Mate Guarding

Ah, another week, another fantastic article from the Chateau. I found this particular post interesting because the study (once again by our friend Dr. Martie Haselton) he breaks down here confirms virtually everything I was developing in Your Friend Menstruation. It pretty much sums up in no uncertain terms what I was detailing about how women in their folicular (proliferative) phase of menstruation become more sexually aroused by men exhibiting Alpha physical traits and behavioral cues.

However, Heartiste and this study go one step deeper than just the observable arousal from Alpha cues. It also demonstrates women’s observable aversion (disgust) to beta cues in men during the same menstrual fertility phase.

At their most fertile period, these women are less likely to feel close to their mates and more likely to find fault with them than women mated to more sexually desirable men, the research shows.

“A woman evaluates her relationship differently at different times in her cycle, and her evaluation seems to be colored by how sexually attractive she perceives her partner to be,” said Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and senior author of the study.

Through a series of high-profile studies, Haselton’s lab has revealed telling changes that take place in women’s behavior during ovulation. Possibly to increase the odds of attracting suitable mating partners, these behaviors include a tendency to dress up and to speak in a higher-pitched, more feminine voice and — in a potential inbreeding-avoidance mechanism — to refrain from contact with male kin. In addition, the lab has found that women whose mates are less sexy and masculine tend to be more attracted to other men during the few fertile days leading up to ovulation.

The researchers found that women mated to the less sexually attractive men were significantly more likely to find fault with their partners and, again, feel less close to their partners during the high-fertility period than the low-fertility period. Women who rated their mates as more sexually attractive, meanwhile, did not exhibit these changes and instead reported being more satisfied with their relationship at high fertility than at low fertility. [emphasis mine]

Most of this I elaborated on in Your Friend Menstruation, however Heartiste then gave me some food for thought here right after this research finding:

When a man’s woman is being bitchy, the problem is him, but not in the way most men would think. Most men will promptly resort to DEFCUNT Level 1 Beta Supplication Mode to appease their harridans, thinking, wrongly, that their women are bitchy because they haven’t gotten enough signs of commitment and support from their partners. And who could blame these men for thinking this? When nagging, inconsolable women lob heat-of-the-moment accusations at their men, the accusations usually take the form of scattershot wails about one-size-fits-all conventional relationship issues that come straight from therapists’ hackneyed textbooks.

“You don’t care about me.” “You never listen.” “You don’t support this marriage like I do.” “You forgot to go food shopping AGAIN. How many times do I have to remind you?!”

So these beta men, quite reasonably, care harder, listen longer, support stronger, and buy enough groceries to fill a fat housewife’s appetizer plate. He reasons, “This is what she claims she wants, so this is what I’ll give her. And that should make her be nice to me like she was last week.”

In the meantime, the alpha male is now on his fifth year of forgetting to go food shopping, and his lover hasn’t bitched once about it

The subconscious default Beta behaviors Heartiste is alluding to here are exactly what I’d classify as Mate Guarding behavior. Appeasement, supplication, sensitivity, etc. are all the classic default behaviors Beta men will resort to in order to solve the “problem” of their mate’s apparent dissatisfaction with him. You see, the man with a Beta mindset earnestly believes that Beta Game is his best strength in attraction with women. So when something is wrong with his precious little snowflake he automatically defaults to upping the Beta.

The more Beta the man the more his proclivity to Mate Guard will be.

I realize this is a very bold statement, but judging from the principles of sexual selection and how women’s biology has evolved to better effect her innate, sexually pluralistic hypergamy, only less sexually arousing Beta men would have needed to psychologically evolve mate guarding mental schemas to protect their parental investments with biologically hypergamous women.

Furthermore, the more organically Alpha men would be rewarded not only with relational fidelity (for fear of losing the hypergamic optimization he represents to a woman), but also sexually due to women’s natural arousal by them during her fertility phase. You could also make the case that predominantly Alpha men would be less prone to mate guarding since their sexual selection and mating frequency would be greater than predominantly Beta men, but this is also further compounded by women’s biological arousal and sexual rewarding of Alphas as dictated by her menstrual cycle.

End result? Alpha men would have been less environmentally motivated to evolve mate guarding strategies that Beta men evolved as a contingency to women’s sexual pluralism (i.e. cuckoldry)

Beta Contingencies

In Mrs. Hyde I quoted yet another study by Dr. Martie Haselton from Why is muscularity sexy? (Aunt Giggles wept):

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

Using strategic pluralism theory as a guide, we can see how mate guarding behavior in predominantly Beta men would have evolved out of necessity. While women (in the past) may have to face trade-offs in weighing genetics versus provisioning, vows of fidelity do little to quell her arousal for Alpha seed when she’s in the proliferate phase of her cycle. In fact I’d argue that the advent of monogamy and monogamous marriage itself is a mate guarding strategy evolved by the meta-interests of Beta men (the most numerous men).

Just to end this on a positive note, I think it’s important to remember that through Game, self-betterment physically & educationally and red pill awareness men aren’t doomed to the absolutes strategic pluralism outlines. In fact this theory, I think accurately, only defines the contingencies and logical outcomes of the SMP – it’s not outlining determinism, it’s illustrating probablism . It doesn’t mean a man can’t transform himself into a contextual Alpha.