The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies

When I first began writing on SoSuave over a decade ago I used to get into what I consider now some fairly predictable arguments about monogamy. It was an interesting time since it was around then I was getting into some heated arguments in my behavioral psychology classes in college.

I had just written what would later become my essay, There is no One and a good majority of my classmates and all of my teachers but one were less than accepting of the theory. I anticipated most of the women in those classes would be upset – bear in mind this was around 2001-02 and the Red Pill was yet to be a thing – what I was surprised by was how many men became hostile by my having challenged the soulmate myth.

I got a lot of the same flack from women then that I get from uninitiated women when they read my work now; “Aren’t you married? Isn’t she your soulmate? Don’t you believe in love? You must’ve got burned pretty bad at some time Mr. Hateful.” Those were and are what I expect because they’re the easy subroutine responses a Blue Pill ego needs to protect itself with. There was a time I probably would’ve mouthed the same. That’s how the conditioning works; it provides us with what we think ought to be ‘obvious’ to anyone. And at the same time, we feel good for ‘defying the odds’ and believing in what we take for granted, or common sense.

This is how deep the subconscious need for assuring our genetic heritage goes. For women this assurance is about optimal Hypergamy, for men, it’s about assurances of paternity. In either case, we need to believe that we will reproduce, and so much so that we will attribute some supernatural influence to the process of doing so. The fulfillment of your own sexuality is nothing less than your battle for existence, and on some level, your subconscious understands this. Thus, for the more religious-minded it gets attributed to fate and faith, whereas for the more secular-minded it’s about the romanticized notion of a soulmate.

Monogamy & ONEitis

I contemplated the idea of ONEitis for a long time back then. I’d most certainly been through it more than once, even with the BPD ex-girlfriend. By then I understood first hand how the belief absorbs a Beta and how it is an essential element, effectively a religion, for a Blue Pill life experience. I didn’t realize it then, but I was maturing into a real valuation of myself and I had the benefit of some real-world experiences with the nature of women to interpret and contrast what I was learning then.

Honestly, I had never even encountered the term ‘ONEitis’ prior to my SoSuave forum days. I referred to the soulmate myth in my writing as best I could, but it wasn’t until (I suppose) Mystery had coined the term. Outside the ‘sphere people got genuinely upset with me when I defined it for them.  Back then I attributed this to having their ego-investment challenged, and while that’s part of it, today I believe there’s more to it than this.

The old social contracts that constituted what I call the Old Set of Books meant a lot in respect to how the social orders prior to the sexual revolution were maintained. That structuring required an upbringing that taught men and women what their respective roles were, and those roles primarily centered on a lifetime arrangement of pair bonding.

It’s interesting to note that the popular theory amongst evolutionary anthropologists is that modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years. Needless to say, it’s a very unpopular opinion that human beings are in fact predisposed to polyamory / polygyny and monogamy is a social adaptation (a necessary one) with the purpose of curbing the worst consequences of that nature. We want to believe that monogamy is our nature and our more feral impulses are spandrels and inconveniences to that nature. We like the sound of humans having evolved past our innate proclivities to the point that they are secondary rather than accepting them as fundamental parts of who we really are.

Women, in particular, are far more invested in promoting the idea of ‘natural’ monogamy since it is their sex that bears the cost of reproductive investments. Even the hint of men acknowledging their ‘selfish gene’ nature gets equated with a license to cheat on women. This is an interesting conflict for women who are increasingly accepting (if not outright flaunting) of Open Hypergamy.

I’ve attempted in past essays to address exactly this duplicity women have to rationalize with themselves. The Preventive Medicine book and posts outline the conflict and how women internalize and ‘hamsterize’ the need to be both Hypergamously selective, but to also prioritize long-term security at various stages of their lives. Ultimately a woman’s position on monogamy is ruled by how she balances her present Alpha Fucks with her future prospects of Beta Bucks.

Seed and Need

It might be that women would rather share a confirmed Alpha with other women than be saddled with a faithful Beta, but that’s not to say that necessity doesn’t eventually compel women to settle for monogamy with a dutiful Beta. In either respect, the onus of sustained, faithful monogamy is always a responsibility placed upon men. The indignation that comes from even the suspicions of a man’s “straying”, a wandering eye, or preplanned infidelity is one of the most delicious sensations a woman can feel. Women will create syndicated talk shows just to commiserate around that indignation.

But in an era when the likes of Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to fully embrace their Hypergamous natures and expects men to be equally accepting of it, it takes a lot of psychological gymnastics to reconcile the visceral feelings of infidelity with the foreknowledge that a less exciting Beta will be the only type of man who will calm her suspicions.

It’s important to also contrast this with the socialization efforts to make women both victims and blameless. As I mention in the last post, men who lack the appreciation of the necessity to prepare for a sustained monogamy with a woman are considered ‘kidults’ or prolonging their adolescence. They are shamed for not meeting women’s definition of being mature; that definition is always one that centers on the idea that men ought to center their lives around being better-than-deserved, faithful, monogamous potentials for women’s long-term security and parental investment.

On the other hand, women are never subject to any qualifications like this. In fact, they are held in higher regard for bucking the system and staying faithful to themselves by never marrying or even aborting children along the way to do so. So once again, we return to the socialization effort necessary to absolve women of the consequences that the conflict Hypergamy poses to them – they become both victims and blameless in confronting a monogamy they expect from men, but are somehow exempt from when it’s inconvenient.

Pair Bonding

Arguably, pair bonding has been a primary adaptation for us that has been species-beneficial. It’s fairly obvious that humans’ capacity for both intra- and inter-sexual cooperation has made us the apex species on the planet. However, the Feminine Imperative’s primary social impetus of making Hypergamy the defining order of (ideally) all cultures is in direct conflict with this human cooperativity. A new order of open Hypergamy, based on female primacy (and the equalist importance of the individual), subverts the need for pair bonding. There is no need for intersexual interdependence (complementarity) when women are socialized and lauded for being self-satisfying, self-sufficient individuals.

Add to this the conditioning of unaccountable victimhood and/or the inherent blamelessness of women and you get an idea of where our social order is heading.

Both sex’s evolved sexual strategies operate counter to the demands of pair bonded monogamy. For millennia we’ve adapted social mechanisms to buffer for it (marriage, male protectionism of women, etc.), but the cardinal rule of sexual strategies still informs these institutions and practices:

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

In this respect, it is men who are expected to make the greater compromise due to an evolved sense of uncertainty about paternity and the social mandate to accommodate women’s sexual strategy.

The counter to this is that women have always borne the responsibility of parental investment if they chose a father poorly (or didn’t choose), but in our post-sexual revolution social order, the consequences of this responsibility have been virtually eliminated. In fact, those consequences are now viewed as evidence of women’s independent strength.

Even aborting a child is a source of pride now.

Men bear the greater effect of compromising their sexual strategies to accommodate and resolve the strategy of women. When we account for the normalization of open Hypergamy, soft cuckoldry, and the legal resistance to paternity testing (ostensibly centering on the emotional wellbeing of the child in question) it is much clearer that men bear the most direct consequences for compromising their sexual imperatives.

From Warren Farrell’s book. Why Men are the Way They Are (h/t to SJF):

Why are men so afraid of commitment? Chapter 2 explained how most men’s primary fantasy is still, unfortunately, access to a number of beautiful women. For a man, commitment means giving up this fantasy. Most women’s primary fantasy is a relationship with one man who either provides economic security or is on his way to doing so (he has “potential”). For a woman, commitment to this type of man means achieving this fantasy. So commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. — P.150

Men who “won’t commit” are often condemned for treating women as objects — hopping from one beautiful woman to the next. Many men hop. But the hopping is not necessarily objectifying. Men who “hop from one beautiful woman to another” are usually looking for what they could not find at the last hop: good communication, shared values, good chemistry. — P.153

The meaning of commitment changed for men between the mid-sixties and the mid-eighties. Commitment used to be the certain route to sex and love, and to someone to care for the children and the house and fulfill the “family man image.” Now men feel less as if they need to marry for sex; they are more aware that housework can be hired out and that restaurants serve meals; they are less trapped by family-man image motivation, including the feeling that they must have children. Increasingly, that leaves men’s main reason to commit the hope of a woman to love. — P.159

Dr. Farrell is still fundamentally trapped in a Blue Pill perspective because he still clings to the validity of the old order books/rules, and the willfully ignorant hope that women will rationally consider men’s sexual imperatives as being as valid as their own.

That said, Farrell’s was the germ of the idea I had for the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies, he just didn’t go far enough because he was (and still is) stuck in Blue Pill idealistic hopes of monogamy. Bear in mind, Farrell’s book is based on his intrasexual understandings of everything leading up to its publication in 1986, however, this does give us some insight into how the old order evolved its approach to monogamy then into an open, socially accepted form of Hypergamy now.

He relies on the old trope that men are afraid of commitment by reasoning that men only want to fulfill a fantasy of unlimited access to unlimited sexuality – all shallow, all superficial, while women’s priority of commitment is correct, selfless, valid and blameless. Farrell also reveals his Blue Pill conditioning by making the presumption that men only Game women in the hope that they’ll find a unicorn, and they’re endlessly fucking women for no other reason than to find a woman with good communication, shared values, good chemistry, etc.

I sincerely doubt that even in the mid 8os this was the case for men not want to commit to a woman, or essentially compromise his sexual strategy to accommodate that of women’s. Farrell never came to terms with dual nature of women’s sexual strategy and how it motivates women over time because he believes men and women have, fundamentally, the same concept of love and mutually shared end-goals.

Mandates & Responses

In the decades since this publication, the normalization and legal mandates that ensure men will (by force if necessary) comply with this compromise is something I doubt Farrell could’ve ever predicted. Legal aspects, social aspects, that used to be a source of women stigmatization about this compromise have all been swept away or normalized, if not converted to some redefined source of supposed strength. Abortion rights, single parenting (almost exclusively the domain of women), postponing birth, careerism, freezing women’s eggs, sperm banks, never-marrying, body fat acceptance and many more aspects are all accepted in the name of strong independence® for women.

Virtually anything that might’ve been a source of regret, shame, or stigmatization in the old order is dismissed or repurposed to elevate women, but what most men never grasp (certainly not Dr. Farrell) is that all of these normalizations were and are potential downsides to a woman’s Hypergamous decisions.

MGTOW/PUA/ The Red Pill, are all the deductive responses to this normalization, but also, they’re a response to the proposition of the compromise that the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies presents to men in today’s sexual marketplace.

In all of these ‘movements’ the fundamental, central truth is that they all run counter to the presumption that men must compromise (or abandon) their sexual imperatives – long or short term. Thus, these ideologies and praxeologies have the effect of challenging or removing some of the total control of Hypergamy women now have mandated to them. Even just the concepts of MGTOW/PUA/TRP are equatable to removing this control.

However, it is still undeniable that there is a necessity for monogamy (even if it’s just temporary) or some iteration of pair bonding that ensures men and women raise healthier, stronger, better-developed children. We are still social animals and, despite what equalism espouses, we are different yet complementary and interdependent with one another. Mutual cooperation, tribalism, monogamy and even small-scale polygamy have been beneficial social adaptations for us.

Gynocentrism and the respondent efforts against it defeat this complementary cooperative need.

Gynocentrism / egalitarianism defeat this cooperation in its insistence that equalism, self-apart independence, and homogeny ought to be society’s collective mental point of origin in place of the application of differing strengths to differing weaknesses.

So we come to an impasse then. It’s likely it will require a traumatic social event to reset or redefine the terms of our present social contract to ever make monogamy a worthwhile compromise for men again. We can also contrast this ‘raw deal’ compromise against the Cardinal Rule of Relationships: In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least. It’s easy to think women simply have no need of men when their long-term security is virtually assured today, but fem-centrism goes beyond just separating the sexes by need. It wasn’t enough to just separate male and female cooperation, fem-centrism has made men’s compromise so bad that they must be made to despise their sex altogether. Men had to be made not only to accept their downside compromise but to feel ashamed for even thinking not to.