Adaptations – Part II

When I first published the comparative SMV graph a few years ago one of the first criticisms was that the age comparisons between men and women seemed too concrete and too specific to contemporary times. I tried to make concessions for this then, but when I was writing that post it was at first meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Still, I try to write with the presupposition that critics will take things either too literally or too figuratively. I knew that the literati then and now would think, “…well, yes it’s a good outline, but you’re looking at the SMV from the perspective of 2012 and society was much different 50, 70, 100, 2,000 years ago so this graph is flawed…”

My SMV graph was never meant to be some canonical tablet handed to me from the almighty. I thought of it then, and still think of it now, as a very good workable outline for how men and women’s comparative SMV relates to the other. This has been borne out in many other statistics from individual studies sent to me by readers or just my coming across them since I created that graph.

That said, and in relation to where I’m going with this Adaptations series, those critics aren’t wrong to suggest that this outline would be subject to the social environments and simple physical realities of earlier times, and likely some times yet to come.

Take what I’m about to delve into here with a bit of salt; I’m not a historian. One of my favorite figures from the civil war ear was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. If you’ve seen the movie Glory you know who I’m referencing here. This young man was 23 when he enlisted and 25 when he was promoted to Major and then Colonel. In that time Shaw saw some pretty grisly shit, including the battle of Antietam.

I’d seen the movie when it first came out in 1989, but after watching it again for a class assignment I had a new appreciation for the real man who was Robert Shaw. I saw the film using what was just becoming my Red Pill lens. It struck me that the realities of that era forced men to become Men much sooner than men do today. The realities of our times give us a leisure the men of Shaw’s age simple couldn’t imagine. The realities of that time necessitated a quick maturation to bear the burden of heavy responsibilities. Those burdens were much more imperative then, but a 23 year old is still a 23 year old.

I thought about how I’d spent my own years between the ages of 23-25 when I was at the peak of my semi-rock star tail chasing in the late 80’s Hollywood scene. I began to really think about the differences in the social and physical environments of the 1860s and the 1980s-90s. I’ve always joked that men don’t become Men until they’re 30. Even on the SMV graph the point at which I attribute men’s real ascendency to their peak SMV at around age 30, but this wasn’t always the case in the past.

Men (comparatively) live longer lives as a result of health and medical advances, but (at least in westernizing culture) it takes much more time and personal investment, as well as acculturation for men to realize their personal potential. Men’s burden of performance wasn’t much different in prior eras, but the timeframe necessary to reach a man’s peak potential was much more accelerated.

So to address the concerns of the temporal critics of the SMV graph, yes, this graph might look a bit different to the men and women of the 19th century. Considering lifespans of the era and the social conditions then, the ages during which a woman would reach her own peak might be around 17, and a man’s may be 25, however the same curves of the bell wouldn’t change drastically. Men adapted to the conditions their environment dictated to them then in much the same way they did before and after the sexual revolution. And this adaptation came as the result of what was expected of them as their burden of performance, as well as what their social leisures would permit them.

Love American Style

Into the 70’s the new social contract of the Free Love generation began to take a new shape. Bear in mind that this new equalitarian contract was based on the hopeful presumption that both sexes would mutually honor the “what’s on the inside is what counts” normalization of attraction. Under this contract women’s Hypergamous natures could flourish, while men’s unlimited access sexual strategy could ostensibly be realized.

Of course these lofty, higher-consciousness, presumptions  were meant to supersede human nature and an evolved sexual arousal function based on human biology. One thing that still thwarts ideological feminism today is that its perceived goal states contradict human beings’ natural states. This contradiction gets narratively blamed on men not wanting to cooperate with feminism, but even the most ardent feminist is still guilty of her own biology and arousal triggers contradicting herself.

Biology trumps conviction. People get fidgety when I apply this in a religious context, but it’s equally applicable to feminism and really any ideology that under-appreciates human nature and the realities of its conditions.

As the new sexual landscape began to solidify, men began to adapt their own sexual strategies to the conditions of this fast and loose environment. Just prior to the Disco Generation hardcore pornography began its path to the ubiquitous porn we know today. The sexual restraint necessitated by the realities of prior generations loosened in light of widespread hormonal birth control and safe(er) legal abortion.

While Hypergamy was effectively unleashed, the women of this era hadn’t fully grasped the scope of it being so or what it would become. Acceptable premarital sex, abortion and unilaterally feminine controlled birth control meant that women had an unprecedented degree of control over their Hypergamous decision making. I doubt many women of the time understood this, but the only real control men had (and still have now) over women’s breeding and birthing outcomes was now grounded in the psychological (Game) or the physical (arousal). Provisioning was still a consideration for women, but the division between short-term and long-term pairing became more stark.

As I mentioned here in the beginning, a slowing of the maturation process was the inevitable result of women’s freedom of Hypergamous choice. Short-term Alpha Fucks no longer posed the same societal and personal risks of a pre-birth control generation, thus long-term pairing choices (Beta bucks) began to be delayed. The ideological cover story was one of women expecting men to “love their insides” despite their age, psychological baggage or physical condition.

Women’s preoccupation with The Wall was ostensibly mitigated by the Free Love social contract that men would honor their end of the higher-consciousness equalitarian dream of a mutually agreed attraction based on intrinsic qualities. The biological realities for both sexes was much different.

Women trusted they could be sexually ‘free’ without social stigmatization, but the reality was that the long-term needs of Hypergamy could be postponed in what would eventually become a Sandbergian sexual strategy. The more Alpha men of the time – ones in touch with the visceral nature of women and themselves – understood the incredibly boon this represented to them.

It’s important to bear in mind that Hypergamy was not the openly embraced dynamic it’s come into today. Thus, the unspoken, secretive nature of Hypergamy was something a man who ‘just got it’ instinctively understood and women were aroused by it.

Machismo

During the 70s ‘Macho’ men began to adapt to a new paradigm. They adapted to the reality that women were conflicted by the Free Love paradigm. These men embraced both the sexual openness expected of women, but they also understood that in spite of the social contract of love being based on intrinsic qualities, women still wanted to fuck (with abandon) the men with extrinsic arousal triggering qualities. The physical began to take priority above the emotional pretentiousness.

The macho quality could take different forms. Whether is was the good ole boy of the south or the Tony Manero at Studio 54, understanding the mindset is what’s important here.

Macho men in the discos and key parties of the 70s figured out they could ‘Game’ the old paradigm of non-exclusivity paired with birth control by re-embracing (with disco era gusto) a masculinity that had been abandoned just a decade earlier. Unlimited access to unlimited sexuality was for men who overtly challenged the Free Love preconditions. They enjoyed the rewards of its expectations of women while rebounding off the self-expectations of the Beta men who were still cooperating with the Free Love social contract.

This era is an interesting parallel to our own. I think much of the Red Pill resentment coming from men still plugged into a Blue Pill mindset is rooted in a similar perception that they’re playing by an acceptable set of rules that “men with Game” are exploiting for their own selfish ends. What they don’t realize is that their Blue Pill interpretations are a designed part of a social paradigm that supports feminine primacy. Game works because, like the macho men of the 70s, it’s primarily based on women’s inborn psychology and the visceral realities of women’s biological impulses.

Beta men in the 70s still believed that the Free Love mindset was equally and mutually beneficial for both sexes since it was supposedly based on a freedom from performance for themselves while freeing women from sexual repression and (covertly) from the reality of the Wall. In reality the Free Love paradigm put men at a disadvantage by giving women almost total control of Hypergamy and the time in which to realize short term mating and long term provisioning.

So these men’s resentment of the Alphas of the era is understandable when you consider that their visceral attractiveness was observably and behaviorally arousing to women who were supposed to idealistically love them for who they were not what they were. These men represented a return to that burden of performance they’d hoped to avoid in the Free Love contract.

These Alpha men understood women’s base impulses then, and that understanding became an integral part of their “just getting it” attraction. However, as we’ll see in the next part of this series, these men would eventually become the butt of their own joke as the Feminine Imperative fluidly transitioned into a new social paradigm of Fem-powerment developing in the 80s and reaching its apex in the 90s.

The arousing ‘macho’ men, the Alphas of the era, would systematically become the most ridiculed parodies and caricatures of masculinity as women came into a better understanding of the power they were only beginning to realize and the Beta men took their perceived revenge. And likewise men adapted to this new paradigm based on the same visceral reality women’s sexuality is fundamentally based on.