Glenn and a few others had a question about last week’s Love Commodity post.:
@Rollo – This seems very inconsistent to me. How can this be true – ” Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. ” While this is true? “In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.”
You’ll have to forgive a long explanation, I couldn’t simply drop this into the commentary, a full post was necessary.
The first thing we need to consider is the Male Experience vs. the female experience. I hate to get too existential, but it comes down to our individuated experiences as men and women. I’m going to give two examples here and this will also cover the Hypergamy is everything thread I noticed the commentary too.
There’s an interesting conflict of societal messaging we get from an equalitarian / feminine-primary social order. This is one that simultaneously tells us that “we are not so different” or “we are more alike than we are different” and then, yet implores use to “celebrate our diversity” and “embrace (or tolerate) our differences” as people.
This is easily observable in issues of ethnicity, but it also crosses over into issues of gender. The most popular trope is that ideas of gender are a social construct and that women and men are comparative equals and only their physical plumbing makes them different in form only.
From a Red Pill perspective we see the error in evidence of this egalitarian fantasy. I’ve written countless posts on the evidential and logical fallacies that make up gender equalism, but the important thing to be aware of is the conflict inherent within that belief – equalism expects men and women’s existential experiences to be the same, while also pleading that we embrace the differences it purports we don’t actually have.
It fundamentally denies the separation, from an evolved biological / psychological perspective, that men and women experience life in different ways. The idea is that it’s the nebulous ‘society’ that determines our gender experiences and less, if nothing, of it is truly influenced by a human being’s psychological-biological firmware.
zdr01dz posted this:
I think maybe this is in part because men have no innate desire to marry up. Hypergamy doesn’t compute for us. I know what hunger feels like and I assume women feel it the same way I do. I’m empathetic to poor, hungry children because I know what they’re feeling. However I have no idea what hypergamy feels like. I’ve never felt it’s pull.
My second example comes from Women and Sex in which I explore the fallacy of the social convention that insists “women are just as sexual as men” and that “women want sex, enjoy sex, even more than men.”
This canard is both observably and biologically disprovable, but the presumption is based on the same “we’re all the same, but celebrate the difference” conflicting principle that I mentioned above. If a dynamic is complimentary to the feminine then the biological basis is one we’re expected to ’embrace the diversity’ of, but if the dynamic is unflattering to the feminine it’s the result “of a society that’s fixated on teaching gender roles to ensure the Patriarchy, we’re really more alike than not.”
The idea is patently false because there is no real way any woman can experience the existence and conditions that a man does throughout his life. I mention in that essay about how a female amateur body builder I knew who was dumbstruck by how horny she became after her first cycle of anabolic steroids. “I can’t believe men can live in a state like this” were her exact words. She was just beginning to get a taste of what men experience and control in their own skins 24 hours a day and it was unsettling for her.
Women are used to a cyclic experience of sexuality, whereas men must be ready to perform at the first, best opportunity sexually. These are our individuated experiences and despite all the bleating of the equalists they are qualitatively different. As zdr01dz observes, no man has an idea of what Hypergamy feels like. To my knowledge there is no drug or hormone that can simulate the existential experience of Hypergamy. Even if there were, men and women’s minds are fundamentally wired differently, so the simulated experience could never be replicated for a man.
I understand how Hypergamy works from observing the behavior and understanding the motivating biology for it. I also understand that our species evolved with, and benefitted from it – or at least it makes deductive sense that what we know as Hypergamy today is a derivative of that evolution – but what I don’t have is a firsthand, existential experience of Hypergamy and I never will. Likewise, women will never have a similar existential experience of what it’s like to be a man.
So it should be an easy follow to deduce that how a woman experiences love, as based on her Hypergamic opportunistic impulses, is a fundamentally different experience than that of a man’s. The equalist social order want’s love to be an equal, mutual, agreement on a definition of love that transcends individuated gender experience, but it simply will not accept that an intersexual experience of love is defined by each sex’s individuated experience.
I have no doubt that there are areas of crossover in both men’s idealistic concept of love and women’s opportunistic concept, but this experience of love is still defined by gender-specific individuation. By that I mean that women can and do experience intense feelings of love for a man based on her Hypergamously influenced criteria for love.
I’m actually surprised that more women have yet to call me to the carpet about their personal experiences of love from the commodity post, but if you sift through the comments on Women in Love and other blog/forum comments you’ll come across examples of women describing in great detail how deeply they love their husbands / boyfriends, and are in complete disarray over being told their love stems from Hypergamic opportunism. Again, I have no doubt that their feelings of love are genuine to them based on their individuated concepts of love; indeed they’re ready to fight you tooth and nail to defend their investment in those feelings. What I’m saying is that the criteria a man should need to meet in order to generate those emotions and arrive at a love state are not universally mutual as an equalitarian social order would have the whole of society believe.
So, yes, men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely – from their own individuated experiences. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. The processes they used to come to this love state differs in concept and existential individuation, and what sustains that love state is still dependent upon the criteria of men’s idealistic and women opportunistic concepts of love.
The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.
The commodification of that love state is presently weighted on the feminine because the Feminine Imperative is socially ascendant. The importance of satisfying the female sexual (and really life-goal) strategy takes primary social precedence today. Thus men’s individuated experience is devalued to an assumption of an “it’s-all-equal” universality while women’s is blown up out of all real valuation with collective expectations of “embracing their unique difference” set apart from that universality. If men’s experience is one-size-fits-all it’s really a small, and socially blameless, step for a woman to withhold the reward criteria men place on their idealistic love in order to satisfy their own sexual strategy.
Women’s social primacy allows them to feel good about themselves for commodifying the idealistic rewards men value to come to their own state of love, as well as maintain it.
It is one further step to embrace the concept that men’s experience of love, the idealism he applies to it and even his own sexual and life imperatives are in fact the same as those of women’s – while still setting women’s apart when it serves them better. Thus the cardinal rule of sexual strategies comes to a feminine-primary consolidation by socially convincing men that women’s experience and imperatives are, or should be considered to be, the same as men’s individuated experiences. Add women’s already innate solipsism to this and you have a formula for a gender-universal presumption of the experience of love based primarily on the individuated female experience of love.
In other words, women expect men to socially and psychologically agree with, reinforce and cooperate with the opportunistic feminine model of love as the equalist, gender-mutual model model of love while still believing that women share their own idealistic model. It’s the correct model that should work for everyone, or so women’s solipsism would have us believe.
re: “this canard”
First, a digression. Along the lines you mentioned, giving a woman enough testosterone to reach “low T” man levels will cause her clitoris to irreversibly enlarge enormously, to almost micropenis size. She will also become extremely horny compared to previously, masturbating vigorously daily but not wanting more partnered sex than before. Her vaginal secretions will increase to about double in volume, and her pelvic floor muscles will too, reaching almost male intensity in orgasms.
She will also experience limerence for the first time.
Continuing about making women into men. Up until recently, the vast majority of trans-folk were male-to-female trans. Of these mtf, only (!) about half were gay, about half are partnered, and about half are pros, i.e. in the sex business. The vast majority of mtf express happiness at womanly feelings and the greater sexual attention from men after every degree of transitioning, and most of the partnered stay with their partners. If not the actual surgery, all would recommend at least female hormonal transitioning to anyone. Less than 20% (the actual stats may be 10%) were ftm. Of these ftm,… Read more »
Continuing. Prior to recently, all of the ftm trans were the butch partners of femmes, like Chaz Bono. Most got facial surgeries to make them look more thuggish to try to get more girls. Very recently there has been a large increase in strictly hormonal ftm, but more of the emo or nerd type of boi, rather than thug. These nerd-boi ftms STILL can’t get the girls, but that’s ok with them because they’re channeling their sexual energies into *men*. They were “straight” girls before, and afterwards they became hairy skinny little “gay” bois, having lotz and lotz of secksas.… Read more »
I wrote an email to Rollo and about thirty minutes later this post came out. Perfect timing. I also shared it on my blog (https://dcllive.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/an-open-letter-to-older-red-pillers/) and the AskTRP sub. The two questions I asked were pretty much answered in this post. They are… Q1. “Why do men look to women for validation, on any scale big or small?” and Q2. “Is there a way to love women for how and who they are?” One response I got from a user named ‘secret_barber’ goes, “Why do men look to women for validation, on any scale big or small?” People, all people,… Read more »
So far you’ve covered how women love differently than men and how women “experience” love. But, I’m curious to hear what pre-requisites a man needs for a women to fall in love with him. I’m speaking in general, no need for outliers here. For the record, before anyone here says it, game doesn’t create love. It merely sustains it to some degree. I’ll post another comment covering this in the morning (I’m off to bed now) but I will say that the initial raw spark for love is Alpha Fucks based (physical). I also understand that a woman’s love can… Read more »
“the criteria a man should need to meet in order to generate those emotions and arrive at a love state are not universally mutual as an equalitarian social order would have the whole of society believe.”
That gonna be a tweet real soon?
If we look at fetish sex we see that 3% of men are interested in it and 1% of women. This says (assuming Gaussian distribution) that there is about 1/2 standard difference in the sex drives of men and women.
Low sex drive men can rather easily find a match on that axis. High sex drive men will need several partners to keep up. Generally.
if you sift through the comments on Women in Love and other blog/forum comments you’ll come across examples of women describing in great detail how deeply they love their husbands / boyfriends, and are in complete disarray over being told their love stems from Hypergamic opportunism. Again, I have no doubt that their feelings of love are genuine to them based on their individuated concepts of love; indeed they’re ready to fight you tooth and nail to defend their investment in those feelings. I believe it was Vox Day who said (paraphrasing) that one should mentally preface any such statement… Read more »
anonymous January 5th, 2015 at 1:59 am That is easy – find a woman who wants YOU more than she wants or will want any other man she comes into contact with. The criteria is easy. The actual finding is quite difficult. I used GAME as my search tool. For the most part the women qualified themselves. I had to go through a LOT of those women who qualified who attached herself to me no matter what. This was my qualification tool: “Sleep with me naked. No sex. I like the body contact.” Sleep wit her naked. No sex. About… Read more »
I had to go through a LOT of those women who qualified to find one who attached herself to me no matter what.
“…but what I don’t have is a firsthand, existential experience of Hypergamy and I never will.” I’ve been thinking about this since the other post. It could be I had a kind of male Hypergamy experience a very long time ago. When I came to University I was in an LTR with some nice girl for several years already. Back in the day I had an intuitive understanding of women coming from growing up in a family with lots of females around. But my rational thinking was very blue pill probably. That intuitive understanding served me well though and I… Read more »
The female opportunism and male ideology spectrum can find a compromise, as this blog has explained. The obstacle this “optimum happiness” incurs is that the former – female opportunism – is born out of fragmentation and short term satisfaction. In other words, a woman grasping onto a man’s provisional facilities will eventually, sooner rather than later, not appreciate it like before. Male ideology of love lasts longer, because most men have formed a mentality that derives from blue pill concepts – “the more I give, the more she will love me.” Eventually, what was once a compromise becomes a one-way… Read more »
It wasn’t long ago that the quality of Rollo’s writing was not readily available, it was not easy to find such insights. Men that did not find this stuff were stuck in a nightmare. What nightmare? Lacking any source of the real truths like the ones found here. That nightmare is over. Every day I’m in gratitude for this. If you never comment here but you benefit from what Rollo Tomassi writes, I hope that you’ll comment here even if it’s a sentence or two. You don’t have to use your real name. The work Rollo is doing is saving… Read more »
You’re so right, Sam!
I also want to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to Rollo for all invaluable posts and time spent sharing your knowledge. You’ve had a great impact on my current and future life.
I also want to encourage many readers here to take action in your lives. Rollo Tomassi and his blog by all means, but this is knowledge meant to better prepare you for upcoming situations. An awareness so to speak. Don’t fall into the trap of just reading, reading and ..reading without doing anything.
Cheers from Sweden
” … For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own. … ”
Is it correct to say that this doesn’t necessarily apply at the level of an individual male-female relationship?
@M Simon ‘This was my qualification tool: “Sleep with me naked. No sex. I like the body contact.” Sleep wit her naked. No sex. About 3/4s will come back gagging for it. The other 1/4? You got to sleep with them naked. Also watch their eyes. When they agree to do it they ALL expect to get f*cked. A man with the self control not to do it is a wonder to them. What goes through their minds? “Is there something wrong with me? Is he gay?” The first part gnaws at them.’ I did that similarly and unknowingly: “I… Read more »
In other words, women expect men to socially and psychologically agree with, reinforce and cooperate with the opportunistic feminine model of love as the equalist, gender-mutual model model of love while still believing that women share their own idealistic model. It’s the correct model that should work for everyone, or so women’s solipsism would have us believe. They also often project their own form of love/attraction onto men as well, which is pure solipsism and projection. So, for example, women will express surprise when a man has an affair with a subordinate who “is less attractive than his wife” (not… Read more »
From the OP – “In other words, women expect men to socially and psychologically agree with, reinforce and cooperate with the opportunistic feminine model of love as the equalist, gender-mutual model model of love while still believing that women share their own idealistic model. It’s the correct model that should work for everyone, or so women’s solipsism would have us believe.” That makes sense as a sort of bait and switch by marketing opportunism as idealism. And I say for survival and success adopting the opportunistic love model under the guise of idealism is best working strategy for men. All… Read more »
Male ideology of love lasts longer, because most men have formed a mentality that derives from blue pill concepts – “the more I give, the more she will love me.” Eventually, what was once a compromise becomes a one-way street. But the blue pill concepts are derived from a scarcity mentality. Men are not the choosers of the relationship the majority of the time so when a woman chooses them they will feel a stronger need to maintain that ideology of love because they just don’t have or don’t feel they have other options. As I get older I realize… Read more »
“However I have no idea what hypergamy feels like. I’ve never felt it’s pull.” While I wholeheartedly agree that men don’t feel the “pull” of hypergamy, don’t we feel a pull of another kind? Matt Ridley made the observation in his book “The Red Queen” (backed up by the some of the work of David Buss) that women are primarily attracted to status and wealth while men are attracted to beauty and youth. In this context female hypergamy makes perfect sense, women will seek the highest status male she can find. But what about men? What middle aged man wouldn’t… Read more »
@lh re: “I never experienced wanting sex and not getting it back then”
I think you’ve stumbled upon the foundation of hypergamy.
@nots re: “While I would definitely agree that men are generally quicker to fall in love than women and that we love idealistically, are we really less opportunistic”?
Yes, we are far less opportunistic when in love. Empirically, when in love a male perceives other females as more repulsed by him.
@Bango Tango re: ” the blue pill concepts are derived from a scarcity mentality”
I’m smelling a theme. bluepill = scarcity = antihypergyny
@M Simon re: “The criteria is easy. The actual finding is quite difficult.”
Yep. Like “buy low, sell high”, it’s easy peasy in theory.
@vinay3543 re: 50 shades + “most certainly to the greatest extent, women will be asking themselves the question to what they are really on this planet for.”
Really? You don’t think instead that women will simply be more dissatisfied, continuing to be dissatisfied, reveling in dissatisfaction?
@jf12 “Yes, we are far less opportunistic when in love. Empirically, when in love a male perceives other females as more repulsed by him.”
Really? Based on my own personal experience, when in a close relationship, I perceive other women as being MORE attracted to me. This is especially true if the woman I’m in a relationship with is particularly attractive. Or did you mean to say that a man in love is repulsed by other women?
@nots4253 re: “Really?”
Yes, really. It’s probably the single most important recent discovery of the pair-bonding function of oxytocin in the male brain: it blasts away his polygynous impulses by making it seem, to him, that other women are repulsed by him. If I remember to, I’ll try to find several references.
Hypergamy isn’t upgrading. Often misunderstood as such. Hypergamy means “only attracted to those who are more attractive than I am” — only attracted upwards, in other words. That is all it means. o s It’s different from optimization. Everyone always tries to optimize everything. Everyone. In all phases of life. Everyone prefers better. That isn’t hypergamy. The difference between hypergamy and optimization is that hypergamy is not attracted to individuals below itself (and in most cases, individuals below self+1), while optimization prefers self+X, but is still attracted to self+0 and self-1 and even in some cases self-2. Women are never,… Read more »
Rollo- excellent
Novaseeker- likewise excellent. Women settle on mens shitty looks for access to resources wgen their own (womens looks) begin to fade in their 30’s. Women cash out for mens cash not mens looks.
“It could be I had a kind of male Hypergamy experience a very long time ago.” H/T Novaseeker for this. You’re not describing a “male Hypergamy experience”; you’re describing what men do when they seek women, which is optimization. They look similar at first glance but they’re really not. What differentiates them is where each sex’s attraction floor is. Women are hypergamous, meaning they want to “marry up” or get better men than they are. This applies not only to marriage, but to sex as well. They want sex with better men than they are. Most women just aren’t sexually… Read more »
hah. Crossposted with Nova. I’m sure he explained it better than I did.
re: The Oxytocin Experience. Oxytocin make for oneitis in men. Essentially the oxytocin experience IS the oneitis experience. In men. Not women.
Oxytocin makes men less able to stray..
Scheele et al. 2012. Oxytocin modulates social distance between males and females. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(46), 16074-16079.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/46/16074
Oxytocin makes wife goggles.
Scheele et al. 2013. Oxytocin enhances brain reward system responses in men viewing the face of their female partner. PNAS, 110(50), 20308-20313
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20308.abstract
Downsizing to one link for posting.
re: The Oxytocin Experience. Oxytocin make for oneitis in men. Essentially the oxytocin experience IS the oneitis experience. In men. Not women.
Oxytocin makes men less able to stray..
Scheele et al. 2012. Oxytocin modulates social distance between males and females. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(46), 16074-16079.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/46/16074
Another link.
Oxytocin makes wife goggles.
Scheele et al. 2013. Oxytocin enhances brain reward system responses in men viewing the face of their female partner. PNAS, 110(50), 20308-20313
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20308.abstract
In contrast, in women the oxytocin pair-bonding experience IS brain-identical with the mother-child bond, as all men have always claimed and all women have always vehemently denied (thus proving its truth). Moreover it is the initial surge of in-love oxytocin that starts the clock on women’s honeymoon period, i.e. the countdown to bond doom.
Maybe most counter-intuitively to men, orgasmic oxytocin causes *extremely* temporary trust feelings in women, which by the next day already recede into distrust.
The thought-exercises of Dr. Breuning suggest that irrational self-confidence is the key to men’s greater success in … polygyny.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201309/getting-past-the-stress-feeling-slighted
In short, oxytocin is the Love Drug for males, and causes oneitis. In contrast, testosterone is the Love Drug for females.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/05/female-viagra-will-save-monogamy-unfortunately.html
Mrs. Gamer said the other night that (Right now she felt like) she was in love with me. Coming from a place where she despised having sex with me–that is a miracle. One word: Dread. About three weeks ago I created Nuclear Dread and have been doing Dread every week for almost a year. Going out clubbing solo. Based on my Relationship Game, I flirt with Mrs. Gamer whenever we’re out together and at home. That helps to alleviate some of the drama.
Most women, when asked, will say that they want an equal partner. And they will believe it when they say it – it sounds right, and believing it makes them feel like they are better people. And they will tell men that men “should” also want equal partners rather than complimentary partners. Men wanting equal partners would make men better people too. The problem comes in what women mean when they use the word ‘equality’. They view equality optimistically on the up-slope and pessimistically on the down-slope. A woman with a BA would not feel un-equal to a man with… Read more »
In a very real sense, the more pair-bonded trust a woman has in her man, the more likely she is to cheat. Seriously.
Women on oxytocin find everybody more attractive.
Hoge et al. 2014. Gender moderates the effect of oxytocin on social judgments. Human Psychopharmacology, 29(3), 299-304.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24911580
Women on oxytocin are more likely to approach strange males.
Preckel et al. 2014. Oxytocin facilitates social approach behavior in women. Front Behav Neurosci., 8, 191.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24904342
I think most women chafe at the use of the word “opportunistically”, not that it is inaccurate. A perhaps more palatable way to say it is, “Women love with a hypergamy-influenced pragmatism.” The weaker species will always be the more pragmatic, always. Just compare the unending drone of human trivialities with the daily activities of a field mouse to get an example. Humans concern themselves, to cancer-causing-degrees with the flippant utterings of people half a world away. A field mouse eats whatever it finds that won’t kill it. Women are the more vulnerable portion of the human species. They are… Read more »
The beating will continue until it no longer will feel better when it stops.
@Novaseeker, @thedeti: Are you sure regarding your own SMV? What if what you call your “attraction floor” is really your own SMV? Don’t answer here, my point is not to question your SMV (I don’t care for that), but to question your theory.
@jf12: “I think you’ve stumbled upon the foundation of hypergamy.”
I think so too. Hypergamy lives where you cannot even imagine the risk of being without love/sex. Given the development of SMV with age, probably all the better looking women we are actually interested in might live in that state until well into their ’30s.
Sorry for double linking. Separating here.
In a very real sense, the more pair-bonded trust a woman has in her man, the more likely she is to cheat. Seriously.
Women on oxytocin find everybody more attractive.
Hoge et al. 2014. Gender moderates the effect of oxytocin on social judgments. Human Psychopharmacology, 29(3), 299-304.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24911580
Women on oxytocin are more likely to approach strange males.
Preckel et al. 2014. Oxytocin facilitates social approach behavior in women. Front Behav Neurosci., 8, 191.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24904342
First, apologies for not having commented on the previous post. I’ve been on a weekend snowmobiling trip and wasn’t really able to keep up with the thread which blew up well past what I expected. Sometimes you just gotta climb a mountain. @Nova, Deti, Jeremy, et. al., I’ve written before that Hypergamy does not seek it’s own level: http://therationalmale.com/2013/06/20/smv-ratios-attachment/ You guys have summed this up very succinctly, however I would add that when women get into “equal-partnership”, comparable SMV pairing – they say they want – these are invariably marked by a perpetual condition of “working on the relationship”, or… Read more »
A summary so far. The romantic Love Experience of men is oneitis induced by oxytocin. This latching is a scam biologically perpetrated on men, and only men, in order to trick them into staying put to help raise a baby into a toddler. In contrast, the “romantic” Love Experience of women is vestigial at best, principally presents as a mothering impulse and secondarily as a trusting feeling that makes the woman feel she doesn’t have to cater to the man’s needs.
Jeremy – “I think most women chafe at the use of the word “opportunistically”, not that it is inaccurate. A perhaps more palatable way to say it is, ‘Women love with a hypergamy-influenced pragmatism.'”
Why does it need to be said in a “more palatable” way? Why can’t objective accuracy be good enough?
So, yes, everyone is tempted to upgrade, if they can pull it off, but, no, that doesn’t mean men are hypergamous. Men are just as likely to have an affair with a sidegrade or a slight downgrade provided she’s above his attraction floor, whereas women don’t do this — they have affairs with upgrades, only, because they are not attracted to sidegrades and downgrades. @Nova. Very true when you are talking specifically about sex. But from a woman’s perspective because men are the gatekeepers of commitment which is where the female is at a disadvantage (unless they fulfill men’s hypergamy… Read more »
Are you sure regarding your own SMV? What if what you call your “attraction floor” is really your own SMV? There is an “absolute floor” in male attraction, regardless of what the man’s SMV is. Let’s say it’s around a “2” on the female scale. What that means is that a guy who is a 2 is screwed, because he is not attracted to women who are self+0 or self-1, and only to self+1 and higher. That can arise where the man’s SMV is itself quite low. Otherwise, no, there’s a difference between men’s floors and their own SMV. This… Read more »
Scarcity/abundance = SMV
So, no, not the case that men’s SMV is equal to their attraction floor. Men have a broader attraction than women do, and a lower attraction floor, and this in itself feeds the phenomenon of the cock carousel (and why you see the Governator cheating with the woman he did and so on).
I agree with you that women have the overall advantage and that would have to be the case once again because of supply and demand. Eggs and child birth time finite vs. Sperm nearly infinite.
@Badpainter
It doesn’t, and that wasn’t my point. The rest of the comment explains my point. Female’s chafing at Rollo’s words on this point should be ignored as the wailings of the willfully self-ignorant.
But from a woman’s perspective because men are the gatekeepers of commitment which is where the female is at a disadvantage (unless they fulfill men’s hypergamy requirements by looking pretty and/or giving lots of hot sex) this could be rightly thought of as the same. It isn’t the same because the key question is this: “is the person attracted to someone who is somewhat less attractive than they are themselves?”. If the answer is “no”, then that’s hypergamy. If the answer is “yes”, then it’s optimization, because whether someone is hypergamous or not, they will always seek to optimize. So… Read more »
@Rollo I have observed what you describe, but I don’t think it is due to passive dread. Have you ever read any books by Deborah Tannen? She has done research into the ways that men and women communicate, and the reasons behind their methods of communication. One thing she describes is that men “report-speak” in order to advance their place in a social hierarchy. Thus, a man will attempt to exert his dominance by virtue of his speaking – his preferred place is that of being “one-up”. He will accept equality. He will HATE being “one-down”, and will use his… Read more »
@Novaseeker @thedeti: I’ll take back the point regarding the floor. Was a bad idea.
@ Jeremy
Thanks.
I asked because the first paragraph of that comment seemed incongruent with the rest.
“ Are you sure regarding your own SMV? What if what you call your “attraction floor” is really your own SMV?” Just to add to Nova’s comments about the absolute attraction floor. My personal experience of the floor is like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart describing obscenity: “ I know it when I see it.” Women below “the floor” are women you would reject sexually even when they serve themselves up on a platter. They are women who you would not have sex with under any then-existing circumstances. Example: I was in college at a house party, putting on… Read more »
[…] in other words, men and women are different. We just are. We think different. We experience the world different. We want and are motivated by […]
I’m on board with the behavioral observations here, but I’m seeing something that I do not grok in this: “The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies: For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.” The above rule sounds very zero-sum to me, and that somehow is not aligning well with . . . something . . . The zero-sum frame here maybe part of the/my problem? My (very broadly read) sense of the evolution of the planet is that it is toward something, something more, which – I think – implies the ability… Read more »
@Novaseeker
“Hypergamy isn’t upgrading. Often misunderstood as such.”
+
“Hypergamy means “only attracted to those who are more attractive than I am” — only attracted upwards, in other words. That is all it means. o s”
I’m one who subscribes to hypergamy = upgrading.
I’m also open to having my mind changed or swayed but I can’t quite understand where you’ve made the distinction between upgrading and optimization.
“…only attracted upwards…”
Upwards/Upgrading. Aren’t they the same? What am I missing?
Genuinely interested.
@ Rollo Tomassi It’s at this time she’ll attempt to limit his ‘progress’ towards an SMV that puts her into a position where his imperatives outstrip her own. There are countless social conventions that facilitate this for her at an age where his SMV is peaking and hers declines. She’s essentially getting exactly what she’d previously wished for, a “co-equal” partner who still hypergamously exceeds her real SMV. Only now (hopefully) his SMV is +2, maybe even +4 if she really ‘gets comfortable’ and obese, and he’s got to be brought down to her level via sociological and psychological means.… Read more »
I agree. But why does she want him to win? Is her interest in his success because she has an altruistic streak and just idealistically wants what’s best for him because she loves who he is? Or is it due to an associative need to see him succeed because what he is serves her imperative better as a relatively attractive woman who’s an obvious outlier for her age? I know far too many men whose wive treat them like the abject Beta-children mules they are in private, but would scratch any woman’s eyes out for pointing out that their husbands… Read more »
BreakingBenjamin January 5th, 2015 at 8:29 am In my experience love is never on the other side. The best you can hope for is that in her mind she can’t do better. I had children in mind (not initially) and that is what you need to keep it together for them. Nice story BTW. And yes. They do go insane with desire if they think they have given it up and you don’t act interested. “My c*nt is so precious. I have given it up to you and you don’t want it? What is a matter with you? What is… Read more »
@dcllcd
As men, who do not experience hypergamy from an internal perspective, we should be cautious what definitions we attempt to throw at it. Best to simply describe behavioral patterns that are explained by it than try to fully define what we ourselves do not experience.
I would call it a set of baseline behavioral tendencies suited towards the maximized potential of female sexual success.
I would not argue that women love opportunistically. Take away the safety and comforts of modern life and it becomes clear, women NEED men (and on an individual level the best man they can secure via idealistic love) to survive. Men don’t really “need” women, except to reproduce. But they don’t need them to survive, except maybe before the age of five or whenever a boy can survive on his own without a mother. If it weren’t for idealistic love, why would a man do anything more than mate with a woman, hope he’s passed on his genes, and move… Read more »
https://twitter.com/Zelcorpion/status/552045740479229952
It’s important to remember that SMV is contextual for women.
Men and women fight over the definition of love because love is not a shared experience, only mutually experienced one. In fact, just going by even biological differences in touch sensitivity, pain tolerance, eye sensitivity to color, taste, smell, etc… It’s difficult to believe any individual human experience can be called a shared experience. At some point, in coming up with a structured society, you have to draw lines, but really those lines are always arbitrary. Most that has been written about love has been written by men. Keep in mind, that that body of literature is written and read… Read more »
“It’s important to remember that SMV is contextual for women.”
The question is if then SMV is the best model to understand Hypergamy. From my experience with women, they don’t have a any clue about some objective value of a man. And this is indeed very difficult to asses since value is derived from values which are subjective as they are your idealisms. Women take their assessment of a man almost completely from how the man sees himself or how she interprets his actions towards her in this regard. Which is frame & game.
OP: “I’m actually surprised that more women have yet to call me to the carpet about their personal experiences of love from the commodity post… So, yes, men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely – from their own individuated experiences. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. The processes they used to come to this love state differs in concept and existential individuation, and what sustains that love state is still dependent upon the criteria of men’s idealistic and women opportunistic concepts of love.” Rollo, I think you are… Read more »
@Atticus, How would you respond to pauli12? I was married for 29 years to a man who got hurt before we got married and couldn’t work again. I stuck by his side, he made the decisions and I worked every day teaching kindergarten. All I asked was that when I got home for him to just smile at me and treat me well. Mostly he started in on something negative as soon as I walked through the door. He was passive aggressive to me and finally after 29 years my love for him took a nose dive and I couldn’t… Read more »
@ Rollo Tomassi But why does she want him to win? Is her interest in his success because she has an altruistic streak and just idealistically wants what’s best for him because she loves who he is? I think it comes back to biological firmware. I might be wrong but women appear to be excited when they see men score touchdowns in life. I remember the time I made my first big sale. When I came home my wife ran up and gave me a huge, passionate kiss. It wasn’t a congratulations kiss. it was a “you’re hot and I… Read more »
jf12 January 5th, 2015 at 9:46 am When I still believed in love and let myself “fall in” I’d lose all interest in other women. I’d still recognize sexy and beauty. But I wasn’t interested. To get that reaction from me she would have to stay surrendered for a month or so. I no longer let myself fall in. It has no advantage. As soon as you fall in you want to be nice to her and she doesn’t like that. She will stop surrendering while telling you how much she craves the benefits of her former surrender. What I… Read more »
Upwards/Upgrading. Aren’t they the same? What am I missing? Genuinely interested. Hmm. Not sure how I can explain it any differently than I have. Everyone seeks to optimize. The best car. The best house. The best job. The best etc. And to upgrade them over the course of life, if they can. That’s optimization. And men and women both seek to optimize their mate choices. The difference between men and women is where the “floor line” is. That is, even though we know everyone is trying to optimize, the issue is where is the floor below which they won’t go… Read more »
@ Novaseeker, before divorce was widely accepted, women could not upwords/upsize without social ramification. That’s what kept it in check. @ Rollo re: big love, maybe that’s projection — women “could” overlook a man’s weight if his collective SMV warranted it? So they mistakenly think men calculate SMV the same way, rather than knowingly mislead their big gal pal? Unless, of course, they want the same guy as the big gal, then they’d probably take her to lunch at the all you can eat buffet everyday, too. So maybe on a macro level the “he should love you just the… Read more »
Novaseeker said: “ The converse — a woman married to a man of lower SMV because of his other qualities — also happens, because women run out of other options, and settle, but these tend not to work nearly as well as the other type, precisely because they run contra to the woman’s natural hypergamy. “Women, however, do fairly often marry men to whom they are not attracted, or at least to whom they are not nearly as attracted as they were to lovers prior to deciding to scale down and settle for marriage, because of the numbers game when… Read more »
@ Novaseeker additionally when open hypergamy was restrained and a woman had to “stand by her man” because society demanded it, her only route to upwards/upsize was to (gasp!) support the guy she picked, be the woman behind the man! That was how hypergamy played out before, my 2 cent theory…
@ redpillgirlnotes
But when women no longer NEED men to survive the cost earning what you’re calling women’s “idealistic love” rises to the point where it’s no longer worth the price, especially when price is unstable, unknowable, and the benefits are unclear.
The NEED, that no longer exists, once mitigated against the rampant opportunism (a sort of emotional profiteering) we see today.
Female hypergamy is rooted in identity. I’m going to talk about a single part of that, the identity we get from our family. You could easily call this social class. After she reaches adulthood a woman’s identity, her value, is derived from the man she gets to marry her. Before that her value derived from her father and his extended family. Once a man reaches adulthood he begins to build his value, his identity, on his own, independent of his father. A man is a lifelong building project. He can improve his value almost until the day he dies. Any… Read more »
@ Novaseeker and when casual sex was not seen as “empowering” but socially damaging, a woman who ran around with the alphas she couldn’t catch because of her tingles paid that price with her greatly diminished SMV. That constraint is also (at least women believe, and blue pill men may also accept) lifted.
@ BP I can see why you would say that. This incentive is gone. Women, listen up! Is that really what we want? Men to no longer want to love idealistically? Hummm…
@ bp I should have said men to no longer *NEED* to love idealistically. They may still want to but…big difference.
@Rollo: “I was married for 29 years to a man who got hurt before we got married and couldn’t work again. I stuck by his side, he made the decisions and I worked every day teaching kindergarten. All I asked was that when I got home for him to just smile at me and treat me well.” Perhaps an outlier? Look at the Beta-of-the -Year on CH. The guy defending his wife’s one-way trip to Mars. Would she be going to Mars if she had 2 babies? Does she love that guy? You’ve always said that men and women are… Read more »
@ redpillgirlnotes
Bloom, and I’m going to refer to you as that because it’s easier to type, speaking only for myself I hope I never again experience “being in love.” There is nothing beneficial in having those feelings. I neither want nor need “love” and I no longer seek it. I will however love as opportunistically as any woman, with a clear understanding that nothing is forever, and I’ll invest and commit in accordance with that knowledge.
And now thinking about this is becoming too disturbing so I will leave it at this…the kicker is I don’t think most women themselves understand their own hypergamy or how the social changes they have demanded in order to (they thought) better maximize it, have destroyed the very yin/yang balance their very hypergamy nature depended on. To men it may seem like women are making a calculated/conscious choice, but it is anything but. Women still do not collectively see this “better” isn’t better for them, at all. And I cringe to think what that will take. It’s woman’s nature gone… Read more »
That constraint is also (at least women believe, and blue pill men may also accept) lifted.
@Bloom —
Correct, the constraints were lifted — both social/sexual mores and financial need. That’s true. I was just trying to explain what hypergamy is, and how it differs from the kind of optimization that both sexes engage in.
@donwory The above rule sounds very zero-sum to me, and that somehow is not aligning well with . . . something . . . To the individual it is a zero sum game, even if society eventually gains. Any gains society makes can be realized after your lifetime. In the current SMV, betas are expected to lose out on lustful sex with young, attractive women so that those women can optimize their hypergamy. Individual men lose out, individual women gain, society as a whole ostensibly gains in the long run through a mechanism put in place by natural selection over… Read more »
@ Atticus
You make a great point. Perhaps ” opportunistic love” is the psychological compensation for the risk of losing the man. Perhaps it’s the next evolutionary step for men as well. A man abandoned because he is not actually needed will have to adapt his psychology to dismiss, forget, and rewrite emotions to survive, and try again.
@ bp you can call me Bloom, good to see you again! I miss seeing all of you at J4G. Glad to see you all here.
@ atticus you may be onto something. Beyond widowhood, women also had to deal with other forced changes in days gone by, like being conquered, captured, traded, or sold. Maybe women can’t afford to love? At least not idealistically? Hummm…
OK, OMG I have to stop thinking about this. Brain tilt. Carry on. 🙂
@Bloom, Atticus: This is the War Brides principle http://therationalmale.com/2011/10/03/war-brides/ And I do agree with the zero-sum aspect of it – it is ruthless. However I’m not going to say that the love women feel for men isn’t real to them, and as per the dictates of Hypergamy just as I wouldn’t deny men feel love according to their idealism. I do however find it interesting that almost all of the female criticism of the love series consists of anecdotes about how much they invested themselves in their “love” only to have a man not live up to the reciprocation they… Read more »
@Rollo (From War Brides). Ever wonder why it is a woman can ‘get over you’ so quickly after a break up from a relationship you’d thought was rock solid for so long? Ever wonder why she returns to the abusive boyfriend she hopes will change for her? Look no further than feminine solipsism.
What if you substituted “Women’s inability to love” for “solipsism” and “opportunistic love” in all your work?
@Bloom, re: “He thinks she loves him idealistically, she thinks he loves her because she’s “the very best.””
Great observation! Men are always befuddled by women’s disappointment that the men don’t require the women to be best.
Both sides can compromise, therefore, but for one side, it is a compromise which leaves him with less than optimal yet still attractive, but for the other it is a compromise which leaves her with not only sub-optimal but unattractive *because* sub-optimal. Hypergamy is where sub-optimal options are per se unattractive, in other words. It has to optimize, because sub-optimal is not attractive (or it has to compromise attraction altogether). The man may choose to sub-optimize and still find the woman attractive. That’s the key difference. @ Nova. Women will not be attracted to sub-optimal when it comes to sex.… Read more »
Hi jf12! And it wraps back around again to game (or dropping out) as the defense/solution/counterpoint, doesn’t it… I somehow sorta feel better, even if I wish it weren’t so. Well men, game on then! Civilization depends on you (as it always has, not that women will admit it!) Good to see you again!
deti makes an irrefutable blanket statement about women. “They are looking less for sexy and more for provider stability. So, they project this onto the men they are “interested” in, and conclude that the sex part will just take care of itself, or will take on declining importance as they both age. It doesn’t work out that way, though”
The primary social obstacle to removing this projective log from our sisters’ eyes is that the social engineers have decreed by policy that it is just a peck.
speck
Off topic but I wanted to share.
Heartiste gets blow the fuck out:
http://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/chicks-dig-jerks-right/
Finally someone else is waking up to Heartiste’s bullshit premise of “all you need to be is a bad boy, women LOVE,LOVE,LOVE bad boys.” LOL, whatever helps you sleep at night. Long live the real shiv!!
“@ Rollo re: big love, maybe that’s projection — women “could” overlook a man’s weight if his collective SMV warranted it? So they mistakenly think men calculate SMV the same way, rather than knowingly mislead their big gal pal? Unless, of course, they want the same guy as the big gal, then they’d probably take her to lunch at the all you can eat buffet everyday, too. So maybe on a macro level the “he should love you just the way you are” advice is female to female sabotage. Hummm” Bloom: This kind of gets to what I think you’re… Read more »
@lh, re: lack of objective SMV value of men.
I wholeheartedly agree. A very succinct explanation of Game’s success.
@Atticus On an evolutionary biological level, would not the female being incapable of love be useful to the survival of the species? Men died hunting and fighting and the women move on. A women pining away for a lost love is not looking to make more babies. Not just useful… necessary. But be careful, we’re talking about masculine love, the love that men grow to have and express to women. Consider early human life. It was brutish, short, and much more constant fear of the next predator. In this environment, it was the men who were tasked with self-sacrifice. If… Read more »
Also, I know that insufferable idiot jf12 is going to comment by saying, “NO,NO,NO! Women love men who treat them bad. I’m right and you’re wrong!”
Give it a rest, jf12. Stomping your ideas on others doesn’t make them right, no matter how hard you screech.
@ deti spot on as usual. 🙂 Ok now I *really* have to go get stuff done. Fascinating, this is…. I will look back in later!