The Burden of Performance

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

One of the most fundamental misconceptions plugged-in men have with regard to their intersexual relations with women is the issue of performance. Back in late March of this year I read an interesting article from Roosh, Men are nothing more than clowns to the modern woman and it struck me that although I certainly agreed with him in the context he presented it, there was more to the ‘entertainment’ factor than simple amusement on the part of women.

Women don’t seek out comfort or stability in men anymore—they seek entertainment. They seek distraction. They seek hedonistic pleasure. This is why provider men (beta males) are so hopelessly failing today to secure the commitment of beautiful women in their prime, and this is why even lesser alpha males fail to enter relationships with women beyond a few bangs. Once the entertainment or novelty you provide her declines—and it inevitably will—she moves on to something or someone else. In essence, the only way you can keep a girl is if you adopt the mentality of a soap opera writer, adding a cliffhanger to the end of each episode that keeps a woman interested when being a good man no longer does.

After reading this I tried to imagine myself being a recently unplugged man or a guy just coming to terms with the uncomfortable truths of the red pill and learning that all of the comforting “just be yourself and the right girl will come along” rhetoric everyone convinced me of had been replaced by a disingenuous need to transform oneself into a cartoon character in order to hold the attentions of an average girl.

That’s kind of depressing, especially when you consider the overwhelming effort and personal insight necessary in realizing red pill awareness. Roosh later tempered this with How to be a good clown and Clown Game vs. Good Man Game, and although he clarifies things well in Game terms, the root of the frustration most guys will have with the ‘clown factor’ is that, in these terms and in this context, their performance isn’t who they are.

In this environment it’s easy to see why the MGTOW option seems like an understandable recourse for red pill men. It’s a very seductive temptation to think that a man can simply remove himself from the performance equation with regards to women. I’ll touch on this later, but what’s important here is understanding the performance game men are necessarily born into. Like it or not, play it or not, as a man you will always be evaluated on your performance (or the perception of it).

I think what trips a lot of men up early in their red pill transformation is sort of a sense of indignation towards women that they should have to “be someone they’re not” and play a character role that simply isn’t who they are in order to hold a woman’s interest. I covered this idea in Have A Look and developed how women are like casting agents when it comes to the men they hope will entertain them.

This was really about a sexual context when I went into it, but as I read Roosh’s original article I began to consider that women’s “character” role they expect men to perform changes as their own phases of maturity dictates and their SMV can realistically demand for that phase. In other words the “characters” they want performed in their Party Years will be different than the ones they want after their Epiphany Phase, which may be different than the character they want for their mid-life years.

How realistic it is for men to be that character becomes less and less relevant as women are socialized to expect disappointment from men actually living up to the characters they’re conditioned to believe they should realistically be entitled to at various stages of their maturity.

Living Up

Right about now I’m sure various male readers are thinking, “fuck this, I’m gonna be who I am and any girl who can’t appreciate me for me is low quality anyway.” This will probably piss you off, but this is exactly the blue pill mentality most ‘just be yourself‘ Betas adopt for themselves.

It’s actually a law of power to despise what you can’t have, and deductively it makes sense, but the fact still remains, as a man you will always be evaluated by your performance. So even with a ‘fuck it, I’ll just be me’ mindset you’re still being evaluated on how well ‘you are just you’.

The simple fact is that you must actually be your performance – it must be internalized. In truth, you already are that performance whether you dictate and direct that, or you think you can forget it and hope your natural, undirected performance will be appreciated by women (and others), but regardless, women will filter for hypergamous optimization based on how well you align with what they believe they are entitled to in a man in the context of their own perception of their SMV.

Looks, talent, tangible benefits and other core prerequisites may change depending on the individual woman, but to be a man is to perform. Even if you’re a self-defined man going his own way who enjoys escorts to fulfill his needs, you still need to perform in order to earn the money to enjoy them.

It Doesn’t Get Easier, You Get Better

For Men, there is no true rest from performance. To believe so is to believe in women’s mythical capacity for a higher form of empathy which would perdispose them to overriding their innate hypergamous filtering based on performance.

Women will never have the same requisites of performance for themselves for which they expect men to maintain of themselves. Hypergamy demands a constant, subliminal reconfirmation of a man’s worthiness of her commitment to him, so there is never a parallel of experience.

Women will claim men “require” they meet some physical standard (i.e. performance) and while generally true, this is still a performance standard men have of women, not one they hold for themselves. There simply is no reciprocal dynamic or prequalification of performance for women, and in fact for a man to even voice the idea that he might qualify a woman for his intimacy he’s characterized as judgmental and misogynistic.

Social conventions like this are established to ensure women’s hypergamous sexual strategy is the socially dominant one. Expecting a woman to perform for a man is an insult to her ‘prize status’ as an individual.

From a humanistic perspective there’s a want for a rational solution to this performance requirement, but as I’ve outlined in prior posts, appeals to women’s reason are no insulation against the subliminal influences of hypergamy.

I read many a ‘dating coach’ who’s approach is complete honesty and full disclosure in the hopes that a like-minded, rational woman will naturally appreciate a man’s forthrightness, but this presupposes a preexisting equal playing field where subliminal influences are overridden by mutual rationalism.

The real hope is that women will drop their innate hypergamous performance requisites in appreciation of this vulnerable, inadequate honesty.

What they sweep under the rug is that you cannot appeal to a woman’s reason or sentiment to genuinely forgive a deficit in a man’s performance. Love, reason, both demand a preexisting mutual appreciation in a common context, but neither love nor reason alleviate the necessity of performance for a man.

Women simply are not motivated to compromise hypergamy on their own accord. They will not be reasoned into accommodating a situation of mutual needs by overt means.

It is a Man’s capacity to perform and demonstrate (never explicate) higher value that motivates women to accommodate mutual needs in a relationship – whether that’s a same night lay or a 50 year marriage.

Demonstrating Higher Value

I get the impression that DHV tends to get a bad rap both from blue pill critics as well as red pill aware men. A lot of that gets wrapped up in technique and practice. It’s easy to dismiss this concept as posturing or bluster, but DHV, as a principle isn’t defined by egotistical measures or how well a guy can ‘showboat’ himself around women.

A lot of DHV is unintentional. In fact the best most genuine forms of DHV are exhibited when a Man doesn’t realize he’s actually performing in a way that demonstrate his higher value. This can be as simple as walking int a room in the right context or environment. Even humility can be DHV in the proper context.

What I’m driving at here is that after reading all of this you might think I’m saying you need to be superhuman to qualify for women’s performance standards, and again that’s kind of depressing – that’s not what I’m getting at. A woman’s performance standards are dependent on many varied contexts and according to the priorities she places on the type of character she finds both arousing and attractive and according to what her conditions dictate for her.

It’s not how you perform so much as that you perform. Ambition and personal drive to perform and be the best and most successful you you can be may have absolutely nothing to do with your intention of attracting a woman, but you are still performing and you will be evaluated on that performance.

DHV or DLV is performance whether intentional or not. You cannot remove yourself from this performance equation. You can cease to direct your part in this performance, but until you die you cannot exit the game.