Half Plus Seven

Last week Dalrock plumbed the dangerous waters of the Eat, Pray, Love feminine social convention for the geriatric crowd in Grannies Gone Wild! It’s an entertaining piece to be sure. If you believe(ed) in the Soul Mate Myth as some article of your personal faith or your internalized  blue pill conditioning, you’re in for a cold bucket of reality when you read the dating escapades of these Golden Girls once their lifetime soulmates husbands die and the Buffers of online dating and social networking are introduced to them by women of the Pepsi generation.

You see gentlemen, hypergamy trumps the soulmate myth, even for the 68 year old sweetheart you met in high school all those years ago. Sort of puts the Myth of the Lonely Old Man into perspective too.

Anyone with some red pill awareness isn’t shocked by this. The Feminine Imperative and the rigors of hypergamy are always a reality men will have to deal with, and even old age wont diminish the drive for optimization. What does change however is the means by which the Feminine Imperative will fluidly adapt the social conventions it embeds into our  social awareness in order to perpetuate itself. Collectively convincing 70+ year old widows and divorcées that ‘they still got it’ is just a new inroad for an old feminine social convention meant to reach the elderly demographic. It’s almost a future reassurance for the 40+ demographic unable or unwilling to live out the ‘Stella Got Her Groove Back’ script. The message is “Don’t worry, if you can’t get your groove back re-optimize hypergamy at 40, 70 looks pretty good too.

With the exception of ‘mature’ porn (not to be confused with MILF porn), the idea of women aged well past their post-Wall expiration date “exploring their options” might seem dubious,..until you read about the rise in sexually transmitted diseases amongst seniors.

Social Convention Fluidity

I’ve written more than a few articles outlining Feminine Social Conventions, but Dalrock’s piece highlighted the adaptability with which the Feminine Imperative will change those conventions to suit its specific purpose. There are many examples of this, but in this particular instance what we’re seeing here is a reinvention of a similarly useful feminine social convention – that is the Half Plus Seven trope made popular by teenage girls and aging spinsters concerned with their competitive edge in the SMP with the younger women men naturally find more sexually arousing. The Urban Dictionary spells this convention out for us:

“Half, plus seven” is the age-old dating rule for dudes. It justifies the dating of younger women, within reason. The formula begins with each dude’s age (for example, 22). That age is halved (22/2 =11), and 7 is tacked on to the divided result. Therefore, a 22 year old male may legitimately date an 18 year old female, a 25 male may date a female of 19.5, and a 30 male may date a female of 22. While there is no technical ceiling on this social anthropological formula, there is a point at which common sense takes over, and it just becomes disgusting. For instance, this formula should not be used to justify a 60 year old man dating a 37 year old female.

Half plus seven examples:

Guy’s age: 20. Formula: (20/2)+7 = Minimum acceptable age of female: 17.

Guy’s age: 25. Formula: (25/2)+7 = Minimum acceptable age of female: 19.5

I’ve locked horns with Aunt Giggles about the Half +7 theory on a few occasions and generally the debate ends when she agrees to the Roissy maxim that the most solid LTRs are the result of the Man being 1-2 points higher than the woman’s SMV rating, or perceptually so to her.

As an aside, it’s important to remember the Cardinal Rule of Relationships here:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

When a woman perceives (legitimately or not) that your SMV is above her own, the power dynamic in the relationship is one of secure attachment. However, boost that SMV beyond 3 or 4 points and the relationship becomes one based on insecurities and fear of loss (for men and women). While dread is an important underlying element in maintaining a healthy relationship, push it too far and too overtly and you lean over into unhealthy insecurity.

As I addressed in The Mature Man, look at this from the half +7 rule, the older a man the greater the impression that he should have matured into a higher SMV than the younger woman, and thereby is perceptually of 1-2 points above her own by virtue of his experience and hopefully affluence. Principles like Amused Mastery are at their most effective when a woman perceives a man’s SMV is higher than her own.

That said, if there is any merit to Half +7 it’s more about SMV imbalance and the Cardinal Rule of Relationships than any feminine social doctrine. So when you look at my SMV graph you can also see the age differential between the points where men’s SMV would generally be 1-2 points above a woman’s (35+) and where a woman’s SMV begins to decline (27+).

Repurposing The Convention

When the age ratios of the ½+7 formula are strategically favorable to the feminine sexual strategy, the response by the feminine is one of enthusiastic embracement. Once that ratio progresses to the point it becomes a sexually strategic liability, or even the source of anxiety, the response is one of scorn and shame for men. In light of this you might think the feminine response would be complete abandonment of the ½+7 canard, but as we see, reinventing the formula from a fem-centric perspective becomes not only a source false empowerment (i.e. the Cougar fallacy), but also the motivation for the Eat, Pray, Love schema Dalrock so ably details in his writing. Thus we have 68 year old women ‘amazed’ by their sunset years desirability, inflated courtesy of technology age buffers, and a built in social convention ready to help them abstract and rationalize away any vestige of guilt they may feel about indulging themselves with (comparatively) younger men.

Hypergamy doesn’t care what age a woman is.

I should add here that any social convention that is a sexually strategic benefit for a woman, which later becomes a strategic liability, will be retrofitted to a man’s shame and repurposed to her strategic benefit under her new circumstances. Another illustration of this is the shifting acceptability of inter-gender friendships with women. Prior to locking down a suitably optimal hypergamous monogamy with a man, women will enthusiastically embrace the idea of men and women being platonic ‘friends’. Once she’s monogamous this acceptability shifts to unacceptability in favor of a cautious, measured jealousy, and again reverts back to acceptability while unengaged with a monogamous prospect. Women having male orbiters, women involved in multiple ‘friendships’ with men, is sexually advantageous to her hypergamous assessment of prospective men – however once that assessment is settled upon, inter-gender friendships (for her man) becomes a strategic liability for her.