Last Friday I had the opportunity (and time) to talk with Christian McQueen once again – this time for a solid three hours. I hardly noticed the time passing since it’s like an exchange among friends, very casual, and a little upbeat I think.
We went into quite a bit and my going on longer is always the first request I get after most interviews so I thought I’d accommodate.
As I said, it’s three hours so you may want to download it and listen at your leisure. We did this last Friday which was the day after the Brexit vote so, yes, I did get asked for some political opinions, but as always I stay on what my take is from an intersexual perspective.
We went into the state of Hypergamy in 2016 and how personal and social dynamics are being influenced by it, and I offer some practical solutions for guys dealing with it in the now. We discuss marriage and how and why it’s changed. I also answer some Twitter questions ranging from dealing with one’s family through a Red Pill lens to answering the common question, “Where do you see this going?” or The Talk.
There’s a lot more in this than anything I’ve done with Christian previously, so tell me what you think and feel free to ask me questions about anything or discuss anything I go into in this interview.
Commenter YaReally dropped an interesting set of videos in last week’s comment thread and I thought I’d riff on them for a bit today. I’m not familiar with Loose Women (the TV show anyway), but from what I gather, it’s on par with The View or any similar mid-day women’s talk show. I don’t make a habit of watching shows dedicated to entertaining women’s need for indignation, but I regularly have readers email or tweet me segments asking for my take on certain aspects of them or how they relate to Red Pill awareness.
It should come as no shock to my readers that shows of this formula are a social manifestation of women’s base natures. Every conversation takes on a sense of seriousness and gravity, but the tone and the presumptuousness that drives these conversations are rooted in women’s solipsism. All iterations of this show are presented from a perspective that assumes a pre-understood feminine primacy. It’s also no coincidence that the rise in popularity of women’s talk shows has paralleled the comfort women have in embracingHypergamy openly.
Whenever I get a link to something the women on The View discuss it’s almost always a confirmation of some Red Pill principle I’ve covered previously, and in this instance Loose Women doesn’t disappoint. Saira Khan (I apologize for my lack of knowing who she is or why I should care to) related to the panel of women – and the expectedly disproportionate female audience – that at 46 years of age and two children (only one by her husband) she has entered some commonly acknowledged phase where she finds herself lacking all libido for her husband.
I decided to write a full post on these clips because Saira amply demonstrates every facet of the latter phases of maturity I outlined in Preventive Medicine. She begins her self-serving apologetics by prequalifying her previously “fantastic sex life in her younger years” and moves on to her bewilderment over her lack of arousal for her glaringly Beta husband. We’ll get to him later, but she’s a textbook example of a woman in what I termed the Alpha Reinterest phase from Preventive Medicine. Granted, at 46 Saira is experiencing this “stage” a bit later than most women, but we have to consider the difficulty she had in having and adjusting to children later in life – all undoubtedly postponed by her obvious fempowerment mentality and careerism.
I love you, but I’m not in love with you
It’s likely most men in the Red Pill sphere have experienced and discussed this very common trope. Saira is quick to apply a version of this standard self-excusing social convention. She “loves her husband” and “he’s a great man”, but lately(?) she simply has no desire to fuck him. I’m highlighting this because it’s an important part of the psychology and the self-excusing rationales that revolve around the less-than-optimal outcome of women’s dualistic (AF/BB) sexual strategy.
It may serve readers better to review the Preventive Medicine series of posts, but the short version is this: Once a woman has settled on a man for her post-SMV peak life plans, and the routine and regimen of a life less exciting than her Party Years begins to reveal the nature of a (usually Beta) man she settled on, that’s when the subconscious sexual revulsion of him begins. The feral nature of
Hypergamy begins to inform her subconscious understanding of her situation – the man she settled for will never compare to the idealized sexuality of the men she’s been with prior to him. Alpha-qualifying shit tests (fitness tests) naturally follow, but Saira herself describes her sexual revulsion for Steve as a sense of “panic” at the thought of him expecting her to be genuinely sexual with him.
As such, there becomes a psycho-social imperative need to blunt and/or forgive these feelings for the “lack of libido” women experience for their Beta husbands. Thus, we get the now clichéd tropes about how “it’s not you, it’s me” or “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” Both of which amount to the same message – I love you, but I have no desire to fuck you. You’re a great guy and a swell husband, but my pussy only gets wet for Alpha.
Saira exemplifies this in her assessment of her husband (Steve), but more so, she illustrates the disconnection she knows is necessary to insulate her ego from knowing exactly what’s “wrong” with her. The problem with her lack of libido becomes separated from the source, Steve. So she says it’s not him, she just doesn’t want to do it.
She qualifies herself as someone loveable (she still cuddles and gets comfort from Steve), but this lovable ‘good person’ doesn’t want her lack of arousal to be something to disqualify her from feeling good about herself.
Solution: make sex separate and ancillary to her relationship with her husband.
For women in this phase, sex is equated with a chore. It’s a chore because it’s not something she has a desire to do, but still feels obligated to do. Steve walks through the door at 6 and her subconscious understands that the expectation of her is that she should be aroused by this Beta man she’s trapped into living with for the rest of her life. Hypergamy informs her subconscious and the manifestation is to find ways to avoid sex with a man her Hypergamous sense acknowledges is a suboptimal sexual pairing. Her conscious, emotive, female mind understands that she should want to fuck him, but it wars with her hindbrain that is repulsed by just the imagining of it.
In order to contend with the internal conflict created by Hypergamy, and a woman’s settling on a poor consolidation of it, social conventions had to be created to make separating sexual arousal (Alpha Fucks) from women’s personal worth (Beta Bucks investment) and the attending bad feelings it causes for them.
Ironically, this show’s original premise was based on the question of whether sex was even a “must” on a couple’s wedding night. This is a prime example of separating desireless sex from women’s sense of personal worth. I wrote about this in Separating Values. If sex is ancillary or only an occasional bonus, it ceases to be a deal-breaking factor in marriage for women when they don’t have a desire to fuck their Beta husbands.
Conflating Values
One of the major problems women have, and more than even some red pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.
It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.
What Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.
It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.
In Khan’s case, she (and the many women in the audience who nod in agreement with her) must devalue sex as an article or an object rather than accept that it’s something she wants to engage in, just not with Steve.
There are many other social conventions that aid women in avoiding sex with Beta husbands. An even more common convention is the popularly accepted idioms that “sex just naturally declines after marriage” or “men and women often have mismatched libidos.” Both of these have filtered into our popular consciousness, but they serve the same latent purpose – excusing a lack of desire caused by women interpreting their husband’s lack of Alpha sub-communications. Wives don’t get tingles from Beta husbands, thus, they need to find ways to offset the bad feelings for themselves first, and their husbands secondarily.
The trick in this is women not personalizing their lack of arousal with a husband’s self-worth – “it’s not you, it’s me” – and deferring to some naturally occurring biological or psychological event that can be conveniently attached to the mystique of women.
It’s not you, but it is you
Thus, the rationale morphs from “it’s not you, it’s me” into “it’s not you, it’s the time/circumstance/effort/need for help with the chores/phase of my mysterious woman-ness” that’s causing her lack of sexual desire.” She’s got a busy life, she’s got kids, and in her pursuit of perfection in these arenas, sex somehow falls by the wayside – or at least the kind of non-obligatory, hot, urgent sex she used to enjoy in her fantastic youth. It’s not you, it’s just life.
It’s not you, it’s wives ‘naturally’ lose interest in sex. It’s not you, it’s that she panics at the thought of you expecting her to be aroused by you.
If sex can be delimited to being all about the person then a lack of women’s arousal can’t be blamed on the mechanics of sex. So when men complain about a lack of sex from their wives or a lack of enthusiastic genuine desire, we get the response we hear from the panel of women on the show; a sarcastic shaming of men who raise the issue that their wives are frigid with them.
“Oh, how can men survive without sex?” or a sarcastic “No bloke can be in a relationship without sex” is a deemphasizing of the importance that the role of sex plays in a marriage and any intersexual relationship. Once again this is due to the separating of personal worth of a woman from the sexual mechanics of Hypergamy that prompt her to genuine arousal. The easiest solution is to cast men into the same sexual expectations as women; if women can forego sex then men ought to be able to “survive” without it too.
This normalized idea stems from the equalist perspective that men and women being equal should also share equal attitudes, prompts, and appetites for sex. This is a biological impossibility of course, but the conversation serves as a stark illustration of women expecting feminized men to identify with the feminine and prioritize that identification above any and all considerations about their experiences of being male.
Ultimately this is self-defeating for women because the nature of the Alpha guy that women crave pushes him to have sex, not to deny himself of it.
In fact, that sexual insistence is a prime indicator that a woman is dealing with an Alpha. The man agreeing to the patience and effort needed to “wait out” his wife’s frigidity is indicating that he’s not accustomed to insisting on, and getting what he wants. If he can sublimate his most powerful biological imperative – to get sex – what else is he willing to sublimate?
Sex is the glue that holds relationships together.
The ladies on the panel mock this idea for exactly the same reason Saira is tying herself in knots about not being hot for Steve. He needs sex, but he shouldn’t really need sex because it’s all about the person and not the mechanics. But it is exactly the mechanics of Hypergamy that are at the root of Saira’s need to solipsistically feel better about herself to the extent that she’ll publicly emasculate her husband on national TV.
As the show grinds on, all of the predictable rationales for wive’s self-consolations for a lack of sex get run down like a check list. Kids? Check. Career? Check. Never do they address that she’s a
Never do they address that she’s a 46-year-old woman raising small children or that her so overstressed condition is only one consequence of delaying what passes for motherhood to her for so long. I understand Saira and Steve struggled with infertility, but my guess is that this too was a physical result of the life choices she made and the difficulty of conceiving and carrying a child to term well after her fantastic sexual prime. I’m 48 and my daughter graduated high school this year so I can’t imagine facing parenthood in my mid/late 40s. This isn’t even an afterthought for the panel because it exposes the costs of the feminist-inspired careerism the show is triumphantly based upon.
Shit Tests and Marriage
As I mentioned earlier in this post, wives in this state will still shit test their husbands just as readily as any single woman. We are meant to believe, no we are expressly told, that Saira’s sexual revulsion is “normal” and it’s not Steve or his dedication that’s at issue. Yet during all of Saira’s journey of self-discovery about her lack of libido, she suggests that Steve go out and find a woman who will fuck him. At some stage in their great open communication, Saira gives Steve express permission to go out and bang another woman because she just can’t.
Naturally she couches this in the idea that she’s so devoted to him “as a person” that she just wants him to be happy, however, she is so repulsed by him, sex is a happiness she can’t find within herself to even feign for him. For all the shocked gasps from the women in the audience, what this amounts to is a very visceral shit test for Steve.
The purpose of the ‘dare’ for Saira is meant to determine whether Steve can still (if he ever) generate genuine sexual desire in other women. I’ve covered this dynamic in at least a dozen different posts – women want a man who other men want to be, and other women want to fuck. Steve’s steadfast devotion to his wife is anti-seductive and Saira, on some level of consciousness, knows this. If another woman found Steve attractive enough to bang it would generate Dread, social proof and confirm his preselection among other women. And as I’ve mentioned countless times, breakup sex (or near breakup sex) always trumps contrived, preplanned special occasion “date night” sex, which predictably is the suggestion that ends the second video.
And as I’ve mentioned countless times, breakup sex (or near breakup sex) always trumps contrived, preplanned special occasion “date night” sex, which predictably is the suggestion that ends the second video.
Steve, the dutiful Beta, is also predictably dumbfounded by her “suggestion”. He’s heartbroken from a feminized emotional perspective, but also because, like most Beta men, he’s heavily invested in the fallacy of Relational Equity. He’s observably sexually optionless so it’s a moot point, but if he were to muster up the balls and the Game to take her up on her oh so caring suggestion to fuck another woman, he risks losing the relationship equity he believes his rational, empowered wife should appreciate and factor into her attraction for him.
Thus, Steve comes up with rationalizations for why he didn’t take her up on her offer of permissive infidelity. He makes his necessity (really his optionlessness) a virtue and sticks to the standard Beta wait-it-out supportiveness he’s been conditioned for but is actually the source of his sexless marriage. He defaults to the “open communication” solves everything meme while ignoring the message that the medium of his wife’s sub-communication is telling him. Steve attributes everything (accurately) to his conditioning that most men, “typical blokes”, are Betas whose responsibility ought to be unconditional supportiveness when in fact they really have no other choice but to be so.
She doesn’t want to be ‘fixed’
One last thing occurred to me while I picked these clips apart. At the end, the panel of women defaults to the “it’s not you Steve, you’re a great guy, Saira’s just experiencing a normal frigidity that comes along for women in marriage.” I thought this was interesting because there’s a push to accept this frigidity as a normal phase women experience, but it still relies on the idea that sex and personal worth are two separate aspects of this problem.
If the root of this ‘normal’ problem is one about mechanics (it’s not Steve, it’s Saira’s physical/psychological malfunction) then I would expect there could be a mechanical solution to the problem. Even the fat brunette panelist suggest that all it takes is a better ‘effort’ on Saira’s part to get herself into the mood, but she even rejects this. Her problem isn’t a pharmaceutical one or a behavioral one, it’s a holistic one rooted in hardwired Hypergamy. So repulsive is the thought of fucking a Beta that Saira cannot psych herself up to do so.
I wondered if she would even consider taking the new “pink pill”, the female form of viagra, but I’ve read enough counter argument articles from women about it to know that women’s hardwired psychology prevents them from even chemically altering themselves to want to have sex with a man her Hypergamy cannot accept. My guess is that even a cheeky holiday in the Maldives won’t be enough to convince Saira to want to fuck Steve.
However, this simple fact, that women will refuse to take the Spanish Fly to work themselves up and bypass their Hypergamy for their Beta husband’s happiness, destroys the convention that her frigidity is the result of her biomechanics. She doesn’t want a pill to fix her because she knows it’s a holistic problem.
Saira knows how to please Steve sexually, she simply doesn’t want to, and it’s because Steve is Steve.
Softek has had the almost predictable move for The Talk from his current (I believe BPD) “girlfriend”. Just to clarify a few things here before I dig into Softek’s questions I think it’s necessary to define what “The Talk” is. Generally, there comes a point with a particular plate you’re spinning when a woman believe it’s within her feminine entitlements to force the issue of exclusivity upon a man. I’ve written several foundational posts about non-exclusivity and the reasons men should opt for (Plate Theory) and I’ve also covered The Talk from practical considerations in Ultimatums, but feminized pop-culture has made what essentially amounts to a Frame shift into a life event.
The Talk is literally the defining of a relationship, and in a feminine-primary social order that defining power is presumed to always reside with a woman according to her “needs”. I should also add here that as men have become more feminized and uncomfortable in describing themselves as masculine, the feminine security need for a confirmed relationship status puts these men into the feminine role of initiating The Talk themselves. There are few grosser indications of a Beta / Blue Pill mental point of origin and a self-confirming lack of options than a man negotiating for exclusivity by formalizing it with a feminized relationship event.
What does Negotiated Desire mean for a relationship when a woman has resorted to it?
They’re powerless, yes, they feel helpless, yes.
But what does this mean for their perception of the man they’re trying to Negotiate for?
Ultimatums are declarations of powerlessness. Let me be clear before I get the standard, “you need to be a Man and set boundaries with her” retort – as with all things for men, it is better to demonstrate than to explicate.
However, in this instance, we have a woman issuing the ultimatum and the sense of powerlessness comes into contrast. The very act of having The Talk is a negotiation of desire. The medium is the message. We can separate a woman’s entitlement to an “official” relationship with it, but the fact that a formal talk would be necessary to legitimize it is the message she ignores or hopes you won’t recognize – it’s a negotiated obligation, not a genuine desire.
Making a euphemism out of this ultimatum by calling The Talk and dancing around the want for a long term security is a form of Buffer for women. And as with all Buffers, the intent is to lessen the impact of rejection by preemptively buffering the seriousness of it should it come to that.
There are a few reasons women will move for something like The Talk. First and foremost is the Hypergamic need for certainty. When a woman presses for exclusivity with a man she tips her hand in the Hypergamic scheme of things. In this instance the root message is twofold – she perceives you as high enough value to seek some kind of exclusive permanency and / or she acknowledges (or is beginning to) that her capacity to attract other prospective men is depreciating. Women with greater sexual market options and a commensurate self-impression rarely push for this relationship formality.
Another reason for The Talk is that women, on some level of consciousness, seek to alleviate the competition anxiety that comes with making an emotional investment in a man she perceives is 1-2 steps above her own sexual market value. A passive form of Dread almost certainly plays a role in the prompt to formalize an LTR, however, what’s prompting that Dread can range from an emotional investment based on a genuine desire to the pragmatic necessity to settle on a guy who meets her security needs in contrast to her ability to attract a better prospect.
As women enter the Epiphany Phase the need for a Talk becomes more urgent. As a woman’s attractiveness wanes Hypergamy cannot afford uncertainty or the risk of a loss of emotional investment. This is yet one more reason women tend to opt for dutiful Betas during the Epiphany Phase. Unattached higher SMV men entering their peak SMV phase are less inclined to look for or agree to, exclusivity when they have more available sexual options. Blue Pill men, unused to a sudden interest from women, are usually eager to formalize on exclusivity irrespective of a woman’s sexual history or her necessitous reasonings for exclusivity.
Have they lost respect for him? What is Negotiated Desire, on the woman’s part, indicative of in the relationship?
Again, this is somewhat subjective and depends on the man and woman’s conditions. As I mentioned above, the push for exclusivity on her part is prompted from necessity or Hypergamous anxiety. Genuine desire cannot be negotiated and it’s important to consider that this is equally true when it’s women doing the negotiating. Blue Pill conditioning has acculturated generations of women to expect that a man formalizing monogamy with her is not just her right, but that men will understand and accept that it is “the right thing to do” if he want’s to be accounted as a man.
We have an entire fem-centric world of women and men reinforcing this male-shame narrative in every branch of society – from church to popular media, you’re not a “man” if you so much as question your role in an exclusivity founded on a woman’s correct need of it.
This presents an interesting conflict for women. Women want men who just get it, but the necessity of petitioning a man for The Talk in the first place conflicts with the organicness of his understanding of women. Pushy, loud-mouthed, outspoken women raised on the Fempowerment narrative are often the most insecure in respect to this conflict. On one hand the narrative has bred her to expect a man to be her-equal-who’s-better-than-her-equal and ‘man up’ and formalize on his own. On the other hand, when he doesn’t, the anxiety that comes with the countdown to her Wall pushes her to force his compliance or to provide her own security for herself.
Now imagine this scenario with an Empowered Woman® dealing with the Beta in Waiting who represents her only viable LTR option. Yes, she may have lost respect for him, but her situation frustratingly compels her to force the issue of exclusivity with a guy who doesn’t get it.
Is it a sign of a failed relationship?
I don’t have any other experience, so my base assumption is that ALL WOMEN will push for commitment eventually, and want to pressure you into it, and ‘make things official.’
What does this mean for the health of the relationship?
Should it just end?
The necessity of a Talk in the first place puts this assessment into doubt. Women who don’t eventually push for commitment understand the nature of that relationship is temporary or there really is no potential, so there won’t be a Talk. The problem I see with making this formality something overtly public is that it has the opposite effect of qualifying what may be genuine desire without it. When The Talk enters into out popular consciousness it then becomes yet another ‘typical male’ fault.
Men become infantilized for not understanding women’s correctness in wanting a formalized declaration of monogamy. Once that infantilization becomes the accepted truism for women, what might’ve been a very good pairing of a man and a woman based on an organic genuine desire, turns into an obligation on his part to convince her that he’s not a child by living above that truism. The relationship becomes less about the genuine interest between the two and more about satisfying the “official” nature of it among men and women plugged into a Blue Pill social conditioning.
Should it just end at that point? If a man’s first act of a coerced monogamy is his capitulating to what amounts to a socially mandated ultimatum I think the woman he surrendered to will subconsciously lose the respect she had for him while they were “undocumented lovers.”
In a case like Rollo’s, or any other married guy here:
How did it happen? How do you get married without Negotiated Desire?
Is it IMPOSSIBLE, and it’s just a matter of minimizing the degree of Negotiation?
Same with having an official girlfriend. When you COMMIT even on the level of a ‘steady girlfriend,’ isn’t that Negotiating Desire by default?
I get this question a lot and for a lot of hard-line guys, even the best thing a married man (or LTR man) can say will always sound like he found a unicorn. You have to understand in my case the last woman I’d been in a formal LTR with before my wife was the BPD I described in the Two Guitars post. I had no intention of getting into an LTR at the time and for a long while, Mrs. Tomassi was one of four plates I was spinning at the time. All of this was above board and we dated non-exclusively for the first 3-4 months.
I began with a rock solid Frame at this time not because I was focused on establishing it, but because I had three other women in rotation and I was entirely indifferent to any idea of exclusivity with any of them. Of those four, Mrs. T was hottest and funnest in and out of bed so I gravitated to seeing her more regularly. I also appreciated her from the new perspective I had in contrast to the psychotic mess my BPD had been. She expected me to be conventionally masculine and I was already filling that role by default because I had a new outlook on women as a result of all that.
We never had a Talk when it came to exclusivity; she simply said that she didn’t like the thought of me banging other women and asked me if she could be my girlfriend. She literally asked to be part of my world during that brief conversation. I’ve had the Frame from the moment we started non-exclusively to where we are now 20 years later.
I’ll say it again, don’t use my example as some model for your own life, but there needs to be an organic flow to how you enter into any LTR.
It is vital to the health of any LTR that a man establish his frame as the basis of their living together before any formal commitment is recognized. As I stated in the beginning, frame will be fluid and conditions will influence the balance, but the overall theme of your relationship needs to be led and molded by you. Even very influential, professional, intellectualizing women still crave the right man to establish his frame in her life. They may fight it bitterly, but ultimately it’s what will make for the best healthy balance she can achieve. There’s a growing undercurrent of mid-life women questioning and regretting their past decisions to remain single into spinsterhood. And for all their late game rationalizations, the one thing they still simply refuse to accept is acknowledging that a man’s frame, the frame their “fierce independence” wouldn’t allow for, was exactly the salve their egos so desperately wants now later in life.
Gentlemen, you will establish frame in any monogamous relationship you have. You will enter her reality or she will enter yours.
I was picking through The Private Man’s blog a few months back and I came across this gem from about 3 years ago. It’s a pretty quick read if you want to click over and come back. PM recounts an all too common scenario from a Red Pill perspective – casually explaining what the Red Pill is to a guy who’s been immersed in a Blue Pill conditioning and experience for most of his life.
“What’s your blog about?”
“I help men be more attractive to women so they can reach their relationship goals.” It’s my standard go-to response when questioned about my blog.
“I don’t understand.”
“Men can learn how to be more attractive to women and I help them with that.”
James looked shocked and then quickly got angry.
“That’s cheating!” He was emphatic. He was pissed off. He was not attacking me, just my message. Again, the guy code applied.
This reaction did not surprise me. James is of the “be yourself and the right woman will magically appear” school of thought. I know where this comes from. For years I held the same point of view. I didn’t back down.
“A man can learn new things to make himself more attractive to women so he can meet his relationship goals.”
James was stubborn.
“I want a woman to love me for exactly who I am.”
That’s a noble sentiment based on an idealized view of attraction, dating, and relationships. It’s the standard response borne of shitty social expectations. But as I deal in the sometimes difficult realities of the situation, I had to be honest with James.
In this instance, James’ anger was the reflexive response I expect from ‘plugged in’ men when they first come into contact with a Red Pill aware man. It’s interesting when you consider this interaction with a Red Pill Lens. You begin to see just how saturated Blue Pill conditioning is for the average guy in real time. It’s one thing to see its influence in popular media, read a blog or book, see a movie or hear a song on the radio, but it’s quite another to experience it first hand with a guy maybe you know, or maybe you don’t.
Private Man doesn’t elaborate on it in his post, but this exchange is illustrative of how a Blue Pill mindset conditions an almost hostile defensiveness in men. Before I started the blog, and before I had a book out, I encountered this fairly often when I thought a certain man might benefit from my own awareness. It took some time for me to see the wisdom in the fourth law of power – always say less than is necessary.
Blue Pill men’s investment in the “truth” that their conditioning leads them to necessitates a constant confirmation of it from others, from his surroundings and from popular culture blanketing his awareness of it. When a Red Pill aware man verbalizes his truths, his observations, and his perspectives it’s often an affront to that Blue Pill guy’s ego-investments. And these are investments that he’s likely unaware he even holds, and he presumes everyone else holds too.
Think as you like…
There’s a comfort in presuming others believe as we do. It’s an interesting contrast when you think about it in terms of your political or religious views and then apply it to how we differ in respect to our respective Game with women. Most guys understand that other people have differing political leanings and religious dispositions, and it makes sense that they won’t see eye to eye with them. And from a cultural perspective – at least from a progressively western one – we are more or less socially expected to respect those differences in the name of mutual cooperation and mutually beneficial tolerance.
How that actually flies in the real world is a topic I’ll let other blogs explore, but when we consider how the Blue Pill and the Feminine Imperative conditions men across various cultural, political and religious spectrums we see a decided intolerance for even a casual, passing disagreement about how men ought to regard, respect and interact with women.
I won’t rehash the influence feminist ideology and the Feminine Imperative play in that conditions ( I have plenty of essays addressing that), but what I want to draw attention to here is the reflexive response James had with Private Man, and how it finds its root in a subconscious conditioning that was only mildly challenged by PM.
James first presumption was that what PM was teaching men was in some way ‘cheating’. What PM was advising was against a predefined rule set that every man ought to be abiding by. This was a Blue Pill reaction to even the premise of a Red Pill truth – that men canand shouldlearn to interact with women in order to come to a more satisfying relationship with them; one defined by that man’s desires.
This actually offends two rules presuppositions: the first, that men would ever presume to ‘know’ women well enough to outdo other men (women as universal choosers) and second to put his imperatives above a woman’s.
When I interviewed with Alan Roger Currie recently I was asked to give my take on what exactly constituted Red Pill / Blue Pill status, and what my definitions were for the abstract terms of Alpha and Beta. It’s exceedingly difficult to apply concrete definitions in a quick hit info-bite, but with respect to the Blue Pill, Blue Pill conditioning is foundationally about a presumption that all men ought to mutually follow and be accountable to an expected rule set; a rule set that now openly serves feminine-primacy.
I developed this idea in The Second Set of Books post, but with regard to men’s dealing with other men and the implied social contract, there is a definite conflict between men invested in the old set of rules and Red Pill aware men who acknowledge, use and endorse a new set of rules. Thus, using Game or making personal choices based on Red Pill aware wisdom seems like the man applying them is in fact “cheating”.
He’s cheating on the first set of rules that the ‘plugged in’ man expects him to adhere to, and adhere to even when those rules make little realistic sense or have scant appreciable reward for. In other words, a martyr for the concept of honor.
Blue Pill ideology is something learned and internalized over the course of a man’s boyhood into his adult life. When you consider a guy’s upbringing and the extent that the Feminine Imperative conditions and reinforces his investments socially, culturally, religiously, etc., it’s easy to see how ‘natural’ and unlearned it seems to the guy who’s centered his identity on it.
To the greater whole of Blue Pill conditioned men the Red Pill is foreign and an affront to that conditioning. In fact, part of his feminine-primary conditioning focuses on the hope that some man will express some ‘sexist’ remark, or express some unapproved thought about women in the hopes that he can rebuke and correct that man. It’s part of Beta Game to look for opportunities to do just this in the hopes that some woman will witness it and find his gender-heroism attractive:
Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism. Even under the conditions of relative anonymity (like the internet), he’ll still cling to that want of proving his uniqueness just on the off chance that a woman might read his rebuff and be fatefully attracted to him.
This is the bread and butter of the White Knight beta. It’s best to assume that most guys who pick up on just your Game vibe, to say nothing of overtly talking about it, are going to side with the feminine imperative by default. For practitioners of Beta Game (which is to say the better part of 90% of guys) this is an organic opportunity to identify with women and engage in the same shaming conventions women use without the fear of having it seem contrived.
…but do as others do
That said, this dynamic is not always so dramatic. There was a time when I lived in Florida before I had started the blog, but well after my time at SoSuave, where I had a get together with some friends at my place for some beer and bullshit time. We’d gotten to talking about ‘how our wives were’ and as you might expect there was all of the “she’s the boss” preprogrammed rhetoric being laughed about until I mentioned that my wife was definitely not the boss.
At that point, beer or no beer, it became apparent that the proverbial crab was about to crawl out of the barrel, so then comes the predictable ridicule about how I’m fulla’ shit, I must domineer her, or how I’m being cocky but my wife really owns me like them – because wives have the pussy so wives make the rules. Real, masterful, masculinity was a joke to these men because they were invested in the idea that they were fortunate to have any woman fuck them, and the one who did was not to be disrespected even in her absence. They wanted confirmation of their investment in the ideology that brought them to their indentured existences.
To the Blue Pill conditioned, wives run the show; to think otherwise is a delusion of masculine power for the Blue Pill man, and all men should acknowledge this.
As I mentioned a few posts ago, Hypergamy needs security. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks seeks to set up social conditions and to socially engineer men who will at least attempt to provide women with some semblance of Hypergamous assurance. It may not seem it, but the social convention that men ought to Just Be Themselves is an effort to confirm this Hypergamous certainty about a man. Men are honor bound (through notions of whatever chivalry might mean) to be who they are, do what they say and say what they mean – and any man who changes that for whatever reason must necessarily be “cheating”.
This trope has the latent purpose of aiding in women’s Hypergamous filtering process. The old set of books, the rules a Blue Pill man expects all other men to play by, find its roots in a man’s worth being the truthful representation of what he really is. This is not so for women. Women’s self-representation is founded in socially acceptable misdirections that serve her Hypergamous interests (makeup to appear young, hair, nails, cosmetic surgery, etc.)
Popular culture ridicules men who falsely “wear masks of masculinity” in a social order that deliberately obfuscates his understanding of what it means, and all while reinforcing female deception of who men really are.
When men aren’t “just being themselves” it’s ‘cheating’. What it’s cheating is Hypergamy. It is cheating the ignorant Blue Pill ego-invested men whose identities are dependent upon men abiding by a rule set that no longer serves their best interests.
I had an interesting study brought to my attention recently (ht/ Robert Burriss) and I thought I’d get back to a nuts and bolts post with something useful I found in it.
As you might expect, much of the findings in this study reinforce many Red Pill principles founded in evo-psych, but there are a few new angles to consider here. Before I start to riff on this study, bear in mind that the concept of female mate guarding behavior centers on what the researchers define as ‘desirable mates’ to women. This subjective assessment of desirability will play into all this analysis.
For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women’s mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women’s fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women’s romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but only when their own partners were highly desirable. Exposure to ovulating women also increased women’s sexual desires for their (highly desirable) partners. These findings suggest that women can be sensitive to subtle cues of other women’s fertility and respond (e.g., via social exclusion, enhanced sexual attention to own mate) in ways that may facilitate their mate retention goals while not thwarting their affiliative goals.
Right from the start here we have two Red Pill foundations confirmed; the influence that perceptual SMV plays in women’s sense of passive Dread and the fundamental influence that menstruation dictates to sexual arousal and concurrent motivations for sex appeal during women’s ovulation phase.
I’ve previously gone into the dynamics that play out between men and women with regard to perceived SMV of a partner versus the other partner’s self-perception of their own SMV and how this determines secure vs. insecure attachment. This post was more of an outline of results of SMV imbalance rather that the motivations for the characteristics of those personal attachments. This study illustrates these underlying motivators very well.
Anyone who’s heard my Man in Demand talk on Hypergamy understands the (menstrual cycle) biological root for women’s personal and sociological behavior, and this study provides yet another confirmation of it. I’ve also written in the past about men’s propensity for mate guarding and the behavioral cues women, both subtly and not so subtly, display that prompts them to mate guarding. However, I’ve yet to explore women’s mate guarding behaviors.
I’m bringing up the SMV ratios and Mate Guarding posts here because it’s important to bear in mind the subjectivity that perceived SMV plays in regard to motivating mate guarding. Depending on that balance (or imbalance) one partner will be more motivated to mate guard than the other. Which of course then brings us back to the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. Mate guarding impulse is contextual to the comparative value of both individuals and the value of others in their social environment (potential sexual competitors).
Thus, it is a significant challenge for women when other women attempt to poach their partners. For instance, over 50% of women admit to attempting to poach another woman’s partner, and over 80% of men admit to having been the object of another woman’s poaching—with about half of men admitting to “going along” with the poaching attempt (e.g., Schmitt et al., 2004; Schmitt & Buss, 2001). Women have good reason, then, to mate guard.
I’m going to encourage readers to take the time to, at the very least, read the introduction, premise and results of this comprehensive study. Naturally there will be incredulous women who will insist that men tend to overestimate the displayed sexual interests of women towards them. This is a common social convention that serves a very specific purpose for women; plausible deniability.
If the common group-think is that men are egotistical, think they’re “all that” and stupidly believe they’re seeing sexual cues from women because “that’s just how men are”, then we have a pre-established condition in which women can believably deny interest. Thus, should a man not find a woman attractive, or opt for another, this then serves as a rejection buffer as well as a precondition for her own rejection of a man should he make an approach and not be found attractive.
The Schmitt & Buss studies account for this, but even if they didn’t there would still need to be a functional reason for women’s mate guarding behavior. That reason puts the lie to the social convention of women presuming men aren’t as perceptive of their sexual cues as they’d like to believe.
[…] whereas men have at times physically isolated and sequestered their female
partners to restrict other men’s access to them (e.g., in harems), women may analogously socially isolate their partners from potential poachers—keeping them apart so as to preclude potentially costly competition for their romantic partners.
The usefulness of this strategy depends on women being able to identify those who might be likely and effective mate poachers, and then excluding them (but not others) from their social circles. If a woman indiscriminately distances herself and her partner from potential poachers (i.e., all other women), she is assured of his fidelity but at the cost of eliminating her access to the numerous benefits of female–female friendships.
Spoiler alert: The study confirms that women will covertly exclude themselves and their lover’s company from women who A.) outclass them in comparative SMV (hotter women than they perceive themselves to be) and B.) happen to be in the proliferative phase of ovulation.
This indicates that not only are women subconsciously (if not consciously) aware of intrasexual rivals ovulatory states – as evidenced by dress, ornamentation, vocal intonation, scent, sexual proceptivity, etc. – but they are aware enough to orchestrate covert methods to protect their sexual investments in a ‘high value’ male while ensuring future intrasexual friendships.
That may seem like an overly scientific way of saying women watch out for other women slutting it up, but the subcommunications of ovulation are so subtle that women’s subconscious, peripheral awareness of those cues evolved for a sensitivity that goes beyond the obvious slut. That’s how important retaining a better-than-self SMV optimal mating choice is to women in an evolutionary scope. That sensitivity is part of women’s psychological firmware.
[…]In addition, if a woman were to consistently and indiscriminately exclude other women from her own and, by extension, her partner’s social circle, she might gain a reputation for being non-communal and non-nurturing, and thus, for being an undesirable friend. This might not only thwart her ability to form future friendships with other women, but might also lead her partner to perceive her as highly difficult, uncooperative, controlling, and non-trusting.
Thus, on one hand, the costs of indiscriminately avoiding other women are high because women reap important benefits from making new same-sex friends, On the other hand, women can and do mate poach with frequency, and those women deeply embedded in one’s social circle may have increased access, motivation, and ability to poach successfully.
There’s a few things to unpack here before we can make this information Red Pill / Game applicable. The most important metric that female mate guarding indicates is her genuine assessment of a man’s SMV and how valuable his participation and investment in their LTR (or even STR sexual value) is to her.
I’ve seen this mate guarding play out in my own relationships before, both as a Red Pill husband who happens to work with beautiful women in the liquor industry and prior to my Red Pill awareness of it in my libertine 20s. Back then it was easy to pass off as ‘bitches be crazy’ when a girlfriend or a short term sex partner “just got jealous”. But in hindsight the timing of those fits of jealousy seemed a bit to regular.
I’m going to suggest that developing an awareness of a woman’s bouts of jealousy or her subtle timing in wanting to spend time alone with you, or her being more sexually proceptive (she wants to fuck more) with you at times you may think odd. These are Alpha or Beta Tells. A woman’s preoccupation with guarding you from other women is a prime indicator of your SMV worth to her. It stands to reason that only ‘desirable’ men deserve the effort of her mate guarding.
This is an important Red Pill sensitivity to have as it also allows you to determine a woman’s unspoken understanding of where she and you stand in relative SMV comparison. As I was saying in the introduction here, that ‘desirability’, that SMV ratio, that Alpha impression that makes you worth mate guarding is subjective to what a woman’s self-perceived SMV is in respect to your own. When we interact with women in the long term it’s very easy for men to lose sight of this balance and think that their frumpy wife is the best they can do. There is a definitive psychological game that women of low SMV will play with men they know are of higher value – they will continually devalue that man as a form of mate guarding.
That devaluation may take the form of browbeating, nagging or accusing him of being attracted to other women in an effort to get her higher value LTR man to self-limit his being poached by endlessly qualifying himself to his low SMV wife/girlfriend. It’s far easier, and far lower an investment of resources if a low SMV woman can convince her higher SMV man to mate guard himself.
Just as an aside here, there may be a few readers who’ll think women will rationally consider that their long term provisioning is virtually assured in a feminine-primary social order. Alimony, child support or pro-female government will assure her and her offspring a baseline of security, so why mate guard any man?
The answer of course is that women’s psychological firm ware didn’t evolve to acknowledge these considerations. Once again T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed, he wants to hunt. So even with the logical consideration that provisioning is assured women’s limbic (particularly on an Alpha Fucks short term breeding assurance) still wants those environmental and behavioral cues that indicate they have that security.
Passive Dread
So with all of this to digest how do we put this knowledge of women’s limbic desire for ensuring a mate’s exclusive sex and provisioning to use for us?
The obvious answer is in the title of this post – developing that awareness of your SMV worth to a woman is a good starting point from which you can subtly employ a passive form of Dread.
I’ve gotten a lot of grief for just my acknowledging Dread, much less using it beneficially for both a man and whatever woman he chooses (long or short term). It’s always about how horribly manipulative it is, or it’s just an unsustainable game of brinksmanship between a couple that destroys trust. But what these (usually female) critics never recognize is that Dread is already an integral part of every relationship by order of degree.
The fact that both male and female mate guarding behaviors are evidential facts of both sex’s hindbrain function should be proof enough that Dread, the concern of loss of investment, and the subconscious, comparative evaluation of SMV is something that’s always an operative. It’s inherent to our conditions as evolved human beings.
My advice in this instance is for men to become sensitive to the indicators of that ovulatory mate guarding dread and use that insecurity to promote a better, genuine desire in that woman. Suggesting this will seem counterintuitive to a Blue Pill mindset. The conditioned response will be to allay that woman’s fears (the ones she’s subconsciously aware of but will hate you for making her acknowledge) and provide her with comfort and familiarity.
But comfort and familiarity are anti-seductive and kill the genuine desire, the genuine need to fuck you in order to keep you and show her appreciation for your higher SMV. Why does a woman compete for what she is constantly comfortably assured she already has?
The trick to employing soft or passive dread is making yourself sensitive to the opportunities to use it and then gently provoke it in as covert and indirect a way as possible. One of the better ideas the early PUAs had was mastering the art of the Neg, or the backhanded compliment. The idea was to casually knock a woman’s self-image down to a manageable degree in order to get her to qualify herself the the PUA. Passive dread operates on a similar principle.
You need to see the opportunities for its use, and women’s propensity for mate guarding men they find ‘desirable’ is a reasonably predictable opportunity. See those chances for other women’s casual flirtations with you, look for those unsolicited opportunities for easy social proof, and don’t dissuade your woman’s initial mate guarding response. Casually push back on the mate guarding impulse, don’t jump to the reassurances of your undying love and interest.
See that opportunity for what it is – a chance to restate whose Frame she’s chosen to be a part of. She wants to merit your value. Take that effort away from her and you become valueless to her.
During the last post’s comment thread I sort of went back in time to when I’d first heard the term ‘open relationship’. It was back in the mid 80s and I’d heard it being proposed to me by my first girlfriend when I was around 19 and she’d grown bored of my predictable Beta perfection. Needless to say this moment preceded my semi-pro rock star 20s and the natural Alpha-ness I matured into. So at the time I was thoroughly steeped in the dutiful Beta conditioning of believing that ‘going steady’ monogamy and only banging the ONE girl was the right thing to do.
I also believed that women’s motives were reliably based on what they said rather than what their behaviors implied (and their contradicting behaviors were the result of being confused by nebulous ‘society’s’ unfair expectations of women). So it was with a great deal of confusion that I was forced to wrap my head around exactly why my ‘girlfriend’ would want to retain me as an intimate orbiter while she pursued other guys to bang and become potential intimates with.
She suggested an “open relationship” – all the same non-sexual intimate expectations with no expectation of reciprocal sexual fidelity – an idea she’d no doubt been familiarized with from her former hippie ‘free love‘ parents. And not unlike the simpering Beta in today’s cartoon, I too was uncomfortable with sharing my 18 year old girlfriend with any other guy. Looking back it was quite the conflict to my 19 year old, Beta conditioned mind. On one hand I was taught to respect the independence of a woman and didn’t want to be the guy to tell her what she could or couldn’t do, but I also bought into the Disneyesque sacrifice all for true love narrative.
I suppose now I owe her some gratitude since my rejecting this “I want to play the field” episode was instrumental in setting me on a course for my Alpha 20s and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude that unintentionally served me so well with women then.
Today there are cutesy synonyms like ‘poly’ to describe a woman who believes it’s in her multiple lovers’, as well as her own, mutual interests that they obligate themselves to what really amounts to her attention, emotional and sexual needs independent of each guy who fulfills that role for her. The problem arises in the degree of investment those men believe that an above board ‘poly’ woman will be able to appreciate. I had this situation presented in last weeks’ comments:
Why does an open relationship favor women and not men? It’s only cuckoldry if you don’t approve of it. If you agree to an open relationship for both of you, then it seems like an equal footing.
The cuckoldry Devil is in the details; and in this case that Devil is in the perceived ‘agreement’ and who’s doing the agreeing. Contemporary Open Cuckoldry and the social conventions of ‘free love’ era faux-idealisms in ‘open relationships’ work in tandem today to promote the sexual selection strategy of women’s Hypergamy.
Cuckoldry, in its most visceral, Hypergamous sense, favors women because there is no margin for error on a man’s part. Bear in mind that an ‘open’ relationship only serves a woman’s sexual imperative because she benefits from comfort, rapport, security and likely provisioning of the primary man with whom she’s come to this agreement with. In all honesty I’ve rarely met a guy in an open relationship who wasn’t a Beta at the mercy of his wife or LTR’s proliferative phase, Alpha Fucks, Hypergamous impulses.
Most of them understand their optionless condition and resign themselves to the women they’ve committed to, wanting to, and acting on fucking more suitably, conventionally, masculine men than themselves. Arguably, most stay at home fathers fall into a sort of contextual form of an open relationship for much of the same reasons even if their wives are only getting a vicarious Alpha ‘fix’ by working among higher status men who haven’t abdicated on their burden of performance by adopting the feminine support role.
What About Those Assholes?
Now I am aware of the often domineering men who insist on fucking women outside of their commitment to a monogamous lover. I also understand that the reverse can and does apply. I’m also aware that when a man’s SMV exceeds a woman’s it places her into a similar position to that of the Beta men I’ve just described.
Bear in mind that the issue I’m on about here isn’t one of fault, but rather how an effectively polygamous relationship serves the interests of either genders’ sexual strategy.
It’s vitally important to consider how both of these ‘open relationship’ formats are popularly perceived in a cultural context. For a woman, being ‘poly’ may hold some stigma to it. She may be considered a de facto slut in some sense – remember she’s maintaining the pretense that she’s committed to one or more men, rather than a booty call where there is no pretense of exclusivity – but the social (not to mention legal assurance) efforts being made to ‘normalize’ what amounts to her cuckoldry of that ‘primary’ partner is reinforced because it seemingly serves as some kind of new-age feminine-primary family unit. And after all, he too is ostensibly free to exercise his sexual strategy in this arrangement. A win-win, right?
In the case where the ‘primary’ partner is the woman and the high SMV man leaves her no choice but to adopt his sexual strategy as the dominant one in the relationship, that ‘open relationship’ is considered dysfunctional and socially frowned upon. He’s a cad or a philanderer at best, and an abusive self-absorbed inconsiderate monster at worst. Reverse the sexes in today’s cartoon and imagine what the feminine-primary social response might be.
Force Fitting Sexual Strategies
What we’re observing in a modern interpretation of ‘poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is a conflict between the normalization of unilateral control of sexual strategy within a monogamous relationship context. I know that sounds like a mouthful but consider…
The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies: For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.
No doubt many Blue and Purple Pill readers will (in the interests of “equality”) remind us that there was a time when it was socially expected of (high socio-economic status) men to “keep” a mistress (or use prostitutes) as well as a wife, or even have many wives. All socio-economic Apex Fallacies aside, this being an outlier rather than a norm, those arrangements still put that man into a position of maintaining support for both (all) women in order to satisfy his sexual appetites as well as the relative wellbeing of them.
In the modern instance where western(ized) women are a protected class in a feminine-primary social order, the priority of sexual strategy changes hands. I cover this exchange in the Adaptation series of posts, but to paraphrase, Free Love, open relationships or now, ‘poly’, has really become an increasingly acceptable methodology for women to optimize both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy while still enjoying a semblance of the security that old order monogamy provides for women’s emotional needs.
In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.
In an economic state where women are less financially dependent on (or autonomous from) men, the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy will take priority. That’s not to say the Beta comfort and rapport appeal becomes worthless as an emotional investment, but it’s less likely for a woman to need to prioritize that aspect while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect. Beta comfort and security have a value, but that value requires less urgency than pursing Alpha sexual experience (functional breeding opportunities).
Consider the poor Beta symp in the cartoon. That caricature is of a Beta conditioned man struggling with the Old Set of Books, with the old order ruleset expectations from a woman who will never recognize them because she’s never needed to. It’s his investment in her, his necessitousness, his optionlessness and his inability to see it’s the source of his frustration and his anxiety. He needs her, expects more from her, than she needs him.
The lie inherent in the humor of the cartoon is that women possess the capacity to compartmentalize their emotional investments. The Medium is the Message; women can only compartmentalize their feelings for men they don’t see as Hypergamously optimal men (i.e. Alpha, higher than their own SMV men). For men who embody that optimization, women simply cannot afford to feel anything more than submission (a submission to a dominant man they innately desire) to him and are thus unable to consider anything like compartmentalizing their emotions for him.
For a female of any species to facilitate a methodology for breeding with the best genetic partner she’s able to attract AND to ensure her own and her offspring’s survival with the best provisioning partner; this is an evolutionary jackpot.
‘Open’ relationships, and the social narrative reinforcement of the concept, are one such adaptation to facilitate this methodology.
All of this may seem a bit pervasive coming from the guy who advises men to spin plates and date non-exclusively for as long as it takes (if ever) to attain the depth of experience to become a relatively good judge of women’s innate nature, and then if he so chooses, decide how best to pair and parent with her.
The difference in this approach is characteristic of the differences in men and women’s sexual strategies. In Plate Theory, while there is an above board implication of non-exclusivity, there is never an implication that a woman is (or should be) more than a non-exclusive dating opportunity. There should never be any pretense of there being an established, invested relationship as we see in the ‘poly’ concept of women.
In fact this is the primary distinction in non-exclusivity; who’s Frame is the predominant one? In a woman’s ‘poly’ Frame there is a retainership implied in what she believes should be an accepted non-exclusivity.
Ask yourself this, why would a man persist in an ‘open’ relationship? What unique advantages does he get in this arrangement that he couldn’t by simply staying single, practicing Game and spinning plates? Then ask yourself what unique benefits does a woman receive from the same ‘polyamorous’ arrangement?
When you’re contemplating this, try to divorce yourself from the emotional investments and focus on cold hard evolved Hypergamy and how it would function for either sex in that arrangement. Keep in mind that as far as feminized society is concerned, and for all of the triumphalism of independent women, the onus of committed relationship responsibility still defines the worth of a man.
I’ve seen men make the mistake of mentioning that they would never raise another man’s child on FaceBook. Shit storms ensued. The usual shaming tactics were trotted out such as manning up. Interestingly enough I’ve heard a woman (on one of those absolutely dreadful day time talk shows such as the View) say that a woman in a relationship with a man with his own kids was a fool for wasting her time on his kids instead of hers. The framework for open cuckoldry is already there, we just need to see the push that makes it completely socially acceptable.
Open Cuckoldry is already in its developmental stage in a social respect. When you consider the Sandbergian plan for Open Hypergamy, the logical implication of this is what’s described here – prioritizing the sexual selection and Hypergamous optimization of women on a societal level while maximally restricting (via social shaming and disapproval) the sexual strategies that would ever serve male interests,…so long as that male is anything less than an optimal Alpha.
Open Cuckoldry has many euphemisms now, but in the Red Pill aware perspective it’s just a matter of time until the social plan of prioritized Hypergamy and outright cuckoldry becomes a social norm.
TuffLuv also presented me with a related question in the last comment thread:
A little too black and white on this stuff Rollo. Sure cuckoldry, as you call it is becoming the norm.. the euphemism being “mixed family”. But I see the majority of instances not being a chick who had the child of some alpha bad boy, or even alpha good boy.. I just see fickle chicks who dumped the baby daddy cuz she either found something better or went looking for something better. The poor dad is just an every day average guy who got his heart broken by the bitch.
So, ponder if you will, if there is a difference between a man raising another man’s child(ren) where the bio father is less alpha (possibly by far) than the new suitor, and a beta man raising the child of one of the woman’s former studs.. I think in the real world you find the former far more than the latter, except in cases where the married or committed woman actually went out and cheated and got pregnant with another man’s child. Maybe that happens a lot but that is not *open* cuckoldry.. That’s classic cuckoldry, and perhaps the only thing that should be called cuckoldry.
I think there should be another designation for the former case. It’s still a bit shameful, but not nearly as much as the latter, eh?
Definitely something to consider, but this situation also implies a change in conditions or context with regard to the woman doing the cuckolding. The fundamentals don’t change – that woman may have bred with a less than optimal man, but the Hypergamous sexual selection impulse still drives her to seek out the Alpha fucks aspect of Hypergamy. She’s Making Up for Missing Out and still she has the provisioning and support she needs in order to pursue the opposite side of the Hypergamous equation she missed out on courtesy of the Beta father.
(h/t to Zelscorpion for the image and ref for today’s post)
Hi Rollo,
On rereading Truth to Power a very inspirational post, I wanted to hear your thoughts on men with families such as my self choosing to travel on vacation alone.
In your videos above you touched on masculine qualities men being in the driver seat around decision making. I have a wife you as with many women is cultured to try assume headship of the household with decision making even vacations etc.
She doesn’t want to travel abroad as we have a 7 month old son where as I feel there is no reason why she should worry about doing so. Anyway the crux of the issue is I am only 28 years old and having sacrificed my independence early (at 25) have a desire to travel and I don’t care about rocking the boat to make that happen.
I would love to hear some advice about the benefits of and good ways of grabbing hold again of control of our own circumstances and decisions!
Never take a woman fishing.
That’s a little idiom I learned way before I was Red Pill aware from the guy who was the best man at my wedding, and my long time fishing buddy. I wouldn’t call him a philosopher, but he was a keen observer of women’s behavior and became salt-of-the-earth wise by default:
“When you take a woman fishing you’re trying to include them in something they really don’t want to be doing, but you like it a lot. So you think ‘I like fishing and I want to include her in something we can do together’, but when you do she complains about EVERYTHING. ‘It’s dirty, I’m cold, I’m hot, I didn’t bring a water bottle, where’s the sunscreen?, there’s too many bugs, why are there so many bugs?, why do we have to hike so far to fish? can’t we just find a spot by the dam? where’s the bathroom?, etc. etc.”
“So what do you do? You force yourself to make her comfortable the whole damn time. You don’t hike, you don’t scout for the sweet spots on the river or, God forbid, you try to get her in a kayak. You end up going out after breakfast and the light’s all wrong. You try to keep them clean and close to the ‘potty’, you bait their hook ’cause it’s filthy, you untangle their reel snarls,…what you don’t do is fish. Your whole trip becomes about making her ‘like’ fishing with you and not about actually fishing and doing all the things we do when we fish together or on our own. I mean, you want ’em to like it, but you’ll never teach them to like it because you’re too busy making everything right for ’em.”
“Unless they were brought up right and they dig fishing ’cause their Dad taught ’em to like it, never try to bring a woman fishing. They gotta come to liking it on their own, they gotta want to do it on their own. I mean, look at Dodge (our dog) he don’t care if it’s cold or 4am, he’s happy to be on the trail going wherever the fuck we’re headed.”
Back in May Zelscorpion tweeted a few of the pictures from this series and made an interesting point:
I had to admit, he’s got a point and it reminded me of the sage words of my Best Man. I think one of the tragedies of men’s Blue Pill conditioning is the presumption that they must find a way, sometimes forcibly, to become more compatible with a woman. I wrote about the paradox of compatibility a while back:
It’s very entertaining for me to hear guys reason as to why they got into yoga, or my all time favorite, salsa dancing as some means of meeting girls. I mean really, if that’s the goal you choose to devote the precious few hours of your leisure time to then I suppose a guy ought to take up scrap-booking or zumba.
If you’re picking up a hobby in order to meet women all you’re doing is attempting to Identify with what you expect your idealized woman to appreciate. If you get into something for this reason it’s not a hobby, it’s a Buffer.
Successful men don’t chase success – success chases them. Women are going to expect you to have your own uncontrived, interests, passions and hobbies established before meeting them.
When I first began counseling men in my SoSuave days many times I’d read guys telling me, “Well if she’s not into the same things I am she’s just not the ‘right’ girl for me”, as if common interests were some criteria that would trump his sexual interests in a girl. Blue Pill idealism convinces men that the “right girl” will necessarily love doing the same things as himself, but the all too common Red Pill truth is that men will have their peak experiencesin life alone or in the company of other men who share the passions and interests their wives simply have no interest in.
Peak Experience
I don’t subscribe to Maslow’s theories in whole, but I do think his Peak Experience idea has merit. There will be times and achievements in your life that will stand out as significantly memorable. It’s easy to point to the experiences that should be the most significant; a marriage, the birth of a child, a religious experience, a first kiss, a school graduation, etc., you get the idea – experiences that should be the standard fare in a romanticized, idealistic sense.
We tend to overblow these experiences because we think they should be something to etch in our consciousness; and if we don’t, well, then there must be something wrong with us for not appreciating their popular significance. Tragically it’s our negative experiences that have the most lasting effect on us; evolution has made pain something memorable so as to help us avoid potentially life-ending future experiences. But the events that should evoke lasting good memories, the ones we are taught should be significant, are often the ones we ruin with unrealistic expectations, or we build up only to have them not quite live up to the fantasy we make of them.
The Peak Experiences I’m talking about here aren’t planned, or are just loosely planned by necessity. Some of the most memorable events you’ll ever experience wont be ones that you had a forethought about. These are often the experiences we hope to recreate long after they occur, but prove impossible to really recapture. Much of what makes up our personal preferences in life come from these spontaneous Peak Experiences. Remember the first girl you got with? Remember that time when things aligned just perfectly for you to hit that hole in one?
One of the reasons I have such a passion for snowmobiles was due to a day I blew off work so I could go out for the entire day on a beautiful Lake Tahoe morning. I went on my own which is something I rarely did. It was a Wednesday so there was nobody on the trails. The snow was only a day old and I took my sled to the top of a place called High Meadows, but even this pristine place wasn’t high enough. I took off in the back country and got to the top of a peak that was as high as I dared to go alone. Once I got there I had a view of the lake that I imagine few people had experienced. Then I fell back on the seat of my sled and stared at a sky that was so blue I never thought of it in the same way again. I laid there for a long time just staring and thinking about life and living and God and the universe.
On my way down the hill I thought how cool it would be to bring Mrs. Tomassi up there so she could appreciate it too. I mean, why wouldn’t I want to share such an incredible Peak Experience with the woman I love; the woman I want to share my life with? To this day Mrs. T has only been on my sled about 3 times. She’s very self-cautious and doesn’t like the smell and sound of the engine. That might seem trivial, but no matter how much I can try to relate that experience or try to recapture it no one but myself will ever have that unique event.
Experience & Frame
When I look at the guy with his dog in these camping shots I can now appreciate them much more because I know he’s experienced that same uniqueness. When you plan an event with a woman, when you make efforts to bring her into an appreciation of something you enjoy the experience of you must remember that you are, in essence, negotiating for her genuine desire to do so.
Now, before I’m run up the flagpole for suggesting otherwise, yes I know that many men and women do in fact find pleasure in commonly held interests. I see women on the river fishing in waders and at Trout Unlimited events all the time. My point isn’t the interest itself, but rather the desire to participate in it. A lot of guys hold the belief that including their wife, girlfriend or even a girl they’re spinning as a plate in something they think she should enjoy will have the effect of bringing them closer. The inherent problem with this is the presumption that including her in it will lead to some new shared experience that will bond them both in a genuine way.
The problem with preplanned ‘date nights’ is the same problem men experience with trying to pull a woman into his Frame by insisting she take up one of his hobbies or passions; it’s contrived and feels disingenuous to her. The point of the experience becomes about her being involved in it and not the actual doing of whatever it is you do together. The vibe becomes one of him making and controlling that experience so it becomes something pleasurable for her to participate in rather than really finding some inherent reward from it due to genuine interest.
Thus you get guys who (figuratively) take their women fishing and the event becomes more about introducing her to it than actually catching fish. Guys get so caught up in controlling unpleasant variables for her that the real experience of fishing is something entirely different. They want that woman to feel the same joy he does in doing something intrinsically rewarding to him, but the truth of it is she must come to it on her own.
Always Maintain Your Individualism
And this leads us back, once again, to establishing and maintaining a positive, dominant and individualistic Frame with a woman. She must want to enter your reality for it to be a genuine desire on her part – you cannot lead her into it, she must enter it of her own volition. Spontaneity is the key. Whether it’s an ‘insta-date’ from a PUA perspective, or an unexpected twist of plans in your marriage, that woman must want to participate in that event, in that moment of her own accord.
A good test of genuine interest with a woman is less about how open she is to trying “your things” and more about how insistent she is instigating her own participation in them. The trap most Betas fall into is converting “his things” into “our things” and he compromises those previously rewarding experiences into a sideshow he hopes will bond he and his woman together.
When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting maintaining the former level of interest in the endeavor.
A similar dynamic plays out when men try to open the Male Space of whatever it is they find individually enjoyable to the women they hope will share in his enthusiasm. One thing I learned very early on in my marriage was the absolutely vital importance of maintaining my individual identity apart from my wife.
The biggest mistake I made when I was involved in LTRs prior to meeting my wife was allowing myself to get caught up in the equalist idea that since both men and women were functional equals we should necessarily base our compatibility estimates on how alike we were in interests. Consequently I progressively began convincing myself that I found their interests fascinating, but in doing so I slipped into their Frame. I was too scared of losing a woman and was too necessitous to experiment with doing what I should have – insisting on maintaining my individual interests and maintaining my own reality for a woman to enter.
I was fortunate in that Mrs. T expected me to control the Frame from the start of our relationship. I’ll admit, at the time it was something very unfamiliar to me to have a woman expect me to prioritize my interests above her own, but the purpose of this was establishing a Frame she wanted to enter into. Today I adamantly insist on having a life that is apart from her, but she can enter into if she has a real interest in it. This blog is just one extension of that dynamic.
If you are to maintain a dominant Frame with a woman you must necessarily set your interests apart from her own. You must still insist on your individualized identity and the experiences that set you apart from her in order to maintain a reality in which she continually wishes to genuinely be a part of.
Ted had a great comment from last week’s thread that speaks to this:
I don’t expect my wife to be like a man with male interests. I expect her to be a human with human interests. Something deeper than pop culture anyway.
I know a little bit about a whole lot of stuff. I’m willing to chat about any number of subjects other than tech and politics. It just has to he something better than what’s on TV and the weather. I keep hearing women can do anything a man can, so let’s see some intellectual debate!
More often than not truths must be brought to women by men. It’s uniquely refreshing when women have the critical insight to look for truths, but it’s refreshing because it’s rare – and it’s refreshing when they seek them from a man who’s Frame she’s chosen to be a part of. One of the best aspects of the principle of Amused Mastery is that, if you actually have the mastery that comes from individualized experience, it makes maintaining a positive, dominant and enjoyable Frame much easier with the same woman.
I apologize for interrupting the flow of this series’ posts, but I felt this question from reader Andy deserved a full stop:
I could care less who I’m talking to. IMO if you’re looking to disqualify a woman based on her sexual history you’re doing yourself a disservice because you better believe that the high quality chicks have been fucked in every way imaginable. If not you it’s somebody else… Might as well be you!
Andy, I do agree with you in part. Too much overt concern (i.e. asking) about a woman’s sexual past is indeed demonstrating lower value. Men whom women consider Alpha, the men that women already have a mental impression of, don’t overly concern themselves with women’s sexual pasts because those men have multiple options going.
On some level of consciousness women know that if what he can glean from interacting with her about her sexual past is off-putting to an Alpha he’ll simply eject and move on to a better prospect. An Alpha mindset is often very minimalist, blunt and direct, but there are aspects of interacting with women that come as a default for a man who is his own Mental Point of Origin. One of those unspoken aspects is a self-understanding that he has options (or can generate more) and this is manifested in his indifference to a woman’s long term sexual suitability. If she doesn’t enter his Frame, to his satisfaction, he moves on to the next prospect with very little communication.
However, we weren’t discussing non-exclusive dating/fucking; we’re discussing making an investment in a woman we’re vetting for our own parental investment. When you consider the all-downside risks a man must wager on that investment it behooves him to be his most particular about that woman’s sexual past and the consequences that YOU will be burdened with if you don’t vet wisely.
Most men (myself included at the time) have very sparse prerequisites when it comes to their considering a woman for marriage or even an LTR. This lack of insight is the result of a constant battery of shame and preconditioning by the Feminine Imperative that tells men any requisites they would have of a woman for marriage are ‘passing judgement’ on her character. He should consider himself “lucky” that any woman would have him for a husband (or “put up with him”) and his concerns about her are shameful, typically male character flaws on his part.
Consequentially men rarely permit themselves the luxury of putting their own considerations above that of a potential mate.
Vetting
If you asked a woman whether she would be wary of marrying a man who was a recovering alcoholic or a cleaned up heroin addict she’d probably disqualify him as a marriage prospect from the outset. And were she to go ahead and marry him anyway with full disclosure of his past addictions, would we be sympathetic with her if he were to relapse and she to bear the brunt of his past indiscretions?
Now suppose that woman married this former addict, but due to his being offended about her prying into his past, she was ignorant of his old addictions. She has her suspicions, but society tells her it’s not her purview to hold him accountable for anything that happened in his past.
He’s moved on and so should she, right? Any lingering consequences from his addictions (such as a DUI, criminal record or his unemployability) shouldn’t be held against him, nor should she judge him, nor should she consider those consequences whatsoever when she’s assessing his suitability for marriage now.
In fact, she should feel ashamed to even consider his past with regard to her feelings about who he is. Her judgementalism only points to her own character flaws.
Now, would we praise that woman for “following her heart” and marrying him? Would we hold her accountable for the decision to marry him if he relapses?
Reverse the genders and this scenario is precisely why women become so hostile when men even hint at ‘judging’ women’s past sexual decisions. There is a very well established operative social convention that the sisterhood will all unanimously get behind; and that is the ruthless shaming of men who would ask any questions about any woman’s sexual past. This is the degree of desperation that women feel during the Epiphany Phase when they acknowledge men becoming aware of their long term sexual strategy.
They understand that, in their Epiphany Phase, the clock is ticking down to zero. That’s the cause of a lot of anxiety. They are just beginning to understand that their marriageability (Beta Bucks) now conflicts with their previous short-term mating strategy (Alpha Fucks). As I detailed in Betas in Waiting, women of this age cannot afford to have their short term sexual strategy count against them at a time when they are at their most necessitous of what that Beta can provide towards her long term security.
Again, on some level of consciousness, women understand that were the ignorant Beta she’s decided to marry (start a family with or help her raise her illegitimate children with) becomes aware of what she did in her sexual past he too might expect that same degree of sexual performance. The performance she reserved for the men she perceived as Alpha and freely gave to them.
Women must keep the details of that past secret and obscured. So grave is this anxiety that men must be punished for having the temerity to be curious about it. It is vitally important because a woman’s capacity to bond with a man is reduced with every new sexual partner. Every new sexual partner is a potential Alpha to be widowed by, but the man who marries her must be kept ignorant of those men if she is to secure his resources and his parental investment.
This social convention operates on absolving women’s past indiscretions by redefining them as a period of learning who she would become. It was her “journey of self-discovery” and she’s “not that person” any more. Cleverly enough this is exactly the same convention and same rationale of women who divorce their husbands later in life to “take the journey of self-discovery” of Eat, Prey, Loveshe passed up when she was younger.
Knowing this, it is also vitally important for men to keep women’s dualistic sexual strategy in mind at every age of her maturity.
Lets not forget the advice of Sheryl Sandberg here:
“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
Open Hypergamy is triumphantly crowed about when women are at their SMV peaks, and sometimes again once that woman has secured her long-term provider or divorced him, but when a woman is in her Epiphany Phase, when she’s anxious and frustrated in securing her own long term provisioning, that is when she will fall back on the social convention that shames men for their own awareness of the same Open Hypergamy they would otherwise flaunt for him.
So, now that we understand the latent purpose of this social convention, let me explain to every gentleman reading – vetting a woman’s sexual past is not just your prerogative, but an absolute imperative to the health of any future relationship you hope to have with her. When you consider the dire risks you are essentially setting yourself up for – risk no woman will EVER acknowledge or appreciate – the single most important thing you can do is vet that woman’s sexual past.
That doesn’t mean you make weak, DLV, overt inquiries about her past. It means you subtly, covertly and discretely pick up on the many cues and tells she will reveal that past with. Most men would rather use a direct approach to this, and while there’s merit to that, it’s far better to do your vetting by drawing out freely offered information. It’s much more honest and reliable. Once you go the direct route the jig is up and she will play the role she thinks you expect from her, not the honest one you need to make your determinations.
Sex is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the height of irony that a woman would place so high a priority on her own sexual experiences while in her SMV peak yet completely disqualify that importance when she gets to the phase where it becomes a liability to her. As a man it is vitally important for you to know whether you’ll be her apex Alpha lover or if your burden of performance will be measured against the ghosts of Alpha men from her sexual past – all while you endure the stresses and joys of raising children with her.
