The Mystery of the Red Dress

Today’s quote is from the Biography of Steve Jobs. I did read the book in its entirety in 2010, but recently had this bit sent to me from a reader as an example of ‘How an Alpha should treat a Gold-digger‘. Mmm? No.

As an example of “alpha behavior” or an illustration of equal justice I can see why this incident might be construed as such, but there’s a much more valuable lesson to be learned in this exchange. The incident took place between Steve Jobs and singer Joan Baez, a woman who Jobs eventually had a relationship with.

In 1982, Jobs was introduced to Joan Baez by her sister Mimi Farina. He was 27 and she was 41. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” said Jobs. Some of his friends believed that one thing that drew Jobs to Baez was the fact that she used to date Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” said Jobs’ college friend Elizabeth Holmes.” The relationship fizzled out when it became clear that Jobs wanted children and Baez did not. 

Rolling Stone, 2011

Using a Red Pill Lens on this situation, we see a few apparent truths. The age difference was definitely a factor, but Jobs was well-known for what was called his “Reality Distortion Bubble“. In effect Steve Jobs had an intrinsic understanding of himself as his Mental Point of Origin. A lot of Type-A personalities have this in common – they innately make themselves the first thought they have in virtually all decisions they make. For some this can border on sociopathy, but most people we consider successes or geniuses had this sense of self as their starting point. Let me make this clear, you don’t have to be a sociopath or a solipsist to make yourself your Mental Point of Origin, but that is where these states begin.

Practically every very wealthy man I’ve ever worked for, or with, had himself in mind before a thought was give to anyone else’s consideration in his decision making process; family, spouse, employees, friends, we’re subordinate to his Mental Point of Origin. For most the process would start and end with themselves and their interests. These were the sociopaths. For a few that process started with themselves and ended with the consideration of others, but the process was a pragmatic one that facilitated a maintaining of power balance. As I’ve said in the past, I’m a proponent of enlightened self interest: I cannot help others until I help myself. Nor can I help others as effectively as when I help myself first. It’s not that you ought to become a selfish prick – you should think of the interests of others – but only after you’ve considered yourself in the scope of your own interests and how your interests facilitate the interests of others.

Now that this is settled, let me say that by this metric, Steve Jobs was none of this. According to the people he worked with, his family and friends, Jobs had all the characteristics of a solipsist. Yes, men can be solipsists too, though it’s more of a learned process rather than the innate proclivity women have to be solipsistic. From a business perspective, from a single-minded determination perspective, Jobs was certainly an Alpha. His mindset was that of an Alpha. His relationship history, however, was grossly influenced by Blue Pill idealism. One commonality you’ll find among men we consider great innovators, inventors, discoverers and entrepreneurial geniuses is they are almost invariably Blue Pill idealists with respect to their romantic lives. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two current examples of this commonality. Argue their greatness if you like, their personal lives are classic examples of what happens to the Nerd, the autist, the high IQ guy, who’s afforded the money and success to live out their Blue Pill fueled impression of what a relationship with a woman should be like. And predatory women, with the savvy to understand (and have the patience for) the nature of Beta men, make these guys their bread and butter.

“There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not sure I would describe Jobs as an autist, or being on the Asperger’s spectrum, but he was certainly on the sociopath spectrum. Try not to conflate ‘sociopath’ with something negative in this instance. Sociopathic behaviors and character attributes can equally be attractive survival traits as they are evidence of megalomaniacal tyranny. Sociopathy is really by order of degree. Jobs most certainly began and ended his thinking with himself in mind.

My Red Pill Lens read on this is as follows: Something in Steve Job’s subconscious was testing Joan Baez for genuine desire.

I’m fairly certain most of my readers will understand the ovulatory shift implications of a red dress being the item in mention here, but there is a method to Job’s madness in this.

“I said to myself, far out, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.”

Joan doesn’t get it from the start here. She presumes that a rich man would want to purchase her affections via the transaction of a gift. Not uncommon for even 41 year old women, and yes, her thinking here is exactly the solipsistic mental point of origin women have a natural default for. Indignant guys will call her a Gold Digger, which is accurate, but moreover you have to look at the process here. She presumes that rich men buy expensive gifts for the women they’re interested in. But in typical Jobs fashion Steve flips the script without knowing that’s what he’s doing.

When they get to the store Steve points out the dress and says, “You oughta buy it.” She looked a little surprised, said she couldn’t really afford it, he said nothing and they left.

“Wouldn’t you think if someone (a rich man) had talked like that the whole evening they were going to buy it for you?”

It would be easy to dismiss this part as default female entitlement, but remember this was 1982, and while women (particularly attractive and famous women) did expect things from well-to-do men, the entitlement levels weren’t anything like they are now. I think she was genuinely confused. She really didn’t get it.

“The mystery of the Red Dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.”

He would giver her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he would be sure to say they were leftover from an event in the office.

“He was both romantic, and afraid to be romantic.”

This end part is Baez’s last attempt to explain why an ‘eccentric‘ rich man wouldn’t buy her a dress he thought she’d look good in. I’m often asked how to go about vetting a woman for a long term relationship, and I’ve written essays about how most men simply never actually have the luxury of holding (much less developing) standards by which to ‘vet‘ a woman’s commitment-worthiness. Most men are not rich men, most men are Betas. Fewer still have the sense of self-value, or the access to so many optional women, as to presume to test a woman’s interest in him in any meaningful sense. Steve Jobs was not a necessitous man, he had, or could easily realize options when he wanted to. But even though he was idealistic in a Blue Pill conditioned sense, his subconscious wanted something it couldn’t buy – genuine desire from Joan Baez.

It’s easy to dismiss the Red Dress Incident as just another quirky personality flaw of a borderline sociopath who didn’t have the Game or the social intelligence to know he was offending or turning off a girl he kind of liked. Indeed, Joan tries to insert her own pop-culture psychoanalysis of Steve in the end; He was afraid to be the romantic she just knew he wanted to be. I expect this kind of rationalization from women who miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to optimize Hypergamy. But what if Steve wasn’t afraid? What if it was a form of his shit testing Joan to determine her genuine desire for him?

As I said, most men don’t have the luxury to shit test women at all. For low SMV men, which is to say most men, the thought of experimenting with testing a woman for desire, much less long term suitability is never a consideration. Most guys can’t believe their luck that a woman actually expressed interest in him because they’ve lacked romantic options for most of their lives. So to consciously experiment with determining honest signals from a woman seems like tempting fate. The Thirst is such that most men would do damn near anything not to screw things up with a girl who’s showing interest in him. Just be thankful your ship’s finally come in, right?

I’ll add again here that most women, particularly in this social media era, are well aware that most men will never vet them for anything beyond baseline arousal and sexual availability. Thirst serves the Feminine Imperative very well, but what about men who are Blue Pill idealists, that can actually afford the options? Men for whom money and access are no object, but still persist in the fairytale the Blue Pill told them was possible?

What I see happening here is Jobs’ request for Baez to buy the dress for herself was a test of her genuine desire for him. Steve could’ve easily bought her the dress, even the whole store, but that wasn’t the point. What Steve wanted was for her to want to please him. His expressing a like for the dress was his subconscious testing her desire to please him.

I think you’d look good in this; It’s perfect for you” isn’t an offer, it’s a request. Will you sacrifice something to please me? 41 year old Joan Baez, could’ve afforded the dress. Hell, Ralph Lauren would have probably given it to her. But she expected Steve to buy it for her; that was her expectation then and it was the source of her confusion right up to Jobs’ biography interview. Her affinity for Jobs was transactional, not based in genuine desire. She failed the test.

Whether subconsciously or by design Steve wanted what most well-conditioned Blue Pill men want today: a genuine connection with a woman based on genuine (preferably unmitigated) desire. The Desire Dynamic is synonymous with The Rational Male. You cannot negotiate genuine desire is a foundational principle of both my work and all Red Pill awareness that follows from it. Steve’s ego wouldn’t allow him to negotiate for Joan’s real desire. His Mental Point of Origin and marginally sociopathic nature wouldn’t conceive it. But consciously or unconsciously he would test her (and other women he was involved with) for her desire to please him.

What is Your Red Dress?

It’s a cliché now for wealthy men to test women’s true interest in them. “Does she love me for me or because of my money/fame/status?” is a Blue Pill fantasy script for Beta men. This has been the plot of many popular stories and movies for centuries now (Coming to America with Eddie Murphy), but it’s a cliché because it accurately describes men’s subconscious coming to terms with women’s mating strategies and opportunistic concept of love. Women don’t fall in love with who a man is, they fall in love with what that man is. If a woman ever falls in love with who a man is it’s only after loving him for what he is first.

That’s some real cognitive dissonance a man has to confront in his life. The indignation that dissonance produces is very much the Red Meat most low SMV men love to wallow in, and commiserate in.

“She doesn’t love me! She loves what I can afford her! She’s a Gold Digger, I knew it!”

We love having women’s duplicity confirmed for us as men. It means we dodged a bullet by not investing in, and wasting our reproductive potential with, a woman who would be a bad bet for our future paternity. It provides the same chemical exhilaration and relief women feel when they think they’ve figured out a man’s “true” nature (Alpha Cad/Beta Dad). In the same way women get off on the indignation of discovering of men’s attempts to deceive women’s existential fear of false signals, so to do low SMV men get off on the indignation of discovering a woman only wants him for his money – not the real him.

What our subconscious truly wants is a pairing with a woman who has a genuine desire for us. Hot, unmitigated, Darwinistic monkey-sex is usually the manifestation of that genuine desire, but there are many more nuanced ways our male psyches will try to determine it. In past essays I’ve had men and women run me up the flagpole for suggesting a man never buy lingerie for his girlfriend or wife.

“How’s she supposed to know what I like if I don’t buy it for her?”
“I love getting something sexy from my man, sucks to be you.”

These, and more like them, are usually efforts in remaining self-ignorant of never having experienced genuine desire from a woman. If a woman has genuine desire for you she will be interested enough in you, and have the desire enough, to know how to please you without you explaining it to her. Genuine, organic desire is the foundation of all healthy relationships between men and women. Women who have genuine, unobligated desire for a man don’t ask him if they can go to Vegas for a girl’s weekend – her desire is for her man. Plates don’t require an active ‘spinning‘ on your part when she has real desire to be part of that man’s life. Women will eagerly share a worthy Alpha (rather than be saddled to a faithful Beta) if she has genuine desire for him.

and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Genesis 3:16

When a woman has genuine desire for a man she Just Gets It when he suggests that a Red Dress would be “perfect for her” and she buys it, borrows it or steals it to wear it for him.

If Steve Jobs had purchased the Red Dress for Joan Baez, every time she wore it she would be wearing it for her, not for him. Something inside Steve knew this, and something in you does too.

Your Mission, Her Mission

Does your woman think of you before herself? 

Does she make your priorities her own priorities?

Does she surprise you with acts of kindness and appreciation?

Does she inherently know that your success is her success?

Does she admire you? How does she show it?

Does she know what you need before you know it yourself?

Does she plan ahead to ensure you’re taken care of?

Does she care to know who, not just what you are?

Does she take time to learn about or participate in the things you are passionate about?

Does she look forward to having sex with you?

Does pleasing you please her?

Does she do any of these things with genuine desire or is she fearful of your displeasure?

Or

Is your woman ‘high maintenance’?

Is pleasing her or avoiding her discomfort your mission in the relationship?

Is your relationship defined by how well you measure up to her expectations?

Is your woman’s success more important than your own?

Are you the sentimental one in the relationship?

Do you plan ahead to ensure she’ll be in the right mood?

Do you perform chores in the hopes that it will make her amenable to you sexually?

Do you believe your relationship is (or should ideally be) an equitable one?

Does her family take priority over your own at holidays?

Is your relationship based on quid pro quo?

Is she ever surprised by your anger?

Is your relationship perpetually a “work in progress”?

Is your relationship’s success defined by qualifying to her metrics?

Do you measure the quality of your relationship by how well you meet her needs?

These are tough questions for most guys. I’m often asked how to vet a woman for a relationship or marriage and the hard part of coming up with a list of qualifications is that you have to actually be in a relationship with that person to really judge a woman’s suitability for a long term commitment. Hot sex is a great ‘up-sell’ for women to convince a man to commit, and it’s usually at the top of a guy’s list of must-haves for his commitment, but you don’t really understand her motivations or genuine desire until you are already in a relationship. Now you have emotional investment in her (caught feelings) at the same time you’re realizing she’s really not the person you thought you were vetting her for.

The ‘Asshole Alpha’

A hard thing for most Blue Pill, Beta men to appreciate is the genuine desire a woman has for an Alpha man. When that guy sees a relationship that’s based on a woman’s dedication to please her Alpha man, his Beta Hamster goes into action. A lot of things don’t line up with what he’s been conditioned to believe about women and how a relationship should go.

His first presumption is that the Alpha guy is a ‘manipulative asshole’ and if he ‘respected’ her she would be better off for it. It’s certainly not how he would treat her. Default respect for women plays well for a Blue Pill mindset. If you read through my first set of questions above the most common impression a feminized mind will have is that I’m implying a woman ought to be beholden to an Alpha man. While it’s true that, ideally, a solid conventional relationship is founded on a man’s ambition and success, and his woman sharing that mission, she has to want to be a part of it. Forcing a woman to be a part of a man’s world is actually the methodology of a Beta man.

Monogamy can occur either because a female chooses to be faithful to a male, or as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead

Exploring the Desire Dynamic has been a key feature in all of my writing. Understanding that genuine desire cannot be negotiated is usually one of the toughest parts of the Red Pill to accept when a guy is just coming into it. It’s hard because most men already realize the principle; they’ve just been building lives around the contingencies, and forming deep rationales, to avoid accepting it. I have readers tell me all the time that what I put forth in my books and essays is stuff ‘they already knew in the back of their heads‘, they just didn’t have the words to articulate it. Your relationship sucks, or your marriage is soul-destroying not because you can’t seem to live up to a false ideal (which is true), but because your woman has no genuine desire to be a part of your world. Modern marriages fail, not because of trust issues, or security, or even ‘her needs not being met’ – they fail due to a lack of genuine desire.

Most women today are in monogamous relationships as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Blue Pill men have a hard time with this as well. A relationship based on a woman’s choice to be faithful to a man, based on her genuine desire, looks a lot like what he’s been taught a lopsided manipulative relationship is all about. The prime-directive of feminism (the female Blue Pill) is that a Strong Independent Woman® should “never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.” Part of a Blue Pill man’s lifelong conditioning is to think like a feminist woman thinks.

Most Blue Pill men are male feminists by default. Whether they vocally identify as one is largely a formality; Blue Pill men think like feminist women, because their social education came from feminist women.

When a Blue Pill male encounters the rare conventional relationship – one based on a woman’s genuine desire and a man’s Frame and ambitions – and he sees a woman doing things for the express pleasure of an Alpha man, his first impression is that she is with him by coercion. That conventional relationship model doesn’t fit with what his female teachers taught him was the egalitarian ideal. Thus, rationalizing that a beautiful woman would only feel obligated to please an asshole is because she has low self-esteem, she’s forced to please him because she’s destitute, she’s codependent, he overtly uses Dread on her, etc. This becomes his ego defense of his Blue Pill conditioning. His default presumption is that she is with that guy as a consequence of a particular lifestyle. It never enters his thought process that she is with that Alpha by choice.

Objects of Desire

Most men are uncomfortable with being the object of genuine desire. Even the idea of having a woman do something inspired for his express pleasure makes them feel like they’re falling into the role of Asshole Alpha. Promise Keepers in particular hate this impression of themselves and will go to great efforts to quash it in themselves, by deriding it in other men.

If you read the first list of questions above and thought, “Damn, that sounds harsh or manipulative. What about her needs?” this is your Blue Pill training coming to the surface of your consciousness. Just the thought that, as a man, you might ever be truly desired by a woman gets conflated with ‘abuser’ status. Either that, or the first consideration is to default to Bank Slate thinking – “What about her?” This is the egalitarian, presumption of ‘equal-and-opposite’ as the ideal thinking. 

Most Blue Pill conditioned men, and virtually every Fempowered woman, defaults to “What about her?” as their Mental Point of Origin. Guys do this because it’s been hammered into their brains since grammar school that ‘putting women first’ is the surest way to gaining their intimate favor. As such, the idea that they might ever ‘come first’ with a woman becomes an alien thought to them. Not only that, but they see the hypothetical Alpha I mentioned above as the villain to defeat in order to prove his quality. That ‘quality’ is based on his ‘putting women first’, so an Alpha Asshole becomes a golden opportunity to display how well he’s learned his Blue Pill lessons from his female teachers.

Without the Red Pill, without the insight to question his conditioned belief-set, this mindset is impossible to break in a guy. For the most part he’s attached his Game – his hope of solving his reproductive problem – to that Blue Pill, Village training. Some guys may never break the cycle. They never see the code in the Matrix. Most men fall into a grind of constant qualification to women because they have never, and will never, be the object of genuine desire of a woman. Their mental models prevent them from ever being that object to a woman. They would feel awkward, dirty, for making anything about them.

When a man’s Burden of Performance can be directed towards qualifying himself to women, men will begin to conflate their masculine identities with how well they can ‘put her first’.

The religious Trad-Con mindset revels in this, but the ideal comes from the same source – feminine primacy. Directionless, purposeless, men find a purpose in making the pleasing of a “quality woman” ideal the metric by which they measure their manhood. The Feminine Imperative figured out how to make women’s security the measure of a man long ago. It was written into men’s sense of duty and his Gods’ will. They must become less so she becomes more. It didn’t always used to be that way, but since the advent of romantic love as an ideal, it’s been the game men were told they had to play. And now, men’s natural competitiveness is channeled to outperforming his rivals in how better he can serve the Feminine Imperative.

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest.

16 Commandments of Poon, Roissy

I can make appeals to men to make themselves their Mental Point of Origin, but few actually wrap their heads around the concept. Fewer still will give themselves permission to do so. The reason for their difficulty is that their reproductive success was pinned to the Blue Pill mindset they’d had beaten into their psyches a long time ago.

The equal partnership ideal is antithetical to how men and women evolved to be complements to the other. That ‘equal’ partnership is predicated on a man endlessly proving his dedication to ‘putting her first’ that his hindbrain believes will lead to a woman’s genuine desire for him. His hope, his understanding, is that if he works at his relationship long enough, if he puts her first, eventually she will appreciate him and desire him based on his efforts and performance. But it is just this priority in his life – the priority he’s linked to what little sense he allows himself to have of his manhood – that defeats his ever getting to that state of a woman’s genuine inspired desire.

Why We Fight

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

In the almost nine years of of this blog I have only hit upon violence on a couple of occasions. I’ve only been in a physical altercation a handful of times in my life. And by that I mean real fights; the kind of violence that requires you to physically harm another person. I’ve been in lots of sparring fights and martial arts tournaments, mostly when I was in my 20s and 30s. While I’ve been hurt and caused hurt to my opponents, I can appreciate that there is a qualified difference between competitive sport fighting and real violence. The one mutual interest my younger brother and I had when we were growing up was beating the shit out of each other. By the time I got to high school I was no stranger to taking a fist to the chops or various headlocks and “wrassling” holds.

Most of the times I’ve been in real fights were in high school. It’s interesting just how Darwinistic our teenage years really are –we’re just too immature to appreciate it then. Unless you grow up in a sheltered family, learning about sex and violence is usually part of our adolescent experiences. After high school I got into a few fights when I was playing gigs in the late 80s-90s Hollywood scene. Depending on where we played and who we happened to piss off, those kind of fights were something you had to keep in the back of your head as being a possibility. Usually you had friends or bandmates who had your back, but not always.

Of those scuffles most of them were versus a drunk guy who presumed he could kick my ass, or my bandmate’s ass, because, well, we weren’t exactly the most physically imposing guys to be honest. And a lot of those fights were initiated in one of two ways; the guy was fed up with guys like us because the women (usually in some sexy outfit) preferred to fuck guys like us – or, the fight was provoked by a woman and the guys fighting were coming to blows over who’d fucked whose girlfriend. Often enough it was the girl herself who’d later admit she “made a mistake” and one or the other found out.

All of that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. Things have definitely changed with respect to how violence is initiated, normalized and respected (or delegitimized) today, but the basis of that violence will never change. Violence is part of human nature. We do ourselves no favors in denying this simple fact. I can remember in 2001-02 when I did casino promotions for this new ‘sport’ called King of the Cage. It was the forerunner for today’s MMA fighting, but back then it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it is now. I believe Nevada was one of the only states that could legally host such an event. The outcry then was that it was an underground ‘bloodsport’ and legitimizing it as a true sport was the first step towards degenerate social savagery. Or something like that. People used to be appalled by it.

Now MMA fighting is something I’ve seen some Evangelical Christian churches use as a draw to get their men to attend a ‘masculine revival’ weekend. Warriors for Jesus with a ‘saved’ MMA fighter speaking about using his sport as a ministry. I think there’s a primal, evolved side of men’s nature that makes violence attractive. And like love and respect, violence is another aspect of the human experience where men and women’s approach and understanding is innately different.

Boys and men are innately drawn to competition, combat and violence. We make ‘guns’ out of our fingers. We craft weapons from scraps we find in the garage to defeat our ‘foes’. We love our plastic army men and G.I. Joes, our cowboys & indians, and we play ‘war’ with our friends. Our video games from the first coin operated arcades to our immersive virtual reality consoles are about combat and strategy. Even sports have been called a “proxy for war”. Team sports are a facsimile of tribal competition. Human males’ physiology, by and large, evolved for combat and physical stresses. I realize that might be hard to believe by today’s standard of masculinity, but the evidence is there.

The male Burden of Performance began with a need for testing that performance against our primal environments and some very real opponents. I have read some interesting research that suggests human beings are innately risk averse. Most humans would rather avoid conflict than voluntarily engage in a fight that they could very well lose, if not die from. The logic is that humans’ success as a species is at least partly due to our evolved sense of caution for life and limb. If you cooperate and play it safe it’s likely your risk-averse genes would propagate into future generations.

Of course the flip side to this can summed up in an old Latin proverb,…

Fortune Favors the Bold

There’s also research that shows men experience a spike in testosterone levels after defeating a rival in combat, and/or killing their opponent. This doesn’t even have to be actual violence; some studies show men experience a similar spike when their sports teams win a significant game. So, while in some instances avoiding conflict and backing down from a dangerous engagement has survival benefits, risk taking and enacting one’s will by force also has some reproductive benefits. 

For as much as they rail to the contrary, women do have an affinity for violent men. Women get turned on by men with a capacity for violence. Modern psychology attempts to pathologize this arousal prompted by dangerous men (hybristophilia), but, by order of degree, women evolved to select for men with at least the perceived capacity to do harm to another man. I would speculate that this attraction stems from women’s evolved need to seek security and protection from men, and sympathetically, men evolved an innate protectionist aspect to our own evolved firmware. Competing with rival men for sexual access, sometimes violently, is part of our ancestral programming. As we developed into a more ‘civilized’ species that competition shifted to contests of performance between men, but the old violent firmware is still part of humans’ starting package.

Let’s You and Him Fight

On Twitter and a few past livestreams, I’ve pointed out that women today have developed a false sense of security with respect to the potential of real violence. This is equally a result of the masculinization of women as it is our accommodating the Feminine Imperative in mainstream cultures. In the age of social media, as the globalization of women’s entitlements have spread, so too has women’s entitlement to personal safety. 

One very real downside to the Fempowerment narrative is that it has convinced women that the fantasy of the “strong female” is something they can aspire to personally. This is what I’ve called the Warrior Princess fallacy: Over the course of generations our feminine-primary social order has convinced women that they can realize the same warrior role as men. Via storytelling in various media the ideal that physical differences in men and women are relative, and women can be “just as tough and dangerous as men” is pervasive. This is a dangerous precedent, and one that is a direct result of old order beliefs in, and popularization of, Blank Slate equals. 

In the idealized fantasy society of equalism, masculinized Amazon Warrior Princesses can give as good as they get from any man. But in the real world, men evolved for physical performance, competition and combat; women evolved to endure the rigors of childbearing and nurturing. And as the introduction of transgendered biological males into biologically female sports divisions is proving, the realities of our physical differences is unavoidable.

However, the idea that women are always entitled to physical protection in the new order presents some interesting dichotomies. Women mix an entitlement to personal safety with an expectation of clichéd female bravado. Remember, this all happens in the context of women’s innate solipsism; add a bit of alcohol and the social posturing of a group of women all vying for attention on a Friday night and you begin to see the volatile potential. Today’s women have grown accustomed to initiating or escalating inherently unsafe circumstances for themselves – to say nothing of the men they’ll involve.

Women have a limbic understanding that, for the most part, they can be violent with relative impunity. If a male ever strikes a female, even in self-defense, she can be assured that a mob of random males, following their evolved protectionist directive, will spontaneously form to beat the shit out of the guy. In today’s Blue Pill engineered society, even the most passive male waits for an opportunity to prove his quality to womankind by becoming ‘justifiably’ violent in defense of a woman. It’s what most men are conditioned for for most of their lives.

“Sorry babe, I don’t know what came over me. I just can’t abide by any man assaulting a woman!”

The old, vestigial, evolved response of violence is something our male hindbrains know will trigger ‘gina tingles in women. The primal ideal of the nobleman with the capacity to unleash justifiable fisticuffs is Blue Pill conditioned psychological red meat. That the woman provoked or escalated an unsafe situation isn’t even an afterthought – the guy raised a hand to a woman, opportunities to prove a legitimate capacity for violence are rare for low SMV men.

As such, women presume safety. Women will raise hell about feeling unsafe around men. They’ll bleat about fantasies of enforcing a ‘male curfew’ (only for undesirable Betas of course) out of safety concerns. We’ll hire security staff to walk a woman across a dark parking lot and install emergency call boxes on college campuses. But in social situations (particularly when drinking) will escalate inherently unsafe situations knowing that men will play by the old order rules.

There is an old PUA maxim that picked up on women’s penchant to provoke men to violence. It was called the Lets You and Him Fight dynamic. Whether women are aware of this and deliberately provoking a fight between men, or, their subconscious motivates the conflict is a debate that’s been around for a while. But the LYHF dynamic is a shit test women will use in assessing a man’s Alpha status. Women need indignation as it is, but in this dynamic is a woman’s hindbrain wants a visceral response from a man.

I first became aware of the LYHF shit test when a friend had told me how annoyed he was by his girlfriend starting fights with guys that she expected him to finish. She would honk the car horn from the passenger seat if someone had even slightly cut them off in traffic. Even flip off other drivers if the opportunity presented itself. She would start fights with other women which would provoke their boyfriends to step in on their behalf and he was tacitly expected to kick their ass to defend her provoking them. “What are you a pussy? Go beat his ass!”

I’ve tackled the subject of shit tests numerous times on this blog so I won’t belabor them here, but this test plays upon some very deep, evolved, intersexual and intersocial dynamics. On some level of consciousness a woman wants to know her man can get violent. Most Blue Pill men find that suggestion appalling. We’re supposed to be “above all of that”, right? For the most part I’m sure the majority of men would rather not be put into a position of taking a fist to the face. As such we build social conventions and rationales around not engaging physically in a real sense. So, to consider a woman might desire a man with a predilection for violence prompts them to qualify that woman for his own safety.

Intrasexual Competition

“Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

When a group (tribe) of primates reaches a certain number of members the potential for ‘hostile takeover’ by lesser males becomes almost a certainty. Beta male primates form coalitions to overthrow an existing Alpha leader. Most dominant Alphas instinctively cull this coalition building to ensure their position. A smackdown, abuse, punishment for anything that looks like a challenge to his position from lesser male troop members is something Alphas do to infrequently teaming up on him. Partially this is a display of dominance (social proof reinforces it), but it is also a curbing function.

Eventually the Alpha becomes weaker and less effective at enforcing his dominance, and the Betas grow in number until such time that they can band together and depose him. Then the cycle repeats with the most dominant male among them assuming the Alpha role. He gets access to the most fertile females, kills off his rivals’ offspring (which prompts the females into estrus) and reproduces for as long as he’s able to remain in that position.

And yes, I’m aware of the theory that pro-social Alphas that build loyalty-exchanges among other males, and display a willingness to share resources with females, tend to make for better ‘leaders’ within a tribe. What most of that research conveniently leaves out is the element of envy and jealousy that develops (even among primates) in the Beta male population until the sentiment reaches a point of challenge. Even the good-guy, prosocial Alpha has to watch his back.

As you might guess, many of these behaviors are paralleled in humans. Alpha displays of violence, even if by proxy, are ‘sexy’, but mostly we manifest male prowess in social displays. Athletics, resource acquisition, peacocking, conspicuous consumption, really any costly signaling of high sexual market value. To compete with these Alpha displays, lesser males must either: 

  • Increase their own value, and learn to display it effectively, 
  • Find ways to convince other men, (coalition building) and reproductively viable women, that those displays are worthless, while propping up his own displays as more valuable.

In the age of social media and mass communication Beta males are constantly reminded of their lesser positions. There’s no respite. Even the most well-meaning, prosocial Alpha’s presence is a reminder of Beta male inadequacies. High school bullies and ‘Jocks vs. Nerds’ is a constant theme across human cultures because the evolved human male experience is always one of competition and a Burden of Performance. To be male is to compete, and as such there will be winners and losers.

Deposing, or disqualifying, an Alpha – much in the same way primates do – is also a constant theme in human cultures. Beta males enacting ‘justice’ on an ‘evil’ Alpha or an Alpha proxy has always been a teenage fantasy for boys. Spiderman, Captain America, the wimp who incredibly transforms into a powerful Alpha himself will prove to the world how that Alpha power should be ethically used. The geek who gets the girl because she magically sees his superior quality that aligns with the terms he’s establishing as valuable is also a fantasy. All of these cast the Alpha as ‘oppressor’.

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” – Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Why is using strength, displaying value and exercising will an act of ’tyranny’? Why is restraint of power a moral imperative? How did we come to disqualifying value displays? I’ve seen a few talks by Jordan Peterson where he promotes the idea that a real man is a dangerous one who possesses the capacity for violence and oppression, but has the strength of will not to use it. This then begs the question, how does anyone know a man even possesses this capacity if he’s not to display it? Concealing strength is awesome, but it is, by definition, indistinguishable from weakness. No one knows if you’re a black belt or a white belt until you get in the ring and fight. However, the moral consensus is that it’s unacceptable for men to display value.

This then is the global, social coalition that was formed by the majority of lesser men. To continually disqualify the merits of superior men is individually taxing and makes lesser men look worse for doing so. But build a social order around men self-policing their displays of value; then you have higher value men doing the heavy lifting for lesser men. You may be powerful, but the social mores of the time (created to serve the majority of lesser men) will tell you to conceal it. In fact, they’ll build social conventions to convince the whole of men that displaying vulnerability, not strength, is a display of value.

Most of what I’m digging at here is old order thinking. Socially enforced monogamy has primarily served the greatest number of Beta men. And while it’s definitely been a stabilizing factor for civilization, I can’t ignore that the social expectation of monogamy is also the result of society-wide coalition building among lesser men to ensure that greater men wouldn’t out-breed them. Most male-specific social conventions are designed to control men’s innate directives. Their latent purpose is to teach rules that limit displays and usage of strength.

And in the new order we see this old order intersexual competition struggle to keep pace with a global sexual marketplace that centers on women’s innate mating strategies reseting context of intersexual dynamics. Open Hypergamy incentivizes men’s overt displays of higher value – and now on a worldwide scale. In response, men form online coalitions to disqualify those displays in an attempt to devalue the strengths of men they couldn’t hope to compete with in the old order. Meanwhile, women in the global sexual marketplace continue to reward men who display genuine value according to their mating strategy’s needs. 

Selective Breeding

Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?

The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the most recent Avengers movie Starlord (Chriss Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story) permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness; a kick in the nuts.

We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.

 If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rodgers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc. are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the next “Thor” movie. And this is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Woman® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that’s been written for them to fill.

Manspreading

Earlier this year I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured what we were told was a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye you can sort of tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve see similar protests before, and if you look at the linked video here today you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in commercials. 

Recently there was another woman who’s won some sort of design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys just sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man so I need to take up space.”

But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. It’s a hindbrain signaling of confidence in men. Now, before you write me off here, think about this; if women’s primary concern was about men taking up space, then why attack a man’s genitals to force him to close it up? Why not simply ask him to close up a bit? Why is pouring water (bleach) on his crotch an acceptable punishment? Why is a hit to the balls a reflexive retaliation?

Women’s existential fear is having their Hypergamous filters bypassed by a clever Beta male impersonating an Alpha, breeding with him, and thereby saddled for a lifetime of support with the child of his inferior seed. Women’s evolved sensitivity to this filter extends to subconscious cues men display in their posture. Ergo, a man ‘spreading’ is perceived by a woman’s hindbrain as a false signal of Alpha by a Beta male. This triggers the existential fear response, thus attacking his manhood is doing all of womankind a favor by humiliating him for his attempt to deceive women’s filters.

I’m sure there’ll be some women (and their ‘allies’) who’ll think this is a stretch, but then, why is it acceptable to kick a man in the nuts when he’s spreading? Why is it that Starlord gets kicked in the balls and we laugh? Because a Beta male tried to pass himself off as an Alpha and retaliation was due. If a guy like Jason Mamoa was sitting spread-legged on a bus it would serve as an arousal cue for most women. Alpha status recognition is an automatic subconscious subroutine, fine tuned over millennia of evolution, in women. Women’s subconscious awareness instinctively reads SMV status and prompts behavior accordingly.

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

Or your shitty genetics for that matter. Patrilinear surnames are a symbolic stamp of ownership for men. They give a name to his genetics – a surname is associated with a specific genetic line. A man’s legacy is his genes and those genes need an identifier. One of the more controversial topics I debate online is the refusal of men’s surname by their wives. Women keeping their last names or hyphenating them in marriage is now a common sign of their independent spirit. Marriage is only acceptable to the Strong Independent Woman® when it looks more like an egalitarian business arrangement rather than a complementary pairing of a man and a woman who understand (and accept) the nature of their own gender. Traditional marriage looks too much like “ownership” for feminist wives and nümale husbands.

Blue Pill conditioned men are far more likely to be okay with their wives’ decision to keep her name, hyphenate it, or even take her name. After all, it’s the progressive thing to do and most believe on some level of consciousness that his accepting her independence in this way will make him more appreciated by her. The truth is this: his acquiescing to her in this way only reinforces what her hindbrain has already confirmed – she’s paired with a Beta male who wouldn’t give an afterthought to insisting his genetics bear his name. He confirms the low quality of his genetics to her hindbrain.

There are a lot of convenient social conventions that come along with a woman’s insistence on keeping her surname. Just like the excuse of men “taking up space” warrants terms like “manspreading”, women and nümales will appeal to pragmatism:

“She’s a doctor, lawyer, soon-to-be-famous-person and she need to maintain her identity for public relations reasons. Otherwise she’d totally take my last name dude.”

“I don’t want her to have a crummy last name like ‘Butts’ or something.”

“Taking a man’s last name is an antiquated symbol of patriarchal ownership of women. Haven’t we evolved past this yet? Are you so insecure in your masculinity that you’ll insist on her taking your name?”

These are a few of the cover stories, but the latent purpose is the same; women’s hindbrains must hedge their Hypergamous bets with men they know are Beta before pretending to commit to a lifetime of breeding and parental investment with them. For a woman marrying a man whom her subconscious acknowledges as Alpha, not assuming his name isn’t an afterthought to her. Women paired with a man who is a confirmed Alpha will often say “I didn’t want children, but I wanted to have his babies.”

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

We’re getting into sexy sons theory here, but the idea is that a significantly high SMV male can inspire women to become submissive/supportive wives and mothers. See my essay on Alpha Widows for more about this.

A woman in a good Hypergamous pairing accepts – desires – his authority, but also his genes. She doesn’t just want children, she wants his children. This then is signified (codified?) in his name passing on to her and their children. Even in ostensibly egalitarian marriages the kids generally retain the name of the male who fathered them (unless single-mom throws useful step-dad a bone and the kids change their name to his). Human beings are innately tribalistic (sorry Jordan). This tribalism is expressed in Selective Breeding practices extending from the personal to the social.

In 2019, and in the reproductive aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, these tribal distinctions are now left to women to determine in a confusing global sexual marketplace. Men’s innate drive for paternal certainty falls away in this environment. The existential fear and frustration that manifests from that drive still persists in men, but the practice of it gives way to women being the primary influencers in selective breeding – and how it will or won’t be expressed. It’s now a common practice for a woman to change the surname of children of a genetic ‘asshole’ father to that of the adoptive step-dad-who-stepped-up. Or the noble Promise Keeper son and holy protector of his single mom (and by extension all of womankind) who changes his last name to something else. 

But why? Why bother to go to that trouble if names are unimportant? If paternity doesn’t matter anyway, why go to the trouble of changing a name?

What Happens When She’s the One Who’s Out of Options?

As I mentioned, women’s existential fear is pairing herself with a Beta male who, through guile and deceptions, convinced her he’s an Alpha. But what happens when that woman runs out of options in her  Epiphany Phase? What happens when she’s forced to settle on the good-enough Beta (the guy Sheryl Sandberg assured women “nothing’s sexier”) because she can’t lock down the Alpha whose babies she wants to have?

She can continue searching indefinitely. The social conventions established by the Feminine Imperative convinces women that their sexual market value (SMV) is unending and imperishable. Those conventions also combine with others that shame men for being so infantile in preferring women who are ‘younger, hotter, tighter’. This shaming gets extended to convincing Beta men they should “align their dating strategies” to prefer mature women who “now have their heads on straight”. The idea that an older woman is more mature and therefore ought to be considered more desirable by men is conveniently positioned in women’s Epiphany Phase – so is the Myth of the Biological Clock.

Or she can settle for the less-than-ideal Beta male she’d never have opted for in her Party Years. Women have various psychological and sociological mechanisms in place to help them rationalize this settling on a Beta in Waiting.

  • Plan B: There’s always a fallback guy. Generally this is one Beta for another, better positioned Beta though. If one were “alpha” he’d already be the Plan A. (Be the A Guy). It’s important to note that if the Plan B Beta eventually ‘alphas up’ in some perceivable way, this generally throws a woman into a psychological conflict.
  • She convinces herself that ‘settling’ is really who she is in that moment. Most women genuinely believe in their Epiphany Phase rationales. Most would probably pass a polygraph test if you asked them if they genuinely felt the way they do about their decisions during this time of their lives. However, Hypergamy and its fundamental rules don’t change for women even when they believe something new about themselves. And often enough that ‘genuine’ belief is motivated by their subconscious understanding about their state n life as a result of their mating strategy.

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

This is a fundamental understanding for Red Pill awareness. It’s one of the easiest indicators men can use to determine a woman’s interest in them, or her subconscious understanding of your status as a man. Is she making more rules for you to obey, more hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for her ‘love’ (i.e. sexual access)?  She probably sees you as a Beta. Is she breaking her rules, the rules she believes she needs to follow in her new (Epiphany) phase of life, in order to get into situations where she can facilitate sex with you? Is she putting off responsibilities in order to enjoy herself with you? She probably sees you as Alpha.

This rule-setting or breaking is a basic litmus test for genuine desire. Women’s hindbrains grasp this  too. If a woman is setting rules for a man, her subconscious understands that he’s predominantly Beta. Because she needs to set rules, because it seems like logic to refuse his surname (another rule) and because he accepts these rules – even encourages them in himself and other men – his status is confirmed as a Beta. Only a Beta would need rules. Only a Beta would comply with those rules.

I should add that this is the basis of all transactional relationships. Jump through hoop (obey rule), get sex. An Alpha, by nature, would have options to replace a woman who made rules for him. Furthermore, it wouldn’t occur to a woman to issue rules with an Alpha man whose babies she wants to have. Hypergamy can’t afford to issue rules to Alpha men.

The Inner War

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her. There are more than a few Purple Pill “relationship experts” who cater to this demographic of women, and they do very well marketing new age magic and cutesy aphorisms to resolve this inner war.

I characterize this war as a conversation between a woman’s Id and her Ego. 

The Epiphany Phase forces her sensualism-seeking, ‘hawt’, short-term sexual (breeding) opportunism to come to terms with the necessity of her long-term security needs. Alpha Fucks (her Id) wars with Beta Bucks (her Ego) in her head – and all with the urgency of knowing that her SMV is decaying to the point where she must either take action or convincingly rationalize why she doesn’t need to take action. Her Ego knows her SMV is in decline and long-term security / parenting / family is becoming less and less available to her. But her Id still wants what it wants; ‘hawt’ sex with ‘hawt’ guys. And she’s still ‘hawt’ too – the feminine-primary world says it all the time “Never Settle Gurl!” – she ‘deserves’ only the best.

Thus, the conversation leads to varying degrees of compromise to outright self-delusions prompted by outside influences (i.e. social media). Plan B is a compromise. Refusing his last name is a compromise (or hedging of her Hypergamous bets). Making rules for, and endlessly testing, a Beta to assuage the Hypergamous doubt (“is he the best I can do?”) is a compromise.

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

Today, the new fascination with ‘Poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is also one more methodology women are using to make a compromise between the Alpha Fucks her Id needs and the Beta Bucks her Ego knows is necessary for her future security and happiness. “Alternative relationship strategy” is the latest euphemism for Poly, but it really distills down to a means for women to find a way to balance the Hypergamous equation. She’ll marry the Beta, but it should necessarily mean she has to have sex with him. Poly relationships are a compromise.

Ideally women would love to give themselves to a worthy man. To follow his plan for their lives,…and she’d like to feel the kind of attraction to him that would inspire the trust that he would do so for her and her children’s benefit. 

“I wanted to have his babies.” — this is Hypergamy balancing Alpha Seed with Beta Need perfectly.

Today though, women wait too long. They believe the lies of their own Blue Pill, that their SMV is never depleted. They don’t look for this balance anymore. They don’t even expect to find it; one man is for a same night lay, the other is boyfriend material

Alpha Widows

As today’s Purple Pill Manosphere tries to sort out what it wants to pick and pull from ideas the Red Pill has been debating for decades now it requires a lot of deliberate misdirection of the old concepts they struggle with. This is actually nothing new. If you look at any of the exchanges I had with Aunt Giggles (Susan Walsh ret.) or various notables from the golden years of this blog you’ll recognize the pattern – Distort the premises of the concepts that conflict with your ego-investments, straw man them, then offer some redefinition of what they ‘really’ mean.

One of these maligned concepts is the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow. I’ve written extensively on this idea for well over a decade now. I’m fairly certain I even coined the term back in my SoSuave days. Back then Alpha Widow was a designation we used to describe a woman’s tendency to become fixated on an Alpha lover she had in her Party Years and still pined for him into her 30s or 40s after marriage. We didn’t just pull the idea out of our asses back then. We came to it because of the overwhelming number of married or LTR men who reported that their wife or girlfriend were pining for old lovers they thought were “the one that got away” or they left them to pursue a new relationship with an old flame.

Back then it was just a useful reference, but it quickly became such a predictable and confirmable phenomenon I thought it deserved more investigation. I mentioned Alpha Widows in The Slut Paradox but it was around this time that Roissy (Heartise) had proposed a simple maxim: 5 Minutes of Alpha Trumps 5 years of Beta. That’s when I decided to look deeper in my own short essay Five Minutes of Alpha. With a Red Pill Lens I began to see this Alpha Widow narrative played out in popular culture. Katy Perry had a song out then called The One That Got Away and it accurately described everything that goes into making an Alpha Widow.

What is an Alpha Widow?

To understand the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow we must look at women’s evolved mating strategy – Hypergamy, a woman’s intrinsic desire to balance the best quality sexual/reproductive male with the best provisioning/parentally invested male. Since a woman’s mating strategy centers on quality in a long term partner(s) women tend to focus on ideals in men. The imperative drive for mate quality extends to both sides of women’s Hypergamous equation; the best genetic, sexual experience and the best long term security potential. Only women are Hypergamous, and Hypergamy never seeks its own level – it is always seeking a better-than-merited exchange in SMV compared to her own. For more information on this concept read False Equivalencies.

When a woman misses the opportunity to consolidate on a confirmed, high SMV (sexual market value) male that man becomes the new standard for what she believes she can attract as a potential mate.

“I’ve had an SMV 8 guy before so in the future no man below an 8 will be my optimal choice.”

Even if a woman’s perception of her own SMV isn’t realistic her Id wants what it believes it can get.

The setting of a mating strategy metric in men is largely a subconscious process for women, but, more often now, high-ego women do consciously acknowledge that one man does (or doesn’t) meet the SMV benchmark of a previous lover. As women have become more comfortable in embracing Open Hypergamy, amongst their girlfriends, on social media, they will readily debate this SMV metric of past boyfriends. The Alpha Widow dynamic is no secret among women. Usually this involves women bemoaning the lack of “eligible” men in their lives when their prime SMV years are behind them. Please note that eligible implies an entitlement to a man who would be an ideal.

This qualification process is a constant for women, and it’s a complement to mens’ Burden of Performance. Women’s Hypergamous filtering process evolved from an Existential Fear of pairing with any man beneath her own (self-perceived) SMV and risking her life on a bad reproductive bet.  The worst existential prospect for a woman is to have her mating strategy superseded and controlled by that of a suboptimal man. 

The flip side to this dynamic is that, evolutionarily speaking, a woman’s subconscious cannot afford to miss out on an optimal Hypergamous pairing. If a woman’s Existential Fear is to be forced to reproduce with a lesser man, the next fear is to lose or miss out out on the opportunity to consolidate on monogamy with a high SMV man. When I talk about how a woman will make rules for Betas, but break rules for Alphas this is the root of that principle. 

As such, a man who exceeds a woman’s SMV, and creates a benchmark of her ‘personal best’ ideal male to breed with and parentally invest with, makes a significant impact on her psyche; sometimes in the long term. When a woman has had this man – one for whom she has genuine, organic desire for – but she cannot consolidate on him (i.e. lock down in monogamy), this represents a critical loss of the ideal Hypergamous/Reproductive/Life strategy option. Mentally this is what a woman will strive in some way to recreate with subsequent men in her life – a return to that ideal state.

This then is the basis of the Alpha Widow:
A mental fixation on the man who made the most significant impact upon a woman as her Hypergamous ideal.

The Fantasy Ideal

Usually this male ideal is an actual man from her past with whom she had some sort of relationship with, but not always. Sometimes the fantasy of that ideal will make a mental impression and sometimes a brief, seemingly insignificant, encounter with an ideal man may be enough to imprint on her psyche. 

Five Minutes of Alpha Trumps Five Years of Beta.

Sometimes the smallest brush with an ‘alpha’ male is enough to trigger the ‘what if?’ possibilities of consolidating on a guy like that. This might be one-night sex, the one guy in the foam cannon party on spring break in her wilder college years, or even just a missed opportunity to fully develop a hoped-for connection at a social gathering. The ‘Missed Connections’ forum on Craig’s Lists are filled with these regrets. All that matters is that the guy, knowingly or not, instilled a sense of Hypergamous urgency that she just knew represented a prospect for consolidating on that ideal.

An Alpha Widow can also be ‘widowed’ from the fantasy of her ideal male. This is fairly common among women who marry early in their Party Years. Most feel like they missed out on having made a good Hypergamous choice (or had it made for them by circumstance or social pressures). That missed opportunity leads some women to be widowed from the fantasy of an Alpha who would have been a better choice. Thus, an ideal Alpha mental model is what she pines for. An interest in romance literature is usually exaggerated in this type of widow. The formulaic stories are a form of vicarious fulfillment of an unrealized Hypergamous ideal. I should also add, this this widow, when married, is a prime demographic audience for divorce porn fantasies.

In any of these instances what’s at issue is the fact that women’s mating strategy always moves them towards a “better-than-merited” SMV exchange and a psychological fixation on the man, or the type of man who best embodies it. It’s as if a woman’s Id is imprinted with the model of the optimal Hypergamous pairing (evolution-wise a life or death proposition) and believes that only in recreating it will that male again save her life. This is the source of that unconscious pining.

Social Enabling of the Alpha Ideal

In 2019 it has never been easier for a woman to explore her reproductive options with an ever-increasing pool of potential Alphas from which to be widowed from. Since the Sexual Revolution western cultures have done little else than facilitate women’s mating strategies. In terms of “sexual liberation” the goal has always been to ensure provisioning and support – the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy – in order to give women the impression that they have an indefinite window of time in which to find their optimal Alpha man. We see this reflected in the age of first marriages getting older and older. And in the age of social media women take for granted that they can remain sexually viable if not indefinitely, then at least as long as a man would. This facility exacerbates the Alpha Widow effect.

Women will fixate on the “one that got away”, but today we have social conventions in place to pander to that predictable insecurity in women. In fact, there are numerous industries that now thrive on exactly this.

Ladies, will you ever find your soulmate? Our Life-Coaching, our 12 step plan, our positivity training, our magic personality test will help you find him today.

I should add here that the very concept of a soulmate began with women pining for their bygone ideal man. That ‘One’ is much easier to justify cheating with, or agonizing over, if you mix in the metaphysical to aid in rationalizing it. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and Eat, Pray, Love also find their root in the Alpha Widow dynamic. Popular culture tells women they are entitled to that ideal soulmate; and the only way they can remain true to themselves, the only way to live their best lives (even the life they believe God meant for them), is to pursue the ‘ONE that got away.’

The Plan B mating strategy is another social convention that forgives women of the consequences of pursuing that Alpha ideal while concurrently holding on to her next best male option. And lastly, the ongoing normalization of a female-initiated Polyandry is also a social convention predicated on allowing women to hedge their Hypergamous bets with respect to finding that Hypergamous ideal mate.

Misconceptions

The following are a couple of the more common misconceptions critics like to presume is meant by “Alpha Widow”. For the most part these are attempts to straw man the phenomenon with no real interest in how anyone came to understanding the dynamic. 

Alpha Widows are the result of “players” who fiendishly used these poor impressionable women before they left them high & dry

Blue Pill conditioned White Knights in particular use this to build their own heroic narrative around women. Of course, not all women are victims of the Alpha they were widowed by. The first part of this misconception is the presumption that no woman would volunteer for her own widowing; the second is that an Alpha “Player” was implicit in his motives to thoroughly imprint himself upon her. The truth is that any seduction requires a willing participant (Art of Seduction, Greene) and in accordance with women’s mating strategy women will eagerly participate in their own seduction. These are Alpha Widows, not rape survivors. 

The misconception is that the woman being widowed was somehow traumatized by her former lover. The truth is that the more positive the experience was for her the more impactful the widowing is likely to be. If women didn’t think fondly of the “one that got away” she wouldn’t be an Alpha Widow in the first place. The emotional despair some women feel over that Alpha is usually the result of having missed pairing in the long term with a better prospective man than the lesser man she settled on by necessity. 

This is an easy misconception for most Blue Pill men to follow along with because often enough women will refer to their ‘asshole ex boyfriend(s)’ as the man (men) who was responsible for her being damaged. Women in their Epiphany Phase will usually incorporate into it some narrative of their having been used by the Bad Boy Jerk who came before the Nice Guy Beta they found it necessary to settle on. This damaged narrative then locks in with a woman wanting to “do things the right way this time”. Women will often use this narrative as a failsafe to excuse their hesitancy to be as sexually available to the Beta as she was with the Alpha she was widowed from. So, you get a Saving the Best situation for the Nice Guy in the relationship and he’s apt to believe her claims of being damaged by the asshole who had her before he did.

Self-righteous Beta men love this damaged by the Player narrative because it allows them constant opportunities to prove to his woman how positively different he is compared to the asshole Alpha she’s still covertly pining for.

• “Alpha Widows” are just men making shit up and thinking the worst of women because they’re bitter and burned.

Yes, it is entirely possible that despondent Incels may exaggerate the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow to rationalize their giving up on women. This still doesn’t invalidate phenomenon. This misconceptions is generally dropped by critics of the Red Pill who’d rather attack the source than have to address a concept that rattles their comfortable Blue Pill understanding of women. That said, I understand how it might be convenient to disqualify the concept based on the bitterness of the individual piecing together why his wife or girlfriend still seems to be having a relationship with her ex even if just in her head. Self-loathing Incels will then use this as an excuse to give up for the same reason they believe Hypergamy is this insurmountable obstacle to their connecting with juice they don’t want to bother squeezing for.

For the record, no, not all women turn into Alpha Widows. All women are Hypergamous, but buffers and learned self-control have historically been the checks and balances needed to protect against this Alpha Widow dynamic. The problem is that these buffers are popularly considered sexual repression of women today. Women simply wont police the worst aspects of their mating strategy and any interference, personal, political or social, that would prevent a woman from exercising her Hypergamous sexuality is viewed as misogynist, sexist repression.

Statistically women with more sexual partners have a higher incidence of divorce and find it more difficult to form healthy attachments in LTRs based on their partner count. Men do not appear to follow these stats or dynamics, why?

Because men and women have different evolved mating strategies and priorities. Men, it appears, have a much easier time compartmentalizing the sex act and separating it from the emotional aspect women apply to sex. Men’s obsession with pornography is a good illustration of this, but it is reflective of the differences in our evolved mating strategies developed in our ancestral past. Men found it necessary to breed quickly and then move out – ejaculate and evacuate.

However, in a social order where Hypergamy is unbuffered women have more access to more men and have more opportunities to be imprinted by Alpha men while in their peak fertility years than in any other era before. This abundance of reproductive opportunities, and a lack of any social stigma or moral reservations are putting women into a position where their Blue Pill husbands turn their denial into hate for the ‘Players’ who violated and ruined their ‘soulmate’ before he came into her life. They refuse to acknowledge that in most cases his girl eagerly chose to give herself to the man she told her husband was a ‘Player’ from her past.

Blue Pill married men have the hardest time accepting the idea that their wives may be Alpha Widows for a man that came before them. They struggle with the possibility their wives gave a part of themselves to a guy that they’ll never experience, so denial and anger becomes their ego’s protection.

They throw shade at the men who have the Game to seduce women (who enjoy the seduction as well) because they “ruin women for great guys like him”. Thus, they turn it into a moral issue for those men or a personality flaw because it absolves their wives of their modern mating choices.

– Illustration, Stefan Schmidtz

Little Big Head

One of the dichotomies I consistently see in the manosphere is the differences in how men approach the importance (or feigned unimportance) of sex. I got a bit sidetracked in last week’s essay. I was planing on writing about this phenomenon when I saw the need to explore how it impacted a larger social narrative. So, let’s consider this essay an addendum to The New Polyandry.

How men publicly and privately prioritize sex is always something that leads to a judgement call about that particular man, how he lives his life, and what it says about his integrity. If you openly make sex a “big deal” in your life, or you acknowledge its importance in intersexual relationships, you open yourself up to men’s Beta Game virtue signaling. The presumption is that if you were a real Alpha sex is just something you should have mastery over. If sex is at all important to a man, and he expresses this, that guy runs the risk of being seen as “obsessed with sex“, a “pussy beggar” or in someway less of a man for allowing sex to control his decisions.

Why is this the perception?

Two weeks ago I had a lively debate with the producer of Pat Campbell’s morning show. While we did have other topics to hit on that morning, she and I dug in and talked about how “sex is the glue that holds relationships together.” You can listen to the full segment here if you like.

As I mentioned last week, the notion that men need sex is nothing I haven’t covered in the past. In You Need Sex I made a case for the importance of sex and how it was, until recently, something that constituted part of a man’s life experience. Now it seems that being a sexless virgin at age 40 should be considered an accomplishment by certain factions in the manosphere: 

One very common dismissal of Red Pill awareness I read from Blue Pill men is this feigned, blasé indifference to sex.

For the most part this false-indifference is really a conditioned, response couched in Beta Game. The idea is for the Blue Pill guy to promote the public perception that he’s above his sexual impulses in the hopes that any girl within earshot (or reading his comments online) will recognize his uniqueness in not letting his cock do his thinking for him. From a male deductive logic standpoint it makes sense to the feminized male – women have all told him how off-put they are with guys who only think about sex, so he’ll identify with the women he’d like to get with and “not be like other guys.”

“All that Red Pill, PUA shit is for guy’s who obsess over sex. They only go to the lengths they do to get laid and never see the bigger picture. You don’t need sex you know? You wont die from not getting laid.”

[…]Thats the Beta Game behind the “you don’t need sex” Buffer, but there’s more to this rationale than that. Technically the Beta reasoning is correct; physically, you’re not going to die if you don’t get laid. You could probably masturbate to relieve yourself or live a sexless existence due to a physical disability and live a productive life as satisfying as you can manage it. If you don’t know what you’re missing or if a sexual substitute does the job, what’s the difference, right? The line of reasoning is that if it isn’t food, water or oxygen it isn’t really a necessity for existence.

You’re All Obsessed!

Self-righteous Blue Pill men always look to make their necessities into virtues. It also helps the men who fall on the 80% side of the Hypergamous Pareto curve to convince themselves and others that their sexual strategy – one that follows enforced monogamy – is the moral one; or the logical, common sense one absent the moral context. If you cannot get laid yourself, at least you can make getting laid into an ‘obsession‘ for the 20% of men who can. By doing so you encourage the 20% of men, who women desire to fuck, to police themselves and women by adopting your own, self-superior, one-woman-per-man sexual strategy.

Pretty much every MRA I’ve listened to, most Traditional Conservatives and a few MGTOWs, like to qualify men who can get laid as being in some way obsessed with getting laid. We’re told how morally superior they themselves are for essentially thinking with the big head instead of the little one, thus confirming their own part in a monogamous sexual strategy. As I mentioned in the last essay, a majority of men tend to fall on one side of the Strategic Pluralism Theory with respect to their sexual strategy.

Low SMV (sexual market value) men are basically forced to invest in one woman at a time if they are to successfully reproduce. This is the basis of a socio-sexual order founded on enforced monogamy. The larger pool of men benefit reproductively if the majority of men can be relied upon to follow the dictates of socially accepted, socially enforced, form of monogamy.

In the past this emphasis also had a culling effect on the worst aspects of women’s Hypergamous tendencies. If all men – including the 20% who could enjoy many women – agreed to play by the old social contract and adopted monogamy as their sexual strategy (in spite of being able to reproduce outside it) then more men would have the opportunity to reproduce. Furthermore, women’s Hypergamy would also be forced to accept lower SMV men’s monogamous strategy as a buffer to worst aspects of their own.

In the past, religious and social mores used to act as a buffer against Hypergamy, but the compromise for women was that they could expect to have the Beta Bucks provisioning aspects of their Hypergamy more or less provided for by the majority of men who adopted this strategy. In an evolutionary sense, protection and provisioning are already an integral part of the male mental firmware. But all of that went out the window after the Sexual Revolution, unilaterally female-controlled hormonal birth control and the socio-sexual/socioeconomic landscape that sprang from the Fempowerment narrative.

Today there is a radical imbalance between the old social contract upon which enforced monogamy was a key element and the new social contract dictated by a gynocratic social order that places women’s sexual strategy well above that of men’s. So it’s small wonder that men would revert back to 80% of low SMV men insisting on, and shaming, the 20% of high SMV men comply with a sexual strategy that women readily confirm isn’t in their best interests. 

On the male side of the strategic equation a majority of low SMV men cannot afford to have Alpha men playing by the rules of polygyny.

That polygyny is really a form of female-directed polyandry (see last week’s essay), but to the 20% of men who enjoy the benefits of falling on the enthusiastic consent side of Hypergamy it just makes sense to go with it. As such, low SMV men are compelled to find ways of discouraging these Alphas from following their r selected sexual strategy. They realize women will want, and pursue, Alphas. And in a polyandrous socio-sexual order based on the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy low SMV men drew the shortest straw.

Intrasexual Combat

When Beta men shame women for wanting to fuck Alpha men it has the effect of making those Beta men seem more insecure. In a feminine-primary social order one of the highest crimes is to attempt to challenge Hypergamy in any way. Even in a religious context, to challenge Hypergamy is to be guilty of repressing women’s sexuality. Today, just this impression is conflated with ‘toxic’ masculinity.

In truth, it would never occur to most low SMV men to shame women for their sexual strategy because they know that in doing so they reduce their own chances of reproduction. Women simply deem them ‘losers’ in the SMP (sexual marketplace). They become scolds, or worse, they become men who are “insecure in their masculinity” because they confirm their low SMV status in doing so. In today’s socio-sexual environment men policing women’s Hypergamy is a lost cause.

The solution then becomes an effort to disqualify the Alpha men they compete with by changing the rules that “real men” are supposed to play by. If you can’t win the Game, change the rules to better fit your strengths.

The ‘Real Man®‘ becomes the guy who exclusively invests himself in one ‘Quality Woman‘ – just like they do.

The apex of masculinity becomes whatever definition best aligns with what they believe they represent.

The’Real Man®‘ is the guy who best fulfills a woman’s, often duplicitous, sexual/life strategy by adopting the K mating strategy of socially/religiously enforced monogamy – just like they do. Oh, and the Quality Woman becomes whatever woman whose necessity compels her to agree with and adopt that strategy (Epiphany Phase).

The Real Man®‘ is the guy who plays by the old social contract rules of enforced monogamy, so more Betas might have a better shot at reproduction. True ‘Manhood‘ becomes a title Betas now feel qualified to bestow on other men; just as women also do with men who help complete their Hypergamous life-strategies. 

Trads vs. The Playboy Lifestyle

In order for Beta men to effect this reigning in of the Alpha men women want to tame and breed with, the high SMV man must be demonized and disqualified from the SMP for following his sexual/biological imperatives. The most common way to do this is by conflating his strategy with a degenerate hedonism. he must be made to seem as if he’s not in control of his sexual nature. So the effort becomes one of building an archetype around the ‘Playah‘ – A man who would be a bad long term bet for women’s Hypergamy because he lacks self-control. For this straw man character his little head does the thinking for the big head making him unreliable as a prospect for parental investment.

If enforced monogamy defines the accepted SMP, and women are presumed to be coequal, co-rational participants in it the ‘Playah’ needs to be cast as the outsider. The latent message is the same intrasexual combat method women use with ‘slut shaming‘; the ‘Playah‘ is a bad bet for long term security even if he is the guy women want to fuck.

However, that Playboy is a cruel reminder to low SMV men that they’ll never be able to fully exercise their own masculine imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. The closest the majority of men will ever get to this is online porn; which of course is why it’s so popular. There is a reason why 68% of Christian men watch porn. They understand that it’s the only viable substitute for their sexual imperative that they’re likely to experience in this lifetime.

While MRAs and MGTOW tend to reserve a special hate for ‘Playahs‘, it’s the Trad-Con mindset that is the most vocal against the Playboy lifestyle. There’s an overarching need amongst Trads to confirm their ego-investment in locking themselves into  enforced monogamy. 

There’s two complications to this:

First, Trad men (and women) tend to superimpose their religious and social belief set on their own sexual strategy. It’s a sin if they don’t accept monogamy as the standard. Today, this belief is a vestige of the old buffers that used to guard against either sex getting too far into their primal sexual impulses and strategies. It’s much easier to impose your sexual strategy on other men, effectively policing their strategy, if it’s ‘God’s Will’ that everyone behave according to that old social contract. I should add that this is the primary reason most Trad men suffer the worst from having their belief in the old set of books destroyed by Red Pill truths. It is galling for men who’ve invested their whole lives in the old social contract to have it vividly disproved by ‘Playahs’ (and women’s behaviors that confirm it) who understand the new social contract well enough to make it work for them.

Second, there’s the self-fulfilling idea that a man who opts for the traditional monogamous lifestyle is in some way more progressive or evolved, or life-satisfied than the ‘Playah‘ with the option to enjoy his non-exclusive sexual strategy. These are the guys who play up the ‘sour grapes’ Law of Power:

Law 36 – Disdain the things you cannot have

If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

MRAs and Trads alike don’t like being reminded that sex has always been an integral part of a healthy life experience for the majority of men who’ve ever lived on this planet. However, to them, sex is almost always a reward for desired behavior that they believe women expect of them. For most of them sex is always transactional so they never live out any frame of reference of having sex with a woman in a validational sense. It’s likely that they will never experience sex in any other context than the transactional. This is simply one of the visceral realities of a Darwinian sexual marketplace. As such, this pretext colors all of their understanding about what is, or should be accepted as, a legitimate sexual strategy – which unsurprisingly is his enforced monogamy strategy.

“Meaningful” Sex

The low SMV majority have many contrivances to corral uncooperative Alphas to adopt their sexual strategy. However, there’s also an involved necessity to convince themselves that their Blue Pill conditioning is the best sexual strategy that would benefit everyone if we’d all just see the validity of it as they do. To effect this they apply a subjective “meaningfulness” to their enforced monogamy (K selection) and “meaninglessness” to pursuing men’s biological imperatives (r selection) or the Alpha sexual strategy.

As a result, low SMV men tend to deemphasize the importance of sex in life. I asked this in the introduction; why is there a perception that a man who enjoys many women is somehow having sex that is less ‘meaningful’ than a man whose sex live is dependent on his relationship with one woman – or, a man who is ostensibly celibate?

The tactic involved here is the control over what constitutes meaning in sex. Low SMV men need this control to direct a meta-Frame that foments their sexual strategy; sex is only valid if it’s ‘meaningful’ in a way that aligns with an enforced monogamy sexual strategy. Thus, they can disqualify high-SMV men by delegitimizing his sexual experience. The higher the notch count, the less meaningful the sexual experience – and the likelier he can be seeen as “obsessed‘ with (meaningless) sex.

“Meaning” is deliberately ambiguous to better salve the egos of low SMV men, but meaning only aligns with what better promotes the enforced monogamy strategy. This strategy conflict actually serves Hypergamy in the long run as well. Women will endorse the importance of meaningful sex since it helps to convince the r selected Alphas that they should (eventually) shift to K selected commitment and parental investment with them. To the Beta moralist, any sex that doesn’t implicitly lead to marriage, children and the formation of families it’s always ‘meaningless’.

For the less moralistic low SMV man the idea that sex is something easily had, something inherently cheap, serves in devaluing Alpha men’s sexual experience. A popular idea among MRAs is that meaningless sex is something any guy can realistically achieve in a random club on a Friday night. This also serves to debase the value of learning Game; something MRAs never seem to have any facility with. By unrealistically cheapening the process of Game the same ‘meaninglessness’ imperative is created.

If any guy can find a worthless club slut with minimal effort then the low SMV man can raise his value by appearing to have higher standards than to lower himself to doing so. See how that works? This is a variation of the ‘sour grapes’ strategy I mentioned earlier. The Alpha who can easily get women becomes common. And by enjoying what Beta men believe should be a common sexual experience that man is reducing himself to his baser instincts. They say he’s “obsessed with pussy” or a “pussy beggar” because he’s applied himself to learning, in the most marginal way, how to have sex on his terms. And if he plays by a rule set that doesn’t align with the “correct” rules all his efforts become “meaningless”.

I should add here that MRAs and some Trad-Con men also like to foment the idea that because they eschew all that easily-had “meaningless” sex that Alpha men and Low Quality women are engaging it frees him up to pursue more esoteric, philosophical and creatively productive pursuits. Again, this helps to boost their esteem while presenting the appearance of uniqueness in spite of the fact that few of them ever have anything concrete to show for it. Along these lines they also love to imply that famous celibate men of antiquity were somehow more accomplished because they had the forbearance of mind to understand sex was a hindrance. When no one believes you aren’t making your necessity a virtue it’s sometimes necessary to paint men more famous than you with the same false-virtues.

The common refrain is that they’ve reached some Nirvana state of higher purpose or that they’ve evolved above the common need for sex. They shame the Alpha’s intelligence by claiming they allow their sexual nature to dictate to their rational nature. This too is a sexual quality signaling (or they believe it should be). They hope that their coequal, co-rational, Quality women will respond to it because they presume they’re using the same enforced monogamy rule book. Most Beta moralists are egalitarian blank-slate equalists. If they are evolved above their sexuality, then evolved, rational women should be too – but only if they are quality.

Past Indiscretions

past_indiscretions

Now that the 21 Convention, 2018, is in the history books it’s time to get back to actually exploring intersexual dynamics rather that talking about exploring them. My speech this year was about the state of the Manosphere and what we can expect from an ever expanding, ever more power-ravenous, Gynocracy in the MeToo era. It’s never been a more dangerous time to be a man who reveals the truths about intersexual dynamics than now. Even if you do so from the most objective perspective you run the risk of censure at best, personal destruction at worst.

One thing I am very thankful of the convention for is the depth and breadth of not just the speakers, but the attendees. Last year I came back with so many new concepts to explore it finished out my year of blog essays. This year the attendance was twice as big and I’ve got a wealth of new material to dig into courtesy of the stories and personal situations men would relate to me. I’ll be doing a more complete breakdown of the convention around the time the video of my talk drops on 21 University. Anthony Johnson has fast tracked this video as well as the Red Man Group Live discussions (there were 3) we did on the bonus 5th day for anyone who stuck around for it.

One of the stories I had a guy hit me with was his making me aware of the black market that’s opened up in the sale of positive pregnancy tests online. There are forums (not even on the dark web) dedicated to convincing “commitment-phobic” men that their girlfriends are pregnant in order to lock them down either in marriage or an LTR. That blackmarket (if you can call it that) also led me to investigating the phenomenon of women covering for their girlfriends’ infidelity or pretending to be an alibi in order to allay any suspicions their Beta boyfriends might have about it. This then led me to another truth about the nature of women:

The Sisterhood will always show solidarity for, provide cover for, or aid and abet a woman trying to optimize Hypergamy,…unless that woman is in direct intrasexual competition with her for the same optimization.

Right now I’m sure there are guys thinking, “Rollo, we know that women can get really brutal when it comes to competing with each other.” And yes that is true; “slut shaming” is almost entirely reserved for women’s intrasexual combat, and there are many other ways women disqualify other women from the sexual marketplace if they feel threatened by that woman’s direct competition. But women evolved to be collectivist and cooperative in our hunter/gatherer past, and this has given rise to a globalized Sisterhood wherein women buy into the narrative of their own victimhood and most understand their gynocentric position of power simultaneously. If there is a prime directive to the social order it’s that all women everywhere are entitled to the best available opportunities to optimize Hypergamy.

Women will almost universally run cover for their sisters’ infidelity, and especially so if they are anonymous and there is little risk attached to their involvement. The rationalization is always the same too; it’s men’s responsibility to “Man Up” and marry a sister and thus subterfuge is justified, or, a woman deserves a shot at hot short term sexual opportunities if that woman is paired with a Beta partner. Either scenario is consolidation of Hypergamy.

Men are never afforded the same luxury of being able to vet women or to abandon one for his own reasons. I constantly get questions from guys asking how to vet a woman for marriage, but the fact that I would be audacious enough to offer advice on this is enough to set most women off. How dare I think that any woman might not be suitable for a long term commitment? To the Sisterhood, that vetting is only ever valid when it comes from another woman, why? Because to women only women should ever have control over Hypergamy and sexual selection. And in a feminine-primary social order a man telling another man that he should pass on a woman for commitment is conflated with misogyny.

Case in point, this story is of a guy who discovers his girlfriend used to be a Sugar Baby and had sex with older men for money in her sexual past. He has plans to break it off with her, but naturally every woman and every Blue Pill simp in the thread thinks he throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This situation isn’t all that uncommon. In fact, with the rise of the internet and a permanent social media digital footprint, combined with Open Hypergamy, it’s become necessary for women to legitimize every woman’s sexual past for fear that their own might disqualify her for a man’s commitment.

So the Sisterhood will cover for infidelity, aid in fraud and deception, keep Beta men ignorant of a woman’s duplicity and support single motherhood if it means that woman can lock down an optimal ideal of Hypergamy or parental investment from a man.

In an age when a woman’s sexual past is part of her digital footprint, a new social convention is needed to absolve her from any preconditions a man may have in vetting her out of his long term investment in her. Solution: Shame men for “judging” her by that sexual history. Men must be shamed as “insecure in their masculinity” if they might ever use a woman’s Party Years against her in a court of marriage. Likewise, women will fall back on the old tropes of traditionalist sexual repression to amp up the victimhood should a man ‘have a problem’ with women’s maturing sexual natures.

A similar situation occurred with the guy in Saving the Best who discovered that his sexually unadventurous wife had some video tapes of herself in amateur porn gangbangs when she “used to be so wild back in college.” His response was Great, I married a slut who fucks me like a prude. This of course sent the Sisterhood apoplectic and he was the one who had the “problem” for committing to and marrying a woman with that kind of past. That he had no knowledge of the videos prior to it made no difference; how dare he judge a woman’s past indiscretions? And then it became and indictment of womankind rather than an indictment of a woman. Men are not allowed to have concerns about a woman’s sexual past when it comes to matters of commitment because it implies a measure of control over Hypergamy.

Long term provisioning is a very serious problem for women’s subconscious Hypergamy. As it stands today a woman’s Epiphany Phase represents the culmination of Hypergamy. It’s vitally important that a woman never be judged for her sexual past if she’s to ever ‘stick the landing’ so to speak. If she follows the Sandbergian plan of Hypergamy she can’t afford to have men judge her for prioritizing Alpha Fucks, short term breeding, in her peak sexual market value years if she’s going to lock down a (hopefully still ignorant) Beta in Waiting. She must stick the landing and cash out of the sexual marketplace just at the right moment, between the ages of 29-31.

During her Epiphany Phase a woman needs to be absolved the ‘indiscretions’ of her Party Years. I’m putting indiscretions in scare quotes because those behaviors are really part of a long term breeding and life strategy. They are anything but indiscretions, they are part of the design.

However, most men have a natural revulsion to women who’ve been with a lot of men. It’s takes a great deal of social conditioning – a lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning – to prepare a man to believe it’s his duty as a man to look past what his instinct is trying to warn him about parentally investing in a woman for whom his paternity might be in doubt. I wrote about this in the War on Paternity, but there is a part of men’s evolved mental firmware that is instinctually suspicious of the certainty of paternity. Our hindbrains want to warn us of bad prospects for a certain paternity with a woman.

partner_count

You’ll notice here that a higher partner count for men is less deleterious than it is for women. I’ll address this fact in a followup to this essay, but for now let’s focus on the effects a higher N-count has for women. Our instinct, it seems, is correct when it warns us that a woman isn’t suitable for a man’s parental investment.

Women with a higher number of sexual partners have more difficulty developing solid attachments, a higher incidence of infidelity and higher rates of divorce. Primarily I see this as being due to the Alpha Widow potential (more lovers, more chance one makes a lasting Alpha impression) and the subconscious comparisons to a past lover. This is a workable theory as to why men adapted for a revulsion (or at least a hesitation) of high N-count women.

This instinctual reservation is a survival adaptation based in men’s need for certainty in paternity. Investment costs and a loss of reproductive opportunity is so high for men in a state of paired monogamy that certainty of paternity became an evolved mental subroutine for men. Men’s biological imperative is to spread seed. This is why we can become aroused on a moment’s stimulation, why we can mentally compartmentalize sex from intimacy, and why we generally err on the side of over-estimating sexual interest in women.

Long term monogamous investment in rearing a child costs a man more than just him following his biological imperative. As such, a certainty of paternity became a key element in that tradeoff for parental investment in a woman. So when women shame a man for even thinking that her sexual past might be indicative of future returns it is literally a woman’s attempt at getting a man to ignore 100,000 years of an evolution that led his ancestors to have him. You don’t just wish away 100,000 years of successful breeding adaptations because it’s impolite for a man to question a woman’s past or the convenience with which she disregards it at a time when her own sexual strategy might benefit most.

This tradeoff exists in direct oppositional conflict with women’s Hypergamy, and in the context of her very limited sexual market value (fertility) peak. Women between 29 and 31 are on the downside of their sexual marketability with respect to locking down a high value man for long term parental investment. While some women can maintain their sexual value longer than others, the decay is undeniably on the downturn with respect to her intrasexual competition and her reproductive viability. She’s gone through her best fertility years focusing most on the visceral side of the Hypergamous equation (short term Alpha seed) and / or investing herself in low ROI monogamy.

In the Epiphany Phase she (and the Sisterhood) knows she can’t afford suitable Beta provisioning men to have revelations about her sexual past affect her viability for long term security.

Hypergamy is in conflict with the male need for certainty of paternity.

As such, the Sisterhood (and its male ‘allies’) unites against any reservations, or shames men for being ‘judgmental’ of her sexual past. This is how Hypergamy fights with men’s paternity imperative. Ultimately it’s a battle of his resources (sunk cost investment) versus her capacity to optimize Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. For more information on this conflict see The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies.

Thus, social conventions must be created to prioritize Hypergamy above Paternity. So, being a Step-Dad makes a man a “hero”. Paternity is legally defined by the mother / wife, and gynocentric legal and medical doctrines restrict doctors from revealing who the real father of a child is to the “dad”. There was a time when being an unwed mother was something society shunned. It was a time when both men and women agreed on a man’s priority of his own paternity. If a young woman became pregnant out of marriage, or if a woman slept with a soldier of an invading army, she was shunned and publicly excoriated. That’s the degree of importance the social order of the time placed on paternity. Now, the Village shames men for ever expecting a child would be his own or that he’d be justified in his concern about a woman’s past.

Now the Village conflates men’s instinctual desire to know paternity (to even put a value on it) with a social construct. It’s not that he’s naturally concerned about paternity, it’s that he learned to be concerned as part of his toxic masculinity social educations.

Finally, I should also add that part of this social convention meant to repress the paternity imperative is about absolving women of the liabilities of a promiscuous past. As I mentioned, men’s reservations inhibit women’s Hypergamous strategies. So men are shamed by women for those reservations, but they are also shamed by Beta male sympathizers (symps). This piling on with the women only aids in the deconstruction of their ow sexual imperatives, but male ‘allies’ used this shame as an extension of their Beta Game in the hopes of identifying themselves better with the feminine (as they were conditioned to). They see the identifying with women’s imperatives as a means to their own reproduction.

Primordial Archetypes

This morning I was made aware of another example of open Hypergamy. A Russian Alpha Widow admitted to her duplicity in switching her Beta husband’s sperm with that of her ex lover’s in her IVF insemination. Now, at the risk of throwing red meat to the wolves here, I wanted to dissect this situation a bit to explain a larger concept I’ve been considering lately. It would be enough to use this situation as one more example of women’s prime directive – Hypergamy before all else – but, there’s more involved here that illustrates the sociological reach that Hypergamy has for women.

You see, Yana Anokhina, 38, couldn’t have pulled off her deception of Maxim Anokhin without enlisting the aid of Dr. Liya Kazaryan and her staff in swapping out his sperm for that of Yana’s former lover; the Alpha for whom she was widowed’. I’m not entirely sure that her former lover (now her current relationship) was aware of the swap, but there’s no question about Yana’s motives.

Ms Anokhina has not spoken about the swap but reports say she wanted the father of her baby to be the man she loved – not her husband.

‘It was found out during the investigation in court that Maxim’s wife Yana was the one who initiated the process of replacing her husband’s biological material,’ reported Vesti.

‘Allegedly, she wanted to give birth to a child by a man with whom she was in love, and her husband was the one who paid the costs.’

So this isn’t just as simple as she got knocked up by her Alpha lover and tricked her Beta husband into believing the inseminated sperm was his own. She had to actually go to the trouble of collecting two samples of sperm, convincing the IVF clinic’s doctor and staff into making the swap (and then withholding the truth from the father) and then carrying the pregnancy to term and keeping her husband ignorant of the ruse for a year. This may seem like the deviousness of a particular woman, but remember, she had to enlist the confidence of Dr. Kazaryan and other clinicians (I presume also female).

And she does all this with a laugh.

I’ve written quite a bit on what I call the Sisterhood Über Alles and this is one more example of how that collective female consciousness intuitively understands and both consciously and unconsciously promotes the interests of the Feminine Imperative – even for unfamiliar, anonymous women.

Now you might say, “Well Rollo, this is just one horrible example of a few women who got in cahoots to deceive a hapless Beta chump. Not all women are like this.” Or I’m sure the more morally conscious of ‘red pill women’ would simply point out that they would never do such a thing and convince us that ‘quality women’ regularly police their own Hypergamous impulses – these Russian women just lack their moral superiority. Well, be that as it may, it’s not too difficult to find online forums dedicated to women collaborating with other women in order to trick a man into marrying a woman via false pregnancy claims. In fact there’s a lucrative black market for positive pregnancy tests sold to women wanting to press their boyfriends into a marriage commitment by way of a false-positive pregnancy scare.

The fact behind all this still remains – women evolved for a subconscious, collective duplicity when it comes to optimizing on Hypergamy.

We can see this in popular culture; a culture defined by the Feminine Imperative now. Dalrock once said we have replaced the monogamous marriage model of child rearing with the child support model of child rearing today. I believe he’s right, but how is that child support model effected today and how doe it align with women’s evolved, instinctual predilections?

Humankind evolved from small tribal collectives, but in each collective there were commonalities of behaviors that developed similarly to solve various personal and collective (tribal) problems. For instance, an instinctive (unlearned) fear of snakes or spiders in women is an evolved part of humankind’s collective mental firmware. A small boys natural propensity to throw an object with strength and accuracy might be another example.

How women interact today in what I call the Sisterhood is a gestalt of the various instinctive behaviors that the women of our tribal ancestors developed to aid them in collective support as well as ensuring long-term security in reproduction. In other words, women evolved to do exactly what Dr. Kazaryan did, and so many other women in various “trick him into marrying you” forums do, to enable another woman’s sexual strategy. From an evolutionary perspective it follows that women who aided their ‘sisters’ in Hypergamy would themselves be aided and insure that this archetypal behavior became a characteristic of women’s collectivist nature.

I once watched a video of some daytime women’s talk show that centered on how women could justifiably trap a man into commitment by essentially lying to him about a faked pregnancy. I apologize for not having a link to it here, but while I was looking for it on YouTube I was inundated with videos of shows on this topic – I literally couldn’t find the one I was thinking of because there were so many returns. Watching this show I was hit by just how many women in the audience rallied behind the women doing the ‘trapping’ and the myriad justifications offered to allay any feelings of guilt, remorse or doubts about having a child.

This is particularly emphasized if the ‘father’ in question fulfills an ideal of women’s collective Hypergamy. To the collective hivemind of women, a woman is, by nature, entitled to a child with the most perfect father (high SMV) she can attract. Remember, shows and online forums like this are only small representative examples of that global Hypergamous archetypal expectation and the support women offer each other to optimize Hypergamy. I’ve stated before the the Sisterhood Über Alles (above all) transcends all considerations of tribe, race, religion and even political stripe. All women are part of ‘team woman‘ before any other affiliation; this is how the Feminine Imperative has remained a social influence since our hunter/gatherer beginnings. As we’ve progressed from small tribalist beginnings to larger collectives, to nations and now to globalism, this female collectivism has expanded to encompass the totality of womankind.

Love Me Vampire, Fuck Me Werewolf

Anyone who’s been reading my work for a while is probably scratching their heads as to why I’m referring to the concept of ‘archetypes’ here. As most of my readers know, I’ve never been a fan of Carl Jung. I’ve written about why this is a few times and I’ll probably write a more comprehensive essay about it in the coming year, but suffice to say that while Jung might be synonymous with the new agey metaphysical concept of archetypes, it was from anthropology that he lifted the term and that’s the basic reference I’m using here. That said, I don’t necessarily disagree with Jungian archetypes, it’s at the point where the concept takes on metaphysical aspects that I part ways with them.

However, the idea of archetypes is necessary to explain the last bit of the puzzle here, because it’s my belief that a primordial understanding of Hypergamy is part of our collective consciousness and unconsciousness. I say collective consciousness because since the time of the Sexual Revolution our global understanding of intersexual dynamics has become part of our social discourse. When I refer to something like Open Hypergamy I’m talking about the almost triumphant, open embrace of women’s sexual strategy. The generations that came after the Sexual Revolution scarcely remember that there was a time when intersexual truths we take for granted now weren’t something that was discussed in polite conversation. Hypergamy, while unconsciously understood, was secretive. A woman who other women called a ‘gold digger’ was disparaged by women not on moral grounds, but rather because she was open about the sexual strategy all women employ and they’d rather be kept secret so as to use it effectively.

In 2018 it’s almost quaint to think that women would be coy about Hypergamy. With the advent of the internet it became impossible for women to keep Hypergamy concealed, and really, why would they care to in an age when the necessary provisioning-side of Hypergamy is veritably insured? But it wasn’t always so obvious. Up until the mid 1960s the understanding of Hypergamy was an unconscious knowledge. Certainly it was discussed and written about by men contemplating the duplicitous nature of women. Ancient religious texts are rife with proverbs warning against the nature of women, so the basics of Hypergamy were something our tribal ancestors we’re well aware of.

I received this Tweet from a reader a few days ago:

This guy’s ‘revelation’ prompted me to consider the primordial understanding we have of Hypergamy. I’ve read dozens of articles by, and listened to dozens more interviews of, ‘popular psychologists’ who explain the commonalities of our classic human stories and myths. I got into this topic in Storytelling. The basic premise is that our common evolution has led to common themes in all human stories. The same elements and the same character archetypes pursue the same motives from culture to culture. Yet all of these commonalities are centered on similar aspects of our evolved mental firmware. The hero, the villain, good vs. evil, the wise old sage, the beautiful damsel to be saved, ect. are all founded on common human development. They are semi-conscious expressions of what our evolution has embedded in our mental firmware.

Now, what if I told you that the reality of women’s Hypergamous nature is also a part of that collective consciousness?

My theory is this: human beings have an innate understanding of the Alpha Seed – Beta Need nature of intersexual dynamics. On some level of consciousness we know, we feel, that it’s true, how it functions and why does. As a result, social institutions (religion and familial) created moral strictures around this unconscious knowledge to buffer against the worst effects of it on society. Only after the Sexual Revolution and men ceding virtually unilateral control of Hypergamy to women did these strictures change.

The concepts of men who represent Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are similarly part of this instinctual understanding of Hypergamy. These too are archetypes, but more so, they form the basis of more complex male archetypes (love me Vampire, fuck me Werewolf). They are the men women want to fuck and the men women want to be provided for by. And we can trace the root of these archetypes through our evolution and even the evolution of other primates. These Hypergamous archetypes then manifest themselves in our era-specific, cultural specific, stories, narratives, mythology, etc.