Adaptations – Part III

Today’s chart comes courtesy of Time’s recent analysis of how Americans met their spouses (h/t to Heartiste). Heartiste provides the most obvious reasoning for these stats:

Every inception source of romance is down over the past 70 years except for bars and online. What happens in bars and online that doesn’t happen in the normal course of events when couples meet through the more traditional routes? That’s right: Intense, relentless, and usually charmless come-ons by drunk and socially clumsy men, that pump girls full of themselves. We’ve entered the age of the narcissistically-charged woman who houses in the well-marbled fat of her skull ham a steroid-injected, Facebook-fed hamster spinning its distaff vessel’s place in the world as the center of existence.

Not to be outdone, but what CH doesn’t address here is the adaptive strategies men are pragmatically employing in order to facilitate their sexual strategy. What this chart illustrates is a graphic representation of the adaptive sexual strategies of the sexes over the course of 70 years.

Granted, in contemporary society women’s attention and indignation needs are as ubiquitously satisfied as men’s need for sexual release (i.e. internet porn) is . This of course leads the mass of women to perceive their social and SMV status to be far greater than it actually is – and when that inflated SMV is challenged by the real world there are countless social conventions already established to insulate women and simultaneously convince men that their perceived status should be the fantasy they believe it is.

It’s important to keep this in mind because men’s adaptive strategies key on women’s self-impressions of their SMV (and often personal worth). I start with this for the last installment of this series because the intergender conditions we’re experiencing today were seeded by the adaptive strategies men used in the past and the contingent counter-adaptations of women employed then too.

From The Abdication Imperative:

The Abdication Imperative

Hypergamy is rooted in doubt. Hypergamy is an inherently insecure system that constantly tests, assesses, retests and reassesses for optimal reproductive options, long-term provisioning, parental investment, and offspring and personal protection viability in a potential mate. Even under the most secure of prospects hypergamy still doubts. The evolutionary function of this incessant doubt would be a selected-for survival instinct, but the process of hypergamy’s assessment requires too much mental effort to be entirely relegated to women’s subconscious. Social imperatives had to be instituted not only to better facilitate the hypergamous process, but also to reassure the feminine that men were already socially pre-programmed to align with that process.

In an era when women’s sexual selection has been given exclusive control to the feminine, in an age when hypergamy has been loosed upon the world en force, social conventions had to be established to better silence the doubt that hypergamy makes women even more acutely aware of. And nowhere is this doubt more pronounced than in the confines of a monogamous commitment intended to last a lifetime. Thus we have the preconception “Happy Wife equals Happy Life” pre-programmed into both gender’s collective social consciousness. It’s as if to say “It’s OK Hypergamy, everything’s gonna be alright because we all believe that women should be the default authority in any relationship.”

When you disassemble any operative feminine social convention, on its most base, instinctive level the convention’s latent purpose is to facilitate and pacify hypergamy.

Heirs of Free Love

Over the course of this series I’ve mentioned the “Free Love” movement. When most people hear that term their first mental impression is usually something like the picture I posted for part one; hippies at woodstock smoking pot. Later it quickly morphed into the 70’s adaptation of socially permissive promiscuity. However, it’s very important to understand that this most recent Free Love social push is by no means the first in human history.

Our impression of Free Love today was colored by the Baby Boom generation, but there have been many Free Love “movements” in the past. This was a fascinating read in light of the SCOTUS recent ruling on gay marriage:

A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. An Early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage. They practiced nudism and believed themselves to be without original sin.

In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage,^[15] and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership

[…] The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where ideas such as free love could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins), who supported the French Revolution developed early ideas about feminism and free love.

Notable among them was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine’s apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.^[19] His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as “Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?” and “Earth’s Answer” seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem “London” he speaks of “the Marriage-Hearse” plagued by “the youthful Harlot’s curse”, the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the “frozen marriage-bed”.

There are certain manosphere writers of note who believe that our current state of “social degeneracy” is unprecedented in human history. And while it’s certain that no prior generation did it in the same manner as the one before it, ours is simply one more chapter in a Free Love flareup that’s punctuated history for many cultures, not just the west – all prompted by the underlying bio-evolutionary / psychological impulses our race has always been subject to.

That said, it’s important to consider the residual social after effects of our most recent Free Love incidence. I can’t speak to the era in the past, but the Free Love ideology is very much an evident part of the egalitarian equalism ideology that’s rooted itself in our contemporary culture. As western culture spreads, so too does that equalism rooted in Free Love.

The Rise of Fem-powerment

By the time the 80s had begun the redefinition of conventional masculinity – masculinity adapted to capitalize on women’s short-term, Alpha Fucks, sexual strategy – was beginning to take shape. By the mid 80s gone were the Captain Kirk and Han Solo archetypal machismo characters. They were systematically replaced by sensitive, supportive, asexual and unthreatening Dr. Huxtable and increasingly contrasted with laughable parodies of conventional masculinity; these roles redefined to fit into shaming and obfuscating any former idea of masculinity and the men who’d attempt to embrace it.

The action heroes of the era abounded, but the expectation to accept a new archetype, the Strong Independent Ass Kicking Woman® was coming into its own.

Granted, the feminization process was gradual. Throughout the 80s this feminization was primarily reinforced by men (or men like them) who’d borne the brunt of the ‘macho men’ of the 70s sexual opportunism. Beta men of the post Disco Generation and the men who identified with them adapted their own Beta Game of increased identification with the feminine, and thus began the rise of the era of fem-powerment.

A new paradigm was evolving; a social environment founded on the same ‘higher selves’ faux-equalism of the Free Love generation(s), but one predicated on Beta men’s enthusiastic supportiveness of women’s imperatives. Gradually the Free Love narrative was sublimated by a one-sided expectation of male supportiveness and self-identification with women.

From Identity Crisis:

Far too many young men maintain the notion that for them to receive the female intimacy they desire they should necessarily become more like the target of their affection in their own personality. In essence, to mold their own identify to better match the girl they think will best satisfy this need. So we see examples of men compromising their self-interests to better accomodate the interests of the woman they desire to facilitate this need for intimacy (i.e. sex). We all know the old adage women are all too aware of, “Guys will do anything to get laid” and this is certainly not limited to altering their individual identities and even conditions to better facilitate this. It’s all too common an example to see men select a college based on the available women at that college rather than academic merit to fit their own ambitions or even choose a college to better maintain a pre-existing relationship that a woman has chosen and the young man follows. In order to justify these choices he will alter his identity and personality by creating rationales and new mental schema to validate this ‘decision’ for himself. It becomes an ego protection for a decision he, on some level, knows was made for him.

Beta Game is predicated upon this effort to become more alike, more in touch with a calculating feminine ideal men they were being conditioned to believe was equitable to their concept of love and would be reciprocated with appreciation and intimacy. Into the 90s, men built their lives around the ‘high self’ hope that if they could just relate more to the feminine – supporting their girlfriends and wives in equalist endeavors women of the past never had access to – they could out-support the ‘ridiculous cad’ parody straw men they’d created for themselves.

The burden of performance that the men of the Free Love eras had hoped to avoid with higher self conditions of love were replaced with a burden of more accessible Beta supportiveness. Thus, into the 90s we had more and more characterization of masculine competition become associated with men out-supporting one another. Stay-at-home Dad became a socially lauded life choice to be proud of. Tootsie, Mr. Mom, Friends, and the culmination of total abdication to feminine identification, Mrs. Doubtfire, became apex examples of men adapting to a socio-sexual environment they’d been conditioned for – a burden of support.

Mrs’ Doubtfire was a particularly egregious depiction of this male to female transition. The apex Beta Father Provider versus the social and sexual Alpha ‘great guy’ in a battle for the genetic rights to the Beta’s children (which he eventually concedes and accepts). This story epitomizes the subtle undercurrent of socially acceptable cuckoldry that would define men’s adaptations during this era.

By assuming the female role, by identifying with the feminine they’d been convinced was so lacking in themselves, men reinforced, aided and abetted the rise of contemporary women’s default entitlements; not just to support, but to conventional masculinity when convenient, and equalist independence when convenient.

There’s a presumption in the manosphere that women have become more masculinized today, and while this is true, the Hypergamy that’s defined every era for women is more dominant now than in any other age. There is nothing that defines the feminine more than the Feminine Imperative’s want for the security of provisioning and sexual optimization that the masculine provides for women.

As men we’re prone to believe that if we’ve become more feminine women have become more masculinized, but is it this or is it the expectation that women need to adapt a masculinized outlook to counter men’s conditioned Beta passivity? Even staunch feminists get tingles from conventionally masculine, unapologetically Alpha men.