Foundations

The primary principles and building blocks of Positive Masculinity.

Dijo sin hablando

Dijo sin hablando – Told without speaking.

Communicate with your behavior. Never overtly tell a woman anything. Allow her to come to the conclusions you intend. Her imagination is the best tool in your Game toolbox. Learn how to use it.

This is the single greatest failing of average frustrated chumps: they vomit out everything about themselves, divulging the full truth of themselves to women in the mistaken belief that women desire that truth as a basis for qualifying for their intimacy or enduring commitment. Learn this now:

Women NEVER want full disclosure.

Nothing is more self-satisfying for a woman than to think she’s figured a Man out based solely on her mythical feminine intuition (i.e. imagination). When you blurt out your ‘feelings’ or overtly make known your optionless status, regardless of the context or the nobility of your intent, all you do is deny her this satisfaction. And like an easily distracted child she discards you for another, more entertaining, toy that holds some kind of mystery or puzzle for her figure out.

Always remember, women care less about the content of what’s being communicated and more about the context (the how) of what’s being communicated. Never buy the lie that good communication is the key to a good relationship with out considering how and what you communicate. Women are naturally solipsistic. Your ‘feelings’ aren’t important to her until you make them important to her.

Despite what any pop-psychologist has ingrained into you, communication is NOT the key to success in an LTR. It’s what and how it’s communicated that is. It seems counterintuitive to deliberately withhold information that you think would solve whatever problem you have. Every touchy-feely therapist will tell you to open up and express yourself, but all that leads to is the negotiation of desire and the disingenuous obligations based on those terms. You cannot ‘tell’ women anything, they must be led to your conclusion and be made to think that they are the ones coming to it with their own devices – preferably by way of her imagined feminine intuition. How you effect this is subject to your own situation with your LTR or your prospective woman, but understand that internalizing the idea that she can be made to understand your perspective indirectly is the first step in ‘real’ communication. Indirect communication is the foundation of effective Game.

Dijo sin hablando – Told without speaking.

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.

Positive Masculinity vs. Equalism

If you type the word “equalism” in a blog’s text box you get that annoying little red line underneath it indicating that you misspelled something. In other words, the English language doesn’t officially recognize that word in any dictionary. I suppose this is apt since for the last 50+ years the effort to feminize society has always used the abstract concept of gender equalism as something ambient in the background of the agenda. It doesn’t have an official definition because, collectively, were supposed to take it as a given; something that should just be considered “common sense”. To be sure, feminization’s plea for a more humane restructuring of society has always been couched in terms like “equality”, which sounds comforting when spoken, even if the intent is distracting.

However, that’s not the “equalism” my computer wont recognize. I read this term in Roissy’s writings. I sometimes see it creeping in from the edges on blogs decrying some nebulous, neo-liberal social agenda, or I see it written as some corrupting element keeping conservatism from realizing it’s ‘true’ potential, but what I don’t see is a very good accounting of it. Equalism needs to be brought out of the shadows – if at least so I don’t have to see that damn red line anymore.

New Gender Definitions

I’ll admit, I was motivated to type all this because of a link that a reader, Sam, posted in yesterday’s White Knight post:

http://mariashriver.com/blog/2011/09/governor-s-spouse-s-story-6-lessons-love-and-learning-dual-career-guy

Granted, this brief article is little more than an apologetic directed toward the author himself, but this pretty much sums up the entirety of the problem – masculinity has been redefined by people (men and women) who have no concept of what its original definition is. The behaviors and characteristics that constitute what is uniquely masculine aren’t being challenged, they’ve been redefined to fit the purposes of an agenda.

In 1905 no one wrote articles on how to “be a man” or bothered to analyze the fundamentals of masculinity. Men knew from their socialization what was masculine and women responded to it.
Traditionally, women define what is masculine and men define what is feminine. The characteristics that made a man desirable were ones that presented the opposite to what men similarly found desirable in femininity. Men and their biology defines what in the feminine that arouses them, women react to this and behave accordingly (knowingly or not).

The root of the male-equalist endemic lies in the fact that as recently as 50 years ago there has been a concerted effort to “de-masculinize” society, not only in mass media, but down to how we educate and condition our youth to assume masculine and feminine roles. What is being challenged is the predisposition of males in predominantly western culture to even consider what masculinity is.

A rugged, stoic, heroic definition of masculinity is losing ground, but is that a good thing? The equalist certainly believes so. When men become feminized, are we leveling any playing fields or are we progessing towards androgeny and homogenization of gender? The equalist hails this as a triumph of a new gender paradigm. Why should masculine traits be of lower value than feminine traits? 

The very characteristics that define traditional masculinity – independence, self-confidence, rugged individualism, physical strength, risk taking, problem solving and innovation – we are now to believe are (or should be) the aspirations of women to the point that ridicule of the singularly feminine female is the order. In expecting women to be just as masculine as men, while simultaneously expecting them to still embody a feminine ideal, not only does this puts undue, unrealistic, ideals upon them, but also devalues the merits of their own femininity.

That’s not to say, given this new gender dynamic, that women are discouraged from claiming their femininity in addition to their masculinity. On the contrary they’re encouraged to “handle their business as well as any man” and “still be a sexy, vivacious woman” every man should want. Yet in opposition to this post-modern gender dynamic, men are not encouraged to embrace their masculine side We are told to “man up” for sure, and yet our mascuilinity (as we define it) is a flaw; we’re poisoned by our testosterone. Our higher aspiration ought to be becoming more feminized, sensitive, emotional, empathetic, nurturing, etc,.. We should “feel comfortable waxing our legs” stripping away the hair that is the result of our poisoning testosterone. Interestingly enough there are few cries in society to have women cultivate their leg or armpit hair.
Yet the ‘masculine’ that the Matrix would have us strive for doesn’t encourage anything resembling traditionally masculine traits in a male’s personality. In fact it’s ridiculed to such a degree in mass media and larger society that it’s literally akin to a disease.

While women are congratulated for embodying masculine traits with an acceptance of her feminine character, men are conditioned to believe that feminine traits are masculine traits and any traditionally masculine characteristics that manifest themselves in us are the unfortunate byproducts of our ‘flawed’ biology. And the true crime of this gender redefining is the real “double standard” that men should be so feminized as to loathe their innate masculinity, yet still be held liable for uniquely male, traditionally masculine responsibilities and accountabilities by virtue of them being male. It’s a gender Catch 22; hate your masculinity, but be held responsible for not “being man enough” to solve uniquely male problems, then to be shamed when a masculinized woman steps in to do so and he’s then ridiculed for not being as masculine as she is. That’s the cycle. This is self-perpetuating negative masculinity that has led to generations of AFCs.

Needless to say, all of this convolutes what masculinity was, is and is intended to be. Before you can set out a plan to live out what I call Positive Masculinity you first have to take into consideration why masculinity has value and should be encouraged as well as cultivated in yourself, your sons and society as a whole. I’m an adherent of the ‘build it and they will come’ school of thought in this regard, but understanding how traditional masculinity has been redefined by social contrivance and distilling it back down to it’s core fundamentals is imperative in getting back to masculinity as a positive.

So where do you start?

With yourself. You must change your mind about yourself as a “m”an and begin thinking of yourself as a “M”an. The first step is to unlearn what feminized conditioning has taught you to the point of it becoming an ego-investment in your personality. You need to become impervious to convenient accusations of “misogyny” or 1950’s caveman thinking whenever you assert yourself. The truly positive masculine Man sets himself apart from the Matrix in spite of a world set against him – this unconscious meta-acknowledgment is what makes a woman (and other men) attracted to you as a vibrant, responsible, but firmly confident masculine Man. You have to genuinely live it in order to set an example of it. That doesn’t mean you’re an uncaring, tunnel vision robot, unwilling to learn from anyone or anything, it means that in spite of a world calling you “egotistical”, “caveman”, “fragile ego”, “macho”, “infantile”, “Jerk”, etc., you unwaveringly, provably, live out and exemplify the positive merits of being masculine.

Your Attention Please.

On many a Game forum you’ll find at least one thread per week decrying the evils of the much maligned Attention Whore. In the time I’ve spent exploring Game mechanics I’ve yet to read a treatise that really analyzed the fundamentals of why men and women alike make distinctions between one woman as an Attention Whore and another simply a garden variety woman who seeks attention.

Your mother, your sister, the girl at the bar and the wife you’ve been married to for 20 years are all attention seeking. Some to a greater and some to a lesser degree, but it is an integral part of the feminine gender to seek various means to grab and hold attention. 

Yes I understand that all people, men and women, enjoy attention for various reasons, but as a gender women seek and use attention very differently from men. From a very early age attention is a primary reinforcer for girls. As I’ve mentioned on occasion, part of my psychology education included child psych and my favorite (and most convenient) subject has always been my ever-present 7 y.o. (at the time) daughter when doing case studies. To understand the feminine attention dynamic you have to go back into female childhood socialization. There are countless case studies that focus on attention-as-reinforcer being a psychological construct for women. I should also add that, from a scientific perspective, there really is no absolute nature, or absolute nurture attributed to personality or gender differences, so a definite amount of socialization and learned behavior intrinsically reinforces attention as rewarding, but the root reward of attention seeking behavior begins in female biology.

A few things to start with
In the same respect that men possess testosterone as their primary, gender-defining hormone, women’s bodies produce estrogen and oxytocin in larger volume. Studies have shown both these hormones foster feelings of nurturing as a primary feminine trait for parental caring and oxytocin is a precursor for feelings of trust and comfort. Studies have also shown that girl babies are picked up and given affection 4 times as often as are boy infants and toddlers. This bears evidence to the biological and socialization associations of female attention reinforcement. In addition, studies of pre-adolescent and adolescent degrees of attention to both genders by parents always favors the female child. Correlation of this would indicate the rewarding benefit of attetion to the female as well as a behavioral modeling influence directed towards masculine independence by socializing boys to not be dependent upon the reinforcing aspect of attention.

Female Socialization
Little girls fight in an entirely different realm than do boys. Where boys fight in a the physical realm, girls fight in the psychological. That’s not to exclude girls from actually coming to blows, but far more common is the occurrence of psychological combat, and in no realm is this more effective than the denial of reinforcing attention within a female social collective.

Little girls have a predictable tendency to form small, girl-only collectives or ‘peer clutches’ from the time they are introduced into kindergarten. This social collective progressively becomes a rewarding and reinforcing social unit, locking out those not included, and nurturing those who are. This dynamic can last through high school (i.e. Cliques, etc.), into college and into mature adulthood, but the commonality within all variations of this clutch is the qualifying influence of the affirming power of attention. Should one member of the clutch offend another, it is the hierarchy of an individual member’s ability to maintain the most attention that generally determines the victor in the dispute. The worst consequence of such a dispute being ostracization from the group – thus the absolute denial of this reaffirming attention-as-reinforcement. The clutch develops a hierarchy of influence depending upon each girl’s ability to attract and maintain reinforcing attention. This attention can be from any source; within the group, outside the group, and opposite sex attention becomes the most valuable after puberty.

Attention attraction capacity denotes social rank within the peer clutch. The more attractive the girl, the more popular she becomes and the more influence she wields. This isn’t to say that any particular female cognizantly realizes this. However, when ostracized from the collective, this capacity for attracting attention in a high degree makes her despised. The attention can still be beneficial for affirmation (i.e. realized jealousy), it’s just that the intent that has changed.

Thus, women use attention not only for their own affirmation, individually and collectively, but also to do combat with each other. Far more damaging than physical fighting is the long term psychological impact of denying this reinforcement, or better still, delegitimizing or disqualifying a girl/woman’s capacity to attract this attention. Combine this with a woman’s natural, and innately higher agency to communicate both verbally and non-verbally (i.e covert communications) and you can see the potential this has in damaging a rival. This might explain a woman’s natural propensity to gossip. When a woman attacks the respectability and character of another (“she’s such a slut”), in essence, she is assualting the woman’s agency for garnering attention by delegitimizing it.

The ticking clock
Now lets add to this complex attention need to the female understanding that, as a woman ages her sexual marketability decreases. Bear in mind that a woman’s primary agency for attracting attention is her her sexuality and physical beauty as rewarded by men. This then fosters a drive for this attention-combat to intensify as a woman ages toward her ‘expiration date’. In the last 30 years there has been a definite push through feminization to de-emphasize this natural push and/or to divert this affirmation to be pulled from other sources (i.e. career, independence, internal rewards, etc.). However it has yet to be fully (if ever) realized within western female-centric culture. All one needs do is look at the countless number of beauty products and the methods used to advertise them in popular media. 90% of advertising specific to ‘career minded’ women is still for beauty products. Irrespective of popular socialization, this attention dynamic will not be ignored.

The Attention Whore
So what exactly separates this attention-as-currency dynamic that women use in their social pecking order from the blatant Attention Whore with dozens of male orbiters and FaceBook “friends” numbering in the thousands? The answer to this is found in the methods and lengths to which an individual woman will go to maintain a degree of attention she’s comfortable with. It’s very easy to speculate about the psychological reasons why some women ‘need’ more attention than others – daddy issues, female clutch outcast issues, self-esteem issues, personality disorders, etc. – what’s not is the means by which they achieve this attention and the gender specific reactions others have to it.

What separates the behavior of the attention whore is her overtness in grabbing that attention. Consider that women’s preferred means of communicating is to be covert. There’s no subtlety in the attention whore’s methods and maintenance. Granted, women will see this as an attack in the AW stealing her ‘entitled’ portion of attention, but on a larger scale the AW is betraying the covert attention needs of the sisterhood. By seeking attention in the overt, the AW is essentially crossing over into Men’s preferred communication means to get attention. There’s no (or certainly less) art to attention whoring, so it comes off as classless and trashy.

Difference of Purpose

Have a look at these videos.

Very interesting. First, I have to acknowledge that the CFM (cosmo for men) video was funded by the magazine, and the ass-cam was funded by Levis as part of a viral marketing effort, but look at the difference in approach to both of these. They’re essentially experimenting for the same purpose, but look where each gender places the emphasis and the methodology each uses to collect data. Yes, I know this is for entertainment purposes, but it’s really fascinating to see the differences “in the wild” so to speak.

For the women it was all about “busting” (i.e. shaming) men checking out their ass, while still enjoying the attention, all set to some club music(something bigger something better). It almost wasn’t worth the effort considering that women have a much more pronounced peripheral awareness than men and they’re only confirming what they already know; guys like a nice ass. As a rule, women love the chemical rush that accompanies experiencing indignation, so it’s no surprise that the overall production is one that prompts this – and this is especially true of the clips where a guy who is obviously ‘with’ another girl takes a moment to check out an ass in her presence. “Men are pigs and here’s the proof.”

Compare this to the much more elaborate men’s video, complete with an ‘onboard’ video unit backpack to support 4 different camera angles. The approach here is to gather covert information, not to shame women. While entertaining, the purpose is to empirically educate men in one of the prime tenets of Game, which also happens to be one of the prime tenets of behavioral psychology:

Behavior is the only reliable proof of motivation or intent. Believe what a woman does, not what she says.

The approach is one of deductive reasoning. What parts of a man’s body are reported by women to be the most attractive? And here we have it; how often do we read that women are first attracted to a man’s face or eyes? To be cute they might also mention how they like a nice butt on a man. Yet neither of these regions were targeted by women very often or at all in the case of eyes. The majority also report that they’re less attracted to “overly muscular men” yet if this experiment is accurate, it was this guy’s biceps that attracted the most attention for women, followed only by crotch gazing in frequency – another body part women would rarely admit to ‘checking out’ on a guy.

Take these videos with a grain of salt. As I started with, both of these were sponsored by business ventures with a vested interest in generating attention and sales. However, I can’t help but see the code in the Matrix here with regard to how each gender process the same idea. It’s the purpose behind the video that betrays the interest. I find this idea infinitely more educational than contrived PUA street demonstrations.

Rewriting the Rules

Women would rather share a successful Man than be attached to a faithful loser – Pook

One of the most common things I’m asked on SS is “how do you keep a marriage fresh Rollo?” Among my responses to this is usually how, contrary to the advice column Oprah-standard answer, a good relationship should be effortless. All of this “marriage is a constant work” is bullshit meant to keep a husband in a constant state of qualifying for his wife’s intimacy intended for her long term frame retention. Women in marriage and LTRs want to push past that nagging competition anxiety, they want security, not just financial, but emotional, and the security that comes from a locked in commitment in knowing they are the only source of sex & intimacy for their spouse/partner.

Pre-Commitment to Commitment

One of the reasons sexual frequency declines for women after a romantic commitment is that the urgency of sex that was necessary prior to the commitment is replaced with the agency of sex being a reward / reinforcer within that LTR. In single, uncommitted, non-exclusive life, sex, while being very enjoyable, becomes a proving ground for most women. In essence, it’s the free samples before the buy, and its urgency is fueled not only by (hopefully) genuine attraction, but also the at least subconscious knowing that she is in a sexual marketplace of competition. It’s one of the few times in life when a woman must qualify for a man’s approval. And admittedly, most men are so sex-deprived or so inexperienced early on in life that the sell is usually not a tough one for her. However, on some level of consciousness, even when the sell is virtually assured, she is aware that she could be replaced by a better competitor.
This then is the contrast for committed sexual interaction. The dynamic now shifts from qualification sex to utility sex. Now before anyone jumps to conclusions, yes, sex is still enjoyable, it can still be passionate, and she can definitely want it, but the impetus shifts. Sex is now a tool. In her uncommitted sex life it was a tool for qualification; in her LTR life it’s a tool for compliance. This is pretty obvious, and it may be more or less extreme depending upon the woman’s disposition or how important a particular issue is to her, but make no mistake, there isn’t a woman on the planet who doesn’t take her sexual agency into account when dealing with her LTR / husband. That agency may be more or less valuable – dependent upon her looks, demeanor, sexual availability, etc. – in comparison to the sexual market value of the man she’s paired with.

And this is where the Cardinal Rule of Relationships plays in. This is the constant interplay of vying for who is more dependent upon the other. Women have for the past 50+ years made a concerted effort, and using social conventions, to establish their sexuality as the end-all for men in power. Vagina = Authority and this is what all too many men parrot back and self-reinforce. “Change, do it, sublimate your desires, or there wont be any nookie for you tonight mister!” And on the surface it seems intuitive to ‘keep the peace’ and finish all the things on her honey-do list in the hopes that she’ll recover even a fraction of the desire she had when you were single, childless and getting blow jobs in the car after a date because she couldn’t wait to get home to fuck you.

The Upper Hand

Well LTR gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that, yes, you do in fact have an intrinsic upper hand in this regard if you’re fearless and willing to exercise your power. What I described in the last paragraph seems to be the most intuitive – do what she says = get sex – so it should come as no shock that the answer to it is counterintuitive. You must find ways to, subtly, return back to the state of competition anxiety she had in the beginning. I emphasize subtly, because, as with most everything else female, doing so overtly will be met with hostility, resentment and at best, obligated compliance. To get more (any?) sex, to retain the frame, to inspire more respect in her, you must disengage from her. That doesn’t mean becoming arrogantly aloof, or sulking like a child, or becoming an instant asshole; those are OVERT signs and methods. What is needed is incremental reassertion of yourself as the primary AND that her sexual agency, while still welcomed, is not a motivator for your own decisions.

I’m fond of saying no vagina is worth years of regret, yet this is exactly where most men find themselves, because they are either unwilling or unable to rock the vagina boat. They fail to understand that a woman’s imagination is the most powerful tool in the Don Juan toolbox. Now, the deductive and obvious way of stimulating that imagination would be to blurt out and say “look bitch, your pussy’s not made of gold and there are plenty of other girls ready to polish my nob if you don’t straighten up, see?” And this of course is met with either resistance or shame from her. What serves a Man better is to make incremental changes in himself that she will perceive as attractive to other women. Women want to be with Men who other women want to fuck, and other men want to be, but this cuts both ways. The more empowered he becomes, the better physical shape he attains, the more professional achievements he gathers, the more social proof and status he accrues, the more valuable he makes himself, the more anxiety is produce – and this is anxiety she can’t argue with.

One of the first things I tell men trapped in a ‘her-frame’ relationship is to get to the gym, train hard, look better. This has two effects; first it makes her interest in fucking increase, and second it fires up that imagination. “Why is he doing this? He’s really looking better these days, I see it, other women must see it too. Maybe I need to start working out? Gosh those girls at the gym look so much better than me.” She can’t argue with a healthy desire to look better, feel better, and be concerned with your health. Getting in better shape is the easiest, most immediate change you can effect. You may have little influence in getting a promotion at work, but you CAN change your body habitus right now. Women, being the calculating gender, know all too well to hit the gym months prior to a break up – she’s not getting in shape for you, she’s getting ready to hit the ground running with the next guy she’ll be fucking. They know this, so your manifesting the same behavior ‘caffeinates the hamster’ since it hits home for them.

Vagina is not authority

Don’t accept that her sexuality is the authority of the relationship. The better you make yourself the more authority you command, the more you abdicate to her the less authority (and respect) you command. Women need to be told “NO”, in fact they want you to tell them “NO”, especially in light of the 800 pound gorilla in the room – her sexual agency. When a woman controls the LTR frame with her vagina, it’s always going to color your dealings with her. THIS IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE. It becomes this ever-present, unspoken understanding that she can ultimately play the pussy card and you’ll comply. And while this may gratify her in the short term, you will lose her respect in the long term. She wants to be told “NO” in spite of you knowing she’s going to hold out on you. This is the ultimate repudiation of her sexual agency – “if he says “NO” with the foreknowledge that you know you wont be getting any, her sexual powers are devalued.” If her sexual agency is called into question it leaves room for doubt and opens the door once again for competition anxiety to creep back in.

As I’ve said before, marriage is no insulation against the sexual marketplace, and no one knows this better than women who can rely on a society that rewards them for recognizing it. Use that to YOUR benefit now. Nothing is as simultaneously fear inspiring and arousing for women as a Man she suspects is self-aware of his own value. This is precisely why a feminized culture must continually confuse him, continually inspire doubt and humiliate him; feminization can’t afford men knowing their true value and potential.

In the end, who cares if you don’t get laid for a week? It’s well worth the price for increasing her respect for you as a commodity, and increasingly, an authority. If you want to maintain that anxiety, you must perpetuate yourself as being a commodity women will compete for, even in the confines of commitment.

Operative Social Conventions

Often I’ll be in the middle of some socio-psychological tear on a particular topic when I’ll come to a dead halt because I play my own devil’s advocate while I’m typing and reasoning aloud, and have to review and edit the paragraphs I’ve spent the last 2 hours constructing because I’d failed to consider how others might interpret my intent, or I’d overlooked some element and had to go back and address that issue, or at the very least have a source ready to cite for the most predictable rebuttals. Needless to say it’s an arduous process, however I’ve found that starting topics in regards to certain theories and ideas I have to see what their intent will be read as helps me greatly. So with this in mind I’m presenting a particular section of my work here to see what the consensus is on what I’ve come to call Operative Social Conventions. I had originally titled the section Feminine Operative Social Conventions, and I may still go back to that, but after you read this you’ll see how these conventions (or contrivances) need Men to play along with them for them to exist in the first place, or so I’ve reasoned.

Operative Social Conventions

In the ‘community’ we’ve become all too familiar with a standard set of problems that are commonly asked of us for advice – “Should I date younger/older women with/without children?””what about women with money/career?”etc. for example. So often are we petitioned for our take on these dilemas that we have a tendency to repeat back a standard reply for them. I count myself among those who do this as well. I’m very prone to see the forest for the trees so to speak and fire back with my stand by reply of Spin More Plates, or NEXT. And while these response are novel to those reading them for the first time (and hopefully having their eyes opened for the first time too), I’d come to realize that I was guilty of not seeing the forest with regards to why certain topics are more frequently reoccurring problems for the Beta-AFC and the aspiring Game student alike. For the most part, Plate Theory covers a multitude of AFC sins, but my concern was with understanding why these questions come up so often and what their root cause is. To this effect I’ve attempted to ‘distill’ down the symptoms (i.e. the commonly related problems) to the motivation behind them (i.e. the disease rather than the symptoms). This led me to a new theory of Operative Social Conventions.

I’ve posted on this blog and in more forum threads than I care to recall about these conventions before, but never really explored the idea in depth. Essentially all of the symptoms of these conventions are manifested as the frequent problems guys come up with, but the disease is the latent purpose of these conventions. For every guy asking if it’s a good idea to date a single mother or an older woman, there’s a single mother or older woman perpetuating the convention in order to best ensure her capacity to secure a man capable of provisioning for her. I wont ramble off into the bio-psychological aspect of why this is such an all important drive for women (and men in some cases), instead I’ll focus on certain conventions, the way they operate and their latent operative function.

Shame
Perhaps the easiest and most recognizable form of social convention is shame. Not only this, but it is also the most easily employable and the most widely accepted – not just by women of all ages and descriptions, but also by popular culture and the media.

Examples:
“Men should date women their own age.”
“Men shouldn’t be so ‘shallow’ as to put off single mothers as viable long term mates.”
“Men have ‘fragile egos’ that need constant affirmation in an almost infantile respect.”
“Men feel threatened by ‘successful’ women.”

As well as being popularized myths, all of these are subtle (and not so subtle) manipulations of shame. Each is an operative social convention that places a man into a position of having to live up to an idealized standard that simultaneously raises the standard for a woman, thus placing her into a better position of sexual selection and in some instances, leveling the perceived playing-field with regard to the feminine competition dynamic (i.e single moms, older and professional women ought to be just as sexually marketable as the younger women men biologically prefer).

The ‘Shallow’ effect – The useful myth of superficiality.

I’m mentioning this as an aside to the Shame methodology since it appears to me to be the root of the Shame operative. In all of the above examples (or symptoms) the burden of expectation that is placed on a man comes with the threat of being perceived as “Shallow” or superficial. In otherwords, the very questioning of whether or not a man ought to date a single mother comes with the veiled threat of having women (mothers or not) tar the questioning man with being ‘superficial’. This ‘Shallow’ effect is so pervasive in so many AFCs, young and old, that I’ve counseled that it becomes an automatic default defense. Even under conditions of complete anonymity, the Shallow Effect becomes so ego-invested in their personality that even the potential of being perceived as “shallow” is subconsciously avoided. This is a major obstacle in transitioning from AFC to positive masculinity. AFCs all initially laugh at PUA technique (C&F, Peacocking, Neg Hits, etc.) because they carry the potential of being perceived as ‘shallow’. The truth of the matter is that individually we are only as superficial as our own self-perceprtions allow, but the Shallow Effect is a useful convention so long as it keeps men doubting their ingenuousness and self-validity as a trade for women’s intimacy.

Selection Position Insurance
Examples:
Women are ‘allowed’ to understand men, but women must necessarily ALWAYS be a mystery to men.

Getting “lucky” with a woman when referring to sex.

Selection position insuring methodologies revolve around fomenting the Scarcity Mentality in men. If the value can be inflated, the value can be increased, thus ensuring a controlling frame. This convention holds fast to the Feminine Mystique or Female Intuition mythology. So long as women remain ‘uknowable’ there becomes less motivation to try to understand them. In fact this convention actively discourages any attempt to understand the feminine to the point that men have adopted it and parrot it back without being cognizant of it. This is exactly the reason why guys will ridicule men seeking understanding of women when they search it out in “how to get girls” books, DVDs, PUA seminars or on the internet. It’s also why men who profess to ‘know’ how women operate are ridiculed; it’s a perfect paradox – to attempt to understand the feminine OR to profess to know the feminine is not only laughable, but it places a man into the Shallow Effect in either case.

Social Escape Clauses – A woman’s prerogative
Examples:
Women always have the prerogative to change their minds. Men must be resolute.

Proactive and Reactive Pseudo-Friendship Rejections:
LJBF rejections – “I already have a boyfriend” or “I’m not interested in a relationship right now” rejections.

Default female victimhood

Escape clause conventions always offer an OUT to a woman and absolve her of, or dramatically reduce her responsibility for personal accountability by means of social reinforcement. A stripper can complain of her self-degradation by men, but be completely blameless for her decisions to do so by virtue of her social conditions, that are, again, the perceived result of a male controlled society. The Feminine Prerogative has been an accepted social norm since the early Renaissance and the advent of ‘courtly love’. Like the Position Insurance convention, this serves to ensure that the ‘mysterious woman’ is validated in her arbitrariness by socially plausible reinforcement. The opposite of this convention is enforced for men, they must be resolute while accepting that a woman “has the right to change her mind.” This, and the cart-carrot of a woman’s intimacy as a reward, is exactly why it is socially acceptable for a man to wait hours for a woman to prepare/show for a date and the kiss of death for a man to be more than 5-10 minutes late. He must be punctual, she is afforded leniency.

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail regarding the LJBF (“lets just be friends”) esacpe clause as it’s been done to death, and aI have plans for a future post on it, but I will add that the LJBF esacpe is perhaps the single most useful convention ever conceived by women. The LJBF rejection has classically ensured that a woman can reject a man yet still maintain his previous attention. It also puts the responsibility for the rejection back on his shoulders since, should he decline the ‘offer of friendship’, he is then responsible for entertaining this friendship. This of course has the potential to backfire on women these days since the standard AFC will accept an LJBF rejection in the mistaken hopes of ‘proving’ himself worthy of her intimacy by being the perfect ‘surrogate boyfriend’ – fulfilling all her attention and loyalty prerequisites with no expectation of reciprocating her own intimacy. The LJBF rejection also serves as an ego preservation for her in that having offered the false olive branch of ‘friendship’ to him in her rejection she also can sleep that night knowing that she (and any of her peers) wont think any less of herself. After all, she offered to be friends, right? She is excused from any feelings of personal guilt or any responsibilities for his feelings if she still wants to remain amiable with him.

Sexual Competition Sabotage
Examples:
“She’s a ‘slut’ – he’s a ‘fag’” and the sub-communications in the terminology.

Catty remarks, gossip, feminine communication methodologies

This convention is the reputation destroyer and it’s easy to observe this in the field. Since it also serves a woman attention needs, it is among the most socially acceptable and widely flaunted, however the foundations and latent purpose of this convention takes some consideration to understand. When women employ gossip it comes natural since it is an emotional form of communication (men have a far lower propensity to use gossip), but the purpose of it is meant to disqualifiy a potential sexual competitior. In terms of female to female gossip this satisfies the attention need, but when men are brought into the salaciousness it becomes a qualification tool. By saying a woman is a “slut”, the sub-communication is, “she sleeps with a lot of guys and is therefore inelligible as a candidate deserving of a man’s long term provisioning capacity, due to her obvious inability to remain loyal to any one, individual male.” This then becomes the ultimate weapon in influencing a man’s (long term) sexual selection.

I’ll also add that this breeding sabotage isn’t limited to just women though. What’s the first thing most men are apt to say about another, anonymous, extremely attractive male? “He’s probably a fag.” Men have learned this convention from women, they sexually disqualify a man in the most complete way possible; “this guy might be as attractive as a GQ model, but he would never breed with a woman and is therefore disqualified as a suitor for your intimacy.”

Gender Role Redefinition
Examples:
Masculinity is ridiculous and/or negative with the potential for violent extremes.

“Men should get in touch with their feminine sides.” – Identification as false attraction.

Although I have a few more conventions in mind, I’ll finish this post with this, the most obvious and most discussed convention. There’s no shortage of articles dedicated to this convention, so I wont rehash what’s been stated. Instead, I should point out the latent purpose behind the popularity and mass cultural acceptance of this, the most damaging convention. The function behind this convention could be androgeny as an idealized state, or a power struggle to redefine masculine and feminine attributes, or even to ensure women as the primary selectors in mating. All of those can be argued and are valid, especially considering how prone to accepting and perpetuating this convention is among men today, but I think the deeper purpose, the real latent function is a sexual selection process.

It’s the man who remains in touch with his masculine side, the guy who, despite all of pop-culture denigrating and ridiculing his gender and the very aspects that make it a necessary, positive strength of human society, will endure and steadfastly resist the influences that want to turn it into something it was never intended; it’s this guy and his confidence that women all over the world find irresistable. He embodies the masculine arousal that their feminine has been seeking and they can’t explain it. This is the ultimate meta-shit test in sexual selection – to discover or learn what it is to be postively masculine and remain so in a world that constantly berates his gender, that tells him he’s poisoned by his testosterone while confirming the same masculine attributes as a positive for women. It’s the guy who understands that it’s gender differences, not androgynous similarities, that make us strong. It’s the Man who can see that the sexes were meant to be complimentary, not adversarial, who passes this shit test. Gender redefinition, as a social convention, serves as an Alpha filtering mechanism.

There is no One.

ONEitis is paralysis. You cease to mature, you cease to move, you cease to be you.

There is no ONE. This is the soulmate myth. There are some good Ones and some bad Ones, but there is no ONE. Anyone telling you anything else is selling you something. There are LOTS of ‘special someones’ out there for you, just ask the divorced/widowed person who’s remarried after their “soulmate” has died or moved on.

This is what trips people up about the soul-mate myth, it is this fantasy that we all at least in some way share an idealization of – that there is ONE perfect mate for each of us, and as soon as the planets align and fate takes it’s course we’ll know that we’re ‘intended’ for each other. And while this may make for a gratifying romantic comedy plot, it’s hardly a realistic way to plan your life. In fact it’s usually paralyzing.

What I find even more fascinating is how common the idea is (mostly for guys) that a nuts & bolts view of life should be trumped by this fantasy in the area of inter-sexual relationships. Guys who would otherwise recognize the value of understanding psychology, biology, sociology, evolution, business, engineering, etc. and the interplay we see these take place in our lives on a daily basis, are some of the first guys to become violently opposed to the idea that maybe there isn’t ‘someone for everyone’ or that there are a lot more ONEs out there that could meet or exceed the criteria we subconsciously set for them to be the ONE. I think it comes off as nihilistic or this dread that maybe their ego investment in this belief is false- it’s like saying God is dead to the deeply religious. It’s just too terrible to contemplate that there maybe no ONE or there maybe several ONEs to spend their lives with. This western romanticized mythology is based on the premise that there is only ONE perfect mate for any single individual and as much as a lifetime can and should be spent in constant search of this ‘soulmate.’ So strong and so pervasive is this myth in our collective society that it has become akin to a religious statement and in fact has been integrated into many religious doctrines as feminization of western culture has spread.

I think there’s been a mischaracterization of ONEitis. It’s necessary to differentiate between a healthy relationship based on mutual respect and a lopsided ONEitis based relationship. I’ve had more than a few guys seeking my advice, or challenging my take on ONEitis, essentially ask me for permission to accept ONEitis as legitimate monogamy. In my estimation ONEitis is an unhealthy psychological dependency that is the direct result of the continuous socialization of the soulmate myth in pop culture. What’s truly frightening is that ONEitis has become associated with being a healthy normative aspect of an LTR or marriage.

I come to the conclusion that ONEitis is based in sociological roots, not only due to it being a statement of personal belief, but by the degree to which this ideology is disseminated and mass marketed in popular culture through media, music, literature, movies, etc. Dating services like eHarmony shamelessly marketeer and exploit exactly the insecurities that this dynamic engenders in people desperately searching for the ONE “they were intended for.” The idea that men possess a natural capacity for protection, provisioning and monogamy has merit from both a social and bio-psychological standpoint, but a ONEitis psychosis is not a byproduct of it. Rather, I would set it apart from this healthy protector/provider dynamic since ONEitis essentially sabotages what our natural propensities would otherwise filter.

ONEitis is insecurity run amok while a person is single, and potentially paralyzing when coupled with the object of that ONEitis in an LTR. The same neurotic desperation that drives a person to settle for their ONE whether healthy or unhealthy is the same insecurity that paralyzes them from abandoning a damaging relationship – This is their ONE and how could they ever live without them? Or, they’re my ONE, but all I need is to fix myself or fix them to have my idealized relationship. And this idealization of a relationship is at the root of ONEitis. With such a limiting, all-or-nothing binary approach to searching for ONE needle in the haystack, and investing emotional effort over the course of a lifetime, how do we mature into a healthy understanding of what that relationship should really entail? The very pollyanna, idealized relationship – the “happily ever after” – that belief in a ONE promotes as an ultimate end, is thwarted and contradicted by the costs of the constant pursuit of the ONE for which they’ll settle for. After the better part of a lifetime is invested in this ideology, how much more difficult will it be to come to the realization that the person they’re with isn’t their ONE? To what extents will a person go to in order to protect a lifetime of this ego investment?

At some point in a ONEitis relationship one participant will establish dominance based on the powerlessness that this ONEitis necessitates. There is no greater agency for a woman than to know beyond doubt that she is the only source of a man’s need for sex and intimacy. ONEitis only cements this into the understanding of both parties. For a man who believes that the emotionally and psychologically damaging relationship he has ego-invested himself  is with the only person in his lifetime he’s ever going to be compatible with, there is nothing more paralyzing in his maturation. The same of course holds true for women, and this is why we shake our heads when the beautiful HB 9 goes chasing back to her abusive and indifferent Jerk boyfriend, because she believes he is her ONE and the only source of security available to her. Hypergamy may be her root imperative for sticking with him, but it’s the soul-mate myth, the fear of the “ONE that got away” that makes for the emotional investment.

The definition of Power is not financial success, status or influence over others, but the degree to which we have control over our own lives. Subscribing to the soulmate mythology necessitates that we recognize powerlessness in this arena of our lives. Better I think it would be to foster a healthy understanding that there is no ONE. There are some good Ones and there are some bad Ones, but there is no ONE.