Hypergamy

Widows & Warbrides

warbrides  

I received the following Tweet from a reader this week:

Hi Rollo, thanks for all of your amazing work. I think one topic that you have not touched upon in detail is the conflict between alpha widowhood and war bride dynamic. If women are constitutionally inclined to move on, then how can they remain sad about their ex alpha lovers? Even if alpha’s SMV was much higher than her, isn’t the whole point of the war bride dynamic is to enable a woman to move on and reproduce without lingering thoughts of her former lovers? This happened to me recently when I had to end a relationship due to unacceptable logistics (long distance). What followed was extreme anxiety on her part about losing me. So this contradicted with what I always hear about women moving on easily.

This was a great question, and one I haven’t addressed before (no, I haven’t written everything), so I thought I’d pick this one apart today.

The TL;DR version is this: Women only ‘widow’ for men that made an Alpha impression on them. If their previous Alpha was somehow ‘killed’ and replaced by a lesser man, their hindbrains resist that man’s authority over her while using her previous Alpha as the lesser man’s SMV (sexual market value) benchmark. In the most extreme examples, a woman who’s been forced to accept the authority of a lesser man who defeated her former Alpha will resist him and/or plot revenge for the idealized lover.

Historical accounts and various cultural fiction are rife with this archetypal story. The woman who is married off to a lesser man or becomes the War Bride of an undeserving rival (usually by subterfuge or sinister means) is an archetype because it reflects women’s deepest evolutionary, existential, fear – to have her Hypergamous sexual selection strategy forcibly chosen for her by a man (or men) who are undeserving or are suboptimal breeding prospects. As I mentioned, this is an existential fear for women; anything less than unilateral control over her own Hypergamous destiny is tantamount to rape. The fear is that she will spend her life raising the child(ren) of a suboptimal man.

War Brides

The premise of the War Brides dynamic is thus: Evolution selected for women who could more easily transition psychologically from one dominant male to another. In our chaotic ancestral past women and girls were a commodity to be preserved for a conquering tribe. While men or boys were either killed or enslaved, fertile age women would be preserved as spoils of conquest for superior, invading, men. Simply put, women have reproductive value – men (and often their sons) were mostly obstacles in the way of resource acquisition and those reproductive opportunities.

That may seem like a bleak proposition to a Blue Pill conditioned mind today. We want to believe in some egalitarian dream of humanism and cooperation, but our evolved, ancestral past is responsible for what we are today in terms of base biological and psychological imperatives. I first proposed this theory in War Brides:

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

A lot of critics of the Red Pill make two key mistakes in their assessment of basic truths. One is that we don’t fully consider the dynamic, and/or two, we think too much about it. The fundamentals we consider about female nature, with respect to women’s psyches, are rooted in our evolutionary past. So, when I deconstruct certain aspects of that nature I have to ask the question, “why would a dynamic be something beneficial to women and/or our species on whole?” When I consider Hypergamy, female solipsism, women’s collectivist mindset, or any number of other characteristics the question I’m going to ask is why is this dynamic still present in modern women, and what are the outcomes of that dynamic in today’s environment?

Look at the obesity epidemic in western cultures today. 68% of adults in the U.S. are overweight today and 34% are morbidly obese. Childhood obesity is at an all time high. Evolutionarily speaking this is the result of how our metabolism evolved to solve certain environmental challenges we faced. Back then food was scarce. Finding a way to insure we fed ourselves and our tribe was at a premium and our biology adapted to give us the best chance of survival. Today this metabolism is a liability in an environment where food is plentiful and what we need to do to get it is much less strenuous. That’s the quick way to illustrate what I’m getting at in the War Brides dynamic:

Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the Paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect to be subjected to. Consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child that could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice. Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it’s women’s innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women. Why should that be? On the face of it you may think that men’s better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness. Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives, why should that be? Because women’s ancestral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

So how does this relate to the Alpha Widow dynamic? Let’s parse that out a bit.

Alpha Widows

Alpha Widows are women who’ve had an Alpha man in their past make such an impression upon them that any man that comes along after him must essentially fight with that impression in order to replace him as the optimal Alpha in her life. This is usually the man a woman pines for from her Party Years. Often he’s the first guy who ever fulfilled her Hypergamous dance card. Generally, this man is at least her perceptual ideal of the sexual selection criteria she was prioritizing during that phase of her life. Usually this guy is her sexual ideal as well. That sexual impact forms a strong psychological attachment because the memories of the sex she had are associated with hormonal triggers. The memories of a significant Alpha male are enough to prompt a physical arousal response in women.

Furthermore, that Alpha impact is so significant it can alter her future sexual strategy for every man who comes after him. This is one reason women generally have a Plan B man on hold should that Alpha ideal not present himself, or should he not be ‘tamable‘ by her in the long term. Women’s long term sexual strategies tend to be punctuated by holding out for their ‘soul mate’ who also happened to be the best sex she’d ever had. Lesser men who follow in his wake are simply contingency plans. In today’s feminine-primary social order, where women are encouraged ‘never to settle for less than they deserve‘, we see generations of women experiencing the consequences of this Alpha widowhood. In fact, we go to great efforts societally to placate to it, to lessen the impact of it, and to plan contingencies for it.

But where does that leave us?

One reason I detailed the War Brides dynamic in my earliest writing was because I’d had so many men ask me this question; ‘Why is it that women can so easily move on after a breakup? We were together for years and it’s like she never even knew me now!‘ The ugly, visceral truth of this is that women are far less convicted to feel remorse, guilt or shame over abandoning (Beta) men who didn’t meet their Hypergamous ideal. We all know the stories of the ‘ride or die‘ girl who would literally do anything for her man. I once had a reader link me a story about a woman who stole a police car whose arrested boyfriend was handcuffed in the back seat. There are definitely women who will help their man bury the bodies. However, that man almost universally is that woman’s Hypergamous, Alpha ideal. And this is where the power of Hypergamy comes into the equation.

Women’s prime reproductive imperative is consolidating in the long term on a man who best embodies her Hypergamous ideal. Even now I’m not sure readers really understand the influence Hypergamy has over women. Even factoring in the War Brides dynamic, there will always be women who will literally kill for a man who best exemplifies what she believes is (or was) the best she could ever do Hypergamously.

I covered some of this in SMV Ratios & Attachment. Hypergamy influences women’s concept of love, so much so that it forms the basis of who they will allow themselves to feel ‘love’ for when it comes to reproductive opportunities. If a man embodies this Alpha ideal no substitute will replace him, unless another man exceeds the previous man’s Alpha impact.

So, how does this modify the War Brides dynamic? Hypergamous imperatives can supersede the War Brides phenomenon in that it incentivizes women to mate guard and even kill a rival to preserve a long term reproductive opportunity with an idealized Alpha man. We can add layers of social and moral doctrines to this (marriage, tribe, religion), but it’s all really embellishments or a cover story for what’s really a biological phenomenon.

Women who monogamously pair with Beta men are far less motivated to feel remorse over that man’s death or replacement by a more Alpha rival. This is where the War Brides dynamic comes in full. Hypergamy never seeks its own level and if a woman’s lesser man is defeated by more Alpha rival this only gives her a better excuse for pivoting into that superior man’s Frame. That may seem duplicitous and self-serving, but this is the ugly, visceral truth, remember? The inverse of this is that Hypergamy dictates that women will only become Alpha Widows for worthy (Alpha) men – and sometimes even the fantasy of that ideal man is enough to replace a lesser man.

So, it follows that the degree to which a woman becomes an Alpha Widow or more easily adopts a War Brides mentality is directly related to what her perception of her former partners was. Regret, remorse and jealousy are reserved for what a woman’s hindbrain believes is her ideal reproductive opportunity. In light of this I’ll have to add some caveats to both the Alpha Widow and War Bride dynamics. Neither are mutually exclusive of the other, and both depend on a woman’s perception of the man (men) involved.

In case you were wondering about the title image here: Dutch and French women who slept with German soldiers during World War II publicly had their heads shaved to shame them for their natural Hypergamous impulses. This is an example of the survival-level conflict between Hypergamy and tribal affiliation.

Past Indiscretions

past_indiscretions

Now that the 21 Convention, 2018, is in the history books it’s time to get back to actually exploring intersexual dynamics rather that talking about exploring them. My speech this year was about the state of the Manosphere and what we can expect from an ever expanding, ever more power-ravenous, Gynocracy in the MeToo era. It’s never been a more dangerous time to be a man who reveals the truths about intersexual dynamics than now. Even if you do so from the most objective perspective you run the risk of censure at best, personal destruction at worst.

One thing I am very thankful of the convention for is the depth and breadth of not just the speakers, but the attendees. Last year I came back with so many new concepts to explore it finished out my year of blog essays. This year the attendance was twice as big and I’ve got a wealth of new material to dig into courtesy of the stories and personal situations men would relate to me. I’ll be doing a more complete breakdown of the convention around the time the video of my talk drops on 21 University. Anthony Johnson has fast tracked this video as well as the Red Man Group Live discussions (there were 3) we did on the bonus 5th day for anyone who stuck around for it.

One of the stories I had a guy hit me with was his making me aware of the black market that’s opened up in the sale of positive pregnancy tests online. There are forums (not even on the dark web) dedicated to convincing “commitment-phobic” men that their girlfriends are pregnant in order to lock them down either in marriage or an LTR. That blackmarket (if you can call it that) also led me to investigating the phenomenon of women covering for their girlfriends’ infidelity or pretending to be an alibi in order to allay any suspicions their Beta boyfriends might have about it. This then led me to another truth about the nature of women:

The Sisterhood will always show solidarity for, provide cover for, or aid and abet a woman trying to optimize Hypergamy,…unless that woman is in direct intrasexual competition with her for the same optimization.

Right now I’m sure there are guys thinking, “Rollo, we know that women can get really brutal when it comes to competing with each other.” And yes that is true; “slut shaming” is almost entirely reserved for women’s intrasexual combat, and there are many other ways women disqualify other women from the sexual marketplace if they feel threatened by that woman’s direct competition. But women evolved to be collectivist and cooperative in our hunter/gatherer past, and this has given rise to a globalized Sisterhood wherein women buy into the narrative of their own victimhood and most understand their gynocentric position of power simultaneously. If there is a prime directive to the social order it’s that all women everywhere are entitled to the best available opportunities to optimize Hypergamy.

Women will almost universally run cover for their sisters’ infidelity, and especially so if they are anonymous and there is little risk attached to their involvement. The rationalization is always the same too; it’s men’s responsibility to “Man Up” and marry a sister and thus subterfuge is justified, or, a woman deserves a shot at hot short term sexual opportunities if that woman is paired with a Beta partner. Either scenario is consolidation of Hypergamy.

Men are never afforded the same luxury of being able to vet women or to abandon one for his own reasons. I constantly get questions from guys asking how to vet a woman for marriage, but the fact that I would be audacious enough to offer advice on this is enough to set most women off. How dare I think that any woman might not be suitable for a long term commitment? To the Sisterhood, that vetting is only ever valid when it comes from another woman, why? Because to women only women should ever have control over Hypergamy and sexual selection. And in a feminine-primary social order a man telling another man that he should pass on a woman for commitment is conflated with misogyny.

Case in point, this story is of a guy who discovers his girlfriend used to be a Sugar Baby and had sex with older men for money in her sexual past. He has plans to break it off with her, but naturally every woman and every Blue Pill simp in the thread thinks he throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This situation isn’t all that uncommon. In fact, with the rise of the internet and a permanent social media digital footprint, combined with Open Hypergamy, it’s become necessary for women to legitimize every woman’s sexual past for fear that their own might disqualify her for a man’s commitment.

So the Sisterhood will cover for infidelity, aid in fraud and deception, keep Beta men ignorant of a woman’s duplicity and support single motherhood if it means that woman can lock down an optimal ideal of Hypergamy or parental investment from a man.

In an age when a woman’s sexual past is part of her digital footprint, a new social convention is needed to absolve her from any preconditions a man may have in vetting her out of his long term investment in her. Solution: Shame men for “judging” her by that sexual history. Men must be shamed as “insecure in their masculinity” if they might ever use a woman’s Party Years against her in a court of marriage. Likewise, women will fall back on the old tropes of traditionalist sexual repression to amp up the victimhood should a man ‘have a problem’ with women’s maturing sexual natures.

A similar situation occurred with the guy in Saving the Best who discovered that his sexually unadventurous wife had some video tapes of herself in amateur porn gangbangs when she “used to be so wild back in college.” His response was Great, I married a slut who fucks me like a prude. This of course sent the Sisterhood apoplectic and he was the one who had the “problem” for committing to and marrying a woman with that kind of past. That he had no knowledge of the videos prior to it made no difference; how dare he judge a woman’s past indiscretions? And then it became and indictment of womankind rather than an indictment of a woman. Men are not allowed to have concerns about a woman’s sexual past when it comes to matters of commitment because it implies a measure of control over Hypergamy.

Long term provisioning is a very serious problem for women’s subconscious Hypergamy. As it stands today a woman’s Epiphany Phase represents the culmination of Hypergamy. It’s vitally important that a woman never be judged for her sexual past if she’s to ever ‘stick the landing’ so to speak. If she follows the Sandbergian plan of Hypergamy she can’t afford to have men judge her for prioritizing Alpha Fucks, short term breeding, in her peak sexual market value years if she’s going to lock down a (hopefully still ignorant) Beta in Waiting. She must stick the landing and cash out of the sexual marketplace just at the right moment, between the ages of 29-31.

During her Epiphany Phase a woman needs to be absolved the ‘indiscretions’ of her Party Years. I’m putting indiscretions in scare quotes because those behaviors are really part of a long term breeding and life strategy. They are anything but indiscretions, they are part of the design.

However, most men have a natural revulsion to women who’ve been with a lot of men. It’s takes a great deal of social conditioning – a lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning – to prepare a man to believe it’s his duty as a man to look past what his instinct is trying to warn him about parentally investing in a woman for whom his paternity might be in doubt. I wrote about this in the War on Paternity, but there is a part of men’s evolved mental firmware that is instinctually suspicious of the certainty of paternity. Our hindbrains want to warn us of bad prospects for a certain paternity with a woman.

partner_count

You’ll notice here that a higher partner count for men is less deleterious than it is for women. I’ll address this fact in a followup to this essay, but for now let’s focus on the effects a higher N-count has for women. Our instinct, it seems, is correct when it warns us that a woman isn’t suitable for a man’s parental investment.

Women with a higher number of sexual partners have more difficulty developing solid attachments, a higher incidence of infidelity and higher rates of divorce. Primarily I see this as being due to the Alpha Widow potential (more lovers, more chance one makes a lasting Alpha impression) and the subconscious comparisons to a past lover. This is a workable theory as to why men adapted for a revulsion (or at least a hesitation) of high N-count women.

This instinctual reservation is a survival adaptation based in men’s need for certainty in paternity. Investment costs and a loss of reproductive opportunity is so high for men in a state of paired monogamy that certainty of paternity became an evolved mental subroutine for men. Men’s biological imperative is to spread seed. This is why we can become aroused on a moment’s stimulation, why we can mentally compartmentalize sex from intimacy, and why we generally err on the side of over-estimating sexual interest in women.

Long term monogamous investment in rearing a child costs a man more than just him following his biological imperative. As such, a certainty of paternity became a key element in that tradeoff for parental investment in a woman. So when women shame a man for even thinking that her sexual past might be indicative of future returns it is literally a woman’s attempt at getting a man to ignore 100,000 years of an evolution that led his ancestors to have him. You don’t just wish away 100,000 years of successful breeding adaptations because it’s impolite for a man to question a woman’s past or the convenience with which she disregards it at a time when her own sexual strategy might benefit most.

This tradeoff exists in direct oppositional conflict with women’s Hypergamy, and in the context of her very limited sexual market value (fertility) peak. Women between 29 and 31 are on the downside of their sexual marketability with respect to locking down a high value man for long term parental investment. While some women can maintain their sexual value longer than others, the decay is undeniably on the downturn with respect to her intrasexual competition and her reproductive viability. She’s gone through her best fertility years focusing most on the visceral side of the Hypergamous equation (short term Alpha seed) and / or investing herself in low ROI monogamy.

In the Epiphany Phase she (and the Sisterhood) knows she can’t afford suitable Beta provisioning men to have revelations about her sexual past affect her viability for long term security.

Hypergamy is in conflict with the male need for certainty of paternity.

As such, the Sisterhood (and its male ‘allies’) unites against any reservations, or shames men for being ‘judgmental’ of her sexual past. This is how Hypergamy fights with men’s paternity imperative. Ultimately it’s a battle of his resources (sunk cost investment) versus her capacity to optimize Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. For more information on this conflict see The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies.

Thus, social conventions must be created to prioritize Hypergamy above Paternity. So, being a Step-Dad makes a man a “hero”. Paternity is legally defined by the mother / wife, and gynocentric legal and medical doctrines restrict doctors from revealing who the real father of a child is to the “dad”. There was a time when being an unwed mother was something society shunned. It was a time when both men and women agreed on a man’s priority of his own paternity. If a young woman became pregnant out of marriage, or if a woman slept with a soldier of an invading army, she was shunned and publicly excoriated. That’s the degree of importance the social order of the time placed on paternity. Now, the Village shames men for ever expecting a child would be his own or that he’d be justified in his concern about a woman’s past.

Now the Village conflates men’s instinctual desire to know paternity (to even put a value on it) with a social construct. It’s not that he’s naturally concerned about paternity, it’s that he learned to be concerned as part of his toxic masculinity social educations.

Finally, I should also add that part of this social convention meant to repress the paternity imperative is about absolving women of the liabilities of a promiscuous past. As I mentioned, men’s reservations inhibit women’s Hypergamous strategies. So men are shamed by women for those reservations, but they are also shamed by Beta male sympathizers (symps). This piling on with the women only aids in the deconstruction of their ow sexual imperatives, but male ‘allies’ used this shame as an extension of their Beta Game in the hopes of identifying themselves better with the feminine (as they were conditioned to). They see the identifying with women’s imperatives as a means to their own reproduction.

Body Language

I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in trouble with this post. One thing I’ve learned from sixteen years of writing in the manosphere is that people take the issue of Looks are very personally. I think there’s something engrained in how our minds evolved to make us aware of where we fit in as far as image is concerned. I think maybe that’s the root of where we get the idea of leagues with respect to sexual market value. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my belief that everyone is keenly aware of their personal conditions on some level of consciousness and how we look to others is part of that awareness.

My friend Tanner Guzy wrote a great book this year titled The Appearance of Power and I learned quite a bit from it with respect to the, often derided, subconscious choices we make in how we present ourselves to others. A lot goes into what we think is the very simple task of dressing ourselves each day and the message we’re conveying to other men, women, our families, our coworkers, our church, etc. We all have at least a peripheral awareness of what we’re communicating with our clothes, our behaviors and our speech.

Another great book I’m presently reading is the new title from Joe Navarro, The Dictionary of Body Language. Joe was one of the speakers at last year’s 21 Convention and I had the pleasure of talking with him for a bit there. For 25 years he worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and this book is a very good resource for a lot of reasons. I’m not sure Joe likes being affiliated with the manosphere, but there’s no doubt that what he’s studied and written about for so long can be an invaluable tool for reading the sub-communications of women in Game applications. 

Way back in 2011 I wrote a brief essay called Learn to Read. At that time my focus was on emphasizing the need to be aware of the information a guy could glean from his surroundings, understanding the social environment and also the sub-communications a woman might be relaying to him in that moment. We tend to take it for granted, but there is a lot of information our brains need to process in social settings. For the most part our subconscious minds push out the background noise and less important information to our peripheral awareness so our conscious minds can focus on what we think is most important. Sometimes the part we take for granted, the information that our subconscious processes can be at least as important as what our consciousness is sorting out.

I’m calling attention to this process (as well as Joe’s work) because I want to stress the importance our Instinctual Process plays in interpreting what we see with respect to social interactions, but more importantly for our purposes, when we see men and women interact with one another. For the past 12 years my career in the liquor and gaming industries has put me in the unique position of being able to people-watch and study the unspoken communications that goes on between men and women in settings where they’re primed to apply their interpersonal skills (or lack of). However, it wasn’t until I started contrasting what I was seeing with what I understood about behavioral psychology, evo-psych and the sexual strategies men and women evolved for.

And this, this is the part where I get myself in trouble. In that time I think I’ve developed a pretty good ability to read what men and women are communicating with their clothing, expressions, posture, physical positioning, etc. and interpreting it with a Red Pill Lens. I get in trouble with this because, like I said, people tend to take my reading into things very personally. Even if I’m reading the photograph of a couple they know nothing about they associate something in the image that with how they perceive themselves.

Most of us were taught from an early age never to “judge a book by its cover.” We were taught it’s wrong to be judgmental and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. This has never really sat well with me, but you run the risk of sounding catty when you judge a person by their looks or whatever it is they’re doing in a picture. They say you sound like a gossipy woman, or else it’s supposedly some indication that you’re projecting your own insecurities onto whoever it is you might be critical of. This is unfortunate because our Instinctual interpretive process makes judgment calls all the time in our peripheral awareness. We all make comparisons in our hindbrains, it’s just impolite to give voice to them. This does nothing to help us objectively assess what sub-communications are taking place.

So, fair warning, I’m going to make some reads on some pictures here and if what I interpret seems a little self-serving or judgmental just know that I’m doing my best to stay objective.

For the past 3 months I’ve gotten into the habit of reading the images of various couples that guys on Twitter have been sending me. If you want a brief primer for this I talked about it with Tim Wenger last August here. For the most part these guys wanted me to determine what they were seeing were Alpha Tells or Beta Tells in the body language between the couple. In the majority of these shots, the Beta male body language was fairly evident even to the untrained eye. What was less evident was what the woman’s sub-communications were conveying.

Leaning In

Of the more than a hundred shots I read, the number one most common position for men was the lean in. This posture is something Roissy once called attention to as the hallmark of a Beta subconsciously manifesting his mindset in his body language:

The lean-in is easily identifiable, and while I don’t think it is always a Beta Tell (depends on context) it’s certainly the starting point for other manifestations of men with a necessitous subconscious. What I mean by that is that the lean-in is a physical display that illustrates how a man’s subconscious has decided that his woman’s Frame is the dominant one in the relationship. He feels the compulsion to put himself into her space as his natural impulse.

It’s also important to bear in mind that when we are photographed with others, in this case women, we are, or would like to be intimate with, there is a subconscious recognition that anyone viewing the image will infer a relationship context. More on this later, but for now keep in mind that some of these inferences will be related to mate guarding behaviors.

The reflexive critique of this lean-in is usually “Well, that’s just that one shot” or “The photographer told him to lean in” to which I can only say that the predominance of couples shots, candid and staged alike, most consistently pose a man as the leaner.

Lean out

The counter to this leaning-in is a woman leaning out or away from the man. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken conflict of hindbrains going on. A (Beta) man leans in to find inclusion and acceptance in a woman’s Frame while her own hindbrain instinctively reacts and attempts to lessen any inference of intimate acceptance to a larger audience.

Above are some examples of the lean-out. In some of these the latent message the woman’s hindbrain is conveying is almost “Get him offa me!”, but with a smile so as not to be too obvious. Also notice the positioning of the free hand in most of these pictures. We’d like to rationalize this as a gesture of affection after the fact, but in the context of these shots the unspoken message is a defensive one against the man’s lean-in. Again, this is one more manifestation of a war playing out between the couple’s subconscious.

The Eyes Have It

I also want to draw attention to the facial expressions of these women. Notice the commonalities in gaze direction and the message their eyes and expressions are sub-communicating. Women are keenly aware of the permanency of an image and what that image communicates. I’ve pointed out in many a prior essay that women’s brains evolved to give them a much fuller capacity for communication and a sensitivity to nuances than men. Men prioritize the content (information) of communication while women prioritize context (feeling) of communication. This is a truth we have to consider when we analyze the expressions and physical communication of women in photos.

I joked with the guy who sent me the second image here that she looks like she wants to bang me, not the guy doting on her. There’s more than a bit of truth in that assessment. Women today are hyperaware of how an image can be used to facilitate or handicap their sexual strategy. It’s no accident or casual glance when a woman directs her attention towards the viewer. It’s not a person behind the camera that she has in mind when she knows she being photographed, it’s the potential audience – an audience that’s grown exponentially in the age of social media. 

In all these shots the woman’s attention is on how she will be perceived by any viewer of the shot. In some other images I was sent the woman’s focus was on anything other than the men whose only focus was her. In advertising there’s a presumption that when two or more people appear in an ad the one with the presumed dominance is always the one looking away or out at the viewer. The submissive party was the one whose attention is directed at the dominant person. The dominant person is the one telling the story in the ad. A common complaint among feminists about magazine ads in the 60s through the 80s was that it was women who were always disempowered as a result of being posed in subservient positions where they focused on a male in the ad image. The only exception to this was in what feminists still refer to as the Male Gaze wherein the dominance a woman was afforded was limited to her sexual viability and her capacity to hold the attention of any men in the ad and men viewing the ad. 

These concepts are an interesting contrast to the millions upon millions of photos girls and women post of themselves on social media every day. Think of the gender power dynamics in all these shots. It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but the reflexive impulse a majority of women default to is one of advertising themselves for potentially better options in the sexual marketplace.

Whether or not this is a practiced or unconscious tact, the latent purpose of women’s responses to their men’s Beta Tells is to advertise their sexual availability to the audience. Some guys have said that women default to these expressions as a means of ego aggrandizement and I’m willing to accept that there’s undoubtedly an element of egoism (certainly solipsism) involved. No doubt women often enjoy the envious attentions of other women on Instagram in the right context. However, these ‘ego shots’ almost universally center on the woman in the power dynamic. In each of these images the power belongs to the woman.

Mate Guarding

Another common Beta Tell is the death grip pose many men will opt for in their couple’s photos. This is a position where the man locks an arm around his woman or drapes an interposing forearm barrier between the viewer and the woman who is trying to coyly escape his mate guarding message. 

In a lot of these the woman often has her hand on his hand as if trying to pry him off to release her. It seems like a reciprocation of affection – similar to the hand on the chest pushing him away – but this is afterthought rationalization. Death grip is a clingy positioning, but again the battle between his and her subconscious centers on the guy mate guarding and her own subconscious desire to broadcast her sexual availability in spite of him.

I Love Mommy

In almost all of these images the male is focused intently on the woman. From a Red Pill perspective, I see this as a manifestation of how these men have been Blue Pill conditioned to make their women their Mental Point of Origin.  Even in the images where the man is looking at the camera his sub-communication is one of clear abasement to, or guarding of, his most important priority.

However, the most disturbing trend I’ve seen in couple’s photos is what I’ve dubbed the I Love Mommy pose. Maybe it’s my instinctual interpretation of it or maybe its’ an obvious Freudian connotation, but in these shots the Beta assumes and almost childlike position of kissing on his woman. 

Okay, so the last one is a press shot, but you get the idea. You can see the I Love Mommy positioning in a few of the prior photos above as well.  I could probably dedicate an entire essay to all of the psychological implications of this phenomenon. I had one critic on Twitter ask me if I genuinely thought this tendency was due to unresolved issues these men had with their mothers; it wasn’t until later he admitted he had a tendency to do the same and was honestly concerned. 

I’m sure the possibility exists, but more importantly I think this habit is due to men internalizing the myth that vulnerability is endearing to women. There’s this persistent lie that accompanies the vulnerability myth. That’s the lie that men can let their guard down and ‘relax’ around the woman they feel securely paired with. As a result they mentally revert to the boy who didn’t need to qualify himself for his mother’s love and they regress to a subconscious comfort in that vulnerability they believe will endear them to their woman. They sub-communicate all this in the I Love Mommy position.

I’ll have to return to this Mother Issues concept in a future essay, but for now, how do you suppose a woman’s hindbrain imperative for Hypergamy will perceive this habit, particularly in light of how image conscious women are in the Instagram generation? My first impression is that it would be one of revulsion, apprehension and resistance. Nothing turns off a woman more than a man indicating that he’d rather be her child than her lover or husband.

Alpha Tells

So, if all of this reads like the overly-critical projection and nitpicking I told you most critics will accuse me of earlier, maybe I can assuage your own judgment by presenting some Alpha sub-communications examples here. Finding these examples can be a tall order in an age where any man photographed in a position not entirely focused on his woman runs the risk of being called ‘toxically’ masculine. Today, men who are confident enough to default to body language that communicates they are their own mental point of origin get accused of ‘abuse’ or at least being self-centered. But as you’ll see this isn’t such a bad thing.

The best example of Alpha Tells in couples photos focus on the man being the center of importance in the shot. Yes, this is Vincent Cassel (51) and his wife Tina Kunakey (21). I have no doubt some hater will come up with some reason in the comments why Vince doesn’t align with whatever their interpretation of Alpha is, but for our purposes these images illustrate the opposite of a lot of the Beta sub-communications we just went through. So try to look past the celebrity and see what’s being displayed here.

First off, notice how Tina’s focus of attention is always on Vince. Women who hold genuine admiration for their men consistently make them the story in photos. Even in the shot where they look at each other her focus is on him. It’s not difficult to assess the power dynamic in their relationship, but you can also feel a genuine desire emanating from Tina.

Also, women who genuinely admire their men are unconcerned that their actions in a shot might be read as subservient or ego-abasing by women’s audience. I’d go so far as to suggest that the attention a woman receives from a man her Hypergamous hindbrain confirms as Alpha is far more valuable to her ego than any lower quality attention she might temporarily enjoy by appeasing her audience. Much of this observation is rooted in the Desire Dynamic. Hypergamy cannot afford to have a high SMV man be confused about her desire or motives. A woman who is proud of the association with man she’s paired with is less concerned about the perception other women might have of her actions – in fact, she’ll convert any disparaging opinion of them into a point of pride, if that man is above her own sexual market value.

When a little girl thought a little boy on the playground was cute her reflexive response to him was not something she had learned to consciously control at that age. That response is often reflected in the expressions of adult women when when their peripheral awareness of an attractive man connects with their Hypergamous hindbrain. The biting of the lip, the beaming admiration, the laser eye focus and the hopeful smile followed by a coy embarrassment of what she’s doing when she regains her composure are all the physical cues of a woman whose primary concern is the man she’s with.

Now, contrast these images with the earlier ones in which the men are clearly the hangers-on of the women in those photos. I’ve mentioned before that a natural Alpha man is almost never aware of his own Alphaness and that’s what really stands out in these photos – the men aren’t trying to evoke the reflexive responses of the women. They fluidly (almost Zen-like) prompt these reaction in women. There is no pretense or the obvious mugging for the audience that you see in shots where the Frame is clearly being directed by the woman while the hapless Beta tries to prove how in love he is by kissing on her while she finds something more interesting to occupy herself with. When a woman admires her man he is literally all she can think about.

In closing here I want to reiterate that I’m aware that all of this is going to come off as self-serving or catty. It’s impossible to objectively interpret body language without someone resorting to point & sputter insults about how they think you’re just being petty or you’re jealous of some celebrity’s life. Be that as it may the discouraging of anyone attempting to understand sub-communications only serves the the party that has the most to gain from a larger ignorance of them. So I hope this breakdown has provided at least some useful references to consider your own, or your woman’s, default behavior when the cell phone cams come out at a party.

But if you learn nothing else from this post, and you need one take-home message, please, whatever you do, don’t be this guy in your next couples shot.

Primordial Archetypes

This morning I was made aware of another example of open Hypergamy. A Russian Alpha Widow admitted to her duplicity in switching her Beta husband’s sperm with that of her ex lover’s in her IVF insemination. Now, at the risk of throwing red meat to the wolves here, I wanted to dissect this situation a bit to explain a larger concept I’ve been considering lately. It would be enough to use this situation as one more example of women’s prime directive – Hypergamy before all else – but, there’s more involved here that illustrates the sociological reach that Hypergamy has for women.

You see, Yana Anokhina, 38, couldn’t have pulled off her deception of Maxim Anokhin without enlisting the aid of Dr. Liya Kazaryan and her staff in swapping out his sperm for that of Yana’s former lover; the Alpha for whom she was ‘widowed’. I’m not entirely sure that her former lover (now her current relationship) was aware of the swap, but there’s no question about Yana’s motives.

Ms Anokhina has not spoken about the swap but reports say she wanted the father of her baby to be the man she loved – not her husband.

‘It was found out during the investigation in court that Maxim’s wife Yana was the one who initiated the process of replacing her husband’s biological material,’ reported Vesti.

‘Allegedly, she wanted to give birth to a child by a man with whom she was in love, and her husband was the one who paid the costs.’

So this isn’t just as simple as she got knocked up by her Alpha lover and tricked her Beta husband into believing the inseminated sperm was his own. She had to actually go to the trouble of collecting two samples of sperm, convincing the IVF clinic’s doctor and staff into making the swap (and then withholding the truth from the father) and then carrying the pregnancy to term and keeping her husband ignorant of the ruse for a year. This may seem like the deviousness of a particular woman, but remember, she had to enlist the confidence of Dr. Kazaryan and other clinicians (I presume also female).

And she does all this with a laugh.

I’ve written quite a bit on what I call the Sisterhood Über Alles and this is one more example of how that collective female consciousness intuitively understands and both consciously and unconsciously promotes the interests of the Feminine Imperative – even for unfamiliar, anonymous women.

Now you might say, “Well Rollo, this is just one horrible example of a few women who got in cahoots to deceive a hapless Beta chump. Not all women are like this.” Or I’m sure the more morally conscious of ‘red pill women’ would simply point out that they would never do such a thing and convince us that ‘quality women’ regularly police their own Hypergamous impulses – these Russian women just lack their moral superiority. Well, be that as it may, it’s not too difficult to find online forums dedicated to women collaborating with other women in order to trick a man into marrying a woman via false pregnancy claims. In fact there’s a lucrative black market for positive pregnancy tests sold to women wanting to press their boyfriends into a marriage commitment by way of a false-positive pregnancy scare.

The fact behind all this still remains – women evolved for a subconscious, collective duplicity when it comes to optimizing on Hypergamy.

We can see this in popular culture; a culture defined by the Feminine Imperative now. Dalrock once said we have replaced the monogamous marriage model of child rearing with the child support model of child rearing today. I believe he’s right, but how is that child support model effected today and how doe it align with women’s evolved, instinctual predilections?

Humankind evolved from small tribal collectives, but in each collective there were commonalities of behaviors that developed similarly to solve various personal and collective (tribal) problems. For instance, an instinctive (unlearned) fear of snakes or spiders in women is an evolved part of humankind’s collective mental firmware. A small boys natural propensity to throw an object with strength and accuracy might be another example.

How women interact today in what I call the Sisterhood is a gestalt of the various instinctive behaviors that the women of our tribal ancestors developed to aid them in collective support as well as ensuring long-term security in reproduction. In other words, women evolved to do exactly what Dr. Kazaryan did, and so many other women in various “trick him into marrying you” forums do, to enable another woman’s sexual strategy. From an evolutionary perspective it follows that women who aided their ‘sisters’ in Hypergamy would themselves be aided and insure that this archetypal behavior became a characteristic of women’s collectivist nature.

I once watched a video of some daytime women’s talk show that centered on how women could justifiably trap a man into commitment by essentially lying to him about a faked pregnancy. I apologize for not having a link to it here, but while I was looking for it on YouTube I was inundated with videos of shows on this topic – I literally couldn’t find the one I was thinking of because there were so many returns. Watching this show I was hit by just how many women in the audience rallied behind the women doing the ‘trapping’ and the myriad justifications offered to allay any feelings of guilt, remorse or doubts about having a child.

This is particularly emphasized if the ‘father’ in question fulfills an ideal of women’s collective Hypergamy. To the collective hivemind of women, a woman is, by nature, entitled to a child with the most perfect father (high SMV) she can attract. Remember, shows and online forums like this are only small representative examples of that global Hypergamous archetypal expectation and the support women offer each other to optimize Hypergamy. I’ve stated before the the Sisterhood Über Alles (above all) transcends all considerations of tribe, race, religion and even political stripe. All women are part of ‘team woman‘ before any other affiliation; this is how the Feminine Imperative has remained a social influence since our hunter/gatherer beginnings. As we’ve progressed from small tribalist beginnings to larger collectives, to nations and now to globalism, this female collectivism has expanded to encompass the totality of womankind.

Love Me Vampire, Fuck Me Werewolf

Anyone who’s been reading my work for a while is probably scratching their heads as to why I’m referring to the concept of ‘archetypes’ here. As most of my readers know, I’ve never been a fan of Carl Jung. I’ve written about why this is a few times and I’ll probably write a more comprehensive essay about it in the coming year, but suffice to say that while Jung might be synonymous with the new agey metaphysical concept of archetypes, it was from anthropology that he lifted the term and that’s the basic reference I’m using here. That said, I don’t necessarily disagree with Jungian archetypes, it’s at the point where the concept takes on metaphysical aspects that I part ways with them.

However, the idea of archetypes is necessary to explain the last bit of the puzzle here, because it’s my belief that a primordial understanding of Hypergamy is part of our collective consciousness and unconsciousness. I say collective consciousness because since the time of the Sexual Revolution our global understanding of intersexual dynamics has become part of our social discourse. When I refer to something like Open Hypergamy I’m talking about the almost triumphant, open embrace of women’s sexual strategy. The generations that came after the Sexual Revolution scarcely remember that there was a time when intersexual truths we take for granted now weren’t something that was discussed in polite conversation. Hypergamy, while unconsciously understood, was secretive. A woman who other women called a ‘gold digger’ was disparaged by women not on moral grounds, but rather because she was open about the sexual strategy all women employ and they’d rather be kept secret so as to use it effectively.

In 2018 it’s almost quaint to think that women would be coy about Hypergamy. With the advent of the internet it became impossible for women to keep Hypergamy concealed, and really, why would they care to in an age when the necessary provisioning-side of Hypergamy is veritably insured? But it wasn’t always so obvious. Up until the mid 1960s the understanding of Hypergamy was an unconscious knowledge. Certainly it was discussed and written about by men contemplating the duplicitous nature of women. Ancient religious texts are rife with proverbs warning against the nature of women, so the basics of Hypergamy were something our tribal ancestors we’re well aware of.

I received this Tweet from a reader a few days ago:

This guy’s ‘revelation’ prompted me to consider the primordial understanding we have of Hypergamy. I’ve read dozens of articles by, and listened to dozens more interviews of, ‘popular psychologists’ who explain the commonalities of our classic human stories and myths. I got into this topic in Storytelling. The basic premise is that our common evolution has led to common themes in all human stories. The same elements and the same character archetypes pursue the same motives from culture to culture. Yet all of these commonalities are centered on similar aspects of our evolved mental firmware. The hero, the villain, good vs. evil, the wise old sage, the beautiful damsel to be saved, ect. are all founded on common human development. They are semi-conscious expressions of what our evolution has embedded in our mental firmware.

Now, what if I told you that the reality of women’s Hypergamous nature is also a part of that collective consciousness?

My theory is this: human beings have an innate understanding of the Alpha Seed – Beta Need nature of intersexual dynamics. On some level of consciousness we know, we feel, that it’s true, how it functions and why does. As a result, social institutions (religion and familial) created moral strictures around this unconscious knowledge to buffer against the worst effects of it on society. Only after the Sexual Revolution and men ceding virtually unilateral control of Hypergamy to women did these strictures change.

The concepts of men who represent Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are similarly part of this instinctual understanding of Hypergamy. These too are archetypes, but more so, they form the basis of more complex male archetypes (love me Vampire, fuck me Werewolf). They are the men women want to fuck and the men women want to be provided for by. And we can trace the root of these archetypes through our evolution and even the evolution of other primates. These Hypergamous archetypes then manifest themselves in our era-specific, cultural specific, stories, narratives, mythology, etc.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

On last Saturday’s Red Man Group we took a call from a woman who has apparently just discovered the “red pill school of thought” and looked up what ever convoluted definitions she could find from the ‘normie web’ to better understand it. For context, the whole exchange began around the 2:04:00 mark here, but the bit I want to dissect I’ve cued up to 2:09 in the above video. The Red Pill as a praxeology is often something most uninitiated people don’t have the patience to really want to understand. So when they’re confronted with a Red Pill truth that conflicts with some ego-invested belief they often just resort to what I call “point and sputter” – they spit out some school yard taunt, tell you how unbelievable it is anyone could ever believe such a thing in this day and then move along to whatever ideological site they’re comforted by.

Credit where it’s due, this woman (and I apologize for not getting her name) at the very least was prompted to ask some questions about how we come to whatever misattributed ideas she read were what it is we think. Listen to the whole exchange for context. In the beginning I was asked the standard “what do you tel your daughter about all of this?” as if this is going to somehow shame me back down to earth, but the part she was most distraught over was the idea that “women are only valuable for what they look like”.

My response to her was based on an essay I wrote 4 years ago titled Separating Values. In that piece I tried to outline how women today have trouble separating their sexual market value from their self-perceived personal worth:

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 [Robin] 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.

Listening to this woman’s concerns, it’s a fairly common refutation and one we come to expect from a mindset that presumes men callously objectify women out of hand, or due to their being taught to be so by a chauvinistic toxic masculinity. Women cling to this because it sounds right and reinforces the victimhood narrative that defines the collective identity of the Sisterhood. So when they read it or see it openly embraced, or spoken about men in a positive context it’s confirmation of an offense they want to believe is endemic in men. Thus, we get the “literally shaking”, sound of a quavering voice.

However, all of this gets in the way of women really understanding that they’ve been conditioned to conflate their personal worth with their sexual market value. As I mentioned in my response, a woman can be a wonderful humanitarian, a great mother, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone who adds value to the depth and breadth of humankind, but it won’t make her look any better in a bikini. And that is where sexual market value starts for women when it comes to men’s arousal and attraction. For as long as I’ve been writing this blog I’ve tried to explain this in as simple a way as possible; men and women are different. Part of our differences is that what constitutes sexual market value for one sex is not an equal evaluation for the other. For as much as the equalist mindset pervades our social consciousness, the reality is men and women are different in many fundamental ways.

One reason Red Pill awareness in men gets vilified by women is because it nakedly exposes, discusses and develops sexual and life strategies around some very Darwinistic and unflattering realities of intersexual dynamics based on those differences. But exposing these differences is only offensive to this social order because there is a presumption of a blank-slate equalism that’s been embedded into every aspect of our gender understanding for almost 70 years now. This offensiveness is less about the actual nuts and bolts of evolution, biology and psychological differences between men and women, but more so it’s about the ego-invested idea that men and women should be blank-slate, functional equals in all respects. Even this presumption is a horse-shit cover story for the latent purpose of feminism floating the lie of “equality” – fundamentally disempowering men so women can aspire to be their masters in various ways.

The woman from our discussion expressed this barely containable angst that men only value her as a sexual object, and it’s important to suss out the reasoning for this confusion and rage. As I mentioned, the problem women have is an inability to separate their sexual market value from their personal value a ‘basic human being‘. A quote I’m known for is “virtue is anti-seductive.” No guy ‘virtues’ a woman into bed, and while I get push back for devaluing the importance of virtue occasionally, what I don’t get is any disagreement from men or women on that point. Virtue, intelligence, honor, duty, wisdom and any number of other esoteric features that would make a man a terrific human being do nothing (or sometimes work against him) for his raw visceral sexuality that women are aroused by. For men, however, these traits and many more will definitely add to his attractiveness as a long term prospect for women.

In men, affluence, status, intelligence, improvisation, creativity, ambition, drive, perseverance, humor, positive-conventional masculinity, and many more aspects make this man an attractive choice for a long term relationship with women. These are attributes that contribute to a man’s sexual market value, but they are incomplete without a raw, visceral physical component. Hypergamy serves two masters, Alpha seed and Beta need – and as such it hates the one and loves the other depending on what a woman’s most pressing necessity happens to be at that point in her life. Women have an innate, limbic understanding of what makes a man a complete package – a great catch.

Where this and most other women fail is that their own Fempowerment conditioning teaches them that what makes a man attractive, what makes his SMV appealing to women must necessarily be what makes for her own personal value and sexual market value. The reason this woman is shaking here is because this conditioning has convinced her and generations of women to build a life predicated on a fallacy: What makes her a “good person” should necessarily make her attractive and arousing to men. This is a great falsehood that is the root of many of the gender conflicts and misunderstandings we see around us today.

Gendered Differences in Attraction

The things that make a woman’s sexual market value high are not the same things make her sense of personal worth high. Yet, this is exactly what the Feminine Imperative conditions women to believe and seeks to shame men for not complying with this fallacy. When men opt for younger, hotter, tighter at all ages of their own maturity, the visceral message is clear – it makes no difference what a woman’s personal value is when it comes to sexual valuation. Where women fall short is they presume that men cannot appreciate women for anything but their sexual value.

This is an interesting dynamic since the Imperative teaches women never to implicitly do anything for a man.

The prime directive of feminism for the past 50 years has been founded on women striving to achieve the ideal of the Strong Independent Woman® (SIW). This SIW ideal is the carrot that gets the mules to pull the cart. That ideal is never fully attainable because if it were it would make an end state for feminism a realizable goal rather than the self-perpetuating social mechanism it is. The SIW ideal is intentionally ambiguous, but the concept is based on selling women the idea that they can not only “have it all” but they can be it all too. The ‘independence’ feminism sells predicated on being a self-sustaining, self-satisfying, autonomous ‘thing’ that doesn’t need for anything. A woman is every bit as good a feminine role model as she is a masculine one, ergo, she has no need for men beyond the physical aspect. In fact, an independence from men, from any form of dependency on men, has been part of the feminist charter since Seneca Falls in 1848.

From a Red Pill perspective, and in my opinion, this independence from men has been the single most damaging aspect of feminism in its history. Men and women evolved to be complements to the other and in evolutionary terms are far stronger together than apart. Each compensates for the one’s innate weaknesses with the other’s innate strengths. Feminism preaches two lies in this respect – the first being that a woman can “have it all”, but also she can be an autonomous being with no intrinsic needs beyond what she can provide for or address herself. The lie is that she “don’t need no man” when a hundred thousand years of evolution says different. Men and women need each other, but it’s feminism that’s selling the lie that they don’t.

The ironic part about this socialized lie is that in emancipating women from the ‘dependency’ of men feminism has founded the basis of ‘having it all’ on how closely a woman can emulate a man. The definition of a successful Strong Independent Woman is how closely she can replicate the success of men. This ideal for SIW success is based on a masculine ideal. As feminism has refocused women’s goals on these masculine ideals it has systematically altered the definition of femininity to align with its ideal of ‘success’.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

As part of that new masculine ideal of female success, along came the concept of the Alpha Female. I’ve read dozens of articles about this fantasy creature; how she’s a boss who takes no shit and turns companies around from the brink of bankruptcy by virtue of being female. A woman of the future who emulates and exceeds the successes of any apex-male CEO of those sexist Fortune 500 companies. Even if she’s not a high powered exec, the match (literally) of any man, women still love to imagine themselves in this “alpha” role in their own little worlds.

“I’m an Alpha Female, and maybe I’m not a jet setter, but I’m a Type A personality and as such I’m headstrong, a go-getter woman who knows what she wants.”

This sloganized mental model is part of the new Strong Independent Woman® costume that feminism is selling to women today.

If you’re a woman who’s bought into the Confidence Porn narrative that’s so popular today, allow me to ruin that image for you. There is no such thing as an “alpha” female – at least not in the respect of the idealistic Fempowered fantasy you think applies to you. The Feminine Imperative likes to convince women that they are ‘Alpha’ using that same masculine model definitions I detailed above here. The Strong Independent Woman meme only holds up insofar as it emulates masculine success and a masculine defined concept of ‘Alpha’. By this definition every woman has a potential to be an ‘alpha’ female in her own little way. Like I said, the Confidence Porn women gobble up is so tasty because it’s so achievable – all you have to do is cop the “I’m the boss, I’m a Type A person” attitude, put some foam inserts in the shoulders of your ‘power suit’ and you too can be Alpha because you say so and you walk the same walk as an Alpha Male.

The push for female-primacy has conditioned generations of women to expect an entitled, default respect, and a deference to their authority from men. They’re told at every opportunity from the time they’re 5 years old that they can do anything, have it all, be it all, and they’re the “natural leaders of the future”. By extension this leads women to the Alpha Female trope.

Ironically, the same people who love to ridicule the idea of ‘Alpha Males’ completely accept the concept of an Alpha Female. They’ll make funny videos ridiculing the Red Pill for using ‘alpha’ as a referential term – “These jokers think they’re wolves or Silver Back Gorillas, hur hur!” – but they’ll eagerly embrace the idea of an ‘alpha’ female. That conditioned deference of the feminine makes it believable; and they like the idea that identifying with women’s delusions of empowerment might get them laid.

Attribution Bias Error

The error that women and feminism make in the ‘Alpha Female’ respect is an attribution bias error. Women are conditioned to believe that if they value the aspects of what makes men attractive, what makes them a good pairing, that men must also value those traits in women. If status, power, social proof, affluence, careerism, drive, etc. is what gets them hot for men (in the long term) then possessing those traits themselves must also be attractive in the reverse. Unfortunately for women, they’re painfully (but slowly) learning that men and women are in fact different and the lie of egalitarian equalism has essentially cost them a future with a husband, children and family living.

In order to counter this harsh reality an industry in biotech egg-freezing has sprung up around the very real female insecurity that these confident Alpha Women wont find a suitable man to start a family with now that they are well past the Wall. Feminine-primary society is capitalizing on this fear.

But the reverse is true; men’s sexual selection criteria is far more simplistic than women’s. From an evolved, naturalist perspective men select women based on looks and sexual availability – and on a subconscious level women know this, yet they rationalize that men should be interested in their coequal professionalism, status and any number of intrinsic qualities they believe they possess. The root of this misunderstanding is once again the socialized lie of egalitarian, blank-slate equalism. Only now women expect that if they invest themselves in the same pursuits as Alpha men that this should compensate for their lack of physical appeal. If men and women are functional equals what defines male dominance should also define female dominance. Evolution says differently.

The woman on the left (Reneé Sommerfield) is the true Alpha female by the standards of evolutionary realities. The woman on the right (Sheryl Sandberg) is what our gynocentric social order would have men believe should be considered an ‘alpha’ female. This is the conflict that’s at the heart of so many manufactured crises of attraction for women and the failure of their long-term plans to have a family.

The Alpha Female is really the woman who best embodies what men’s evolved, biological imperatives determine what makes her an attractive breeding and long-term mate choice. Men’s criteria is very simple; fitness, youth, assertive sexuality, playfulness, conventional femininity and genuine desire to please him. Beyond this, submission, respect, nurturing (potential mothering qualities), a natural deference to male authority, humility, admiration and an unobligated desire to recognize that man as her complementary partner are just some of the long-term attributes that make a woman someone a man might want to invest himself in a family with.

Unfortunately all of this criteria is counter to the message ‘alpha‘ Females are taught are valuable today. They are taught that anything a woman might do for the expressed pleasure of a man is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman® meme. The presumption is that a desire to meet any of this criteria is a failure on the part of a woman who demands to be the ‘equal’ of a man. Even acknowledging the innate, complementary natures of men and women is an affront to the equalist narrative. Furthermore, any man who would base (much less express) his own decision making criteria as such is shamed via social conventions. The narrative is that he must be needy, or threatened by a “strong woman” or he must want this woman to be his Mommy substitute. All of this is a social mechanic meant to force fit that natural complementary criteria into the box of egalitarian equalism.

Value Added

I don’t write for a female readership per se. In fact, I don’t really direct my writing towards any audience, but in this instance I want to end here with a message for my female readers. Take this message to the bank: the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, not adversarial. But that adversarial feeling you get when you read me describing some unflattering aspect of female nature is the product of your own Blue Pill conditioning that’s taught you the lie of egalitarianism-as-female-empowerment. If you truly want to ‘empower‘ yourselves set aside your self-importance, look inside yourselves and ask this question –

What is it about me that a man would find attractive from a naturalistic perspective?

What do I possess that a man would truly believe is Value Added?

That may feel a bit counterintuitive to you, but understand that the reason this introspection is alien or offensive to you is because you’ve been conditioned to believe that your masculine qualities are what men should find attractive about you. You turn this offense back on men and make it their fault for not finding your ‘alpha femaleness’ the root of their attraction to you. Is the idea of changing yourself, to add value to your package, for the pleasure of a man a source of anger for you? Why is that?

I see far too many otherwise beautiful women who destroy themselves on the lie of the ‘alpha’ female and a never ending struggle to perfect an equalist archetype in themselves. They rail on about infantile men, or bemoan that men are afraid to ask them out, or ask “Where are all the good guys nowadays?” Understand that these efforts to shame men into finding something attractive about you based on your masculine criteria for attraction will always fail; leaving you a lonely childless middle aged wreck all because you refused to accept that you need to be someone worth marrying.

Men and women are better together than they are apart. We evolved to be complements to the other. But, feminism, the Feminine Imperative and an endemic Fempowerment culture have taught you to believe “you are enough”, you are complete, you don’t need a man because you can satisfy all of your own needs. This is the most damning lie ever perpetrated on womankind – that you can be it all – and only when it’s too late do women realize that they’ve been had.

Blue Pill Trauma

Something I’m asked a lot is,…

“How do you unplug a guy from the Matrix? All of this Red Pill awareness about intersexual dynamics has radically changed / saved my life for the better!  I want to let my friends, my brothers, my dad, know about how this knowledge will help them in their relationships, with the women their involved with, and dealing with women in life in general.

This stuff is SO IMPORTANT. But I run into such resistance from even my close friends and family. What can I do? I want to give these guys your book and discuss it rationally with them. I want to pass on this awareness like you encourage, but it’s like they’re just unwilling to see the truth. They don’t even want to talk about it. They just want to persist in doing shit that’s frustrating them and dealing with women from a blue pill perspective. Rollo, how do I help my brother?”

There was a time when I was a moderator on the SoSuave forums when we would discuss exactly this question. The frustration of knowing that your brother or your best friend could be living such a better life if only they would open their eyes and see how they’ve been trapped in a way of thinking about intersexual relations that they were conditioned to accept from a very early age. Believe me, I still get frustrated today. I see stories about how a guy like the one in the discussion above here is on the verge of despondency or suicide because they’re unable or unwilling to consider anything outside the box that the Blue Pill will allow for.

That’s a pretty serious thought. Blue Pill conditioning, and a guy’s capacity to break away from it, is literally a matter of life and death. Now, imagine you’re a Red Pill aware man and you have the experience of seeing your best friend or brother’s descent into relationship madness only because his ego-investments in the Old Set of Books wont permit him to think any other way. They’d rather put a noose around their neck than reconsider their investments in how things ought to be between men and women.

She’s My Everything

We’re going to come back to this question later in this essay, but now I’d like you to have a look at the IM exchange I had a reader make me aware of on Twitter this week. I apologize for the resolution; the tweet was deleted not long after I commented on it and I had to rely on screen captures. What you’re looking at here is an exchange between a very invested Blue Pill guy and the thought process guys like this typically go through when the woman they’ve made their ‘everything’ wants them gone. There’s a lot going on in this and I wanted to parse it out here. When you’re Red Pill aware for any length of time it can sometimes be confusing to see the thought process that Blue Pill conditioning predisposes a guy to. The Red Pill Lens is one of the gifts (and curses) of having unplugged, and internalizing the awareness can make us somewhat confused or jaded to the experiences of guys who are still plugged in and trying to make their blinded understanding of intersexual dynamics work for them.

“Can this guy really not see why this girl wants to get away from him?” From a Red Pill perspective we might think this guy is an idiot for not seeing what he’s doing. It’s plain as day for us so their must be something wrong with him, right? Usually, the only thing wrong is that these guys’ Blue Pill conditioning has limited them to understanding their situations from that old set of books – the rule set that they believe (like a religion) that ‘quality women’ acknowledge and play by too. Lets try to put this jadedness aside for a moment.

[…] I can’t take my mind off of you no matter what I do and yesterday I literally cried for an hour in my room because I didn’t know what to do. I just really need you in my life and it kills me to know that I have messed our relationship up,…

This kid’s (it reads like he’s an adolescent) whole exchange is riddled with self-incrimination. This is an intrinsic part of Blue Pill conditioning – the guy is always at fault in any break up. Even with his now ex’s admission of her own complicity in their split, he’ll have none of it. If a relationship, a marriage, fails it is always because a guy wasn’t invested enough; even if she cheated on him the Blue Pill conditioned mind will only accept his complicity in her looking outside the relationship. I should also add that this is an integral part of the Promise Keepers mentality as well as the ‘Oprah-Marriage Counselor Approved’ notion that “relationships take a lot of work” and it’s always a man’s responsibility to qualify himself for a woman’s intimacy by maintaining that work.

As a result, the Blue Pill mind automatically defaults to self-blame and looks to find ways to negotiate some kind of new work-program that will ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ relationship he somehow caused. Blue Pill conditioned men are still men, and as such they default to the deductive reasoning that we’re largely predisposed to. So in that Blue Pill state it seems like logic to look for solutions that will put the relationship back together again. This is how Blue Pill men’s minds work; they have a set of (Old Books) rules they believe everyone is, or ought to be, playing by and since he also believes the lie of coequal agency (blank-slate) between men and women he thinks a woman’s desire and intimacy can be deductively bargained with.

He realizes his failing and will be sure to correct it. But that’s not how all this works. In fact, it’s this very acknowledgement that only reinforces this woman’s decision to leave him. Hypergamy is rooted in doubt, and it turns out he is as Beta and optionless as her Hypergamous hindbrain suspected. His reaction to her confirms it.

[…] how can you just cut me out of your life so quickly? I want to make things better and work on our relationship because I know what it can be, why don’t you want to work on it?

I’m trying to avoid most of the clingy emotional shit in this exchange. Blue Pill guys will pepper in their emotive state even in the best of times in a relationship, but when they’re facing a break up, that’s when all the stuff he’s been taught about vulnerability being a strength turns into a huge liability for him. Not to mention it disgusts the woman leaving him.

Here we see the standard Blue Pill bewilderment over why this woman he’s deeply invested in can so casually blow him off and move on. Isn’t she playing by the same rulebook he’s been playing by since he learned to dutifully put women as his mental point of origin? I linked my War Brides essay in his quote above because this is the nuts and bolts reason as to how women can, and often do, move on so quickly. It is literally part of women’s preinstalled mental firmware to have the capacity to turn on a dime with their emotions.

Next he makes the Blue Pill appeals to Relational Equity and declares his willingness to ‘work on the relationship’ in order to fix it. In a breakup this ‘work on the relationship’ narrative works against women; particularly if the guy they’re leaving is overly invested in equalism. He’s been taught that “open communication is the key to any healthy relationship®” so he’s confused as to why his coequal ‘soul mate’ wouldn’t want to work on things and patch it up. When things are good the ‘work on things’ narrative is a benefit for women getting the things they want, but when she wants to leave a Blue Pill guy (usually because she wants to open herself to better Hypergamous options) it’s a leash around her neck. Why doesn’t she want to ‘work on the relationship’?

This is really what defines his outlook on this breakup, but he can’t see that it’s what his Blue Pill conditioning has embedded in his ego. He is incapable of interpreting his situation in any other way.

So, yeah, it gets worse. Now we discover that this guy has done exactly what I explained most Blue Pill men do when they define themselves by their ego-investments: the Blue Pill kills their capacity not to just achieve their dreams, but to have dreams or ambitions at all. We have a guy whose dreams center on being the “perfect boyfriend”; the guy who’ll literally do anything to make it work. A ‘good relationship’ is his highest aspiration, so when that woman isn’t playing her part – playing by the ‘do anything to make it work‘ rule set – the response is usually to find fault in himself, because to find fault in his ‘soul mate’ is to question the whole Blue Pill mental apparatus.

But still, she won’t play ball, so there are 3 possibilities: The first and go-to reason is that he must’ve fucked something up somehow. The next is that there’s something wrong with her because she’s not playing by the same rules he was conditioned to believe women play by. And lastly there’s something wrong with his entire ego-invested Blue Pill outlook on the whole rule set. That last one is the most difficult and unlikely conclusion a guy will ever come to.

Out Come the Knives

More often than not this is the stage at which the woman involved begins building her defenses against the attacks her ex Beta boyfriend is lobbing at her in an effort to explain why “working on the relationship” isn’t solving his fear of having to be single (and optionless) again. You’ve got a Blue Pill conditioned guy who believes he’s done everything by the books and is now very confused that his commitment to ‘making it work‘ hasn’t earned him the Relational Equity that any coequal, co-rational, woman should count towards his value to her. Whatever he did that was ‘wrong’ should be paid for by that equity. And anyway, the rules clearly state that open communication and negotiation are what’s expected from her too, right?

Only, that ‘equity’ isn’t protecting him from a Hypergamy that can’t afford for her to spend a minute longer with him. But he doesn’t know this, so, like any deductive Beta he pleads his case and this is what sets off her defensiveness.

Even the sweetest, most unassuming wallflower of a girl has her ego intimately linked with Hypergamy. Optimizing Hypergamy is her Darwinistic prime directive in life. So when just the notion of her being forced to compromise that optimization looks like a possibility she rebels with the intensity of a survival instinct level of self-preservation. There was a time when social controls were expected to buffer the worst exploits women would use to optimize Hypergamy. Arranged marriages, social and religious conventions, peer pressure, etc. were all, in some part, a means to controlling this survival instinct, gut level anxiety – and instituting a degree of control over Hypergamy by men and society.

Today, in our post Sexual Revolution dystopia, the idea that a woman might be personally or socially expected to compromise her Hypergamous stakes in life is met with that reflexive, feral, survival instinct. This is why women bristle at the idea that they might ever need to “settle” on Mr. Good Enough once they reach their sexual market expiration date. It’s like telling their hindbrains that they need to consider spending the rest of their lives invested in children that aren’t as good as they might be had they held out a little longer. Hypergamy bets a woman’s life on a future with a given man, so yes, it’s very muck a survival instinct.

All of this gets compressed into the hostility a woman feels when a ‘lesser man’, one confirmed to be unworthy of that lifetime bet, essentially tells her she wrong for betting on him and then removing her bet. That feral response comes at him full force, but only after she’s absolved her complicity in playing along with his Blue Pill paradigm. She needs to be able to explain to her ego that she did try to ‘let him down easy’ before she ripped off the bandaid in one go. Now he’s “crazy”, “needy”, has “mommy issues” is “insecure” and various other rationales as needed to keep her ego blameless for what she really knew was his dedication to the Blue Pill.

He’s Blue Pill, but He’s Crazy

I’m sure there are men and women alike reading this and thinking, well, this guy is genuinely disturbed. Maybe he’s just an Incel who made good for a while and then his codependency surfaced and she wisely ejected from the relationship. That seems like an obvious take, but I’m going to argue that all Blue Pill conditioned guys are this guy. That life-long conditioning plays on men’s innate Idealism and fosters exactly his way of thinking. When women are your conditioned Mental Point of Origin, rearranging your life to accommodate “working on the relationship” is a natural progression. Getting Zeroed Out is a lot easier when you’re taught to believe that you literally cannot live without a woman.

Finally, we come to the point where this guy – maybe the friend you’ve been trying to unplug before something like this happened – is confronted with staying the course, self-righteously accepting his dumping and clings even more so to his Blue Pill Lens on the world, or he develops some introspect and confronts the idea that his outlook on the set of rules he’s been playing by is not valid. The most common way men find the Red Pill community is via an experience like this. Unfortunately, it often requires a significant life trauma to shake the sleeping man awake, but having your outlook on intersexual dynamics challenged is the only way most men will ever be open to anything contradictory.

When men ask me, “Rollo, my friend, brother, dad, are heading towards something awful, how do I get them to realize they need to unplug?” I have to say wait for the right time. There are some guys who will make this transition on their own and all it might take is your handing him my book and talking about it. There are some guys who will come to it because what they’re doing isn’t bearing fruit in their personal lives and they become Red Pill aware because circumstances pushed them that way. But most men are Betas. Most of them have lived through an extensive conditioning that put them right where this guy is, and most of them will fight you tooth and nail for trying to convince them they were raised the wrong way.

It’s sometimes just easier to ghost on these men, but what do you do when it’s your brother who White Knights at any opportunity in spite of being run through the machine of a Blue Pill social order?  My best advice is to wait for your moments. A lot of people will tell you that it’s manipulative to lay the Red Pill on a guy who’s at his most vulnerable, but it requires a stripping away of all the Blue Pill pretense and mind-fuckery to really make a cogent case and unplug the guy.

I would always advise that you stay honest, open and forgiving of the guy. Most likely he’s told you how fucked up or misogynistic your world view is in his White Knighting efforts in the past. It’s like he ridiculed you for thinking you could ‘educate him’. You have to let that go when you make your case for Red Pill awareness. It would be better to ghost him than to be vindictive, gloating or tell him “I toldja so.” Let him tell you you told him so when he thanks you later.

As an aside here I need to draw readers’ attention to just how vulnerable this shit makes Blue Pill, Beta mindset men to the predations of what I call “Success Porn” brokers. One of the most fucked up outcomes of understanding how Blue Pill idealism affect men is the desire to capitalize on this weakness by Purple Pill life-coaching hacks. One in particular is RSD’s (Real Social Dynamics) new “get me a girlfriend game” program that, in my opinion, plays directly on this hopeful Blue Pill “make it work” idealism.

“Life Coaches” see this neediness as a perfect niche to sell Blue Pill dreams back to guys who want to cling to their Blue Pill security blankets in Red Pill awareness. How miraculous would it seem to think you’re Red Pill savvy enough to make all your old Blue Pill dreams – the ones you went through hell to disabuse yourself of – come true. Hacks like this are too happy to ruin your life for you in rekindling that fantasy as long as you buy the premier edition of their “program”. Caveat emptor.

 

The Nature of the Game

I had a reader ask me some questions recently and in answering it gave me some food for thought.

Are we stuck in our Alpha fucks/Beta cucks categories? Should we attempt to blend the two categories into the ultimate hybrid?

Or is there nothing we can do, but attempt to use the information that you have (brilliantly) given us as a navigational tool to find our way through this world and godspeed to every fellow?

Before this I came across these Tweets from Rian Stone:

I think a lot of guys new to Red Pill awareness tend to apply qualifiers to the ideas of what is Alpha and what is Beta. In a similar respect a lot of plugged-in Blue Pill conditioned ‘Beta’ men like to make similar qualifications, but their understanding is rooted in what their conditioning has convinced them of. For the newly unplugged guy, Alpha is whatever he hadn’t been doing before with women that is now working for him once he flipped his own script. For the plugged in guy, whatever he’s been convinced of that women say they want is ‘Alpha’ to him – and usually that means whatever benefits a woman’s sexual strategy in terms of long term provisioning, parental investment and security. They just don’t realize their own utility to women in that game.

That said, I don’t disagree with Rian here. Over the course of fifteen years and three books I have made every effort to correct critics who insist that “all those Red Pill guys think Alpha men are Silverback Gorillas or Wolves.” Roissy once called this Etymology Hate:

5. Etymology Hate

Hater: Your definition of an alpha male is false. In the animal kingdom, the alpha male is leader of the pack, not a cad/badboy/jerk who pumps and dumps women.

Isn’t it just like a nerd to get hysterical over the appropriation of a narrow-sense scientific term to conveniently illustrate broader truths about men and women.

These “broader truths” are why I still use Alpha and Beta as descriptions for men and their mindsets. Critics and disingenuous haters like to think that even considering men or behavior sets as being Alpha or Beta is cause for dismissing whatever is being said. There’s a reason for this blanket disqualification which I’ll cover in a moment, but what they (willfully) misunderstand is that these classification are abstractions for bigger ideas. Alpha and Beta are placeholder terms necessary to consider more complex ideas in intersexual dynamics. For the most part, when I hear or read Blue Pill conditioned men mock the idea of Alpha men and insist that it’s a direct derivative of believing those ‘idiot Red Pill guys thinking they’re Alpha wolves or Silverback gorillas’ I know that I’m not dealing with a serious debate. More on this later.

Rian is also correct in his observation that both Red Pill aware men and critics alike tend to think of Alpha and Beta as specific archetypes of men. I’ve written almost a dozen essays about the nature of Alpha, but in each one I make an attempt to dispel the archetype of what an Alpha or a Beta man is. The Beta archetype is easy to agree on because almost no guy wants to be a “beta male”. As would be expected we tend to think of betas as the stereotypical ‘cuck’ or ‘soy boy’, or the Nümale with his fear grimace agape.

I should point out that even the guys who we would categorize as Betas don’t think they are. Very few Beta men look in the mirror and go “damn, I gotta Alpha up”. They believe that they are the vanguard of the new definition of Alpha; that they and women have evolved beyond the visceral realities of Hypergamy and Beta is the new Alpha. Recently there’s been a concerted social effort to redefine what is acceptable masculinity in the wake of the narrative shift that would have us accept that all masculinity is toxic.

For men there will always be a want to believe that whatever qualities make up their own personality and their own lifestyle is what should define what is “alpha”. From Alpha:

Guy’s like Corey [Worthington] infuriate men who have invested their self-worth in the accomplishments of what they think ought to be universally appreciated and rewarded. So when they’re confronted with a natural Alpha being undeservedly rewarded for brazenly acting out of accord with what they think the rules ought to be, they seethe with resentment. The natural response in the face of such an inconsistency is to redefine the term ‘Alpha’ to cater to themselves and their accomplishments as “real men” and exclude the perpetrator. The conflict then comes from seeing his new definition of Alpha not being rewarded or even appreciated as well as a natural Alpha attitude and the cycle continues. Your respect (or anyone else’s) for an Alpha has nothing to do with whether or not he possess an Alpha mindset. 3 failed marriages and 100+ lays has nothing to do with his having or not having an Alpha mindset.

In the same way that a Blue Pill conditioned “beta male” believes he best represents the new “alpha” definition, so to do a lot of Red Pill aware men who play the same game of applying their own traits to what should be considered or appreciated as “alpha”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Trad-Con circles – an Alpha is a guy who takes care of his family and is respected as the head of the home. He takes care of his duties to family, God and country, etc., etc. Really all this is is another grab at affirmation of personal worth. Blue Pill “betas” believe exactly the same self-fulfilling thing from a different set of ideological beliefs.

In the process both the plugged-in and the unplugged create convenient archetypes for the opposite of the apex they want to believe they are and what they hope will be confirmed and rewarded. Usually these are binary caricatures: the Alpha ‘Chad’ is usually whatever image of the popular high school jock that used to be their nemesis fits, while the Beta ‘doormat’ is the George McFly character whose introversion and lack of social intelligence places him at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. Either one of these guys can be seen in a positive or negative light depending on the perspective of who’s doing the viewing. To the Nümale, whatever that classic Beta does should be what’s appreciated as ‘alpha’ and to the Trad-Con an Alpha is the guy who dominates, but only insofar as he sticks to what they think is his ‘duty’.

Funny how both tend think the Alpha Playah, the self-important ‘Cad’ who women tingle for, who follows his own sexual strategy shouldn’t be considered ‘Alpha’ in spite of women consistently, predictably rewarding him with sex and genuine desire.  Rian nailed this part; Alpha makes her wet, Beta makes her secure. Our Instinctual interpretive process understands the visceral reasons why women get worked up for that physically ideal guy who also completes the fantasy of the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. But our Emotional and Rational processes want to recreate a reality in which what we have is what women really want. So we try to persuade and convince women to act against their own Instinctual interpretive process with respect to what they should find sexy and genuinely desirable – us, just as we are. We want to change the Game to fit our capacity, our skill, our genetics, to excel in it.

Beta men don’t just hope that women will perceive their own redefinitions of ‘alpha’ as the accepted ideal, they build lives and systems of belief around convincing others and themselves that we’ve evolved past the visceral realities of what arouses women. Trad-Con men, even Red Pill aware men, do something similar – they hope that their own definition of what should constitute Alpha, and best describes themselves, will likewise supersede the natural evolved impulse of what a woman’s hindbrain perceives as an ideal Hypergamous opportunity.

Alpha Seed, Beta Need

T-rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress sixty-five million years of gut instinct. – Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park

Hypergamy wants what Hypergamy wants, but it’s also important to remember that Hypergamy has two sides; Alpha Seed and Beta Need. When we look at the dynamic of Ovulatory Shift we see this play out. In a woman’s proliferative phase of her menstrual cycle she is predisposed to seek out sexual opportunities with high SMV, masculinized, dominant (to the point of arrogance) men. In her luteal phase she seeks comfort, rapport, security and protection qualities in men. Alpha Seed, Beta Need. As Rian pointed out, we’ve made archetypes (and caricatures) of the type of guy who embodies these needs, but we do so to persuade a woman’s evolved Instinctive understanding of what they are. Women’s hindbrains want to hunt for Hypergamous opportunity, men’s rational (and emotional) process wants to ‘feed’ Hypergamy by redefining what that Instinct should want.

Where both Nümales, Trad-Cons and more than a few Red Pill aware men get it wrong is believing that the security Beta represents should also be what gets her wet. We live in a day and age where men are so feminized that 80%+ default to ‘beta’ behaviors and mindsets because they believe it’s what arouses women. I’ve also written many essays about how anxiety, urgency and (sexual) tension are necessary factors in the ‘enthusiastic’ sex women have with men they genuinely desire. When it comes to comforting a woman, rapport, honesty, emotional investment and security the Beta men of today have been acculturated to have it all in spades. Where they fall short is the Alpha capacity to generate tingles based on making women uncomfortable. One reason men have a tough time with Red Pill awareness is because it all seems so counterintuitive to everything they’ve ever been conditioned to believe about women and sex and how to initiate it.

If you read Roissy’s old categories of Beta to Alpha it follows a predictable pattern. The same applies to Vox Day’s socio-sexual hierarchies (Omega, Gamma, Sigma, Delta, Beta, Alpha, etc), but what we’re really defining in these ranking is a male dominance hierarchy as it applies to women’s sexual selection process – Alpha seed, Beta need – and according to any individual woman’s capacity to demand any particular rank of man.

To answer the first question I began with here, I don’t think the “categories” ever really end because dominance hierarchies are something innate to our world. So, rather than think we can change this, change the nature of reality as equalism attempts to, I think men ought to learn to play it better. The nature of the game doesn’t change. In fact, the equalist mindset that wants to change it ends up making those who accept it and play it well appear that much more exceptional. 

Why? Because the game doesn’t change and our hindbrains know this. So when we see a man who is a “good player” of the game we evolved to play, who became so in spite of all the foolish efforts to change the game to better fit those who don’t play it well, our instincts are attracted to that person that much more. In other words the guy who Just Gets It is even more attractive in a world that women’s hindbrains know is trying to convince her that he shouldn’t just get it. This is why even the most staunch, egalitarian equalist feminist of women still adore a conventionally masculine man who looks and plays the natural role of Alpha man well. They still want to bang him, they still want to submit to him in spite of their ego investments. And they’ll coyly, shamefully, but without any self-consciousness admit they love being loved, fucked, protected, secured, etc. by that guy.

As an adaptation to increase the likelihood of reproduction men and women seek to change the Game that we’ve been playing for 100,000 years now. Only in our age of “gender enlightenment” are we so deluded as to think that prioritizing our emotion or reason above the realities our evolved instinct is spelling out for us might be a way to get intimate and reproduce. Women want to change men’s evolved sexual natures – via social constructionism, feminism, feminine-primacy – in order to reproduce with men they would naturally never have a chance breeding or pairing with, and without any burden of their own performance or merit. They want to change the Game to suit their deficits in playing it the way it is.

Similarly, men seek to improve their own reproductive success by also redefining the terms of the Game to also breed and pair (mostly breed) with women that their own Burden of Performance would merit them. This is why transvaluation (vulnerability is strength, etc.) features so prominently in this mindset. It is an effort in achieving reproductive success and intimacy without excelling in a man’s performance burden. This is precisely why Blue Pill men insist on defining Alpha and Beta in as literal a sense as possible. By rejecting and mocking these terms it self-reinforces the misbelief that they, and ‘quality’ women, have evolved beyond the visceral aspects of Hypergamy. By denying the realities of Alpha and Beta aspects in men the belief is it sets them apart from any natural dominance hierarchy. They’re “above all that”, “women (at least the ‘quality’ ones) are rational agents too and above their own Hypergamous impulses” and “people are all unique individuals set apart from all that human nature stuff.” Each of these rationales is linked to a core misbelief in blank-slate equalism (I’ll address in another essay), but they are also representative of an effort to remove these men from a natural dominance hierarchy and place them into a new Game they believe women are also playing and in which they, by default, are at the highest degree by virtue of having progressed beyond the old Game.

 

Incels

Back in the summer of 2014 I wrote two essays outlining the minds of Incels. The first was The Severing and the second was Owed Sex. I wrote these essays in the wake of the Eliot Rodger shooting and the sudden emergence of the term ‘red pill’ into the popular lexicon. Eliot had a lot of manifesto style youtube videos as well as a fairly detailed written manifesto he published online just prior to his shooting. His frustration was palpable in these videos. Here was a kid who fit the profile of an AFC, an average frustrated chump. AFC is an old school PUA term used to describe average guys who were confused by intersexual dynamics, usually as a result of their life long Blue Pill conditioning. I used to unironically use AFC to describe a guy who I’d probably refer to as a Blue Pill Beta in my work today, but in light of the most recent “Incel attack” in Toronto last month I’m wondering if AFC isn’t a better descriptor for these guys.

I’m doing a bit of review here because I want to put the perspective on time in these incidents. Alek Minnasian, the Toronto truck driving killer, another AFC, reportedly idolized Eliot Rodger. In and of itself this is probably to be expected from a self-avowed Incel, but what motivates these guys. That’s what the mainstream media wants to know, right? And literally hundreds of bloggers and social pundits seem to all have an expert knowledge about the motives of Incels. Weeks after the Toronto killings there are people I’ve never read before who are convinced that they know all about these “losers”. For the most part, the mainstream media (and I include online pundits in this category now) want ‘crazy’. Even the guys who are ostensibly part of the manosphere know that crazy gets eyeballs on the screen, and nothing is crazier than a ‘killer Incell’.

Incels are the low hanging fruit for pretty much anyone on either side of the ideological spectrum. I can read any number of feminists wanting to link Incels to ‘red pill radicalization’ and how they are ‘gender terrorists’ (this is genuinely laughable considering the natures of most of these kids), to the Red Pill guys who want to carve out their own trad-con niche in the ‘sphere using Incles as a negative example to prove their version of whatever qualifies as masculinity. Lets face it, Incels are easy targets. They’re universally described as “the losers you used to know in high school who couldn’t get laid”. This makes them easy to dismiss most of the time, until one of them shoots up a university or mows down random women with a panel truck.

Incel is short for involuntary celibate, but there’s a lot more contributing to these guy’s condition than just an inability to get laid. Back in 2014 the term Incel wasn’t used to define Eliot Rodger. He was an Incel for sure, but very few people trying to analyze him made this connection. Again, they wanted crazy, and what’s better than crazy? More crazy. So all the efforts used to pick Eliot apart back then were really pointing to bigger motives, nefarious groups of ‘misogynists’ and more craziness.

Back then, Eliot belonged to an online forum called PUA Hate; literally a group formed by these guys’ collective dislike of the Pick Up Artist set that virtually all of them had once been hopeful would end their involuntary celibacy. For whatever reason the promised magic formula that would end their loneliness and sexlessness didn’t work for them. They were all understandably mad. Ironically, Rational Male articles I had written got link-backs to various posts on the forum and most of them were appreciative of them, however, that may’ve also been part of the problem. Fast forward four years and today the deleted PUA Hate forum is replaced by incel.me, another forum with a similar charter (and also one I get good link-backs to).

I think one of the most pressing problems in Red Pill awareness today is that awareness itself. Not every guy is ready to be unplugged. One of the inherent risks I take in writing what I do is presuming every man I make aware has the presence of mind to accept it and work it out for himself. If you look at the profiles of the past 6 school shooters, include Eliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, you find a lot of similarities. Most were the products of a fatherless home, most were diagnosed with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, and all of them were the ‘Forever Alone’ types triggered by the rejection of a girl. These young men are the product of a generation that has removed the man from their upbringing and taught them to emote before they think.

Today we’re just starting to acknowledge this generation of ‘lost boys‘; the young men who drift rudderless in life, are socially retarded to varying degrees and a demographic that is looking outside themselves for solutions to problems that are the result of the social order that created them. Is it any surprise we have such a rise in popularity of any speaker or organization that might be able provide them some direction?

Many of these guys are simply not ready to be made Red Pill aware. It is a risk to their egos, but also, it’s often a crushing disillusionment of the Blue Pill ideals they’d hoped would be a reality for them if they could just play the Blue Pill’s game correctly. For a lot of them it was their Blue Pill hopes that formed the basis of their existence. Now add the harsh truths of the Red Pill to a lost boy, one who is socially maladapted or has a genuine psychological disorder, and take that (misguided) ‘hope’ away from him. What does that kid do when the Red Pill shows him the reality of the game he’s involved in?

There is no ‘Black Pill’

I’ve heard Roosh and a few other commenters in the ‘sphere describe the “Black Pill” – the idea that the social order of the Blue Pill, the Feminine Imperative, or the ‘gynocracy’ if you like, is so rigged against men that they accept their role in it and give up on trying to make themselves or their circumstance better. What these guys are describing is what I’ve referred to in the past as the Abyss. This Abyss is the psychological / existential gulf a man needs to cross when he becomes Red Pill aware. He realizes that the person he carved himself out to be in a Blue Pill conditioned ideal was based on a the same falsehoods. This stage of unplugging has difficulties unique to men at various stages of their lives and according to the decisions they made for themselves throughout their lives in accordance with those Blue Pill ideals. It’s one thing for a young man of 25 to unplug and turn his life around in a Red Pill aware paradigm, but it’s quite another for a man of 70 to become aware and look back on his life, marriage(s), family dysfunction and the long term impact his blindness to the Blue Pill game he was a part of for so long.

There is a necessary state of nihilism, or at the very least a prolonged doubt, that occurs when men realize that they’re cut away from that Blue Pill conditioned life. This is why I compare it to mourning in The Five Stages of Unplugging, men are literally mourning the loss of their investments in that paradigm; they’re morning the loss of Killing the Beta they used to be.

Understand this, there is no Black Pill – there is only the Abyss of accepting the truth that comes with Red Pill awareness and a man’s capacity to make this awareness work in his best interests.

Incels, if nothing else, want to find ways to make this awareness work for them, but most are too damaged to deal with the realities that Red Pill awareness reveals to them. They’re not ready for the truth, but it’s unavoidable today.

A lot of femosphere critics want to lay the blame for Incels at the feet of the Red Pill. They think there’s some nefarious plot to radicalize young men to be killers in some misogyny fueled gender-jihad against women. This presumption also comes on the heels of the #MeToo / Future is Female movement so it fits in perfectly with the ‘resistance’ narrative. As I said, it’s easy to hate on Incels. They fit another profile too; that of the basement dwelling 30 year old who refuses to leave his parents house. For the Man Up crowd Incels are easy to AMOG, for the lathered up militant feminist they’re the perfect foil needed to legitimize their own ego investments in gender dystopia.

The truth of the matter is Incels have always been with us. They were the losers, the nerds (before they were told they were cool) and the guys who were Darwin’s dead ends. I knew dozens of them when I was growing up. I know many now, all of them building a life-theme around their life long confusion and misery of not figuring out women. I know a lot of married men today who are technically Incels in their marriages. We like to say they’re ‘unlucky’ in love or we’ll say “Don’t worry, you’re a great guy. Any girl would be lucky to have you. You’re just meeting the wrong kind of girls, just be yourself and it’ll happen for you.” Then we hope they don’t fixate on one of our girlfriend’s girlfriends and they go off to figure out how the real world works.

AFCs in 2018

So what’s different now? Well, to start, we have a generation of lost boys who’ve been acculturated to think that even asking a girl out is a form of sexual misconduct. The Village has raised boys as if they’re defective girls, devoid of any of the masculine discipline necessary to teach these young men how to cope with real rejection from a girl, how to deal with defeat or how to come back stronger as a result. As we’ve feminized these boys so to have we embedded the same feminine victimhood narrative that women rely on into their collective psyche. Except these boys are still beholden to the old social contract that women believe incumbent upon men. This puts these boy-men into a very precarious position: they are educated like defective girls and as such adopt the same frail sensibilities and are subject to the same entitlement narrative as most women are, but they are also male and therefore are expected to suck it up, take it on the chin and carry on. They are told to express their feelings and in the next moment are told to check their male privilege.

Most of the lost boys generation are not ready for the disillusionment that the Red Pill brings to them, but it’s not the manosphere that’s opening their eyes so much as they are having it thrust in front of them by a communication age steeped in the Feminine Imperative. Today, Red Pill truths are harder and harder to get away from as Open Hypergamy and all of the unflattering truths about the female nature are triumphantly lauded by women themselves. Every swipe left on Tinder is one more confirmation of exactly the harsh truths that push Incels to their limit.

Of every article I’ve read on Incels since the Toronto killings not one author has analyzed the problem correctly, but also none have any actionable idea about how to solve the problem of Incels snapping. There are no longer the same outlets that ‘losers’ had back in my day to channel that sexual frustration to more productive ends. Many a frustrated high school boy became his generation’s iconic artist or musician. I think it’s the height of irony that Mark Zuckerberg essentially created Facebook to stalk his ex girlfriend. There are no longer the creative ways to deal with the discontent that comes from sexual rejection. Some will say to me there are, it’s just these guys are too unmotivated to apply themselves. And while that may be true, there are much easier outlets that further stunt that boys development. Rather than redirecting that sexual angst to something creative, it’s much easier to lose themselves in online porn or immersive escapisms facilitated by this age’s technology.

Or they can seek out a forum of similarly disaffected young men and commiserate about the truth of a world that has no place for them. I read that Dr. Jordan Peterson suggested that a social order based on ‘enforced monogamy’ might be a cure for Incels. I get what he was trying to say, but it’s just one more flippant redirection away from the real causes of this rise in Incels. I can remember reading a post that Roissy had made about a knife wielding man in China who had gone to a day care center to specifically kill women and children. As horrifying as that is what had prompted the guy was the understanding that he’d essentially been selected out of the reproductive game because there was a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women in China as a result of their one-child policy for so long. Roissy went on to suggest that as more and more men are disaffected by a feminine-primary social order, one that bases all its legislation and social doctrine on optimizing Hypergamy, the men disenfranchised by it will become either more violent (in their effort or angst to reproduce) or more suicidal – which we also see in men killing themselves at 5 times the rate of women.

Incels are the canary in the coal mine that is a gynocentric social order. They are what results when a society prioritizes and incentivizes Alpha Fucks (enthusiastic consent) while Beta Bucks is more or less assured by direct and indirect resource transfer to women. When 80%+ of men are evaluated as ‘unattractive’ to women fed on a steady diet of ego inflating social media, you get Incels. I made a case for this in Dangerous Times, but Incels are a byproduct of a feminine-primary form of polyandry. Incels are a result of shifting from a social contract based on marriage to one based on a sustained child support. The old social order was founded on giving a guy a decent shot at marriage and reproduction by way of being a good provider, this contract is gone today. When a woman’s primary incentive is no longer provisioning all that’s left is a socio-sexual contract based on the most available Alpha seed to meet a need that a woman cannot provide for herself.

As we move into the next decade I believe we will see even more narrowing of this socio-sexual contract. This is why some countries are legislating that anything less than an enduring enthusiastic consent for a woman is rape. This is an effort in insuring a woman is never again inconvenienced by having transactional sex for resources, nor should she be bothered by men who will know not to approach her. Incels are the natural expression of the frustration that comes from this truth becoming more and more blatant and accepted in society. Incels have it right; they more than any guy understand the brutal truths of a social order founded on mandating Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. Where they go wrong is in their way (or non way) of coping with that truth. They accept their Black Pill and never cross the Abyss to a better life because they don’t know how to evolve with it.