Love

Love and Ambition

I’m a psychotherapist working with couples, especially men who get left by their wives. I’ve studied your material for over a year now and the hypergamy stuff is dead on. I just wanted to share and maybe talk with you about the red pill rage that results — women love opportunistically yes, but many men who comment on your material are missing a component I believe. And it’s not one I’ve heard you allude to much either.. When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship. When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

I had this sent to me recently. It’s actually a pretty standard trope for Trad-Con women who want to justify their leaving a husband or having left an old lover/baby-daddy. They like to pretend they’re ‘red pill’ and so the only men who might qualify for their expired sexual market value will be Red Pill men who meet their new qualifications. One thing I’m seeing more and more of in this sub-section of the manosphere (really femosphere) is aged-out divorcé women who want to rebrand the ‘red pill’ to justify their unmarried, unpaired, state in the new sexual marketplace. As you might imagine, their solipsism gets combined with what they convert into a convenient rationale about what Red Pill men ought to be like. The lack of ‘real men’, real ‘red pill’ men is ostensibly why they’re still single – no man is actually ‘red pill’ enough to satisfy their hamstering and thus, it’s not they who have the problem, but rather the men who lack the balls to live up to those expectations.

If this sounds familiar – like maybe a feminist spouted off a version of it – you’re right. I wrote about this rationalization back in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, Hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” – an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

Red Pill Women – A Convenient Rationale

I wrote this back in 2012. Some of my earliest posts were about predicting exactly this phenomenon in the future. The more Red Pill aware a woman is – or I should say, the more she consciously acknowledges it – the greater the need will be to find fault in men for not living up to what they redefine as ‘red pill’ canon. The more widespread Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics becomes, and the more accepted it is, the more it will serve as an alibi for women trying to rebuild a life they destroyed themselves. It becomes a Red Pill man’s ‘duty’ to forgive their indiscretions and help them recover too.

Over the years Dalrock has gone into how women detonate their marriages as a result of divorce porn fantasies. I’m not sure he really dissects the aftermath of their divorces. And this is only one way in which women may find themselves single around middle age. In Preventive Medicine I detail how women go through at least to periods of crisis level Hypergamous doubt during a marriage. Women’s prerequisites for attraction (not arousal) shifts radically once she reaches the Epiphany Phase (29-31). She becomes far more compromising in terms of physicality in exchange for aspects of a man she finds desirable for long-term prospects of security. Whereas she may have only dated banged guys 1-2 inches taller than herself in her Party Years, now she’s willing to entertain the idea of banging dating a guy slightly shorter than herself so long as he has a capacity for success and provisioning for her.

This is an interesting phase to pick apart because it’s likely the first time in a woman’s life that she’s considering a relationship with a guy based on transactional sex as opposed to the prime directive of validational sex she’s been pursuing for most of her Party Years (18-26). For the first time her long-term attraction is based on different aspects of a man’s Burden of Performance.

During the Epiphany Phase a woman plays a complex game of internalized mental gymnastics. Her hindbrain understands that her sexual market value has been decaying for at least a couple of years prior to this conscious recognition of it. The enjoyment of the Party Years has to be weighed against the fact that she’s progressively losing the attention of the men she would like to have ‘enthusiastic’ validational sex with, and the necessity of a long-term security with a long-term partner. Thus, the rationalization engine kicks into overdrive. She must convince herself that the less exciting (arousing) but better provisioning guy who’s happy to have her at 30 represents the type of guy she ‘should‘ have been with all along.

This is a self-bullshitting contrivance of course, but in her mind the guy who she’s marrying or pairing long term with must be an example of a ‘good prospect’. This is when she does the self-conditioning of turning her necessity into a virtue. She was “so crazy in college, but now she’s matured and not like that anymore.” Or she’s “Getting right with God” or she’s “Learned her lesson in dating banging those Bad Boys” who’ve characterized her intimate life up until this point.

Those are the easy self-contrivances; what’s more difficult is convincing her hindbrain (that desperately wants the exciting validational sex with the Bad Boy) that the unexciting ‘Good Guy’ is really what’s best for her. This is where women like to rearrange what’s really important to them in a man.

This is the internal conflict that takes place in the Epiphany Phase, but what happens to the woman who never gets to consolidate on the ‘Good Guy’? For a variety of reasons (mostly overvalued evaluation of their SMV) more and more women find themselves ‘never marrieds’ and/or they follow the timeline in Preventive Medicine and find themselves divorced of their own doing. In either case, women still work through a similar series of self-rationalizations with respect to what they’re looking for, and what they feel they are entitled to, in a man around 38 to 45, sometimes as late as 50.

And this is where the Red Pill feeds that female entitlement schema. The logic goes like this:

If I’m a Red Pill woman and I agree with all of these Red Pill men who, despite all my misgivings, align with my (self-defined and sanitized) definition of what it means to be “red pill”, then these men owe it to me to unplug from their Blue Pill delusions and see me for the jewel in the rough that I really am.

I think the time a woman is most likely to discover she’s a “Red Pill Woman” is conveniently at the point in her life when she’s at her most necessitous. You will almost never find a girl of 22 who’d want to identify as a Trad-Con “Red Pill” woman – the incentives to do so simply don’t exist at this age. The fact that it is predominantly Traditional Conservative women who are either just pre-Wall or post-Wall, single-mothers, never married spinsters, divorcés or married-to-lesser-Betas who wish to redefine ‘Red Pill’ to use as a litmus test for the type of men they believe they’re entitled to is no coincidence.

Message to the ladies: Men don’t owe you shit. If you happen upon a man who shares your entitlement belief-set, a man willing to forgive your past indiscretions and marry you despite a ruthless marriage/divorce industrial complex arrayed against him, then thank whatever God you pray to and fuck that guy’s brains out to keep him happy, but don’t pretend it’s because either you or he is “Red Pill”. The fact that he would entertain the idea of a relationship with you disqualifies him from being “Red Pill”.

If you find yourself single, never-married at 38 and it “just never worked out for you” it’s time you look past your solipsism and find some real introspect. The problem begins and ends with you.

Love and Opportunism

Now, all that said, the ‘psychotherapist‘ who sent me this does have some legitimate points.

When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship.

First of all this is flat out false; I’ve written several posts that illustrate exactly this perspective. From Setting the Rules:

Once a woman understands the gravity and legitimacy of your purpose / passion, only then can she come to appreciate the significance of you foregoing or postponing the dictates of that purpose for her. She will never feel more important to you than when you (occasionally) lift her above that legitimate, verified purpose.

Women will never appreciate a relationship that is a Man’s greatest ambition.

That’s an old (obscure?) post I wrote some time ago, but the basic principle is that a man must be fearless in his pursuit of his passions both before and after he’s entered into some kind of committed exclusivity. In Acing the Test I point out that women tend to shit test for different things while single and when in an LTR. In a long term relationship these test are characterized by the need to quell the Hypergamous doubt that she paired with a guy who is, or has the potential for competency. In other words her Hypergamous hindbrain wants to know it made its best ‘bet’ on you.

And while that’s all fine and well, her hindbrain’s insecurity wars with the need for you to retain your ambition and your being emotionally available for her. When these two aspects come into conflict it is up to a man to retain the world, the Frame, he’s established in which she feels comfortable and yet uncomfortable enough to know he’s competent to be powerful in directing his own course in life.

When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

Again, this is a perfect illustration of the differences in the concepts men and women each independently hold when it comes to love. Men love Idealistically, women love Opportunistically and this quote spells this out in no uncertain terms – in fact it’s so ironic I’m not sure the woman relating this to me even realizes what she’s doing. Women intimately associate a man’s ambitiousness, his drive for mastery and power, his want for dominance, with her Opportunistic concept of love. She’s correct here, when men get lazy women feel discarded. However, this is because a man contenting himself with how things are and dropping all ambition confirms what her Hypergamous nature fears most – he’s really incompetent.

This is especially salient when a man trades his ambitions (assuming he had them) for a relationship with her. This reverses the Burden of Performance to her and as a result she feels unloved because her concept of love is founded on his capacity for competence. She feels unloved because opportunism defines her concept of love; and he only confirms his worthlessness by abdicating his Burden of Performance.

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

A lot of this relates to the standard Mental Point of Origin conversation.

Blue Pill men are conditioned to think two things:

1 When they get married their troubles are over with respect to the sexual marketplace. Because they believe women share their own idealistic concept of love for love’s sake that it shouldn’t matter how they perform now. The Burden of Performance, if they ever accepted it, gets replaced by the idea that she’ll love him “for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer” and therefore he doesn’t consider it as a prerequisite for her love and intimacy.

What he fails to ever grasp or accept is that men and women have different concepts and approaches of love. His Pollyanna Blue Pill Disney preconditioning leads him to believe in happily ever after and his failings and vulnerability and fears will not only be accepted by his wife, but will be a source of their marriages strength and intimacy. This is exactly why the transvaluation of vulnerability-is-strength is so dangerously wrong in modern LTRs.

2 This is the husband who lives in a Blue Pill fantasy land, so rattling his cage about the visceral realities of Hypergamy and telling him his wife never shared what he believes is a mutual, universal concept of love is like telling him God is dead. When Beta/Blue Pill husbands enter into marriage their singular goal is ensuring his wife’s satisfaction and happiness. He still suffers from never making himself his Mental Point of Origin and making womankind his reflexive mental priority.

He makes her his world. If he had a sense of his Burden of Performance he diminishes or replaces his own ambitions with the ambition of making his wife ‘his world’ – and God forbid anyone tell him anything counter to the “you gotta work to keep things fresh” mantra he learned about marriage throughout his single years. Telling him he needs to be more self-important is the antithesis to this conditioning, but it’s exactly the catalyst that will cause his divorce. Women don’t want to marry their Beta orbiters, so how would you expect them to feel when the man they’re supposed to live the rest of their lives with turns into an orbiter. But he’s been taught to sacrifice EVERYTHING to keep the relationship “healthy”.

From Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

Deep Conversion

conversion

About four years ago Nick Krauser dropped a quick-hit post on his blog called Deep Conversion. I made a mental note in my head about this concept back then because, in spite of the brevity of it, I really thought Nick was on to something much more significant. The direction of my recent discussions both on this blog and a few other forums I read got me thinking about Nick’s observations.

I had an old reader (who want’s me to believe he’s a new reader) dig back through my archives and reheat an old debate about conflating my post about women’s concept of love with, “women are incapable of love – at all.” Over the five years that this blog’s been online I’ve gone to great lengths to define my position on the differing concepts of love either gender holds, and what influences the origins of love for either gender. I wont do a remedial post to reassert my points on this here. If you’re new reader and unfamiliar with that expansive series of posts I’ll refer you the Love category on my side bar links. However, to restate the premise for today’s post so everything is clear:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation. Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of an ability for women to love Men as Men would like them to.

That bolded part there was always emphasized for a very important reason – to avoid the misperception in men that women are entirely incapable of love, and to make a distinction about men’s Blue Pill hope that a woman could love him according to his idealistic concept of love. As I said, there is an expansive series on my ideas about this, and it requires an (I believe rewarding) investment of time and comprehension in understanding them. Sorry, but there is no TL;DR version here.

When I wrote this, and during my deliberating it, I fully expected to get this most common response I get from men still stinging from a more cynical Red Pill awakening. And that is the want to believe that women’s Hypergamy prevents them from ever feeling a “genuine” love or a genuine desire for men beyond what their most immediate opportunistic need may be according to their sexual strategy – short term breeding or long term security. Generally, it’s newly unplugged guys who want to accuse me of not thinking it all the way through because I need some hopeful rationale to justify my 20-year marriage, or they think I’ve never considered Briffault’s Law.

Concepts & Expectations

I expected all of this when I wrote my early essays on men and women’s differing concepts of love. And while I’ve covered the idea of love being a complementary arrangement between men and women each holding differing concepts in prior essays, one thing I haven’t explored is what Nick calls the “Deep Conversion” a woman goes through and what she feels for a man with whom she genuinely falls in love with.

Nick refers to this process as a kind of ‘soul surrender’ in which a woman recognizes a Man’s inherent value to both her short term sexual, and long term security needs. From her perception, this guy represents her Hypergamous ideal. Such is his sexual market value in relation to her own that it puts all but the most deeply rooted doubts of his quality to rest for her and opens her to associating him with an emotional state.

I should also point out that this emotional state needn’t always be a positive association; just that the association he represents is an ideal situation her hindbrain interprets as Hypergamously optimal. If that dynamic seems like a recipe for potential abuse you’re not too far from the mark. This conversion comes as a result of a woman’s perception of her Hypergamous need and her own SMV in comparison to what she believes that man’s  SMV is in relation. Shaking a woman out of the devotion she has with an abusive husband/boyfriend is really shaking her out of the perception that he represents her Hypergamous ideal.

That optimal state is also qualified by her own self-perception of her sexual market value, and again prioritized by her most necessitous needs for her phase of maturity. However, given all these variables, that man’s perceived value to her Hypergamy is always valued as higher than her own. Hypergamy never seeks its own level, but always looks for a better-than deserved SMV comparison. In terms of SMV ratios-to-attachment Deep Conversion takes place somewhere between a 2:1 to 3:1 variance.

Most guys are simply incapable of inspiring this kind of total soul surrender and devotion in a women. Most women never get to feel it and instead must get off on Deep Conversion Lite through sugar-rush books like 50 Shades of Grey. It’s the difference between spinning plates with fuck buddies and having a genuine harem where all your girls are exclusive to you. The women aren’t aligning with you out of cold calculation or temporary strung-out groupie lust, the connection runs far far deeper and feels wholesome to both of you.

This was an excellent observation on Nick’s part, however, I think it’s important to consider this bit in terms of why most men are incapable of instilling a Deep Conversion state in women. The first reason is that most men (being Beta) already presume that any woman who would find them suitable for a monogamous commitment must already feel this sense of Deep Conversion otherwise they’d never agree to that commitment. This is part of the Blue Pill conditioning for Beta men – any girl who says “yes” to him must necessarily see him as her Hypergamous ideal. Most men lack the Red Pill awareness that women regularly make long term relationship decisions based on security needs, not because that guy represents her Hypergamous ideal.

Women would rather cry over an asshole than be saddled with a guy who bores them to tears. That doesn’t sell very well with Blue Pill men raised on Disney dreams, but women readily get into LTRs where the Beta they pair with is no comparison to the Alpha she’s widowed from; for whom she had a Deep Conversion with. And as Nick says, this is when they look to manufacture their own indignation and the excitement they lack in cheap (but safe) substitutes.

Another reason most men never experience this is because, due their Blue Pill conditioning, never give themselves permission to become the conventionally masculine men with a dominance that women need in order to feel this conversion for him. Most Blue Pill men have been taught a default deference to women. Theirs is one of a ‘Nice’, passive sensitivity to a woman’s perceived wants, rather than a dominant knowing of her need which is born from a lifetime of learning to place his mental point of origin on the whims of women.

This may be my own interpretation, but I would also argue that both a woman’s evolved psychological filtering (testing) of a man’s Hypergamous qualifications and her socialized sense of self (ego) contribute to a woman resisting this Deep Conversion for a man. As a lot of men in the Married Red Pill and DeadBedroom subredd forums will attest, it’s entirely possible to spend your life with a woman who will never feel this conversion with a man.

Deep Conversion

Done correctly deep conversion is the most satisfying experience possible between a man and a woman. So long as you keep the elements in place, it has no natural time limit. I had my ex-wife in this state for eight of the nine years we were together (losing it only when I lost my mojo) and I’ve had four girlfriends in the past two years in the same position. I’ve got a few more on the boil now. It’s really not very hard to do if you have the following core competencies in place:

  1. An unshakeably strong frame. You are special, you know you’re special, and your masculinity is stratospheric compared to the chumps around you.
  2. Cheerful misogyny. You love women but don’t take them seriously. This is more than just the attraction phase teasing. You genuinely believe women are more like dogs or children, meaning they are a delight when well-lead and a nightmare when left ill-disciplined without a pack leader. It’s empathetic but not weak or equalist.
  3. Direction. Your life must be a straight line in a Deida-esque manner. Whether it’s your music, philosophy, career, fitness your life contains several arrows pointing the same direction… towards building the archetype of a fully developed man. If you are one-dimensional the girl will hold back.
  4. Sexual mastery. Understand that women crave dominance above all else in the bedroom. Give her the kind of sex that penetrates her soul. This isn’t high-fitness sport sex and G-spot finding. Those men will keep a woman around as her sexual provider, the guy she goes to when she wants a good fucking, the bedroom equivalent of a qualifying beta chump. A sexual master rocks a girl psychologically so even a half-assed knee trembler in a public toilet has her dreaming for weeks afterwards. The girl dreams of pleasing him, not him pleasing her.

All four elements increase with age if you live your life correctly. I don’t want to write too much about it and certainly the book will never be released. Just be aware that it has it’s own ego traps, its own risks…. but it is possible. When you’re tired of the notch-carousel you might want to look into it.

Much of what Nick is outlining here is Red Pill 101 and I’d also add that Roissy’s original 16 Commandments of Poon would fill out this list more completely. What I’m exploring here, however, is the concept of how this Deep Conversion fits into the framework of men and women’s individualized concepts of love. On the one hand I have men who are critics tell me I’m in error because women’s opportunistic concept of love doesn’t meet their criteria for what love ought to be between a man and a woman – a mutually shared, unconsciously agreed upon, concept that aligns with men’s idealistic (love for love’s sake) concept.

Yet still, they don’t disagree with my assessment that women’s concept of love is rooted in optimizing their innate Hypergamy and manifests as an beneficent opportunism (beneficent in terms of quality control for the human race, not necessarily for men). This is where the conflict starts. If a male-idealistic concept of love is the correct one, and women lack a capacity to understand, appreciate or engage in that concept in a genuine, organic fashion then women entirely lack the capacity for love as men would define it. This is the deductive logic that tears men up when I explain men and women’s differing concepts of love. Their definition has to be the correct one, and if it is then women cannot love men. For guys reeling from the initial hopelessness that their Blue Pill world was always an exploitative fantasy, it’s hard for them to accept that their concept of love is only subjectively correct for them.

Blue Pill Idealism

Much of this hopelessness stems from the all-is-equal mentality that the Blue Pill sells us when we’re being raised by the ‘Village’ of pop-culture. Equalism is the religion of the Feminine Imperative, so Blue Pill men are conditioned to believe that men and women, being co-equal, co-rational agents, would necessarily share a common concept of love. As with everything egalitarian, that equalism outright denies any innate differences physically or psychologically that would separate men and women or make them adversarial in sexual strategy or purpose in life. This premise, of course, is deftly twisted by the Feminine Imperative to make feminine-primary sexual strategies and women’s concept of love, the socially correct expressions of ‘equalism’.

But therein lies men’s conflict. The same influences that convince men their idealistic concept of love is the mutually shared one are also the influences that convince men that satisfying women’s socio-sexual imperatives ought to be their life’s priority and their mental point of origin if they ever hope to achieve that idealized love state. Take this Blue Pill path to that idealistic state away from men, and you get very despondent guys who don’t believe women have a capacity to feel actual love for them. It all becomes jumping through hoops to create a feeling of love in women whose criteria for a love that originates in their opportunistic concept they must constantly qualify for.

Women critics of this differing love concepts dynamic, unsurprisingly, personalize every experience they have, their friends have or their family ever had by referring to examples of their own selfless acts of devotion to a certain man. It’s always a story about how they gave everything to a (often unappreciative, unreciprocating) man they felt some undying idealistic love for themselves, and how dare I impugn their sincerity in it?

And again, I’ll add that the only way they came to this idealistic love was through a Deep Conversion they had with a man who satisfied their Hypergamous opportunism long before they were ever inspired to those selfless acts of devotion and sacrifice. For every Alpha Widow woman who ever gave herself over to that conversion and surrendered her soul to a guy who never reciprocated it, there are a hundred Beta men who will never inspire that degree of devotion in the wives who settled on marrying them. Statistically, 80% of men (Betas) will never inspire the Deep Conversion that 10-20% of men women feel it for did.

The Red Pill Conversion

When I wrote The Love Experience I was asked to elaborate on a quote I’d made about men and women both having the capacity to love each other deeply and passionately:

“Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures.”

For men who innately cling to an idealistic concept of love, their own kind of Deep Conversion can come in the form of ONEitis and develop into some very unhealthy dependencies. One of the reasons ONEitis is so common among men is because their Blue Pill conditioning predisposes them to putting women’s needs above his own and they see that as the path to sustaining this True Love state – a state defined by their idealism.

For women, this Deep Conversion can only result from a man who so thoroughly satisfies her Hypergamous nature she’s willing to abandon her own sexual strategy. And, like the guy with ONEitis, she dedicates herself to the one guy she was able to (she thinks) lock down who was a better-than-deserved Hypergamous prospect. Women get very upset when this dedication is questioned (not unlike the ONEitis guy) because they’ve generally abandoned furthering their sexual strategy by investing their egos into a guy who satisfied their Hypergamous natures. To doubt that devotion is to doubt the wisdom of her investment – and that goes down to her evolved biology and psychology in that choice. I should note here that Alpha Widows are born from this conversion.

However, for all of that inherent risk, and despite men and women’s differing concepts of love, men and women can and do come together in individual states of love (that they often believe the other shares) that are ‘genuine’ to them and also last a lifetime. I would argue that this state cannot exist without a woman’s Deep Conversion occurring after, and as a process of, her testing and evaluating the quality of the man she feels it for. And I would also argue that a man who commits himself to this woman must also feel some sense of his idealistic concept of love being validated by that woman who has devoted herself to him.

Under the old social contracts, and under the old set of books, this conversion in men and women was likely something much easier than it is today. Women are distracted by social and cultural influences that distorts their ever truly understanding their greatly diminishing value to men, and at the same time places so many men so far below women in general that this conversion and devotion will always seem demeaning to them – even for men who exceed them in SMV.

However, this Deep Conversion state is not an impossibility and it is not impossible to sustain it in a Red Pill aware paradigm. In fact, I’ll say that Red Pill awareness and internalized Game is really the only way to sustain it in an era of Open Hypergamy where Blue Pill conditioning of men is the norm, and women’s expectations of men are ridiculously low, but standards are ridiculously exaggerated.

For the Red Pill / Game aware guy, understanding this conversion and how to inspire it is something he ought to contemplate since so much of a woman’s ego becomes invested in her devotion to him once that conversion takes place. Conversely, Red Pill men should also understand, as Nick explained about his ex-wife, that this conversion is always tentative upon his own capacity to perpetuate it.

Managing Expectations

expectations

One question I was asked during the Christian McQueen interview was what my perspective on a “healthy” kind of love would look like. Anyone familiar with my writing understands that, to the best of my objectivity, I try to be as descriptive as I can when it comes to the dynamics I analyze. The Rational Male will always be an endeavor in descriptiveness, not prescribing what I think anyone ought to be doing. I’ve run down my reasons for this in the past, but the solutions to your problems begin with your understanding the nature of those problems. I’ll give you tools, observations and suggestions, but my hope is you’ll use them in your life according to your need.

As I said in the interview, my interest isn’t in making Rollo Tomassi clones, and anyone telling you they have a customized plan to lead you to the relationship of your dreams is selling you something (likely a $1200/month ‘counseling’ retainer). That said, I’m going to break protocol here for a moment and see if I can provide you with some general observation about what I believe are the foundations of a heathy love relationship.

From a Red Pill perspective I’d say the first and most important thing for a man to grasp is coming to terms with realistic expectations with women based in Red Pill awareness.

In a Blue Pill paradigm men are conditioned to believe that Blue Pill goals are both attainable and worthwhile in the effort needed to achieve them. Deferring to feminine primacy, deffering to feminine correctness and essentially enabling and facilitating the ends of women’s sexual strategy are all the hallmarks of that conditioned thinking.

In Mental Point of Origin I explain how a man’s origin of thought is conditioned to default to a feminine purpose; he puts his first thought to the benefit of the feminine rather than himself and it takes either a very traumatic personal episode or a Red Pill awakening for a man to realize how thorough his conditioning has been.

I’m reviewing this Blue Pill mindset because the expectations a man has of a woman while he’s trapped in that mindset is radically different when he moves into (and accepts) a Red Pill awareness. That may seem a bit remedial for Red Pill men now, but it’s important to be reminded of how much your expectations of women have shifted since you came into that new awareness.

There was a time when you were Blue Pill and not taking a woman seriously at her word – as opposed to understanding the primary importance of her actions – was probably offensive to you. Any White Knight you encounter in life is still basing his expectations of women in that same egalitarian equalist premise that women are rational agents with an equal interest in men’s goals and purpose. The mistake being that they put faith in the idea that men and women have intellectually risen above the influences of their evolved psychology and can be relied upon to behave reasonably and in each other’s best interests.

Ironically a Beta /White Knight’s methodology for qualifying for women’s intimate attentions are still rooted in performing to the standards of what he believes is a pre-understood social contract between men and women. However, his expectations of women and how they’ll reciprocate his feminine-identifying efforts is where he’s gravely in error.

It’s my belief that Red Pill men need to come to realistic expectations of women based on their Red Pill awareness in order to come to a loving relationship with women. Accepting that reality also means accepting the differing concepts men and women have with regard to love. That’s a very tall order for men still coming to terms with the fact that their Blue Pill conditioning made them hopeful they could sustain a love based on Blue Pill expectations of women. Their idealistic concept of love has an end-goal of that concept being mutually reciprocated by a woman; this is the Blue Pill hope for love.

Love in the Age of Equalism

Egalitarian equalism between the sexes is nominally based on an acceptance of agreed terms, but love, like desire, is not the result of a process of negotiation.

What’s more ironic is that the more pronounced the efforts in gender parity are in society the more pronounced the men and women in that society cling to traditional sex differences:

To the contrary, most cross-cultural studies find nations with the highest sociopolitical gender equality (e.g., Scandinavian nations) exhibit the largest psychological sex differences in the world. You read that correctly. Higher gender egalitarian nations tend to have larger sex differences in mate preferences for Good Looks, in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[97]. If sociopolitical gender egalitarianism is supposed to reduce sex differences to the point where they “disappear,” it’s doing a terrible job. In fact, it’s most often doing the exact opposite. Without the constraints of patriarchal sex role socialization, it appears men and women are freer to follow their evolved desires in ways that lead to even greater psychological difference

It’s important to recognize truths like this because our acculturation in an equalist doctrine of gender parity is often never considered with regard to how the sexes interpret a loving relationship. How a society perceives love on a meta level is greatly influenced by the degree to which that society considers and acknowledges sex differences. I’ve stated in the past that androgyny is not a goal-state for any species – it leads to stagnation and an inability to adapt. Androgyny becomes homogeny; an evolutionary dead end, and the statistics seem to back this up. When a society idealizes a state of homogeny between the sexes that society presumes love is also homogenous.

Play with her, and play with her

I’ve mentioned in the past that revealing Red Pill truths to women you want to become intimate with is ultimately a self-defeating effort. The same can be said for women you may be involved with at the moment and are attempting to convince of your new Red Pill identity. Once you let a woman in on the Game it changes the game. Observing a process will change that process. This is known as the observer-expectancy effect, or the Hawthorne effect which is a “form of reactivity in which subjects modify an aspect of their behavior, in response to their knowing that they are being studied.”

In my perspective this is the main reason couples’ therapy, marriage counseling and Purple Pill couples’ coaching is ineffective. Those negotiations that are supposed to lead to a better relationship and a “healthy” love are founded on Blue Pill goals and Blue Pill expectations of an equalist understanding that men and women are fundamental equals with an equal interest in rational problem solving.

Why am I inserting this here? Because your Red Pill expectations of women must remain stoically within yourself.

Once your expectations of women are out in the open the process has changed. Women love Men who Just Get It, but explaining how you Get It disqualifies you from being the Man who does. Demonstrate, never explicate.

In a way I pity the women who identify themselves as Red Pill women. Not because I think their efforts are misplaced, but because they become privy to Red Pill truths and now have a different awareness of that observer-expectancy effect. The process is changed with regard to how they deal with men, maybe their husbands, and now they can no longer play the Game without some peripheral awareness that they are playing a game. The machinations of it are revealed so the context becomes one of identifying aspects of those truths and being self-conscious of men’s and their own behaviors being influenced by them.

In coming to terms with Red Pill expectations of women a man must embrace some ugly realities. Those realities that used to be denied or sugar coated with the pretty lies of the Blue Pill can rub you raw. Among others, Hypergamy, women’s sexual and love opportunism and the potential of damning a man to a life of indentured servitude are tough expectations to have to weigh against the idealistic want of a healthy loving relationship with a woman.

There will be a contingent of men who’ll insist women be held accountable for the worst of these behaviors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, there will always be a want for personal accountability and justice for women’s actions from men, however, this belief is still rooted in the idea that women are coequal and rational actors. That personal accountability desire is based in an equalist mindset. That’s not to say women shouldn’t be held accountable for the results of their impulses, or given license to them – Hypergamy is not itself an excuse for the worst of its consequences. Moreover, it is to say that a Red Pill aware man needs to base his expectations of women on the Red Pill foreknowledge of what her instincts and impulses will lead her to.

Conventional Love Model

I posted the following comment in response to Girl With a Dragonfly Tattoo’s recent plea for women to embrace empathy and / or sympathy:

Sympathy / Empathy flow downward from men to women and then to children. Men who understand and accept this never expect empathy from women to begin with. For that man, either a woman meets his criteria for his investment or he drops her for a better prospect.

Only in a feminized equalist society do men expect in-kind reciprocation from women. As a man, your “needs” are only important to you. Men’s disappointment comes from expecting a balanced return on his emotional investment and relational equity; this is the result of his egalitarian equalist conditioning. It sucks and it’s offensive to men because they’ve believed for most of their lives that there should be an equitable exchange of emotional and personal investments – his woman should have his needs and his best interests in mind in a like fashion that he has for her; this is not and has never been the case.

In fact it’s a recipe for failure, since it puts men into a position of neediness, and thus forces him to negotiate for his woman’s desire.

I’ve made an attempt in today’s post to address this last part. A great deal of men’s frustrations with women finds its root in an equalist expectation of a like-for-like exchange of intimacy. In A New Hope I explained how a man might cast off his former hope for a Blue Pill solution to the problems inherently created by an egalitarian mindset. I think it’s vitally important for men to keep that in mind – the source of those problems offers the false hope of a solution to those problems.

As a man it is important to understand that love will always, necessarily, be an unequal exchange of sacrifice for a woman. You simply don’t share the same concept of love with a woman. There are complementary benefits, but never assume your investment with a woman will be an equitable tradeoff. Men weren’t designed for that, this is why notions of relational equity is a real tough ego-investment for a man to abandon when he comes to Red Pill awareness.

In closing, what I find interesting in all of this was recalling how my Vulnerability post was received. That was an important post because it described the expectation of submissiveness and surrender that the Feminine Imperative and egalitarian equalism inculcate in men. Even the definition of the word was recreated to fit the doctrine – weakness is strength – and more than a few critics still clinging to that Blue Pill boilerplate wanted to re-redefine it in some way to be palatable to both the manosphere and that old Blue Pill hope. That’s the essence of the Purple Pill.

What they fail to realize is the inherent vulnerability men face in loving a woman at all. All risk, with no realistic expectation of reciprocation of his emotional investment and even greater risk of rejection for expressing that expectation – now that’s vulnerability. Egalitarian equalism always stresses the importance of men and women meeting each other’s needs to achieve a balanced loving relationship. This is a fundamentally flawed premise in the context of feminine social primacy. In a Blue Pill paradigm a man’s needs are always subordinate to a woman’s. That is vulnerability – a man putting faith in the presumption that a woman’s sustained long-term interests will ultimately serve his own.

Men will always be the risk takers in all aspects of life.

Idealism

 

idealism

When Neil Strauss was writing The Game there was an interesting side topic he explored towards the end of the book. He became concerned that the guys who were learning PUA skills and experiencing such success with women of a calibre they’d never experienced before would turn into what he called “Social Robots.” The idea was one that these formerly Game-less guys would become Game automatons; mouthing the scripts, acting out the behaviors and meeting any countermanding behaviors or scripts from women with calculated and planned “if then” contingencies.

The fear was that these Social Robots “weren’t themselves”, they were what Mystery Method, Real Social Dynamics, etc. were programing them to be and the relative success they experienced only reinforces that “robot-ness”. My experience with guys from this blog, SoSuave and other forums has been entirely different. If anything most men transitioning to a Red Pill mindset tenaciously cling to the ‘Just Be Yourself and the right girl will come along’ mentality.

A strong resistance guys have to Red Pill awareness will always be the “faking it” and keeping it up effort they believe is necessary to perpetuate some nominal success with women. They don’t want to indefinitely be someone they’re not. It’s not genuine to them and either they feel slighted for having to be an acceptable character for women’s intimate attention or they come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain ‘the act’ indefinitely. Either way there’s a resentment that stems from needing to change themselves for a woman’s acceptance – who they truly are should be enough for the right woman.

I’ve written more than a few essays about this dynamic and the process of internalizing Red Pill awareness and Game, but what I want to explore here is the root idealism men retain and rely on when it comes to their unconditioned Game. In truth this Game is very much the result of the conditioning of the Feminine Imperative, but the idealistic concept of love that men hold fast to is what makes that conditioning so effective.

What’s Your Game?

I’ve written before that every man has a Game. No matter who the guy is, no matter what his culture or background, every guy has some concept of what he believes is the best, most appropriate, most effective way to approach, interact with and progress to intimacy with a woman. How effective that “Game” really is is subjective, but if you asked any guy you know how best to go about getting a girlfriend he’ll explain his Game to you.

Men in a Blue Pill mindset will likely parrot back what their feminine-primary conditioning had him internalize. Just Be Yourself, treat her with respect, don’t objectify her, don’t try to be someone you’re not, are just a few of the conventions you’ll get from a Blue Pill guy who is oblivious to the influence the Feminine Imperative has had on what he believes are his own ideas about how best to come to intimacy with a woman.

For the most part his beliefs in his methodology are really the deductive conclusions he’s made by listening to the advice women have told him about how best to “treat a woman” if he wants to get with her. A Blue Pill mindset is characterized by identifying with the feminine, so being false is equated with anything counter to that identification.

When you dissect it, that conditioned Blue Pill / Beta Game is dictated by the need for accurate evaluation of men’s Hypergamous potential for women. Anything that aids in women’s evaluating a man’s hypergamous potential to her is a tool for optimizing Hypergamy. The dynamics of social proof and pre-selection are essentially shortcuts women’s subconscious uses to consider men’s value to her. Likewise the emphasis Blue Pill Game places on men’s ‘genuineness’ is a feminine conditioning that serves much the same purpose – better hypergamous evaluation. If men can be conditioned to be up front about who they are and what they are, if they internalize a mental point of origin that defers by default to feminine primacy, and if they can be socially expected to default to full and honest disclosure with women by just being themselves, this then makes a woman’s hypergamous evaluation of him that much more efficient.

This is where most Blue Pill men fail in their Game; who they are is no mystery, their deference and respect is worthless because it’s common and unmerited, and just who he is isn’t the character she wants him to play with her.

So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is. However, it’s important to consider that this genuineness is still rooted in his idealistic concept of a mutual and reciprocal love.

From Of Love and War:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

In The Burden of  Performance I made the case for men’s need to perform for feminine acceptance and how men’s idealistic concept of love centers not on a want for unconditional love, but rather a love free from the performance requirements women’s opportunistic, Hypergamous, concept of love demands of him. This quote sums up that idealistic want for rest from having to perform to earn a woman’s love and acceptance.

The problem of course is the supposition that a performanceless love would ever really be love, but men’s idealistic nature still believes that the state is realizable. On a social scale the Feminine Imperative sees the resource utility in this and so encourages the idea that both men and women mutually share his concept of idealized love. Thus men, unaware of the respective differences in concepts both sexes hold with regard to love, enter into a perpetual state of qualifying for a love they believe women should be capable of. Men will work hard, build empires and amass fortunes to come to that state of performanceless rest they idealize should be possible with a woman.

The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism

About two weeks ago I was called to the carpet in the commentary by George Weeks (a.k.a. Not Born This Morning, one of many aliases) for what he believes was an inconsistency in my assessment of men’s idealistic concept of love and how that idealism is really symbiotic with women’s opportunistic concept of love. I’ll spare you his autistic attention trolling, but he did raise a few points I do need to clarify about how men and women’s separate, but purpose driven, concepts of love developed.

From Intersexual Hierarchies:

In the beginning of this series I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can really see how the two dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two come together.

When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.

From Heartiste’s post:

7. Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance were highest in couples where the woman made all or most of the decisions. Female decision-making status was an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.

8. Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers. Lesson for men: You can have a happy relationship with a woman who makes more than you as long as you remain the dominant force in her non-work life. Or: GAME SAVES MARRIAGES.

When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.

This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.

In and of itself, a man’s idealism can be a source of strength or his greatest weakness. And while unfettered Hypergamic opportunism has been responsible for many of women’s worst atrocities to men, in and of itself Hypergamy is the framework in which the human species has evolved. Neither is good nor bad, but become so in how they are considered and how they are applied.

Men’s idealistic concept of love is a buffer against women’s opportunistic concept of love. When that idealism is expressed from a Beta mindset women’s opportunism dominates him and it’s debilitating. When it’s expressed from an Alpha mindset it supersedes her opportunism to the relationship’s benefit.

Conditioned Idealism

If you want to use Blue Valentine (the movie) as an example, the guy in the relationship abdicates all authority and ambition over to his wife’s opportunism. He idealistically believes “love is all that matters” and has no greater ambition than to please her and ‘just be himself’, because his conditioning has taught him that should be enough. His Beta conditioning convinced his idealism that his wife would shared in that idealistic concept of love in spite of his absence of performance. Consequently she despises him for it. She’s the de facto authority in the relationship and he slips into the subdominant (another child to care for) role.

Now if a man’s Alpha, willful, idealism propels him to greater ambition, and to prioritize his concept of love as the dominant, and places himself as his mental point of origin for which a woman accepts you can see how this leads to the conventional model. His idealism is enforced by how he considers it and how he applies it.

Men’s idealistic concept of love can be the worst debilitation in a man’s life when that idealistic nature is expressed from a supplicating Beta mentality. It will crush him when that idealism is all about a bill of goods he idealistically hopes a woman shares and will reciprocate with. This is predominantly how we experience idealism in our present cultural environment of feminized social primacy.

From an Alpha perspective that idealism is a necessary buffer against that same feminine opportunistic concept of love that would otherwise tear a Beta apart.

There was a time when men’s idealistic concept of love was respected above the opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love. I explored this social control of Hypergamy in Women Behaving Badly.

Under the old set of books, when men’s attractiveness (if not arousal) was based on his primary provisioning role his love-idealism defined the intergender relationship. Thus, we still have notions of chivalry, traditional romance, conventional models of a love hierarchy, etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this love-idealism.

There was a time when men’s idealistic love concept pushed him to achievements that had social merit and were appreciated. Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles would not be the human icons they are if that idealism weren’t a driving force in men and society. Likewise, women’s opportunistic, hypergamy-based concept of love, while cruel in its extreme, has nonetheless been a driving motivation for men’s idealistic love as well as a filter for sexual selection.

Under the new set of books, in a feminine-centric social order, the strengths of that male idealism, love honor and integrity are made to serve the purpose of the Feminine Imperative. Men’s idealistic love becomes a liability when he’s conditioned to believe that women share that same idealism, rather than hold to an opportunistic standard. This is what we have today with generations of men conditioned and feminized for identifying with the feminine. These are the generations of men who were conditioned to internalize the equalist lie that men and women are the same and all is relative. From that perspective it should follow that both sexes would share a mutual concept of love – this is the misunderstanding that leads men to expect their idealism to be reciprocated and thus leads to their exploitation and self-abuse.

A man’s idealism becomes his liability when he enters a woman’s opportunistic frame still believing they both share a mutual concept of love.

The Love Experience

experience

Glenn and a few others had a question about last week’s Love Commodity post.:

@Rollo – This seems very inconsistent to me. How can this be true – ” Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. ” While this is true? “In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.”

You’ll have to forgive a long explanation, I couldn’t simply drop this into the commentary, a full post was necessary.

The first thing we need to consider is the Male Experience vs. the female experience. I hate to get too existential, but it comes down to our individuated experiences as men and women. I’m going to give two examples here and this will also cover the Hypergamy is everything thread I noticed the commentary too.

There’s an interesting conflict of societal messaging we get from an equalitarian / feminine-primary social order. This is one that simultaneously tells us that “we are not so different” or “we are more alike than we are different” and then, yet implores use to “celebrate our diversity” and “embrace (or tolerate) our differences” as people.

This is easily observable in issues of ethnicity, but it also crosses over into issues of gender. The most popular trope is that ideas of gender are a social construct and that women and men are comparative equals and only their physical plumbing makes them different in form only.

From a Red Pill perspective we see the error in evidence of this egalitarian fantasy. I’ve written countless posts on the evidential and logical fallacies that make up gender equalism, but the important thing to be aware of is the conflict inherent within that belief – equalism expects men and women’s existential experiences to be the same, while also pleading that we embrace the differences it purports we don’t actually have.

It fundamentally denies the separation, from an evolved biological / psychological perspective, that men and women experience life in different ways. The idea is that it’s the nebulous ‘society’ that determines our gender experiences and less, if nothing, of it is truly influenced by a human being’s psychological-biological firmware.

zdr01dz posted this:

I think maybe this is in part because men have no innate desire to marry up. Hypergamy doesn’t compute for us. I know what hunger feels like and I assume women feel it the same way I do. I’m empathetic to poor, hungry children because I know what they’re feeling. However I have no idea what hypergamy feels like. I’ve never felt it’s pull.

My second example comes from Women and Sex in which I explore the fallacy of the social convention that insists “women are just as sexual as men” and that “women want sex, enjoy sex, even more than men.”

This canard is both observably and biologically disprovable, but the presumption is based on the same “we’re all the same, but celebrate the difference” conflicting principle that I mentioned above. If a dynamic is complimentary to the feminine then the biological basis is one we’re expected to ’embrace the diversity’ of, but if the dynamic is unflattering to the feminine it’s the result “of a society that’s fixated on teaching gender roles to ensure the Patriarchy, we’re really more alike than not.”

The idea is patently false because there is no real way any woman can experience the existence and conditions that a man does throughout his life. I mention in that essay about how a female amateur body builder I knew who was dumbstruck by how horny she became after her first cycle of anabolic steroids. “I can’t believe men can live in a state like this” were her exact words. She was just beginning to get a taste of what men experience and control in their own skins 24 hours a day and it was unsettling for her.

Women are used to a cyclic experience of sexuality, whereas men must be ready to perform at the first, best opportunity sexually. These are our individuated experiences and despite all the bleating of the equalists they are qualitatively different. As zdr01dz observes, no man has an idea of what Hypergamy feels like. To my knowledge there is no drug or hormone that can simulate the existential experience of Hypergamy. Even if there were, men and women’s minds are fundamentally wired differently, so the simulated experience could never be replicated for a man.

I understand how Hypergamy works from observing the behavior and understanding the motivating biology for it. I also understand that our species evolved with, and benefitted from it – or at least it makes deductive sense that what we know as Hypergamy today is a derivative of that evolution – but what I don’t have is a firsthand, existential experience of Hypergamy and I never will. Likewise, women will never have a similar existential experience of what it’s like to be a man.

So it should be an easy follow to deduce that how a woman experiences love, as based on her Hypergamic opportunistic impulses, is a fundamentally different experience than that of a man’s. The equalist social order want’s love to be an equal, mutual, agreement on a definition of love that transcends individuated gender experience, but it simply will not accept that an intersexual experience of love is defined by each sex’s individuated experience.

I have no doubt that there are areas of crossover in both men’s idealistic concept of love and women’s opportunistic concept, but this experience of love is still defined by gender-specific individuation. By that I mean that women can and do experience intense feelings of love for a man based on her Hypergamously influenced criteria for love.

I’m actually surprised that more women have yet to call me to the carpet about their personal experiences of love from the commodity post, but if you sift through the comments on Women in Love and other blog/forum comments you’ll come across examples of women describing in great detail how deeply they love their husbands / boyfriends, and are in complete disarray over being told their love stems from Hypergamic opportunism. Again, I have no doubt that their feelings of love are genuine to them based on their individuated concepts of love; indeed they’re ready to fight you tooth and nail to defend their investment in those feelings. What I’m saying is that the criteria a man should need to meet in order to generate those emotions and arrive at a love state are not universally mutual as an equalitarian social order would have the whole of society believe.

So, yes, men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely – from their own individuated experiences. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. The processes they used to come to this love state differs in concept and existential individuation, and what sustains that love state is still dependent upon the criteria of men’s idealistic and women opportunistic concepts of love.

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

The commodification of that love state is presently weighted on the feminine because the Feminine Imperative is socially ascendant. The importance of satisfying the female sexual (and really life-goal) strategy takes primary social precedence today. Thus men’s individuated experience is devalued to an assumption of an “it’s-all-equal” universality while women’s is blown up out of all real valuation with collective expectations of “embracing their unique difference” set apart from that universality. If men’s experience is one-size-fits-all it’s really a small, and socially blameless, step for a woman to withhold the reward criteria men place on their idealistic love in order to satisfy their own sexual strategy.

Women’s social primacy allows them to feel good about themselves for commodifying the idealistic rewards men value to come to their own state of love, as well as maintain it.

It is one further step to embrace the concept that men’s experience of love, the idealism he applies to it and even his own sexual and life imperatives are in fact the same as those of women’s – while still setting women’s apart when it serves them better. Thus the cardinal rule of sexual strategies comes to a feminine-primary consolidation by socially convincing men that women’s experience and imperatives are, or should be considered to be, the same as men’s individuated experiences. Add women’s already innate solipsism to this and you have a formula for a gender-universal presumption of the experience of love based primarily on the individuated female experience of love.

In other words, women expect men to socially and psychologically agree with, reinforce and cooperate with the opportunistic feminine model of love as the equalist, gender-mutual model model of love while still believing that women share their own idealistic model. It’s the correct model that should work for everyone, or so women’s solipsism would have us believe.

Commodifying Love

commodity

Dalrock gave me something to chew on recently:

In my first post of 2014 I introduced the topic of the ugly feminist.  As I explained at the time, this is an old charge but is typically aimed at the superficial instead of the core problem.  Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.  Several commenters pointed out that this is a devastating charge against feminism, as they could see no viable counter argument for it.

I’m not going to try to offer a counter to Dal’s assertion because in essence I think he’s correct. However I will suggest that this ugliness is the result of a commodification of love (and with it sexual access) that’s resulted from the unfettering of women’s Hypergamy. Love and caring is the commodity women’s Hypergamy uses to fulfill their dualistic sexual strategy.

To this day my most contentious post (and chapter in the book) on RM is Women in Love. This is primarily due to first time readers taking my assertions to their literal extreme. Women’s concept of love stems from opportunism, men’s concept stems from idealism. Most women and Blue Pill men take this to mean that women cannot actually love a man, and absolutist men angry with themselves for having never understood it think much the same thing, “My God! I knew it all along, women cannot actually love a man.”

I assert neither of these positions (really the same position) in that post, nor any of the followup post (that no one seems to want to read once they make up their minds), but what I do assert is:

Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In prior posts I’ve also made the case that men’s idealistic perspective of love stems from an unending need for performance to merit a woman’s opportunistic love. It’s not that men want an unrealistic, unconditional love, but rather they want a woman’s love to be a refuge from having to perform up to, above and beyond the requirements of satisfying an unending optimization of her Hypergamy. It’s not unconditional love they idealize, it’s a love that’s not predicated on their burden of performance.

What frustrates this love idealism is that men are popularly sold the idea that women’s love is based on a mutually similar model. From Disney movies to romantic comedies, to Shakespeare and epic stories, to popular music and the daily talk shows, the message is that love (if it’s real love) is omniscient, conquers all and overcomes all odds. It’s a very seductive message of hope for men whose lives and existences are evaluated on constant performance.

“Could she really love me despite all of my glaring inadequacies?”

“Does she love the real me or is it my money and the lifestyle I provide for her?”

The fact that these themes are a constant in human history illustrates the subconscious, peripheral awareness we have of the differing models of love each sex bases their understanding of love on.

The Commodity

What this selling of idealistic love does for men is keep them in a state of perpetual hope that this idealism is shared by both sexes and they can realistically achieve that ideal goal of a love not founded on his performance. It’s important to note here that this performance isn’t necessarily something a man must make a constant effort to maintain (though this is the usual case), but rather what he represents, not who he is personally. It may be that his effortless looks or inherent status represents a cue for a woman’s optimal hypergamous satisfaction, or it may be the result of years of dedicated performance effort – either way it’s what that man represents; remove the factors a man possesses that satisfy a woman’s Hypergamy and her opportunistic model of love will reveal itself.

Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.

Dalrock’s observation here is profound in that it illustrates exactly the state of opportunism on which women base their concept of love. On some level of consciousness women understand the inherent value their love, concern, attention and caring has for men. It’s repression or expression is a commodity that has reward value for men who also have an awareness that their performance is what merits a woman’s love.

The popular criticism is that this want for an idealistic love is really a man’s preoccupation with his need for sex, but this is to be expected from a fem-centric culture that needs women to ration love and caring for men in order to ensure its social dominance. And God forbid a man express his desire for a performance-less based love and caring; he’s ostracized for wanting a mother’s love (Freudian), being necessitous (thus powerless) and revealing his deficiency in performance.

As Open Hypergamy becomes more proudly embraced and normalized in society, so too will women’s sexual strategy be laid more bare. And in laying that strategy bare, so too will women’s opportunistic model of love become more apparent to men. This new apparentness is already conflicting with the old-order messaging that kept men hopeful of realizing their idealistic love state.

Women cannot sell Open Hypergamy and the love-conquers-all ethereal ideal love at the same time.

Dal is correct, the philosophy of feminism is ugly, but it’s important to consider that feminism is just the current social operative of the Feminine Imperative today. For the moment women can be miserly with love and caring. They can even express resentment for having to be so with men who they doubt are meritorious of it, or for those who don’t measure up to the rigors of an increasingly open and increasingly demanding Hypergamy.

They can do this because they understand that the hopeful, idealistic love they have men convinced can be achieved is still a commodity to men.

Before I close, I’m going to give you a bit of Red Pill hope (again). Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. My point with this essay is to reveal how this love develops and the conditional environments it comes together in. In spite of the strongest bonds, there is a threshold at which men’s loving idealism and women’s performance requirements can test, stress and break that bond.

Men’s idealistic love can be strong, as can women’s opportunistic love – the two models are not mutually incompatible, and it’s my belief that the two are even complementary to each other. Neither is a right or wrong way to love, and neither is the definition of real love. Bear in mind these are models that predicate a condition of love, what happens after that is up to the individuals.

Where these models become incompatible is when one commodifies and exploits the condition of love that the other holds. In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.

For further reading see the Love series of posts:

Women in Love
Men in Love
Of Love and War
Burden of Performance
Love Story

Vulnerability

achilles_heel-1

One of the most endemic masculine pitfalls men have faced since the rise of feminine social primacy has been the belief that their ready displays of emotional vulnerability will make men more desirable mates for women.

In an era when men are raised from birth to be “in touch with their feminine sides”, and in touch with their emotions, we get generations of men trying to ‘out-emote’ each other as a mating strategy.

To the boys who grow into Beta men, the ready eagerness with which they’ll roll over and reveal their bellies to women comes from a conditioned belief that doing so will prove their emotional maturity and help them better identify with the women they mistakenly believe have a capacity to appreciate it.

What they don’t understand is that the voluntary exposing of ones most vulnerable elements isn’t the sign of strength that the Feminine Imperative has literally bred a belief of into these men.

A reflexive exposing of vulnerability is an act of submission, surrender and a capitulation to an evident superior. Dogs will roll over almost immediately when they acknowledge the superior status of another dog.

Vulnerability is not something to be brandished or proud of. While I do believe the insight and acknowledgement of your personal vulnerabilities is a necessary part of understanding oneself (particularly when it comes to unplugging oneself), it is not the source of attraction, and certainly not arousal, that most men believe it is for women.

From the comfort of the internet and polite company women will consider the ‘sounds-right’ appeal of male vulnerability with regard to what they’re supposed to be attracted to, but on an instinctual, subconscious level, women make a connection with the weakness that vulnerability represents.

A lot of men believe that trusting displays of vulnerability are mutually exclusive of displays of weakness, but what they ignore is that Hypergamy demands men that can shoulder the burden of performance. When a man openly broadcasts his vulnerableness he is, by definition, beginning from a position of weakness.

The problem with idealizing a position of strength is in thinking you’re already beginning from that strength and your magnanimous display of trusting vulnerability will be appreciated by a receptive woman. I strongly disagree with assertions like those of various Purple Pill ‘life coaches’ that open, upfront vulnerability is ever attractive to a woman.

The idea goes that if a man is truly outcome-independent with his being rejected by a woman, the first indicator of that independence is a freedom to be vulnerable with her. The approach then becomes one of “hey, I’m just gonna be my vulnerable self and if you’re not into me then I’m cool with that.”

The hope is that a woman will receive this approach as intended and find something refreshing about it, but the sad truth is that if this were the attraction key its promoters wish it was, every guy ‘just being himself‘ would be swimming in top shelf pussy. This is a central element to Beta Game – the hope that a man’s openness will set him apart from ‘other guys’ – it is common practice for men who believe in the equalist fantasy that women will rise above their feral natures when it comes to attraction, and base their sexual selection on his emotional intelligence.

The fact is that there is no such thing as outcome independence. The very act of your approaching a woman means you have made some effort to arrive at a favorable outcome with her. The fact that you’d believe a woman would even find your vulnerability attractive voids any pretense of outcome independence.

Hypergamy Doesn’t Care About Male Vulnerability

When I wrote Women in Love and the followups, Men in Love and Of Love and War, I described men’s concept of love as ‘idealistic’.

Naturally, simple minds exaggerated this into “men just want an impossible unconditional love” or “they want love like they think their mothers loved them.” For what it’s worth, I don’t believe any rational man with some insight ever expects an unconditional love, but I think it’s important to consider that a large part of what constitutes his concept of an idealized love revolves around being loved irrespective of how he performs for, or merits that love.

From Of Love and War:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

The concept of men’s idealistic love, the love that makes him the true romantic, begins with a want of freedom from his burden of performance. It’s not founded in an absolute like unconditional love, but rather a love that isn’t dependent upon his performing well enough to assuage a woman’s Hypergamous concept of love.

Oh, the Humanity!

As the true romantics, and because of the performance demands of Hypergamy, there is a distinct want for men to believe that in so revealing their vulnerabilities they become more “human” – that if they expose their frailties to women some mask they believe they’re wearing comes off and (if she’s a mythical “quality woman“™) she’ll excuses his inadequacies to perform to the rigorous satisfaction of her Hypergamy.

The problems with this ‘strength in surrender’ hope are twofold.

First, the humanness he believes a woman will respect isn’t the attraction cue he believes it is. Ten minutes perusing blogs about the left-swiping habits of women using Tinder (or @Tinderfessions) is enough to verify that women aren’t desirous of the kind of “humanness” he’s been conditioned to believe women are receptive to.

In the attraction and arousal stages, women are far more concerned with a man’s capacity to entertain her by playing a role and presenting her with the perception of a male archetype she expects herself to be attracted to and aroused by. Hypergamy doesn’t care about how well you can express your humanness, and primarily because the humanness men believe they’re revealing in their vulnerability is itself a predesigned psychological construct of the Feminine Imperative.

Which brings us to the second problem with ‘strength in surrender’. The caricaturized preconception men have about their masculine identity is a construct of a man’s feminine-primary socialization.

The Masks the Feminine Imperative Makes Men Wear

To explain this second problem it’s important to grasp how men are expected to define their own masculine identities within a social order where the only correct definition of masculinity is prepared for men in a feminine-primary context.

What I mean by this is that the humanness that men wish to express in showing themselves as vulnerable is defined by feminine-primacy.

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

“The Mask You Live In” by director Jennifer Siebel Newsom (dual surname noted) is the perfect example of this perpetuation. You have a woman deciding for a larger public in a documentary what the male experience is and then solving the problem (i.e. the tired trope of men needing to get more in touch with their emotions) for men.

Men are ridiculous posers. Men are socialized to wear masks to hide what the Feminine Imperative has decided is their true natures (they’re really girls wearing boy masks). Men’s problems extend from their inability to properly emote like women, and once they are raised better (by women and men who comply with the Feminine Imperative) they can cease being “tough” and get along better with women. That’s the real strength that comes from men’s feminized concept of vulnerability – compliance with the Feminine Imperative.

Ironically Newsom is still oblivious to the fact that she can only create such a documentary in an environment of feminine-primacy. No man could produce this and be taken seriously in our contemporary social climate.

It’s indictment of the definers of what masculinity ought to be that they still characterize modern masculinity (based on the ‘feels’) as being problematic when for generations our feminine-primary social order has conditioned men to associate that masculinity in as feminine-beneficial a context as women would want.

They still rely on an outdated formula which presumes the male experience is inferior, a sham, in comparison to the female experience, and then presumes to know what the male experience really is and offers feminine-primary solutions for it.

From The 16 Commandments of Poon:

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest. When she grasps for a pillar to steady herself against the whipping winds or yearns for an authority figure to foil her worst instincts, it is you who has to be there… strong, solid, unshakeable and immovable.

True vulnerability is not a value-added selling point for a man when it comes to approaching and attracting women. As with all things, your vulnerability is best discovered by a woman through demonstration –never explaining those vulnerabilities to her with the intent of appearing more human as the feminine would define it.

Women want a bulwark against their own emotionalism, not a co-equal male emoter whose emotionalism would compete with her own. The belief that male vulnerability is a strength is a slippery slope from misguided attraction to emotional codependency, to overt dependency on a woman to accommodate and compensate for the weaknesses that vulnerability really implies.

I know a lot of guys think that displays vulnerability from a position of Alpha dominance, or strength can be endearing for a woman when you’re engaged in an LTR, but I’m saying that’s only the case when the rare instance of vulnerability is unintentionally revealed. Vulnerability is not a strength, and especially not when a man deliberately reveals it with the expectation of a woman appreciating it as a strength.

At some point in any LTR you will show your vulnerable side, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is the overt attempt to parlay that vulnerability into a strength or virtue that you expect that woman to appreciate, feel endearment over or reciprocate with displays of her own vulnerability for.

A chink in the armor is a weakness best kept from view of those who expect you to perform your best in all situations. If that chink is revealed in performing your best, then it may be considered a strength for having overcome it while performing to your best potential. It is never a strength when you expect it to be appreciated as such.

Intimacy

intimacy

Bad Painter had a great question a few months ago:

What exactly is intimacy? What does that look like in a Redpill context?

I used to think I knew what intimacy was, in a blue pill way at least. And I have come the realization that intimacy is either not worth shit, or I simply don’t get it. What I do know is that those times were I was informed intimacy had been achieved were not correlated with my feeling comfortable, more secure or less anxious rather it was the opposite.

This is a good question.

In my writing I use the term ‘intimacy’ as a sort of confirmation of a woman’s genuine interest, but I don’t think I’ve ever really defined it.

Strictly from a PUAs sense I would say intimacy is a woman’s sexual availability – in no uncertain terms it’s confirmation of her intimate interest and acceptance of you, but then again, in my own sexual past I’ve had more than one fuck-buddy with whom I really didn’t share any real intimacy with.

In those instances I was (at least perceived) a point or so above these women’s SMV and enjoyed all the Alpha benefits that arrangement afforded me, but beyond the sexual, I had no real interest in any kind of intimacy, shared or not.

In a sense, I actually had a much deeper intimacy with the three fuck-buddies I would bang in my 20’s than the women with whom I’d invested myself with in more “meaningful” relationships. You see, with my fuck-buddies all pretense of caring about what they thought of me personally (and certainly from a long-term investment) was simply a non-issue. I was free to express as much or as little of myself as I wanted because I wasn’t actively qualifying for their future investment in me. My Frame was dominant from the outset – sex-on-call is a pretty strong indicator of dominant Frame.

When I was writing the final edits of the Wait For It? post for the Rational Male book I felt that I needed to add a caveat towards the end of that section to account for a sense of intimacy for red pill men, who by conviction or otherwise, weren’t comfortable with actually fucking a woman to confirm genuine desire.

The point of that being that sex isn’t necessarily a determinant of intimacy, but rather the real desire for that person and the want for a mutual connection (to be consummated by sex) creates a condition of intimacy.

Zenpriest on intimacy:

“When one considers that one must “game” a woman, even your wife, in order to keep her around, then it also means that you must always be operating at a “higher level” than her. It totally negates the whole notion of having a “soul-mate” and means that on many levels, a man will always be alone.” 

That is probably the most important lesson a man can ever learn.

Intimacy with a woman is impossible if you have any interest in being her lover. If you are fine with being one of her grrrlfriends, and don’t mind the stupid messed up games women run on them, then you can share to your heart’s content – and will always be on the LJBF ladder.

The fundamental problem with today’s concept of marriage is that it seems both men and women expect their spouse to be all things to them – lover, confidante, helpmate, “soulmate”, co-housekeeper, and co-wage-earner. With so many role demands, it is inevitable that everyone will fail at some of them. That is why the old division of roles worked fairly well for most people – each could concentrate on a few things they were good at, and leave the rest to the other person.

Zenpriest outlines one of the fundamental differences between a forced egalitarian equalist approach to relationships with the natural complementary approach – intimacy between two autonomous, self-sufficient, self-reliant individuals is an impossibility in a sustained relationship. If there is a complete self-sustaining independence between both partners (an eqaulist idealized state) then there is no true purpose for intimacy between the two.

Buena Vista:

I have been the Alpha Fucks, the Beta Bucks, and I have been both at the same time. Civil marriage requires a man, as Deti notes by inverse example, to commit to permanent Game. Permanent Game rarely involves true intimacy. This is the reality of the Plan B Nice Guy in marriage.

Eon:

It seems that intimacy, like love, is only possible if you are greater than (and thus truly independent of) the object of your love.

Softek:

In my opinion, intimacy is unchanged by the red pill. It’s the ideas and perceptions about it that are changed.

There’s a lot of dichotomy: sex, attention, and affection are all thought of as needs, but at the same time, if you’re not getting any of those things, the only way to get them is to take on the mindset of having an abundance of them.

And the guys who seem to have free access to all of those things have access to them because they don’t care if they have access to them or not.

I have to consider these perspectives of intimacy and cross reference it with the Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

Although in an extreme this may seem manipulative to the uninitiated, this balance exists in every relationship irrespective of whether one party is intentionally using that power or not. In fact the most frustrated men you’ll ever meet are those whose women aren’t intentionally using the power his qualifying for her intimacy bestows upon her. He wonders why he can never merit her intimacy, while she, obliviously, wonders why he keeps trying to merit it.

As I illustrated in my fuck-buddies example, I was free to be as intimate as I chose with them because I literally had nothing to lose by doing so. And in that state of outcome indifference they wanted those occasions of intimacy far more than any woman I’d held in a high enough esteem to think I needed to qualify for their intimacy.

However, from a Red Pill perspective, I think the idea that “real” intimacy requires a constant effort of Game is in error. I’ve shared an enduring intimacy with Mrs. Tomassi for 19 years because Game and Red Pill awareness are simply part of who I am now. Game, if that’s even the right word for it, becomes effortless once you’ve made Red Pill truths an intrinsic part of who you are.

I still think Buena’s right though, permanent Game rarely involves true intimacy, but only if that Game is a constant act a man feels he needs to make believable to sustain his relationship. This then comes full circle to wanting to fulfill Blue Pill idealisms of intimacy with applied Red Pill awareness.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

Most men’s concept of intimacy, like love, is shaped by his Blue Pill conditioning. The key to real intimacy is understanding how it can grow and be sustained in a Red Pill context. Chasing after an intimacy defined by the feminine suffers from the same misdirection of presuming women’s concept of love (opportunism) agrees with men’s (idealism).

So, weekend discussion questions:

How do you define intimacy?

Do you think men and women share the same concept and definition of intimacy?

Is ‘true’ intimacy only achievable when you have nothing to lose and nothing invested in a woman?

 

End Note: I’m well aware that intimacy has far broader inferences than just the relations between men and women, and I’m not attempting to pigeonhole the entire concept. There is intimacy with your family, your God, your pets, yourself and a variety of other things. However, even in those instances there is still a power dynamic at play.