Reader Nas had an interesting question regarding female duplicity:
“Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism.”
Can you please expand on this Rollo? I find it fascinating.
OK, baton down the hatches, we’re heading for dangerous waters. What I’m getting at here is suggesting that women’s propensity for solipsism is a psychologically evolved mechanism. In other words, it helped women to cope with the harsh realities of the past, to develop a more focused sense of self-interest. To really grasp this you need to understand women’s brain function and chemistry. I’m not going to get too detailed in this, but suffice it to say numerous studies show that a female brain is hard-wired for emotional response and communication on a more complex level than men. I think this is pretty much an established point for my readers, but if you disagree, well that’s going to have be the topic of another post.
Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect be subjected to. Consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child that could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice. Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it’s women’s innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women. Why should that be?
On the face of it you may think that men’s better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness. Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.
Men are the disposable sex, women, the preserved sex. Men would simply die in favor of a superior aggressor, but women would be reserved for breeding. So it served a feminine imperative to evolve an ability to cut former emotional ties more readily (in favor of her new captor) and focus on a more self-important psychology – solipsism.
Now, here is where I’ll step off the diving board and into the theoretical. It’s my purview that a lot of what men would complain are duplicitous acts of indifference towards them are really rooted in this innate feminine solipsism. That’s a bold statement, I realize, but I’d argue that what men take for inconsiderate indifference in a break up or in ruthless shit tests is really a woman tapping into this innate, self-preserving solipsism. Combine hypergamy with the chronically hostile environments of the past and you end up with a modern day feminine solipsism. Add to this an acculturated sense of female entitlement, social conventions that excuse this ‘duplicity’, and a constant misdirection of intent by women themselves, and you come to where we are now. As if that weren’t enough, throw in the element of hypergamy and the countdown in terms of fertility and long term provisioning that a woman must deal with before hitting the imminent Wall, and now you have a fuller picture of the conditions and stresses that necessitate this solipsistic nature.
Ever wonder why it is a woman can ‘get over you’ so quickly after a break up from a relationship you’d thought was rock solid for so long? Ever wonder why she returns to the abusive boyfriend she hopes will change for her? Look no further than feminine solipsism.
After reading all of this I can understand if anyone thinks this is a very nihilistic observation. Let me be clear, this dynamic is real by order of degrees for individual women. A woman’s conditions may be such that she’s never needed to tap into this reserve. Also, we are dealing with subconscious elements of her personality here, so it would come as no surprise that feminine solipsism wouldn’t be cognitive for most women – thus offensive and denied. I’m not asking that anyone accept this idea as gospel, just that the dots do connect very predictably.