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”.
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.