Operative Social Conventions

Sizzle & Steak: Evangelism in the Hustle Economy

What exactly are we teaching the Lost Boys today?

I came across the term Lost Boys in 2016. It’s attributed to the fan base that Dr. Jordan Peterson was generating around that time, but I had heard similar references to “drop out” young men as early as 2014. The fem-stream media was concerned that these 18-29 year old men were deliberately thwarting women’s mating/life strategies by not preparing themselves for adulthood. Women were concerned that fewer young men were going to be suitably ignorant-yet-dutiful husband material by the time they were 30. Meanwhile, TradCon media (predictably) made this crisis of masculinity all about men “shirking their responsibilities” from a want to “perpetuate their adolescence”. As expected, men assuming more masculine responsibility was the cure to solving this social malaise. Both sides of the ideological spectrum have never had a real interest in discerning the root causes for the now two generations of Lost Boys. To do so would challenge both ideology’s base presumptions about innate sex differences, feminism, gynocentrism and female empowerment stretching back to the sexual revolution. Hannah Rosen called it the End of Men in The Atlantic back in 2012. The Kidults and Peter Pan Men were an easily shamed novelty. Breitbart called them the Drop Out Generation and we’re similarly dismissed as “lazy kids not preparing themselves for being fathers and husbands.” Even I threw my hat in the ring when I penned Are You Experienced.

In 2021 we are now two generations into the Lost Boys. Just like the latter half of the Millennials, now Gen Z young men are becoming the next wave of guys trying to find purpose in a life that has no need of them – or they’re endlessly derided for not living up to an old order standard. As Rian Stone has said, they are sheep in search of a shepherd – students with no teacher – young men who are effectively rudderless in life. This is where the Red Pill, Manosphere, male space or whatever we’re calling it now is stepping in to become the teachers these young men have lacked. But what are we actually teaching the Lost Boys? From what I see today, most “coaches” haven’t done much more than profit by them. Today, they are more lost now than when Dr. Peterson identified them. What will be the long-term human, societal, cost of two generations of young men guided, taught and/or hustled into, or out of, embracing conventional masculinity?

The Blind Lead the Blinder

“Who’s the more foolish, the Blue Pill chump or the chumps who follow him?”

If you’ve read my latest book The Rational Male, Religion you’ll already be familiar with the concept of The Brand of Me. Today, everyone is their own brand. From the frustrated soccer mom, to the 12-year-old girl interacting with “friends” she’s never met, to OnlyFans girls, to niche marketing Gurus, everyone you know is actively engaged in some form of personal brand management. Even your grandmother on FaceBook is her own PR agent. Likewise, masculinity/positivity gurus are their own personal brands. I’m emphasizing ‘are’ here because we live our own brand identity as our personal identity in our day to day lives now.

It’s becoming exceedingly difficult to separate the ‘man‘ from his brand today. In the Hustle Economy, managing brand identity, is managing livelihood, is managing personal identity. Everyone is their brand. In the early 2000’s it was the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian who were the pioneers of being famous for being famous. Neither had (has) any real exceptional talent that made them celebrities; they simple were famous. There are other examples, but most of that “fame” was generated via careful personal brand management in a time when social media was nothing like it is today. Then, it took a lot more work and money to curate fame for being famous. Now, in the new order, it’s never been easier to create an easily believable perceptions of fame – even if it’s just a low degree of it.

It’s all sizzle and no steak. E-Celebrity is now reality show entertainment that virtually anyone, any demographic, can create for themselves. In my 2014 essay Hysteria I detailed the social experiment of a guy who created his own instant celebrity:

Basically, the guy had a few friends follow him around the mall, one guy filming him and the other two guys (I can’t tell if any of his hired guns were women) acting as his “groupies” or entourage. He goes around identifying himself as “Thomas Elliot” when people, mostly women, ask him his name. Eventually, he begins to pile up admiring and gawking female attention, which only snowballs into more female attention. Apparently, not one of these starstruck chicks thought to question if Thomas Elliot was a real celebrity. That’s the power of preselection and fame; so powerful, it can disengage a woman’s neural logic circuitry.

Remember, the linked videos were produced in 2012. This experiment required a film team, at least 2-3 collaborators to give the guy some legitimacy. You don’t need this today. In fact you don’t even need great post-production or computer skills now. All that’s required to create a similar video is a smart phone and Instagram. Social proof, preselection, status, clout, prestige, indignation and fame have never been easier to manufacture for average people than in the first 20 years of the 21st century.

Never have more people (and mostly women) been so rewarded for so little real work, talent, virtuoso, education or creativity. And rewarded with money, adulation, admiration, “respectability“, love, attention and importance. Today, anyone can become influential – an influencer. Potentially, anyone can get paid better and enjoy more status than the career they may have went to years of college to get. As a result, the value of a formal real education is debased.

But, who cares about college or education anyway, right? Even STEM fields and the hard sciences have been infiltrated by Wokezis. Academia is rife with socialists and Marxism at every level now. Post-modernism has owned the humanities and the arts since at least the 1960s if not the late 1800s. True education has become a grift too. Most universities are just very expensive diploma mills that supply you with the paperwork necessary to allow you to be considered for an entry-level job – usually determined by an underpaid Karen in the HR department; likely with less “education” than what you paid for just to get an audience with her. Now, is it any wonder that education and “preparing oneself for life and responsibilities” is effectively worthless to the Lost Boys generation?

‘Cause I’m a twenty-first century digital boy
I don’t know how to live but I got a lot of toys
My daddy’s a lazy middle-class intellectual
My mommy’s on Valium, so ineffectual
Ain’t life a mystery, yeah?

Bad Religion, 21st Century Digital Boy, 1990

Damn, that song was prophetic. If an education’s purpose is to allow the graduate access to the job (in the working world) he believes will profit him best, and he’d have better results in the Hustle Economy, why bother with the investment of time and student debt? If a young woman can make a fortune from the minimum investment needed to be an OnlyFans influencer (sex worker) why bother to study nursing? If a guy can make more money and be more attractive as a “life coach” for far less investment than a degree in a suspicious major like psychology what’s the incentive to be educated?

The motive is profit and the process is profit. In the New Order we’ve become hyper-efficient at commodifying both motive and process. This has led to a mistrust, if not disdain, of education, science (as a method), wisdom and genuine creative inspiration.

“If it doesn’t lead to my first million dollars what’s the point of doing it?”
“Fuck it, I’ll just be a stripper OnlyFans girl or entrepreneur.”

As a result the Hustle Economy tends to attract pathological personalities. As most of my readers know, crazy tends to draw more crazy into its orbit. Pathological doesn’t always mean criminally insane. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk had/have pathological reality distortion fields about them. And while they are what we’d excuse as eccentric, maybe asocial, they weren’t destructive malcontents. Unfortunately, they’re the rarer exceptions. Get rich quick, get fit quick, get clout quick, get love, adoration, props, respectability, attention, concern, empathy/sympathy, and commiseration instantly, with the least amount of money and personal investment is an irresistible pull to pathological personalities. In any other era, these guys would have to be supremely creative and driven to get up and over the loser status barrier to become more than they started as. And only then after a constant learning from defeat and setbacks. For today’s TL;DR generation, if it can’t be delivered instantaneously why else would you bother doing something?

“Only the insane have the strength to prosper. Only those who prosper truly judge what is sane.”

Part II, next week,…

The Future Shock

When something big in the news goes down I’ve learned from experience not to be too quick to write anything about it until the hype dies down and more information comes out. My long-time readers know what I’m talking about. In the early days of this blog I could get caught up in a story about how a guy got Zeroed Out and committed suicide or killed his family and himself, and people would run me up the flagpole for jumping to conclusions. That those conclusions were, in fact, accurate was irrelevant to critics. It was all about ‘hasty generalizations‘ and confirmation biases at the time of writing.

This new Corona Virus pandemic is something different though. There are a lot of people very eager to jump to those hasty generalizations in this global crisis – and pointing out their panic only makes them feel more justified in panicking. At the time of this writing we’re seeing a globalized response to a globalized virus. For all or our new order information, technology, access and connectivity the same old order human nature remain the same. Odd that the people who’ve criticized me for being too mechanistic about our evolved nature are the same people who are in a righteous panic caused by the nature I’ve been told we’re supposed to be evolved above now.

But today, instead of a localized panic, we get a global panic. Instead of localized disinformation, we have globalized disinformation.

“In the social media age, people have forgotten that it’s not remotely normal to be able to see hundreds of millions of people’s opinions & actions, let alone engage with them.

We’re living in the biggest experiment in human history and have little idea of the long term consequences.”

Zuby

Ironically, Zuby tweeted this quote about a week before the Corona Virus really became what it is now (late March, 2020). At the time I though it captured what was going on in our Global Sexual Marketplace so I saved the quote, but it’s true about a lot of new order areas of our modern globalized lives. And that includes global pandemics too.

I wrote about old order versus new order thinking a few months ago. This essay, The New Age of Enlightenment, is actually an excerpt from my upcoming fourth book in the Rational Male series and is a theme I carry through much of it. At the time of my writing it I had come to much of the same thinking as Zuby had here: it’s time we re-envision what a rapidly advancing global society looks like. My take began in the global sexual marketplace, but it’s expanded to many other areas of life. It’s a challenge to humanity to be sure. Reassessing what was old order wisdom worth preserving and abandoning what was simply inaccurate (or deliberately distorted) in the age of new order information and communication is something most people are unprepared for. Most people are too comfortable in the lives they built for themselves based on the foundation of old order ideals.

The Virus pandemic is proving this to us in real time and online 24 hours a day now. Faced with the rapid, systemic shutdown of every major economy on the planet, the global community now reverts to its very human, very predictable nature. The response to real, existential crisis is what defines the person, and what defines their ego-invested belief-sets – except everything is intensified.

Here’s what I’m seeing happen.

Believers’ Confirmation

Doomsday preppers rejoice. Christians, Catholics, [insert Millenarian Dominionist religion] all love and hate this crisis simultaneously. It both proves God’s love and God’s wrath in the same breath. And as I’ve expounded upon in the fourth book, there’s simply no arguing with people who have no questions. Don’t take this as a flame on believers – I get why they find comfort in it – it’s a simple observation of how crisis situations bring out what truly motivates people in a way we only rarely see.

Even the woo woo magical thinkers find a common confirmation of their spiritual-but-not-religious beliefs. They all told you so. They all knew it was coming. The tea leaves and energy ‘vibrations’ have all been off for months. If only we’d sent enough positive Juju out into the universe the Law of Attraction would have prevented all this! Likewise, they’re all equally unprepared for it. A reaffirmed faith (however they define it) will see them through. And maybe that’s a good attitude to have when panic and fear are the hot new commodities to sell on the worldwide stage (I’ll get to that in a moment).

Uncertainty is difficult for people, but there’s a lot of comfort in finding confirmation of beliefs in crisis and tragedy. And that belief doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. Political wonks are equally zealots now. This pandemic will define presidencies and, going forward, will likely determine the platforms of future world leaders for some time.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” – especially in an age when the majority of the worlds’ people literally cannot escape seeing it in real time. For the political ideologist, on either side of the spectrum, how this pandemic is being handled by officials, and the prophecies of inevitable economic ruin, is just as belief-affirming as religious confirmations.

For the Left, this is the event they’ve always waited for to bring down a president who’s been effectively invincible since the Primaries of 2015. To use their own words, they can “finally get the motherfucker.” That it took a global pandemic is irrelevant. For the Right, it’s an illustration of how life will look under the fantasy Socialist tyranny they see in the Left. The wholesale closing of abortion clinics is an added bonus. In our own sphere, for MGTOW it’s the sweet humbling of women’s egos as, from all appearances, women turn to a new appreciation of conventionally masculine men and ape the mannerisms of traditional femininity – for now. For the Trad-Con sunhat ladies this feminist pivot is, again, reaffirming. Gone, almost overnight, are the bleating of social justice warriors with all discussions of socially constructed gender norms. Noticeable in its absence is all talk of Women’s History Month (March) and the need for reparations in gender inequities. Hell, in Finland the all-female, all-feminist, government is glaringly impotent from all accounts I’ve read.

Most of this is what I’d expect from the average global citizen in the face of a world changing, relatively lethal, pandemic. However, it’s the new order Outrage Brokers and Success Porn Hustlahs scrambling to place their bets on the next 9 months who are truly a wonder to behold now.

Outrage Brokers in the Apocalypse

Amongst all of this pandemic gnashing of teeth we get the inevitable grifters. If we’re honest, we knew most of these guys were leeches when times were good. Certainly not all of them, but the temptation of quitting an old order day job for the promise of a new order monthly direct deposit from Google for playing ‘life coach’ on a webcam was a dream come true for most. Now their true natures rise to the surface as they see the chuckwagon of the gig economy pulling away. And just like rats going through an Extinction Burst they frantically try every new angle that they might profit from.

These are the war profiteers of this new order era, but the pitch is the same as it was in the past – stoke fear, sell security.

It almost seems quaint that I brought up this exact formula as discussion topic on Rule Zero just 2 weeks ago. We were illustrating how the term Red Pill (and now MGTOW) has been coopted as a branding opportunity by “coaches” and “relationship experts” with very little experience beyond what they can glean from others in the sphere. The main point was this: it’s far easier to get views and build subscriber bases in next to no time when your material is all red meat outrage for ‘underserved’ Average Frustrated Chumps. Toss out a few “red pills”, paint a few of them black, and commiserate with the average 80-percenter guy’s reality with women, gynocentrism and then play on the same indignation porn that the mainstream has been selling to women for 3 decades now. All sizzle, no steak. Is it any wonder that critics think the Red Pill is populated with nihilistic, homicidal Incels?

But that’s the formula. It just took men longer to perfect it for a fresh generation of male consumers. Indignation might be an innate female need, but the past 3 generations of men have developed a taste for it as well. It’s what happens when boys are raised as defective girls.

It’s important to see this crisis through the emotional lens that the past 4 generations of men and women have been taught to prioritize. For over 50 years now we’ve been conditioned to see the female, emotions-first, experience as the correct interpretation of every facet of a globalizing society. This pandemic is no exception.

Because of their emotions-first nature fear is easy to sell to women. Women’s innate need for security is what made them the primary consumer in western societies, but now we have at least 2 generations of men who were educated to be defective women. ThoseVillage-educated emotions-first men are susceptible to the same sales formulas now. Feels before Reals isn’t just for women, and this pandemic crisis is proving it in spades.

The savvy hucksters know this. The not so savvy ones will attempt to go back to whatever cubicle job they think still exists for them before they quit their day jobs. But the career Outrage Brokers are already profiteering from that formula; feed the fear, sell security.

You know the names. Watch them. You’ll need to remember their nature when things shake out.

Zeroed Out

What even the best Red Pill rage-bait “entrepreneur” knows is that the vast majority of his/her soon-to-be-former supporters will be Zeroed Out in the coming months. There is no going back to what we thought of as normal. Even if we recover back to a comfortable normalcy fairly quickly this experience changes things. The game has changed, all games have changed, and the uncertainty of the basics will replace the leisure of having the personal concerns we used to entertain before the virus hit.

A lot of good men will be Zeroed Out in the wake of this crisis.

I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

The red meat is still there. The chemical rush that comes from indignation-without-solution will always satisfy in the short term, but now it will be a reminder of what people had a luxury to pursue before all this shit went down. Grifters and Outrage Brokers know this. Zealots and Shamans know this. Black Pills, God-Pills, MGTOW and every Red Pill rebrand knows this. And the old order thinkers who were comfortable and self-righteous in the certainty of a condition that couldn’t ever end for them will all say they saw this coming while they shit their pants looking for a way to sustain themselves. The red meat is all that’s left for them, and they’ll climb over themselves to be the source of it.

I’m not throwing all this out there to freak anyone out. Freaking out is the reflexive response I’ve been seeing for 2 weeks now. It’s more infectious than the actual virus. I’m simply trying to put this crisis into rational, masculine perspective. That requires observation.

Yes, women are going to revert to their survival instincts; observe it, catalog it, use it to confirm what the Red Pill has been proposing for 20 years now.

Yes, lesser men will panic and expect you to panic along with them. Their imaginings and superstitions are a source of dopamine for them. Learn from their real nature.

Yes, the Outrage Brokers will all feed you fear and sell you product to allay that fear. They’ll all have a nootropic pill to cure Covid soon. Make a note of who they are.

And yes, you will likely be Zeroed Out in some manner in the coming year. Take comfort in knowing you’re definitely not alone. You, me, everyone will need to rebuild ourselves to some degree soon. Start analyzing you strengths, pay attention to what’s going on around you. You must be agile like never before. Many different aspects of Red Pill awareness will be confirmed for you, a lot probably have been already, learn from these confirmations. This is the Future Shock. Now is not the time to flounder in despair. Look for the opportunities.

Rise Above

I received this comment on my January 29, 2020 livestream of Rational Male 101:

I think Rollo is talking about an idea that I’ve read about before in Thomas Sowell’s famous book Conflict of Visions. One side of the spectrum says that humans are very animalistic despite their capability of rationalizing otherwise, and human nature must be constrained by laws and social processes (such as constraining hypergamy). The other side of the spectrum says that humans are entirely capable of overcoming their Darwinian natures through intentional decisionmaking and must be unconstrained in order to flourish. Everyone lies somewhere between the two. I assume most men here lean more toward a constrained vision.

Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.

Most “old order” ideologies today are struggling with relevancy in what I called the age of “new order” thinking or our New Age of Enlightenment. This new order understanding is the result of the unprecedented deluge of information we now have access to in this millennium. Not only is it this new influx of data that’s challenging the old order ideologies, but also the accessibility to it that old order thinkers can no longer keep pace with.

The response to this influx of information requires us to parse it out like never before. In predictable human fashion most people will make a hard turn towards the old order dictates that used to be able to explain harsh truths to us adequately enough for us to move on to other things. Thus, we see the global Village return to an interest in old religions, shamanism, metaphysics and tribal superstitions (and a lot of Chick Crack) today. That’s not to say that some of these old order institutions never had merit. A lot of what new order data presents to us can be confirmed by old order beliefs and wisdom. What we used to take on faith can now be confirmed by new order information. But this is also problematic for old order believers. It’s never a comforting thought to be confronted with what you had thought was sublimely metaphysical actually being something that can, in fact, be quantified. Yes, your religion was correct about some things, but those things are no longer the magical articles of faith they once were.

But We’re Better Than That, Right?

The Nature vs. Nurture debate is really a polite proxy for the war between two perspectives – Determinism vs. Freewill. While questions of consciousness and personal philosophies are outside the scope of this blog, what is in scope is how these perspectives define the way we approach our understanding of innate mating strategies, long term relationships, forming families and raising children.

As I mentioned early, determinism feels wrong to both kinds of believers. When ever I debate the harsh realities of how Hypergamy works, not just for our species, but most of the animal kingdom, I’m invariably met with the question of whether or not Hypergamy is ‘Good or Evil’. There’s always a want to qualify what’s really a natural dynamic. Is a pack of wolves evil for bringing down a caribou to feed the pack in the dead of winter? It all depends on who you’re rooting for I guess.

The ‘sphere’s contemplating these scenarios are nothing new. Considering the moral implications of the uglier aspects of Hypergamy is just one easy example among many other naturalism vs. moralism dilemmas in Red Pill praxeology. Empiricists will explain the dynamic in the hope that knowing about it, and how it works, will lead to better predictive outcomes. Hypergamy works thusly X-Y-Z; now plan accordingly and build a better life upon that predictive model. Believers on the other hand will absorb this data and look for moral equivocation:

They believe that the goal of debate is to establish what is morally better, and what everyone should do. They argue about what is right.

The Believers vs. The Empiricists

On a recent video I did with Rich Cooper and Dr. Shawn Smith one point of debate was whether or not the idea of Hypergamy should be used as a “predictive framework” for understanding intersexual relationships. The topic of our discussion was the merits of Hypergamy in its expanded, robust, definition and whether it’s a reliable metric to compare people’s relationships (married and dating) against. As you might guess a lot of Red Pill awareness centers on Hypergamy; it’s why I continue to stress it even when my detractors lie about my interests. It’s really that important.

But as we we’re debating the ins and outs I posed another question to Dr. Smith, “If Hypergamy is not a reliable predictive framework for understanding intersexual relationships, then what is a better one?”

I wasn’t being facetious, nor was I trying to hit Shawn with a gotcha question; I genuinely wrote this question down in my preparatory notes for the show. If not Hypergamy, in its expanded definition, (that describes women’s innate mating strategy) then what is a good outline by which we might judge women’s (and men’s) motives, incentives and behaviors with respect to their mating strategies.

Do women even have mating strategies defined by their innate, evolved, natures? Or are their sexual, reproductive decisions purely an act of cognitive will, as defined by their socialization? If 100,000 years of human evolution didn’t shape women’s reproductive strategies, then what are we left with that explains the commonalities we see women using (with our new order data gathering) in their mate selection and breeding (or aborting) habits? Is it entirely freewill and personal choice? We’re certainly meant to believe it’s “her body, her choice” and the decisions are an extension of her cognitive will.

Yes, I get that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. The possibility exists that it’s both nature and nurture affecting women and men’s mating strategies – and certainly choice is involved in the outcome of those strategies. I’m more inclined to believe it’s both, or at least we want to believe our conscious decisions are what’s pulling the strings. I’ve been in all the livestream debates when we asked the question, “Do women have agency?” and if not then are we our Sister’s Keeper? The more moralistic a guy is usually the more he’s likely he is to include women’s lives to his list of masculine duties and personal responsibilities.

The underlying assumptions in all these accounts is “Aren’t we better than this?”

As reasonably rational, self-aware creatures, with what we presume is freewill and a liability of personal responsibility for the choices we make when exercising that freewill, then haven’t we evolved above all our base impulse? If not, then shouldn’t we have by now?

Every day I harp on about the fallacy of the Blank Slate that most old order thinkers can’t seem to disabuse themselves, but if we are in fact “above it all” then the fallacy of the Blank Slate, as well as the notion that we might ever be influenced by our evolved natures is all a moot point. If our conscious selves are in fact better than our evolved natures then the variables of evolution are rendered meaningless. All that matters is the self and developing our consciousness to rise above our conditions.

Our conscious minds are capable of overriding our innate natures. We can, sometimes do, kill ourselves by not eating. A fast or a hunger strike is something we can consciously do as an act of will. A sense of righteousness and virtue can get mixed into that conscious and our will supersedes our innate nature (we get hungry and need to eat or we die). It doesn’t change the operative physical state that our bodies need certain things. We often commit suicide as an act of will or the conscious act of our depressive emotional state. Again, will (however it’s defined) overrides our physical conditions, but how much of what we believe is our willpower is uninfluenced by the same physical conditions, environment, upbringing, socialization and personal circumstance that we hope to rise above?

Very soon, perhaps within my own lifetime, we will be able to genetically engineer humans. In 2018 a Chinese scientist broke codes of ethics to create the first gene-edited baby. The science, if not the technology, is already here. The possibility exists that human beings, through sheer force of will, can custom engineer our physical states to conform to what our ideologies would tell us is preferable. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattaca you’ll understand the implications of this technology. It’s this author’s opinion that we are living in a time when the ideologies we subscribe to today will affect the ethics of what we engineer into the humanity of tomorrow.

Gattaca is science fiction, but the philosophical questions it poses are very real now. From a objective, humanist perspective this raises a lot of interesting questions. Should we engineer-out of humanity “diseases” like Down’s Syndrome? What about sickle cell anemia? If a gay gene is ever discovered (I don’t believe homosexuality is genetic), should we edit it out of humanity to ensure “normal” heterosexual human beings in future generations?

The Chinese scientist who broke the rules of ethics was reprimanded for his experimentation. “When the news broke, peers in China and abroad condemned him for manipulating life’s building blocks using a relatively untested gene-editing tool.” But why? Chinese official declared his experimentation illegal. It’s entirely possible that a new race of superior humans could be engineered to be better ‘adapted’ to live longer, be smarter, more immune to certain diseases, possibly eradicate some disease and make for a stronger human species. Why would it be wrong or unethical to strive for “perfection”?

Have we not elevated our will above our physical limitations? Or are we using our physical conditions as an implement of our will? We’ll find out soon, but our ideological bent and the ideas of what right and wrong is most certainly influenced and defined by the realities of our physical selves.

Rise of the New Order

This was a comment from Jack about the rise of the New Order:

Rollo, the digital age has ruined us. Culture and pop culture today move at an alarming rate, what was hip now won’t be in the next year or month, society has never moved this fast and as a result the new way is merely a day away from being the old way. The demon’s out of the ring now, no turning back, and there’s no real way to deal with the modern age.

If you are not born into greatness, or utilizing the vast knowledge of the net to surpass everyone and stay there, you get nothing. It’s now the same way with women, previously, our worlds were smaller and hypergamy wasn’t as out of control. There were checks and balances, God and church being two of them, shame was a motivator for keeping women in check as they don’t understand loyalty like men. Now, they have infinite access to all top men, with upwards access to all jobs, and no reprecussions for acting in their very best interests and base instincts at all times. This shrinks the dating pool dramatically to only a few desirable mates because they value themselves so highly. So, if you’re not a natural at flirting with women, or learned how to do it through you and the many other “red pill” men out there AND CAN KEEP THAT ON 24/7 WHILE DOING IT BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE, you will get nothing or lose what you have.

It’s almost all risk no reward for modern men unless you’re alpha”, and even then you’re not safe. Women will always want more and better, so if you’re not constantly 100% on at all times, you lose. If Jeff Bezos and Johnny Depp aren’t safe despite their fame and fortune, what does that say for everybody else? It’s exasperating as a modern man, you have to be and do too much to compete on the global market, as a man younger than you I don’t know if you can understand how daunting it is to have to be everything all at once and it STILL not being enough. You can’t even stay established anymore, if you’re not constantly putting out content, you fall to nothing again and have to start from scratch.

Your competition as a red pilled man, are other men armed with this knowledge, and it will get harder as time goes on with more men are forced to adapt this way of thinking or give up entirely. The new system forces you to constantly adapt faster, and better than all of your peers, or die instantly. There is no rest, no reprieve, no time to catch your breath, either you constantly innovate and improve on the new or you simply don’t eat. I cannot understand how this can keep up when this new “enlightened” era leaves the majority of the male sex in the dumpster.

That being said, without men such as you or Dalrock, established constant fonts of content for this, the kind of thing men need to hear, there will be no direction for men in the coming years. Yes, someone might come along eventually to replace you and the groups you represent, the thought even, but the men like you are very much buoys and lighthouses to keep those of us drifting in the digital age’s ocean from sinking. Without that, we’re all absolutely lost. Without guys like you, it’ll be even harder to aggregate that information and even try to compete or establish relevance. So the destruction of Dalrock’s work means setting those of us who wish to live and fight for a better life back several years, which none of us can afford. Many of us have learned partly, or greatly from you and men like you, whether that’s connecting the dots or having the entire mind opened. So wether or not he wants to delete everything, his work must press on for every one of us who wants a chance to survive in this.

While I’m flattered to be considered one of the pioneers of understanding intersexual dynamics from Red Pill perspective, I can entirely relate with the sentiment of perpetual vigilance. “If [insert male celebrity] can’t make it in today’s sexual marketplace with today’s women then what hope does the average guy have?” is a common MGTOW refrain. I understand men’s desire to just throw in the towel and accept one’s sexless fate. We now live in a Global Sexual Marketplace. The old order rules for the localized sexual marketplace that the last 3 generations of men still expect to work for them today are a thing of the past. And this is only one symptom of the rapid expansion of technology and its effect on our cultural narratives.

For all the alarms we’d like to raise about humans’ genetically engineering future generations of humans, the effects of the meta-scale social engineering experiment that is gynocentrism are already here. Men have always formed adaptations to the realities of solving their reproductive problems, but never have a generation of men had to adapt to so rapidly a changing environment. And it’s only going to get more complex as we move forward.

Today’s men have few options available to them in our present state. Most of us will continue to keep pace and attempt to see the signs of ways to best advantage what comes at us in the sexual marketplace, and really life in general, until we can no longer keep up. Evolve or die. Keep pace with the trends and stay sharp enough to look ahead and leverage what you can based on an objective assessment of what human beings really are. Stay sharp until you no longer can. Hopefully, if you’ve wisely conserved and protected your resources during that time you’ll have some security until you die. If not, then you can expect to fall prey to the next generation of vultures who see your nest egg as their source of revenue.

Or you can give up. You can do just what’s necessary to survive in a system that passed you by and console yourself with complaining about how degenerate and unfair it is. And you’ll be right on both counts because that’s where you are. Old order thinking is very comforting, and it will be until there are no more old order thinkers – replaced by a succeeding generation of new order thinkers who themselves will be swept aside by new order thinkers.

More and more we’re going to see a return to the old order religions, metaphysics and tribalism as the generations that cannot keep pace with human advancement seek meaning and consolation. As a result we’ll also see a new virtue signaling and ego-investments in the power of the self, freewill and mindful consciousness. The Trad-Cons of today are already here and the more ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ social justice adherents apply their own brand of magical thinking, but for the same reasons. The effect is the same – the retreat from competing in a globalizing system that, sooner or later, will outpace us all.

And like all other aspects of this rapid advancement, even this retreating demographic will be coopted and commercialized by savvy ‘players’ who are still keeping pace. Formalizing the retreaters, organizing them, catering to their idiosyncrasies, all will be big business for those who learn to sell consolation (if not hope) to those who think they’ll never keep up.

The Truth About Standards

Most men never vet women for anything like long term acceptability. A lot of guys would have you believe they have high standards for the women they self-righteously allow into their lives, but for the most part this is internet posturing from Trad-Cons and ‘spergs‘ who’d like their circle of virtual friends to believe they have more options, or more learn-ed wisdom, than other men. After-the-fact rationalizations about how discerning a guy was in choosing his wife or girlfriend are a necessary insulation for men’s egos when they come into the Red Pill community. They get uncomfortable when the Red Pill Lens forces them to take a better look at their own choices.

The flip side to this are the guys who’ve already been burned by a woman, and by association the totality of Gynocentrism. They also tend to reverse engineering their lack of vetting. A wife who was once his Quality Woman becomes the bitch who turned on him – the living example of all women and their Hypergamous nature. Likewise, these guys never truly vetted their ex. In someways they may have been as equally naive about the nature of women as the guy still married and self-convinced that he’s done his due diligence in selecting the perfect mate.

Now add to all this a religious belief-set that is founded on marriages staying solid foundations of family formation and resistant to divorce (thus ensuring contentment and righteous living). Here we add another layer of self-blinding on top of men’s haphazard long-term mating strategy founded on his necessitousness. Surely a man’s true religion is the key to a loving and happy wife, appreciative children, strong family ties and quality of life? Men will always seek validation in the choices they invested their lives in – particularly in the face of realities that contradict them.

All of this is related to men’s long term mating strategy. I’ve written extensively on men’s innate mating strategy and the existential importance of men ensuring their own paternity. But just as women’s Hypergamy is a manifestation of their biological nature, so too are men’s imperatives in their own mating strategies. However, a distinction needs to be made with respect to Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks equalist comparisons with women’s strategies. Men and women’s mating imperatives are both antagonistic and complementary depending on the nature of the men and women coming together to reproduce.

Men’s innate, unconditioned, biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Left to his own volition, and unimpaired by women’s Hypergamous filtering strategies, men’s innate drive is to opt for variety of sexual experience.

Critics will counter with “Well, women look for variety too dontcha think?”

While there is some truth in this, women’s desire for broader sexual experience is motivated by a search for better quality in the men she has sex with, not quantity per se. Monogamy (as we know it) is really a tool for low SMV men to socially ensure reproduction and paternity (at least in theory).

For men the motivation is about quantity. Yes, men love variety in women. Yes, men would rather there be no hindrance to getting to that sexual experience with that variety. This is why pornography is ubiquitous today, and has always been a motivator for men – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. There’s a reason why young Muslim men are promised 70 virgins in paradise if they martyr themselves. Variety and ensured paternity, even if it has to be in the afterlife, is clearly a strong motivator for men. Rockstars and religious zealots all strive for the same goal, they just come to it in different ways.

Priorities

Men are so motivated by sexual experience that it supersedes the need for food. Research shows brain cells specific to men fire up when mates are present and override the need to eat. Take this as you will, but it does reinforce the idea that for men, sex is in fact a biological need.

Left unhindered human (Alpha) males will opt for securing multiple breeding partners; in some cases sequestering them for his long-term use. Locking away harems in secured compounds is something powerful men have done since our tribalistic past. Secure mates – secure paternity with them. There’s a reason why eunuchs guarded harems. The notion that men and women were ever naturally monogamous is an idealistic social convention. True monogamy in the animal kingdom is an extreme outlier. It’s just this prioritization of sexual opportunity that makes vetting women for monogamy compete with reproductive opportunism.

Strategic Pluralism

Most men are not Alpha males. The vast majority of men in this life and in eras past only had sexual access to a precious few women in their lives – if at all. Even in social conditions that rewarded monogamy and punished infidelity men and women have always found ways to manifest their antagonistic mating strategies. As few as 8,000 years ago (post agrarianism) 1 male reproduced for every 17 females. And as few as 4,000 years ago women were out-reproducing men. Again, read and make your own conclusions, but the point is human mating strategies find ways to circumvent social conventions.

On paper, monogamy is not a bad idea. As a social convention monogamy has been a stabilizing force in human evolution, but it in no way aligns with our innate sexual proclivities. Monogamy is a sexual strategy that primarily benefits low SMV men because most men will never experience (relatively) unlimited access to unlimited sexuality outside of pornography.

In Red Pill spheres we encourage men to consider themselves the prize. I personally believe that the most important step in unplugging a guy from his Blue Pill conditioning starts by internalizing the concept of Mental Point of Origin, but why is this often the most difficult step for men? It’s hard to think of oneself as a ‘winner’ when all a guy has done is lose for most of his life. The numbers don’t add up, and all the pep rallies a guy can pay for wont account for much until the day a girl actually responds to the “new you“. Feeling good about yourself is great, but most men want a solution to their sexlessness. Remember, sex really is that important to your male hindbrain. Food < Sex, got it?

According to Strategic Pluralism Theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests Of The Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

A lot of men get confused about the masculine imperative, but for the most part I think Strategic Pluralism Theory outlines most of mens’ mating strategies. In the Pareto Principle I delved into how women separate men into different sub-groups. The popularized oversimplification of this goes something like this:

“20% of men are fucking 80% of women.”

This is a misnomer. Granted, it used to have the good intention of getting men to believe that a small percentage of guys are having sex with a majority of women, and well, it might as well be them, right?

I’m sure that was meant to be a kind of motivational encouragement for guys learning Game, but it’s effectively wrong. The reality is 100% of women are interested in fucking about 20% of guys. We can see this repeatedly illustrated in various online dating stats and the realities of what Tinder has done to the SMP. But that’s the principle, not the practice. Just because a woman wants to get with a twentieth percentile man in no way means she will be getting with that guy. The issue here is the want not the get.

The Scarcity Mentality

Most men live in a state of sexual scarcity. So to implore a man to believe he’s actually the prize, or he should consider himself the prize, is an alien thought to him. Whether he acknowledges it consciously, his hindbrain understands the realities of his present-state sexual market value and it understands the reproductive equation it’s tasked with solving in (hopefully) a prosocial way.

Any time a woman actually shows an intimate interest in a low SMV man he will instinctively overlook the “deal breakers” his rational mind would otherwise give him pause to consider. Remember, sex supersedes hunger in the evolved scope of things for men. There are no considerations for ‘red flags’ with a woman when reproduction is of more strategic importance to his hindbrain.

When I’m listening to shows like Before the Train Wreck I hear the same predictable problems voiced by young men over and over again. There are consistent red flags these man should’ve seen before committing to a woman. And as a third party to this, we’re always dumbfounded by how the guy couldn’t have seen the signs before acting or committing to a woman’s mating strategy in order to facilitate a compromised version of his own strategy. Men’s rational process (particularly young men’s) are bypassed by sexual instinct and the hindbrain realization that his breeding opportunities are few and far between.

75% of college men would agree to have sex with a (semi-attractive) female they just met on campus while 0% of women would do the same with an unfamiliar male. Most men simply do not vet women for long term compatibility. The nature of our biology and our access to reproductive opportunities makes vetting a hindrance to solving a reproductive equation. In short, most men can’t afford to miss out on breeding opportunities.

As I outlined in Instinct, Emotion and Reason, our rational process requires time to be fully useful to us. The Instinct and Emotional processes are far quicker in their assessments and immediate effect on us. While men may innately prioritize reason before emotion, Instinct beats all other processes in speed and efficiency – if not accuracy. In our feminine-primary social order we further complicate (and disadvantage) men today by teaching them that their emotional response is the “correct” one to base decisions on. We conditions men to prioritize the Emotional process from a very early age. Again, all this makes actually vetting a woman for intimate acceptability almost offensive to the average (Beta) man today.

And this discomfort with holding any standards for women to receive his intimate approval also serves women’s sexual strategy.

You Just Got Lucky

There is a social aspect that comes into play with respect to men pairing up with women. As western societies have become more gynocentric the need to establish limitations on men’s mating strategies, and the simultaneous unfettering of women’s strategies, becomes apparent. In short, men simply aren’t allowed to hold standards for women to follow. And it’s offensive for men (not women) to even suggest the criteria women might need to ‘live up to‘ for men’s consideration of commitment.

Rich Cooper’s engagement on this one Tweet should illustrate what I’m getting into here. I’ve seen other variations of this message serve as outrage fodder for local news programs. The point is that a man making even marginal requirements for a man’s investment in a woman is met with extreme hostility. If your goal is getting social engagement there’s no better way to get it than by having the audacity to tell women they should qualify to a man – in any context. The idea that there is a man somewhere on planet earth who would voice his conditions for intimacy with women is unconscionable in gynocentric society.

But why? Why do women and their ‘allies‘ become so incensed by this? Because it commits the cardinal sin of the female power structure; it removes a degree of control away from women’s Hypergamous choice. If a woman must qualify to a man – in any context – it also sins against the maxim of the Strong Independent Woman®:

Never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.

Notice how hostile women become when any man would place conditions on his terms for intimacy/commitment. This is a challenge to women’s unilateral control of Hypergamy in the social order. But more so, it is an affront to women’s Existential Fear:

The Existential Fear in women is that their innate Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.

That a Beta male would ever hold conditions for his commitment triggers indignation in women.

Even Alpha men must never put terms on their commitment; men should feel blessed that any woman would have them. When Beta men reflexively default to social self-deprecation around their wives or LTR we see this social convention confirmed. We are conditioned to feel “lucky” that a woman lowered her standards to accept a man as her mate.

This is the intersexual poker game women play with men on whole. Entitlement, solipsism, anxiety over optimizing Hypergamy, all that competes with the foreknowledge that her attractiveness will decay over time. Women’s hindbrains know that their sex appeal, their agency in achieving that optimization, is ultimately perishable. Now add to this the anxiety that a Beta male might ‘trick’ her into choosing him as a mate and you can see why the Sisterhood will rally against men holding any demands for their interest in a woman.

Men often acquiesce to the mindset that they ought to feel fortunate that a woman would ever have them. They also foster this necessitousness in other men, usually as a form of Beta Game.

This endemic sense of metaphysical gratitude is what prevents men from even considering having standards for women. It also polices other men from holding standards themselves. How dare you be so arrogant as to expect a woman to live up to your demands? Just be glad the gods took pity on you and granted you a wife when so many Incels are at home with dick in hand. Tsk, tsk.

When a man ever has the temerity to evaluate women’s worth he’s made into a pariah. Today we expel boys from school for making lists rating the girls in their classes. Meanwhile women develop apps to do exactly the same for the men they’ve dated to inform other women. In a fem-centric social order only women are allowed to hold standards. This fact is a manifestation of a larger power dynamic between the sexes today.

A list of qualities a woman should have to please a man, to hold his long-term interests, goes viral and makes the evening news. Those men then become the easy, chauvinistic, villain to hate – “Can you believe that men like this still exist?!”

Eligible Bachelors

In my last post I made mention of how women were in crisis mode about the lack of ‘economically attractive’ men today. The articles about this crisis center on the idea of “eligible” men. Even the wildly popular show The Bachelor is built around the idea of men’s ‘eligibility’ to be considered for women’s approval. Qualify. Prove your quality. Be worthy of a woman’s love. Be ‘eligible’.

A female-primary social order – an order dedicated to maintaining feminine social control – needs to ruthlessly control which man is eligible for women’s consideration. It’s never the other way around. ‘Eligible’ is a way of psychologically maintaining a superior station of value for women.

Always bear in mind, women break rules for Alpha men and make rules for Beta men. But on a social scale it helps maintain the power imbalance if even Alpha men believe the same mythologies as Beta men.

This essay is the first in a series meant to establish a hierarchy of relationship needs that men might consider to help them accurately vet the women they allow into their lives and to enact these standards.

Are Men Adapting to the New Sexual Marketplace?

I revisited the topic of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) last Saturday on Rule Zero. I don’t like rehashing old debates I’ve learned will ultimately go nowhere. You simply wont reach most people who don’t want to be reached. Once they’ve had some experiential lessons in life, reinforced it with the tribalistic need to affirm the beliefs derived from that experience and then invest their egos in them it becomes kind of pointless. I’m not saying just give up on people, far from it, but do understand what you’re up against. This is why I say unplugging men from the Matrix is dirty work, and a lot like triage. Know what’s worth expending energy for.

Most men, and nearly all women, don’t form a belief set based on multiple, independently funded, peer reviewed studies or statistical analyses. We go with experience first and then modify it from there.

I did a bit of preparation for this talk. My schedule last Saturday only permitted me an hour so I wanted to be succinct and throw out at least something new to the conversation. There’s a lot of tribalism in the Manosphere today and it’s no surprise that MGTOW as a tribe in growing – but likely not for the reasons most MGTOW would be willing to admit. MGTOW is becoming atomized and commercialized in the same manner as I predicted the Red Pill would (and has) last year.

What that means is MGTOW is rapidly becoming the same commercial vehicle for grifters that the Red Pill was just a year and a half ago. Life Coaches, Relationship Experts, Fitness Gurus, even Christian men’s ministry pastors are all looking online to find out ‘where have all the men gone?’ When men were found in the Red Pill this is where the grifters would coalesce. Thus, you had every ‘brand-of-me’ self-improvement hack calling himself “red pill”. A few of them still do. A few of them read verbatim from my book(s) and plagiarize it as their own. But more now I see these same grifters referring to themselves as MGTOW without realizing (or even caring) what it really means to men.

MGTOW is the new ‘brand’ that lifestyle ‘coaches’ are adding to their twitter profiles and YouTube channel About pages. They see the potential for growth by association. Even if they get owned in their comments and feeds, adding the tag MGTOW will draw clicks. A few of these ‘coaches’ had a familiarity with the tribe and decided to finally commit in the hopes that it would boost views, others are former ‘power-of-positivity‘ life-coaches who slide into MGTOW because the definition of what makes a man “go his own way” is so loose now that it can align with virtually anything the guy had written about before his new affiliation.

It’s a real short step from “Make yourself your Mental Point of Origin” to “Make yourself #1 in your life” and then to “Go your own way.” I’ve had at least four “dating experts” (one female) claim Mental Point of Origin was their own idea in their subscriber emails as recently as August. Grifters used the Red Pill and are now using MGTOW to legitimize their brands today. In 2015 the MRAs decided to appropriate the Red Pill as their own brand to name a feminist’s “journey of self-discovery” movie The Red Pill. This appropriation is continuing with MGTOW now.

As I said on the Red Man Group back in May, the Red Pill is going to have a real PR problem in the coming year. Everything I predicted in my State of the Manosphere address a year ago has come to pass and I predict it will only intensify in the 2020 election cycle. The Gender War needs a convenient, easy-to-hate villain to point to in order to reinforce the Future is Female narrative.

Very soon MGTOW will have the same PR problem. And once the next Eliot Rodger or Alex Minasian incident occurs you’ll see these grifters scatter from MGTOW like roaches when the lights come on. When there are dead women on the sidewalk somewhere, and the MSM is using terms like ‘MGTOW’, ‘Incel’ and ‘radicalization’ that is when all the ‘tribes’ of the Manosphere will throw each other under the bus. That’s when you’ll know who was ‘playing MGTOW’ for likes.

Adaptation

One thing this re-debate of MGTOW has made me reconsider is whether men are adapting to the new realities of the sexual marketplace or just looking to make their necessities a virtue. At its simplest MGTOW is men refusing to make women the measure of their lives, and then molding their lives to their own plan. This pairs nicely with virtually every pet ideology and ‘positivity’ grift in the ‘sphere today. Even Tradcons will agree with MGTOW if it means “Be the best man you can be“. It agrees with Mental Point of Origin. It agrees with Roissy – “You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority.” It agrees with “Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.“

If that was all there was to MGTOW it would simply be Red Pill. What “MGTOW” life-coach grifters don’t realize is that MGOTW is a derivative of the Red Pill. I’ve always argued that once a guy becomes Red Pill aware he cannot help but live in some different fashion. Even the guys who go into complete denial can’t unsee the truths of intersexual dynamics. It’s what you actually do with that new awareness that sets apart Red Pill praxeology from MGTOW in practice. There’s more to MGTOW than just refusing to make women the measure of a man’s life – it’s also deciding what actually is deference to women. And that’s where it becomes highly subjective.

In my last post I outlined how women were upset there weren’t enough ‘eligible‘ men to marry in the current (westernized) sexual marketplace (SMP) today. Of course the two most common responses were either:

  • Women are the victims of the SMP they created. Women’s solipsistic, socially enabled entitlements to an ‘economically attractive’ man (a man who exceeds her own productivity by 58%) only proves the point that women’s social media bloated egos have made them unrealistic tyrants. Now their beliefs and actions have come home to roost.
  • This is proof-positive that MGTOW is working! Finally women are waking up to the realities of their beliefs and actions. If enough guys abandon the SMP altogether then women will be forced to come back to reality and choose men based on other criteria than ‘economic attractiveness’.

One point I struggled to make on last week’s show was that I wondered if MGTOW believed that, from an evolved perspective, men and women are better together than they are apart. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pursue that question in depth; do MGTOW largely believe that, if social circumstances were different, men and women evolved to be complements to the other and the best social outcome would be for the sexes to be together rather than segregated?

For the last 60 years feminism has effectively driven a wedge between men and women. The Gender War of today exists because of a systematic segregation between men and women (don’t @me with the cultural marxism/’evil juice’ shit for the moment). Honestly, I’m sick of reading about how negative it is to merely point out the realities of this ‘gender cold war’ by Success Porn grifters, but is not MGTOW an adaptation to this segregation? Is not MGTOW an exacerbation of this segregation. When I read mantras like ‘Dogs, Dudes and Dolls’ it sounds an awful lot like ‘Cats, Girlfriends and Vibrators’.

Is MGTOW an adaptation to the conditions in a sexual marketplace that was (and still is) contrived by feminism/gynocentrism?

The following quote is from a long time commenter and friend Deti. This was from a larger discussion that began here if you want to get some context. Sorry guys, I just don’t have the space to repost the whole thread, but I don’t want this to get lost. Hopefully, it will inspire further discussion in this post’s comments:

I read Novaseeker as saying in his comments on this post, that women have adapted within this particular milieu. In other words, women noted the changes and have adapted to them. It helps that the changes were geared to them and prepared with them in mind. But women have adapted, and men have not.

About 100 years ago, it was all geared toward men and the sexual and marriage marketplaces were prepared with men in mind. They were prepared to advantage men and disadvantage women. Women responded to and lived within that milieu in a number of ways.

Using soft power, manipulation, deceit, subterfuge, behind the scenes machinations. Most women were more or less OK with marrying an OK guy, having OK sex, and living an OK life.

Of course, sometimes women cheated on the downlow. Sometimes women cuckolded husbands. I mean real actual traditional definition of cuckolding, which is a married woman getting pregnant by an Alpha and passing the child(ren) off as the Beta Husband’s. There’s no way to know how often that happened, but it wasn’t really rare – Maybe anywhere from 5 to 20% of children then weren’t fathered by their bio-moms’ husbands. In rare cases, not marrying and becoming spinsters, living as bohemians or as “favorite cousins” or “favorite aunts” with male relatives, working as teachers or seamstresses or some other job, and being live in nanny/maid. In rare cases, divorcing and living off family money or a husband’s alimony money. Living as widows and not remarrying.

The point is that women learned how to adapt. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they did adapt.

The main responses men have used today to adapt to changing circumstances have been:

  1. Game/PUA/Seduction – Use the changes to men’s advantage and go for easy sex and the bachelor lifestyle.
  2. MRA – Fighting the changes to advocate for either equalizing the laws or rolling them back to a return to Marriage 1.0 and pre-sexual revolution status.
  3. MGTOW – Check out of the new system, refuse to support or participate in it, and eschew relationships with women to varying degrees.

About, oh, 20 years in, I think we can safely say that option 2) is dead in the water and has been for some time. About the only real reforms here are that divorce and family laws are slowly, very, very slowly, moving toward 50/50 residential custody and away from alimony (except in the case of longer term marriages with breadwinner spouse/dependent nonemployed wife). Unless you have been married more than 20 years and support a housewife, you probably will not be paying alimony except for temporarily. Thats about the entire sum and substance of how “equal” it’s going to get between men and women.

That leaves 1) Game; and (3) MGTOW.

It’s hard to tell what will come out of this. I think we can say:

• Marriage 1.0 is dead and we are never going back to it for at least 2 more generations. If you think you’re going to have a “traditional marriage” where you don’t have to do much to maintain it or you can let up on your attractiveness levels, think again. Because that is not going to happen. If you’re going to marry a woman, you need to improve your attractiveness, marry a woman who is not financially dependent on you, and cultivate your own life separate and apart from her. You need a contingency plan in the event the marriage goes south. And with all that, you need to consider whether you want to risk bringing kids into the mix. You absolutely need a prenuptial agreement, even if it gets judicially torn up or modified later.

The bottom line is, people are still marrying, it’s just that it’s all being pushed out later and later, and people are staying single longer and spending less time married. Many women are meeting the men they eventually marry in their early to mid 20s, and then marrying in their late 20s and early 30s. That’s a paradigm that’s increasing in frequency; this idea of long term dating and engagements lasting 2 to 5 years while both the man and woman establish their careers.

If you want long term relationships you should consider marriage alternatives like living together, or being exclusive while living apart. You absolutely must avoid at all costs these polyamory/polygyny situations, and open marriages. You absolutely must avoid women who want to continue AF’ing it even after they marry. That must be an absolute no go, not an option, ever.

• Men have to improve and increase their sexual attractiveness to create, maintain, and sustain relationships with women. You can’t let up here. That’s IF you want relationships with women.

• More and more men will go pure MGTOW and will severely minimize if not eliminate their relationships with women. For a growing number of men, this option is going to be the best one, because (a) they did the work and still couldn’t attract women; or (b) they don’t want to do the work and it’s easier to stay as is than to try.

For most men, avoiding women entirely, except for paying hookers, is a no go. The thirst is that strong. The male sex drive is that potent. Most men want to have some contact with women, even if it’s just random hookups now and again. And the only way to do that is to make yourself as sexually attractive as possible. That just is so. Women are the ones who pick sex partners, and they have no problem with sharing attractive men with other women. So if you want sex partners, you have to make yourself sexually attractive. And you have to know male and female sexual nature, so that you know what you’re getting into, you know what you’re seeing, you know what women are doing, and you know what women really mean when they talk.

For men, improving one’s own attractiveness increases one’s power in the market. It increases his ability to control some of the selection process. It gives him an abundance mentality. It gives him the power to walk away from situations that disadvantage him. It gives him the ability to tell women “no” and to reject women who cannot or will not give him what he wants and needs.

On the other hand, going your own way can also increase your power in the market. It maximizes your control over your own life. It sharply reduces your responsibilities to others, and increases your opportunities. It frees up your resources to expend the way you want. Sharp reductions in responsibility means a sharp reduction in the needed resources for day to day living, meaning you can work less and increase your leisure time.

I think that more and more men will go pure MGTOW, which is essentially “make the best of a tough situation, be single, and don’t have a family. At least that’s better than getting divorce raped and it’s less work than going to the gym, getting in shape, and eating clean. This way I can eat what I want and work 30 hours a week, and live by myself in my apartment”. It’s kind of similar to women 100 years ago, where the path of least resistance was for Bertha BigGirl, Martha Dumptruck, and Plain Jane to “find a decent, OK man to support me, and probably have at least 3 of his kids. At least it’s better than living with Mom until she dies, and then having to live with my brother and his wife, and taking care of their kids.” And similar to the spinster, the MGTOW will be low status, or at least perceived as low status. But for the spinster and the MGTOW, their lifestyles will be at least better than whatever else they could have gotten.

Guys, Nova is absolutely correct in that men by and large are not adapting.

I think that what’s going on is that many men are saying “want to stay the same, don’t want to do a lot of work, but I still want women to be attracted to me and to be able to date a lot and eventually get married and have a family like (a) mom and dad had when I was growing up; or (b) like I didn’t get to have growing up.” Well, you can’t have that, at least not without working for it. If you want something you’re going to have to work for it. If you want women and sex, you’re going to have to make yourself attractive to women. And the way you’re going to do that, the only way to do that, is to stand out. And the way you stand out is by improving every area of your life – your job, your body, your finances, your lifestyle, your hobbies, your social acumen, and everything else that involves you going through your life.

The funny thing is that when a man stops caring so much about it, forgets about women, and sets about improving his life, he starts attracting women.

That’s the current state of things, I think.

I don’t disagree that we’re presently at a turning point in intersexual relations. After the advent of unilaterally female controlled birth control and the Sexual Revolution that followed the upheaval in how men and women come together and relate was inevitable. Now that we’re 50 odd years past that point we’re figuring out how reproduction, love, marriage, and something as simple as boy-meets-girl is going to look for future generations. The internet and a social media acculturation on a global scale has seen to it that it will likely never look like it did under the old social contract. There’s a theory that post-agrarian societies experienced a similar shift in intersexual dynamics in our ancestral past. Socially enforced monogamy was the obvious intersexual shift.

Right now we’re seeing a similar shift in intersexual relations. Is it simply better for men and women to live segregated lives? I don’t believe so, but it seems like a larger cultural narrative believes it’s time for both men and women to go their own ways. Until one side concedes, fuck any notion of evolved complementarity is the narrative I guess.

I do disagree with Deti in that I think men are adapting. They always have. It’s that the adaptation is counter to what we might hope is the natural order between men and women.

Unmarriageable

This week there’ve been a rash of articles all outlining the latest statistics about marriage in this decade. US marriage rates are at a 150 year low and, if you believe the all-female article writers, it’s of course men’s fault for failing to be marriageable. These articles are referencing a study published last week titled Mismatches in the Marriage Market and this study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses. One implication is that the unmarried may remain unmarried or marry less well‐suited partners.

That’s right gentlemen, you’re unmarriageable and the ladies want you to shape up. If you want to experience marital bliss – despite all the inherent personal dangers for men in today’s “marriage economy” – you must make yourself “economically attractive“:

“Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult,” says lead author Daniel Lichter in a press release.

The stats don’t lie and they are pretty bleak. More women are enrolled in college than ever before and more are expected to enter through the middle of the coming decade. Now, a degree doesn’t guarantee a woman a job, and it says nothing about the majors and job sectors women prefer, but a college education does reinforce the idea that women are entitled to marry an economically attractive man who himself has an education and enough aspiration to make something of himself to become marriageable.

That’s some real shit right there and we’re not even half way through this post. We’ve gotten to the point where the truth of the past five decades is apparent; gendered politics has actively, openly, disadvantaged men in terms of education. Whether this hobbling of men is via educational dispensations (Title IX) or social conventions (divorce, child support, Duluth model feminism) the outcome is now unignorable.

In most western societies today there is a separate standard of justice that applies to women. Women are receive far fewer consequences and are sentenced much more leniently than men for committing the exact same crimes. These are easily proven statistics, but even when they are brought to light the gynocentric social order doubles down and justifies them because, women.

My intent here today isn’t to depress anyone. Neither am I drawing attention to this because I’ve made a new turn to the Men Rights Movement. No doubt there’ve been many article already written about the female hubris inherent in these revelations – revelations the Red Pill community has been pointing out for almost two decades now.

The manifestations of about 50 years of social changes produced by a feminine-primary social order are unignorable. Even mainstream media sources are finally seeing these stories as the red meat du jour for the masses now. A lot of the Red Pill principles and I and many other men in the Manosphere have been drawing attention to about intersexual dynamics are now coming to light in popular consciousness.

Aww Quit Complaining

Last year I delivered the State of the Manosphere Address, and in that talk I outlined the rise of what I saw as a new Gender War (or gender cold war). Naturally I was called a reactionary, and have been since described as “overly negative” even by the organization that asked me to deliver that speech. But yet, everything in that outline has come to pass in less than a year. Of course, the easy dismissal is to blame this on election year propaganda. More than one mainstream talkshow conservative has jumped on the Toxic Masculinity bandwagon, pointing out how the Left and mainstream feminism are one and the same.

However, there have been many swings of the political pendulum in the past 50 years. Conservative zeitgeists have contributed to the same feminine-primary social order that’s resulted in men being unmarriageable today. It’s just been good politics to appeal to the Feminine Imperative no matter what side of the political aisle you happen to sit on.

But I’m a man. I’m not supposed to be overly concerned with issues like this. As long as I’m measuring up to my Burden of Performance any marginal raising-of-awareness to truths like the ones above make me seem like I’m complaining. And that’s something men are never allowed to do. It’s a very effective way of silencing men. Get them to feel like they ought to silence themselves. Real men don’t complain.

Meanwhile, it’s Broke Men who are hurting American Women’s Marriage Prospects. My good friend Dalrock once wrote a series of post around the idea that feminism would be so much more successful if men would only cooperate with it. When women are unable to optimally complete their mating (and life’s) strategies it’s men’s fault for being uncooperative. It’s men’s fault when women’s life plans don’t come together as Sheryl Sandberg told them it would. It’s men’s fault when they won’t play the approved role they should when women hit their Epiphany Phase and their sexual priorities shift.

Confirming the Red Pill

If you needed a better illustration of the Solipsism inherent in women’s nature you’ll be hard pressed to find it on a bigger scale than the dozens of stories bemoaning the lack of marriageable men today. Furthermore, it goes to prove another Red Pill truth: as a man, women don’t care who you are as much as what you are. I’ve taken a lot of heat over the years over my assessment of how men and women have different concepts of love. Men love idealistically. I rarely get any pushback on that assertion, but when I layout how women’s Hypergamous natures predispose them to a concept of love based on opportunism men and women lose their minds.

Yet, here we are. Women enthusiastically proving my point for me without me having to do any heavy lifting. As women become more comfortable in Open Hypergamy we see this embracing of their nature proudly flaunted. Naturally women will double down on this.

“Of course women don’t wanna marry no bum!”

And then the Trad-Cons join the chorus,

“It’s men’s fault they aren’t measuring up to being the men all women are entitled to.”

There are dozens of studies that correlate divorce with women earning more than their husbands. In fact, women are reluctant to admit that they out-earn their husbands. Throughout the history of this blog I’ve shown the evolved reasons for this dynamic, but what the articles all dance around is women’s natural evolutionary desire for men who exceed them in all aspects. But because we’ve opted to believe in, and standardized on, social constructionism we lay all of that on “societal expectations” of men and women. In a future essay I’ll be defining how the cope of humans being ‘above it all’ in their evolved instincts is the root source of many deliberate misgivings about intersexual conflict. For now, understand that blaming any inconvenient intersexual truth on a nebulous “society” is the go-to rationale for a feminine-primary social order.

“If only men would evolve and rise above what society foists on them we women would be happy” versus “Men need to accommodate women’s success by making themselves more ‘economically desirable’“

And “Oh, but love is important too, *wink wink*.”

“Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors’,” Lichter says.

It’s interesting that some articles advocate for marriage as a “stabilizing force” in society, all while never (maybe deliberately) seeing the economic risks of disaster that the divorce industry incentivizes in women. There’s nothing stabilizing about promoting marriage between men you’ve deemed “economically unattractive” and women who feel entitled to a man who exceeds their Hypergamous expectations. There’s nothing ‘stabilizing’ about the incidence of divorce between couples where the man is unable to out-earn his wife.

Naturally we want to make this a ‘his‘ problem. He can’t get over the fact that she makes more, has more education, etc. He’s insecure in his masculinity and must feel threatened by Her success. Or it could be the fact that on an instinctual level he understands that it’s an evolved imperative for a man to provide for and protect his family. This is the fallacy of Rise Above It. No matter how enlightened and progressive we’d like to think we are nature drags us back to reality. It’s not a socially constructed problem – if it were it would be easily solved – it’s a human nature problem. Women reveal the true Hypergamous nature in articles like these. They want a man who they can naturally look up to, respect and admire. That’s the natural truth coming out, but they source the problem in a socially constructed fantasy that it’s men’s insecurities that are holding them back from completing women’s mating/life strategies.

Women don’t need to get married anymore. The average age of first marriage is hovering around 27 years old for most couples. Studies also show that more than half of young people in America don’t have a romantic partner. We’ve all but eliminated the Beta Bucks side of the Hypergamous equation for women. Open Hypergamy (and Open Cuckoldry) are the logical outcomes of this provisioning insurance we’ve made ubiquitous for women over the last 40 years. Yet, women still want to be married to a man who outclasses them in all areas of life. They feel they deserve that guy. Their hindbrain knows they do, but the nebulous society still encourages women to believe there’s never been a better time for them to be single. This is the message women are being fed as they complain about men’s not living up to being their “equals”.

Nearly half of working-age women will be single in 2030, a new Morgan Stanley study predicts, a demographic that will drive increased sales for companies in the athletic wear, cosmetics and clothing sectors.

The investment bank’s “Rise of the SHEconomy” report says 45 percent of working-age women between 25 and 44 in the U.S. will be single women in 10 years, Forbes reported.

Single women will drive the economy in the next decade and savvy businesses are already planning on exploiting this demographic. But yet it’s men’s fault for not being marriageable and/or avoiding marriage altogether?

Too many people think I’m down on marriage. Apparently 23 years of what most guys would consider an ideal marriage isn’t enough to convince them. Honestly, as an institution – socially enforced monogamy – I think marriage, based on evolved gender difference complementarity has been the foundation of the success of western culture. But maybe we’re at a turning point in human history where traditional marriage is left behind, replaced by feminine-primary polygamy with all its inherently violent risks. It seems we’re heading in a direction where we convince Beta men it’s in their reproductive interests to abandon their evolved need to be invested in their own paternity – and that attending to and raising the children of men that women selected before them makes them ‘better men’.

There’s a lot more to the anti-marriage reasoning than just the “losing half my stuff” arguments.

It really sucks for a guy like me who’s managed to make a Red Pill aware marriage work in spite of all this. Guys get confused. How can I be anti-marriage and still married? But it’s just that dichotomy that tells the you about the nature of what marriage has become for men today. The way we do marriage today has the potential to be the most damaging decision a man can make in his life. It may even end his life. But despite all that I still believe men and women are better together than we are apart. We still evolved to be complements to the other.

It’s the coming together and living together, and all the downside risks to men today that I have no solution for at the moment. Maybe it’s going to take a war or a meteor striking the earth to set gender parity back in balance, but at the moment there’s only a future of sexual segregation to look forward to.

Selective Breeding

Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?

The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the most recent Avengers movie Starlord (Chriss Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story) permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness; a kick in the nuts.

We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.

 If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rodgers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc. are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the next “Thor” movie. And this is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Woman® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that’s been written for them to fill.

Manspreading

Earlier this year I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured what we were told was a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye you can sort of tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve see similar protests before, and if you look at the linked video here today you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in commercials. 

Recently there was another woman who’s won some sort of design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys just sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man so I need to take up space.”

But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. It’s a hindbrain signaling of confidence in men. Now, before you write me off here, think about this; if women’s primary concern was about men taking up space, then why attack a man’s genitals to force him to close it up? Why not simply ask him to close up a bit? Why is pouring water (bleach) on his crotch an acceptable punishment? Why is a hit to the balls a reflexive retaliation?

Women’s existential fear is having their Hypergamous filters bypassed by a clever Beta male impersonating an Alpha, breeding with him, and thereby saddled for a lifetime of support with the child of his inferior seed. Women’s evolved sensitivity to this filter extends to subconscious cues men display in their posture. Ergo, a man ‘spreading’ is perceived by a woman’s hindbrain as a false signal of Alpha by a Beta male. This triggers the existential fear response, thus attacking his manhood is doing all of womankind a favor by humiliating him for his attempt to deceive women’s filters.

I’m sure there’ll be some women (and their ‘allies’) who’ll think this is a stretch, but then, why is it acceptable to kick a man in the nuts when he’s spreading? Why is it that Starlord gets kicked in the balls and we laugh? Because a Beta male tried to pass himself off as an Alpha and retaliation was due. If a guy like Jason Mamoa was sitting spread-legged on a bus it would serve as an arousal cue for most women. Alpha status recognition is an automatic subconscious subroutine, fine tuned over millennia of evolution, in women. Women’s subconscious awareness instinctively reads SMV status and prompts behavior accordingly.

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

Or your shitty genetics for that matter. Patrilinear surnames are a symbolic stamp of ownership for men. They give a name to his genetics – a surname is associated with a specific genetic line. A man’s legacy is his genes and those genes need an identifier. One of the more controversial topics I debate online is the refusal of men’s surname by their wives. Women keeping their last names or hyphenating them in marriage is now a common sign of their independent spirit. Marriage is only acceptable to the Strong Independent Woman® when it looks more like an egalitarian business arrangement rather than a complementary pairing of a man and a woman who understand (and accept) the nature of their own gender. Traditional marriage looks too much like “ownership” for feminist wives and nümale husbands.

Blue Pill conditioned men are far more likely to be okay with their wives’ decision to keep her name, hyphenate it, or even take her name. After all, it’s the progressive thing to do and most believe on some level of consciousness that his accepting her independence in this way will make him more appreciated by her. The truth is this: his acquiescing to her in this way only reinforces what her hindbrain has already confirmed – she’s paired with a Beta male who wouldn’t give an afterthought to insisting his genetics bear his name. He confirms the low quality of his genetics to her hindbrain.

There are a lot of convenient social conventions that come along with a woman’s insistence on keeping her surname. Just like the excuse of men “taking up space” warrants terms like “manspreading”, women and nümales will appeal to pragmatism:

“She’s a doctor, lawyer, soon-to-be-famous-person and she need to maintain her identity for public relations reasons. Otherwise she’d totally take my last name dude.”

“I don’t want her to have a crummy last name like ‘Butts’ or something.”

“Taking a man’s last name is an antiquated symbol of patriarchal ownership of women. Haven’t we evolved past this yet? Are you so insecure in your masculinity that you’ll insist on her taking your name?”

These are a few of the cover stories, but the latent purpose is the same; women’s hindbrains must hedge their Hypergamous bets with men they know are Beta before pretending to commit to a lifetime of breeding and parental investment with them. For a woman marrying a man whom her subconscious acknowledges as Alpha, not assuming his name isn’t an afterthought to her. Women paired with a man who is a confirmed Alpha will often say “I didn’t want children, but I wanted to have his babies.”

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

We’re getting into sexy sons theory here, but the idea is that a significantly high SMV male can inspire women to become submissive/supportive wives and mothers. See my essay on Alpha Widows for more about this.

A woman in a good Hypergamous pairing accepts – desires – his authority, but also his genes. She doesn’t just want children, she wants his children. This then is signified (codified?) in his name passing on to her and their children. Even in ostensibly egalitarian marriages the kids generally retain the name of the male who fathered them (unless single-mom throws useful step-dad a bone and the kids change their name to his). Human beings are innately tribalistic (sorry Jordan). This tribalism is expressed in Selective Breeding practices extending from the personal to the social.

In 2019, and in the reproductive aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, these tribal distinctions are now left to women to determine in a confusing global sexual marketplace. Men’s innate drive for paternal certainty falls away in this environment. The existential fear and frustration that manifests from that drive still persists in men, but the practice of it gives way to women being the primary influencers in selective breeding – and how it will or won’t be expressed. It’s now a common practice for a woman to change the surname of children of a genetic ‘asshole’ father to that of the adoptive step-dad-who-stepped-up. Or the noble Promise Keeper son and holy protector of his single mom (and by extension all of womankind) who changes his last name to something else. 

But why? Why bother to go to that trouble if names are unimportant? If paternity doesn’t matter anyway, why go to the trouble of changing a name?

What Happens When She’s the One Who’s Out of Options?

As I mentioned, women’s existential fear is pairing herself with a Beta male who, through guile and deceptions, convinced her he’s an Alpha. But what happens when that woman runs out of options in her  Epiphany Phase? What happens when she’s forced to settle on the good-enough Beta (the guy Sheryl Sandberg assured women “nothing’s sexier”) because she can’t lock down the Alpha whose babies she wants to have?

She can continue searching indefinitely. The social conventions established by the Feminine Imperative convinces women that their sexual market value (SMV) is unending and imperishable. Those conventions also combine with others that shame men for being so infantile in preferring women who are ‘younger, hotter, tighter’. This shaming gets extended to convincing Beta men they should “align their dating strategies” to prefer mature women who “now have their heads on straight”. The idea that an older woman is more mature and therefore ought to be considered more desirable by men is conveniently positioned in women’s Epiphany Phase – so is the Myth of the Biological Clock.

Or she can settle for the less-than-ideal Beta male she’d never have opted for in her Party Years. Women have various psychological and sociological mechanisms in place to help them rationalize this settling on a Beta in Waiting.

  • Plan B: There’s always a fallback guy. Generally this is one Beta for another, better positioned Beta though. If one were “alpha” he’d already be the Plan A. (Be the A Guy). It’s important to note that if the Plan B Beta eventually ‘alphas up’ in some perceivable way, this generally throws a woman into a psychological conflict.
  • She convinces herself that ‘settling’ is really who she is in that moment. Most women genuinely believe in their Epiphany Phase rationales. Most would probably pass a polygraph test if you asked them if they genuinely felt the way they do about their decisions during this time of their lives. However, Hypergamy and its fundamental rules don’t change for women even when they believe something new about themselves. And often enough that ‘genuine’ belief is motivated by their subconscious understanding about their state n life as a result of their mating strategy.

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

This is a fundamental understanding for Red Pill awareness. It’s one of the easiest indicators men can use to determine a woman’s interest in them, or her subconscious understanding of your status as a man. Is she making more rules for you to obey, more hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for her ‘love’ (i.e. sexual access)?  She probably sees you as a Beta. Is she breaking her rules, the rules she believes she needs to follow in her new (Epiphany) phase of life, in order to get into situations where she can facilitate sex with you? Is she putting off responsibilities in order to enjoy herself with you? She probably sees you as Alpha.

This rule-setting or breaking is a basic litmus test for genuine desire. Women’s hindbrains grasp this  too. If a woman is setting rules for a man, her subconscious understands that he’s predominantly Beta. Because she needs to set rules, because it seems like logic to refuse his surname (another rule) and because he accepts these rules – even encourages them in himself and other men – his status is confirmed as a Beta. Only a Beta would need rules. Only a Beta would comply with those rules.

I should add that this is the basis of all transactional relationships. Jump through hoop (obey rule), get sex. An Alpha, by nature, would have options to replace a woman who made rules for him. Furthermore, it wouldn’t occur to a woman to issue rules with an Alpha man whose babies she wants to have. Hypergamy can’t afford to issue rules to Alpha men.

The Inner War

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her. There are more than a few Purple Pill “relationship experts” who cater to this demographic of women, and they do very well marketing new age magic and cutesy aphorisms to resolve this inner war.

I characterize this war as a conversation between a woman’s Id and her Ego. 

The Epiphany Phase forces her sensualism-seeking, ‘hawt’, short-term sexual (breeding) opportunism to come to terms with the necessity of her long-term security needs. Alpha Fucks (her Id) wars with Beta Bucks (her Ego) in her head – and all with the urgency of knowing that her SMV is decaying to the point where she must either take action or convincingly rationalize why she doesn’t need to take action. Her Ego knows her SMV is in decline and long-term security / parenting / family is becoming less and less available to her. But her Id still wants what it wants; ‘hawt’ sex with ‘hawt’ guys. And she’s still ‘hawt’ too – the feminine-primary world says it all the time “Never Settle Gurl!” – she ‘deserves’ only the best.

Thus, the conversation leads to varying degrees of compromise to outright self-delusions prompted by outside influences (i.e. social media). Plan B is a compromise. Refusing his last name is a compromise (or hedging of her Hypergamous bets). Making rules for, and endlessly testing, a Beta to assuage the Hypergamous doubt (“is he the best I can do?”) is a compromise.

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

Today, the new fascination with ‘Poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is also one more methodology women are using to make a compromise between the Alpha Fucks her Id needs and the Beta Bucks her Ego knows is necessary for her future security and happiness. “Alternative relationship strategy” is the latest euphemism for Poly, but it really distills down to a means for women to find a way to balance the Hypergamous equation. She’ll marry the Beta, but it should necessarily mean she has to have sex with him. Poly relationships are a compromise.

Ideally women would love to give themselves to a worthy man. To follow his plan for their lives,…and she’d like to feel the kind of attraction to him that would inspire the trust that he would do so for her and her children’s benefit. 

“I wanted to have his babies.” — this is Hypergamy balancing Alpha Seed with Beta Need perfectly.

Today though, women wait too long. They believe the lies of their own Blue Pill, that their SMV is never depleted. They don’t look for this balance anymore. They don’t even expect to find it; one man is for a same night lay, the other is boyfriend material. 

Bargain Abasement

“Men conquer worlds, women conquer men.” – Pook

From the time boys are about five years old, we’re taught self-control. Anyone with a young son  understands the challenge in this, but for the most part the control we teach our boys differs from what we teach (or don’t teach) our girls. For the most part, this control is necessary to curb boys’ natural proclivities to take risks, but in a feminine-primary social order this inhibiting risk comes from a need for female security . Our young minds, boys and girls, lack the capacity for abstract thought. In fact, our brains continue to develop to their fullest potential right up to 20-21 years of age. 

For millennia, adult men, fathers, mothers, the Village that is our larger social order, understood the need to place limitations on boys innate impulsiveness – usually for their own good. While these restrictions and discipline have always been a needed part of boys’ upbringing, today that self-control is taught in the context of how a young man can be more ‘correct’ by his female teachers. In the time of our old social contract teaching young men self-control and self-discipline was a means to self-mastery as an adult man. In the new social contract our gynocentric education system (and socialization) teaches boys discipline in the hopes that they will provide the security that women need.

And the way this is taught is by embedding a deep sense of shame and self-loathing of the male gender into ever-younger generations of future men. Mental Point of Origin is a constant theme in all of my literary work. I want to stress here that crushing any sense of self-priority or self-importance from boys and young men is the prime directive of a gynocentric education system. Last Saturday we discussed the “worshiping of women” on our new show Rule Zero. In this episode I pointed out that men are taught to place womankind on a pedestal from an early age. This meta-pedestalization of the feminine begins when boys are taught self-abasement as part of self-control. Essentially, all control becomes for boys is reducing themselves while aggrandizing (supporting) girls and later women. This is the main reason why wrapping your head around Mental Point of Origin is so difficult for men later in life. Their Blue Pill conditioning taught them to be servants as a means of proving their self-control.

Most women, certainly all feminists, will do their best to convince us that it’s still little girls who are taught to repress their naturally boyish natures. But it’s a cliché now to believe that little girls would be every bit as ‘curious about how the world works’ if not for a nebulous society that represses their passion for discovery. Since the Sexual Revolution our social order has done its damnedest to reverse gender roles – boys are taught to emulate the feminine, girls emulate the masculine. The Disney corporation has been the most active social agent in western culture in fomenting this reversal. Every story across all genres follows the same plot; a repressed little girl would make an even better boy if not for these Patriarchal rules she must break from. The story of Mulan is a good example. The girl Mulan must impersonate a boy in order to prove herself as a masculine equal – and to get closer to the Alpha male she naturally wants to pair with. Our popular fiction today all follows a similar teaching; girls need to break away from self-control to be more empowered.

The notion that little girls are ever taught to repress their natures is laughable in real life. If little boys are taught like they’re defective girls, then girls today are taught that they can literally do anything – and be free of any lasting consequences. In fact any restrictions, any pretense of a girl/woman requiring a degree of self-control is immediately associated with repression. This old order idea of female repression is a favorite trope for the Fempowerment narrative. The most marginal, well-meaning, criticism of women or the feminine is always steeped in ‘judgmentalism’. Being ‘judged’ is always a concern for women. For the past 3-4 generations of women, being freed from ‘repression’ is also to be free from judgement. They have an entitlement to avoid consequence.

Abasement

On last week’s Rule Zero episode we asked a question: why is it so many men will abase themselves with women? If you’ve been Red Pill aware for a while it’s easy to just dismiss these guys and think they’re all just low self-esteem losers, but the belief is endemic to the 80% of Beta men. The combination of having been raised to prioritize the concerns of women above his own interest, and the notion that doing so will make him a better romantic catch in the eyes of women (who already feel entitled to him being a useful servant) turns self-abasement into a form of Beta Game.

Why does a man get down on one knee to propose marriage to a woman? Surely this old social contract form of abasement was an expectation of men. It’s in practically every romantic story ever told.

Under the old social contract a man was presumed to be above a woman in status. The old intersexual hierarchy of love followed from the man to the woman and then later to the child(ren). It was a natural, understood, dominance hierarchy prior to the Sexual Revolution. In all the old stories Disney has ever retold the presumption of this hierarchy defines the plot of the story. Of course now we’ve grown accustomed to gender swaps and expectation swaps in these retellings, but when a woman gets down on bended-knee to propose to a man – as her empowering teachers have taught her is acceptable – there’s something awkward when a woman abases herself to a man. 

One of the prime directives of feminism is this:

Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.

Anything a woman might do just to please a man is abasement. It smacks of the repressiveness little girls are told still holds them back in spite all the world’s attempts to advantage them. Doing something, wearing something, being something or behaving in a way that might intentionally please a man is the antithesis of the Strong Independent Woman® ideal. But yet, women are taught that they should expect to live in Sadie Hawkins’ World where they should feel empowered to ask the man on a date and ask him to marry her if he merits it. Again, it’s all part of the gender reversal we’re expected to embrace.

But when you see it, when a woman is doing the proposing, it doesn’t feel empowering. It feels awkward, backwards. Social constructionism says that awkwardness is the result of society teaching you stereotypical gender norms; but those norms haven’t been the standard for at least 4 generations. Disney’s taught us different for some time now. But it still looks weird. The man is supposed to initiate. The man is supposed display and she is supposed to choose. The man is supposed to abase himself, right?

Male abasement is a sign of submission in an age that expected him to be an Alpha already. There used to be a time when men were expected to be the masters of their lives. Men understood their  Burden of Performance and built a life around creating (conquering) their own worlds. Certainly this achievement was motivated by finding a wife, but more so because of his innate sense of idealism.

The Ideal Man

The old social order expectations of men are still what women feel entitled to in the new order:

  • Superior Physicality: He must be more than her equal in height and strength. Muscularity is an ideal in men. Women hold far more strict and static ideals of male beauty than men have ever held for women.
  • Superior Dominance: He is respected, deferred to and sometimes feared by his peers. He holds status, power (in the traditional sense) and honor that is confirmed and reinforced by others – but only insofar as it can be useful to a woman. Women tend to have an immature understanding of the nature of power.
  • Superior Confidence/Competence: He must be more innovative and competent than herself. Competence is directly tied to the Hypergamous doubt – “Is he the best I can do?” If she is more competent (or she believes she is) than he is it upsets the natural intersexual dominance hierarchy and ultimately his Frame control. Confident competence is the foundation of a woman’s need for long term security.
  • Superior Mastery: He must be a master of himself and the world he directs. Again, this is tied to a woman’s need for security which he must ensure in the long term; even into his old age. He must “Just Get It” with her and understand women in general – this is derived from experience and being supremely desired by other women.

For all of this mastery the ideal man is expected to possess, the fantasy is that he must abase himself to her due to her uniqueness. The power of love is what he must defer to. Even today, in a post Sexual Revolution era, this chivalric ideal is still an unspoken expectation. That ideal is a superior man who abases himself to her, and only to her. This is the Beauty and the Beast archetypal story. The fantasy ideal man is only beholden to her particular charms. Men conquer worlds, women conquer men.

A few years ago (2012-13) I did a series of posts about the chivalric ideal. In those essays I proposed that the western concepts of chivalry, bastardized by the influence of ‘courtly love’, were an extension of power by the feminine. Essentially chivalry was feminism 1.0 in that it leveraged men’s obligations of honor to benefit the Feminine Imperative. Chivalry was a Male Space into which women inserted themselves (via courtly love), assimilated the principles and rewrote the rules to better fit themselves. We still see vestiges of this today when women post something on Facebook or Twitter stating that “only a ‘real’ man does the things that benefit me, my sexual strategy and my ensured survival and happiness.” 

Male sacrifice now extends to a man abasing himself for an entitled benefit of womankind. It’s no longer just an expectation of undying love and commitment, it’s a surrendering of his evolved imperatives.