The Reckoning

If these bell curves look eerily similar to the male SMV curve I introduced two years prior to them being published, it’s only because my experience in the manosphere led me to then what the researchers concluded:

So why the late 30s? The most obvious factor is education: Scientists spend ages 5 through 18 in school, and then ages 18 through 30ish getting their academic degrees. Then a few years of learning on the job, and presto! You dig up an uncertainty principle. Meanwhile, scientific breakthroughs tend to be less common in old age because we invest less in learning as we get older, and our skills gradually become less relevant.

It’s a pretty fascinating study if you have the time to read it.

If you remove the Nobel Prizes and innovative achievements out of the equation I think the rough outline of the bell curve is still generally reflective of most men’s peak potentials with regard to SMV.

Realized Potentials

In Mid-Life Crisis I offered that this contrived “crisis” really isn’t rooted in a man’s yearning for his younger days, but rather his coming to the realization that his SMV and peak potential put him into a state of awareness that he could actualize things he previously thought weren’t possible for him. For many men this is the first time in their lives that they really have the introspection to understand the harsh Red Pill truth.

They realize options they never knew they could have, and they realize they could exercise them in ways they never expected.

They come to understand that the life decisions they’d made 10-12 years ago were based on a fulfilling long-term female sexual strategies. Now they see how that path played out for them. Men find themselves in a position of having wasted that SMV peak potential by accepting the responsibilities he was convinced were his duty by the Feminine Imperative in his 20s, or he finds himself experiencing the boons of that SMV and unable to truly capitalize on them because of his commitments.

It’s important to mention that there is a stark contrast between a man’s mid-life awareness of his peak SMV potential and how women experience their own 10-15 years earlier. Men experience their SMV peak with the benefit of about 12 years of maturity to reflect on while women experience their peak without that benefit. There is no comparison to how men and women experience this peak.

After roughly 15 years of obeisance to the Feminine Imperative, and for the first time in their lives, men can experience a sexual market valuation above that of the women they committed themselves to. For the first time in a man’s life the Cardinal Rule of Relationships shifts to his (potential) advantage. For men who’ve experienced a nominally sexless marriage during that time, coming to the awareness that they’ve tolerated that state for so long and combined with a new realization of their SMV, men will deductively begin taking stock of their marriages.

Granted, a majority of men don’t maximize their personal potential and their wives’ SMV can still, at least perceptively so, out class their own. This is a particularly frustrating position for men without the Red Pill awareness necessary to understand the precariousness of it. These are the men who tend to rely on the fallacy of relational equity and the equalist hope that his wife can be expected to rationally appreciate the sacrifices he’s made of himself for her and their family’s benefit.

Resented Potentials

For women in either case there is a resentment for men entering their peak phase. With few notably exceptional outliers most women realize in earnest that their SMV is well below their husband’s or the potentially acceptable men they’d prefer to be intimate with during the same age range (35-38). On some level of awareness these women understand that their sexual marketability is, perhaps for the first time, at a disadvantage.

Feminine-operative social conventions shift radically during this time because the long-term security needs side of Hypergamy takes on a new urgency as women come to the reality that their own SMV has declined. At the Epiphany Phase the frantic realization that the past short-term sexual indiscretions Hypergamy made a priority for her are no longer (and never really were) a sustainable reality creates the necessity of men to forgive them.

The readied social conventions usually revolve around men’s social contract and commitments, but the old standby of shame is always useful. At no other point in a man’s life will he be humbled (humiliated) more than in the years leading up to his peak potential years. Again, this is by design. In the meta scope of women’s sexual strategy, women cannot afford a man becoming self-aware of his role in fulfilling her strategy.

This is an interesting paradox; optimally a woman would want a man to realize his maximal potential to ensure her long-term security, but she can’t have him fully understand the role he plays in serving her sexual strategy. Thus he must be humbled, if not outright ridiculed, in his social and professional victories. His confidence at this stage cuts both ways. While his confidence in his potential is attractive, women realize it’s also attractive to other women at a time when her SMV is on its decline in earnest and he’s beginning to become more aware of the game that’s been perpetrated on him during the 15 years he’s risen to that maturity.

Late Game Dread

Dread is always an effective Game principle, but the passive Dread that accompanies a man’s SMV peak years is particularly potent. I’ve explored passive or soft Dread in the past, but I think men in their peak years need to understand the effect that unsolicited social proof as a result of increased status and SMV has on women’s (wives’) Dread during this phase – particularly for women who’ve until then never experienced their LTR man in that context.

Red Pill savvy men understand that a woman’s imagination is the most potent tool in the Game toolbox, however, this peak phase has the potential to really emphasize those imaginings and can be played to a real advantage. Since a woman has more to lose on her long-term sexual strategy’s investments these imaginings can inspire an anxiety she’s never known. For a Beta man this is usually the point at which he will double down on his placating in order to allay his woman’s fears, which in turn only reemphasizes and verifies his Beta status to her.

(Implied) Experience Teaches Best

One final point here, I should add that at no other time in a man’s life will employing Amused Mastery be so effective:

Amused Mastery is particularly effective for older men / younger women Game. Assuming you’re in reasonably good shape and have some degree of affluence, being older gives you a degree of authenticity. With maturity comes an expectation of knowledge and experience for Men. I’ve used Amused Mastery with my “pour girls” at promo events and it’s like cat nip for them. You become that Father figure to them (FILF?) that they crave, but can’t seem to get from younger guys. There’s a certain Alpha security dynamic at play between a woman and a Man who emits an ambient vibe of having been with enough women to be able to predict her shit tests, and then pass them with a casual roll of his eyes and a knowing smirk. When a man is giving off the cues of Amused Mastery theres an unspoken presumption by women that he “just gets it” when it comes to dealing with women.

Amused Mastery is far more effective during a man’s SMV peak because women presume that the attitude is more legitimate since a man matures slower into his peak. They expect men to have the maturity and experience to actually be amused by a less experienced, less mature woman. An established man who’s made the most of his potential is presumed to have an attractive Frame into which a woman will want to become a part of.

Fem-centric society conditions men to humble themselves for fear that his confidence would be interpreted as cockiness and thus risk her rejection of him. Most (Beta) men are petrified to even experiment with Amused Mastery because they believe it would be interpreted as disrespect toward a woman, but the truth of it is counterintuitive to them. What they fail to consider is the associations women make with a man’s maturity:

The Associations of Maturity

First off,  it’s a mistake to just peg 40 y.o.s in this demographic. There are plenty of early to mid thirties guys that can and do pull girls 5 to 8 years younger than themselves regularly. Funny how there’s little shaming stigma with that age difference. It’s not a man’s physical age so much as what the age represents (or is perceived to) – maturity, accomplishment, better provisioning capacity, status, etc. Do ALL men actually realize these to their satisfaction by this time? Of course not, but it’s the perception that they SHOULD have actualized this that is the attractant in comparison to younger guys who haven’t, nor would really be expected to. Mature Men represent this perception of assumed accomplishment and security – exactly what women are looking for in a phase of life where their sexual marketability declines and their need for long term provisioning becomes more urgent..