Alpha

The Second Set of Books

books

One of the cornerstones of red pill truth is in men coming to terms with what amounts to (in most cases) half a lifetime of feminine conditioning. It’s interesting to consider that there was a time (pre-sexual revolution) when a man wasn’t in someway socialized and acculturated in his upbringing to give deference to the feminine or to become more feminine-identifying. There are plenty of other manosphere bloggers who’ll run down in detail all of the many ways boys are now raised and educated to be what a feminine-primary world would like them to be, but at the heart of it is a presumption that boys should be raised and conditioned to be more like girls; conditioned from their earliest memories to be better providers for what women believe they will eventually want them to be as adult ‘men’.

For men who’ve become aware of this conditioning through some trauma or personal crisis that prompted him to seek answers for his condition, we call this period our blue pill days. I think it’s important to make a distinction about this time – whether or not a man is Alpha or Beta doesn’t necessarily exclude him from the consequences of a blue pill conditioning. That isn’t to say that a more natural Alpha Man can’t see the world in a red pill perspective by his own means, but rather that his feminine-primary upbringing doesn’t necessarily make a man Alpha or Beta.

The Blue Pill Alpha

I’m making this distinction because there is school of thought that being blue pill (unaware of one’s conditioning) necessitates him being more Beta. To be sure, feminine-primary conditioning would raise a boy into a more feminine-pliable man – ready to serve as the good Beta provider when a woman’s SMV declines and she’s less able to compete with her younger sexual competitors.

However, there exist more Alpha Men also conditioned to be servants of the Feminine Imperative. These men make for some of the most self-evincing White Knights you’ll ever meet and are usually the first men to “defend the honor” of the feminine and women for whom they lack a real awareness of. Binary absolutism and an upbringing steeped in feminization makes for a potent sense of self-righteousness. Blue pill Alphas live for the opportunity to defend everything their conditioning has taught them. To the blue pill Alpha all women are victims by default, all women share a common historic suffrage and any man (his sexual competitors) critical of the feminine are simply an opportunity to prove his worth to any woman in earshot who might at all find his zealousness attractive.

The Second Set of Books

On June 15th, 2011, Thomas Ball set himself on fire in front of Cheshire Superior Court in New Hampshire. While I strongly disagree with his decision to self-immolate, I understand his sentiment. In last week’s Possession, Living Tree attempted to call me to the carpet about how a man might come to the conclusion of suicide or murder once he’d become confronted with a total loss of all his personal and emotional investment in life:

But Rollo, you just justified murder as “logical”, by illustrating that insecurity is the prime motivator for this man’s life (and many others, I’d imagine). The decision may have be understandable in an empathetic sense, and he might have seen it as logical at the time, but there is nothing logical about it. You are making extreme beta-ism seem more and more like a mental disorder.

Just for the record, I’d argue that ONEitis, however extreme, is in fact a mental disorder.

I haven’t justified anything, murder or suicide, I’ve simply outlined the deductive process men use when confronting the actualized loss of their most important investment (or perceptually so) in life. They are convinced and conditioned to believe that women are playing by a set of rules and will honor the terms of those rules, only to find that after ego-investing themselves for a lifetime in the correctness and appropriateness of those rules does he discover in cruel and harsh terms that women are playing by another set of rules and wonder at how stupid he could be to have ever believed in the rules he was conditioned to expect everyone would abide by.

Suicide or murder is certainly a deductive and pragmatic end for some men, but by no means is it justified. Thomas Ball, for all of his due diligence in uncovering the ugly processes of the American divorce industry, was far more useful alive than dead in some symbolic suicide. He wasn’t the martyr he probably expected he’d be, he’s just a footnote.

For all of that, Thomas Ball and his last message to humanity serves as an excellent illustration of a man coming to terms with his own conditioning. In his message Ball makes a very important observation about his legal ordeals. He comes to understand that there are two sets of books rather than the one he’d been lead to believe that everyone understood as ‘the rules’ everyone should play by.

The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime call Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright.

Ball was of course making a political statement in his account of going through the legal system and the cruel education he got in the process, but when men transition from their comfortable blue pill perspective into the harsh reality that the red pill represents, the experience is a lot like Ball discovering that the set of books (the set of rules) he’d believed everyone was using wasn’t so. Likewise, men who’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that women were using a common set of rules – a set where certain expectations and mutual exchange were understood – were in fact using their own set. Furthermore these men ‘just didn’t get it’ that they should’ve known all along that women, as well as men’s feminization conditioning, were founded in a second set of books.

In and of itself, this is a difficult lesson for young men to learn and disabuse themselves of before they’ve invested their most productive years into what their blue pill conditioning has convinced them they can expect from life and women. However, when a mature man, who’s based the better part of his life and invested his future into the hope that the first set of books is actually legitimate set is disenfranchised by the second set of books, by the actual set of rules he’s been playing with, that’s when all of the equity he believed he’d established under the first set of books counts for nothing. Literally his life (up to that point) counted for nothing.

When faced with the prospect of rebuilding himself after living so long under false pretenses, after having all he believed he was building turn up to be a lifetime of wasted effort, he’s faced with two real options. Recreate himself or destroy himself. Needless to say suicide statistics among men are a strong indication that the majority of men (Betas) simply don’t have the personal strength to recreate themselves. Thomas Ball didn’t.

There’s usually a lot of disillusionment that comes with making the transition to Red Pill awareness. I’ve written more than a few posts about the stages of grief and acceptance that come along with that transition. Guy’s get upset that what they now see was really there all along, but it’s not so much the harshness of seeing red pill dynamics in women or a feminized society play out with such predictability, it’s the loss of investment that cause the real sense of nihilism. When I wrote Anger Management, the overarching reason most men experienced what they called a righteous anger, wasn’t at how the second set of books had been dictating their lives for so long, but rather it was anger at having invested so much of themselves in the first set of books and losing that very long term investment.

The good news is you can rebuild yourself. A lot gets written about how nihilistic the red pill is, but this is for a lack of understanding that you can recreate yourself for the positive with the knowledge of both sets of rules. One common thread I see come up often on the Red Pill Reddit forum is how Game-awareness has completely destroyed a guy’s world view. I get it, I realize it’s a hard realization, but their depression is only for a lack of realizing that they can become even better in this new understanding than they were in their blue pill ignorance.

Appeals to Reason

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“A woman in love can’t be reasonable, otherwise she wouldn’t be in love”
— Mae West

Last week The Chateau posted an article about a Beta male asking girls for reasons why they rejected him. In the typical deductive logic that most Betas are prone to use, he runs down a checklist of questions regarding what he thinks killed his chances with the girls he thought he could get with. He petitions four women with questions about themselves, which, being women, all are more than eager to answer.

Do you usually figure out if you wanna do more than make out with someone pretty instantly? Or, is it a slow burn?

Was there anything I did wrong that turned you off?

If you had advice for any guy looking to meet a girl, what would it be?

What makes someone attractive to you? Do you have any types?

Do you feel that you could never date someone shorter than you?

Am I an unattractive person to you?

These are some of the more common questions John Brown puts to the girls, and true to form the girls answer with the standard feminine boilerplate responses that absolve themselves of their part in his rejection, while trying not to hurt the feelings of a guy they knew would never see them naked. With the exception of maybe Vanessa, it’s pretty clear that John’s punching well above his blue-pill weight with these girls even though I’d only rate Victoria as the only HB8 in the bunch.

The questioning is what I’ve come to expect from most chumps mired in their blue pill bubble of applying logic to their sexlessness, but it’s not John’s overt grilling of these women that’s keeping him trapped in the Matrix – it’s his buildups and followups to those questions. John isn’t just interviewing them to ‘get to the bottom of things’ so he can solve his sex problem, he’s leading these women with ‘if then’ logic in an effort to convince them that, by their own words, they should be attracted to him.

John is make the most fundamental error every plugged in chump makes — he’s appealing to women’s reason.

Why Women Can’t ‘Just Get It‘

Appealing to women’s logic and relying on deductive reasoning to sort it out is the calling card of a Beta mind. There is nothing more anti-seductive for women than appealing to her reason. Arousal, attraction, sexual tension, subcommunication of desire, all happen indirectly and below the social surface for women. It’s not that women are incapable of reasoning (hypergamy is one logical bitch) or are crippled by their emotion-based hindbrains, it’s that if you’re asking her how to be more attractive you don’t Get It. It’s in the doing, not the asking.

If you read through the responses these women give John from a red pill perspective, you’ll see a pattern emerge. On an intrinsic, subliminal level,  women understand that their genuine desire, their genuine arousal and attraction, has to be an organic process. When a guy like John makes attempts to convince a woman that by her own reasoning (and led by his) she should be with him intimately, it offends and then cancels that process for her.

For women, one of the qualities of the Alpha her Hypergamy demands is a guy who Just Gets It. An Alpha would intrinsically know what women’s arousal and attraction cues are without being told and without even the inclination to ask about them. John’s issue of overtly confirming for himself ‘what women want’ is really an abdication of a Beta who doesn’t get it. And true to form, John’s, and Betas like him, next logical resort is to rationally convince a woman (preferably using her own words) to be attracted to him by attempting to re-impress her of his status.

Betas like this generally end up as the infamous emotional tampon, or the Surrogate Boyfriend to a woman who’s banging the most Alpha Man her looks can attract. However, this appeal-to-reason rationale filters into other aspects of men’s lives. The logical progression for John would be to better identify with the women (really the feminine imperative) he hopes to bang in the future – embody the feminine prerequisites, get the intimate approval. For married or monogamous men this appeal-to-reason may come as a mistaken belief that doing more chores around the house will lead to more (or any) sex for him.

The fallacy of Relational Equity is essentially founded on men’s dependency on appeals to women’s reason. Your doing homework with your children to better their lives (while very ennobling) doesn’t make your wife any hotter for you in bed, nor will it be any bargaining tool should she decide to leave you. Just as John is learning here, women don’t fall in love with who you are, they fall in love with what you are, and no appeal to their reason will convince them otherwise.

Red Pill Women

There’s a lot being made in the manosphere about the emergence of red pill or Game aware women. I’m on record for stating that every woman is a red pill woman, it’s just getting them to drop the feminine-primary, psychological pretense and cop to red pill truths that’s the trick. While I do share the generally wariness of self-identifying “Red Pill Women” and their potential for sanitizing or repurposing Game-awareness to a better feminine liking, I think most women are already aware of the truth of Game. There’s a very real danger in Men accepting “red pill women’s” conversion and acceptance of those truths for exactly the appeal-to-reason dynamic I’ve described here.

Red pill women’s acceptance of what the manosphere forces them to acknowledge about themselves is essentially a convincing appeal to their reason, and this will always make their “conversion” suspect. Regardless of their reported red pill self-awareness, red pill women still want a guy to Just Get It, their desire still can’t be negotiated, and as illogical as it may seem to a manosphere Man, hoping to appeal to the same reason that made her “red pill” still wont get you laid.

Red pill or not, women are still women, and basing any relationship you have with them on appealing to their reason, rather than solid Game awareness and truths, is building you house on a foundation of sand.

Dominance

Dominance

I’ve been watching with some interest the proceedings of the Ariel Castro kidnapping case. As more of the details come to light and the media aggrandizes the victims (virtually insuring a book or TV deal), there’s a lot of uncomfortable questions that need to be answered.

“Most of the sex that went on in that house, probably all of it, was consensual,” Castro said. “These allegations about being forceful on them — that is totally wrong. Because there was times where they’d even ask me for sex –many times. And I learned that these girls were not virgins. From their testimony to me, they had multiple partners before me, all three of them.”

I covered this a bit in He’s Special, making modern comparisons to the War Brides:

,..there’s been a lot of discussion on the forums I frequent about  Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus being held captive by Ariel Castro for a decade. Let that sink in a minute, a decade. That’s 11 years. That’s a lot of life to live. That’s a lot of normal to get used to. There are other cases like this; Jaycee Dugard and  Elizabeth Smart come to mind, but are all of these instances the results of a hard-wired Stockholm Syndrome in women?

Just for the record here, I wouldn’t dream of trying to defend Castro, but in eleven years time a lot can become normal. I have no doubt that Castro held these women captive for 11 years, and the media would have us believe they endured sex dungeon conditions living like the Gimp in Pulp Fiction, but there comes a point of normalcy in ones daily routine life.


“I am not a violent person. I simply kept them there without being able to leave.”

“We had a lot of harmony going on in that home,” he said.

In our lives there is a certain degree of routine and structure most people become accustomed to. I get up at 5am most mornings, I’m at the gym until 7:30 and I’m off to work until 5pm. Somethings change every day but I live in a set of patterns and I know what to expect most of the time. The more I read about Castro the more I’m thinking the guy settled into a state of normalcy with these women and they with him. In 11 years they made no reasonable dramatic effort to escape? They endured a forced abortion and a homebirth (not unlike Jaycee Dugard) and still no collaborative plan they could come up with was effective for 11 years until one day Ariel left the door open? None of these girls were malnourished, and they could stand to lose some weight.

Naturally the feminine-primary meme is that Castro was “blaming the victim“, but I don’t think that was his point. He knows he’s going to prison for life plus 1,000 years, why not just shut up and go away? There was something of a normal life that became a routine for them all for 11 years. That’s 11 Christmases, 11 Easters, 11 independence days. The MSM will spin the story of their heroic support of each other and I don’t imagine the girls wanted to be there, but at some point living with Ariel was their ‘normal’.

Ariel, got sloppy. He got comfortable in that normalcy. Even if he was abusive, after 11 years my guess is he expected for that normalcy to continue and this was what his plea was really about. He actually thought they “had a lot of harmony going on in that house.” It’s easy to pass off his words as insanity, but here was a guy who at least wanted ‘harmony’. At the end of it all, all he wanted was what most men want – his means were evil and reprehensible, but wanted harmony.

Domination

A week back CH had a study and post regarding the importance of dominance and how it’s ultimately dominance that attracts women to men. Of course Roissy would like for looks to play a lesser role in attraction, and my perspective is that arousal is based on the physical to a much greater importance than women can afford to let on, but dominance is a key factor in attraction. I would also argue that an elite physique is the most obvious environmental cue for male dominance. The best form of peacocking is a good build.

However, all of that breaks down if the guy lacks a dominant Alpha mindset. Without that self-confidence and competitive spirit, the best looking guy becomes a foil for a more dominant one. Conversely, enough bravado and fearless genuine Alpha dominance can make even the ugliest of guys attractive by order of degree.

Ariel Castro was one ugly motherfucker, my guess is he never had the Game needed to even sniff at the women in the porn he claims he’s addicted to, but what Ariel had in spades was dominance. Raw forceful dominance he used to enslave not one, but three captured women. Capturing  and physically coercing them to be his prisoners was an act of dominance, but the want, and the expectation that he could have a harmonious normal life with these women was a testament to his (delusional) sense of self-importance.

Irrational self-confidence is the cornerstone of attraction.

When we contemplate male dominance it’s important to remember that to whatever degree we can actualize being dominant – at work, with women, in competition – our own personality, both flaws and attributes, will be manifested in our dominant actions and our beliefs. Castro is a piss poor example of a human being, but he’s an excellent illustration of how his frustrations and his personality were transferred into his actions.

He’s the negative side of that coin, and much of what is termed the Dark Triad of personality traits might also be considered dominant self-importance. However, that same sociopathy that makes for the bad examples is also the root of the positive ones. It really comes down to the individual, their sense of purpose and how they choose to direct that dominance.

If all this sounds like a pep talk to get you to adopt a more dominant mindset it wasn’t really my intent. I’m asked a lot, “Rollo if confidence is the key, then how do I get more confident?” This is a common deductive argument, as if they sold confidence in bottles at the drug store and all you had to do was buy the right brand. It doesn’t work this way. You have to believe it.

It’s fine for me to tell you act irrationally confident, and hope that the act becomes a permanent fixture in your personality, but most men don’t feel confident even when they’re acting confident. Confidence, and dominance, come from real established options and the knowing that you can successfully generate more. This is what makes confidence attractive, it’s the unspoken message to a woman that this guy can, has proven before, and potentially will again, produce more than he needs and other men aspire to do so.

Can’t Buy Me Alpha

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I can’t imagine most of the manosphere, to say nothing about MRAs, haven’t read about the latest feminist triumphalism in a recent Pew study that’s determined that 23% of women now out-earn men. The ironic inconsistencies are an easy mark for most red pill men, but I imagine they’re particularly galling for MRAs:

Moms now earn more than dads in almost a quarter of all U.S. families, the highest level in history. It’s a huge leap from 50 years ago when only a handful of moms were bringing home the bacon, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

Overall, women – including those who are unmarried – are now the leading or solo breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households, compared with just 11 percent in 1960, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau analyzed by Pew.

Cue the MRA rage posts about unmarried women receiving uniquely feminine social benefits and entitlements men have no access to, not to mention state enforced male child support for unmarried mothers and remarried mothers. I get it, really I do, but my emphasis here isn’t so much about the factual information being skewed by the feminine imperative, rather its neurolinguistic delivery of  those distortions.

That’s both good news and bad news, depending on which end of the scale you examine. At the top level, educated women are catching up with men in the workforce. But at the bottom rungs, there are more single mothers than ever and most of them are living near the poverty line.

Bear in mind this report by Amy Langfield was what hastily replaced this report by Bill Briggs – For Richer or Poorer?, When wives make more, some men’s health suffers – on NBCs frontpage. As I’ve written before, the feminine imperative will never allow even its own message to be sullied with a male perspective.

When wives bring home more bacon than their husbands, household budgets surely may sizzle but in some cases, men may pay a price. Some guys who lose their role as primary earners are known to lose sexual steam and may deal with insomnia and other issues, researchers say.

In relationships where women’s wages become slightly fatter than what their spouses pocket, scientists have determined that men are about 10 percent more likely to require prescription pills to combat erectile dysfunction, insomnia and anxiety, according to a recent study by Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School.

Naturally the comment section is rife with feminine ridicule and accusations of men’s masculine insecurities being made manifest in not being able to get it up when wifey makes more money. The apex fallacy is a helluva drug for the feminine imperative.

“There is a powerful social norm for many men that it’s important to make more than their wives and, essentially, when that social norm is violated, what this does is make them feel emasculated,” said Lamar Pierce, a professor of strategy at Olin who completed the study in February, working with colleagues in Denmark. Other research has shown that men with wives who earn more are more likely to cheat. 

It’s going to be important to read that linked 2010 article about men who’s wives earn more being more likely to cheat, because this is the crux of who gets to decide what emasculation feels like for men. Lamar Pierce’s assertion, as with most blank slaters, is that masculinity is the result of “powerful social norms”  and not the result of a culmination of what millennia of biological and psychological evolution physically made of men. The nuts and bolts get discarded when the feminine imperative defines the terms of what men feel and why they do.

The problem here is that the nuts and bolts are about the physical male sexual response. What is it about women earning more money (excluding for single mother bonuses) that makes them less likely to pass the boner test? If the feminine imperative is to be believed, it’s due to men’s fragile egos and masculinity being defined by his ability to provide. No mention is made of women’s lack of femininity, physical sexual attraction or simple logistics when she’s the one tasked with bringing home the bacon. No mention is given about women’s desire to even be in the position of being the sole or majority breadwinner.

Buying Alpha

The main problem with women earning more than their men is far more hardwired into both gender’s psyches than the experts consigned by the feminine imperative will ever be allowed to relate. It’s not very complimentary to the imperative because it reveals far too much of its real inner workings and exposes its social engineering to effect them.

On the feminine side we have the cruel reality of feminine Hypergamy that’s constantly reminded that the man she’s paired with (or would pair with) isn’t capable of, or is less capable of, the provisioning her Hypergamy ultimately demands of him, and which she can provide for herself. For the single professional woman this imbalance results in their constant search for a man they consider “her equal”, and is the cause for many post-Wall women’s common lament of not being able to find the guy she thinks she deserves.

By this distorted logic, professional women subscribe to the social convention that they can ‘buy Alpha’; that their credentials, financial and social status ought to be the deciding factor for men’s intimate estimations of them, and any man not abiding by these conditions is by definition “infantile”, has a “fragile ego” and is “threatened by successful women”.

Feminine Operative Social Conventions are the meta-hamster of the gestalt consciousness of the feminine imperative.

On the masculine side the problems are twofold. The first comes from men’s evolved subliminal understanding about how being a provider is his last, best, resort of securing a mate who will send his genes on to future generations. Once this capacity is removed, he becomes conscious of his vulnerability to the predations of his wife’s Hypergamy.

If men met their future wives when the women already were the bigger breadwinners, “they never have any problems later on,” Pierce said. “The problems are all coming in marriages where the guys are making more, they get married, then their pay slips (below their wives’ salaries).” The study was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Since mass media is rooted in a fem-centric reality, we’re spared the gory details of women’s Hypergamic re-estimations of their husbands. Rather, we’re left to believe that it’s the husbands who have an inability to cope with their wives making more money (due to fragile egos remember?) and suffer from a masculine insecurity that’s making their cocks go soft. No mention is made of men’s now-impassable Hypergamic shit-tests women demand of men affecting their previously stable marriages.

For the majority of Beta men, their cow-eyed confidence and reliance on being able to at least provide an equal contribution to a woman’s wellbeing as part of his Beta-Game sexual strategy gets flushed down the toilet when she out earns him. For Beta men, men’s primary sexual market value is derived from performance – unfortunately Betas are beginning to be outperformed by women and their wives. Once that outperformance is actualized for women, only Alpha dominance defines men’s SMV since it’s the other remaining side of women’s Hypergamy and their pluralistic sexual strategy.

The Bought Alpha

The second masculine issue is the bought Alpha. When a woman is in fact capable of her own provisioning all that’s left wanting for her hypergamy is Alpha dominance. Most breadwinning women are condemned to being frustrated by this dynamic. The majority of elite earning women simply lack the feminine grace and physical appeal to attract this Alpha dominance. Fewer still have the capacity to surrender to that Alpha, but the upper 1% of elite earning women can, and they illustrate the dynamic here. I realize it’s an old article but have a quick read – Guys more likely to cheat on high-earning women.

In fact, men who were completely dependent on their partner’s income were five times more likely to cheat than men who contributed an equal amount of money to the relationship, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

You’d think such men wouldn’t want to risk their meal ticket. But lower-earning men may be self-medicating their inner macho guy, says Cornell University sociology graduate student Christin Munsch, who conducted the study.“Having multiple sexual partners may be an attempt to restore gender identity in response to these threats,” she writes. “In other words, for men, sex [outside their relationship] may be an attempt to compensate for feelings of inadequacy with respect to gender identity.”

Despite the masculine shaming threaded throughout the article, what’s not being addressed is women who make substantially more money, or all the money, in their relationships have flipped a dangerous gender script. As elite earners, women tend to want to pair off not with the the guy who’d otherwise be a loyal, respectable Beta provider under other conditions, but rather the men they feel they ‘deserve’. The provisioning part of their Hypergamy has been satisfied, so the visceral part is all that’s left wanting. Thus they gravitate to the Alpha cads they’re aroused by, and they ‘deserve’ by virtue of their earning ability and status. These women’s Game is a reflection of Beta men’s Game – they believe that their provisioning alone will be the lynchpin in keeping their spouse loyal.

An Alpha guy (like Jesse James from the article) grows tired of being his wife or girlfriend’s accessory, and as is the Alpha nature, he’s happy to have the financial backing to fund his infidelity. An inverse of this would be Tiger Woods’ marriage and his indulgences. The marriage becomes a means to an Alpha end (or a hinderance for Tiger), and our rich, empowered wife duplicitously loves and hates that her Man is so desired by other women, but can’t balance her Hypergamic nature any other way.

He’s Special

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Sunshine Mary had an interesting insight about some of my analysis of Soft Dread:

It may come as a comfort for a guy who’s unused to sentimental declarations of appreciation, but it’s important to remember the why in that declaration, rather than the who in that declaration.

Although it seems mercenary, there is some truth to that. However, we are grateful because our husbands have saved us from spinsterhood. So it’s not a “rather than” situation, it’s that we are grateful to him because of what he has done…it’s both the who and the why. I wouldn’t have wanted to be saved from spinsterhood by just any man, ya know?

Mary knows I love her, and this is in no way a cut on her, but here’s a new item to add to the Hypergamy doesn’t care list:

Hypergamy doesn’t care about who you are, it only cares about what you are.

Your awesome personality, charm and any number of ingratiating personal traits are all perks – value added – that contribute to what you might consider Relational Equity, but as we’ve already observed, Hypergamy doesn’t care about Relational Equity. The problem with Mary’s estimation here is she hasn’t considered women’s Hypergamic capacity to make any man into a special man so long as he meets her Hypergamic criteria.

Chick Logic

In the past I’ve described the female sexual strategy as schizophrenic, but what it really is is pluralistic. All the jokes you read as 4Chan memes about ‘chick logic’ are only funny because we all have an intrinsic, largely unspoken, understanding of this sexual pluralism. The female sexual response is characterized by a dual nature, Alpha fucks and Beta bucks.

That’s the simplistic, distilled version ready for easy consumption and understanding, but the feminine sexual response is much more detailed on an individual level, and much more significant on a social level than just this jargon. Every stimulus bearing on the feminine, from how she’ll explain her girl’s night out to her LTR Beta, to how women in the workplace can rejigger legislature to create a society directed by the feminine imperative, all come back to the Alpha fucks / Beta bucks equation for optimizing Hypergamy.

Alpha fucks and Beta bucks is literally a biological imperative for women. I wrote in Balancing Sexual Pluralism about this pluralism describing the desire for that perfect balance of Alpha sexuality when ovulatory impulse predisposes women to it, as well as Beta comfort and security when her cycle predisposes her to it. This isn’t just my speculations, it’s a scientifically documented phenomenon common to all women. Yes, in this instance, all women are like this. It is literally in their DNA.

Hypergamy is the constant striving for an optimization of a woman’s sexual plurality. Although there may be behavioral permutations that women will use to achieve it, or the imitation of it, the underlying motivation of Hypergamy is the same for all women. It’s a hard-coded psychological survival script that’s benefitted the human race since our tribalist beginnings.

The War Brides Effect

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion on the forums I frequent about  Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus being held captive by Ariel Castro for a decade. Let that sink in a minute, a decade. That’s 10 years. That’s a lot of life to live. That’s a lot of normal to get used to. There are other cases like this; Jaycee Dugard and  Elizabeth Smart come to mind, but are all of these instances the results of a hard-wired Stockholm Syndrome in women?

As it applies to women, I think Stockholm Syndrome is a convenient term for psychology to a give a name to what really amounts to adaptive hypergamy. Granted, due to media sensationalism we may not hear about incidents where men have been taken captive for as long, but this identifying with one’s captor is far more prevalent in women than men.

Primarily I attribute this to the War Bride effect, wherein evolution selected-for women with a psychological facility to adapt to a new dominant male captor as a species-beneficial survival trait. Have a read of War Brides for the full theory, but the short version is essentially this: in early tribal societies, women evolved a capacity to accept new out-tribe (presumptively Alpha) conquering men as their masters after the fathers of their children were killed or otherwise defeated and neutralized.

This is not unfounded historically. There are documented tribal traditions in cross-culture societies where it was not only accepted, but expected of a man who’d defeated another in a challenge to assume responsibility of the slain man’s children and wife(ves). In terms of inter-tribal warring, it was common practice for the conquering tribe’s men to take (and often rape) the defeated tribe’s women. Another, more humane, version of this War Bride effect is found in Old Testament Jewish law where a dead man’s brother was expected to take his wife to bear children irrespective of the woman’s interest.

I originally went into detail in War Brides about this dynamic due to men’s observing women’s ease of transitioning romantically from one lover to another. That facility is a vestige of a psychology evolved to ensure Hypergamy is optimized with the best mate a woman’s environment (and her own physical conditions for attraction) will allow her. More often than not, in our evolutionary past, a woman’s conditions and environment were not of her own choosing, thus psychological contingencies had to evolve in order for women to maintain a mental and emotional dissonance while still ensuring as Hypergamously optimal a situation as she could.

Women lacking the mental capacity for selective, impersonal indifference to men would’ve been selected-out, either by debilitating emotional breakdown or by her new captor’s disregard for her provisioning. We can draw modern day parallels to the latter situation when we hear about how a woman might divorce her previous Beta provider husband for an Alpha lover only to regret having done so. It’s not the emotional consideration she regrets, but rather the loss of provisioning when her Alpha pumps and dumps her. Hypergamy is sated from one side of her sexual pluralism (Alpha fucks), only to create a deficit on the other side (Beta bucks).

War Brides vs. Alpha Widows

Where all this gets interesting is in considering the Alpha Widow dynamic;

 These are the Alpha Widows – women so significantly impacted by a former Alpha (or perceptually so) lover that she’s left with an emotional imprint that even the most dutiful, loving beta-provider can never compete with. A woman doesn’t have to have been an archetypal slut in order to have difficulty in pair bonded monogamy.

On the surface of it, it may appear that the Alpha Widow dynamic contradicts the War Brides dynamic, but if we dig deeper we find that they are both mutually reinforcing principles, and both are expressions of Hypergamy attempting solve the problem of women’s plural sexual strategy.

It is actually a woman’s capacity for selective indifference that predisposes her to an Alpha Widow state because the Alpha(s) she “can’t get over” imprinted an idealized state of an optimized Hypergamy for her. So the guy she banged in high school or college (the one with enough Alpha impression to take her virginity) is the idealization she harbors while married to the dutiful Beta. Even the abusive lout that a battered wife keeps returning to and refuses to press charges on, still represents that Hypergamous ideal to her.

Women will pine for the most significant Alpha they’ve experienced in life. It’s not who the Alpha was it was what he represented to her in terms of an idealized Hypergamy. That’s not to delegitimize women’s genuine feelings of love, respect and devotion for that Man, but it is to say that all of those feelings are consequences of her impression of an idealized Hypergamy.

There’s a lot being made about how women should or shouldn’t settle for ‘Mr. Good Enough’ before it’s too late. Granted, much of women’s indignation about settling for less than they deserve stems from an overly exaggerated appreciation of their true (and decaying) SMV courtesy of social media and social conventions intended to alleviate the anxiety of the approaching Wall. However, the underlying psychology of that indignation is rooted in women being forced to acknowledge that they’ve reached a point in their lives where they can no longer achieve an idealized Hypergamy.

So the stress responses are social variations of “Don’t tell me I can’t have it all”, “I deserve better than ‘good enough'” or, “Look at (insert aging celebrity’s name), she’s proof that you don’t have to settle.” All of these are pleas for a recognition of an imperfect ability to balance her sexual pluralism.

Hyenas

In my time spent in the manosphere I’ve been asked on more than one occasion what I thought about the concept of the Alpha Female. For a time I was resistant to the idea, not because I didn’t allow for the possibility that certain women were predisposed to being Type A personalities and given to the same desire for power and control that men predominantly have, but rather due to the way that Alpha Female came to develop that personality.

As the social impulse to feminize men took root, so too was the counterbalance of masculinizing women instituted. As I’ve stated in earlier post, the concept of power, real power, isn’t invested in controlling the action of others, but in how much control we can exercise in the course of, and over our own, live’s. Freud’s concept of penis envy not withstanding, up until the time of the sexual revolution it’s been men who’ve seemingly had the most control over the courses their lives will take. This of course is a classic fiction for the majority of men, but this is the perception even the most unassuming women have had with men – even the poorest of men have more power to decide what direction their lives will take than women.

In a natural state, women’s biological, emotional, provisioning and protection needs have always been sustained by men. Women evolved to be the more necessitous sex. This isn’t to say women were patently helpless, didn’t provide nurturing or couldn’t adapt to new environmental challenges, but it is to say their individual survivability, if not entirely dependent upon men, was greatly enhanced by cooperating sexually and socially with men. Due to this male-centric necessity women’s predisposition for a want of a survival-level security evolved – and so too did the subliminal anxiety to ensure themselves against survival insecurity.

As social progress advanced (and occasionally retreated) so too did the influence of the Feminine Imperative over men. I would argue that the Feminine Imperative, as a socio-sexual construct, was evolved from a desire not so much to control men, but as a means to relieve the anxiety of women’s earliest insecurities. This struggle for power necessitated the development of the Feminine Imperative, but only in the respect that it afforded women real power – a greater control over the course that their own lives would take.

Ensuring an enduring dominance of genetic material being passed on with the best male stock (i.e. Hypergamy) was of equal importance to ensuring the survivability of her offspring. This is nothing new to the manosphere, it’s simply the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks dynamic, but reduced to its evolutionary beginnings. As women were (and still are) afforded greater control over their own lives (true power) the application of this power is spent in easing women’s dependency upon men. A woman’s desire for power is rooted in easing the anxieties and insecurities her feral and tribal ancestors hard-coded into her contemporary psyche.

For every female CEO exercising her influence over today’s (male created) corporations, for every book about the End of Men, for every speech about Feminist Triumphalism, it’s important for men to understand that all of these overt declarations of power stem from women’s primal insecurity about their own survivability without the aid of attracting and sustaining an enduring relationship with a man.

Alpha Females

I drew this up to put into context the misnomer that is the Alpha Female. I find it ironic, but not unexpected, that a fem-centric society will adamantly resist the idea of Men being Alpha, yet enthusiastically embrace labeling strong independent women® as Alpha Females. Feminists and Mangina intellectuals alike will spend endless hours elaborating over how human males can’t possibly be compared with Alpha lions or wolves in the wilderness, and that it’s basement dwelling keyboard theorists who promote the idea; yet will giddily endorse women like Sheryl Sandberg as being Alpha Females.

At the risk of reopening the “what is Alpha?” can of worms, women cannot be Alpha in the same sense that Men are considered Alpha. The operative point being that Alpha in the male sense is a derivative of the male biology. By virtue of testosterone, male animals have (by order of degree) an inborn disposition towards an Alpha behavior set. On the most rudimentary scale, Alpha behaviors and physical traits are defined by their utility to that male and the breeding motivations they inspire in females.

Before I get run up the flagpole for asserting that testosterone is a key element for determining an Alpha status, allow me to direct your attention to today’s linked video. There is a species of mammal wherein the female of the species possesses more testosterone than the male, and consequently the role of sexual agressor and pack leading Alpha status is conferred to her.

They’re called Hyenas.

Watch the video (it’s short) and contrast the female hyena’s behaviors and,..physical characteristics with the fem-centric popularized notion of an Alpha Female.

To be sure, there are Alpha traits and behavioral learnings most Beta men can develop and internalize. I’m still a firm believer that to a greater degree, Alpha status for men can become who a Man is. In fact behavioral Alpha dominance is (was) passed on from one dominant male to his offspring, or close relation. So it does stand to reason that women too can learn these dominant behavior sets. The rapid masculinization of contemporary women is proof of this, and women may also internalize this dominance schema to become who they are; but does this make them Alpha?

Obviously women are not hyenas, but the physical dimorphism of hyena sexuality is an interesting illustration for the masculinization of females in humans. Primarily it changes the social dynamic of the group. Women can do what our female hyena does in this video through anabolic steroid use and a lot of heavy lifting, and with similar physical results, but does this alter a female security desire evolved for thousands of years? That answer might be yes, but for a woman to be Alpha she must physically and mentally transform into as close an approximation of a man as societal conditioning and physical mutation will allow.

This being the case, is she really female anymore?

Taming the Beast

beast

Sunshine Mary proposed an interesting question in a comment thread last week:

Knowing what we know about hypergamy – that it’s inborn and does not give a crap – and also what we know about women’s attraction cues swaying toward much more alpha men during ovulation…can men deal with the thought of living with someone who is having to fight against (presuming she’s fighting against it) a general innate desire to trade up and a specific desire to stray with an alpha male during ovulation?

The short answer to this is yes, in fact men have socially and psychologically evolved contingencies to mitigate hypergamy since our hunter-gatherer beginnings. You could even argue that much of our cultural and species-level achievements were the result of men’s latent drives to deal with women’s innate hypergamy.

The common mistake Mary is making here is to presume that hypergamy’s natural state is in a vacuum. Hypergamy is not static. The capacity an individual woman possesses to optimize hypergamy is specific to that woman. There are many complex variables that affect what contributes to a woman’s self-perception of her sexual market valuation.

For a general instance, a hot 22 y.o. coed will generally be more predisposed to her hypergamous impulses because she has the capacity to capitalize on it better than a 44 y.o. divorced mother of two. Too many guys think that hypergamy requires this endless attending to, but with the exception of outlying women, women will should regulate their hypergamy based on their self-perceived capacity to optimize it.

Simply because a woman’s natural state is hypergamy doesn’t mean she is able to optimize it. She may lack opportunity (i.e no Alpha men in the right place or at the right time), she may lack the physical appeal, she may have internalized beliefs that cause her to be more self-conscious, she may have self-esteem issues (over and under inflated), or she may simply be acculturated in a society that enforces limits upon her capacity to optimize hypergamy. All of these limiting conditions contend with her innate hypergamous impulse.

This is the primary struggle women face; managing these limiting factors in the face of a hardwired hypergamy, while facing the constant, inevitable, progression towards the Wall.  Cash in too early and face the nagging doubt she could’ve consolidated with a better man’s commitment. Cash in too late and live with the consequences of settling for the man her looks, personal conditions and societal influences allowed her to consolidate on (Alpha Widows). Remember, all of this occurs within the framework of the varying personal limitations (or benefits) she has a capacity for.

Hypergamy Unbound

One common misunderstanding I think most guys have about hypergamy is that it requires a constant attention. Most MGTOWs follow this logic to some degree, thinking that the effort necessary to contain women’s hypergamy means this endless mindreading and jumping through vaginal hoops in order to maintain some balance and harmony in any relationship with a woman. They think the pay off isn’t worth the effort, and by their individual case they may be correct, but what they don’t account for is the natural balance between the genders that is already existent. Hypergamy is far easier to contain the less a woman is able to capitalize on it.

Imposing limitations on women’s hypergamy is really a matter of application. Why is our reflexive response to label possessive men as ‘insecure’? Because underneath his overt controlling we believe a man lacks the capacity to inspire genuine desire in his woman, thus prompting her to self-regulate her own hypergamy. Yet, we still consider Mate Guarding to be wise in a measured application. So there you have the line in controlling hypergamy – like virtually anything else in Game, apply it overtly and you appear ‘insecure’, apply it covertly and you seem confident and in control.

To really grasp this you have to also take into account the Alpha/Beta response dynamic. Women’s hypergamy will predispose even the woman with the most secure attachement to her mate to shit test him. When men become aware of this their rational minds see it as insecurity and a nuisance that they will constantly have to deal with. However, nature has engineered into our own psyches the means to deal with these tests in ways we’re not really aware of. I’ve experienced even the most beta of men put their foot down after a particularly mean shit test and basically tell their wives or GFs to STFU. It came from exasperation, but that provokation and the response their woman got for it was exactly passing the test. They didn’t realize they were doing it, they were just pissed, lost their temper and later maybe apologized for acting so brash, but this was exactly what their women’s hypergamy needed to confirm that he isn’t a pushover.

Mate guarding is another of these subliminal efforts to contain hypergamy. Most (generally beta) men don’t realize that they are manifesting mate guarding behaviors at exactly the time his woman is ovulating and more aroused by the sperm of the unfamiliar Alpha. Her disposition manifests in behavioral cues that his evolved psyche registers and reflexively triggers his own subconscious mate guarding behaviors – all in a naturalized effort to contain her innate hypergamy. Nature is already aware of hypergamy and has evolved contingencies to limit it.

Another aspect of limiting hypergamy is the inter-sexual competition women subject each other to in the sexual marketplace. Amongst women, hypergamy is essentially a race to the top. The higher value resources (high SMV men) drive down the cost (effort) for the lower value ones. The highest value men cascade down in value by the frequency of lower value men, but hypergamy doesn’t seek its own level, it always defaults to a better optimization. For a woman, the biological jackpot is to secure a commitment of genetics and resources from a mate who registers higher than herself in SMV valuation.

The very nature of hypergamy has a culling effect amongst women. As if the pressures to optimize hypergamy weren’t urgent enough in the light of her personal conditions and the impending Wall, add to this an unforgiving inter-sexual competition that mitigates hypergamy.

Thwarting Nature

If a guy swings drastically toward the beta chump side of the bell curve, this may well trigger a new self-perception for a woman and reinvigorate her hypergamous impulse. Likewise social media is contributing to new generations of women who lack a realistic self-image with regard to SMV and thus a false perception of their capacity to optimize their hypergamy. Women’s overinflated sense of SMV and all the contributing factors to it is a manosphere meme now. All of these factors and more upset the balance of the feminine imperative with the masculine and demand new social and psychological adaptations

Many a manosphere commenter will tell you how unbound women’s hypergamous nature has become since the rise of feminism, fem-centrism and the multi-generational push to feminize every aspect of western culture. While it’s true that hypergamy doesn’t care, and many a man suffers the unprepared consequences of outdated expectations of relational equity, I don’t believe the cultural shift towards the primacy of the feminine imperative is the doom of modern society.

To be sure the sexual revolution and feminine-ubiquitous hormonal birth control has radically shifted primacy to the feminine imperative and its prime directive of hypergamy, but what this means is a readjustment of the masculine imperative is now necessary. With the rise of the internet and the meta Game that is the manosphere I think we’re seeing this adjustment in its beginnings. In our past, society and nature evolved ways to contain hypergamy in ways we’re only peripherally aware of today, but they were serviceable contingencies that kept hypergamy in check. That balance will return eventually, either by men opting out of the traditional measures or women coming to a generational realization of the predicament unbridled hypergamy and the consequences of the falsehoods fem-centrism has brought to their mothers and grandmothers.

Mister Softee

mr_softee

I have friend named Floyd. Floyd is in his early 50’s and spent the better part of his life in the military. He’s in fairly good shape for his age and has the rough, but stoic attitude of a soldier who’s seen actual combat. He doesn’t talk too much about those years, but he is an interesting guy and has a wealth of world-learned experiences that he’s more than ready to let you know about.

Floyd is not what I’d call a Type A personality, but he does have the pragmatic ‘get it done’ personality taught in the military, and he’s prone to being opinionated. At the risk of splitting hairs again, I’d definitely say he’s Alpha, but in a subdued, matter-of-fact, self-evident sense rather than the stereotypical in-your-face douchey Alpha caricature most beta chumps like to associate it with. Being a Man comes natural to him, and his expressions (or non-expressions) of such irritates the betas we know – but in a passive sense rather than an aggressive one. Just being who he is, often enough, gets eye rolls from our more plugged in friends.

Unfortunately Floyd’s Game-ignorant. After his discharge, he followed the ex-military formula for marriage by getting involved with a very domineering woMAN who promptly got ‘accidentally’ pregnant 12 years ago. They have a son whom they share custody of, the divorce not being final until last year. For all his Alpha cred, he followed the ‘do the right thing’ script right up until the finalization of his divorce. In the military, he was ostensibly a badass; with his ex he was always trying to find a solution to her problems with a rational ‘get the job done’ approach. He didn’t see the method behind her madness then, he does now.

Since the finalization Floyd has gotten together with a new girlfriend, Ann, who is the polar opposite of his ex. Against my advice he’s moved her into his home, but the bright side of this arrangement is that Floyd has learned the importance of maintaining Frame with her. Maintaining Frame with Ann isn’t too difficult for him as she’s about a point below Floyd in SMV. She’s not unattractive, but Ann loves Floyd because he takes care of business like the Alpha  her ex never was.

I was hanging out with Floyd last weekend and the conversation got around to how unlikely it was that Ann would get with a hard ass like Floyd. She say, “Oh that’s just his schtick, he’s really a big softee. Underneath all that he’s really a sweet guy.”

The Scripting

Now I realize these are the words of a 48 year old woman who’s vested interest and second chance at long term security are in my tough-guy friend, but it struck me that no matter how genuine a Man can be in his personality, no woman wants to accept a personality that is incongruent with her own imperative.

The main reason for this is rooted in women’s innate solipsism. If the reality doesn’t fit with her interpretation, rationalize the reality to force fit it to that interpretation. The nuts and bolts of it is that Floyd represents a valuable prospect at a second chance for provisioning. Floyd is not an overly emotional or emotionally available guy, but to reconcile the wish that he would be, Ann must tacitly endorse that he is; “you just don’t know him like I know him.”

A lot of freshly unplugged guys have trouble accepting Game as being anything more than an act – a series of behaviors meant to elicit a response in a woman, and once she’s been attracted they can go back to their regularly scheduled personality. They rely on rote memorization instead of learning and internalizing Game. What a lot more don’t understand is that even in their blue pill Beta Game days they also followed a similar ‘acting’.

This acting is encouraged in much the same way as Ann was attempting to distort her own reality. As with most women, they fall in love with a dichotomy; they want a sweet guy, who’s tough and gets shit done. If one of these aspects is out of balance her rationalization engine (i.e. Hamster) will make subconscious attempts to compensate for it in her words and beliefs. “I want a sweet guy with a good heart” is boilerplate for the feminine imperative because it ‘sounds right’. Men hear this and ‘act’ on it in the deductive belief that it will endear him to women in general.

The greater truth is that, for all the conflicting messages about men needing to get in touch with their feminine sides, and then men need to Man-Up, your personality is still going to be rationalized to fit a woman’s psychological ideal.

Upping the Alpha Doesn’t Mean Offing the Empathy

I think too many critics in the manosphere believe that the underlying message is about men needing to kill off the emotional, sentimental or impassioned aspects of their personalities. I would never advocate this. Firstly because I don’t think it’s entirely possible, but more importantly, you shouldn’t have to. No man should lessen himself or his human experience to accommodate the feminine imperative.

When I wrote Kill the Beta people assumed I meant that doing so would also include killing of the better parts of their  personalities. Beta is a mindset in the same way Alpha is. You can be an emotional Alpha, and women will swoon, but be an emotional Beta and you’re doomed to feminine pity. Emotions and passions only reinforce a self-defeating loop for a Beta mindset, but in careful, self-controlled measure they strengthen an Alpha mindset.

The problem is in the measure. Most Betas, raised from birth to believe that women want a “sweet man with a good heart”, build a personality around that message. Thus we have several generations of men trying to out “sweet” one another. In the end of The Game Neil Strauss worried that PUA practitioners would turn into “emotional robots”; men only aping the behaviors that have value in their getting laid and not genuinely emotional. I think his worries are unfounded, because most men of the last generations have such a foundation of ‘being in touch with their emotions’ the issue is more about the self-control necessary to maintain that emotionalism.

Upping the Alpha doesn’t mean offing the empathy. Game doesn’t mean learning sociopathy – it means learning control of one’s psychology. Most Betas find themselves miserable because they’ve been raised to believe that self-expression and open communication of emotions are the keys to successful living with women. It’s interesting that for all the understanding about how women are wired for emotion and men are wired for reason that it should be the men of the last generations who are more emotionally expressive than any preceding generation.

Guys like Floyd aren’t any less emotional or compassionate or sentimental, they simply know the value in controlling their more ephemeral aspects. They know when to apply it and when to withhold it. They know the reward value a rare display of emotion means to women who want to write their own script for the Man they’re in love with.