particularly if that indignation facilitates men’s sexual strategy at the expense of women’s. Thus a woman taking a yearlong break from her marriage to bed as many men as she cares to indulge (fully expecting to come back to her dutiful Beta husband afterwards) is cast as an iconoclastic hero for casting off “patriarchal sexual repression.”

Furthermore, it’s only a small step to wipe the accountability of her actions off on the horrible man who wont cooperate by doing his duty to fulfill her sexual strategy. There is no more permanent a devotion to the male sexual strategy than to get a vasectomy and thus deny a woman the ultimate culmination of her own. If you ever want to experience just how close to livestock the Feminine Imperative considers men to be, just try getting a vasectomy before you’re married or without a wife’s explicit and written consent. Legally it’s easier to geld horses or neuter dogs.

It’s important to consider how the doubt over past hypergamous choices effects a mature woman. When a woman has passed through her Epiphany Phase and become a never-married woman into her late 30s the mindset becomes one of self-justification. This is similar to the Kate Bolick effect whereby a woman has very little choice but to live with her past intimate decisions and convert necessities into virtues. She embraces a ready-made empowerment narrative wherein she convinces herself that her choices were the bold, unconventional ones she needed in order to grow.

Next and most commonly is the woman who consolidated on a man’s commitment once she’d become less sexually competitive just prior to 30. I can’t be sure, but it’s likely that Rinaldi falls into this demo, the schedule more or less plays the same.

From Preventative Medicine IV:

Redevelopment / Reinsurance

The Redevelopment phase can either be a time of relational turmoil or one of a woman reconciling her hypergamous balance with the man she’s paired with.

The security side of this hypergamous balance has been established for her long term satisfaction and the Alpha reinterest begins to chafe at the ubiquitous certainty of that security. Bear in mind that the source of this certainty need not come from a provider male. There are a lot of eventualities to account for. It may come from a ‘never married’ woman’s capacity to provide it for herself, the financial support levied from a past husband(s) or father(s) of her children, government subsidies, family money, or any combination thereof.

In any event, while security may still be an important concern, the same security becomes stifling for her as she retrospectively contemplates the ‘excitement’ she used to enjoy with former, now contextually Alpha, lovers, or perhaps the “man her husband used to be”

The Soul-Mate Mistake

Vox had an astute observation about this phenomenon not too long ago:

Alpha Widowhood is a description of an observed behavior, not a cruel invention of the Game theoreticians meant to plague BETA husbands and give them sleepless nights:

“Steve has been with me for the past 50 years and Ron for 47. Neither is the man I am married to, nor have I seen or spoken to either since our love affairs ended in my 20s. All the same, there is no denying they have both messed with my marriage to Olly, the man who has been by my side for the past 40 years.

I found myself thinking about them both as I read recent research that suggested women who played the field before marriage are unhappier with their lot than those who entered matrimony virginal.
Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man

Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man.”

I think it’s important to remember that an Alpha Widow doesn’t even necessarily need to have slept with a man she considered ‘Alpha’ from her past to feel the Alpha Widow effect:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Sometimes being an Alpha Widow means hypergamic ‘rumination’ over a better Alpha option a woman missed or was rejected by in her past in comparison to the guy she “settled on” for marriage. This is particularly significant if that guy was a woman’s Plan B husband. It’s not just the actual Alphas she banged back in the day, you’re competing with an imagined ideal and the more women are empowered and encouraged to feel secure in exploring their hypergamous options (i.e. correct their ‘soul mate’ mistake) the more you’ll read stories like this.

However, for all intents and purposes my instincts tell me Rinaldi falls into the “making up for missing out” demographic. On whole this demo of women can eventually become the worst self-inflicted Alpha Widows in their latter years. I let Rinaldi explain…

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

[…] One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

As I illustrated in Preventive Medicine, there’s a root insecurity inherent in women’s Hypergamy. From an immediate perspective this can manifest itself as a battery of women’s psychological and sociological filtering mechanisms for Hypergamous optimization with a man she’d just met, to the husband she’s been married to for 20 years. However, it’s vitally important for men, particularly married and LTR men, to understand that the confines of a committed relationship is never any insurance against Hypergamy in the long-term, and the rationalizations of that Hypergamy evolve as women mature.

Of course the first, best advice is the simplest “just never get married”, but even if you are a single man entering your 50s you will encounter women who’ve experienced (or never experienced) a crisis of Hypergamy and the incessant drive for Alpha optimization of it. If you are a younger man dealing with an older woman (why, I don’t know) you will likely encounter women like Rinaldi and women with similar mindsets as Robin Korth. It’s important to know what you are, or will be, dealing with.

224 Comments | tags: 50 Shades of Grey, Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, marriage vows, Preventative Medicine, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Robin Rinaldi, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, The Wild Oats Project, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Case Studies, Game, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Psychology, Relationship Game, The Feminine Imperative

February 20, 2015

Memento Mori

By Rollo Tomassi

sjfrellc hit me with this question from Monday’s post:

Rollo, what are your real “feelings” about this blue pill guy. Are you surprised that you couldn’t peer counsel him to come around to your perspective? Or are you frustrated that the Blue Pill Feminine Imperative and social conventions are like a black hole and sucked him in and wouldn’t let go?

Lets just be clear about something I’m not sure I’ve ever addressed before, I never expect any guy to come to a Red Pill perspective. I’m thankful guys find this blog, I’m glad I can help and my book and writing here is accessible, but I don’t expect men to accept any of it. If I expect anything it’s that the vast majority of men will resist even a passing reference to anything counter to their Blue Pill conditioning like a cornered animal. Most men are completely inured and dependent on an intergender social system and a set of rules they’ve been raised to believe is fair (if not grossly weighted in their own favor) and women are abiding by. They believe that contenting and satisfying a woman’s sexual strategy is a realizable life success.

I’ve always said unplugging guys from the Matrix is like triage, but this man was like reading last rites to a guy 10 years ago only to find out he hasn’t died yet. It’s no secret that I’ve personally known a man who hung himself and two more who swallowed bullets as a direct result of their inability to come to terms with their shattered hopes of an ideal Blue Pill life. It’s one thing to have men commit suicide because their ONEitis fears of losing “the best girl they’d ever get” leave them, but it’s quite another to watch a similar man waste away to the end of his life still grasping for the hope that in the last half hour of his life that Blue Pill goal might be realized if he’s only good enough.

I never expected him to unplug even then, but to see the guy still grasping at Blue Pill ideals because he utterly has no other frame of reference put the totality of a Blue Pill existence into perspective for me. I’m all about guys spinning plates, enjoying more and better sex with them or their wives, and certainly about adopting an Alpha mindset and behaviors that facilitate doing that, but it’s important to also remember that the importance of a Red Pill awareness has much broader implications. It can literally save your life.

Anyone wondering why I have a problem with purple pill advocates pandering to the sensibilities of their majority female readership (i.e. clients) by encouraging Blue Pill half-measures to men’s lives should keep that in mind.

When you become Red Pill aware you become more conscious of how the conditioning of a Blue Pill mindset predisposes men to frustration because Blue Pill idealism is really unattainable by design. You also become aware of how dangerous that frustration has the potential to be for men who can neither handle the Red Pill truth nor the constant measuring and failure to achieve Blue Pill goal-states he’s been conditioned to believe are attainable, and other men have.

That frustration can be dangerous to both himself and others, but that’s in the now. Precious few men in the ‘sphere consider the long-term consequences of the life of a man immersed in Blue Pill idealism, responsibility and promises that keep him grinding on until he’s reached the end of his usefulness to the Feminine Imperative.

“He was never much of a man…”

Since I started writing on SoSuave, and especially more now that I’ve detailed Open Hypergamy, I’ve had many guys relate a similar story about how their grandmother, mother or mother-in-law had just openly told him or his wife that her husband was never “much of a man”.

These women are all in their late 70s to early 80s and it’s like at that point all bets are off and what do they really have to lose by letting their daughters and granddaughters in on grandma’s words of warning about “settling” on a man? I’ve even had women readers relate how their own mothers confessed that there was a “just part of her she just could never share with a man like her father.”

These Alpha Widow confessions usually came after her husband was in the ground or had been delivered to the assisted living facility and too far gone to really register the gravity of her real estimate of him after living the better part of her life with him. The guys who relate these stories to me are Red Pill aware so their jaws dropping came with a little knowing expectation, but imagine how the Blue Pill husband of the daughter of one of these elderly women must process that confession. What mental contortions does a man need to do to fit that information into a Blue Pill mindset?

I think when a woman has nothing to really lose by copping to it is when they’re most comfortable with Open Hypergamy. This same comfort is becoming more common for younger women due to the social and personal security they’re ‘entitled’ to now, but for women who don’t really feel that security has solidified until their golden years this admonition and confession of Open Hypergamy almost seems like a relief to them. A relief in the hope that they’ve warned their daughters or granddaughters to opt for monogamy with an exciting Alpha lover/husband (no matter how perceptual) rather than regretting the ‘safe bet’ she made by settling on her Plan B man, her Beta-dependable husband she conveniently ‘found’ in her Epiphany Phase.

As women age towards their later years the urgency to warn younger generations of the sisterhood about the results of their hypergamous life decisions becomes more pressing. To be sure there’s a degree of desire to live vicariously through their daughter’s and granddaughter’s experiences, but more so this confession is for their own need of closure – a final coming clean about what was really influencing those past decisions and living (or not) with them. There comes a point when admitting the ugly truth feels better than worrying over keeping up the pretense of concern.

Far too many Blue Pill men (even young men) are terrified of living the life of the lonely old man. They imagine that if they don’t comply with the Feminine Imperative’s preset relational context of women that they’ll live lives of quiet desperation. I outlined this in the Myth of the Lonely Old Man – the threat point is one where men are encouraged to believe that if they don’t comply with women’s relational primacy they’ll endure a life of decaying loneliness into old age, unloved and devoid of children who’ll comfort them bedside as they peacefully pass into the next life.

What these Blue Pill men fail to realize is this is simply one more part of the feminine-primary fantasy they’re condition for. Do a Google image search for “end of life issues”, see all of those pictures of grandpa holding hands with wife and family in a clean comforting hospice bed saying his last goodbyes before he passes on? That advertising is the Blue Pill fantasy. In all likelihood you’ll die in an elderly care home, from lung fluid buildup, in the middle of the night with no one around or a complete stranger in the bed next to you. I understand that’s a depressing thought, but the truth of it is you’ll really have no influence in deciding how you’re going out at that stage, and hopefully that wakes you up about living a Blue Pill existence based on fear, compliance and appeasement till death do you part.

Put that into perspective with a man who wakes up to his conditions.

Die Alpha

Now before I get the predictable “not with my grandpa” stories, let me just say that you’ve got to put the generational differences into perspective.

When I published Empathy I figured I’d get some backlash from women in the oversimplified binaries I’ve come to expect. So before those same sputterings arise let me unequivocally footnote here that women are absolutely capable of a learned empathy and sympathy for men. However those sympathies, like genuine desire, cannot be negotiated for. Whatever your misguided concept is about how Relational Equity should merit a woman’s sympathy or respect, those are only valid and genuine when a woman freely gives them to a man she perceives as Alpha, never as something he’s due.

In every story you’ll hear about how the wife, kids and grandkids gathered around the family patriarch in the hours before he passed, understand that he was in all likelihood a respected dominant Alpha for most of his life. I want to add a bit of balance to the Blue Pill elderly I described this week, so let me also say I’ve known a handful of Men who died Alpha. These are the Men for whom a widow and his kids honor his memory once a year. They go to the gravesite because he was worth the cost of putting him in the ground instead of a cheap cremation.

323 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, scarcity mentality, sexual market value, SMV, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Unplugging

December 17, 2014

Estrus

By Rollo Tomassi

Last week saw the publication of the latest paper by Dr. Steven W. Gangestad and Dr. Martie Hasselton titled Human Estrus: Implications for Relationship Science. Anyone who’s read the Rational Male for more than a year is probably familiar with my citing Dr. Hasselton in various posts (her catalog of research has been part of my sidebar links since I began RM), but both she and Dr. Gangstad are among the foremost notable researchers in the areas of human sexuality and applied evolutionary psychology. For this week’s post I’ll be riffing on what this paper proposes with regard to a condition of estrus in women.

In the introduction section of The Rational Male I relate a story of how in my Red Pill formative years I came to be a connector of dots so to speak. While I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies a great many issues jumped out at me with regards to how many of the principle of behavioral psychology could be (and were already being) applied to intersexual relations. For instance, the basic concepts of intermittent reinforcement and behavioral modification seemed to me an obvious and learned practice of women in achieving some behavioral effect on men by periodically rewarding (reinforcing) them with sex ‘intermittently’. Operant conditioning and establishing operations also dovetailed seamlessly into the Red Pill concepts and awareness I’d been developing for several years prior to finishing my degree.

Since then the ideas I formed have naturally become more complex than these simple foundations, but what I only learned by error was how thoroughly disconnected both students and my teachers were with what I saw as obvious connections. I met obstinate resistance to flat denial when I wrote papers or gave a dissertation about the interplay between the foundations of behaviorism and interpersonal relationships. It was one thing to propose that men would use various aspects to their own advantage, but it was offensive to suggest that women would commonly use behavioral modification techniques to achieve their Hypergamous ends.

This peer resistance was especially adamant when I would suggest that women had a subconscious pre-knowledge (based on collective female experience) of these techniques. I never thought I had brass balls for broaching uncomfortable considerations like this – I honestly, and probably naively, assumed that what I was proposing had already been considered by academia long before I’d come to it.

I was actually introduced to the work of Dr. Hasselton during this time, and along with Dr. Warren Farrell, she’s gone on to become one of my go-to sources in respect to the connection between contemporary behavioral ‘dots’ with theories of practical evolved function in intersexual dynamics. I owe much of what I propose on Rational Male to this interplay, and while I doubt Hasselton would agree with all of what I or the manosphere propose, I have to credit her and her colleague’s work for providing me many of the dots I connect.

I understand that there are still evo-psych skeptics in the manosphere, but I find that much of what passes for their piecemeal “skepticism” is generally rooted in a desire to stubbornly cling to comforting Blue Pill idealisms. That said, I’d never ask any reader to take what I propose here on faith, but personally I’ve found that the questions proposed by evo-psych reflect many of the observations I had in my college days.

Hypergamous Duplicity

For the social theater of the Feminine Imperative, one of the more galling developments in psychological studies to come out of the past fifteen years has been the rise of evolutionary psychology. The natural pivot for the Imperative in dealing with evo-psych has been to write off any concept unflattering to the feminine as being speculative or proving a biased positive (by “misogynistic” researchers of course), while gladly endorsing and cherry-picking any and all evo-psych premises that reinforce the feminine or confirm a positive feminine-primacy.

Up until the past two years or so, there was a staunch resistance to the concept of Hypergamy (know as sexual pluralism in evo-psych) and the dual natures of women’s sexual strategy. Before then the idea of Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks was dismissed as biased, sociologically based and any biological implications or incentives for Hypergamy were downplayed as inconclusive by a feminine-centric media.

However the recent embrace of Open Hypergamy and “Sandbergism” of the last two years has set this narrative on its head, and the empowered women who found the idea of their own sexual pluralism so distasteful are now openly endorsing, if not proudly relishing, their roles in a new empowerment of Hypergamous duplicity.

Your Beta qualities are officially worthless to today’s women:

For those of you that aren’t aware, women now are often out earning men and more of them receive college degrees than men. As of now there aren’t really any programs to help guys out. Assuming this trend continues what do you think will happen to dating? I think that attractive women, will have their pick regardless.

However, for a lot of women, trying to lock down a guy in college will be more of a big deal. I don’t think hook up culture will disappear, but will definitely decrease.

With the exception with my current boyfriend, I have always earned more than any guy I have dated. It has never been an issue. I just don’t have to think about their financials, my attraction is based on their looks and personality. I am guessing the future will be more of that.

I thought this TRP subred was an interesting contrast to the Estrus theory proposed in the Gangstad-Hasselton paper (comments were good too). Yes, the woman is more than a bit gender-egotistical, and yes her triumphalism about the state of women in college and their earning is built on a foundation of sand, but lets strip this away for a moment. The greater importance to her in relating this, and every woman embracing open Hypergamy, is the prospect of better optimizing the dual nature of her sexual strategy.

In many a prior post I’ve detailed the rationales women will apply to their sexual pluralism and the social conventions they rely upon to keep men ignorant of them until such a time (or not) that they can best consolidate on that dualism. Where before that strategy was one of subtle manipulation and pretty lies to keep Betas-In-Waiting ready to be providers after the Alpha Fucks decline at 30, the strategy now is one of such utter ego-confidence in feminine social primacy that women gleefully declare “I’m not just gonna have my cake and eat it too, I’m getting mine with sprinkles and chocolate syrup” with regard to Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks.

The Estrus Connection

For all of the ubiquitous handwringing the manosphere imparts to the social implications of today’s Open Hypergamy, it’s important to consider the biological underpinnings that motivate this self-interested conceit.

From Human Estrus: Implications for Relationship Science:

In the vast majority of mammalian species, females experience classic estrus or heat: a discrete period of sexual receptivity – welcoming male advances – and proceptivity – actively seeking sex – confined to a few days just prior to ovulation, the fertile window. Only at this time, after all, do females require sex to conceive offspring. The primate order is exceptional. Although prosimians (e.g., lemurs, tarsiers) exhibit classic estrus, the vast majority of simian primates (monkeys and apes) are sexually active for at least several days outside of the fertile period [2]. Humans are an extreme case: Women may be sexually receptive or proceptive any time of the cycle, as well as other nonconceptive periods (e.g., pregnancy).

Do Women Retain a Functionally Distinct Fertile Phase?

Graded sexuality. Women’s sexual activity is not confined to an estrous period. But are women’s sexual interests truly constant across the cycle? Many female primates (e.g., rhesus macaques and marmosets) are often receptive to sexual advances by males outside of the fertile phase, but they initiate sex less [2].

In fact, women’s sexual interests do appear to change across the cycle. Women exhibit greater genital arousal in response to erotica and sexually condition to stimuli more readily during the follicular phase [5-8].

A recent study identified hormonal correlates of these changes by tracking 43 women over time and performing salivary hormone assays [9]. Women’s sexual desire was greater during the fertile window, and was positively related to estradiol levels (which peak just before ovulation), but negatively related to progesterone levels (which rise markedly during the luteal phase).

Changes in the male features that evoke sexual interest. Since the late 1990s, some researchers have argued that what changes most notably across the cycle is not sexual desire per se but, rather, the extent to which women’s sexual interests are evoked by particular male features – specifically, male behavioral and physical features associated with dominance, assertiveness, and developmental robustness. Over 50 studies have examined changes across the cycle in women’s attraction to these male features.

The importance of behavioral features? Whereas preference shifts of major interest early on concerned male physical features (e.g., facial masculinity; scent), several recent studies have focused on women’s reactions to men’s behavior and dispositions. Previous research had found that women find male confidence, even a degree of arrogance, more sexually appealing during the fertile phase [e.g., 15-16]. Recent studies replicate and extend that work, finding not only that fertile-phase women are more sexually attracted to “sexy cad” or behaviorally masculine men (relative to “good dad” or less masculine men), but also that, during the fertile phase, women are more likely to flirt or engage with such men [17,18]. Females of a variety of species, including primates [2], prefer dominant or high ranking males during the fertile phase of their cycles. These males may pass genetic benefits to offspring, as well as, potentially, offer material benefits (e.g., protect offspring). Women’s fertile-phase sexual attraction to behavioral dominance appears to have deep evolutionary roots.

Much of what’s explored here I laid out in Game terms in Your Friend Menstruation over two years ago, but the implications of the behaviors prompted by women’s menstrual cycle and biochemistry strongly imply an estrus-like predictability. This estrous state is a foundational keystone, not just to developing Game, but a keystone to understanding the dynamics behind Hypergamy, women’s dualistic sexual strategy, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks, and can even be extrapolated into the drive for ensuring feminine social dominance in both overt and covert contexts.

When women embrace a social order founded upon a feminine state of openly revealed Hypergamy they confirm and expose the reality of this estrous state.

Whereas before, in a social order based on concealed Hypergamy, this state could be dismissed as a social construct (and a masculine biased one at that), or one that had only marginal influence to reasoning women with a “higher” human potential. No longer – the confirmation of a true estrus in women via open Hypergamy literally confirms virtually every elementary principle Game has asserted for the past 13 years.

Dual Sexuality

Within the dual sexuality framework, fertile-phase sexuality and non-fertile-phase sexuality possess potentially overlapping but also distinct functions [22,23]. In a number of primate species, extended sexuality – female receptivity and proceptivity at times other than the fertile phase – appears to function to confuse paternity by allowing non-dominant males sexual access [e.g., 24]. These males cannot rule out their own paternity, which might reduce their likelihood of harming a female’s offspring. In humans, by contrast, extended sexuality may function to induce primary pair-bond partners to invest in women and offspring [e.g., 22].

I found this part particularly interesting when you contrast this dynamic with the social resistance that standardized paternity testing has been met with. In a feminine-primary social order based on open Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative can’t afford not to legislate a mandated cuckoldry. If Beta provider males will not comply with the insurance of a woman’s long-term security (as a result of being made aware of his place in Open Hypergamy) then he must be forced to comply either legally, socially or both. The old order exchange of resources for sexual access and a reasonable assurance of his paternity is replaced by a socialized form of cuckoldry.

Some studies have found that women’s sexual interests in men other than partners are strikingly rare during the luteal phase, relative to the fertile phase [25,26]. Other research has found moderating effects; for example, women who perceive their partners to lack sex appeal experience increased attraction to men other than partners, less satisfaction, and a more critical attitude toward partners, but only when fertile [27,28]. Fertile-phase women in one study were more assertive and focused on their own, as opposed to their partner’s, needs, especially when attracted to men other than partners during that phase [29].

Most research on cycle shifts has been inspired by theory concerning women’s distinctive sexual interests during the fertile phase. One study explicitly sought to understand factors influencing women’s sexual interests during the luteal phase, finding that, at that time, but not during the fertile phase, women initiated sex more with primary partners when they were invested in their relationship more than were male partners [30]. This pattern is consistent with the proposal that extended sexuality functions, in part, to encourage interest from valued male partners. Others have proposed that women’s estrus phase has been modified by pair-bonding.

Initiating sex or being receptive to a primary partner’s sexual interest during the luteal phase (the Beta swing of the cycle) follows when we consider that a woman being sexual during this phase poses the least potential of becoming pregnant while simultaneously (rewarding) reinforcing that primary partner’s continued investment in the pairing with sex (intermittent reinforcement). This is a very important dynamic because it mirrors a larger theme in women’s socio-sexual pluralism – it’s Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks on a biological scale.

Compare this intra-relationship predisposition for Beta sex and contrast it with the larger dynamic of open Hypergamy Alpha Fucks during a woman’s prime fertility window in her peak SMV years, and her post Epiphany Phase necessity to retain a comforting (but decidedly less sexually exciting) Beta provider.

Women’s sexual strategy on a social scale, mirrors her instinctual, estrous sexual strategy on an individual scale.

Cues of Fertility Status
Females across diverse species undergo physical and behavioral changes during estrus that males find attractive: changes in body scents in carnivores, rodents, and some primates; changes in appearance, such as sexual swellings, in baboons and chimpanzees; changes in solicitous behavior in rodents and many primates [2,31] Because women lack obvious cyclic changes, it was widely assumed that cycle shifts in attractiveness were eliminated in humans, perhaps with the evolution of
pair bonding [32].

In 1975, a pioneering study documented increased attractiveness of women’s vaginal odors midcycle [33]. A quarter century later, research revealing other detectable fertile-phase changes began to accumulate, including increased attractiveness of women’s upper torso odors, increased vocal pitch and attractiveness, and changes in women’s style of dress and solicitous behaviors [34]. Meta-analysis of this literature confirms that changes across the cycle in women’s attractiveness are
often subtle, but robust (K. Gildersleeve, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2014).

A notable recent study demonstrated that hormones implicated in attractiveness shifts in non-humans also predict attractiveness shifts in humans [35]. Photos, audio clips, and salivary estrogen and progesterone were collected from 202 women at two cycle points. Men rated women’s facial and vocal attractiveness highest when women’s progesterone levels were low and estrogen levels high (characteristic of the follicular phase, and especially the fertile window).

Emerging evidence suggests that these changes affect interactions between males and females. During the fertile window, women report increased jealous behavior by male partners [25,29,36]. A possible mediator of such changes – testosterone – is higher in men after they smell tshirts collected from women on high- than on low-fertility days of the cycle [37; cf. 38]. A recent study examined related phenomena in established relationships by bringing couples into the lab for a close interaction task (e.g., slow dancing) [39]. Following the interaction, male partners viewed images of men who were attractive and described as competitive or unattractive and noncompetitive. Only men in the competitive condition showed increases in testosterone from baseline – and only when tested during their partner’s fertile phase.

What remains less clear is how we can understand shifts in attractiveness from a theoretical perspective. It is unlikely that women evolved to signal their fertility within the cycle to men [22,34]. In fact, the opposite may have occurred – active selection on women to conceal cues of ovulation, which could help to explain weak shifts in attractiveness relative to many species. Concealment might have promoted extended sexuality with its attendant benefits from investing males, or
facilitated women’s extra-pair mating. Possibly, the subtle physical changes that occur are merely “leaky cues” that persist because fully concealing them suppresses hormone levels in ways that compromise fertility. Behavioral shifts, by contrast, may be tied to increases in women’s sexual interests or motivation to compete with other women for desirable mates [e.g., 40].

Usually after first-time readers have a chance to digest the material I propose in Your Friend Menstruation the first frustration they have is figuring out just how they can ever reliably detect when a woman is in this estrous state. On an instinctual level, most men are already sensitive to these socio-sexual cues, but this presumptuousness of sexual availability is rigorously conditioned out of men by social influence. In other words, most guys are Beta-taught to be ashamed of presuming a woman might be down to fuck as the result of picking up on visual, vocal or body posture cues.

Beyond this perceptiveness, there are also pheromonal triggers as well as behavioral cues during estrus that prompt a mate guarding response in men.

I would however propose that the evolved concealment of an estrus-like state and all of the attendant behaviors that coincide with it are a behavioral mechanic with the purpose of filtering for men with a dominant Alpha capacity to “Just Get It” that a woman is in estrus and thus qualify for her sexual access either proceptively or receptively. Women’s concealed estrus is an evolved aspect of filtering for Alpha Fucks.

In addition, this concealment also aids in determining Beta Bucks for the men she needs (needed) to exchange her sexual access for. A guy who “doesn’t get it” is still useful (or used to be) precisely because he doesn’t understand the dynamics of her cyclic and dualistic sexual strategy. Her seemingly erratic and self-controlled sexual availability becomes the Beta Bucks interest’s intermittent reinforcement for the desired behavior of his parental investment in children that are only indeterminately of his genetic heritage.

Evidence of this intermittent reinforcement can also be observed in what Athol Kay from Married Man Sex Life has described as wives “drip feeding” sex to their husbands. The confines of a committed monogamy in no way preclude the psycho-sexual influences of estrus. Thus placating a less ‘sexy’, but parentally invested man with the reinforcer of infrequent (but not entirely absent) sex becomes a necessity to facilitate the prospect of a future sexual experience with an Alpha while ensuring the security of her Beta.

In closing here I think the importance of how this estrous state influences women on both an individual and social level can’t be stressed enough in contrast to the social embrace of open Hypergamy. The Hypergamy genie is not only out of the bottle, but women are, perhaps against their own interests, embracing the genie with gusto.

Just today Vox posted a quick hit article about how men are discovering that pornography is now preferable to relating with the average woman. In an era of open Hypergamy I don’t believe this is a rationalized preference so much as it’s simply a pragmatic one. Men are rapidly awakening to a Red Pill awareness, even without a formal Red Pill education, and seeing the rewards (the intermittent reinforcement) simply aren’t worth the investment with women who blithely express their expectations of them to assume the role they would have them play in their sexual strategies.

344 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, physical attractiveness, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual impulse, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale, women | posted in Alpha, Biomechanics, Foundations, Game, Hypergamy, Psychology, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

December 1, 2014

The Fog of Menopause

By Rollo Tomassi

Strange things happen to women at the onset of menopause. Most mature men who’ve experienced it firsthand can attest to the obvious symptoms: Hot flashes, loss of libido, vaginal dryness, mood swings and irritability, but do have a quick look at the list I’ve linked here to get a better understanding of just how nature eventually punishes women as the last of their eggs decay to a fine powdery dust.

Change in body odor, brittle nails, incontinence, weight gain, irregular heartbeat, depression, anxiety, panic disorder, fatigue, allergies, osteoporosis – these late life symptoms are hardly something most men give any consideration for when they’re contemplating a lifetime of marriage with a woman.

Most of the manosphere will tell you marriage is simply never worth the financial risk, or that a woman always has the option to detonate the marriage and take the kids at a moments notice, but how often do you read a Red Pill guy tell you about how the hot piece of ass who became your long term ONEitis will eventually experience some (possibly all) of the 34 Symptoms of Menopause roughly 20-25 years after you say ‘I do’ (assuming it lasts so long)?

Those symptoms, in varying combinations, make for some very disconcerting prospects for a guy who’s been a keen ~~supplicant~~ supportive Beta for the entirety of his marriage, believing that the privilege of being married means he’s getting his wife’s sexual best when it matters most. It kind of puts things into a lifetime perspective when you consider that Mr. Dependability (Beta Bucks) gets to accommodate the symptoms of menopause while Bad Boys enjoyed her sexual best before he arrived on the set.

Add to this that at least 66-70% of (at least western) women will become overweight and/or morbidly obese during their lives and it doesn’t bode well for the enduring SMV that most unassuming men are banking on for a long term marriage with the 28-30 year old dream girl who’s now suddenly gotten right with herself enough to want to get married.

Side note: it’s interesting how closely female-male bone density decay comparison charts mirrors my SMV graph.

Nature Abhors a ~~Vacuum~~ Barren Womb

There’s some very brutal evolutionary truth behind the biological realities of menopause.

Anyone familiar with The Red Queen by Matt Ridley or The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins will get the gist of menopause’s intrinsic message – survival-side evolution essentially gives up on women once they reach a point where they are no longer reproductively viable.

Hormone imbalances, immunodeficiency, nutritional, vitamin and mineral (most notably calcium) deficiencies, neurological disorders triggered by plummeting estrogen levels, and many more physical debilitations make it obvious that a woman who’s reached the age when she ceases to be a reproductive asset becomes a species-collective liability. Unless she has some honored status or useful, learned wisdom to pass on, she becomes dead weight to a human tribe’s interests in survival efficiency and propagation.

While it’s a testament to our success as a social species that we’ve achieved a capacity to prolong our lives, there are certain glaring evidences of how our physiology evolved for efficiency within set frames of time during a (previously average) lifespan. The physical changes that come with the onset of menopause and the constancy of presenting the appearance of youth and vigor for women is one such example, post-menopausal hormone therapy another.

So too is the convenient timing of the myth of the biological clock and the social conventions structured around it to provide a woman with the maximum amount of time to sort out her hypergamous options. It’s no coincidence that women’s Epiphany Phase is concurrent with the latter stages of her fertility window (27-32 y.o.) – the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative are nothing if not efficient at maximizing women’s sexual strategy potential.

At every occasion, in every form of media, a rapidly westernizing, feminine-primary social order seeks to reshape and deemphasize the physical realities women of previous eras had the benefit of a socialized understanding (if not a collective wisdom) to accept and prepare for. In an age of hormone therapy, sperm banks and ovum freezing as part of a company benefits program, the latent message to women is that they need not concern themselves with these previously life-fulfillment limiting physical realities to coincide with their personal choices.

The Feminine Imperative will go to great lengths, socially and legally, to convince contemporary women that they aren’t in fact tied to the realities of their physical conditions. In a social sense, the incentive is the same “have it all” mentality with the prerequisite social conventions in place to lessen the blow when women realize they can’t actually realize what the feminine-primary advertising suggested.

In a physical sense the Feminine Imperative will gratuitously incentivize funding for every feminine-specific medical condition while simultaneously deemphasizing (to the point of encouraging indifference) any male-specific disease, legally, financially and socially. It’s a testament to the efforts of the imperative that modern women statistically outlive men in spite of the physical debilitations associated with menopause.

But for all this effort in engineering generations of women to become über-women, the same pesky, evolved limitations still influence their decision making.

Echoes of The Wall

New commenter (and I use the term loosely), unilantern, graciously provides us with some insight on this with her comments on The Wall:

This is a myth, i can tell you how i know. Any man would pass up a 20 year old in shape woman who is strong and athletic for a 30 something feminine type in a dress who is willing to submit.

Its the same reason men pass up pretty young women from a lower social class bracket in favour of more mature well spoken mutton.

So keep up with the clock ticking nonsense, and remember time waits for no man.

I will let you know how i used to think for most of my 20s! And how i think now.

I used to think, do i have to wait until im too old and tied to feel like going about the world to be able to do so without sexual harassment, do i have to be nearing the menopause to no longer be seen as here for reproductive meat.

Then at age 30, and now at age 33 i look back at all the years of youth and energy and wish i could have had the type of conditional freedom i have now then. Women have to be too old to have the energy to do anything before they get their body for themselves and by the time it comes its not worth having, having to compete with men for your own body is the real reality of women, and yes time is ticking.

I bet i will be there at 40 with unconditional freedom, as in no harassment no matter what i wear or do!

Tick tok!

I found unilantern’s (perhaps drunken) comment’s particularly ironic in light of all the attention generated by various staged and / or edited viral videos recently of women being cat-called while walking for longer than most women’s work day in, shall we say, less than reputable neighborhoods. Despite an obvious effort in preserving the necessary female-victimization trope, a certain demographic of post-menopausal women suffering from confirmation bias (and probably some post-menopausal neuroses) genuinely want to believe these pseudo-documentaries at face value – even after they’ve been falsified and confirmed as such.

Ironic, because unilantern’s rationalizations and denial of The Wall are rooted precisely in the designed social conventions the Feminine Imperative would have both sexes agree upon. There’s never really a Wall per se when women are convinced they can ‘have it all’ socially, physically and psychologically. And again, the latent purpose of this social convention is to convince women (and to evoke agreement among men) that they are exempt from the physical realities that confine them at various phases of their maturation.

SMV in Girl-World

Women want to be men. This is the legacy that a since-decayed feminist social impetus has imparted to the generations of both men and women who’ve come after the Gloria Steinem’s got married themselves and blew away. Women need to be the men of tomorrow. I suppose I should’ve seen this messaging long before, and in honesty I think the greater part of Matrix thinking revolves around role reversal, but this is more than reversal. Women want to be men.

If a man can wait until his maturation develops, his achievements are more actualized and his SMV peaks at 38-40, equalism says “why shouldn’t you Man-Girl?”

As I work my way through the second draft of my next book, I’m beginning to see and build upon the real-world physical underpinnings women are subject to which motivate both the social buffers and the reasoning for their moving into the various mental phases of maturity I outline in the Preventative Medicine series of posts.

At an earlier phase, women claim to deplore their sexual objectification while young and subjected to the lascivious attentions of the mythical Male Gaze. This is recently decried by the cat-call videos I mentioned above, but yet before these videos were ever contrived, older women, women in a later phase of maturity, had already decried how horrible it is to be “invisible to men” and how they yearn to hold male attention as they once did in their youth:

Women feel invisible to the opposite sex at the age of 51, it emerged yesterday.

A detailed study of 2,000 women revealed a large percentage felt they no longer received the level of attention they once did after hitting 51.

Many even went as far as to admit they felt ‘ignored’.

The women claimed their confidence plummeted after hitting 50 and blamed greying hair, having to to wear glasses or even struggling to find fashionable clothes.

The lifestyle study, commissioned by herbal remedies company, A.Vogel, also found more than two thirds of women over 45 had walked into a room and felt ‘completely unnoticed’ by the opposite sex.

And this is yet again another conflict between what the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative has taught women and the physical realities of the conditions they wishfully hope they can be exempted from. When a man makes women aware of The Wall, intentional or innocently, the response is usually one of “Well, you men get fat and old and insecure later in life too”, and that may very well be for the majority of men. However, the differences is men don’t have a life-time of social infrastructure to convince and disappoint themselves that they can ever be exempt from a lack of performance.

No social order has ever sold men the idea that they can simply ‘have‘ it all.

181 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, physical attractiveness, physical realities, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Richard Dawkins, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, Symptoms of Menopause, the rational male, therationalmale, women | posted in Biomechanics, Foundations, Hypergamy, Operative Social Conventions, Psychology, The Feminine Imperative

November 28, 2014

Rational Male – Q&A

By Rollo Tomassi

SoSuave and Rational Male reader compleks had a few questions about what he read in The Rational Male book. Since I’ve been doing these weekend questions lately I thought these might make for some interesting discussions. Hopefully they wont distract you from family time this holiday weekend, but maybe they make for some interesting dinner table talk.

Just a side note here, I’m deliberately leaving my own answers less detailed than I normally would so as to inspire your owndiscussions:

If The Rational Male was recommended to me as a book about game, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But my friend who put me onto it basically described it as a life altering piece that would forever change the way I viewed the world of inter-gender relations.

Big sell!

So I read it.

Being freshly unplugged I’m still just awakening from that groggy comatose/confused state. However I feel as though I have a slight head start on at least some of the material. Just by sheer chance, rather than any real research into the subject.

I’ve only ever been in one LTR (2years), and it was with the girl I first hooked up with (she let me sleep with her, better hang onto this one!). Anyway, I ended that (5-6years ago) and have been single ever since, with no desire of entering another relationship.

I started ‘spinning plates’ about a year ago, just through a natural realization that any moral/ethical objection was actually completely unfounded. Not just my own (programmed) objections, but objections from the feminine perspective, which I guess are one in the same. I thought I must have been ‘wired’ differently because I had no desire of settling back into a LTR. I actually argued my case on multiple occasions to avoid it happening.

This book was eye opening and definitely shed some light on issues I never would have even thought to question.

If you care to keep reading I’m just going to spew some thoughts/questions having just finished the book. Keep in mind this is from a very rudimentary understanding of the text.

QUESTIONS

1) Does ONEitis best Hypergamy?
We all know a girl (either personally or anecdotally) who is in a committed relationship with some deadbeat. Everyone knows she can do better, but you can’t possibly convince her to leave him. What factors are at play here? Does SHE suffer from ONEitis to the point that her hypergamous tendencies have been shut off?

Or could it be a case of low self esteem and lack of self worth, so much so that she believes he is the best she can do? Or could he actually just be an Alpha male (albeit a bad example of one)? I’m sure there’s a grey area or middle ground here with many factors potentially at play depending on the specific scenarios. But it’s a pretty common scenario and I’d like to hear what you guys think.

I get this one now and then – “What about this one great looking girl I know who’s stuck on this complete douchebag, deadbeat, scumbag, suckup, :insert invective here:?” While I’m not sold on the idea that women ever get ONEitis for a guy, I am thoroughly convinced that women being 1-2 SMV points below a particular man they’re involved with develop a strong attachment for him.

For women, oftentimes that attachment gets paired with the soul-mate myth. I’d separate that “spiritualism” from the ONEitis a man gets for a woman, but it’s still rooted in the same dynamic – the subconscious realization that this person is the ‘best they can do’ in the SMP.

The reason I’d make the separation between how men experience ONEitis and women is due to the concepts either have when it comes to love. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism as a result of their innate drive towards hypergamous optimization. All this ‘deadbeat’ needs do is be perceptually 1-2 levels above her own perceived SMV and the Alpha prerequisite for Hypergamy is met.

Most guys looking from the outside of that perception in realize the guy’s a fuck up (even Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington is an example), and we can’t understand why that subjectively hot woman can’t use reason and rationality to see that he is, but then, this is due to our own self-perceptions and our mistaken belief that women’s reason can be appealed to.

2) Genuine Inter-Gender friendships?
Okay, so i don’t have the book with me. But I remember reading a sub-section on inter-gender relationships. It didn’t sit well with me when I read it, but it’s probably something I will have to re-read. I have a lot of female friends. Friendships that go back 15 years. Some of these are very close friends in a completely non-sexual way.

I’m closer with some of these girls than I am with many of my male friends.
Initially these friendships may have blossomed based on the fact that I was a shy kid and didn’t have any ‘intimate’ relationships with women till I was 19. But they are now concreted as some of my most valued friendships.

What is your take on Rollos opinion of inter-gender friendships (as outlined in the rational male)?

My take in the book, and still is, is that men and women cannot be friends in the same way and to the same degree of intimacy that same sex friendships develop.

Men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural response to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 18 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I should add here that the presumption of an equatable degree, character or quality of intergender friendship (platonic) being the same as a same-sex friendship is a product of the same “we’re-all-the-same-with-different-plumbing” naive equalism that deliberately ignores complementary differences between the sexes.

This presumption is actually a vetting mechanism for women’s control of sexual selection and Hypergamy. The social convention that promotes the idea of equitable concepts of friendship only serves women’s imperative of being able to hold the attentions of multiple male orbiters until such a time that she can optimize both sides of her sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). The longer you’re rapt by the idea of an equal intergender friendship, the longer she has to consolidate on whatever side of hypergamy she’s prioritizing at the phase of life she’s in. In other words, the longer you’re in the bullpen, the longer you’ll be a Plan B prospect.

3) Religion vs Evolution vs Habit?
This is a bit abstract. But in terms of a decayed loveless marriage, what would you say are the factors holding these marriages together? Neither party is happy, but they are also unwilling to do anything about it.

One clings to a religious frame as reason to not leave/divorce, as the children are all old enough now that “staying together for the childrens sake” no longer applies.

The other seems completely indifferent and stuck in the routine. Both are mid 50’s and have been married for 30 years and probably just scarred shitless of being alone. But what would you make of this from an ‘unplugged’ point of view. (might be a stretch from the realm of this book, but just curious).

What you’re describing is akin to the phenomenon of Grey Divorce. In the time line from my Preventative Medicine series, I briefly outline what’s known as the 20 year itch – the period of life, usually after 50 around the time a long-married couple becomes ’empty nesters’ and the binding responsibilities of raising children is at, or almost at an end.

It’s around this phase that a reassessment of one’s partner takes place and the prospects of living out the rest of a life with that person gets serious consideration. This is a phase that’s very telling of the overall prospects of marriage as an institution on whole and how either sex really considers their idealistic, loving union from very mater-of-fact practicality, when there is no longer a mutually cooperative goal (childrearing) as the centerpiece of that relationship.

Religion and/or a conviction that children are better raised by an involved two parent (male and female) family who are both mutually invested in the success of their kids is generally a bond that both parties mutually agree to as the cornerstone of their marriage.

Once that goal has been met (or termed out) then that relationship must be reestablished and based on a genuine interest and desire for the other person. For a man this may involve his realizing an understanding of tenets of the Game that he’s, until then, unwittingly been a party to. For women this may be a longing for renewed interest from extra-marital (but not necessarily infidelity) attentions and desire from other men.

It’s kind of telling how men’s idealistic concept of love endures beyond his late-life Epiphany stage. In spite of having experienced the consequences and all-downside risks men face in their prior marriages, it’s still overwhelmingly men who want to remarry and take another shot at that idealism.

It is women, in either their veiled pragmatism or their aging, unrealizable opportunistic concept of love who are more or less indifferent to the prospects of remarriage.

“Most currently divorced or widowed men are open to the idea of remarriage, but women in the same circumstances are less likely to be,” says the report, which draws on figures from a survey it conducted in May and June. Almost two thirds of men either want to remarry or would at least consider it, while fewer than a half of women would.

These stats alone are more than enough to verify my assertions of how either sex hold different concepts of love.

Men still dream of an idealistic love, and women have find precious little use for men beyond the practical when presented with the prospect of having to optimize Hypergamy at an age they are no longer capable of intersexual competition.

111 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, friendships, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, relationship, relationships, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, sosuave, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Case Studies, Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, Psychology, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

November 23, 2014

Vulnerability

By Rollo Tomassi

One of the most endemic masculine pitfalls men have faced since the rise of feminine social primacy has been the belief that their ready displays of emotional vulnerability will make men more desirable mates for women.

In an era when men are raised from birth to be “in touch with their feminine sides”, and in touch with their emotions, we get generations of men trying to ‘out-emote’ each other as a mating strategy.

To the boys who grow into Beta men, the ready eagerness with which they’ll roll over and reveal their bellies to women comes from a conditioned belief that doing so will prove their emotional maturity and help them better identify with the women they mistakenly believe have a capacity to appreciate it.

What they don’t understand is that the voluntary exposing of ones most vulnerable elements isn’t the sign of strength that the Feminine Imperative has literally bred a belief of into these men.

A reflexive exposing of vulnerability is an act of submission, surrender and a capitulation to an evident superior. Dogs will roll over almost immediately when they acknowledge the superior status of another dog.

Vulnerability is not something to be brandished or proud of. While I do believe the insight and acknowledgement of your personal vulnerabilities is a necessary part of understanding oneself (particularly when it comes to unplugging oneself), it is not the source of attraction, and certainly not arousal, that most men believe it is for women.

From the comfort of the internet and polite company women will consider the ‘sounds-right’ appeal of male vulnerability with regard to what they’re supposed to be attracted to, but on an instinctual, subconscious level, women make a connection with the weakness that vulnerability represents.

A lot of men believe that trusting displays of vulnerability are mutually exclusive of displays of weakness, but what they ignore is that Hypergamy demands men that can shoulder the burden of performance. When a man openly broadcasts his vulnerableness he is, by definition, beginning from a position of weakness.

The problem with idealizing a position of strength is in thinking you’re already beginning from that strength and your magnanimous display of trusting vulnerability will be appreciated by a receptive woman. I strongly disagree with assertions like those of various Purple Pill ‘life coaches’ that open, upfront vulnerability is ever attractive to a woman.

The idea goes that if a man is truly outcome-independent with his being rejected by a woman, the first indicator of that independence is a freedom to be vulnerable with her. The approach then becomes one of “hey, I’m just gonna be my vulnerable self and if you’re not into me then I’m cool with that.”

The hope is that a woman will receive this approach as intended and find something refreshing about it, but the sad truth is that if this were the attraction key its promoters wish it was, every guy ‘just being himself‘ would be swimming in top shelf pussy. This is a central element to Beta Game – the hope that a man’s openness will set him apart from ‘other guys’ – it is common practice for men who believe in the equalist fantasy that women will rise above their feral natures when it comes to attraction, and base their sexual selection on his emotional intelligence.

The fact is that there is no such thing as outcome independence. The very act of your approaching a woman means you have made some effort to arrive at a favorable outcome with her. The fact that you’d believe a woman would even find your vulnerability attractive voids any pretense of outcome independence.

Hypergamy Doesn’t Care About Male Vulnerability

When I wrote Women in Love and the followups, Men in Love and Of Love and War, I described men’s concept of love as ‘idealistic’.

Naturally, simple minds exaggerated this into “men just want an impossible unconditional love” or “they want love like they think their mothers loved them.” For what it’s worth, I don’t believe any rational man with some insight ever expects an unconditional love, but I think it’s important to consider that a large part of what constitutes his concept of an idealized love revolves around being loved irrespective of how he performs for, or merits that love.

From Of Love and War:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

The concept of men’s idealistic love, the love that makes him the true romantic, begins with a want of freedom from his burden of performance. It’s not founded in an absolute like unconditional love, but rather a love that isn’t dependent upon his performing well enough to assuage a woman’s Hypergamous concept of love.

Oh, the Humanity!

As the true romantics, and because of the performance demands of Hypergamy, there is a distinct want for men to believe that in so revealing their vulnerabilities they become more “human” – that if they expose their frailties to women some mask they believe they’re wearing comes off and (if she’s a mythical “quality woman“™) she’ll excuses his inadequacies to perform to the rigorous satisfaction of her Hypergamy.

The problems with this ‘strength in surrender’ hope are twofold.

First, the humanness he believes a woman will respect isn’t the attraction cue he believes it is. Ten minutes perusing blogs about the left-swiping habits of women using Tinder (or @Tinderfessions) is enough to verify that women aren’t desirous of the kind of “humanness” he’s been conditioned to believe women are receptive to.

In the attraction and arousal stages, women are far more concerned with a man’s capacity to entertain her by playing a role and presenting her with the perception of a male archetype she expects herself to be attracted to and aroused by. Hypergamy doesn’t care about how well you can express your humanness, and primarily because the humanness men believe they’re revealing in their vulnerability is itself a predesigned psychological construct of the Feminine Imperative.

Which brings us to the second problem with ‘strength in surrender’. The caricaturized preconception men have about their masculine identity is a construct of a man’s feminine-primary socialization.

The Masks the Feminine Imperative Makes Men Wear

To explain this second problem it’s important to grasp how men are expected to define their own masculine identities within a social order where the only correct definition of masculinity is prepared for men in a feminine-primary context.

What I mean by this is that the humanness that men wish to express in showing themselves as vulnerable is defined by feminine-primacy.

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

“The Mask You Live In” by director Jennifer Siebel Newsom (dual surname noted) is the perfect example of this perpetuation. You have a woman deciding for a larger public in a documentary what the male experience is and then solving the problem (i.e. the tired trope of men needing to get more in touch with their emotions) for men.

Men are ridiculous posers. Men are socialized to wear masks to hide what the Feminine Imperative has decided is their true natures (they’re really girls wearing boy masks). Men’s problems extend from their inability to properly emote like women, and once they are raised better (by women and men who comply with the Feminine Imperative) they can cease being “tough” and get along better with women. That’s the real strength that comes from men’s feminized concept of vulnerability – compliance with the Feminine Imperative.

Ironically Newsom is still oblivious to the fact that she can only create such a documentary in an environment of feminine-primacy. No man could produce this and be taken seriously in our contemporary social climate.

It’s indictment of the definers of what masculinity ought to be that they still characterize modern masculinity (based on the ‘feels’) as being problematic when for generations our feminine-primary social order has conditioned men to associate that masculinity in as feminine-beneficial a context as women would want.

They still rely on an outdated formula which presumes the male experience is inferior, a sham, in comparison to the female experience, and then presumes to know what the male experience really is and offers feminine-primary solutions for it.

From The 16 Commandments of Poon:

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest. When she grasps for a pillar to steady herself against the whipping winds or yearns for an authority figure to foil her worst instincts, it is you who has to be there… strong, solid, unshakeable and immovable.

True vulnerability is not a value-added selling point for a man when it comes to approaching and attracting women. As with all things, your vulnerability is best discovered by a woman through demonstration –never explaining those vulnerabilities to her with the intent of appearing more human as the feminine would define it.

Women want a bulwark against their own emotionalism, not a co-equal male emoter whose emotionalism would compete with her own. The belief that male vulnerability is a strength is a slippery slope from misguided attraction to emotional codependency, to overt dependency on a woman to accommodate and compensate for the weaknesses that vulnerability really implies.

I know a lot of guys think that displays vulnerability from a position of Alpha dominance, or strength can be endearing for a woman when you’re engaged in an LTR, but I’m saying that’s only the case when the rare instance of vulnerability is unintentionally revealed. Vulnerability is not a strength, and especially not when a man deliberately reveals it with the expectation of a woman appreciating it as a strength.

At some point in any LTR you will show your vulnerable side, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is the overt attempt to parlay that vulnerability into a strength or virtue that you expect that woman to appreciate, feel endearment over or reciprocate with displays of her own vulnerability for.

A chink in the armor is a weakness best kept from view of those who expect you to perform your best in all situations. If that chink is revealed in performing your best, then it may be considered a strength for having overcome it while performing to your best potential. It is never a strength when you expect it to be appreciated as such.

431 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread game, emotional vulnerability, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, male perspective, manosphere, plate theory, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, SMV, vulnerability, women | posted in Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Love, Positive Masculinity, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

September 29, 2014

A New Hope

By Rollo Tomassi

Towards the end of The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill I wrote this:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I unplugged (such as it was) was throwing away ‘hope’.

Not real, internal, personal hope, but rather the ‘hope’ I had been led to believe was a realizable state – if circumstances, if personalities, if fate or some other condition defined by the feminine imperative would just align in such a way that I’d been conditioned to believe it could, then that feminine defined contentment could be actualized.

I wanted very much to realize that idealized state by defining hope (or having it defined for me) in a context that was never of my own real choosing. I got just as depressed as anyone else when I unplugged. I got angry. I didn’t want to think that I’d invested so much of myself in something that was fundamentally unattainable because the my understanding of it had been incorrect, either deliberately or by my own hopeful interpretations of it.

My own ‘unplugging’ was a gradual affair and came after a lot of drawn out trauma. And yes, to realize that all of that trauma amounted to nothing after hoping and struggling to mold myself into something that I was led to believe was achievable it was even more depressing.

It wasn’t until I realized that the hope I was sold came from the same social paradigm that never held my best interests as a priority that I threw it away. That was a tough day because I realized in doing so I would have to find a new sense of hope for myself. It seemed very nihilistic at the time, and I had to really make an effort not to make that choice from a sense of self-pity.

One particularly hard revelation I had to disabuse myself of was understanding that women love differently than men. That was tough to embrace because the old hope I was struggling to realize was based on the primary tenet of blue pill thinking; the equalist notion that men and women share a mutually recognized, mutually accepted concept of love.

Once I understood this was an idealization rather than a reality, and that women can and do love men deeply, but in an entirely different feminine-specific concept of love, I discovered that I no longer ‘hoped’ for that mutuality and embraced the hope that men and women could still genuinely love each other from their own perspectives of love without a mutual consensus.

I remembered then an older man I had done some peer counseling with while in college and how this man had essentially striven his entire life to please and content his ex-wife and his now second wife of more than 30 years. From his early 20s he’d spent his personal life in a hopeful attempt at contenting, appeasing and qualifying for a mutually shared state of love he believed these women (the only 2 he’d ever had sex with) had a real capacity for.

At 73 (now) he’s spent his life invested in a hope that simply doesn’t exist – that he can be loved as a man ideally believes a woman ought to be able to love him – just as all the romantic, feminine-defined ideals of love he’d learned from a feminine-centric social order had convinced him of for so long.

This is why I say men are the True Romantics, because the overwhelming majority will devote a lifetime to the effort of actualizing a belief in a male-idealized love to find fulfillment in a woman and for that woman.

Old Hope for New Hope

I hope that doesn’t sound too fortune cookie, but it’s a prime example of redefining hope in a new red pill-aware paradigm. You can hope and thrive in a new red pill context – I know I do – but it’s much easier when you internalize red pill truths and live with them in a red pill context instead of force-fitting them into your old, feminine-defined, blue pill context. I can imagine what my marriage would look like if I hadn’t made the red pill transition and learned to use that awareness in it. There are a lot of guys paying ‘marriage coaches’ $149 an hour because they never did.

There was a comment buried in last week’s comment thread from Hobbes that was too good not to include in its entirety here:

I think I get it!

For years I have been bitter about this need to “perform” about how this shows that women do not love us as we love etc.. And just now I was reviewing my old relationships and I recalled something.

In each of my relationships, prior to meeting the women I eventually fell in love with, I was constantly working on myself, I would get in shape, hang out with friends, explore my environment and work on myself and my music etc. As soon as I would “fall in love” I would slowly drop those activities, I’d focus on being a good bf, I would focus on providing and “being what she wanted” what I thought she wanted, better said.

But here is my Eureka moment, what I recalled each time was being unhappy, what I recall each time was feeling boxed in and kind of dull.. of feeling trapped.

Is this what Rollo means when he says our response to women is a conditioning, and that the sadness we get from Red Pill truth is the result of behaving and believing something that is not really our nature, but the result of having someone else’s behaviors and beliefs installed into us?

So I think I finally understand it for myself… the talk of putting yourself first, of “performing” etc is really just a way of saying “you don’t have to do what people say you’re supposed to do in a relationship – you don’t have to drop everything for her, you don’t have to stop doing what you like and love and you don’t have to kiss her ass”

In my case I dropped everything for two reasons. One was to do what I thought I was supposed to do.. what I heard women say they wanted from a man, what my mother said a man should be etc.. and the second reason was insecurity. I wanted her to love me, I didn’t want to rock the boat, I was scared of losing her.. so eventually I did. I believed that in order for me to be worthy of her, of her love, I had to go along and give her what she said she wanted, what I was taught she wanted.

Is this what Rollo and everyone else is talking about? Because I think I finally get it. Up to now I have faked my Game, to some extent. I just knew better than to do certain things or did things I knew would make me attractive, etc. to women. But seeing this now, not only am I realizing there is nothing to be bitter about – I was always happier working on myself and my interests and actually resentful of having to stop them – but that I am actually happier doing this thing women want of us we call “performing”.

In a way, you are performing, as Rollo says, either way. If you stop and think you can rest, in many ways you are doing so because you have been conditioned to believe, as I was, that you should. That real love meant you could and should.
Anyway, maybe this is simply me and my personal experience of it, but it makes sense to me.. and I think this has revealed to me something monumental, personally. Maybe other guys have a different experience of it, but this is how I have seen it played out in my life.

I feel better.

The key to living in a red pill context is to unlearn your blue pill expectations and dreams of finding contentment in them, and replace them with expectations and aspirations based on realistic understandings of red pill truths.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

Killing your inner Beta is a difficult task and part of that is discarding an old, comfortable, blue pill paradigm. For many newly unplugged, red pill aware, men the temptation is to think they can use this new understanding to achieve the goal-states of their preconditioned blue pill ideals. What they don’t understand is that, not only are these blue pill goal-states flawed, but they are also based on a flawed understanding of how to attain them.

Red pill awareness demands a red pill context for fulfillment. Oracle Z wrote a fantastic article on Return of Kings this week called Why you shouldn’t seek emotional fulfillment through women. It’s well worth the read, but what Oracle Z outlines here is a fulfillment based on feminine-primary, blue pill conditions for that contentment. Even when men achieve these blue pill goal-states, the ones they’re conditioned to believe they should want for themselves, they find themselves discontent with those states and trapped by the liabilities of them.

Just as Hobbes illustrated, the periods when he was not striving to achieve or maintain those blue pill goal-states were the times he was most fulfilled with his life, talents and ambitions.

As if this weren’t enough to convince a man he needs to re-imagine himself in a red pill-primary context, when women are presented with ‘the perfect guy‘ in a blue pill context they gradually (sometimes immediately) come to despise him. As proven by their actions, even women don’t want that blue pill perfected goal-state because it stagnates the otherwise exciting, self-important men they are aroused by, and attracted to in a red pill context.

I’ve stated this in prior posts, but it bears repeating,

“Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.”

Living in a blue pill context, and hoping you can achieve fulfillment in its fundamentally flawed goal-states, conditions men to make women the focus of their lives. Throw that hope away and understand that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

235 Comments | tags: blue pill, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, the rational male | posted in Love, Positive Masculinity, Relationship Game, Unplugging

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