Novaseeker had an excellent breakdown of how Hypergamy has developed and is radically altering a long established social order in favor of one centered on the female sexual strategy. This was timely for a post I was working on, so rather than allow it to be buried in the last thread I thought I’d riff on it a bit here:
So in my head, I tried to think of what the best response to hidden estrus would be from a male perspective, and the only thing I could think of was essentially hiding male horniness, I used the word stoicism. The only way to balance the effects of hidden estrus is for all men to simply appear to not want what a women are offering, to appear uninvested, uninterested, etc.., because this again gives the perception of a lack of abundance to the women and re-balances things. Eventually such behavior would become selected for to some degree, and male emotions would become less prominent.
I agree with what you are saying, although I think it’s important to bear in mind that the expression of female sexuality historically was quite restricted, once we were at a level of more complex social organization beyond the rather small. Things did vary by community and culture somewhat, but once things reached that level of social advance, in most places a woman’s family/kin had a huge control over the expression of her sexuality, with the parents (largely the father) and to a lesser extent her male brothers exerting substantial restrictive pressure on the expression of her sexuality.
I should note here that while there is a definite social structure built around various strategies of mate guarding, these social mores and familial repression of women’s Hypergamous impulses does, in fact, stem from evolved, behavioral adaptations.
Kin Affiliation Across the Ovulatory Cycle : Females Avoid Fathers When Fertile Consider that girls will make subconscious efforts to avoid their fathers during the proliferative phase of their ovulatory cycle. Also, consider girls enter puberty at an earlier age when their fathers are not present in the family. Both of these are examples of phenomena that have a physical manifestation and a latent evolutionary purpose, but socially we build moral/social frameworks around buffering for (or sometimes accommodating) them.
Likewise, there are social controls that span all cultures that have the same purpose of buffering against the predations and mechanics of women’s Hypergamous natures. The most stringent of these might be repressing of women’s sexuality, but the latent purpose is still the same; controlling for paternity assurances.
There was, of course, cheating of the system that took place in terms of women bucking the system covertly, but most women were not sexual free agents in most places most of the time historically, and so were not acting on their estrus, concealed or otherwise at these later points in history. It does seem like something which likely occurred prior to the time we developed significant social organization (which is unclear when it precisely happened, but likely happened gradually quite some time before the development of large-scale agriculture), and is inherited from that earlier time, while the later social structures mostly, or at least in many cases, served to rather severely hem in the expression of female sexuality and free sexual choice to a large degree.
The Feminine Imperative that exists today still uses these historically extreme controls as a baseline for provoking an emotional response among women (and feminized men) today. In spite of the realities of Open Hypergamy and Open Cuckoldry, and paired with the fact that we live in the most sexually permissive society the world has largely known to this point, there is still a necessity to sell a narrative of sexual repression in order to perpetuate a social condition of ‘victimization’ among women and thus perpetuate a status of concern and primary importance.
So I guess my perspective is not that what you are suggesting is incorrect, in terms of the deeper evolutionary inheritance, but that the response of men to this eventually evolved, socially, into the use of social/legal/moral structures that acted as a counterweight to the inter-sexual issues raised by concealed estrus, and that, being social animals, this was itself also a powerfully selected thing (tribes that did not adopt similar restrictive measures did not generally survive except in relatively isolated areas where they were not exposed to the same degree of competition with patriarchal tribes and their sexually restrictive cultures). I suspect it dawned on the males in some tribal groups that the gains to be had from a kind of system of “one girl for (almost) every guy (who isn’t killed in war, or banished or enslaved)” when it came to women, in terms of reducing sex-related conflict among men, became more important when the scale/size of social organization grew beyond the small and moved to a larger, more complex scale, where different structures were needed to ensure cooperation and alleviate conflict which could undermine that cooperation and the scale made possible by it. So in other words, the strategy that men adopted had to do with the needs of the social order and the need for greater cooperation and less conflict once the scale grew to the point where close kinship among the males could no longer feasibly serve as a conflict-reducer effectively.
This was done, of course, at the direct expense of the female sexual strategy, and females have been scratching and clawing against that result in various ways ever since that time, but really have only recently had the success of overturning pretty much all aspects of that restrictive system (while retaining selective elements of it in form, mostly, as it serves their own interests) with the collaboration of most men, by the way, in the process (for various reasons, many of which Rollo has detailed in various posts on this blog). The resulting system is therefore new, and requires men to adapt, which is what we are about doing here, of course. The idea is to have a system which is of a large scale and complexity, socially, and which requires high levels of cooperation in order to function, while at the same time removing the last vestiges of of the “one girl for (almost) every guy” sexual system and replacing it with the freest, most open and adversarial system of sexual competition among males that our species has likely seen since long before the time we evolved into socially-based human groups.
I’ve covered most of the male adaptiveness that Nova mentions here in the Adaptation series of posts. For the short version, however, it’s important to note that even the sexual restrictiveness of women in prior eras were themselves adaptations meant to buffer against women’s conflicting sexual strategy. As I stated in the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies, for one sex’s strategy to succeed the other must either be compromised or abandoned. Prior sexual restrictiveness was a repression meant to force women to abandon and later (in monogamy) compromise their own Hypergamy (Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks).
It remains to be seen how feasible this is, longer term, because it is still so new. And the adaptation required by men is substantial, because the change is gargantuan from anything we have experienced in thousands upon thousands of years, in terms of sexual system and related mores. I think relatively few will adapt, and the majority of men will fail at the system, in terms of actually getting what they want. I don’t mean most guys will be incel all their lives, but that their relationships with women will be extremely skewed to the women’s terms, through a combination of outright duping, indoctrination into wishful thinking, and a steady move towards ever more libertine sexual morality for women as a part of the further expression of the Feminine Imperative.
And that comes back to the concealed estrus issue, because the social solution that men in certain groups came up with a long, long time ago (substantial restrictions on female sexual expression) is now pretty much completely removed in this culture, meaning that it is playing a bigger role in human inter-sexual relations than it has been permitted to play in a long time. In fact, the development of reproductive technologies and the related legal regime supporting their free use has augmented the ability of women to utilize this aspect of themselves to tilt the field in their favor, well beyond what nature provided them, in terms of controlling who among the men gets to breed. Again, most men will not be able to adapt quickly enough and will be in lopsided relationships as a result. Other men, like us, are able to adapt and thrive under the new system as individuals, knowing full well we can’t really overthrow something like the sea change in sexual system that we have seen occur, even if we thought that was wise, which it may very well not be. Every man, once he comes to this realization, therefore has a choice to make, really, and a fairly stark one. Most guys have no chance, however, because they are totally subsumed by the feminine primary and never come to a realization of things as they are, and just what the heck happened in the culture, sexually, over the last 100 years or so.
Although my last post may have been on the melodramatic side, the exaggeration is still founded on the same dynamic Nova is getting at here. Since the time of the sexual revolution there has been a complete social abdication on the part of men to have any say in exercising, much less advocating for, prioritizing their own interests in the sexual strategies equation.
It’s gotten to the point that even men’s initiating an approach at the most marginal form of intimacy runs the risk of not just rejection, but legal and social punishments for even taking it upon himself. The onus of sexual selection, as per every legal mandate, is unilaterally placed upon the part of women. The latent purpose of this is to prioritize women’s sexuality and women’s sexual strategy (Hypergamy) above men’s – all while clinging to the pretense of the sexual repressions that they believe still characterize the condition of women.
If you ever wonder at the declining marriage rates, the delaying of marriage until well past women’s prime fertility years, male suicide rates being four times that of women or the rise of men who’ve contented themselves in being single for their lives look no further than this reprioritization of women’s Hypergamy as the socially predominant sexual strategy.
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I would say that attempts at overt male control of covert female sexuality oftentimes amount to window dressing that only serve to help convince the men of their paternity, even when they’ve no reason to be assured of it. Only in cultures like those established by strict Islamic doctrine/Sharia Law can paternity be (mostly) assured by social forces. Outside of that, women can oftentimes have free reign at getting away with good old-fashioned cuckoldry.
In a social order founded on Hypergamy, that dynamic demands that men’s utterly abdicate their sexual and biological imperatives to women. This means any paternity assurances, or even the idea that they should matter to a man, must be surrendered to the point that they are literally conditioned and bred out of the consciousnesses of men.
I’m hitting upon this in the hopes of prompting some discussion about the aspects of Hypergamy Novaseeker mentions here, but also because I will be discussing much of this with Alan Roger Currie this coming Thursday night on his podcast.
We’ll be talking at 10pm EST/7pm PST and this will be a live call-in format, so if you’d like to participate I’d encourage you to do so. While my appearance is not necessarily an endorsement of Mode One or anything else Currie is selling, I respect him as a thoughtful interviewer and he’s been asking me to appear for some time now.