Case Studies – Page 4

February 15, 2015

End of Life Issues

I had an interesting experience this weekend with a man I used to do peer counseling with almost ten years ago. The guy’s wife had heard I’d moved back to northern Nevada and asked if I’d spend some time with him as he’s been suffering from cancer, and honestly, he’s in death’s waiting room. He’s late 70s now but when I first started counseling the guy at university he was one of the tougher men I knew in trying to expose to what’s now the Red Pill.

He’s never really accepted the fundamental truths and for literally his entire life he’s been struggling with the frustration that Blue Pill men all do when they simply don’t understand that the set of books they believe women – particularly older women from his generation – should be playing fair by. It was particularly disheartening to listen to him still complain about his wife’s lack of sexual interest in him.

For her part she’d completely checked out of anything intimate with him beyond the perfunctory duties of being civil with her husband years ago. As his illness has progressed he’s become less mobile and more resentful of her indifference to him. From my perspective, coming back into this story after almost ten years, it struck me how a Blue Pill conditioning solidifies into a man’s life in his later years. Revealing the Red Pill truths as to what’s brought him to where he is now is almost too cruel to torture him with, and honestly he wouldn’t accept it.

I’ve always advocated that unplugging men from the Matrix is like triage, save the men you can, read last rites to the dying. For those who don’t come to terms with the Red Pill and the true nature of the realities of the sexual marketplace at least there’s some hope that eventually they will experience something similar to what the Red Pill defines for them and they’ll have pause and insight to reconsider those truths. That’s the bitter taste of the Red Pill – there’s no going back once you start to see the behaviors and relate them to Red Pill principles.

I read guys on the TRP subreddit forum who are newly unplugged who really have a tough time coming to terms with that new reality. They get pissed off, they want to cling to the “it’s not really that bad” or “not all women are like that” conditioning and throw their hands up in disgust with the Red Pill and move on.

Only they can’t. Four months later they come back to the forum after having a woman behave exactly as the theories predicted they would. There’s a manosphere saying that women hate the Red Pill because it more reliably and accurately predicts human behavior than feminism ever has. That Red Pill awareness and predictability is tough to shake for guys who want to go back to the comfort of believing there’s still hope for them in a Blue Pill world.

This Old Man

I realize this is going to get depressing here, but it’s important to consider the totality of what a lifetime of Blue Pill ignorance represents to a man at his end. There are going to be men who will never accept Red Pill truths. They will never make the connection that the rule book they think everyone is working from is a plan with the intent of consuming him all the way to his death-bed. For whatever reason anything counter to their preconception of how women and men ought to relate to one another simply doesn’t register for them.

I’ll continue with my story about this man, but before I do I think that for anyone to have a complete understanding of how what we call Red Pill awareness affects our lives as men we need to consider how that awareness plays out across the span of our lives. Red Pill awareness, what I call positive masculinity, and the counter to a social order founded on the Feminine Imperative is still in its infancy. Some guys want to characterize it as a return to what was once conventional masculine ideals, and while I think that has some merit things simply aren’t going back to what men romanticize they were with women.

In the ‘sphere there’s a particular focus on how men can get the desired results they want in their personal and intimate lives by applying what Red Pill awareness helps them to reasonably predict. That’s fine for PUAs, maybe MGTOWs, and in the meantime MRAs will channel the parts of the Red Pill they do accept to increase awareness of men’s issues. But all of these branches and all of their interests are applied in the now.

My father died from complications of Alzheimers in 2010. My brother and I had him provided for in an assisted living facility for the last year of his life and it got to the point he couldn’t recognize either of us or his grandchildren. It was very difficult to watch my Dad who was a brilliant man, but a life long Beta, decay to a shell of himself. However even while suffering from memory loss, he was still clinging to the behaviors his Blue Pill conditioning taught him would make him appreciated by the other women in the facility.

My Dad taught me the meaning of the Savior Schema throughout most of his life – if that post seems poignant to you it’s because I learned it well from my old man. His ‘dating’ methodology was always based around a strategy of what he could do to better solve, buy or otherwise alleviate the problems a woman had in the hopes that a reciprocated appreciation of it would result in intimacy. The old set of books, he had them memorized.

I mention this because even with his mind addled by dementia some part of his subconscious still expected old women, women he had no idea what their names were, to reciprocate their love and intimacy for doing their gardening or fixing something for them. He couldn’t remember my name, but he could remember being slighted by women not giving him a kiss or patting him on the back ‘for all he did for them.’

This is just one example of the extent and consequences of Blue Pill conditioning. Using Red Pill / Game to pick up or live a better life with women, or extending that awareness to other aspects of one’s life is commendable and a betterment to a man’s life, but appreciating that betterment is incomplete without acknowledging the consequences of what a Blue Pill life path looks like.

When I agreed to spending most of my day with this man I had a kind of idealistic want to create a memorable time for him. He’s still pretty together mentally, but physically the guy can’t walk for more than 30 yards without getting winded. I took him out to the casinos, he hung out with me and some of the guys I snowmobile with, we drank good bourbon and I had hoped he’d get out of this self-pity by just doing something different for him.

He wouldn’t have it. All he could talk about was his resentment of his wife’s treatment of him “after all he’d done for her over the years”. He’ll be gone inside a year or two and he complains about Blue Pill frustrations as if there’s a chance he might live a better life in the future.

Last April I lost one of my most prized greyhounds to osteosarcoma. He was only 8 years old so it was kind of tragic, but I’d had him x-rayed and caught the signs early enough to manage his pain for an extra month before the pain was too much for him. Literally the day I had him put down, to the hour before, he insisted on going outside to walk in the grass and breath the air, he leaned on me like greys do, but it was an acknowledgement of him knowing it was his time. That dog took the last train home with more dignity and self-awareness than this man will.

I’m not a big fan of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, but I do accept his concept of having ‘peak experiences’. I think there is a Blue Pill presumption that those peaks are only peaks if they include their ONEitis girlfriend or wife along there to experience it with them. This is a tragedy because it disqualifies those fantastic life experiences (even stressful ones) because that Beta want of a mutually shared love precedes the capacity to recognize those great peaks.

It is important from a larger meta-life experience to understand just what the implications of a Blue Pill existence are and rise above them. Red Pill awareness isn’t just about getting better and hotter women, it’s about living a better life – when you’re 22 and 92.

January 30, 2015

Father Knows Best

I received the following from Mark Minter in this week’s comment thread. Regardless of what your or my opinion of Minter is, I will admit this is an area I haven’t explored before:

I have a request for a post. It is for a rework of a Rational Male post sometime back about sons of divorce that try to be “better than dad”.

I would think you might have more to say on the topic since a couple of years have passed since you posted it.

Or perhaps how a newly red pill divorced father might approach his son, especially if there has been a period of estrangement.

I have a “date” for a phone call with my son after quite a long period. You might imagine my relationship with my “old family” is sort of “interesting”, to put it euphemistically. My daughter has dropped my last name from social media accounts. My son calls himself “Younger Minter” and his assumed “middle name” is “Fucking”. Sort of a throwback to mine back in the day, but he seems quite pissed though.

I have been told these things can be quite emotional, and then a flurry of contact, but then a “backsliding” away from contact. Inevitably and probably rightfully so, he has innate loyalty to his mother. And he grew up in one of places that is so liberal it is often referred to as “The People’s Republic of …”

So the question is “How to bring him along?”

If by “bring him along” you mean convince him you’re not the asshole he’s convinced you are, that’s really subjective to your personal history and how amenable he is to listening to your side of the story. That said, there’s a world aligned against you that’s likely conditioned your son not just to hate you, but to loath his own sex by association with your past decisions and circumstances.

My intent with this weekend’s discussion isn’t to run Minter up the flagpole, but rather delve into a tough Red Pill area – reestablishing a lost or misguided connection with a son or daughter, from a post-Red Pill awareness perspective.

The post Mark is referencing was Promise Keepers. In that post I hit this situation from the opposite side:

Slay the Father

One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on fanaticism, with outdoing the life-performance of their asshole fathers. Before I go on further, many of them had legitimately rotten, alcoholic dads, who were abusive to them and their mothers. Others had the perception of their fathers colored for them either by their ‘strong independent®’ single mothers, or by watching their fathers resolve their own beta tendencies in a post-divorce life. Whatever the case, each of these guys had a mission – to be a better man than their father was, protect their mothers, and by extension the future mother their girlfriends and wives would become for them. His father’s personal failings would be his personal triumphs.

Being the father in this scenario and attempting to reestablish an after-the-fact, positive connection with a son is a very tall order. It’s almost easier to address the particulars of a daughter with ‘daddy issues’ who’s absent father contributed to her ‘victim status’ condition than it is to consider the upbringing and feminine conditioning a boy receives in his father’s relative absence.

The difficulty being that a son will have every negative perception of his father reinforced for him by a feminine-primary social order. Even in the rare instances when an insightful mother doesn’t resentfully color her son’s negative perceptions of his father during his formative years, there is an entire world of feminine social conventions pressing and affirming that impression into him.

From Daddy Issues:

Matrix Fathers

Have a look at postsecret this week. It’ll all be gone by Sunday so have a look while it lasts. This week’s thread is the usual fare for Father’s Day, a hearty “Fuck You Dad!” or “You’re the reason I’m so fucked up!” interspersed with a couple ‘good dad’ sentiments so as not to entirely degrade the feminized ideal of fatherhood – wouldn’t want to discourage men’s perpetual ‘living up’ to the qualifications set by the feminine imperative. There has to be a little cheese in the maze or else the rat wont perform as desired.

I always see a marked difference in attitude between mother’s day and father’s day, especially now that I’ve been one for 14 years. I was listening to a local talk radio show on the ride home Friday that was opening lines for callers to express their ‘gratitude‘ for their fathers, as they’d done the previously in May for mother’s day. Damn near every caller had the same “fuck you dad!” story about how shitty their lives were because of their father’s influence or his lack thereof. One girl had called in to bleat out her story about how her dad had left her mother 30 years ago and for the last 10 years she’d sent him a father’s day card with a big ‘FU’ on it to tell him she’d never forgive him. Another guy called in to say how horrible his dad was for leaving his mom and how he sends her a father’s day card because he thinks she fulfilled a masculine role for him that he owes some gratitude for.

Father’s Day is a slap in the face for me now – not because my wife and daughter don’t appreciate me as a father, but because it’s become a big “fuck you” Mr. Man. It’s now a reminder (as if we needed a special occasion) that masculinity, even in as positive a light as the Matrix might muster, is devalued and debased, and we ought to just take it like a man and get over it.

It’s a difficult task to unplug a man who’s a friend and open his eyes to Red Pill awareness. That guy has to be seeking answers to really be open to having his ego-investments in his conditioning challenged and realigned – you can’t really make a man Red Pill aware, he’s got to come to it in some fashion. This is a very important distinction to make when the man you’re attempting to unplug is your own son.

A father in this predicament has the double jeopardy of clearing his name as a father and as a representative of masculinity – the representation of all the negative aspects the Feminine Imperative has ever embedded into him about the taint of his own masculinity. As I mentioned in Promise Keepers, some of the most ardent anti-conventional-masculinity crusaders I’ve ever encountered all had the common denominator of a ‘bad dad’. There are no ‘deadbeat mothers’.

Minter’s not the first father to ask me for advice about this. One of the more painful aspects of waking up and accepting Red Pill truths is coming to terms with the consequences of basing your past decisions on a Blue Pill paradigm. I can empathize with younger unplugged Betas getting angry with themselves for having wasted part of their lives with the effort of chasing after the carrot of Blue Pill goals, but it’s an entirely different anger older men feel after coming to realize that their lives and the lives of their children (the only reason to get married, remember?) are the results of their Blue Pill decision making.

Fortunately I had my Red Pill awakening prior to my daughter being born and had the foresight to live by example. However I know enough men in similar straights as Minter to see what an impossible task it is to untangle the past Blue Pill version of themselves with the Red Pill aware men they’ve become. I do not envy them.

I think the questions for the weekend are obvious:

I understand that Mark is seeking reconciliation here, and it may not even be warranted, but what would advise you men in a similar situation?

Attempting to unplug a friend, even one in a trauma that makes him ready to hear Red Pill truths, is a difficult task, but when that man is your own son how do you go about it?

Bear in mind I do understand that raising your son by a Red Pill example would be ideal. I’ve written about it before. What I’m asking is how to approach a young man already steeped in a Blue Pill feminized conditioning for the better part of his life and make him Red Pill aware? That kid may be a son who’s made it his life’s mission to be a “better man” than you based on the definition of a feminine social doctrine that’s taught him to hate you, his own sex, or at the very least would prefer he remain confused about masculinity until after he’s committed himself to useful Beta provisioning when a woman needs it most from him.

I’ll give my own response in the comments.

Related:
Dreams of the Future Past

January 27, 2015

Loyalty & Hypergamy

I actually had another post warming up for this week, but I received the following correspondence from a reader whom I’ve promised to keep anonymous. I don’t do ‘guest posts’ on Rational Male, however I do repost some comments and email I receive on occasion, and in light of the recent discussions on the male concept of love and shit tests I thought I’d let this stand on its own today:

Rollo,

I know it’s been a long time since you posted your piece, “Soldiers”, but it struck a nerve with me. I’m not sure what kind of new insight (if any) you can get from my experiences, but I left the Air Force 6 years ago and have found the transition to civilian life much more difficult than I had expected. After reading your post and reflecting, I also realized that the values the military instilled into me set me up for a lot of difficulty with women down the road. I only wish I had something like your blog as a resource when I was 21.

I went to one of this country’s military academies at the age of 17. I am 31 now and am still friends with some of the guys I went through basic training with. The basic training experience was 6 weeks long, and physically and mentally very tough. At the academies this environment gets drawn out (in modified form) through the entire first year, where we are plebes and function as sort of second-class citizens beneath all upper classmen. There is a lot of adversity, a lot of animosity directed at you in such a system, but you come to realize later on it’s a kind of “tough love”. These experiences forced us all to bond with each other, and help each other out through some very rough times.

I spent too many years of my life hoping that I could find a relationship with a woman that would be on par with the relationship I had with my male military friends in terms of honesty, loyalty, trust, forthrightness. I ended and/or sabatoged a number of relationships with women because I was looking for this kind of “love” I had for my brothers and could never find it. I had always assumed that I would find a form of “love” that rivaled all other relationships I’d had previously. Loyalty was (and is) a major virtue for me, and I never felt like I was finding that with the women I dated. In the military I developed a pretty keen eye for bullshit, and every relationship I had with women, even the best ones, I found my bullshit alarms going off at some point. Now I realize what was tripping my bullshit alarm—hypergamy. Hypergamy is directly opposed to the concept of loyalty. I could tell when women were being shifty.

Part of the reason I could tell is because I had actually swallowed a version of the red pill as a cadet, though I’d never actually heard the term before. A few of my friends are what they call “naturals”. They helped to undo a lot of the extreme blue pill notions that I had been raised with.

Years of movies and TV and guidance from authority figures had trained me to look for “that special girl”. One of my friends in particular introduced the idea of being “kind of an ass” to girls, and only showing the nice side later (because I really was a nice kid). Never lead with your nice side, he advised me.

We also fucked a lot of girls with boyfriends. I saw some of the most disloyal and underhanded behavior out of women during that time. I remember when my friend was urging me to make a move on a girl we’d been talking to in a bar for some time. I said, “oh she has a boyfriend”. He asked, “well did she bring him up in conversation? Unless she brings it up it’s fair game. And you don’t address it either. Don’t say anything about the boyfriend, just keep the conversation elsewhere for the entire night.” It worked. Tactics like these worked over and over again, and while I enjoyed the hell out of this new found power, I was becoming more uncomfortable about the nature of women. It’s only due to my sense of morality and loyalty to other men in arms that I didn’t fuck the wife of an army guy who was deployed. I felt too disgusted with myself to go through with it… she, however, didn’t seem the least bit troubled by her marriage.

Fast forward to my adult life, I decided that I should be looking for a good woman to settle down with. See, I had never swallowed the Red Pill completely—I resisted the harsher implications of it. I told myself, NAWALT, and that I just needed to look for a good girl. The One. I understood so much that so many other guys don’t get, but I was still holding out hope for The One. I figured I would find this One at some point in grad school. After all, this is where all the smart, motivated, good girls are, right?

In two relationships the girls wanted to be exclusive with me. I said yes quickly, because exclusivity was what I wanted too. It wasn’t too long after that that my bullshit alarms got set off. One girl, leading into Christmas break, said she was going to a techno show in a city about an hour away from our school. I was planning on studying for a final, so I didn’t bother trying to go. As the date neared I realized I felt comfortable about the final and I wanted to go out that night. I asked to go with her—she said no. And this is where I could see the hamster frantically spinning its wheel.

All her reasons were obvious bullshit. I know when a girl is seeing another guy, because I’ve been the other guy. I know what the stories are like. I ended it. I was heartbroken. I wondered constantly whether I had made the right call. I missed her desperately, and I constantly questioned whether my radar had been off. My male friends (now thoroughly blue-pill, as I was attending a liberal civilian grad school) told me I was overreacting and being paranoid and jealous and not respecting her space, blah blah blah… A whole year later a girl I was friends with let slip that my ex actually was meeting another guy in the city, and fucked him the day after I dumped her.

No surprise—but I was quite upset that a few other girls I was “friends” with had known and never told me. They could have saved me a lot of grief. But then again, they were women—I don’t quite get it, but it’s like all the girls were sticking up for each other and covering for each other, even though they weren’t really close friends. It’s almost as if they felt they needed to cover up the tactics that women use, and keep the men from knowing about them—as though there was a driving need they had to keep men in the dark as to the true nature of women.

In fact, I have never been steered in the right direction in relationships by any woman. And this will bring me around to my next point—the feminine dominated civilian environment—especially academia.

The second grad school relationship followed a path that was remarkably similar to my first—in fact, looking back, I have had three major relationships, with girls who wanted to be exclusive, and they have ended because the girls were becoming involved with other men.

University life was especially difficult to adjust to. There was a lot less voicing of opinions and a lot more concern over offending others—that was one of the first things I noticed. I also noticed that many of the men seemed timid compared with my male military friends. See, this grad school was almost an extension of high school.

Approval by the females was very important, you could not anger them. The men were incredibly concerned with their popularity, and with getting to know the right people. I figured out early on that pissing off one of the cuter girls could lead to social death. And even apart from the girls, the men didn’t seem to act like men I had known.

There was a hierarchy in the school, and these young men followed the rules of this hierarchy. They would not challenge any male who was deemed to be “socially superior”. This blew my mind, because my military friends would never have accepted such a thing. We had a group, a crew, and we could always stand our ground, and if push ever came to shove then we might have to fight someone—if it meant protecting our dignity. I also figured out that physically standing my ground wasn’t socially acceptable in this environment.

I realize I may sound like some sort of thuggish asshole with a persecution complex, but I was responding to some blatant disrespect that shocked me. In the military, the men I knew wouldn’t openly disrespect or ridicule a man—unless they were looking for a fight. Actually, in the military I recall a lot more general respect between the men than I found in grad school. The grad school men felt like women to me—gossipy, petty. Overall, the male virtues that I had learned in the military became unimportant in the culture I found myself in.

Other values took priority, and I think this may be the Feminine Imperative you spoke of. Conflict was always to be avoided. Drastic effort must be taken to avoid offending others. Most of the men were willing to undercut each other for just a chance to be with one of the prettier girls. And the pretty girls—they walked on water, constantly had a harem of beta males tending to them. Actually, I watched several of these girls cheat on one boyfriend only to begin dating his friend. The social power of the prettier women cannot be overstated. I dated and dumped two pretty girls in a row (for the reasons I stated above) and quickly found myself on the outside of most social events.

I saw a lot of truth in your thoughts about military men. Some military men are some of the most Alpha dudes I’ve ever met. My military friends changed me from a dyed-in-the-wool beta to an Alpha that could fuck other dudes girlfriends with far too much ease, and stand up for himself (a modified pseudo-alpha, obviously I wouldn’t need to write this letter if I was a true natural alpha). But a lot of military men, Alpha though they are, have not actually swallowed the red pill completely. Somehow, I’d like to be able to get that message across, because there’s still a lot of NAWALT and One-itis in the military culture, even though it is a predominantly alpha culture. I am just grateful that I came across your blog.

After two failed relationships I was feeling like shit. I had tried looking for The One, and tried to have an Open and Honest relationship with lots of Communication and it failed dramatically. Now that I’ve found your blog I’ve come to terms with a lot of what had been plaguing me about women. I’m back to spinning plates, and I really do think it’s the best option for any male in today’s society. I’m still a little bitter about these red pill truths, but I’m no longer trying to fight against them.

I have a good correspondence with men in the military and it’s one of the more humbling aspects of writing what I do. I’ve had men on deployment send me pictures of their worn copy of The Rational Male on the barracks bed and I get chills. I’m glad I can help these guys transition from the idealism they have in the military to the often tragic Red Pill realities they encounter when they’re discharged.

This reader makes an interesting point I hadn’t considered in the Soldiers posts; there is a modicum of loyalty and respect men develop amongst themselves (even between different branches of the military) while enlisted that they believe will be relatable and respected by the women they encounter after their time in the military. They believe that the idealistic male concept of love (and in this case love for their military brothers) is the same concept women will share when they enter civilian life.

Young men entering into military life out of high school have (in most cases) 4 years to learn an idealism based on the Old Set of Books, is it any wonder they become suicidal after they are forced to come to terms with the disillusionment of that idealism in the face of the feminine-primary reality they enter when they’re discharged?

22 Veterans per day take their own lives.

January 18, 2015

“She turned on me”

In the last comment thread Rational Male regular, Glenn, had an interesting exchange that went like this:

My marriage exactly. And she really did turn on me by the time my daughter was 2, also having two miscarriages. It was as though a switch went off and she simply fucking hated me. In my case, I had too much dignity and many women who were interested in me who seemed quite fine, so I put my foot down and my ex then just began an affair with a Plan B she had in the wings (hotties always have a Plan B guys, especially wives). She married him and destroyed him too, but it wrecked my relationship with my daughter along the way. So much destruction and pain.

I often look back on my marriage now from the RP perspective and have started to blame myself for not being more dominant and not seeing shit tests for what they were etc, but I also wonder if there was anything I could have done? She was hot, there were always good looking guys willing to fuck her – I mean, is it just inevitable for some women?

As I’m finishing up the final edits of the next book, I’m once again reminded of its main purpose – a cautionary explanation of what men can expect of contemporary women at the various phases of their maturity. In Anger Management I detailed the anger men direct at themselves, not at the women who followed a natural predictable ‘flow’ of rationalizations and social conventions they can be expected to as their conditions in life dictate. Naturally any anger a man may deal with or express in this regard is always presumed to be directed towards women. A feminine dominant social order is one founded on the innate solipsism of women.

Now, before I dig in a bit deeper here, I want to make clear that while Glenn’s comment started my thinking process about this week’s topic, what I’m going to get at here isn’t a reflection on anything personal. His story of being “turned on” by a wife he believed was playing on his team is a very common one related by many a post-divorced man using the hindsight of a Red Pill lens.

I’m adding this caveat since only Glenn can really say for himself whether his mindset at the time he first met, and later married, the wife who turned on him was colored by Blue Pill idealism and / or a Beta self-perception. My guess, as with most men in his situation, was that he actually had what was a realistic expectation of a reciprocal relationship based on what he thought would be her genuine appreciation of his efforts and merits.

Betas at the Epiphany

I’ve discussed in several prior threads the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks strategy women use in both the short and long term. What I think needs a bit more explanation is the long term effects of that strategy on the Beta man’s mindset as a result of his fem-centric conditioning.

When a woman approaches and enters into her Epiphany Phase, she has a limbic understanding that her genetic chips need to be cashed in with a man who has ‘proper’ long term provisioning potential. For the greater part, those men are at least expected by women to have a Blue Pill, Beta conditioning that will make them more compliant with, now, what’s becoming an unignorable open Hypergamy.

These are the men Sheryl Sandberg describes as,

“…someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.”

These are nice euphemisms used to describe a man willing to accept his position of powerlessness in the grand scheme of feminine-primacy and open Hypergamy for his participation in realizing women’s dominant sexual strategy.

The Beta man encountering this new found attraction convinces himself that women’s interest in him is genuine and organic. In a sense it is, but although this attraction (not to be confused with arousal) is perceived as genuine on the part of women, it’s an attraction born of necessity. That necessity is the need to consolidate on monogamy with a man who’ll willingly ignore not just her past Alpha Fucks indiscretions, but participate in what he’s been conditioned to believe is his duty as a man from society and start to build a “mature adult” life with her.

A Beta at the Epiphany phase believes his ship has finally come in and his self-righteous AFC strategy of patience and perseverance will be rewarded. The social conventions at the time make him believe he’s to be more lauded for ‘forgiving’ a woman’s past, irrespective of whether he can expect praise for looking past her misgivings.

The Alpha Widow or carousel riding wife-to-be may then convince herself that she in fact actually sees an Alpha potential, or a potential for long term success, in ‘settling’ on that Beta in the long term. While I have had men relate horror stories about women knowing that they were settling and being insecure about their futures before or at the time of their wedding, I’m going to suggest that this foreknowledge is rarely a conscious aspect of women’s insight. “Turning” on their husband-to-be later in is life rarely a preconceived plan, but it is a predictable outcome for men who persist in a Beta mindset throughout their marriages.

Getting Her Settled Best

Saving the Best continues to be a seminal post on Rational Male, not the least of which because so many men could relate to the experience. However, this may not have been the experience of discovering a sexual past his wife had no intention of ever allowing him to share with her , but rather the expectation men have of receiving a woman’s ‘sexual best’ in marriage. That may not amount to the sexual experimentation she had in her Party Years, but for a Beta who believes his patience and virtue are to be rewarded at long last it is an expectation of enjoying the same or better sexual urgency his wife-to-be shared with her past lovers.

That Beta believes it’s his turn, because why else would a woman commit to a lifetime investment in a man she didn’t think was her best option?

Remember, during the Epiphany Phase a woman’s rationale for choosing the Beta for a long term investment is because she’s “experienced it all” and finally “knows better than to keep dating the Bad Boys who don’t appreciate her.” Thus the Beta believes he must be the best option for her by virtue of her investment in that belief.

And if she’s finally come to realize he’s the best option, why would she not expect to enjoy her best sexual performance with him? After all, even Sheryl Sandberg said, “…in time, nothing’s sexier.”

For the Alpha Widow marrying the Beta-in-waiting, the comparison of his sexual appeal with prior lovers conflicts with her need to finalize the long term security she couldn’t with her previous Alphas (or the men she perceived as Alpha). Thus comes reserved, self-restrained and self-conscious sex with her new Beta provider. She knows that sex with her Beta lacks the intensity of her prior lovers, but falls back on her Epiphany Phase rationalizations that she’s “doing it for the right reasons this time”.

That right reason being of course getting pregnant to further consolidate long term provisioning.

Our Beta simply lacks the same sexual experience as his wife-to-be to know any better (unless of course he finds proof of that experience later), but he gradually suspects her progressive lack of passion, reservations and self-consciousness by comparing it to porn or some of the other women’s he’s had sex with.

Social conventions abound for women to rely on as they become less incentivized to have sex with their Beta after the first child. Body image considerations, ‘mismatched libidos’ and “well, sex is supposed to taper off after marriage, everyone knows that” are just some of the prepackaged tropes ready for use.

The Turning

Once the first (and possibly second) child arrives, a woman’s order of intimate priorities changes, “turns” to that of the child. The sex “reward”, the ‘cookie time for good boy’, for desired behavior or performance ‘turns’ off, or sex is used as an intermittent reward for desired behavior (i.e. Choreplay). Sex becomes a utility; a positive reinforcer for her Beta increasing his provisioning capacity rather than the true visceral enjoyment she had with her past lovers.

This new functionality sex represents to a wife becomes ‘turning’ on her husband who believed he would always be her most intimate priority. In the instance of a woman marrying her ‘Alpha Provider’ this may in fact be the case, but as with the hierarchies of love that Alpha doesn’t have the same concern with, and didn’t marry his wife under the same pre-expectations a Beta does.

For the man who persists in his Beta mindset (or the guy who regresses into that mindset) this ‘turning’ becomes more and more pronounced. The turning comes out of the bedroom and into other aspects of their relationship – finances, familial ties, her expectations of his ambitiousness, his asserting himself at work or with their mutual friends – on more and more fronts he’s compared to other men and the ghosts of the Alphas she knows or has known.

Even though the Beta is aware his children are now his wife’s true priority, his Blue Pill conditioning still predisposes him to sacrifices. Again, he meets with ready-made social conventions that shame his discontent; “Is sex all that’s important to you?” It shouldn’t be, because it’s really “what’s on the inside that counts”, but he can’t shake the feeling he’s slipping out of her respect.

This is when Beta Dad doubles down. His Blue Pill expectations of himself require an all-consuming, self-sacrificing predisposition. The horse will work harder. His wife may have lost respect for him by this point, but his sense of honor and duty press him on. He doesn’t want to be like his oppressive or non-present father was. He wants to ‘out-support’ his father’s ghost, or what he believes ‘other guys’ would do when their marriages get tough.

So he waits it out, but she’s ‘turned’ on him by this point. It wasn’t planned, but all of his martyr-like determination only makes her that much more resentful for having settled on this Beta. After a certain stressing point, her disinterest or indignation goes even beyond his capacity to stay committed to a losing investment. These are the guys who tell me, “Damn Rollo, where where you when I was 30? I wish I’d known then what I know now.”

Do all marriages and relationships follow this schedule? No, but it’s important that men know the signs, understand what’s really expected of them and know when they’re being settled on despite all a woman’s self-interested refutations of that. It’s important they realize that performance isn’t limited to how well they meet a woman’s expectations, but that performance means ignoring those preconceptions and exceeding them because he has a passion to excel on his own, and for himself.

It’s important that he lives in his own Frame and that any woman, wife or otherwise, participates in his Frame at his pleasure. Beta men rarely have those expectations, beginning from a position of scarcity and a preconditioned responsibility to forgive a woman’s sexual strategy while still being gushingly appreciative that she chose him to settle on.

November 28, 2014

Rational Male – Q&A

SoSuave and Rational Male reader compleks had a few questions about what he read in The Rational Male book. Since I’ve been doing these weekend questions lately I thought these might make for some interesting discussions. Hopefully they wont distract you from family time this holiday weekend, but maybe they make for some interesting dinner table talk.

Just a side note here, I’m deliberately leaving my own answers less detailed than I normally would so as to inspire your owndiscussions:

If The Rational Male was recommended to me as a book about game, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But my friend who put me onto it basically described it as a life altering piece that would forever change the way I viewed the world of inter-gender relations.

Big sell!

So I read it.

Being freshly unplugged I’m still just awakening from that groggy comatose/confused state. However I feel as though I have a slight head start on at least some of the material. Just by sheer chance, rather than any real research into the subject.

I’ve only ever been in one LTR (2years), and it was with the girl I first hooked up with (she let me sleep with her, better hang onto this one!). Anyway, I ended that (5-6years ago) and have been single ever since, with no desire of entering another relationship.

I started ‘spinning plates’ about a year ago, just through a natural realization that any moral/ethical objection was actually completely unfounded. Not just my own (programmed) objections, but objections from the feminine perspective, which I guess are one in the same. I thought I must have been ‘wired’ differently because I had no desire of settling back into a LTR. I actually argued my case on multiple occasions to avoid it happening.

This book was eye opening and definitely shed some light on issues I never would have even thought to question.

If you care to keep reading I’m just going to spew some thoughts/questions having just finished the book. Keep in mind this is from a very rudimentary understanding of the text.

QUESTIONS

1) Does ONEitis best Hypergamy?
We all know a girl (either personally or anecdotally) who is in a committed relationship with some deadbeat. Everyone knows she can do better, but you can’t possibly convince her to leave him. What factors are at play here? Does SHE suffer from ONEitis to the point that her hypergamous tendencies have been shut off?

Or could it be a case of low self esteem and lack of self worth, so much so that she believes he is the best she can do? Or could he actually just be an Alpha male (albeit a bad example of one)? I’m sure there’s a grey area or middle ground here with many factors potentially at play depending on the specific scenarios. But it’s a pretty common scenario and I’d like to hear what you guys think.

I get this one now and then – “What about this one great looking girl I know who’s stuck on this complete douchebag, deadbeat, scumbag, suckup, :insert invective here:?” While I’m not sold on the idea that women ever get ONEitis for a guy, I am thoroughly convinced that women being 1-2 SMV points below a particular man they’re involved with develop a strong attachment for him.

For women, oftentimes that attachment gets paired with the soul-mate myth. I’d separate that “spiritualism” from the ONEitis a man gets for a woman, but it’s still rooted in the same dynamic – the subconscious realization that this person is the ‘best they can do’ in the SMP.

The reason I’d make the separation between how men experience ONEitis and women is due to the concepts either have when it comes to love. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism as a result of their innate drive towards hypergamous optimization. All this ‘deadbeat’ needs do is be perceptually 1-2 levels above her own perceived SMV and the Alpha prerequisite for Hypergamy is met.

Most guys looking from the outside of that perception in realize the guy’s a fuck up (even Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington is an example), and we can’t understand why that subjectively hot woman can’t use reason and rationality to see that he is, but then, this is due to our own self-perceptions and our mistaken belief that women’s reason can be appealed to.

2) Genuine Inter-Gender friendships?
Okay, so i don’t have the book with me. But I remember reading a sub-section on inter-gender relationships. It didn’t sit well with me when I read it, but it’s probably something I will have to re-read. I have a lot of female friends. Friendships that go back 15 years. Some of these are very close friends in a completely non-sexual way.

I’m closer with some of these girls than I am with many of my male friends.
Initially these friendships may have blossomed based on the fact that I was a shy kid and didn’t have any ‘intimate’ relationships with women till I was 19. But they are now concreted as some of my most valued friendships.

What is your take on Rollos opinion of inter-gender friendships (as outlined in the rational male)?

My take in the book, and still is, is that men and women cannot be friends in the same way and to the same degree of intimacy that same sex friendships develop.

Men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural response to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 18 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I should add here that the presumption of an equatable degree, character or quality of intergender friendship (platonic) being the same as a same-sex friendship is a product of the same “we’re-all-the-same-with-different-plumbing” naive equalism that deliberately ignores complementary differences between the sexes.

This presumption is actually a vetting mechanism for women’s control of sexual selection and Hypergamy. The social convention that promotes the idea of equitable concepts of friendship only serves women’s imperative of being able to hold the attentions of multiple male orbiters until such a time that she can optimize both sides of her sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). The longer you’re rapt by the idea of an equal intergender friendship, the longer she has to consolidate on whatever side of hypergamy she’s prioritizing at the phase of life she’s in. In other words, the longer you’re in the bullpen, the longer you’ll be a Plan B prospect.

3) Religion vs Evolution vs Habit?
This is a bit abstract. But in terms of a decayed loveless marriage, what would you say are the factors holding these marriages together? Neither party is happy, but they are also unwilling to do anything about it.

One clings to a religious frame as reason to not leave/divorce, as the children are all old enough now that “staying together for the childrens sake” no longer applies.

The other seems completely indifferent and stuck in the routine. Both are mid 50’s and have been married for 30 years and probably just scarred shitless of being alone. But what would you make of this from an ‘unplugged’ point of view. (might be a stretch from the realm of this book, but just curious).

What you’re describing is akin to the phenomenon of Grey Divorce. In the time line from my Preventative Medicine series, I briefly outline what’s known as the 20 year itch – the period of life, usually after 50 around the time a long-married couple becomes ’empty nesters’ and the binding responsibilities of raising children is at, or almost at an end.

It’s around this phase that a reassessment of one’s partner takes place and the prospects of living out the rest of a life with that person gets serious consideration. This is a phase that’s very telling of the overall prospects of marriage as an institution on whole and how either sex really considers their idealistic, loving union from very mater-of-fact practicality, when there is no longer a mutually cooperative goal (childrearing) as the centerpiece of that relationship.

Religion and/or a conviction that children are better raised by an involved two parent (male and female) family who are both mutually invested in the success of their kids is generally a bond that both parties mutually agree to as the cornerstone of their marriage.

Once that goal has been met (or termed out) then that relationship must be reestablished and based on a genuine interest and desire for the other person. For a man this may involve his realizing an understanding of tenets of the Game that he’s, until then, unwittingly been a party to. For women this may be a longing for renewed interest from extra-marital (but not necessarily infidelity) attentions and desire from other men.

It’s kind of telling how men’s idealistic concept of love endures beyond his late-life Epiphany stage. In spite of having experienced the consequences and all-downside risks men face in their prior marriages, it’s still overwhelmingly men who want to remarry and take another shot at that idealism.

It is women, in either their veiled pragmatism or their aging, unrealizable opportunistic concept of love who are more or less indifferent to the prospects of remarriage.

“Most currently divorced or widowed men are open to the idea of remarriage, but women in the same circumstances are less likely to be,” says the report, which draws on figures from a survey it conducted in May and June. Almost two thirds of men either want to remarry or would at least consider it, while fewer than a half of women would.

These stats alone are more than enough to verify my assertions of how either sex hold different concepts of love.

Men still dream of an idealistic love, and women have find precious little use for men beyond the practical when presented with the prospect of having to optimize Hypergamy at an age they are no longer capable of intersexual competition.

November 4, 2014

Moments of Clarity

Even for the most abject Beta man there comes significant points in his life when he makes a Red Pill connection – a point at which, despite his feminine-primary socialization and for all his own participation in a system that deceives him, his circumstance or a trauma rattles him into a state of clarity.

As I wind my way through the Preventive Medicine timeline in the second draft of the next book I come to understand the periods at which these moments of clarity most commonly occur for Beta men.

Early in life that prompt may be the sting of having a high school sweetheart break up with him before she goes off to college. In or after college it might be the undoing of a long distance relationship he thought for sure his soul-mate would help him dutifully preserve. Later it maybe the realization of how much of his personal potential he truly lost after investing so much in a wife who divorced him and separated him from his children.

Not all of these events are as traumatic as this, but it’s during these Red Pill moments of clarity a man begins to see a hint of the code in the Matrix; a suspicion that maybe what he’s believed about how intergender relations should be really haven’t been directed toward his best interest.

So it was with a certain amount of interest I took notice of a man named Stephen when he petitioned advice from a mouthpiece of the Feminine Imperative this week. Though he doesn’t yet realize it, Stephen is at a Red Pill moment of clarity in his life, and as most Beta men are won’t to do, he seeks answers from the same feminine-primary trough that’s kept him in a state of patient stasis until his yet unrealized potential has now become useful to the Feminine Imperative.

Rather than simply allow the feminine crabs drag him back down into the barrel (until his next Red Pill moment of clarity), I’m going to re-post his plea for understanding here and give him (with the help of my esteemed commenters) the Red Pill truth he deserves at so critical a juncture in his life.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my college dating experiences. I’m 28 years old now and I’ve noticed a very odd phenomenon lately. I’m getting noticed (and approached) by women that never would’ve given me the time of day when I was in college. Successful, accomplished women! One in particular is incredibly hot, but they all are attractive. I am baffled by this. You may laugh, but this is making me extremely frustrated and stressed out.

Reading your blog has offered some explanations. I’m an analytical guy, so I’ve been very impressed with the social science you weave into your writing, and the research about how 28 is the ideal male age for women helped to explain what might be going on. But I still can’t figure out what’s going on, with me or with them. I feel emotions like resentment and suspicion, as well as desire, but I’m not at all flattered. I find myself unable to respond in any way, positively or negatively. I feel paralyzed.

Sometimes I think I’m just offended. These are the very same women who rejected me time and again in college. I mean, I know they’re not the same but…they’re the same. I wanted relationships (I tried casual sex…EPIC FAIL), they didn’t want me. My one serious college girlfriend cheated on me with her professor. I was really, really hurt, felt like a chump, etc.
To put it in a HUS context, the [college girls] preferred alpha males (I’m definitely a beta, introverted, overly intense, with a baby face.) Or maybe they were reluctant to get involved during college because they wanted to be free to move on after graduation and not be tied down.

The thing is, I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. Frankly, I couldn’t change if I wanted to, even if it meant getting these women. I may have come out of my shell a little, but I honestly don’t think it’s me that’s different. It’s them, and I don’t think I like the difference. I think I’m the consolation prize. I think they still want the alphas but they’ve given up. Time to settle. I’m offended. I don’t trust these women.

Am I too proud? Getting my revenge? Guarded from past humiliations? Or have I just grown up and learned from my experiences?

Stephen

Stephen, the moment of Red Pill clarity you’re now experiencing is coming from your newly realized status. The women you describe being attracted to you (different than being aroused by you) are entering what I call The Epiphany Phase – the point at which their sexual market value begins to decay in earnest while a man’s begins his greatest potential to capitalize upon his own SMV as it steadily (should) increase.

This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice of husband (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in the prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

Where you find yourself now, Stephen, is in the midst of these women coming to terms with their waning SMV and the increasing effort it takes women of that age bracket to effectively compete in a sexual marketplace where younger women simply outclass them with every new year that she doesn’t consolidate on a man who represents a good long term provisioning prospect.

As you suggest, these are the same women who found you sexually invisible when they were younger and enjoying the same SMV peak with the relatively more Alpha men they wanted to have short term sexual experiences with. These women were the younger competition they now find threatening their sexual selection today.

Are they exactly the same individual women? I don’t know for sure from your outline, but even if they aren’t, the Schedules of Mating script women follow is so common and predictable that they may as well effectively be the same women to you – and this is precisely what your subconscious instinct is attempting to relate to your conscious-self now.

…I honestly don’t think it’s me that’s different. It’s them, and I don’t think I like the difference.

Unless you’ve made a drastic improvement to your physical appearance or you’ve become more Game aware and have changed your intersexual outlook and behavior the obvious answer is, it is these women who’ve changed.

Now the question remains, why?

What has changed in these women’s lives that prompted this dramatic shift in how they’ve re-prioritized what they now find sexually acceptable? What is it about you in the now (and not back then) that makes you ideal for that acceptability?

Aunt Giggles wants to convince you to let bygones be bygones and follow along with the script the Feminine Imperative expects of you by shaming you for not forgiving a woman of her past indiscretions…

No doubt the girls at college rewarded the males who were early developers and exhibited masculine qualities then. Why take that personally?

I’ll tell you why, because the men they were interested in short term sexual prospects with then weren’t being asked to make anything resembling the life changing personal investment in these ‘reformed’ women she hopes you’ll man-up and be a ‘Better Beta’ for. Those men got the milk for free because the cow milked herself and gave it to them, gladly.

Now that’s a hell of a proposition for a guy who’s played by what his prior feminine conditioning would have him believe were the ‘rules’ for as long as you have. Is it really that far a stretch to want to protect the investment of your personal potential, not to mention your yet unrealized peak SMV potential, with women who now hope you’ll be sex, love and desire starved enough for the past 10 or so years to look past all the short term sex they had with more Alpha men in the Party Years of their early to mid 20s?

Maturation of Beta Bucks

Aunt Sue has always ridden the fence when it comes to acknowledging the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks nature of women’s sexual strategy. When it suits her narrative she agrees with Hypergamy, when it doesn’t, well, you’ll never know because those posts get scrubbed from her blog.

Fortunately you don’t need her input on Hypergamy to understand women’s pluralistic sexual strategy – there are many, much higher profile women than Susan Walsh who openly and publicly endorse exactly the strategy these women (who are suddenly attracted to you now) are using:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

And since we’re interested in the research perhaps we can ask Aunt Sue why it is nearly half of women in relationships retain a ‘Plan B’ guy:

Whether he’s the one that got away, the office husband, or a gym partner, chances are he is the “Plan B” man you fantasize about running away with. Like an insurance policy, this man is the handpicked boyfriend or husband replacement you have on standby once “plan A” starts to break down on you. According to a survey conducted by OnePoll.com, an online market research company, half of women who are married or in relationships have a Plan B man on standby who is “ready and waiting” because of “unfinished business.”

You see Stephen, it’s not those “Red Pill, Dark Triad cads” who perpetuate the “Beta Bux” theory; we don’t need to, it’s modern women who proudly, triumphantly, openly confirm their own Hypergamy and blatantly expect you to comply with it by default. In fact they’ll shame you, as all the commenters on HUS are doing now, for even questioning your expected role in affirming their sexual strategy.

So, with the knowledge of this new Red Pill truth, openly confirmed by the very same women who are ‘attracted’ to you now, how do you intend to benefit from it? Will you stick your head back in the blue pill sand of HUS, or will you become curious about the broader truths of the Red Pill. Just remember, now you’re aware of a Red Pill truth, there’s no going back.

However, bear in mind, you’re 28, the women you’re dealing with now have had a lot longer than just the 4 years they may have spent in high school to decide if you were attractive to them – these women have had the better part of the past 10 years and the benefit of experiencing the peak of their SMV potential up to this point in life.

Aunt Giggles’ would have you believe your new found SMV is the result some maturation process or change in your personal conditions when in fact it’s the very calculated result of an proudly confirmed, pre-designed sexual strategy. And it becomes really insidious when the operative feminine social convention in play accuses you of wanting “revenge” for acknowledging the same strategy that these women do openly already; you could be cowed into the fear of remaining alone, but that’s a myth to bust in another post.

Commenters, perhaps I’ve missed something here.

Please, feel free to post your advice for Stephen in the always open, never moderated and entirely uncensored comment section only here at The Rational Male.

October 13, 2014October 13, 2014

Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany

About three weeks ago I was made aware of Jenny Bahn’s article, 30 is the New 50 which I thought was timely as it went beyond the xojane pablum where it first appeared to wider readership being picked up by Time. It was timely (heh) because it was right around the same week I published Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma and, coming from a fairly attractive woman, it highlighted many of the points I’d made in that post.

Commenter myreality asked me:

To what extent, if at all, do you think that validation hunting is part of male preference for large age differences when a man is in his late 30’s and beyond? It is definitely not 0%…

I think this is presuming a truth that isn’t.

The idea that men “seek validation” for their earned status or to ‘right’ past wrongs to their egos while they were working their way to that status is a social convention. The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.

Have a look at my Sexual Market Value Graph. (click to enlarge)

Although I’ve gone into explaining the loose metrics I’ve based this graph on several occasions, I’ve added some arrows here to illustrate a point that often gets missed or simply blown over because the truths it represents aren’t very flattering. Women would rather men not be aware of their own SMV potential prior to women being able to consolidate upon her sexual strategy.

Popular culture never presumes women are ‘validation hunting’ when they’re enjoying their peak SMV potential at 23 and (by order of degree) indulging that opportunity with men while at their peak. Women are acculturated to feel “empowered” by their sexuality, and really, no guy who wants to bang a hot 23 year old woman is ever going to rebuke her for it, much less develop social conventions to limit their odds of doing so.

However, men enjoying peak SMV in their mid to late 30’s are (by default) presumed to be vindicating themselves and validating their “fragile egos” by dating the younger (and in Jenny Bahn’s case an SMV peaked 23 year old no less) women they naturally find more attractive.

If there is any ‘validation’ for SMV peaked men it’s less about the sense of deserving a hot piece of ass or vindication for the women of his peer age who found him sexually invisible until he hit his peak, and more about validation in a new self-awareness that he finally is in a position of choosing and qualifying women for his intimacy rather than being filtered for his own acceptability for so long.

It’s not about turnabout or fair play now that the sexual selection shoe is on the other foot, but simple deductive pragmatism for a man who is aware of his own SMV and, assuming he’s hasn’t hamstrung his ability to maneuver, wants to exercise that value at (presumedly) the top of his game.

It’s not (usually) that he’s made a conscious effort to make himself an Alpha Agent of Righteous Karma, but that he steps into that role by default when the SMV balance shifts to his favor, and he naturally prefers sexual access to the best physical, and most sexually available woman his newly recognized SMV will afford him. That may not be a 23 year old coed, but it might be with a necessitous 29 year old looking for a solution to her long term investment.

About Those Arrows

One very common (or deliberate) misunderstanding about this chart is the presumption that like should necessarily attract like. A lot of critics claim indignation over the idea that I was suggesting a 23 year old woman should be attracted to a 36-38 year old SMV peaked man. I’ve never proposed this scenario in any post I’ve ever written about SMV, but it’s important to understand the prioritizations of attraction women make during the later phases of their maturation.

Critics who like to presume that this attraction is only based on looks, prowess and virility often don’t take this attraction prioritization into account. Obviously a more youthful man is in better physical shape when he’s younger, and if all we were considering was short term mating prospects and the Alpha Fuck side of feminine hypergamy this graph would look much different. However, once a woman has reached 30 (thank you Ms. Bahn) those attraction (not arousal) priorities look much different.

The primary reason I placed men’s peak SMV in his mid to late thirties is because, if he’s made the most of his potential, this is when he is most likely to have established himself in his status, affluence and achievements while (if he’s maintained himself) still retaining the looks of a more mature man.

It’s exactly women’s sexual prioritization at their most necessitous which puts men at the top of their SMV game. As I’ve detailed in many prior posts, hypergamy wants optimization (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). Women’s pluralistic sexual strategy is optimized when a woman can consolidate a monogamous commitment from a man who can deliver a better genetic benefit and a better personal (providership) investment than her own SMV should realistically be able to warrant her.

In general, at no other point in a man’s life does he possess the a better potential to optimize women’s innate hypergamy.

If you follow the pink arrow, from about women’s 30th year that established SMV peaked man has the best potential to satisfy both aspects of the dualistic nature of hypergamy. It’s important to consider that when a woman reaches her 30s her sexual prioritization is affected by her own capacity to attract and hold male attention. What happens is a sort of subconscious establishing operation – as her capacity to attract becomes diminished, and as the next generation of SMV peaked women comes into their own, the urgency to cash out of the sexual market place increases.

So it’s not that the expectation should be one of 23 year old women wanting to get after it with 38 year old men (though this is exactly the scenario in Jenny Bahn’s story), but rather that 38 year old men increase exponentially in value to 30 year old women at a time when what he possess is what she needs the most.

Back in May a data set was released on Twitter from OKCupid founder Christian Rudder is his book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). It’s a fascinating read actually and reinforces much of what I speculate about with regard to my own SMV graph.

It’s important to remember that this data is based primarily on looks, but it illustrates the point of my adding the blue arrow to the graph. Men’s arousal and attraction triggers are virtually static. While men’s attraction value variates for women, it is a locked value for women.

While in her SMV peak – as we can see averaged her to around 22 – women enjoy the benefit of having the most sexual selectivity of their lives. However, the power of this selectivity declines as she ages and is further stressed by sexual competition as she does. And while men compete for sexual access to women, the sexual market value of the woman being competed for is still rooted in her capacity to attract attention and arouse men.

When in her SMV peak years, women’s preferences and sexual strategy supersede those of the men who would compete for her, however as she moves towards maturity, and as men ascend to their own SMV peak, a man’s preferences gradually take precedence over women’s.

Jenny Bahn, a reasonably attractive (former model) woman provides us with an excellent example of this transition.

Alex is 38. I’m 30. Technically, there are no “people our age.” But I’m starting to feel that a 30-year-old woman might as well be a 40-year-old man, though infinitely less desirable, culturally speaking.

At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.

[…]A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.

As I mentioned in The Threat:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

Jenny, like most women in their Epiphany Phase, is now coming to terms with the transition of sexual selection power from what she once no doubt enjoyed to a man who’s made the most of his maturity and potential she wants to consolidate on in long term monogamy.

Jenny has a rare honesty and insight to recognize this, but naturally the ‘validation’ social convention is there to assuage her predicament. Even in her self-acceptance of her situation Alex is colored with an uncooperative attitude. His perspective is ‘incorrect’ in a fem-centric social order. If he were really ‘mature’ he would be dating and marrying Jenny (a victim of her own past decisions) instead of seeking ‘validation’ with a 23 year old hottie.

The presumption of Alex validating himself with a hot 23 year old makes men his age, in general, more shallow or manipulative, or uncooperative with the mandates of a feminine-primary social order. A mature, established man shouldn’t want to date women in their 20s, he should cooperate with the Feminine Imperative and validate Jenny’s sexual strategy by becoming monogamous with her.

What Alex is doing isn’t seeking validation, it’s simple SMP pragmatism – the power of sexual selectivity (though by no means unilateral) has switched in degree to his favor. Alex is enjoying his peak SMV and a large portion of that value comes from his desirability from women like Jenny; women who delayed capitalizing on their SMV peak and now, at 30, find themselves on the necessitous side of that sexual selectivity.

September 15, 2014September 15, 2014

Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma

Reader Keyser Soze had an interesting comment last week that I thought would be a good jump off point for today’s topic:

@Siirtyrion: You said, “Many scientists still go by this notion because it explains the frequent tradeoffs in mating and gives us a more complete picture for sexual selection as a whole. I understand that I uphold physicality as king, but understand that hypergamy isn’t completely about a short-term mating strategy, regardless of what some people may think. Women may be able to fund their our lives currently but rest assure, they still seek out Beta Bucks in other forms aside from monetary or material gain (i.e they still seek out physiological and emotional comfort from less than ideal males).”

Question for all:

Reading this, I had a thought. We often talk about women hitting the wall at 35ish and their sudden willingness to be me more reasonable with their expectations in a mate as they realize their SMV has decreased. I wonder if the above quote also plays into this. By the time women hit 35ish, historically (without modern methods of assisted conception) they are past their childbearing years. I wonder if their mating strategy changes at this age not only because of diminished SMV, but also because they are no longer looking for prime genetic material for reproduction as much as they are looking for “physiological and emotional comfort”. Perhaps this was implied all along, but I never thought about it this way before.

I hate to think this is going to come off as sympathy for the aging spinsters who had their cake in their youth and now, late in life, are looking to make honest amends for their past decisions, but it probably will.

A few months ago I broke-down Robin Korth’s aging sexual denial and in response we got a glimpse into the rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) at work in feminine solipsism:

http://twitter.com/RobinKorth/status/486636301207093248

My intent here isn’t to pick on Korth personally or really any woman in the post-Wall demographic in particular, but this self-insight is an excellent illustration of the feminine solipsism I often refer to on this blog. Furthermore, this sense of ego-blamelessness is then combined with the easy rationales and social conventions ready-made by the Feminine Imperative to affirm her self-importance.

Deti comments:

Robin Korth should be reposing in the love of her husband of the past 35 years, give or take. She should be doting on children and grandchildren as the esteemed matriarch of her family.

Instead, Ms. Korth is still out there acting as if she’s 25 years old. She’s still trying to navigate the sexual and dating minefields. In the end she’s trying to show everyone (but really herself) that she’s still “got it”; that she can still arouse a man sexually. It is all really about self aggrandizement. It is all about self- validation and affirmation. In the end, it’s all about Robin Korth. It’s pathetic and sad, really.

And no, Ms. Korth, your life is not the result of what you think about yourself. You are what you do. You are NOT what you think, read, or write. You are not what you were or what you’d like to be.

You are what you do. Period. Full stop.

And from The Difficulty of Gaming Women by Age Brackets by (the old) Roissy:

36 to 38 year olds

She is at peace with her spinsterhood and her failure in the dating market. She will acquiesce easily and gratefully to sex with very little game, as long as you don’t look like a grandpa. Her expectations are so low, it will be a challenge to disappoint her.

If you are prone to guilt, you might feel it when you inevitably dump a woman in this age range. Don’t. Remind yourself that her past is littered with her insouciant dumping of many beta men before you. You are merely an alpha agent of righteous karma.

Granted, Robin is well past the 38 year old mark by over 20 years, however even at 59 the description is still remarkably apt in light of Deti’s overview, however, the real lesson here is for men.

There comes (or should come) a certain empowerment for men after a point of maturation in life where he grows into an understanding of how the Game is played by women. As I’ve noted in the past month, this game, the former secret of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, is becoming more and more of an open secret amongst a feminine-primary culture becoming increasingly more assured of its primacy. If anything this plan for women’s optimizing hypergamy is just this side of proudly flaunting it to men.

As I pick my way through exactly this ‘plan’ in writing the next book, I’ve actually become less surprised by so many examples I find of this willingness with which women will overtly share their strategy for assuring short-term Alpha sexual desires during their SMV peak, and then consolidation on the security a Beta provider represents as their SMV decays beginning at around 30 years of age.

My purpose in writing this next volume of The Rational Male is to make men aware of just this life-schedule and sexual strategy, but even with my own efforts and the glaring willingness with which women will now confirm it, a larger whole of men simply don’t mature into this overall understanding.

For all the education the Red Pill represents for men, the larger blue pill whole simply don’t want to accept the ugly reality of women’s sexual strategy even when women openly confirm this for them – or when they do it’s too late for anything but pensive self-reproach and then signing the alimony/child support check anyway.

As this understanding becomes more widespread some social change will have to follow. Men will either become so pathetic as to ‘normalize’ it for themselves, and personally identify with what amounts to their open (proactive or reactive) cuckolding under women’s grossly overt championing of their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy – or Men will come to the realization (hopefully sooner than later) that the fantasy of monogamous bliss based on a notion of intergender compromise and the ‘give & take’ (but mostly give) they were sold on was never in the best interests of feminine-primacy.

The Feminine Imperative was (and is) only ever concerned with men’s imperatives or male-specific priorities insofar as they align with the superseding, primary imperatives of women. Thus, as open hypergamy becomes more common and the truth of this duplicity and imbalance (really disinterest) of mutual sexual imperatives becomes more evident, men will again (as with Game) evolve methods and mentalities to consolidate on their own imperatives or simply live in denial of it all.

The Long Game

For almost 6 months I’ve had this post from Cail Corishev bookmarked. It’s an excellent driver for exactly this point: prior to the digital age men tended not to play a long game when it came to socio-sexual strategies. The short game is all that matters in the moment, and all that stimulates, but until the advent of digital forums where men could figuratively compare notes, most men were simply unable, and perhaps too distracted to ask the obvious questions about women’s hypergamy and how it plays out over the course of 10-30 years and the roles women expect men to play during those stages of their lives in order to accommodate their strategy.

In Cail’s piece he describes a woman he knew at age 30 and how attractive she was, and his consideration of starting a relationship with her. After a failing interest and 10 years of no contact, she reinitiated with Cail:

But while we were chatting, I saw some of her recent pictures, and whoa! She’s gone from a 7-8 to maybe a 5, and that would be adjusted for age. She hasn’t gotten fat, but that’s about the only positive note. She looks so rough that I found myself wondering what I was thinking ten years ago, but I looked back at some old pictures, and she really was pretty at 30 — not a model or anything, but enough to turn heads. Now she looks like she’s lived 20 hard years in 10. She works nights at a pretty demanding job and has had some serious health problems, so I guess it’s no surprise, but it was really striking: ten years ago I ached for this girl, and now I wouldn’t look twice at her if I passed her in the grocery store.

That got me thinking about Rollo’s chart. My own SMV, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much from mid-30s to mid-40s, just as his chart would predict. I’m about the same weight, same build, maybe a little less hair, but I’d lost quite a bit of it already back then. I’m not much better-off financially, but at least not worse, and I have more of a sense of direction in my life. I’m certainly more confident, especially with women, and more established in my communities. So some pluses and some minuses, holding steady at about the same level. The amount of interest I get from women seems to support that.

She, on the other hand, going from 30 to 40, has gone from fertile to not likely. She’s also a grandmother now, so instead of looking to start a new family, she’s focused (and rightly so) on helping her kids with theirs. (If single moms don’t have much spare attention to give a husband, imagine the single mom of a single mom.) An additional ten years of dating and relationships under her belt certainly doesn’t add to her appeal. On top of those reasons, add the drastic decline in her looks, and now I not only don’t want to marry her, but as we chat I’m mostly thinking, “How soon can I politely say goodnight so I can get to sleep already?” Harsh, but true. Just as Rollo’s chart predicts, her SMV has been on a steady decline since we met — maybe more of a free-fall in her case — and now mine is well above hers.

I had a similar post to this I published back in December of 2011 – Protracted SMV:

It’s a simple matter to tell a guy he’s dodged a bullet in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s altogether different to provably show him how he’s dodging it. For all the evils of facebook at least it gives him [men] an ability to see the forest for the trees, but the feminine can’t even afford him that. You must stay dumb, you must stay plugged-in for the feminine to maintain primacy. For all the benefits of a globally connected world, the feminine imperative expects you to accept a feminine-centric normalization of it.

What the Feminine Imperative fears is men becoming what Roissy terms Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma. Due to a lifetime of feminine conditioning, men tend to underestimate the leverage their SMV has in the context of women’s biological imperatives.

Pity for Reneé

I have a similar story to Cail’s. When I was a senior in high school I had a ‘friend‘ named Reneé, she was a gorgeous auburn-red head with a fantastic 17-18 year old body. We were good ‘friends‘ in the sense that it was clear I wasn’t ever going to see her naked and she had all of the personality trappings of a girl who knew she was attractive (she did modeling after high school), but also had the beginnings of a very self-important ego-invested feminist mind set.

I never really stayed in touch with her after graduation since by then I had moved on to women who enthusiastically reciprocated my interests and I moved along in life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got on FaceBook and began having old friends look me up – Reneé was among the first. Very similar to the woman in Cail’s story we started to catch up with what the other had been doing through their 20s, 30s and now 40s.

As it turned out she was still fairly attractive for having had one daughter and never marrying the father, or any other guy for that matter. Most of the predictable single mommy issues and false-empowerment memes were bandied about by her, but the short version is here she was at 41 and her daughter was a year away from leaving for college. She was between jobs, but the one she had and the one she hoped to get were mediocre low to mid-management type, subsistence level employment.

She was and still is single 5 years later. The predictable questions about what my wife was like and how long we’ve been married came up, how we met, and where I’ve travelled in my work, etc. and I can honestly say I felt bad for her just recalling all of the life I’ve lived in the interim and basically forgot about her since high school.

She’s 46 now, and loves FaceBook as much as any aging spinster, but I really don’t want to call her that. In between the many pictures of her 4 cats (no lie) she occasionally posts some lament about how lonely she is now that her daughter has gone away to school and she comes home to an empty apartment these days. She makes not-so-subtle pleas to her FB community friends to set her up with ‘a great guy’ and all the dutiful Betas come out of the woodwork to tell her how pretty she (still) is and to keep her chin up and the right guy will “come along” – not so unlike the advice she gave me and at least half a dozen other guys I knew back in the day.

Reneé still clings to all of the feminist memes and mantras (reposts all the most popular), and complains of not being able to find a “great guy” anymore. This is of course infantile men’s faults for not manning up to her fem-correct standards, or else it’s a complaint about the ‘creepy’ men who really just want to bang her when she out with friends.

Unhappy Feminists

I hadn’t really ever considered using Reneé as a blog post subject until I read this article in Psychology Today:

According to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning the cash would increase if you skipped any 40-something, single female professionals and focused on the middle-aged male managers with one child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered “profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers.” And here it is:

Male

39 years old

Married

Household income between $150,000 and $200,000

In a senior management position

1 young child at home

A wife who works part-time

And the unhappiest profile?:

Female

42 years old

Unmarried (and no children)

Household income under $100,000

In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)

Minus the professional status, essentially Reneé fits the profile for the most unhappy person in the western world today. Now, return back to Robin Korth’s comment, her life is the result of what she thinks of herself. What does this say about the decision making both she and Reneé have made in their lives?

I can’t say I have any sympathy for the likes of Korth, but for Reneé I do feel a pang of pity (in spite of Roissy’s advice for women of this age). For all of the accusations of red pill “misogyny” I genuinely do like women, and I’m not rooting for them to smash into the Wall. However I can see why my observations make this seem so – hard truths are often warnings that we don’t like to heed.

I often wonder if women of this profile aren’t as much victims of an ideological conditioning as Betatized men are over the course of their lives. Much of what’s resulted in Reneé’s life are the consequences of having (and still subscribing to) a mindset that’s based on equalist individualism, and she’s now beginning to reap what she’s sown – knowingly or not.

I don’t know the father of her daughter, but my red pill instincts (and knowing how hot she used to be) tell me the guy was likely a pump and dump Alpha bad boy. Reneé never struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never consider a Beta for a relationship.

Observations

So my observation is this; while granting that women’s decisions are their own, and they should in all ways be accountable for the consequences that follow from them, how much of those decisions are based on a conditioning that promotes an idealized ideology of feminine, equalist independence?

For the same reason I can’t entirely fault a man with an internalized blue pill mindset over his conditioning, shouldn’t we also consider that women are likewise mislead by a similar influence? Are we (again) giving women too much credit for being rational independent agents under different circumstance?

For men’s part, it’s hardly avoidable that we become Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma by default for women in this cohort. Perhaps not as Alpha as we’re perceived, but as our SMV ascends in our 30s and (sometimes) through our 40s, it’s almost unavoidable that, even with a baseline of ambition, we’re seen as more desirable long term prospects.

In all honesty, were I to find myself single tomorrow, Reneé or women like her would never make my ‘to date’ list. Women love to complain that mature men really aren’t, and all they want is a young girl to fuck and coo for them. I would argue that men in my demo (at least should) have the depth of experience to know what the Feminine Imperative (and its social arm feminism) has bred and conditioned into women, and we honestly don’t want the hassle of dealing with it.

There is precious little reward for a man, and no appreciation, for having a big enough heart to save a woman from the consequences of her past decisions. That’s not meant as a callous punishment, just simple pragmatism.

As I stated in The Threat,

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When you’ve spent your whole life attempting to ‘have it all’ on your own, perhaps men can’t help but be an agent of Karma when that ‘all’ includes a man’s participation.

	PalmaSailor on Field Reports
	Sentient on Field Reports
	PalmaSailor on Field Reports
	PalmaSailor on Field Reports
	PalmaSailor on Dread Games