The Savior Schema

“Every time a man is being nice to you, he’s offering dick. That’s all it is. ‘Uh, can I get that for ya? How ’bout some dick? Can I help you with that? Can I help you with some dick? Do you need some dick?’ ” – Chris Rock

The Savior Schema – the beta male expectation of reciprocation of intimacy (usually sexual) for problems solved.

This is a learned/developed behavior that results from men’s natural push to deductively search for the most rational solution to a problem. It’s really a linear logic; I need sex + women have sex + I must discover what is required for me to get sex from women + I will perform/embody/identify with said requirements = woman will reciprocate with her intimacy. Needless to say this is simplistic at best, but men have a tendency to believe that women will respond as rationally as they themselves would in qualifying for her stated desires. The manosphere is full of men who can tell you this simply isn’t the case for any number of reasons, but sadly they still think that women ought to live up to their implied “agreement.”

The fundamental flaw of the Savior Schema (also, Captain Save a Ho) is that it is essentially negotiated intimacy, and negotiated intimacy is never genuine. You can fix a woman’s flat tire, help her out of a financial jam, fix her a nice lasagne, give her the perfect shoulder to cry on, take care of her kids and listen to her drone on for hours on the phone, and she’ll still go fuck her outlaw biker boyfriend because her intimacy with him is genuine, unnegotiated, unobligated desire. She wants to have sex with him, she doesn’t owe him sex.

What AFCs fail to understand is that all the financial, emotional, dependable support you could possibly offer a woman is no substitute for raw, unmitigated, chemical desire. Some of the most irresponsible, unreliable, poverty level washouts often get more sex than any dutiful AFC suffering from a Savior Schema, because there is no obligation.

Reciprocity

In the wild, the law of reciprocity and fair exchange is a fairly obvious one. Most high-order social animals have some innate understanding of exchanging resources. In fact you could argue that pair bonding, family structure and social collectives are for the most part based on this shared exchange arrangement. So it stands to reason that in the course of human evolution we too developed this innate psychological wiring, thus making men prone to seeing it as the shortest distance between what we have and what we want.

The difficulties arise when (perhaps cleverly) women learned to covertly use this  innate psychology of exchange within the context of a social framework that gives them a resource advantage for little or no exchange of their own. Thus women modeled a social norm, that mirrors men’s natural default position of disposability, and put their attentions and intimacies as unassailable resources so valuable that no effort on a man’s part can merit it. When a woman is appalled by the notion that she should be obligated to have sex with a man in exchange for a dinner and a movie (even over multiple occasions), this social convention is the root of that insult.

The Protector Dynamic

Of course the flip side to this argument is the Protector Dynamic which is the natural propensity for a man to want to provide protection for his mate. Over the course of our evolutionary history certain psycho-biological behaviors proved to be beneficial to the survival of our species. Specific hormonal releases prompt different emotions and behavioral reactions as a response to our environments. Women, for instance, produce higher volumes of oxytocin and estrogen thus prompting a natural instinctual feeling of wellbeing and nurturing her children (which also, interestingly enough, is released after female orgasm). The same is true for men. Being generally physically stronger and posessing 17 times the testosterone, men have evolved chemical cocktails of their own and thus feel a natural protection instinct when prompted.

The conflict comes when the AFC confuses this Protector Dynamic with a Savior Schema. The natural feelings derived from his biochemistry only serve to reinforce his Savior mentality and solidify it as part of his personality. Even when a woman’s repeated behavior directly contradicts this notion of reciprocating intimacy for help (or his idea of ‘protection’) the Savior Schema only rationalizes it as being inconsistent with a single, individual woman.

This then is the root of the White Knight schema; exchange protection for intimacy (i.e. sex). And, once again, women cleverly, almost subconsciously so, use this dynamic to arrange a beneficial, but unequal, exchange of resources.