Tag Archives: SMV

November 11, 2014

Beta Tells

TRP poster, needathrowawayplease from the Red Pill subreddit has a timely question / observation:

Knowing your SO’s menstrual cycle can be extremely powerful. [Indeed]

During the fertile stage of her cycle, thousands of years of evolution mean her body is screaming at her to get knocked up by an alpha male. A simple test to determine is she sees you as her alpha fucks is to not initiate during the fertile period of her cycle and observe her behavior: does she come to you to get fucked? Does her body language or physical behavior change when she’s fertile. Maybe she touches you more often or more intimately or plays the role of the seductress: things like coming to bed wearing lingerie where she usually wouldn’t? Even if she’s relatively low-sex drive and doesn’t initiate, does she at least respond more passionately to your sexual advances or orgasm more easily or intensely when she’s fertile?

You obviously can’t draw conclusions from a single cycle but you should eventually see a pattern – and the more she values you sexually during her fertile period the better. If she isn’t doing anything differently or reacting to you differently when she’s fertile, something’s up.

This test can have false negatives but not false positives. There’s no false positive case where she suddenly starts riding you while you’re watching the Packers game but she doesn’t see you as her alpha. But it can have false negatives where she doesn’t initiate but still sees you as her alpha. If she isn’t initiating when she’s fertile (and you aren’t initiating in order to test her reaction), it could be due to stress, lack of time, being too used to you doing the initiation, etc. But at the very least she should be demonstrating increased passion and sexual ecstasy during her fertile period.

At a high-level:

The best case: She initiates during her fertile period if you don’t. She gets cravings for your D.

The OK case: She responds more passionately and orgasms more easily during her fertile period.

The uh-oh, something might be wrong case: No observable change during her fertile period.

The beta case: Dead bedroom, what the fuck are you even doing (sorry if you got married and you can’t get out).

Of course if she’s an extremely sexual being and all of the above describes your sex life 24/7, then none of this should even concern you.

Disclaimer: Once again, this test is a tool that works best for women with higher sex drives (who really wanna get fucked when they’re fertile). If your 37 year old wife of 15 years fucks you when you want and isn’t cheating, you’re fine. I don’t think test applies to all women (LOL, broke /trp/ rules oops) but it’s useful nonetheless.

Lets presume for a moment that neither a controlled experiment nor an uncontrolled, but documented, correlatively scientific, sociological field study has ever been performed to test the principle of feminine Hypergamy. For a moment, as a man, imagine yourself living in a period of time prior to any formalized school of psychology; pre-turn of the 20th century. There is no Pavlov, there is no Skinner, there is no Freud.

Using only personal observations, observations of learned behaviors related by your father and brothers, male friends and the intergender experiences of a very socially isolated (by today’s standards) group of people who make up your peers, and a restrictively limited access to any classic philosophical literature beyond the Judeo-Christian Bible – what would you presume would be the nature inimical to women and the feminine?

Would your observations, intuition and the education proffered by your father, brothers and other influential male friends and relations lead to an insight to know what Hypergamy is, how it motivates women and how to control for, or capitalize on it?

Not only do I believe it would, but I would argue that, up until the sexual revolution and the past 60 or so years, men have had an innate and learned understanding of Hypergamy, how it functions, and how to control for it.

To be sure, it didn’t have the formal name of ‘Hypergamy’ – in fact that term was until recently, strictly defined and reserved for “women with the tendency to marry above their socioeconomic level” in polite, pop-psychology circles – but men knew Hypergamy before the manopshere (re)exposed its true definition.

Waging Hypergamy

Resistance to the uncomfortable truths innate to the female experience is to be expected from women – until the advent of Open Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative needed the sisterhood to be united and its secrets jealously guarded to the point of cognitive dissonance.

My guess is that most of my female critics would still agree with the basic parameters of Hypergamy, but what I doubt they’re aware of is that in denying the inherent biological nature of female Hypergamy women must also reject the sociological, psychological and (observably) behavioral aspects of Hypergamy inherent (and largely subconscious) in women.

Commenter Mookie:

“As women approach the Epiphany Phase (later the Wall) and realize the decay of their SMV (in comparison to younger women), they become progressively more incentivized towards attraction to the qualities a man possesses that will best satisfy the long-term security of the Beta Bucks side of her Hypergamy demands.”

Did your woman say, “you’re (so much) different than the guys I used to date.” Or, “I finally got smart and found a good guy.” If so, this is clear evidence that you are her Beta Bucks guy. Maybe she used to date DJs, NFL players, drug dealers, whatever. If these guys are different types of guys than you, do NOT continue the relationship. She has no clue, but she is rationalizing her choice in her mind. You will pay a severe price later, as in cheating, nonstop bitchiness, or sudden divorce. Find a girl that always dated guys like you. She may have swooned for the lead guitarist, but if she didn’t devote her early 20s to chasing him, you’re okay.

Beta Tells

One of the more common questions I’m asked in consults is whether something a guy did was ‘Beta’ or not. Usually it was a situation wherein the guy was instinctually sensitive to his own behavior in context to his Frame and how the woman he was dealing with perceived him. In most cases a man knows when he’s slipped in his perception of dominance with a woman, they just look for a third party confirmation of it – which is then followed by more rationalizations for why his behavior shouldn’t be considered Beta because they believe women are equally rational, equally forgiving, agents as men (really he is) are.

From Gut Check:

Whenever you feel something isn’t quite right in your gut, what this is is your subconscious awareness alerting you to inconsistencies going on around you. We tend to ignore these signs in the thinking that our rational mind ‘knows better’ and things really aren’t what they seem. It’s not as bad as you’re imagining, and you can even feel shame or guilt with yourself for acknowledging that lack of trust. However, it’s just this internal rationalization that keeps us blind to the obvious that our subconscious is trying to warn us about. Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. So when that predictable behavior changes even marginally, our instinctual perceptions fire off all kinds of warnings. Some of which can actually effect us physically.

It’s at this point most guys make the mistake of acting on the “good communication solves everything” feminized meme and go the full disclosure truth route, which only really leads to more rationalizations and repression of what’s really going on. What they don’t realize is that the MEDIUM is the message; her behavior, her nuances, the incongruousness in her words and demeanor (and how your gut perceives them) is the real message. There is an irregularity in her behavior that your subconscious is alerting you to which your consciousness either cannot or will not recognize.

I began the Alpha Tells post with the intent of recognizing how a woman behaves when she’s in the presence of a Man she perceives to be Alpha. A lot of men get hung up on trying to ‘act’ Alpha; wanting to ape (and hopefully internalize) the behavioral tells a more confident Alpha displays.

Consequently there’s a lot of debate about how men posture and how they naturally display these Alpha cues, but I think the best gauge of what defines those cues is not in men’s displays, but women’s behaviors and attitudes that are prompted by a perception of Alpha-ness.

And just as women will respond viscerally to an Alpha perception, they will also manifest behaviors which indicate her subconscious knows she’s dealing with a Beta aligned male.

It’s easy to pick apart what a guy thinks are his own Alpha tells, but it’s far more uncomfortable to dissect women’s Beta tells when they’re in the presence of men they perceive to be Beta. Much of what I’ll outline that follows will be hard to read for many guys, and as always you’re free to disagree.

My purpose here isn’t to bash Betas, rather it’s to increase awareness of women’s behaviors toward them. As I’ve explained above, try to put these behaviors into a Hypergamous context and how they would be perceived by women who’ve evolved to have an instinctual sensitivity to these Beta behaviors, as well as expressions of Beta attitudes in your words and emotional emphasis.

I could very easily compile a list of behaviors that are simply the reverse of the Alpha Tells I noted in the previous post, but it’s much more important to address the root reasons for these Beta Tells:

Does she initiate sex or affection spontaneously?
Does she entertain a large pool of “male friend” orbiters with the expectation of you being ‘mature enough’ to accept it?
Does she keep a core peer group of ‘girlfriends’ she insists on prioritizing over being with you? Frequent GNOs?
Has she explained to you how she was so different in college and how she’s glad those days are behind her now?
Is she experiencing her Epiphany Phase?
Does she cite “mismatched libidos” as a reason for her lack of sexual interest in you now that you’re married or living together (even after she’s had better sex with you or a former lover when single)?
Is she averse or repulsed by your ejaculate being on her skin, in her mouth or overly concerned with soiling a bed sheet?
Will she have sex with you anywhere besides the bed?
Do you perform oral on her to get her off more than you have intercourse?
Is she a wide-eyed lover or does she squint her eyes closed while having sex? Is sex a chore for her to perform?
If you’re married, did she assume your last name, or did she insist on a hyphenated surname for herself?
When you’re together does her regular, unpracticed body posture indicate an openness or are you always having to break into her intimate space?
Is she preoccupied with her side of the family or a certain pet in preference to being concerned with your well-being?
Is she consciously aware of being 1-2 points above your own relative SMV? Is she overt about it?
Does she presume authority in your relationship? Do you accede this authority as a matter of (equalist) belief?

There are many more tells of course, and I hope more will be presented in the commentary, but it’s important to understand that these behaviors and attitudes are manifestations of a woman who on some level of consciousness understands that she’s dealing with a Beta man.

I should also mention that, as with Stephen’s case in Moments of Clarity, there are particular phases of a woman’s life when she becomes more attuned to dealing with Beta men due to perceived necessities on her part. A clear understanding of how these phases predispose women to convince themselves to be more accepting of Beta behaviors and a Beta mindset is imperative to avoiding the common pitfalls men encounter with regard to issues of Frame in their relationships.

Beta men are all too eager to believe they’ve matured into being a self-defined Alpha when a semi-attractive 29 year old in the midst of her Epiphany Phase is giving him wide-eyed indicators of interest in him. Only after she’s consolidated on that long-term security does he realize the plans her sexual strategy had for him.

Predisposition for Mate Guarding

One of the best Beta tells is how defensive a guy gets about the subject of mate guarding.

An Alpha has little preoccupation with mate guarding because subconsciously he knows he has sexual options. That applies both within and without monogamy. I’m presenting this here because the majority of what motivates Beta tells (and really a Beta mindset) is rooted in how men deal with a scarcity mentality. Beta tells are almost always indicators that a man believes he needs to guard his paired woman and thus telegraphs a Beta status to that woman as well as other women in her peer clutch.

Mate guarding, and its intrinsic set of subconscious suspicions and behaviors, is an evolved adaptation of ensuring paternity for a Beta-provider. These men must rely upon exchanging resources and external benefits for women’s sexual fidelity. In essence, it’s an unspoken awareness that Beta men must negotiate for what they hope will be a woman’s genuine desire in exchange for his provisioning, parental investment support and emotional involvement.

Beta men are aware on on a limbic level that Hypergamy dictates an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks trade-off in women’s sexual strategy – thus a subconscious ‘mate guarding’ mindset evolved from Beta men’s heightened awareness of women’s preference for Alpha Fucks particularly around the proliferative phase time of women’s ovulation.

Paradoxically, the best assurance you have of fidelity with a woman is simply not to allow yourself to become exclusively monogamous with a woman and rather, have her make the efforts to pair with you under her own auspices you being Alpha. Romance is not required from a lover a woman perceives as Alpha, only his sexual interest – this represents a confirmation of Hypergamous optimization for a woman. The fuck-buddy dynamic – all sexual interests with no reciprocal expectation of emotional investment – is a strong Alpha tell for a man.

The best gauge for determining a woman’s perception of you as either an Alpha or Beta type is examining yourself and your feeling a ‘need’ to mate guard her, to appease her, or an impulse to correct yourself in order to align with her terms for intimacy. A scarcity mentality is the mental point of origin for a Beta mindset – and that internalized mental model will manifest itself in a predisposition for Beta behaviors.

There’s a common belief that even the most Alpha of men will at times slip into a Beta behaviorism. You can’t be ‘on’ your game all of the time, and while that’s true it doesn’t invalidate that women have a mental model of your overall, predominant condition being either Alpha or Beta. A predominantly Alpha frame and mindset (and yes, looks), plus an acknowledged (real or perceived) SMV primacy will cover a multitude of Beta sins, but the predominant Beta has the sisyphean task of convincing a woman he’s more Alpha than she pegs him for.

So to answer the man asking whether or not something he did was Beta, your answer really lies in your motivation for behaving ‘Beta’ as you did in comparison to how a woman perceives your predominant character.

272 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, manosphere, physical attractiveness, rational male, rational male year 2, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual impulse, sexual market value, SMV, the rational male, therationalmale, white knights, women | posted in Alpha, Game, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Psychology, Relationship Game

November 2, 2014

Alpha Tells

By Rollo Tomassi

For as long as I’ve been writing in the manosphere, the definition of “what is Alpha?” has been the number one point of contention I’ve had to state and restate the most often. I’m not going to rehash this now as I have several posts on the nature of Alpha already linked in the sidebar, so if you’re looking for my take on Alpha that’s where to find it.

However, to lead in to today’s post I need to address the basis of what I believe are the most common misunderstandings about the term Alpha.

Well before the inception of this blog, in the early beginnings of what would evolve into the manosphere there was a need of terminology to describe the more abstract concepts developing in the ‘community’. Some of these analogies and terms are still with the manosphere today, others have morphed into more useful abstractions; Alpha Widows, Hypergamy (in its true nature), the Feminine Imperative, even Red Pill awareness are all examples of established terms or analogies for understood abstractions. Among these are also the concepts of a man being Alpha and Beta.

From The Unbearable Triteness of Hating at CH:

5. Etymology Hate

Hater: Your definition of an alpha male is false. In the animal kingdom, the alpha male is leader of the pack, not a cad/badboy/jerk who pumps and dumps women.

Isn’t it just like a nerd to get hysterical over the appropriation of a narrow-sense scientific term to conveniently illustrate broader truths about men and women.

One of the most common disconnects men encounter with the Red Pill for the first time is equating the term Alpha with its usage in describing the mating habits of Lions, Wolves or Silver Back Gorillas. It’s easy to ridicule or simply dismiss a valid, but uncomfortable, Red Pill truth when you’re simplistically comfortable in defining ‘Alpha Male’ in literal etymological terms.

This is the first resistance blue pill men claim they have with the Red Pill. They have no problem understanding and using abstractions for blue pill concepts they themselves are ego-invested in, but challenge that belief-paradigm with uncomfortable red pill truths and their first resort is to obstinately define Alpha (as well as Hypergamy) in as narrow, binary and literal a sense as they can muster.

“Get in Touch with Your ~~Feminine~~ Beta Side”

The next most common misunderstanding comes from conflating the abstractions of Alpha and Beta with masculine and feminine traits. In this (often deliberate) misdirection, the concepts of being Alpha or Beta become synonymous with being masculine or feminine. This is the personal basis of Alpha and Beta many Purple Pill advocates (really blue pill apologists) comfortably redefine for themselves, to suit themselves.

This purple pill conflation is really just a comforting return the the curse of Jung – anima & animus – if the complete man is an even mix of Alpha and Beta, masculine and feminine, then all the worst aspects of his “betaness” can’t be all bad, and he reinterprets what really amounts to a complete androgyny as “being the best balance”.

Unfortunately, and as blue pill chumps will later attest, the feminine expects to find its paired balance in the masculine, not an equalist idealization of both in the same man. Thus women, on a limbic level, expect men to be Men.

This one of the missives of an equalitarian mindset; that an individualized, egalitarian balance of masculine and feminine aspects in two independent people should replace the natural complementary interdependence of masculine and feminine attributes in a paired balance that humans evolved into.

What purple pill temperance really equates to is a 21st century return to the 20th century feminized meme “men need to get in touch with their feminine sides”… or else risk feminine rejection. 60+ years of post sexual revolution social engineering has put the lie to what an abject failure this concept has been.

What they fail to grasp is that an Alpha mindset is not definitively associated with masculine attributes. There are plenty of high-functioning, masculine men we would characterize as Alpha based on our perception of them in many aspects of life, who nonetheless are abject supplicating Betas with regard to how they interact with, and defer to women.

Whether that disconnect is due to a learned, Beta deference to the feminine (White Knighting), some internalized fear of rejection, or just a natural predisposition to be so with women, isn’t the issue; what matters is that the abstraction of Alpha isn’t an absolute definitive association with the masculine.

Likewise, Beta attributes are neither inherently feminine. As has been discussed ad infinitum in the manosphere, 80%+ of modern men have been conditioned (or otherwise) to exemplify and promote a feminine-primary, supportive Beta role for themselves and as many other men they can convince to identify more with the feminine.

The Beta mindset isn’t so much one of adopting a feminine mindset as it is a deference to, and the support of, a feminine-primary worldview.

The reason purple pill (watered down red pill) ideology wants to make the association of Alpha = Masculine, Beta = Feminine is because the “get in touch with your feminine side” Beta attributes they possess in spades can be more easily characterized as “really” being Alpha if it helps make him the more androgynously acceptable male he mistakenly believes women are attracted to (if not directly aroused by).

Alpha Tells

From jf12:

The sexual alphaness of a male towards a female is exhibited by her wanting to please him, and the sexual betaness of a male is exhibited by him needing to please her. A man’s alphaness obviously and definitionally does not cause her to more require him to please her (i.e. alphaness does not rub off like that). And also, betaness is not transferrable, no matter how much we betas wish that our women-pleasing caused women to want to please us.

Moreover, the social dominance of a male in a male hierarchy is barely correlated with his sexual alphaness, and certainly not causal. There are far too many counterexamples, such as Bill Gates, Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, and the list is very very long.

However, and this is a key sociologically empirical point, the social dominance of a *female* human (the best kind!) in a *female* human hierarchy is extremely correlated, in this precise way: A woman to whom women cater to will 99.9% of the time demand to be catered to by her man. This is why women believe man-pleasing women (I admit there are some) are “lesser”. It is also why men (e.g. me) who have tended to be mated to females who are socially dominant in a female hierarchy are invariably betas. It’s simply false that female-dominant women tend to choose men who demand pleasing.

What critics of an Alpha/Beta dichotomy conveniently sweep under the conversational carpet is that the dichotomy they want to debate only exists in their convenient, personal interpretations of Alpha or Beta mean to them.

From a male perspective we can endlessly debate (from our own personal biases) what we believe constitutes an Alpha state (remember, an abstract term, stay with me here) and the expectations of which we think women should respond to according to those expectation. But it’s women’s instinctive behaviors around Alpha men (or men they contextually perceive so) that provide us with the tells as to how she perceives a man’s Alpha or Beta status.

For as much as we believe women should respond to our definition of Alpha – and despite how women will explain they agree with those self-prescribed definitions – as always, it is their behaviors when in the presence of, or in a relationship with men they perceive as being Alpha (or of higher sexual market value than themselves if you prefer) that they bely their true, instinctual recognitions of Alpha.

In a social environment where men are conditioned to believe that women are as equal, rational agents as men, the belief men put their faith into is that women will appreciate their intrinsic qualities and base their sexual selectivity upon a man’s virtue, bearing, intelligence, humor, and any number of attractive intrinsic qualities. However, the truth of what women base their sexual selectivity upon (arousal) is far more evident in their instinctual, unconditioned behavior when around Alpha men – as well as men’s instinctual sensitivity to that behavior.

There are many examples of this Alpha reactive behavior. I’ll make an attempt to illustrate a few of them here, but I expect there’ll be many more offered in the comment thread an I’ll encourage a discussion of the behaviors that serve as Alpha tells. Rossy/Heartiste has made a sport with his ongoing “spot the Alpha” series of posts in which he analyzes a picture or video of a woman’s reaction to a man who she is obviously has an Alpha interest in as her body language and subcommunications suggest. (h/t to CH for today’s image)

The common criticism of these images is that red pill men would read too much into these displays, but the underlying message in that criticism is rooted in understanding and willfully ignoring what our instinctual perceptions of them are. We know Alpha when we see it, but need an explanation to protect our own ego’s Alpha assessment of ourselves.

The Real Selection

For all the delighted ego ’empowerment’ of women boasting they are the sexual selectors in this life, there is still a nervous uncertainty about being found acceptable themselves to an Alpha lover of higher SMV status than they might otherwise merit. This is where the illusions of an assortive mating model break down for women. If feminine-primary sexual selection were the only element to mating there would be no need for the behaviors women are subject to in seeking the approval from men they perceive as Alpha.

There’s a look, an attitude and a presence women will give to Men for whom they have a natural deference to. I don’t just mean blatant sexual subcommunications like casually biting her lower lip, or the hair twirling that’s almost cliché now. It goes beyond the sexual into a kind of meta-attraction/arousal. While the sexual urgency for an Alpha is strong and manifests in a woman’s forwardness toward him, the meta-attraction is both of submission and a subconscious desire for his approval of her.

Men predisposed to a Beta mindset also display many of these same behavioral cues with the women they hope will appreciate them in the same fashion a woman does for a Man that her hindbrain instinctually knows is of a higher SMV. In Beta men we see these behaviors as evidence of “clinginess” or “neediness” and is an identifiable Beta tell; but in women this natural and unprovoked leaning in to a Man, this desire to submit for his approval, is a positive indicator of Alpha attraction.

This is why, as third party observers, we instinctually find such behavior in men distasteful; we subliminally sense a complementary imbalance between the man and woman.

When a woman makes an unforced effort to please a man with subtle words, unintentional wide-eyed contact, and body positioning / posture you’re dealing with a woman who is compelled to defer to you as Alpha.

That isn’t to say this can’t be faked. In fact strippers, good ones at least, are not just physically arousing, or more sexualized, but are in tune with the deficit most men feel when it comes to this Alpha deference. Beyond just the sexual aspect, one thing that makes strippers so enticing and seductive is that the majority of men are simply unused to the fawning affections and Alpha interest (albeit feigned) of any woman, much less an attractive one.

This is also one reason men become so prone to ONEitis both inside and outside this contrived, transactional, sort of attraction. Men are the True Romantics, they want to believe a woman’s sincerity in her Alpha deference to him.

Does the girl you’re interested in come to you, or do you go to her?

I’ve emphasized the importance of establishing and maintaining Frame for years now, but I sometimes wonder if the importance of holding Frame isn’t lost on most men.

To an equalist mindset this Frame establishment seems like I’m advocating men be domineers of their relationships and a man rely on some dark manipulative psychology to enforce his will in that relationship. That’s not what I’m suggesting for the simple reason that it’s too effort consuming, and genuine desire is unsustainable within that constant effort. Maintaining Frame demands a voluntary, uncoerced, desired compliance.

What I’m suggesting is that men simply not invest themselves in women whose Alpha interest in them is mitigated by doubt or an obvious SMV imbalance. This is difficult for most men as it conflicts with our want for an idealized romance with a woman – a want for a love that requires a mutual definition with a woman lacking the capacity to realize this with him. And it’s within that idealized desire men lose Frame and excuse the behaviors of Alpha deference.

The Medium IS the Message

As I’ve written in the past, the Medium IS the Message with women. On some level of consciousness men instinctually understand their relative status with a woman based on the behaviors she directs toward him.

Is she affectionate without being prompted or only when circumstance makes your comfort needed for her?

Is Amused Mastery an easy default for you, or does she resist even playful attempts at it?

Does she initiate sex with you, or is your provocation only ever the precursor to sex?

Is sex even a priority for her (with you)?

Does she make efforts to make things special for you (you both) or is your relationship one of her grading your efforts in qualifying for her Alpha approval of you?

What most guys think are ‘mixed messages’ or confusing behavior coming from a woman is simply due to their inability (for whatever reason) to make an accurate interpretation of why she’s behaving in such a manner. Usually this boils down to a guy getting so wrapped up in a girl that he’d rather make concessions for her behavior than see it for what it really is. In other words, it’s far easier to call it ‘mixed messages’ or fall back on the old chestnut of how fickle and random women are, when in fact it’s simply a rationale to keep themselves on the hook, so to speak, because they lack any real, viable, options with other women in their lives. A woman that has a high interest level in a guy has no need (and less motivation) to engage in behaviors that would compromise her status with him. Women of all ILs will shit test, and men will pass or fail accordingly, but a test is more easily recognizable when you consider the context in which they’re delivered.

Are you making psychological concessions with a woman who’s never displayed an Alpha deference to you?

189 Comments | tags: Alpha and Beta, Alpha Fucks, Alpha Male, alpha state, Alpha Widows, amused mastery, best of rational male, Beta Bucks, blue pill, dread game, evolutionary psychology, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, iron rule, manosphere, masculine and feminine, Napoleon Bonaparte, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Foundations, Game, Idealizations, Love, Sexual Market Value

October 13, 2014

Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany

By Rollo Tomassi

About three weeks ago I was made aware of Jenny Bahn’s article, 30 is the New 50 which I thought was timely as it went beyond the xojane pablum where it first appeared to wider readership being picked up by Time. It was timely (heh) because it was right around the same week I published Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma and, coming from a fairly attractive woman, it highlighted many of the points I’d made in that post.

Commenter myreality asked me:

To what extent, if at all, do you think that validation hunting is part of male preference for large age differences when a man is in his late 30’s and beyond? It is definitely not 0%…

I think this is presuming a truth that isn’t.

The idea that men “seek validation” for their earned status or to ‘right’ past wrongs to their egos while they were working their way to that status is a social convention. The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.

Have a look at my Sexual Market Value Graph. (click to enlarge)

Although I’ve gone into explaining the loose metrics I’ve based this graph on several occasions, I’ve added some arrows here to illustrate a point that often gets missed or simply blown over because the truths it represents aren’t very flattering. Women would rather men not be aware of their own SMV potential prior to women being able to consolidate upon her sexual strategy.

Popular culture never presumes women are ‘validation hunting’ when they’re enjoying their peak SMV potential at 23 and (by order of degree) indulging that opportunity with men while at their peak. Women are acculturated to feel “empowered” by their sexuality, and really, no guy who wants to bang a hot 23 year old woman is ever going to rebuke her for it, much less develop social conventions to limit their odds of doing so.

However, men enjoying peak SMV in their mid to late 30’s are (by default) presumed to be vindicating themselves and validating their “fragile egos” by dating the younger (and in Jenny Bahn’s case an SMV peaked 23 year old no less) women they naturally find more attractive.

If there is any ‘validation’ for SMV peaked men it’s less about the sense of deserving a hot piece of ass or vindication for the women of his peer age who found him sexually invisible until he hit his peak, and more about validation in a new self-awareness that he finally is in a position of choosing and qualifying women for his intimacy rather than being filtered for his own acceptability for so long.

It’s not about turnabout or fair play now that the sexual selection shoe is on the other foot, but simple deductive pragmatism for a man who is aware of his own SMV and, assuming he’s hasn’t hamstrung his ability to maneuver, wants to exercise that value at (presumedly) the top of his game.

It’s not (usually) that he’s made a conscious effort to make himself an Alpha Agent of Righteous Karma, but that he steps into that role by default when the SMV balance shifts to his favor, and he naturally prefers sexual access to the best physical, and most sexually available woman his newly recognized SMV will afford him. That may not be a 23 year old coed, but it might be with a necessitous 29 year old looking for a solution to her long term investment.

About Those Arrows

One very common (or deliberate) misunderstanding about this chart is the presumption that like should necessarily attract like. A lot of critics claim indignation over the idea that I was suggesting a 23 year old woman should be attracted to a 36-38 year old SMV peaked man. I’ve never proposed this scenario in any post I’ve ever written about SMV, but it’s important to understand the prioritizations of attraction women make during the later phases of their maturation.

Critics who like to presume that this attraction is only based on looks, prowess and virility often don’t take this attraction prioritization into account. Obviously a more youthful man is in better physical shape when he’s younger, and if all we were considering was short term mating prospects and the Alpha Fuck side of feminine hypergamy this graph would look much different. However, once a woman has reached 30 (thank you Ms. Bahn) those attraction (not arousal) priorities look much different.

The primary reason I placed men’s peak SMV in his mid to late thirties is because, if he’s made the most of his potential, this is when he is most likely to have established himself in his status, affluence and achievements while (if he’s maintained himself) still retaining the looks of a more mature man.

It’s exactly women’s sexual prioritization at their most necessitous which puts men at the top of their SMV game. As I’ve detailed in many prior posts, hypergamy wants optimization (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). Women’s pluralistic sexual strategy is optimized when a woman can consolidate a monogamous commitment from a man who can deliver a better genetic benefit and a better personal (providership) investment than her own SMV should realistically be able to warrant her.

In general, at no other point in a man’s life does he possess the a better potential to optimize women’s innate hypergamy.

If you follow the pink arrow, from about women’s 30th year that established SMV peaked man has the best potential to satisfy both aspects of the dualistic nature of hypergamy. It’s important to consider that when a woman reaches her 30s her sexual prioritization is affected by her own capacity to attract and hold male attention. What happens is a sort of subconscious establishing operation – as her capacity to attract becomes diminished, and as the next generation of SMV peaked women comes into their own, the urgency to cash out of the sexual market place increases.

So it’s not that the expectation should be one of 23 year old women wanting to get after it with 38 year old men (though this is exactly the scenario in Jenny Bahn’s story), but rather that 38 year old men increase exponentially in value to 30 year old women at a time when what he possess is what she needs the most.

Back in May a data set was released on Twitter from OKCupid founder Christian Rudder is his book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). It’s a fascinating read actually and reinforces much of what I speculate about with regard to my own SMV graph.

It’s important to remember that this data is based primarily on looks, but it illustrates the point of my adding the blue arrow to the graph. Men’s arousal and attraction triggers are virtually static. While men’s attraction value variates for women, it is a locked value for women.

While in her SMV peak – as we can see averaged her to around 22 – women enjoy the benefit of having the most sexual selectivity of their lives. However, the power of this selectivity declines as she ages and is further stressed by sexual competition as she does. And while men compete for sexual access to women, the sexual market value of the woman being competed for is still rooted in her capacity to attract attention and arouse men.

When in her SMV peak years, women’s preferences and sexual strategy supersede those of the men who would compete for her, however as she moves towards maturity, and as men ascend to their own SMV peak, a man’s preferences gradually take precedence over women’s.

Jenny Bahn, a reasonably attractive (former model) woman provides us with an excellent example of this transition.

Alex is 38. I’m 30. Technically, there are no “people our age.” But I’m starting to feel that a 30-year-old woman might as well be a 40-year-old man, though infinitely less desirable, culturally speaking.

At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.

[…]A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.

As I mentioned in The Threat:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

Jenny, like most women in their Epiphany Phase, is now coming to terms with the transition of sexual selection power from what she once no doubt enjoyed to a man who’s made the most of his maturity and potential she wants to consolidate on in long term monogamy.

Jenny has a rare honesty and insight to recognize this, but naturally the ‘validation’ social convention is there to assuage her predicament. Even in her self-acceptance of her situation Alex is colored with an uncooperative attitude. His perspective is ‘incorrect’ in a fem-centric social order. If he were really ‘mature’ he would be dating and marrying Jenny (a victim of her own past decisions) instead of seeking ‘validation’ with a 23 year old hottie.

The presumption of Alex validating himself with a hot 23 year old makes men his age, in general, more shallow or manipulative, or uncooperative with the mandates of a feminine-primary social order. A mature, established man shouldn’t want to date women in their 20s, he should cooperate with the Feminine Imperative and validate Jenny’s sexual strategy by becoming monogamous with her.

What Alex is doing isn’t seeking validation, it’s simple SMP pragmatism – the power of sexual selectivity (though by no means unilateral) has switched in degree to his favor. Alex is enjoying his peak SMV and a large portion of that value comes from his desirability from women like Jenny; women who delayed capitalizing on their SMV peak and now, at 30, find themselves on the necessitous side of that sexual selectivity.

311 Comments | tags: dread game, feminine imperative, hypergamy, Jenny Bahn, rational male, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Case Studies, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

September 23, 2014

The Burden of Performance

By Rollo Tomassi

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

One of the most fundamental misconceptions plugged-in men have with regard to their intersexual relations with women is the issue of performance. Back in late March of this year I read an interesting article from Roosh, Men are nothing more than clowns to the modern woman and it struck me that although I certainly agreed with him in the context he presented it, there was more to the ‘entertainment’ factor than simple amusement on the part of women.

Women don’t seek out comfort or stability in men anymore—they seek entertainment. They seek distraction. They seek hedonistic pleasure. This is why provider men (beta males) are so hopelessly failing today to secure the commitment of beautiful women in their prime, and this is why even lesser alpha males fail to enter relationships with women beyond a few bangs. Once the entertainment or novelty you provide her declines—and it inevitably will—she moves on to something or someone else. In essence, the only way you can keep a girl is if you adopt the mentality of a soap opera writer, adding a cliffhanger to the end of each episode that keeps a woman interested when being a good man no longer does.

After reading this I tried to imagine myself being a recently unplugged man or a guy just coming to terms with the uncomfortable truths of the red pill and learning that all of the comforting “just be yourself and the right girl will come along” rhetoric everyone convinced me of had been replaced by a disingenuous need to transform oneself into a cartoon character in order to hold the attentions of an average girl.

That’s kind of depressing, especially when you consider the overwhelming effort and personal insight necessary in realizing red pill awareness. Roosh later tempered this with How to be a good clown and Clown Game vs. Good Man Game, and although he clarifies things well in Game terms, the root of the frustration most guys will have with the ‘clown factor’ is that, in these terms and in this context, their performance isn’t who they are.

In this environment it’s easy to see why the MGTOW option seems like an understandable recourse for red pill men. It’s a very seductive temptation to think that a man can simply remove himself from the performance equation with regards to women. I’ll touch on this later, but what’s important here is understanding the performance game men are necessarily born into. Like it or not, play it or not, as a man you will always be evaluated on your performance (or the perception of it).

I think what trips a lot of men up early in their red pill transformation is sort of a sense of indignation towards women that they should have to “be someone they’re not” and play a character role that simply isn’t who they are in order to hold a woman’s interest. I covered this idea in Have A Look and developed how women are like casting agents when it comes to the men they hope will entertain them.

This was really about a sexual context when I went into it, but as I read Roosh’s original article I began to consider that women’s “character” role they expect men to perform changes as their own phases of maturity dictates and their SMV can realistically demand for that phase. In other words the “characters” they want performed in their Party Years will be different than the ones they want after their Epiphany Phase, which may be different than the character they want for their mid-life years.

How realistic it is for men to be that character becomes less and less relevant as women are socialized to expect disappointment from men actually living up to the characters they’re conditioned to believe they should realistically be entitled to at various stages of their maturity.

Living Up

Right about now I’m sure various male readers are thinking, “fuck this, I’m gonna be who I am and any girl who can’t appreciate me for me is low quality anyway.” This will probably piss you off, but this is exactly the blue pill mentality most ‘just be yourself‘ Betas adopt for themselves.

It’s actually a law of power to despise what you can’t have, and deductively it makes sense, but the fact still remains, as a man you will always be evaluated by your performance. So even with a ‘fuck it, I’ll just be me’ mindset you’re still being evaluated on how well ‘you are just you’.

The simple fact is that you must actually be your performance – it must be internalized. In truth, you already are that performance whether you dictate and direct that, or you think you can forget it and hope your natural, undirected performance will be appreciated by women (and others), but regardless, women will filter for hypergamous optimization based on how well you align with what they believe they are entitled to in a man in the context of their own perception of their SMV.

Looks, talent, tangible benefits and other core prerequisites may change depending on the individual woman, but to be a man is to perform. Even if you’re a self-defined man going his own way who enjoys escorts to fulfill his needs, you still need to perform in order to earn the money to enjoy them.

It Doesn’t Get Easier, You Get Better

For Men, there is no true rest from performance. To believe so is to believe in women’s mythical capacity for a higher form of empathy which would perdispose them to overriding their innate hypergamous filtering based on performance.

Women will never have the same requisites of performance for themselves for which they expect men to maintain of themselves. Hypergamy demands a constant, subliminal reconfirmation of a man’s worthiness of her commitment to him, so there is never a parallel of experience.

Women will claim men “require” they meet some physical standard (i.e. performance) and while generally true, this is still a performance standard men have of women, not one they hold for themselves. There simply is no reciprocal dynamic or prequalification of performance for women, and in fact for a man to even voice the idea that he might qualify a woman for his intimacy he’s characterized as judgmental and misogynistic.

Social conventions like this are established to ensure women’s hypergamous sexual strategy is the socially dominant one. Expecting a woman to perform for a man is an insult to her ‘prize status’ as an individual.

From a humanistic perspective there’s a want for a rational solution to this performance requirement, but as I’ve outlined in prior posts, appeals to women’s reason are no insulation against the subliminal influences of hypergamy.

I read many a ‘dating coach’ who’s approach is complete honesty and full disclosure in the hopes that a like-minded, rational woman will naturally appreciate a man’s forthrightness, but this presupposes a preexisting equal playing field where subliminal influences are overridden by mutual rationalism.

The real hope is that women will drop their innate hypergamous performance requisites in appreciation of this vulnerable, inadequate honesty.

What they sweep under the rug is that you cannot appeal to a woman’s reason or sentiment to genuinely forgive a deficit in a man’s performance. Love, reason, both demand a preexisting mutual appreciation in a common context, but neither love nor reason alleviate the necessity of performance for a man.

Women simply are not motivated to compromise hypergamy on their own accord. They will not be reasoned into accommodating a situation of mutual needs by overt means.

It is a Man’s capacity to perform and demonstrate (never explicate) higher value that motivates women to accommodate mutual needs in a relationship – whether that’s a same night lay or a 50 year marriage.

Demonstrating Higher Value

I get the impression that DHV tends to get a bad rap both from blue pill critics as well as red pill aware men. A lot of that gets wrapped up in technique and practice. It’s easy to dismiss this concept as posturing or bluster, but DHV, as a principle isn’t defined by egotistical measures or how well a guy can ‘showboat’ himself around women.

A lot of DHV is unintentional. In fact the best most genuine forms of DHV are exhibited when a Man doesn’t realize he’s actually performing in a way that demonstrate his higher value. This can be as simple as walking int a room in the right context or environment. Even humility can be DHV in the proper context.

What I’m driving at here is that after reading all of this you might think I’m saying you need to be superhuman to qualify for women’s performance standards, and again that’s kind of depressing – that’s not what I’m getting at. A woman’s performance standards are dependent on many varied contexts and according to the priorities she places on the type of character she finds both arousing and attractive and according to what her conditions dictate for her.

It’s not how you perform so much as that you perform. Ambition and personal drive to perform and be the best and most successful you you can be may have absolutely nothing to do with your intention of attracting a woman, but you are still performing and you will be evaluated on that performance.

DHV or DLV is performance whether intentional or not. You cannot remove yourself from this performance equation. You can cease to direct your part in this performance, but until you die you cannot exit the game.

189 Comments | tags: alpha widow, beautiful women, dread game, gender relations, hypergamy, manosphere, performance, personal interpretations, rational male, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, women | posted in Foundations, Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Unplugging

September 15, 2014

Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma

By Rollo Tomassi

Reader Keyser Soze had an interesting comment last week that I thought would be a good jump off point for today’s topic:

@Siirtyrion: You said, “Many scientists still go by this notion because it explains the frequent tradeoffs in mating and gives us a more complete picture for sexual selection as a whole. I understand that I uphold physicality as king, but understand that hypergamy isn’t completely about a short-term mating strategy, regardless of what some people may think. Women may be able to fund their our lives currently but rest assure, they still seek out Beta Bucks in other forms aside from monetary or material gain (i.e they still seek out physiological and emotional comfort from less than ideal males).”

Question for all:

Reading this, I had a thought. We often talk about women hitting the wall at 35ish and their sudden willingness to be me more reasonable with their expectations in a mate as they realize their SMV has decreased. I wonder if the above quote also plays into this. By the time women hit 35ish, historically (without modern methods of assisted conception) they are past their childbearing years. I wonder if their mating strategy changes at this age not only because of diminished SMV, but also because they are no longer looking for prime genetic material for reproduction as much as they are looking for “physiological and emotional comfort”. Perhaps this was implied all along, but I never thought about it this way before.

I hate to think this is going to come off as sympathy for the aging spinsters who had their cake in their youth and now, late in life, are looking to make honest amends for their past decisions, but it probably will.

A few months ago I broke-down Robin Korth’s aging sexual denial and in response we got a glimpse into the rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) at work in feminine solipsism:

My life is the result of what I think of myself. #robinism

— Robin Korth (@RobinKorth) July 8, 2014

My intent here isn’t to pick on Korth personally or really any woman in the post-Wall demographic in particular, but this self-insight is an excellent illustration of the feminine solipsism I often refer to on this blog. Furthermore, this sense of ego-blamelessness is then combined with the easy rationales and social conventions ready-made by the Feminine Imperative to affirm her self-importance.

Deti comments:

Robin Korth should be reposing in the love of her husband of the past 35 years, give or take. She should be doting on children and grandchildren as the esteemed matriarch of her family.

Instead, Ms. Korth is still out there acting as if she’s 25 years old. She’s still trying to navigate the sexual and dating minefields. In the end she’s trying to show everyone (but really herself) that she’s still “got it”; that she can still arouse a man sexually. It is all really about self aggrandizement. It is all about self- validation and affirmation. In the end, it’s all about Robin Korth. It’s pathetic and sad, really.

And no, Ms. Korth, your life is not the result of what you think about yourself. You are what you do. You are NOT what you think, read, or write. You are not what you were or what you’d like to be.

You are what you do. Period. Full stop.

And from The Difficulty of Gaming Women by Age Brackets by (the old) Roissy:

36 to 38 year olds

She is at peace with her spinsterhood and her failure in the dating market. She will acquiesce easily and gratefully to sex with very little game, as long as you don’t look like a grandpa. Her expectations are so low, it will be a challenge to disappoint her.

If you are prone to guilt, you might feel it when you inevitably dump a woman in this age range. Don’t. Remind yourself that her past is littered with her insouciant dumping of many beta men before you. You are merely an alpha agent of righteous karma.

Granted, Robin is well past the 38 year old mark by over 20 years, however even at 59 the description is still remarkably apt in light of Deti’s overview, however, the real lesson here is for men.

There comes (or should come) a certain empowerment for men after a point of maturation in life where he grows into an understanding of how the Game is played by women. As I’ve noted in the past month, this game, the former secret of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, is becoming more and more of an open secret amongst a feminine-primary culture becoming increasingly more assured of its primacy. If anything this plan for women’s optimizing hypergamy is just this side of proudly flaunting it to men.

As I pick my way through exactly this ‘plan’ in writing the next book, I’ve actually become less surprised by so many examples I find of this willingness with which women will overtly share their strategy for assuring short-term Alpha sexual desires during their SMV peak, and then consolidation on the security a Beta provider represents as their SMV decays beginning at around 30 years of age.

My purpose in writing this next volume of The Rational Male is to make men aware of just this life-schedule and sexual strategy, but even with my own efforts and the glaring willingness with which women will now confirm it, a larger whole of men simply don’t mature into this overall understanding.

For all the education the Red Pill represents for men, the larger blue pill whole simply don’t want to accept the ugly reality of women’s sexual strategy even when women openly confirm this for them – or when they do it’s too late for anything but pensive self-reproach and then signing the alimony/child support check anyway.

As this understanding becomes more widespread some social change will have to follow. Men will either become so pathetic as to ‘normalize’ it for themselves, and personally identify with what amounts to their open (proactive or reactive) cuckolding under women’s grossly overt championing of their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy – or Men will come to the realization (hopefully sooner than later) that the fantasy of monogamous bliss based on a notion of intergender compromise and the ‘give & take’ (but mostly give) they were sold on was never in the best interests of feminine-primacy.

The Feminine Imperative was (and is) only ever concerned with men’s imperatives or male-specific priorities insofar as they align with the superseding, primary imperatives of women. Thus, as open hypergamy becomes more common and the truth of this duplicity and imbalance (really disinterest) of mutual sexual imperatives becomes more evident, men will again (as with Game) evolve methods and mentalities to consolidate on their own imperatives or simply live in denial of it all.

The Long Game

For almost 6 months I’ve had this post from Cail Corishev bookmarked. It’s an excellent driver for exactly this point: prior to the digital age men tended not to play a long game when it came to socio-sexual strategies. The short game is all that matters in the moment, and all that stimulates, but until the advent of digital forums where men could figuratively compare notes, most men were simply unable, and perhaps too distracted to ask the obvious questions about women’s hypergamy and how it plays out over the course of 10-30 years and the roles women expect men to play during those stages of their lives in order to accommodate their strategy.

In Cail’s piece he describes a woman he knew at age 30 and how attractive she was, and his consideration of starting a relationship with her. After a failing interest and 10 years of no contact, she reinitiated with Cail:

But while we were chatting, I saw some of her recent pictures, and whoa! She’s gone from a 7-8 to maybe a 5, and that would be adjusted for age. She hasn’t gotten fat, but that’s about the only positive note. She looks so rough that I found myself wondering what I was thinking ten years ago, but I looked back at some old pictures, and she really was pretty at 30 — not a model or anything, but enough to turn heads. Now she looks like she’s lived 20 hard years in 10. She works nights at a pretty demanding job and has had some serious health problems, so I guess it’s no surprise, but it was really striking: ten years ago I ached for this girl, and now I wouldn’t look twice at her if I passed her in the grocery store.

That got me thinking about Rollo’s chart. My own SMV, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much from mid-30s to mid-40s, just as his chart would predict. I’m about the same weight, same build, maybe a little less hair, but I’d lost quite a bit of it already back then. I’m not much better-off financially, but at least not worse, and I have more of a sense of direction in my life. I’m certainly more confident, especially with women, and more established in my communities. So some pluses and some minuses, holding steady at about the same level. The amount of interest I get from women seems to support that.

She, on the other hand, going from 30 to 40, has gone from fertile to not likely. She’s also a grandmother now, so instead of looking to start a new family, she’s focused (and rightly so) on helping her kids with theirs. (If single moms don’t have much spare attention to give a husband, imagine the single mom of a single mom.) An additional ten years of dating and relationships under her belt certainly doesn’t add to her appeal. On top of those reasons, add the drastic decline in her looks, and now I not only don’t want to marry her, but as we chat I’m mostly thinking, “How soon can I politely say goodnight so I can get to sleep already?” Harsh, but true. Just as Rollo’s chart predicts, her SMV has been on a steady decline since we met — maybe more of a free-fall in her case — and now mine is well above hers.

I had a similar post to this I published back in December of 2011 – Protracted SMV:

It’s a simple matter to tell a guy he’s dodged a bullet in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s altogether different to provably show him how he’s dodging it. For all the evils of facebook at least it gives him [men] an ability to see the forest for the trees, but the feminine can’t even afford him that. You must stay dumb, you must stay plugged-in for the feminine to maintain primacy. For all the benefits of a globally connected world, the feminine imperative expects you to accept a feminine-centric normalization of it.

What the Feminine Imperative fears is men becoming what Roissy terms Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma. Due to a lifetime of feminine conditioning, men tend to underestimate the leverage their SMV has in the context of women’s biological imperatives.

Pity for Reneé

I have a similar story to Cail’s. When I was a senior in high school I had a ‘friend‘ named Reneé, she was a gorgeous auburn-red head with a fantastic 17-18 year old body. We were good ‘friends‘ in the sense that it was clear I wasn’t ever going to see her naked and she had all of the personality trappings of a girl who knew she was attractive (she did modeling after high school), but also had the beginnings of a very self-important ego-invested feminist mind set.

I never really stayed in touch with her after graduation since by then I had moved on to women who enthusiastically reciprocated my interests and I moved along in life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got on FaceBook and began having old friends look me up – Reneé was among the first. Very similar to the woman in Cail’s story we started to catch up with what the other had been doing through their 20s, 30s and now 40s.

As it turned out she was still fairly attractive for having had one daughter and never marrying the father, or any other guy for that matter. Most of the predictable single mommy issues and false-empowerment memes were bandied about by her, but the short version is here she was at 41 and her daughter was a year away from leaving for college. She was between jobs, but the one she had and the one she hoped to get were mediocre low to mid-management type, subsistence level employment.

She was and still is single 5 years later. The predictable questions about what my wife was like and how long we’ve been married came up, how we met, and where I’ve travelled in my work, etc. and I can honestly say I felt bad for her just recalling all of the life I’ve lived in the interim and basically forgot about her since high school.

She’s 46 now, and loves FaceBook as much as any aging spinster, but I really don’t want to call her that. In between the many pictures of her 4 cats (no lie) she occasionally posts some lament about how lonely she is now that her daughter has gone away to school and she comes home to an empty apartment these days. She makes not-so-subtle pleas to her FB community friends to set her up with ‘a great guy’ and all the dutiful Betas come out of the woodwork to tell her how pretty she (still) is and to keep her chin up and the right guy will “come along” – not so unlike the advice she gave me and at least half a dozen other guys I knew back in the day.

Reneé still clings to all of the feminist memes and mantras (reposts all the most popular), and complains of not being able to find a “great guy” anymore. This is of course infantile men’s faults for not manning up to her fem-correct standards, or else it’s a complaint about the ‘creepy’ men who really just want to bang her when she out with friends.

Unhappy Feminists

I hadn’t really ever considered using Reneé as a blog post subject until I read this article in Psychology Today:

According to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning the cash would increase if you skipped any 40-something, single female professionals and focused on the middle-aged male managers with one child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered “profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers.” And here it is:

Male

39 years old

Married

Household income between $150,000 and $200,000

In a senior management position

1 young child at home

A wife who works part-time

And the unhappiest profile?:

Female

42 years old

Unmarried (and no children)

Household income under $100,000

In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)

Minus the professional status, essentially Reneé fits the profile for the most unhappy person in the western world today. Now, return back to Robin Korth’s comment, her life is the result of what she thinks of herself. What does this say about the decision making both she and Reneé have made in their lives?

I can’t say I have any sympathy for the likes of Korth, but for Reneé I do feel a pang of pity (in spite of Roissy’s advice for women of this age). For all of the accusations of red pill “misogyny” I genuinely do like women, and I’m not rooting for them to smash into the Wall. However I can see why my observations make this seem so – hard truths are often warnings that we don’t like to heed.

I often wonder if women of this profile aren’t as much victims of an ideological conditioning as Betatized men are over the course of their lives. Much of what’s resulted in Reneé’s life are the consequences of having (and still subscribing to) a mindset that’s based on equalist individualism, and she’s now beginning to reap what she’s sown – knowingly or not.

I don’t know the father of her daughter, but my red pill instincts (and knowing how hot she used to be) tell me the guy was likely a pump and dump Alpha bad boy. Reneé never struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never consider a Beta for a relationship.

Observations

So my observation is this; while granting that women’s decisions are their own, and they should in all ways be accountable for the consequences that follow from them, how much of those decisions are based on a conditioning that promotes an idealized ideology of feminine, equalist independence?

For the same reason I can’t entirely fault a man with an internalized blue pill mindset over his conditioning, shouldn’t we also consider that women are likewise mislead by a similar influence? Are we (again) giving women too much credit for being rational independent agents under different circumstance?

For men’s part, it’s hardly avoidable that we become Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma by default for women in this cohort. Perhaps not as Alpha as we’re perceived, but as our SMV ascends in our 30s and (sometimes) through our 40s, it’s almost unavoidable that, even with a baseline of ambition, we’re seen as more desirable long term prospects.

In all honesty, were I to find myself single tomorrow, Reneé or women like her would never make my ‘to date’ list. Women love to complain that mature men really aren’t, and all they want is a young girl to fuck and coo for them. I would argue that men in my demo (at least should) have the depth of experience to know what the Feminine Imperative (and its social arm feminism) has bred and conditioned into women, and we honestly don’t want the hassle of dealing with it.

There is precious little reward for a man, and no appreciation, for having a big enough heart to save a woman from the consequences of her past decisions. That’s not meant as a callous punishment, just simple pragmatism.

As I stated in The Threat,

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When you’ve spent your whole life attempting to ‘have it all’ on your own, perhaps men can’t help but be an agent of Karma when that ‘all’ includes a man’s participation.

279 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, dread game, feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, hypergamy doesn't care, rational male, rational male year 3, rational man, rationale male, rationalmale, rollo blog, rollo tomasi, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tommasi the nine iron rules, rollo tommasi year one, sexual market value, SMV, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Case Studies, Foundations, Idealizations, Operative Social Conventions, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

August 14, 2014

20 Questions

By Rollo Tomassi

Back in May of this year I was asked to do a second installment of the red pill Reddit forum’s AMA (“ask me anything”) and I’m not really sure too many of my core readers were aware of it. Unless you follow me on Twitter you probably didn’t know I’ve done two now.

After I’d closed out that discussion thread it reminded me of another ‘interview’ I was asked to participate in at my home forum of SoSuave back in December of last year. I hate to say, but I never really got around to posting my replies back to the original thread, however I did save the questions as a post draft so I could do the interview some justice later.

Well here we are. Next week will mark the three year anniversary of my launching Rational Male, and as always I’ll be doing another year’s retrospective post as well as another Best of Rational Male – Year Three links post.

I make it a policy not to go into too much personal detail on Rational Male unless the topic is something I can illustrate better with a personal story. I’ve never wanted the Rational Male to about me, but rather the experiences and input of my readers. However, after almost three years and one book later, I figure I’ll open up once and publish these question I was asked back in December with the hope that maybe something I answer will give someone some new insight themselves.

1) What brought you to SoSuave and how did you find the site?

Unlike a lot of SoSuave guys I actually found the forum because someone suggested to me that I might be able to reach more guys who needed help there.

Most guys go searching for answers about how they can get back with an ex, or why their last LTR imploded on them because they went too Beta or didn’t understand the basics of red pill awareness. I found SoSuave through the old Ladder Theory site as I was toying with the idea of psychology as a second major when I was at university. A lot of people don’t know the SoSuave of today is actually the second version of the forum. My understanding is that Alan, the forum admin and owner, had to expand to a larger server and forum architecture due to the site being so overwhelmingly popular.

There really wasn’t a manosphere or what we term Red Pill back then, just Mystery Method, PUArtistry, FastSeduction, RSD and the collected experiences of guys just posting their Field Reports and hitting upon commonalities of those experiences.

Mystery had made some conjectures with regards to the psychology involved in pickup and I just happened to come across it while I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies. I also found that making the connection between the two, at least publicly amongst teachers and classmates, was a very contentious prospect. I got called a misogynist a lot back then just for proposing the germs of the ideas that have built the foundation of what the Rational Male and the red pill have become now.

2) Any special reason for your SoSuave username, why you chose it?

It was actually a hold-over from my old online persona from some other forums and it stuck. If you watch the movie L.A. Confidential you’ll get the meaning of it. It actually seems more fitting now with the book’s release. Rollo Tomassi was the generic name given to a nameless criminal who got away with his crime.

I also understand that Rollo was the name of an infamous viking. I found this interesting since we both descend from Danish heritage.

3) What’s the best and or worst advice you’ve ever received in regards to chicks?

JBY, Just Be Yourself is definitely the worst advice because it’s so endemic of people who are ignorant of Game. It’s such a passive, easy dismissal of a guy wanting to know why what he’s been doing isn’t getting him the results he wants, but at the same time it illustrates the belief and trust of the person saying ‘just be yourself’ in the conditioning that brought them to it.

It’s a very uncomfortable revelation for anyone to embrace in thinking they should need to change and/or improve themselves in order to get the results that they want. The foundational mistruth of blue pill conditioning is that a nebulous ‘being of oneself’ should be enough for anyone (or ‘the right ONE‘) to be attracted to, and discourages any real self-analysis or improvement. ONEitis and Just Be Yourself tend to be codependents and, in tandem, really fuck up a lot of guys lives.

Best advice is more difficult, but for me personally it was “believe what a woman does, not what she says.” For most red pill guys this seems kind of remedial now because it’s a foundation for really unplugging I covered almost 11 years ago, but it can’t be stressed enough.

This basic truth is what inspired The Medium IS the Message and as stupid-simple a truism as it is, it’s often the most difficult part of Game-awareness that blue pill guys first struggle with. They struggle because their earliest feminized conditioning has always taught them that women are fundamentally the equal, rational agents that men are and they will relate to boys / men in full confidence and reason (just as they would expect from men) if they themselves don’t play games with them and communicate in full confidence and full disclosure.

It’s believe what she says and ignore, forgive or get over your judgementalism for what she does because she’s (supposed to be) being equitably honest, forthright, and knows exactly why she does what she does in spite of herself.

I don’t believe men and women are equals of each other in an egalitarian sense – there are simply too many empirically provable differences in both sex’s psychology and biology to draw any other conclusion; and as such each sex has it’s own imperatives and strategies for achieving them.

I do however believe that the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, one sex’s strengths compensating for the other’s weaknesses. It’s this overreaching social impetus (idealistic humanism and feminine social primacy) that encourages us to believe we are independent, autonomous and self-sufficient entities (founded in feminine solipsism), equal in biology and psychological potential that imbalances that mutually beneficial complementariness.

4) Have you ever posted in or lurked in other seduction forums/blogs etc?

I occasionally post on Dalrock’s, Just 4 Guys, Chateau Heartiste, Roosh’s forum, The Red Pill reddit, Return of Kings and a few others. I sometimes track back to forums my articles get linked to, but I honestly don’t have time to respond to everything I read.

5) How many chicks have you slept with?

My N count is public record; more than 40, less than 50. I’m not trying to be ambiguous, it’s just that when I try to make an accurate count I just don’t remember some names – mostly just places partners and experiences.

Just for some red pill perspective, most of that experience was between the ages of 17 and 28 in the late late 80’s to mid 90’s when there was no formal Game, manosphere, internet, cell phones, Tinder, etc. – getting laid was all analog and mostly instinctual.

It’s kind of funny to think that my N count is well above average, but I expect in comparison to many of the single, active, members of the manosphere / PUA community, 40 individual sex partners might be so low as to disqualify me from being taken seriously with regards to Game.

By the time I was 21-22 I’d figured out how to get laid with some relative predictability. Mostly because I was a fairly good looking, semi-professional musician playing in Hollywood with a bit of social proof and a practiced ability to pick out women who’d be into me.

I should also mention that of those 40+, four were long term relationships, including my wife.

This’ll sound facetious, but I’ve never thought of sex as being “validating” or ego-affirming. I honestly think a lot of that expectation comes from a feminized conditioning about “how sex should be” for men. I was, and still kind of am, more into sex as experience. It’s always been something fun to enjoy with a woman for me, not some meaningful act of cosmic significance. I’ve had sex with women I loved and women I didn’t, some were memorable, some were…meh. Even in my bluest of blue pill days my ‘validation’ came from other sources, not sex.

6) What was your worst and best experience with a chick? (wife, girlfriend or not)

The worst was the 4 years I spent with a BPD girlfriend. I did a post on it. I was in the pit of blue pill hell and pushed to the brink. I didn’t know what borderline personality disorder was back then, in fact I don’t think the DSM even recognized the complex as a psychological disorder in the early 90s.

My best experience is hard to put a finger on. It’s interesting to think about definitively bad experiences, but hard to put a “best” title on a good one. All of my best experiences would have to be with Mrs. Tomassi, our wedding, our daughter’s birth, the fact that even in her late 40s she’s still in fitness caliber shape and we genuinely enjoy each other.

Pre-marriage, I had my share of rock-club women, and when it was on, it was really ‘on’. I can think of at least 4 very memorable women, one was a fuck-buddy who was easily the most sexually hungry (and not just with me I came to find out).

I know the trope is that older women are supposed to be better in the sack than younger women – this was never my experience at all. In fact the younger the girl, the easier time I had bedding her, and the more adventurous a lover she usually was. I think even marginal social proof has a greater impression on younger women and they’re more eager. The older women I’ve been with have always been much more self-conscious.

7) Have you ever gotten friendzoned by a chick and if so were you able to get out of it?

Of course, particularly in my teenage years. In my early 20s I had enough female interest that I’d simply blow off the women I learned weren’t worth the investment. There was one exception though; a girl I knew from a community college who “didn’t date rocker guys or guys in bands.”

In hindsight I know she was leaning into her Epiphany Phase (maybe a bit early) and was trying to do things “the right way” after getting after it with various guys in her early 20s.

I was kind of surprised at getting a LJBF since it hadn’t happened to me for years by then, but all it took was right place, right time, a little social proof and the competition anxiety of other interested women, and I got the lay – which, by comparison at the time was kind of underwhelming. Still, I went back to pursuing her afterwards, got re-LJBF’d and I moved on to other plates.

8) Have you ever had a chick or chicks offering their pussy to you on a platter and you blew them off for whatever reason? And why? (i.e. they offered the pussy on a platter to you at a bar in conversation or even at your or their place and you blew them off.)

Yes, but mostly due to logistics rather than from spite or wanting to up the urgency with a girl as most guys think denying women sex will do. Most often it was because I had a better offer somewhere else or I was just plain tired. When it’s happened to me in the past the girl was a) on the cusp of my maximum weight limit, or b) there was something a bit off about her personally – as in she didn’t seem right mentally.

I once left a DTF girl in a hot tub because I just couldn’t bring myself to hitting that big of a girl (but, in her defense, I have what I think are exceptionally high physical standards for women)

9) How did you handle chicks who’ve flaked?

It depends on what time of life we’re talking about. In my younger, hungrier days, I tolerated flaking because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the medium was the message, and I thought it was caused by something I fucked up, which I guess it was. Later I simply didn’t care because I had other plates going at the time, but I found that the more options I had going (or had the potential to get going) the less women were likely to flake.

I go into it in Plate Theory, but there are a lot of subliminal behavioral cues a guy gives off (mostly unknowingly) when he’s seeing another (or more) woman that other women pick up on.

Mannerisms, attitude, vernacular, a guy with options just acts different than a guy with none. It’s like women pick up on the subcommunication of a guy who’s less invested in them and associate it with their sexual competition of women who might be interested in him.

10) Most plates you’ve spun at one time?

Actively (meaning I double shifted at the time) 4. Inactively 7 when I was about 23.

11) How did you handle a time of having no plates?

Again, that’s really a question of which time.

Between the ages of 17 and 21, I wouldn’t even consider seeing more than whatever girlfriend I had ONEitis for at the time. However, even before I met my wife, I had some irons in the fire, but when I didn’t I don’t think I worried too much about it since I knew I was probably just one party or gig or business event away from meeting some new talent.

I know a lot of guys get weird or depressed about a dry spell, but I was always kind of optimistic about having no plates because I enjoyed having the freedom to get with whomever, and I looked forward to meeting new women.

12) Dress style you use for going out on the town/ social functions?

I work in the liquor and casino industry so it depends on the event and what time of year it is. Nowadays if I’m out it’s usually because I’m at a promo, a new brand launch or some casino special event I’m involved with.

Lets just say that ‘business casual’ is neither. I either go loose or I go tight, but it really depends on the venue. Loose is jeans, some nice slip-ons, a stylish tailored button down, maybe a casual sport coat. If I’m tight it means I’m somewhere upscale or I’m with the people I work with, so I fall back on well tailored suits.

When you get older, style is much different than when you’re younger. What you wear at 22 is not what you wear at 42; there’s ways for men to capitalize on a maturity in style that women expect from men with the refinement that comes from maturity.

I’m probably not the best guy to hit up about style though – I think I spend way too much on what I could probably get cheaper. Christian McQueen is a better guy to ask about style.

13) Are you currently working out/exercising?

Always. I’m at the gym at 5-5:30am five days of the week, and I haven’t gone more than taking one week off from that schedule for about 15 years now. That may seem like dedication, but it’s really about convenience; early morning is the only time my schedule permits me to work out, and honestly I prefer working out in an empty gym.

For about the last 3 years I’ve been doing kind of a modified Max OT workout. I got into straight Max OT when I lived in Florida after a trainer friend suggested it to me.

I’m not overly huge to begin with, but once I started lifting heavier (and I mean heavy all the time) and my intensity went up, it helped me push past a plateau naturally. I put on a solid 8 lbs. of muscle inside of 4 months. Heh, I had to buy new pants because my thighs got bigger.

It’s probably not for everyone, I just know my body responded well to it. You do have to be careful of injury though, and not just in the lifts. I fucked up my back twice in about 2 years just getting cocky pulling heavier dumbbells off the rack. Just because your focused muscle group can do the lift doesn’t mean your other supporting muscles can. You gotta be careful.

14) For meeting chicks in the past which way was most successful in your point of view and have you tried all venues? Day, Social circle, Online social media/ Online dating, clubs, vacation, through family, work or whatever else.

Again, I’m probably not the best guy to ask about contemporary pickup Game. Back when I was inadvertently spinning plates, my Game at the time consisted of playing in various semi-pro bands and hooking up after a gig. I suppose that would amount to Night or Club Game now, but it was the environment I was in and familiar with. Most of my Game relied on social proof, DHV and looking the part. There was a definite ‘character role’ women liked that I played very well then.

It got to a point where I could get a girl to buy me a drink which I’d nurse for a bit while I talked her up. If I got the right IOIs from her I’d simply say something like “hey, our set’s coming up, watch my drink till I get back will ya?” If she was still there at the bar with my glass after an hour the girl was always DTF.

I should add that, later in life I became very apt at social circle Game, but again, that’s always going to be dependent on social proof, preselection and demonstrating higher value to get a third party endorsement of your SMV.

I know the popular presumption is that if a guy walks into a club/party/social gathering with a ‘hot girl who’s his friend’ it sends some magic preselection vibe to all the other women at the gathering. I’ve never found that to be true. Not that I doubt it happens, but rather if I’m somewhere with a woman (friend) who’s SMV is 1-2 points above the most attractive woman at the event, other women tend to get catty or figure if I can score her why would she bother with me?

There’s a fine line between the benefits of preselection and women simple feeling outclassed by a sexual competitor.

15) Have you ever went full “No Contact”? (Not expecting “results” of getting a chick back but simply cutting all ties.)

Oh yes. I really had no choice but to go no contact with the BPD girl I’d been with in my 20’s, but she’s really the only woman I’ve ever made a conscious effort never to contact again.

For other’s I think no contact really came down to my indifference to the women I really had no more interest in after some event. Though I didn’t do it intentionally, I was spinning plates and had other options to exercise so I’d just become occupied with another woman making no contact just a matter of course.

As I put forth in Plate Theory, non-exclusivity and maintaining your options is your best insurance against ONEitis, which in turn makes for a healthier frame of monogamy for a man later if that’s what you choose to do. No contact is easy when you’re genuinely indifferent to the girl you’re going no contact on.

16) How is married life going for you so far?

18 years on July 20th. I’ve only ever written a couple of direct posts about my marriage, but that’s mostly due to my not wanting men to view it as some model to aspire to. I understand my circumstance aren’t what most guy’s are, personally, family or career-wise, but I don’t for a minute believe I married the elusive unicorn of a woman.

I love Mrs. Tomassi more than anything in this world, we’re a very good match, and red pill awareness has only accented that good match. And for the record, yes, Mrs. Tomassi occasionally reads what I write here and has read my book.

17) Have you read the full DJ Bible? Or some of it/none of it/ participated in it?

The old version yes. The new version not entirely, but I have several of my old essays included in it. I still think it’s a pretty valuable resource for guys new to the red pill.

18) Have you ever met up with or talked to any SoSuave posters offline?

Yes, when I lived in Florida there were about six guys from the forum I used to meet occasionally for sushi or at one of my vodka brands’ promos. Beyond that I do email and (very rarely) phone consults with people who request them depending on my availability and ability to help at any given time.

For the record, I never charge money for a consult.

19) Favorite So Suave posters or posters on your site other blogs etc?

Gawd, I don’t want to play favorites, but in no particular order off the top of my head I think Deti, Dalrock, Novaseeker, Donalgraeme, Good Luck Chuck, Deepdish, Stingray, Morpheus, Han Solo, Obsidian, Mark Minter, Yohami, YaReally, Jeremy, Earl (yes Earl), LiveFree and even the commenters I most emphatically disagree with, all give me something new to think about.

20) How’s feedback coming along for your book, The Rational Male?

Better than I ever imagined. It’s been a success in everything I hoped it would be in the regard that it’s reaching men and helping change their minds and lives. My intent was never to make a load of cash from it, but rather to make it as accessible as possible to have the greatest reach possible and it’s more than done this after only 9 months.

69 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, gender relations, genuine change, hypergamy, manosphere, men in love, rational male, Rational Male Blog, Rational Male Book, rational male year one, rationalmale, rollo, rollo tomasi blog, Rollo Tomassi, Rollo Tomassi Iron Rules, rollo tomassi rational male, sexual market value, SMV, social proof, sosuave, therationalmale, women | posted in Communication

July 15, 2014

Separating Values

By Rollo Tomassi

Every so often I’m in the midst of considering an idea, sometimes even typing away at a draft, when the internet gods hand me the divine gift of an example of exactly the concept I’m attempting to make a bit more concrete. Today was one of those days.

59 year old Robin Korth made an effort in feigned indignation on the Huffington Post last Saturday. I can’t imagine most of my readers haven’t been made aware of it already since this story is making the rounds in the manosphere; Return of Kings and Chateau Heartiste were predictably first to the punch. Please do, at the very least, skim through these posts (they’re not long); they provide many more examples of red pill wisdom than just the points I’ll make today.

These blogs have already done an admirable job in dissecting Ms. Korth’s feminist boilerplate, male-shaming efforts so I don’t really feel the need to toss another log on that fire. Briefly though, Robin was upset that a 55 year old man she met online found her body beyond his threshold of physical arousal – in other words, she didn’t pass the boner test for him.

For all her self-induced self-perceptions of what she believed men should find ~~attractive~~ arousing about her, the man, Dave, was completely honest with her about his evaluation of her sexual market value. But as I’ve stated in prior threads, women say they want honesty, but they never want full disclosure.

Dave went so far as to make a counter offer, by making suggestions she might better present herself in a more sexy context for him to increase her arousal potential:

We talked for some time more, my head reeling at the content of the conversation. He spoke of special stockings and clothing that would “hide” my years. He blithely told me he loved “little black dresses” and strappy shoes. He said my hair was not long and flowing as he preferred, but that was okay because it was “cool looking.” I felt like a Barbie Doll on acid as I listened to this man. He was totally oblivious to the viciousness of his words. He had turned me into an object to be dressed and positioned to provide satisfaction for his ideas of what female sexual perfection should be.

He explained that now that I knew what was required, we could have a great time in the bedroom. I told him no. I would not hide from my own body. I would not wear outfits to make my body more “tolerable.” I would not undress in the dark or shower with the bathroom door closed. I would not diminish myself for him — or for anyone. My body is beautiful and it goes along with my mind and my heart.

I’m just going to take a moment here to point out a few notable observations.

Initially I assumed Dave was attempting to establish Frame, and maybe in a Beta way he was, but in doing so Dave is negotiating desire – his own desire, and this is equally ineffective when men do it from an advantage because eventually a man will realize he’s compromised his genuine passion and the woman will grow resentful.

Also, Dave makes the mistake of appealing to Robin’s reason – an obvious Beta tell. Like a properly conditioned Beta, Dave lays everything on the table in full disclosure. Most feminized men internalize the popular notion that women want to know and discuss the sexual things “they like” in order to pragmatically and rationally fulfill each other’s “needs.”

It’s counterintuitive for men to express what they like sexually, especially when this trope is taught to them as part of their ‘open communication’ (i.e. “the key to a great relationship”®) sensitivity training. What Robin was really upset with was less about his words and more about her hypergamous filters being tricked by a guy who ‘just doesn’t get it’ that a woman has to want to please a man.

Genuine, unnegotiated desire doesn’t work rationally or pragmatically.

If Dave had read The Gift he would know that buying for, or requesting that a woman wear lingerie is a Beta push. A woman buys and wears lingerie to please a Man for whom she has a desire to please – anything else is a form of negotiating desire.

However, Ms. Korth’s example is one of a commonly solipsistic woman who’s default presumption is that pleasing anyone but herself is self-diminishing servitude.

I can’t say as this comes as a shock – most properly conditioned women now feel that just cooking for a man is a form of submitting to, and appreciating him for, his authority (cooking has become the expectation of men to prove their worth in a fem-centric role reversal). Under the doctrine of egalitarian equalism any act of anything less than mutually autonomous independence has the potential to be turned into (the perception of) patriarchal domineering.

Conflating Values

One of the major problems women have, and more than even some red pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.

It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.

What Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.

It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.

From the Timeline of the Professional Woman:

This is the overreach of the feminine imperative – to attempt to thwart men’s biological predispositions by convincing them what they should find attractive and arousing in women. This becomes all the more ironic when you consider that the women the imperative would have men be attracted to are masculinized versions of women.

Feminist ‘equalism’ is always shocked that evolved human biology and its feral predispositions won’t cooperate with it, but such is the frustration with any social order or ideology which fails to account for the realities of human being’s natural states and biological imperatives. There is a conceived, higher-order expectation that, through freewill, conviction or some other learned, reasoned means, people will rise above the influence of their base nature and comply with what they believe will make for an idealized existence.

What egalitarian equalisim, struggles against is basic human instinct, nature and impulse.

Sexual Market Value vs. Personal Value

After two years since publishing it, my SMV chart continues to be a benchmark for manosphere / red pill theory and it’s extended beyond whatever humble hopes I had for it. However, it’s always been very contentious because it places a valuation on men and women according to the dictates of the sexual marketplace:

[…] however for our purposes today it is important to note that these valuations are meant to encompass an overall sexual value based on both long and short term breeding prospects, relational desirability, male provisioning capacity, female fertility, sexual desirability and availability, etc. et. al.. Your milage may vary, but suffice it to say the ten scale is meant to reflect an overall value as individuated for one sex by the other. Outliers will always be an element of any study, but the intent is to represent general averages here.

When you attempt to quantify any aspect of human ‘value’ you can expect to have your interpretations of it to be offensive to various people on the up or down side of that estimate. There is simply no escaping personal bias and the offense that comes from having one’s self-worth attacked, or even confirmed for them.

The first criticism I’ve come to expect is usually some variation about how evaluating a person’s SMV is “dehumanizing”, people are people, and have intrinsic worth beyond just the sexual. To which I’ll emphatically agree, however, this dismissal only conveniently sidesteps the realities of the sexual marketplace.

Again, sexual market value is not personal value. Personal value, your value as a human being however one subjectively defines that, is a definite component to sexual market value, but separating the two requires an often uncomfortable amount of self-analysis. And, as in Ms. Korth’s experience here, this often results in denial of very real circumstances, as well as a necessary, ego-preserving, cognitive dissonance from that reality.

Denial of sexual market valuation is a psychological insurance against women losing their controlling, sexual agency in their hypergamous choices.

You Shouldn’t Know This Stuff!

I recently read a story on the Red Pill Reddit forum about a guy who’s girlfriend discovered my book he’d been reading. She began picking through various sections and, expectedly, got really pissed off at the chapters on SMV (the chart in particular). They both discussed the parts she’d read and she admitted she wanted to read the whole thing, but from what they talked about she confessed that there wasn’t really anything she disagreed with.

Her words were, “You men shouldn’t know this stuff!”

It wasn’t that she was irritated by the sections of the book, but rather the fact that men might become aware of women’s sexual strategies as laid bare by the SMV sections and chart.

In the most visceral, biological sense, the primary value of women to men is sex. Almost a year ago I was involved in a lively blog discussion about how men sexually size up women within the space of a glance. Either a woman has sexual potential or she doesn’t. Women like to complain that this is sexual objectification, but men’s brains are literally wired to do exactly this. When we see an arousing woman it triggers the parts of our brains involved with tool manipulation – that’s a feature, not a bug, of the male sexual response.

That may seem shallow or dehumanizing, but just because sexual valuation is a prime value for women it doesn’t mean it’s their only value – in fact far from it. However, there is a distinction between the two, but there’s is a definite utility to women’s interest in maintaining their hypergamous selectivity when they conflate the two together, or deny / reject the validity of sexual market value altogether.

This is what Ms. Korth, and countless other women who share her mindset, has illustrated here. The reality is that a man, Dave, is separating her sexual market value from her estimation of her personal self-worth (inflated and exaggerated as it may be). Robin mistakenly believes her self-impression should be her sexual market value, but this simply isn’t, and never will be, the case.

245 Comments | tags: Chateau Heartiste, feminine psyche, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, personal interpretations, personal value, physical attractiveness, Robin Korth, sexual impulse, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, women | posted in Biomechanics, Case Studies, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Psychology, Sexual Market Value

June 25, 2014

Balancing Act

By Rollo Tomassi

Donal Graeme had some very relevant ‘musings’ about last week’s post that summed things up and provides me with a great prelude into this week’s post. I hadn’t intended these last couple of posts (and now this one) to become another series (again). I suppose they are now, but I don’t think I’ve quite hit this from all angles just yet. In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that these last three posts were inspired by the first section of the Preventive Medicine book I’m presently working on so it helps organize my thoughts.

From Donal Graeme’s Removing the Mask:

Many, if not most, men would not be content to marry a woman whom they realize is choosing to marry them solely as a meal ticket, and effectively a sperm donor as well. It should surprise no one that men don’t like to be used in that way, and will balk at it if they realize that is what is happening. Hence the importance of hiding what is going on from them.

On the other hand, this repulsion at being used is mitigated/countered by a sense of desperation in many men in the West. Owing to the nature of the SMP, they have limited options when it comes to female companionship. Naturally, this makes them desperate, and they are willing to take on women they wouldn’t otherwise if it gets them at least some measure of opportunity with them.

What seems to be happening is that many women are now certain that male desperation in the future will be greater than any sense of male self-respect, and so they can do whatever they want and not have to hide it. Part of me wonders if women see the ability to be open about their intentions/strategy as a status symbol- a woman who can act that way is a woman of value, and therefore a woman to be envied. The problem with this strategy, though, is that it relies on male desperation not having any limits. I suspect this to be a grave mistake. This is because the average quality of women in the West has been dropping fast, perhaps even faster than male desperation has been rising. If that is the case, we will soon reach a point where most men will simply not accept the (Western) women who are available, no matter how desperate they might have become.

All of this plays into part of this subject- the looming fight between women. Women at the margins of “value” will start to feel the pinch first. The “where have all the good men gone?” articles out there seem to indicate that this has already begun. It will only increase in tempo over time as more and more women drop below the acceptable rate for most men. Combine this with many men being burned or realizing what a danger most Western women are, and you get a huge disparity in outcome between the female “haves” and “have-nots”.

This may seem optimistic coming from me, but I think it will be ‘educated’ men who are the 3rd rail in this equation.

Men at the top end of the SMV curve will always be the commodity over which women will feel entitled to. Feminine hypergamy does not seek its own level, it looks for a better-than-market optimization. Thus the ideal ‘balance’ is one where there is a greater than 1-2 SMV degree difference between that of a man and the women he spins as plates or considers to become intimate with in the long term.

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies
For one sex’s sexual strategy to become realized, the other sex’s strategy must be compromised or abandoned entirely.

One of the greatest misdirections of gender understanding over the past 60 years has been the idea that both men and women should share the same sexual strategy. A naive equalitarian ideology dictates the need for both genders to have equally similar, cooperative gender life goals, and equally similar methods to realize them. But as with most feminine-primary social engineering, Mother Nature and men and women’s biological imperatives are always at odds with this.

Generally this assimilation of a commonized sexual strategy is ingrained early on in men’s feminization conditioning. I use the term ‘assimilation’ because men are taught and conditioned to presume that the feminine sexual strategy (however most women subjectively choose to define it) is universally the correct strategy – and any deviation from what ultimately serves feminine hypergamy is met with ridicule at best, accusations of misogyny and ostracization at worst.

The goal of feminism is to remove all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

Roissy dropped this maxim years ago, but in its simplicity it defines the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies as they apply to a post-sexual revolution, feminine-primary society. Remove all constraints on hypergamy, maximally forcing men to compromise or abandon the male sexual strategy.

As I outlined in the last post, feminine hypergamy essentially revolves around optimizing (and maximally protracting) women’s unilateral sexual selection from Good Genes men and Good Dad’s men. Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks.

From a biological perspective men’s sexual imperative is one of unlimited access to unlimited sexual availability. This isn’t to discount the very strong impulse in men to seek assurances of paternity in the children they ultimately sire, however, prior to his parental investment, the male impetus is to seek unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.

When we consider a male sexual imperative in the biological respect, and the strategies men use to effect it, it becomes easier to understand the social conventions and engineering the Feminine Imperative uses to control and maximally restrict men as sexual selectors.

Widespread ubiquitous pornography and then the social pathologizing of the male sexual response (while empowering and encouraging the female sexual response) are two very easy observations of this control. However, when we consider paternity laws, legal bans on genetic paternity testing, outlawing testosterone while making female hormones readily available and many other legal and social trends that restrict the male control not just of women’s hypergamous priority, but any degree of a man’s shadow of his own sexual strategy’s control, Roissy’s maxim becomes all the more clear.

Is Game Adversarial?

Almost three years ago I considered this question in a post. My critic at the time posed this to me:

“My biggest problem with the Ro writers is that Game is by definition adversarial. It’s us against them, don’t let the bitch win. That is most definitely Rollo’s approach, yet he commands respect from men here. I can only assume that good men read a lot of Roissy, Roosh or Rollo, incorporate some small fraction of it, and use it to improve their relationships, rather than for nefarious means.”

It took time for me to come into an understanding of the real nature of this ~~distortion~~ concern until May’s tragic events and the deliberate misdirections that followed it in the media and the blogosphere proper.

Game is adversarial because it has to be. I’ve gone on record stating that Game is the logical response to the changes feminism has wrought in society and gender relations over the course of the last 60 or so years, but it’s really more than that.

Game is a threat to feminine-primacy because it returns a degree of control of sexual strategy prioritization back into the hands of men. Game challenges that maximal restriction of male sexuality and leverages (however marginally) some of women’s hypergamous choice to his own purpose.

The Feminine Imperative hates Game because it’s an effective tool against its control – so anyone steeped in the conditioning of the imperative will naturally perceive that challenge as being adversarial. You’ll notice this (female) critic’s first concern was to presume men would use Game and a red pill awareness for ‘nefarious’ ends. This is a prime illustration of that terror of losing hypergamous control.

Tricks and Traps

As I mentioned at the beginning, hypergamy does not seek it’s own level. An ever pragmatic evolution drives hypergamy to seek a better-than-equal pairing. This is the evolutionary jackpot: to combine and send one’s genes into future generations with a (at least perceptually) better than equitable genetic match – and ensure one’s progeny with a better than SMV equitable provisioning.

For all of the handwringing about assortive mating recently, evolution’s capacity to adapt stagnates and stunts under conditions of homogeny. It may occur under less than ideal circumstance from a moral perspective, but assortive mating is regularly thwarted by the (usually hypergamous) drive to mate with a better than equitable sexual market value than the lesser partner.

The problem with the assortive mating equation is that hypergamy has two sides and two (often conflicting) aspects to optimizing it – Good Genes / Good Dad (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). Assortive mating is not the same order as assortive pairing.

Nature has selected-for women with an instinctual capacity to satisfy and optimize the visceral needs of short-term breeding and optimizing on the genetic aspects of hypergamy. However the better-than-SMV assortive pairing aspect relies on men adhering to and behaving within defined roles in order to optimize it.

The Feminine Imperative needs honest provider males to behave predictably in order for women to select a better than equitable provider.

The Feminine Imperative demands assurances of both better than equitable breeding and better than equitable provisioning – and it’s got a very brief window of sexual peak SMV competitiveness in which to assure them.

The imperative needs men to fulfill these roles according to calculated and defined sexual stations of each man. So any duplicity or challenge on the part of men to this defined order is a threat to the assurances that women need to optimize hypergamy. Hypergamy’s optimal window of peak SMV for women can’t afford to be tricked into presuming men are anything less or more than their feminine sexual strategies define those men’s roles as.

Hypergamy can’t afford tricks, the ‘tricks’ that Game’s breaking of their sexual strategy’s code represents to women expecting to have their sexual strategy remain unilaterally dominant. As women’s comfort level has increased with the confidence that their strategy will contain that of men’s, they are that much more offended when their strategy is figured out and read back to them by red pill aware men.

It’s an uncomfortable reminder that they’ve traded their believed capacity to intuitively filter for themselves the men who best fill their hypergamous roles; traded that is for the comfort of having men socially controlled to expect to fulfill those roles as a default.

This outrage isn’t just limited to women’s hypergamous ‘exploratory’ years in her SMV peak. Whenever you read an article or hear some 33 year old woman lament the lack of marriageable men of ‘equal’ pairing to themselves (intellectually, professionally or otherwise) know that every cry of ‘Man Up’ is really a frustrated cry over men not playing by the conditioning the Feminine Imperative assured them men would play by, before or once they got to the point of losing the capacity to attract those men.

That’s the trap.

167 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, feminine imperative, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, personal interpretations, plate theory, sexual impulse, sexual market value, SMV, women | posted in Biomechanics, Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Operative Social Conventions, Relationship Game, The Feminine Imperative

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