If the red pill and Game-awareness have a lasting effect of any future significance, my hope is that the red pill becomes preventative medicine for young men’s feminized conditioning.
This awareness is the single greatest threat to the feminine imperative and feminine social primacy. I’ve covered aspects of this prevention in Hear Me Now, Believe Me Later, but this post was more of an after-the-fact perspective from older men’s experiences, and how they wish they’d have known about the red pill, Game and the intergender dynamics I’ve written about for the past 12 years of my writing.
When I wrote the now seminal post of Navigating the SMP and introduced the comparative SMV chart I had no idea how influential (and usefully accurate) it would be. My hope then was to educate (albeit a bit tongue in cheek) a younger generation of red pill men about the basic outline of how men and women’s sexual market value waxes and wanes during phases of each sex’s lifetime. This post – and more than few subsequent ones – was prompted by the desire to have an outline of what young men should anticipate in a contemporary, westernized gender landscape.
For as much as the critics of that SMV outline would have you believe it’s just an effort in wishful thinking on the part of older men convincing themselves of a higher sexual market value, the salient message of that graph is an uncomfortable exposing of the strategies women use in optimizing hypergamy over the course of their lifetimes. When considered chronologically, many identifiable patterns become apparent both in women’s motivations and behaviors at or around distinct phases of a woman’s life.
Depending upon her capacity to fulfill them at any particular phase (attractiveness), we can get a better overall idea of what is motivating a particular woman during that period of her life and adjust Game and/or expectations accordingly to a Man’s best advantage.
Roissy wrote a fantastic piece about the difficulty of Gaming women by age brackets back in 2010, and I’m going to refer readers with a mind for Game to cross reference this article while reading what I propose here. With a better understanding of these phases, and the SMV particulars of those phases, a Man can more easily adjust his Game, maintain frame, apply Amused Mastery, and host of other red pill / Game applications covertly and confidently with a reasonable expectation of outcome, or a better understanding of the traps that may await him.
One common understanding most men had with regards to the woman in my Saving the Best post, and how her rationalizations of her past and present sexual behaviors affected the man considering divorcing her, was that she was subject to conditions at particular periods in her life which motivated her to those behaviors. I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect the blue pill guy in that situation to have seen her sexual hangups and self-consciousness with him as the red flags that we can being dissociated with his condition – however, there is a certain awareness that comes with the red pill that helps us better understand what those flags are. The armchair counseling we give him is that he should’ve known that she was looking for her Beta provider when he married her – it was at that woman’s phase of life when women are looking to consolidate on her own long term security.
But can we really expect this from a guy who in all likelihood based his decisions to marry her on false presumptions and a thoroughly blue pill hope that she’d ‘come around’ to being more sexual with him later in their marriage? Can we really expect him to know what her motivations were then for her long term security when he’d never had the benefit of ever having those motivations spelled out for him by the red pill?
It’s with this in mind that I’m presenting that outline here.
Click for an expanded view.
What I’ve constructed is a loose and generalized chronology of how women effect their hypergamy over the course of typical woman’s life between the ages of 15 and 50. I’m fully prepared for the same outcries of generalizations and NAWALT that the infamous SMV graph inspired, but understand this, before any woman or femen comes up with those predictable objections, this is an outline; variables like culture, ethnicity, moralism, socio-economic status and outlying circumstance are all factors to consider when evaluating the motivations of any woman. This timeline however is intended as a roadmap to follow to get a better understanding of what motivates women at particular phases of their lives and hopefully help men to better prepare themselves for the strategies women will use to optimize hypergamy during those phases.
Understanding Hypergamy
Before we get too involved in this chronology it’s important to get a good idea of how hypergamy motivates women during these phases. A lot of the manosphere likes to define hypergamy as a woman getting the best bang for her attractiveness buck, but this is only one side of hypergamy. Using the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks principle of women’s dualistic sexual strategy it becomes clear that there is a drive to balance hypergamy between these two impulses. As I stated in Schedules of Mating, hypergamy wants to have both sides of the AF/BB equation satisfied by the same man, but rarely is this dualistic satisfaction met in the same individual.
It’s my belief that a drive for hypergamic optimization exists in both the impulse to secure the best genes (sexy son theory – Alpha Fucks) and the best provisioning / emotional investment (parental investment – Beta Bucks) a woman’s attractiveness can be leveraged for. The problem then is one of leveraging her attractiveness relative to any particular phase of her life and the circumstance that phase dictates for her. Needless to say a woman’s physical conditions, her personal decisions and modern social pressures will influence this ‘balancing act’ (careerism, feminism, religious conviction, etc.), but I think it’s only half correct to apply hypergamy only to the Alpha Fucks side of women’s dualistic sexual strategy.
It’s also important to consider that, from an evolutionary standpoint, hypergamy always seeks an optimization of either side of the AFBB motives that is better than any individual woman’s attractiveness realistically warrants. Keep in mind that modern social pressures (social media etc.) exacerbate this, and further distort a woman’s realistic evaluation of her own SMV at any given phase of her life. The most secure, monogamous attachments women will make are with Men they perceive are 1 to 2 degrees above what she perceives is her own relative SMV.
The Teen Phase
I ostensibly began the relative SMV graph at age 15 since this is about the post-pubescent age during which girls come into their maturation and teenage boys begin to take a real awareness of them. As you’ll see on the overall timeline, Alpha characteristics with regards to teenage attraction cues are largely based on physical attributes and prowess. These physical arousal cues girls find primarily attractive in adolescent boys (later men) will continue for the better part of a woman’s life, but during a girl’s formative years her foremost attraction is for the ‘hawt guy’ with a good body, the correct eye color and the right haircut.
Between the ages of 15 and 25 women associate and prioritize men according to their physical features. Even a relatively introverted guy with a Beta mindset and/or a brooding ‘creative’ personality can still be considered Alpha if his physical presence meets a girl’s archetypal attraction profile.
The main reasoning for this is fairly obvious in that physical cues (though also influenced externally) are primarily innate. This physical interest from adolescence through young adulthood is the top prioritization in attraction. These physical attraction / arousal cues are intrinsic; extrinsic attraction cues such as status / performance do factor in progressively as a woman matures, but the priority is the physical, and other extrinsic factors (status, Alpha confidence, Game, etc.), while definitely beneficial, are prioritized lower by the simple fact that a girl lacks any real experience of a guy with Game or the need for provisioning.
Long term provisioning potential during this phase is rarely even an afterthought for a young woman. From adolescence forward a woman’s dualistic sexual strategy primarily revolves around short term breeding opportunity – Alpha fucks. This can be attributed to a girl/young woman’s provisioning needs being relatively accommodated for by family, the state in some effect or even her own self-provisioning, as well as the breeding urgency that comes with hormones and youth.
I’ll add the caveat here that a woman’s prioritization of the physical is inversely proportional to the degree to which her provisioning needs are being met beyond seeking a mate or mating opportunities. In other words, if thing aren’t secure at home (Daddy Issues) an adolescent girl physically and mentally prepares herself for a long term mate earlier than when a solid masculine father is present in her life and the home. Further reading on the physical aspects of this phenomenon can be found here.
The short version for teenage Game (when you’re in high school) is that looks, physique and physical prowess are a woman’s attraction priority. This priority will build a foundation for her attraction cues later as she matures, but the primary importance is looks and performance.
The Break Phase
I’ve added this phase here because it’s become an increasingly too common, and potentially damaging, occurrence amongst young men I’ve counseled. Generally the Break Phase comes at or about the time of a young woman’s senior year (or shortly after) of high school when she’s forced into a conflict between continuing a monogamous relationship she began in her teenage years, and severing it as college or a simple want for ‘freedom’ looms closer as she approaches young adulthood, graduation and possibly moving away from her home for an indefinite period.
This is a major frustration for Beta minded young men given to a feminized conditioning that convinces them they’ll be rewarded for loyalty, support and building relational equity with a girl. I’m highlighting this phase because often enough it’s at this beginning point young men are prepared to compromise their life’s ambitions to play a role that their feminine conditioning predisposes them for. The danger being long term life decisions made in order to maintain a relationship he believes his sacrifices will be rewarded for in favor of personal goals or developing passions and personal potential.
Here is the warning for any late teen / early adult man: This is generally the point at which you’ll have to make some real personal assessments of yourself if you have a girlfriend. This will be the first test of the red pill versus your feminized conditioning. Most blue pill guys entertain the ‘invisible friend’ of an LDR (long distance relationship) for the first time at this juncture, or they alter their educational priorities to accommodate maintaining their relationship.
Statistically the girlfriend you expected to build a Disney-story life with will break up with you as her options expand while yours constrict (due to prioritizing her goals above your own). The decisions you make at this stage are up to you, but understand (barring personal convictions) this stage will come as a woman’s SMV begins it’s rapid ascent and along with it opportunities she’s been scarcely aware of until now.
The Party Years
The five year span between 20 and 25 are what I euphemistically call a woman’s ‘Party Years’. It’s at this stage women generally experience their peak SMV (22-23 y.o.), and as I stated in Navigating the SMP, at no other point in a woman’s life will so many socio-sexual options be available to her. A lot of manosphere moralists believe that women ought to marry and get pregnant during the party years since this is the point of peak fertility as well as physical beauty, and in the not so distant, pre-sexual revolution past this certainly made sense. However, under the social conditions of the last 50+ years, women’s priorities have changed.
The available opportunities – social, sexual, educational and career-wise – that a woman experiences during these years are afforded to her in relation to her SMV. At no point will you find a woman more cocky and self-assured of her predominance in society according to the option she enjoys relative to her attractiveness. Her personal image will be one based on merit, and while it’s certainly possible she is talented and/or intelligent, her opportunities are predicated on her attractiveness and the leverage it has on other’s (men and women) decision making.
The physical arousal priorities she had in high school remain a top attraction priority, however, as she matures into the new experiences her SMV peak affords her, status, and later affluence (wealth or potential provisioning) start getting added to the attraction mix. As women learn the utility of their relative SMV, and begin to understand a future need for long term provisioning (on some level of consciousness) they come to understand the transactional nature of their sexual agency.
It’s during the party years that women begin to prefer ‘dating’ men older than themselves. Generally this is between a 5-7 year difference, however Roissy postulated that even more mature men still have potential depending upon their own SMV:
Hard to believe, but it is often easier to bed a very young woman than an older woman, if you are an older man. This is because 20-40% of women are specifically attracted to older men. It is hard-wired in them, and this hard-wiring can be reinforced by poor family upbringing resulting from divorce of parents or absentee fathers. Single moms are the greatest source of future generations of slutty daughters the world has ever known.
During the party years, hypergamy is still firmly rooted in physical attraction / short term mating cues, however, women begin to develop an appreciation for personality cues of confidence and (Alpha) character as it relates to her long term investment. Later in the party years a woman’s hypergamy leads her to look for the Alpha bad boy who might also be molded (tamed) into her long term ideal – this is the Tarzan Effect, the want for an optimized balance of hypergamic interests in the same Alpha male. The idea is one that an Alpha Man might be tamed, in some cases coerced via pregnancy, into assuming the providership role the other half of her sexual strategy demands.
One point of attraction older men (who capitalize on their SMV potential) have is that their capacity to provide for more than themselves, and still maintain an above average physique, tends to be a form of preselection for this hypergamic balance as women mature past the latter part of their party years.
Just to be clear, as a woman becomes more cognizant of her decreasing capacity to sexually compete with the attractiveness of younger women, her attraction for more than just the physical aspects of men begins to assume a higher priority. Those aspects (status, confidence, affluence, worldly maturity, etc.) are typically found in men old enough to have had the experience to acquire them.
I should also add here that, there are incidents of women who, for some condition or circumstance opt out of their party years. Either their socioeconomic situation prevents it, or an early, unplanned pregnancy, or for religious convictions, but whatever the reason they move past this phase without a sense of having capitalized on it. In some respects this may seem to be a better choice than riding the proverbial ‘cock carousel’ into her Epiphany and Transitory phase (discussed in the next post), but it’s important to remember that these circumstances don’t disqualify a woman from the maturation process I’ve described here.
In some cases it may be the source of resentment at a man for having ‘held her back’ from all of the experiences her girlfriends went through (through which she vicariously lived), or it may be her coming into a better understanding of how other men (perceptually) meet her hypergamic balance better than the one she settled for earlier than she had the maturity to understand. As we’ll explore in the next continuation post, this resentment can be a later source of marital dissatisfaction (and divorce) for women approaching the Epiphany and Transitory phases.
This post is the first in a 3 part series. In part 2 I’ll outline the Epiphany, Transition, Security and Development phases.