Biomechanics

Gut Check

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

Back in 2003 I lived in Reno, Nevada. I can remember one distinct morning I was driving from the gym into work and I was waiting at a stop light. It was around 8am and as I slowed and stopped at the intersection, along drives my wife in her car coming from the cross traffic. I knew it was her, I saw her in the driver’s seat and I knew the car (because I had bought it). I have to ashamedly admit that the first thing that crossed my mind was that she was running around on me. Instant jealousy, instant suspicion. I felt that all too familiar rush of chemicals flood my bloodstream as I wondered just what the hell she was doing at that time of the morning in that particular part of the town. I later realized that she had chosen that particular route to avoid an accident that was snarling traffic on the freeway to get to an early doctor’s appointment, but I can’t deny that my first impulse (however fleeting) was one of jealousy, suspicion or potential betrayal. My wife of (then) 7 years, who’d never in that time gave me pause to question her fidelity triggered, for about 10 minutes, a jealousy-suspicion – the effects of which we’re quantifiable in that adrenaline-endorphin rush leading to irrational imaginations.

Although I like to pride myself on pragmatism and rationality, I wont deny that my first impulse was suspicion. I think this is a fascinating aspect of our psycho-evolutionary development as a species so I did a bit of research. It was easy to find study after study of this jealousy effect not only in humans, but primates and most advanced mammals – hell, even some birds get jealous! All of this is triggered by certain environmental prompts according to situation, species, conditions, etc. A very complex cocktail of hormones is released into our bloodstreams when such conditions are met, leading exactly to the feelings and irrationality I experienced that morning. Jealousy is a very well studied dynamic and one that has latent survialism functions. Obviously one of our biological imperatives in this life time is ensuring the fidelity in the choice of our partners with whom we’ve decided to share parental investment (or potentially will share it with). So imperative is this that our own biologies have evolved to react to even the suspicion of infidelity. This is the root of these very volatile emotions.

Sherlock Holmes

One of the more common question I’ve been asked for advice on is whether a guy is justified in his “snooping” or spying on a lover. It’s always an interesting dynamic because it graphically illustrates the conflict between a man’s base, evolutionarily hardwired imperative to confirm fidelity in his (potential) parental investment mate and a socio-psychological countermeasure on the part of feminization and it’s primary imperative of hypergamy. That’s a lot of $10 words so let me distill it a bit more. Men are presented with an internal conflict that pits their instinct for suspicion against a social convention that accuses him of “trust issues”. As with most feminine social conventions, shame is the operative here, but he loses respect whether his suspicions are confirmed or not. If a man ‘spies’ and/or pieces together inconsistencies that confirm his suspicions, he still spied and is therefor guilty of “not respecting her privacy”. Needless to say a woman is socially reinforced for trusting her ‘feminine intuition’ if her suspicions are confirmed, but men cannot win in the game of relationship espionage.

To further complicate matters, a man must also struggle with his rational nature in the context of this feminized frame. Logic and rationality tells him that maybe his suspicions ARE unfounded and that he does in fact have a problem with trusting. It’s very easy to find reasons why your suspicions are really baseless, but that reasoning still grates against what your gut instinct is telling you.

The irony of it is that there’s really not much purpose in spying if you’re properly spinning plates as you should. Most of the men I’ve counseled on their suspicions all had one thing in common, they were over-invested in their relationship to the point that they had no other viable options. They HAD to spy, but in all their stories each of them were really only confirming things that they already knew. They were willfully ignoring the message in the Medium because their hindbrains knew that they had no other viable options to fall back on. They instinctually understood the inconsistencies in their women’s behaviors, mannerisms, nuances, etc., they knew and confirmed what had changed, but explained them away for fear of losing her. Men (alphas) with options don’t have ‘trust issues’ simply because when one of his plates has cause to consider putting him off for another lover he has 2 or 3 more women on his roster ready to fill her place.

Gut Check

Whenever you feel something isn’t quite right in your gut, what this is is your subconscious awareness alerting you to inconsistencies going on around you. We tend to ignore these signs in the thinking that our rational mind ‘knows better’ and things really aren’t what they seem. It’s not as bad as you’re imagining, and you can even feel shame or guilt with yourself for acknowledging that lack of trust. However, it’s just this internal rationalization that keeps us blind to the obvious that our subconscious is trying to warn us about. Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. So when that predictable behavior changes even marginally, our instinctual perceptions fire off all kinds of warnings. Some of which can actually effect us physically.

It’s at this point most guys make the mistake of acting on the “good communication solves everything” feminized meme and go the full disclosure truth route, which only really leads to more rationalizations and repression of what’s really going on. What they don’t realize is that the MEDIUM is the message; her behavior, her nuances, the incongruencies in her words and demeanor (and how your gut perceives them) is the real message. There is an irregularity in her behavior that your subconscious is alerting you to which your consciousness either cannot or will not recognize.

With so many varied stimuli in our environment, human beings had to evolve psychological mechanisms in order to cope with so much information. We simply cannot apply our focus and concentration on every stimulus bombarding us so we employ a peripheral, subconscious awareness of it until it warrants our attention. A lot has been written about human’s ability to multi-task, but it would be impossible to multi-task without this peripheral awareness.

What the ‘trust issues’ feminine social convention does is turn that peripheral awareness into a liability in order to promote the agenda of hypergamy. Trust your gut, but don’t trust it where a woman is involved. This is a very devious social convention in that it attempts to short-circuit millennia of evolved instinctual cues that confirm men’s interests in parental investment while promoting female hypergamy as the primary breeding strategy.

How to use the Medium

Now, for as much as that all sounds like some grand conspiracy, understand that this all operates under the surface, and for the most part is simply accepted as the norm. It is possible, not to mention profitable, to flip the script on women. For instance, when you just marginally deny her your (probably far too available) attention, what happenes? Does she resort to some vocalized confessions of you becoming distant, or express some need to rationally communicate to solve a problem? No, her gut instinct recognizes irregularities in your usually predictable behaviors and she reacts by changing her behavior accordingly. You ‘caffeinated the hamster’, and she takes the initiative to react accordingly without you having to say a thing more than give her some plausibly believable breadcrumb of your reasoning.

Bear this in mind; women just want to hear the music and dance; they rarely care about the lyrics, or the measure or the reasons that went into creating the music. The medium IS the message. Be the medium, understand the message in it, but NEVER attempt to explain the medium to her. That ruins the music.

Law 9: Win Through Your Actions, Never through Argument
Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

The Beta Hamster

I’ve never had meaningless sex; I meant to bang every woman I’ve ever banged.

It’s endlessly entertaining to read the rationalizations men will create in order to better identify with what they’ve been conditioned to think is expected of them to achieve the ‘precious gift’ of a woman’s intimacy. They get quite creative sometimes. Aunt Susan has (yet another) anecdotal analysis of Casual Sex highlighting exactly these anonymous stabs at male pre-qualification courtesy of Reddit. And once again, in classic feminine form, the thread becomes this echo chamber circle jerk of male identifiers qualifying themselves to the equally anonymous women – parroting the ‘right thing to say’, and we all renew our faith in humanity and the hope for men who really ‘relate to what women want’.

I think I covered this identification motive as a primary element of Beta Game fairly adequately in Identity Crisis, but lets look under the hood at this specific dynamic. The inherent problem with doubting what is intended as the noble motives of a guy to eschew casual sex is that you risk appearing shallow for doing so. Betas generally love to wallow in preconceptions of nobility and delusions of being more ‘deep’ than the general mass of men that they hear women complain of. They think it gives them an edge. It’s an integral part of the beta mating strategy; the more alike you are with women the more they’ll appreciate you as being unique and reward you with sex.

The Spinning Wheel

For beta men this mindset also has the added bonus of giving the perception that he is unique among men in his ability to place the importance of relationship above his natural impulses. In publicly confirming his stance on placing relationship (women’s first security priority, i.e. wait for sex) above his ever-present physical need for sex, his subconscious hope is to appear so in control of his feelings and so above his feral nature that women will have to appreciate him as a paragon of female identification. That’s some REAL pre-fucking-qualification there Mr. Alpha. This guy not only has the capacity, but also the depth and conviction to turn off his sexuality in order to better comply with the relationship security priority women need to enable their own sexual strategy. This is the ultimate in pedestalization of womankind – to put women’s emotional criteria above his physical need for sex. And the god of biomechanics laughed atop his throne of genitalia.

The Beta Hamster

It’s very difficult to criticize social dynamics rooted in personal feelings. All one need say is “it’s just how I feel” and the discussion grinds to a halt because who am I, or who are you, to doubt the veracity of what they’re telling me? Add to this that it’s men who are the true romantics of the sexes and it gets even harder to be suspect of an underlying self-serving motive. In fact it may not even be a conscious effort on the part of a guy to express this. Feminization has conditioned into society a greater, almost default validity for personal feelings. As men have become increasingly adaptive to a feminized culture, placing primacy on identifying with, becoming more like, women, so too have they developed their own version of the female imagination – the feminized-male version of the mental Hamster that spins the wheel in women’s heads. The doubts, suspicions and anxieties caused by the male Hamster are directed towards an idealized female-centric goal state which they mistakenly believe is a male-centric goal state.

Behaviorism

Self-reporting has always been an unreliable measure in psychological analysis, particularly when the one doing the reporting isn’t aware of the latent purpose of the psychology behind those ‘feelings’ they’re sharing. The only truly reliable, provable means of demonstrating motive or intent is observable behavior. It’s kind of a cliché in the community now, but bears repeating: never believe what a woman says, believe what she does. We use this meme more liberally with women because men make the mistake of wanting to believe that women are more rational agents than they are emotional agents, but this should really apply to men as well, and particularly when men are predisposed to women’s mental models.

From a behavioral standpoint, we’re going to see a lot of incongruent behaviors vs. the Beta Hamster’s rationalizations. To begin with, I’m not going to deny that there is some base element in men that desires a real emotional connection with a woman. However, sex is a man’s priority, it’s a biological imperative, and actively denying that it isn’t or creating mental schemas that attempt to sublimate this imperative are disingenuous at best, psychologically retarding at worst. Sex is the glue that keeps a relationship together, and it’s sexual arousal that prompts a relationship in the first place. Deemphasizing sex, actively desexualizing yourself in the hopes that it will make you more sexually arousing is an effort in self-defeat.

To paraphrase Joe Rogan, men will blow themselves up for the very unlikely possibility of sex in another dimension. That’s the degree to which men place a value on sex, any sex, meaningful, a fuck buddy, a hooker, any sex. Pornography isn’t a multi-billion dollar industry because guys are concerned with adding some nebulous ‘meaning’ to sex. Women are concerned with applying meaning to sex because it is integral to their long term mating strategy and locking down a commitment of male provisioning. The men who claim to share in this importance (at least initially) are listening to the Beta Hamster and repeating what it says to them back to the women they hope to fuck. Even anonymously on a Reddit thread, they can’t let the pretense drop for fear that they’d miss a potential opportunity to prove themselves as ‘deep’ meaning oriented guys.

I have to laugh when men make these self-effacing claims to be seeking more ‘meaning’ after they tire of their long string of ONSs or ‘cheap sex’. Statistically, most men never even approach a lay count that could validate such a claim. According to the most recent studies I’ve read, most men have an average of 7 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime. That may be changing, but even if it were an average of 10 or 12 it would still make the rationale for seeking ‘meaningful’ sex as a result ridiculous, as well as suspect of a feminine-identifying mating strategy. Add to this that 80% (a conservative estimate) of men are plugged-in betas, hopelessly lacking the social skills and motivation to rack up a lay count that would ever justify this reasoning. So what is it that compels them to concoct these self-convincing rationalizations? The Beta Hamster.

It’s a far healthier mentality for men to embrace their own sexuality. God forbid a woman actually might think you find her sexy and want to fuck her. Despite their protestations, women want guys to want to fuck them. Women often complain that the reason they don’t feel sexual is due to their not feeling sexy, and they wont feel sexy if you approach sex from an asexual starting point because you think it adds ‘meaning’. Of the 40+ women I’ve had sex with, not one do I regret banging. I most definitely regretted some of the ensuing drama as a result of a few of those relationships, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sex. Sex for the sake of sex is OK. Trust me, after the one thousandth time you’ve had sex with your wife or LTR, sex for the sake of sex is fantastic. Stop writing poetry about sex and get fucking.

Indignation

In the absence of indignation, women will actively manufacture it for themselves.

Over the weekend, The Chateau had an interesting quick-hit post extolling the Game virtues of a man losing his cool. This is an interesting concept from a behavioral psychology perspective in that it unexpectedly rattles comfortable, predictable, behavioral patterns women come to expect from their men. When controlled and used tactically it can reinvigorate a woman’s failing interest level, but I should add the caveat that for it to be effective you already need to have established a relationship to the point that doing something unexpected conflicts with a set expectation of behavior from you. If a woman doesn’t know your character “losing your cool” will only make you seem erratic and unstable.

Lets dig a little deeper here – what makes this break in routine so appealing to women’s psyches? You can of course argue that it’s outburst of feral Alpha that sparka ‘gina tingle, and that’s definitely a visceral effect, but what drives that glandular response is the prompt of indignation. Women live in a quandary when it comes to security. On an evolutionary level, the security impulse is a primary directive. Long term provisioning, parental investment and the innate understanding of the rigors of hypergamy and it’s relation to breeding make ‘security seeking’ a woman’s primary impulse. This isn’t to discount the influence of other impulses – sex being the next in order – however, herein lies the problem; the very cues that fire a woman’s sexual triggers are the same that conflict with her security needs.

On the surface, women have a social responsibility to present the perception that their interests are those of the uniter. Everything should revolve around home and hearth and security above all, but their behaviors tell a much different story about their appetites. Women need indignation. Watch one episode of ‘Dance Moms‘ and you’ll get a much clearer picture of the value indignation holds for women. Whether the source is gossip, living vicariously through third parties or eating it up in popular media (Oprah, Tyra Banks, romance / fan fiction media), in the absence of indignation, women will actively manufacture it for themselves. A lot of men believe that this need for indignation is the calling card of a “high drama” woman when in fact it’s really psychological predisposition for women.

Women’s biology predisposes them toward security, but they chafe in a condition of total security. In contemporary terms this translates to living under the conditions of relative security whilst seeking out avenues to create that indignant spark. The wise Man will develop tactical, measured ways to make himself the focus of that need for indignation. The Chateau’s article actually illustrates the most common way Men stumble upon the usefulness of this dynamic. You get fed up and pissed off, either at some boundary she’s crossed or some 3rd party has, and your anger flares up. Your usually patient countenance is gone and you go caveman. The reason this is shocking is that most men will tolerate far more personal indiscretions from their romantic interests, or want to present the appearance of humility or patience with others while she’s around, in an effort to convince his LTR interest that he is a good security provider. And while this may appeal to her provisioning instincts it directly conflicts with her more feral instincts of physical attraction.

Most plugged-in men don’t like this reality. It’s far more comforting to think of women’s attraction as requiring less confrontation. Women who are grossly overt in this need for indignation are (rightly) labeled ‘Drama Queens’, but what they don’t consider is that ALL women have this innate need by order of degree. It can be a useful tool for a Man who can use it covertly and skillfully. Accepting a feminine need for indignation is the first step, the next is to center her focus for it on yourself – instead of Dance Moms and gossip. An occasional, well timed flare up is sometimes all it requires to grab her attention, but be damn sure you’re in the right about whatever issue you decide to explode upon. Send a perfectly good plate of food back at a restaurant. Find some issue that meets with your disapproval and “let it get to you”.

The Power of No

A perceived righteousness of purpose is often best when you “get upset”, however, it’s not always necessary. One very powerful assertion of frame control is simply the word “no”. For as often as men will blather off a complicit “yes” in order to keep the peace, women NEED to be told “no”. Get into the habit of saying no, even when it seems unreasonable. Get comfortable in saying no for the sake of establishing your authority. Most men don’t see the purpose or value in this to even consider experimenting with their respect and frame control. They just want to keep their heads down, not rock the pussy boat and get along. That’s the recipe for a beta-herb divorce.

Here’s an example: there was once a point in my life when Mrs. Tomassi asked me if we could buy a new bed for our daughter; I told her no. I had the money, it was really no issue, I just didn’t want to build a new bed at the time and get rid of the old one. Besides, her bed was more than fine for the time and Mrs. Tomassi really wanted it because of the style. She got indignant; “I don’t see why we can’t, it’s a good price,…blah blah blah,..” and against my first impulse toward contrition I again said “No. We’re not getting the damn bed.” At that point the dynamic of the conversation shifted. It wasn’t about a bed, it was about frame. Of course lesser men will laugh and think, “yeah, she turned off the pussy after that to I bet, heh, heh,..” and for about a week they’d be right, but learn this now:

No amount of negotiated pussy will ever be worth losing frame for.

It’s always better to fuck a woman who accepts you as her authority than some half-assed lay with a woman who’s only fucking you out of a sense of obligation. Learning to use indignation is a fantastic primer for frame control.

Would you leave if she got fat?

Tony Romo would.

It appears that the topic du jour in the community this week has been, (how shall I state this?) women of “larger girth” and their oddly commensurate attitudes of entitlement, due to the the ‘love thyself’ body image apologists making their mark on popular culture.

I generally go into great detail on a lot of my posts about the conditions for intimacy women place on men. Roissy codified this as the “436 bullet point checklist’, but I just tend to distill women’s list of stated criteria a man needs to meet in order to be acceptable for her intimacy. He’s got to be attractive, tall, well employed or the potential to be so, he must have status (some call it power), be caring, sensitive, humorous, educated, not overbearing, decisive, confident, a good listener,..etc., etc. and the list goes on and on.

However, rarely do I have the chance to explain men’s one condition for intimacy – physical attraction. She’s GOT to be hot. Guys rarely start thread topics seeking advice in order to hook up with  HB 2s or 3s – they post about HB 7s to 9s.

That said, a Man’s one condition should be pretty important as well as effect the highest standard he’s capable of attaining. Not accounting for Game, men’s individual ability to attract women is based on a number of criteria (including his own appearance) and respective of his own physical conditions – in other words, fat guys are going to be limited in their ability to attract exceptionally fit women, and those that do so by meeting women’s other conditions for intimacy (most commonly wealth) will still be hindered in their ability to maintain a woman’s continuous interest level, genuine desire, arousal and passion. 

The same situation holds true for women only there is a much higher standard for maintaining her physical attraction. His one condition for intimacy is that she remain attractive and to a greater degree, sexually available to him. In order to circumvent this women for centuries have maintained a complex social dynamic that makes his one condition his greatest fault. Thus we hear how ‘shallow’ he is for not seeing her ‘inner beauty’. We are scolded for being ‘superficial’ and ridiculed as being unevolved troglodytes for those men with still enough testosterone to overtly say they’re looking for the most attractive woman they can get.

“It’s what’s on the inside that counts”, or “Beauty is only skin deep” has been the Disney mantra of westernized romanticism and ‘courtly love’ since the Renaissance. And why not? It works in a woman’s biological favor to breed with the male gifted with not only the best genes, but also the best ability to provide for her security and that of her offspring. What better social dictum than one that shames him for recognizing his one condition for intimacy while simultaneously giving her the advantage of better selection when she doesn’t measure up to what his standards would biologically be his preference? Human beings have many social practices that have the latent purpose of thwarting our evolved, biological best interests; this is one of them.



Just as a side note here, I should point out that the two most common reasons cited for divorce in western culture are sex and money, and in that order. Men most commonly complain that their wives are no longer in the shape that they were when they met and women generally complain of reasons relating to his ambition and economic status.

Every married man I’ve known has always expressed feelings that his wife isn’t as sexually available – in frequency or intensity (i.e. passion/desire) in comparisson to when they first encountered each other. Generally this is due to her “letting herself go” after marriage or childbirth and she no longer ‘feels sexy’ so sex becomes less important to her or worse still, it takes the status of becoming another ‘household chore’ to add to her list. This then becomes a vicious cycle; she’s let herself go, sex decreases in importance to her and she makes little attempt to, or has no time to take care of herself physically as she did in her youth when she had a prime motivation to maintain herself in peak physical shape (or as close as she could). Add to this the psycho-social dynamic that stresses that men ought not to be so concerned with the physical or place such importance upon sex, and goes as far as to shame him as a ‘deviant’ if he is unwilling to internalize and accept this. Her lack of desire is characterized as HIS problem.



He of course feels cheated and goes through the frustrating internal turmoil of dealing with a social dynamic that tells him he’s ‘bad’ for recognizing his wife is no longer the woman he married. This is the ‘bait & switch’. Her sex drive and physical condition is more than acceptable during courtship and pre-marital relations, but after the marriage he feels he got a raw deal and is powerless to even mention that she ought to take better care of herself for fear of driving that psychological wedge between them that the dynamic of ‘loving her for what she is and not her physical form’ dictates. Essentially he is stripped of his one condition for intimacy while her conditions remain and are even more pronounced in light of the responsibilities he assumes in marriage or an LTR.

How important does the role of attraction play in a relationship? The funniest thing is you can apply the same idea to women with regards to a man’s level of success. If a guy cheats on his girlfriend or wife after she ‘lets herself go’ and puts on 20 extra pounds he’s called ‘shallow’, yet if a woman, hypergamously, leaves a guy who’s out of work and/or lacks a certain level of ambition she’s just ‘being prudent’. That said, the definition of what is ‘shallow’ is generally defined by women. It’s a man’s biological imperative to mate with as many fit and attractive females, while it’s a woman’s imperative to choose the male who is best capable of providing her with security and by default to ultimately share in parental investment. But, feminized (not feminist) society calls a man shallow and a woman wise for accepting the roles nature has dealt for them. So it’s my advice that we stop accepting this epithet of ‘shallow’ as some kind of punishment for simply being a man.

In terms of life investments and capitalizing upon opportunity and ambition, men have FAR too much on the line in the long term NOT to be concerned with demanding the highest standard from a woman for an investment that goes beyond anything she could hope to genuinely appreciate or match by other means. It’s really up to you to make the judgement call, but by no means should you allow accusations of superficiality influence your decisions in which woman you ‘should’ find attractive. As a Man, you are well within your rights to expect a maintained physique from a woman, considering the far greater sacrifices she expects from you. Would you leave her if she got fat? Damn right you would. Would she leave you if you went beta-listless-unemployed-alcoholic? Damn right she would.

Women & Sex

“Booty is so strong that there are dudes willing to blow themselves up for the highly unlikely possibility of booty in an other dimension. There are no chicks willing to blow themselves up for a penis.”
– Joe Rogan

One of the single most annoying tropes I read / hear from men (more so than women) is the “Women are just as / more sexual than men” canard. Nothing stops me in my tracks more abruptly than reading this line parroted back in some form by a self-effacing white knight trying to convince himself, hope against hope, that it could be true. This is a VERY effective feminine social convention, even internalized and spouted back by the likes of more than a few infamous PUAs. This fantasy belongs among the higher order social convention myths like the Myth of Sexual Peak. Just a rudimentary knowledge of female biology is all that’s needed to deconstruct the myth.

Women are more sexual than men, but they are repressed due to a lack of “trust”.

Patently false. A healthy male produces between 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone a woman does. It is a biological impossibility for a woman to want sex as much as, or as often as men. Trust me, when a woman says, “I don’t understand why sex is so important to guys” she’s speaking the literal truth. No woman will ever experience 17 times the amount of her own testosterone levels (barring steroids). Amongst its many other effects, testosterone is the primary hormone involved with stimulating human libido. I should also add that, on average, and barring environmental variables, a mans testosterone only declines 1% per year beyond age 40, so even at age 60 the average, healthy male is only dealing with an average 20% deficit in testosterone.

Critics of this observation like to argue that, for female sexual response and arousal, testosterone isn’t the only factor to consider. To which I’ll agree, however it is the PRIMARY factor in sexual response. A woman cannot possibly understand what 12 to 17 times their present amount of testosterone could feel like without steroid use. In fact the first effect female bodybuilders report when cycling anabolic steroids is a 100 fold increase in sexual interest and libido. So in terms of natural female hormonal / biochemical response there is no unaltered way a woman could ever make an accurate comparison to what a man’s baseline libido is in relation to her own. Women’s sexual desire is also cyclical. Even at the peak of her ovulatory cycle, when she’s at her horniest, she’ll never experience what men do 24 hours a day. This is the root of the myth, and the source of the social convention.

Other critics would erroneously argue that estrogen plays a part in female sexual arousal. They’d be wrong.

Estrogen does ‘control’ libido – for men: Estrogen Have a look at the Functions section here. And while you’re at it you may want to have a look at Testosterone; and in particular this:

Like men, women rely on testosterone to maintain libido, bone density and muscle mass throughout their lives. In men, estrogens simply lower testosterone, decrease muscle mass, stunt growth in teenagers, introduce gynecomastia, increase feminine characteristics, and decrease susceptibility to prostate cancer. Sexual desire is dependent on androgen levels rather than estrogen levels.

I also understand that female sexuality functions differently than male sexuality, but this only reinforces my point. Women’s sexuality is cyclic, not only on a monthly schedule, but also over periods of a lifetime (menopause, and peak fertility for instance). There are periods over a month and a lifetime where sexual desire waxes and wanes, (healthy) men’s stays relatively constant from puberty to about age 40. Women are slower to arouse, they tend to need more than just visual stimulation, and there is definitely a psychological element (they need a fantasy) necessary. Men only need visual stimulation and minimal feedback to get aroused (i.e. porn).

It should come as no shock that post-menopausal hormone therapies use testosterone to boost women’s flagging libidos too. When women are at the peaks of their ovulatory cycles, low and behold they experience a sharp spike in testosterone levels in order to facilitate pregnancy and then it gets flushed out during menstruation. You can debate about how best to get a woman’s testosterone flowing, but it’s testosterone that’s needed to prompt a sexual response.

Now the real question is, why would such a popular myth be such a useful social convention? Think about it. It sexualizes women, while not making them outright sluts. They can avoid the stigma of promiscuity while presenting the fantasy that they are secretly “more sexual” than they are “allowed” to be, if only they could meet a man skilled enough to bring this out in them. It’s a sexual selection convention. The fantasy is that women are really these wolves in sheep’s clothing for the right guy. To an extent this is true. Studies do indicate that women in their peak fertility window do in fact aggressively seek out Alpha males for conventional sexual encounters. However, again, the root of this social convention is in the presumption that “women are just as sexual as men”, which is simply not the case considering the conditionality of the female sexual response.

No self-interested Man is ever going to be encouraged to refute the idea that women are equally preoccupied with, equally aroused as, or equally desirous of sex as men are. We love the fantasy that women are secretly yearning for sex with us, if only society were more open and accepting of feminine sexuality. Yet, in the same breath we’ll hear about how slutty and aggressive women have become in the fall of western society by the same guys. It’s ironic, but it gives guys hope that if they can find the secret formula to unleashing the sexual beast within every woman he’ll find this insatiable she-devil to pair off with monogamously. If women were men’s sexual equals, why would they not be given to the same drives that conflict with monogamy? Imagine a world where women are as horny as men. Think of a gay bath house and you might have a workable model.

Women of course love to encourage and reinforce this social convention because it sounds like empowerment in the face of patriarchal sexual oppression (yes, we’d be more sexual if you’d only allow us to you evil men), while at the same time tacitly acknowledging that it turns men into white knight sympathizers of the cause (i.e. feminine entitlement and primacy).

The point of my starting this topic wasn’t to debate whether or not women are sexual at all – obviously they are – however it was my intent to draw attention to the canard that women (and their would-be male identifiers) would like everyone to believe, “women are just as / more sexual than men”. No woman can make a realistic assessment about that unless she’s had 12 -17 times her natural testosterone levels increased and lived in a man’s biological condition. Just on the face of it the assertion is silly, but as I said, for women it’s empowering to think that women are “just as sexual” as men. And female-identifiers are all too happy to reinforce that meme because it offers them the hope of getting laid with one of these ‘sexually repressed’ women.

War Brides

Reader Nas had an interesting question regarding female duplicity:

“Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism.”

Can you please expand on this Rollo? I find it fascinating.

OK, baton down the hatches, we’re heading for dangerous waters. What I’m getting at here is suggesting that women’s propensity for solipsism is a psychologically evolved mechanism. In other words, it helped women to cope with the harsh realities of the past, to develop a more focused sense of self-interest. To really grasp this you need to understand women’s brain function and chemistry. I’m not going to get too detailed in this, but suffice it to say numerous studies show that a female brain is hard-wired for emotional response and communication on a more complex level than men. I think this is pretty much an established point for my readers, but if you disagree, well that’s going to have be the topic of another post.

Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect be subjected to. Consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child that could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice. Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it’s women’s innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women. Why should that be?

On the face of it you may think that men’s better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness. Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

Men are the disposable sex, women, the preserved sex. Men would simply die in favor of a superior aggressor, but women would be reserved for breeding. So it served a feminine imperative to evolve an ability to cut former emotional ties more readily (in favor of her new captor) and focus on a more self-important psychology – solipsism.

Now, here is where I’ll step off the diving board and into the theoretical. It’s my purview that a lot of what men would complain are duplicitous acts of indifference towards them are really rooted in this innate feminine solipsism. That’s a bold statement, I realize, but I’d argue that what men take for inconsiderate indifference in a break up or in ruthless shit tests is really a woman tapping into this innate, self-preserving solipsism. Combine hypergamy with the chronically hostile environments of the past and you end up with a modern day feminine solipsism. Add to this an acculturated sense of female entitlement, social conventions that excuse this ‘duplicity’, and a constant misdirection of intent by women themselves, and you come to where we are now. As if that weren’t enough, throw in the element of hypergamy and the countdown in terms of fertility and long term provisioning that a woman must deal with before hitting the imminent Wall, and now you have a fuller picture of the conditions and stresses that necessitate this solipsistic nature.

Ever wonder why it is a woman can ‘get over you’ so quickly after a break up from a relationship you’d thought was rock solid for so long? Ever wonder why she returns to the abusive boyfriend she hopes will change for her? Look no further than feminine solipsism.

After reading all of this I can understand if anyone thinks this is a very nihilistic observation. Let me be clear, this dynamic is real by order of degrees for individual women. A woman’s conditions may be such that she’s never needed to tap into this reserve. Also, we are dealing with subconscious elements of her personality here, so it would come as no surprise that feminine solipsism wouldn’t be cognitive for most women – thus offensive and denied. I’m not asking that anyone accept this idea as gospel, just that the dots do connect very predictably.

Duplicity

It’s endlessly entertaining (and predictable) to see how often women’s (and feminized men’s) default response to anything they disagree with in regards to gender dynamics is met with a personalization to the contrary. It’s always the “not-in-my-case” story about how their personal anecdotal, exceptional experience categorically proves a universal opposite. By order of degrees, women have a natural tendency for solipsism – any dynamic is interpreted in terms of how it applies to themselves first, and then the greater whole of humanity.

Men tend to draw upon the larger, rational, more empirical meta-observations whether they agree or not, but a woman will almost universally rely upon her isolated personal experience and cling to it as gospel. If it’s true for her, it’s true for everyone, and experience and data that contradict her self-estimations? Those have no bearing because ‘she’s’ not like that.

Recently I’ve been fielding responses generated from my Wait for it? post, courtesy of Susan Walsh and the Hooking Up Smart audience. What started as some really good discourse has kind of degenerated into the monogamy vs. biology team mentality. There’s a lot of good stuff, but after 300+ responses all that just kind of gets buried. However, Susan had a predictable come back to my (misunderstood) premise of the Iron Rule of Tomassi #3:

Are you saying that all women are prepared to bang a stranger at a foam cannon party on Spring Break? Or even that all women would attend a foam cannon party?

Are there any women who are in control of their lives and actions, in your view? It sounds as if you do not allow for that possibility.

One of the great failings of a good debate is casting your perspective in binary terms – and that’s what’s happening here. This isn’t an all or nothing, black or white premise; intelligent people falling back on binary straw-men arguments is usually a sign that they either don’t grasp the premise (my fault) or that they really have nothing to back up their own (their fault).

That said, lets put it this way, all women have the potential to bang the hot guy in the foam Cannon party. Whether they have the means, or their personal / physical conditions permit them to carry out the behavior is subject to speculation, but the desire and potential is there under the right circumstances.

Now, the next predictable retort will be, “so you actually believe women are unaware of their own impulses?” I’ll save you the time of asking, and just respond with, yes. ‘Lives’ and ‘actions’ are often conscious decisions, however, the motivators behind those decisions are are not. That’s going to seem outrageous to a gender who’s psychological imperative is to preserve an appearance of being worthy of long term provisioning at all times, but empirical study and observations will contradict this.

Have a look at the work of Dr. Martie Hasselton here:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/papers/

Pay particular attention to her studies and experiments regarding female ornamentation during periods of ovulation (high fertility) as well as women’s subconscious propensity for seeking men displaying Alpha cues during ovulation, and Beta male provisioning preferences during menstruation.

You might also look into the works of Dr. Meredith Chivers:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/06/030613075252.htm

In their study, Chivers and Bailey showed erotic films to heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian women while measuring their genital and subjective arousal. They found that women, unlike men, showed the same genital responses to different kinds of erotic stimuli regardless of their sexual orientation, says Bailey. Whether the films depicted two males, two females, or a male and a female engaging in sexual activity, the different groups of women in the study responded similarly.

As I stated previously, hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock, and women’s biology and psychological wiring have evolved to make women extremely adept sexual opportunists. So yes, ALL women have the propensity to want to fuck the hot guy on spring break, and simultaneously maintain the impression (for themselves and others)  that they’re worthy of long term provisioning potential. Women know their first, best, agency with men is their sexuality. On some level of consciousness they’re keenly aware that men’s primary interest in them is fucking – everything else is ancillary to sex. The value a woman has beyond the sexual only becomes relevant after she’s been sexual.

I can hear the gnashing of feminist, and their male identifiers, teeth at this, but don’t take this as some horrible proof of the human condition. The binary response will be to presume I mean women are worthless beyond sex; that is not my premise. What I am illustrating is that there will always be a condition of sexuality between the sexes that influences our dealings with each other.

I’d love to perpetuate the pretty lie that women hold off on sex in order increase their sexual market value to men, but the overwhelming meta-consensus as reported by men online is there are far too many “good girls” who’ll knowingly string along patient, dependable (not necessarily beta) men because “she wanted them to like her for more than that” only to fuck a high SMV Alpha the first night she met him. Opportunism is a universal human drive, but it manifests itself differently in each gender as fits their imperatives.

Self-Shots  NSFW.

Have a look here at the sheer volume and frequency with which average women will voluntarily become sexual here. This is just one collection, there are countless millions more. Remember, no one is coercing these girls to take nude and semi-nude pics of themselves in a bathroom mirror – they want to do this. Are they all sluts? How many of these women have uttered the words ” I want to wait so I know you want me for more than sex?” How many of these women would make great wives in 5-10 years? How many of these women are already (or have been) wife material? How many of these women are thought of as the sweet natured “good girl”? How many guys have considered these girls “Quality Women”? We can look at them with their clothes off and declare them sluts, but would you know the difference if you saw her in church?

Most women are literally oblivious to the underlying motivations of their sexual selections / attractions. Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism. Hypergamy necessitates solipsism.

Social Matching Theory

How to spot a rich guy

We laugh our asses off at this joke, but why is it funny? It is funny because human beings, like many other higher order animals, have the innate ability to make cognitive comparisons on a subconscious level. The reason it’s humorous is because we see an imbalance in a system and make deductive conclusions with regard to individual conditions. This is the basis of the Social Matching Theory.

Social Matching Theory, in essence, is defined as follows: All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themself.

Just as an aside, this is a well recognized social psychology theory, not something manufactured by Game theorists. However, in a nutshell it outlines the sexual marketplace dynamic, before adding variables like Game, status, provisioning, etc.

This is a naturally occuring commonality among many specific aculturations and societies. The trick to this theory is of course that ‘All Things’ are rarely equal. However, my point to this isn’t to naively assume that attraction and sexual pairing happen in a vacuum – far from it. It is to illustrate an underlying psycho-biological principle that operates beneath our consciousness that prompts other psychological schemas from an intimately personal (micro) level to the social psychology of an entire (macro) culture.

As I’ve posted in several forum threads with regard to “Why Women Cheat” or why men are so compelled toward sex with archetypically attractive women, the root of this desire is a psychologically evolved  opportunism that is founded on our ability to make and assess these natural comparissons in order to better facilitate our own survival and the survival of our offspring. It has served our species so well over  millennia that this natural comparisson making capacity has become an autonomous and subconscious aspect of experiencing our environment. We understand that eating a large apple is preferable, from a survial standpoint, to eating the small one. We have a tendency to want what our biologies compel us towards and develop idealizations based on what we think would best satisfy these ends.

As I stated, I understand that attraction and intersexual relations do not happen in a vacumm and there are many (generally predictable) variables that influence this, but Social Matching Theory isn’t about the process of attraction or pairing so much as the motivations for selection. I’m often asked about the importance placed on physical appearance, prowess, etc. bearing influence on attraction, and I can speak from my own experience saying yes, it absolutely does. A fat guy is simply not going to attract a Fitness America competitor without some very unique circumstances influencing this attraction. Neither would I support this attraction being based in a qualitative, genuine physical desire for the fat male. It is an imbalance in a system.

All things being equal; socio-economic, intellectual, emotional levels etc. you will have a tendency to attract and be attracted to people of similar physical presence as yourself. This is the root of the psychological schema many men and women apply when they follow the “He/She’s out of my leauge” mentality. They are manifesting this subconscious understanding that the prospects of another person of a more idealized physical presence being attracted to them or pairing with them would be an unlikely match. They self-perceive this imbalance and thus limit themselves to opportunities that have a better likelihood of success in gratifying their need – in this case sex.

Look at the ‘Rich Guy’ picture again. The woman in this imbalance we might presume is a ‘Golddigger’. This too is inspired by an innate understanding of the Social Matching Theory. Why else would an (arguably) attractive woman in comparatively good shape, wearing a thong (indicating sexual availability), be with a morbidly obese male if he didn’t posess some other redeeming variable to inspire the match? We see a picture and laugh, and women make the internalized rationalization that she’s not genuinely interested in the guy, but is ‘in love’ with his provisioning means. Superficial? Perhaps, but it still illustrates this comparative instinct we have, particularly when we know nothing about individual circumstance. The possibility does exists that this woman genuinely loves the guy, or is attracted to him, but this isn’t our first impression. In fact it takes significant, trained, mental effort to consider the possibility because the Social Matching comparison IS our natural default.

Finally, I should add that the Social Matching Theory is also one of the primary foundations upon which AFCism and ONEitis is based. This natural fear of rejection associated with both of these schema stem from a subconscious understanding of this theory. ONEitis in particular can be traced back to this self-perception of imbalance leading to the “I’ll never find a better woman/man than this person” mentality in so much as it represents a limitation of opportunism. In other words, it becomes preferable for a person to stay and accomodate an otherwise intolerable relationship if that person has internalized the understanding that their relationship represents an imbalance in this Social Matching. Abuse endured from the more idealized mate becomes preferable to rejection from anonymous, less idealized sources of intimacy.

At this point you may be wondering what brought this post to the surface. I recently got into a debate with a self-described feminist who entirely rejected notion that a sexual marketplace should even exist in contemporary human society. It wasn’t that she was denying the underlying dynamic of the sexual marketplace, but rather that it was an antiquated and dehumanizing influence in the human condition. Up until this conversation, I’d always taken the idea of a sexual marketplace and sexual market value as applied to individuals as a given. The SMP was a recognized universal framework in which we maneuver – some successfully, others with difficulty. The rejection of this idea, or the desire to alter it sociological, seems absurd to me, even though I would agree that it is a brutal game we play. My counterargument with her was that the SMP is actually more representative of our humanity, in that it’s healthier to accept that the way we evolved as a successful species was due to the harsh reality of the SMP. She wouldn’t hear it.