When I was detailing the landscape of our contemporary sexual marketplace in Navigating the SMP there comes a point on women’s SMV (sexual market value) progression where she becomes cognizant of her SMV decline and impending date with The Wall. Generally this occurs in women’s late 20′s and possibly early 30′s but as a rough estimate on the graph I provided in that post, this is the point of transition at which women realize their decaying capacity to hypergamously compete with women in their sexual primes, and the point at which men are beginning to realize their own increasing SMV potential. I dubbed this intersection the point of Comparative SMV. It’s also important to note that this phase conveniently coincides with the social convention of women’s mythical biological clock. (more on this later).

The Epiphany Phase

I’ve previously described this phase as a parallel to men’s feminine-redefined midlife crisis. This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain to her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in their prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

For the spiritually inclined woman (which is to say most women) this may manifest in a convenient return to convictions she’d disregarded since her adolescence. For other’s it may be some kind of forced celibacy; a refusal to have sex under the hypergamic auspices of her ‘party years’ in the hopes that a well provisioning male (the ones not realizing their own potential SMV as yet) will appreciate her for her prudence – so unlike herself and all of the other girls who rejected him over the last decade.

The self-affirming psychological schema is one where she’s “finally doing the right thing”, when in fact she’s simply making the necessity of her long term provisioning and security a virtue she hopes men will appreciate. And if they don’t, then there’s always shaming them to think they’re ‘less-than-men’ for not living up to her eating her cake once she’s had it.

The Shifting Point

Case in point Hephzibah Anderson, author of the book Chastened, The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex. Here we have a graphic insight into the inner workings of women’s rationalization at the crossroads of acknowledging her decaying SMV, the need for long term male security, provisioning and intimacy, and realizing the necessity for a new psychological paradigm to justify her shift in behavior.

It’s easy to dismiss this interview as just another 3 women allowing their hamsters to colate on camera, but when you view this clip in a red pill context a surprising amount of information is revealed about the Epiphany Phase women experience.

We begin here with the now clichéd Kate Bolick Brand® former boyfriend-in-love regretfulness as the catalyst for Hephzibah’s newly gained insight. He’s serendipitously buying a ring for his new fiancé and the Alpha Widow mojo takes root in her psyche, “some girl found him valuable enough to marry.” She then proceeds through the predictable, “I’m 30 and need to reprioritize my life” boilerplate that’s made more than a few women authors a good deal of money writing for The Atlantic.

As I noted earlier, this phase also coincides with a woman’s sharp decline in fertility and childbearing capacity, so the instinctual urgency to breed, reinforced by the myth of the biological clock contributes to this internal crisis. All of this coalesces into some amazing feats of rationalization hamster acrobatics.

I’d thought those thoughts once or twice, but it would never have occurred to me that I’d actually go ahead and voluntarily eject sex from my life. It took a bizarre serendipity, a torrid affair and a chance anecdote to make me realize that the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a post-feminist, 21st-century Western woman — a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy — was not working for me.

Better late than never right? Unfortunately no. While I’m sure this realization will seem ennobling to the more moralistically predisposed  mindset, what you see now is the expectation of a new appreciation for her insight which was prompted by her need, not a genuine introspective. It’s kind of ironic in that the Chastening Hephzibah is so proud of was prompted by her own necessity.

All right, in most circumstances it’s still just about required for life’s perpetuation, but we can lead perfectly healthy and, indeed, happy existences without nooky, whoopee or bonking. People can — and do — go decades without sex. Some live their entire lives without it.

Side Note: In Girl-World a woman can electively forego sex for an entire year and it’s recognized as a sacrifice worthy of writing a book to be published by a major print publisher, while the only way a man can be recognized for his 40 year celibacy is when he enters a fitness center and guns down 7 women in a pilates class. As I’ve stated before, when a woman tells you “I don’t understand why sex is sooooo important to guys“, she’s telling you the literal truth.

Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen, and there was nothing metaphorical about the title, history assures us.

Robert Dudley and a long list of the Queen’s confirmed lovers disagree. What follows here is an attempt by Hephzibah’s rationalization engine to affirm what she’d like to think is her radical decision to go abstinent – plenty of luminaries from the past have gone without and lived perfectly fine lives. What she’s in denial about is the necessity of sex in a mature human experience. Sex is the glue that holds a relationship together; without sex a woman becomes a man’s mother, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, but not his lover, and certainly not his wife. Deemphasizing the importance of sex, actively desexualizing yourself in the hopes that it will make you more sexually arousing is an effort in self-defeat.

What follows here is yet another overwritten self-examination of a woman facing the Wall and attempting to reconcile a past of eschewing offers of genuine intimacy with (albeit probably beta) guys and her own hypergamous impulses during her 20′s. When a pre-Wall Anderson makes a conscious effort to remove sex from the equation in order to bring her more “clarity” about a man’s long term value what she’s doing is attempting to dissociate hypergamy from that process. In doing so she devalues the important sexual aspect of a relationship and turns off the men she’d probably fit well with because she believes that sex is the foil in her past failures, not herself, not her ego-investments, not the delusions the feminine imperative has saddled her with. Sex isn’t her problem, her innate hypergamy will eventually reveal this to her, but it’s how she’s been doing it and the late hour at which she’s come to her “new” epiphany with all of its urgency.

Hephzibah is easy pickings for the manosphere Men with a bent for shaming women about riding the Cock Carousel (she even alludes to this in the article). That’s a given, but it’s not the operative issue I’m on about here. What her story illustrates for us is the psychological machinations behind the reconciliation of her unfulfilled hypergamy and her need for future intimacy, security and provisioning.

For red pill, Game-aware Men, this is a supremely important stage in women’s maturation to consider. A woman in the Epiphany Phase is looking for a “fresh start” for a much more visceral reason than some newly inspired sense of self. This motivation prompts all kinds of behavioral and social conventions to facilitate a man’s commitment to forgiving her past indiscretions. As Roosh has pointed out more than once, it’s women in this phase of life (or the mothers of women in this phase) who most vocally complain about men’s lack of interest in committing to them. As Hephzibah is painfully aware of, women in their peak SMV years don’t complain about a dearth of marriageable men– “Man Up” is the anthem of women in the Epiphany Phase.