Psychology

The Rise of the Hustle Economy

Back in January of this year I published a bit from my upcoming 4th book in The New Age of Enlightenment. As I get closer to publication the current events of 2020 have made me consider a new dynamic in regard to how, in an unprecedented way, the new power of cancel culture has given rise to what I’ve called the Hustle Economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on their channel as a ’side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns 86% of the publishing market today)? How many former cubicle workers decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.

I write this at a time when several prominent names in the Manosphere (and other spheres) with large subscriber bases are having their channels erased by YouTube/Google. In some cases this erasure is a complete deletion from mainstream social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even WordPress). I’m not a fortuneteller, but I did predict this happening as far back as my State of the Manosphere address in 2018 and as recently as a defunct convention I spoke at back in May of 2019. I said a storm was coming. I saw then that a mainstream Village would need convenient foils, easy targets, to defeat in the 2020 election cycle; and the “Red Pill” – as subjectively defined by every online ideologue-grifter – would make the perfect, easy-to-hate, villains to bring down to prove a point. Purging long-overdue “hate accounts” would seem like a necessary and needed step to prove ideological virtue to the ‘woke’ masses.

Well, that storm is upon us now, and the people who convinced themselves they were entrepreneurs, and a much more profitable side hustle was their true calling in life, are looking around with a bit of nervous hesitancy now. Even the guys with the temerity to start an online business in the wake of the Corona Virus eliminating their jobs are now realizing they may not be as anti-fragile as they thought. Cancel Culture isn’t just about getting ideological enemies fired from their day jobs. It’s about total personal assassination, and stealing that person’s bread in the form of denying them any future ability to exist online, much less generate revenue, is the real objective. Right now, the Cancelled are just faceless randoms online losing jobs and tenured university staff who got too comfortable in the belief that they could never be fired. But in the coming months the Cancelled are going to look like an army of dispossessed with nothing to lose by hunting down the ones responsible for canceling them.

An Economy of Hustlers

The Hustle Economy came about because the barriers to entry into that economy have never been lower. For roughly 7-8 years anyone with a laptop, webcam and a basic understanding of social media and WordPress could join the hustle revolution of online “influencers“. Who wouldn’t want to make more money than the shitty 9-5 corporate cubicle job they spent 4 years in college to get into? Is it any wonder that for a decade the various ‘spheres have been dissuading young men from attending college, to get worthless degrees, in order to get into one of these jobs? Why bother with the “leftist indoctrination” we call education when you can make six figures in a couple of years online if you learn how to leverage SEO, engagement, grow an email list and pitch offers and merch? Hell, you can pretend to be a dog online and make more money than that job you thought assuming all that student debt for would be so rewarding.

The Hustle Economy was a natural progression from the Gig Economy. A lot of companies understood the sense in ‘retaining’ at-home employees, or project/contract workers. No benefits, next to no overhead, productivity was up to the freelancer completing the tasks on time (instead of monitoring hourlies’ productivity in a cube farm) and all for about the same, if not less, compensation. Don’t like your gig? Fine, just fire your “employer” and go back to your service advertising site to pick up a new one. For being a hired gun or contractual employee working from home most smart pros saw the freedom of the Hustle Economy almost immediately. Cut the middleman out and have the “jobs” come to you in the form of a potentially worldwide clientele.

Around 2014 the online Coaching/Guru hustle really began to develop into a template that anyone with a bit of social media savvy could follow. ‘Smart’ men and women quit their dead-end cubicle jobs or rearranged their Gig Economy jobs, for the more lucrative positivity hustle dollars that only required the small investment of a laptop, webcam and a willingness to parrot the scripts of Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill or Norman Vincent Peale. To be fair, this new Hustle Economy isn’t unique to the Manosphere; the Lost Boys Generation – this generation of directionless young men – niche market is just one among many lucrative markets today. Health & Fitness, “Entrepreneurs”, dating/relationship/marriage, personal empowerment, motivational positivity, the Law of Attraction, these are just a sampling of what I’ve called the Success Porn industry in the past. And new order technology makes all the old order grifts seem novel to a generation that’s never experienced them before. This Hustle Economy online template is cross-cultural and largely globalized now. Religion, psychology, motivation, business, philosophy, fitness, medicine/health, dating/relationship, marriage, child-rearing, or even just catering to the red meat needs of others’ desire for affirmation in their own despondency; all of these and more are now the spheres of the Hustle Economy.

Old Order Mastery vs. New Order Hustle

In 2015 I had a guy approach me at the Man in Demand conference who wanted to thank me for my work and The Rational Male. He said he’d come to reading it at the suggestion of his (male) therapist while he was recovering from a nasty divorce. This was the first time I had ever been told that a legitimate clinical psychologist had been using my book as a part of their therapy practice. The significance of this was profound for me then, but I don’t think I fully appreciated it until I had more men relate a similar beginning to reading my work in 2017 up to today. Here were real psychologists with doctorate degrees using The Rational Male as a reference in their practices. It was at this time I began to pay more attention to doctors and scholars and legitimate business pros who were aligning themselves with the various influencers of the new order spheres.

Psychologists are the best example of this because of the diversity of fields they can involve themselves in. Take a guy like Gad Saad, easily one of my favorite evolutionary psychology researchers. He’s a bonafide doctor and evo-psych scientist who’s found a new celebrity in various Hustle Economy sub-spheres on Twitter and elsewhere. His YouTube channel is pushing 180K subs and he managed to leverage himself as an e-personality. But Gad is one of the few legitimate psychologists to successfully transition to the new order hustle. More psychologists struggle with it because they still cling to an old order thinking that their pre-New Enlightenment educations were founded upon. They may still hold private clinical practices that they developed some 10-20 years ago. That’s the way you did it as a therapist in the old order. In fact, one reason I never pursued a postgraduate in behavioral psychology was because the only way to make any “real money” was to get a doctorate and start a practice. Masters degrees would get a you a job as a social worker.

Today, legitimate psychologists must actively compete in the Hustle Economy to make the hard work, time and money they invested in their degrees pay off as well as an online self-help Guru or Coach‘s hustle; some of whom have had their own practice open online with a 99 page “e-book” available filled with positivity pablum lifted from The Secret, going for as long as they’ve been in school. When WebMD first launched in the late 2000s doctors everywhere had to contend with their patients diagnosing themselves with whatever disorder they believed their symptoms indicated according to what they read on the site. The age of the self-educator had begun in this regard and online “clinicians“, both certified and holistic, saw the opportunity to profit from the symptomatic fears of people about their health. Real doctors had to either fight a losing battle of reeducating and allaying the fears of increasingly more people’s health concerns one by one, or find their own angle in the Hustle Economy and leverage their title and credentials to add validity to it. Today, an honorific is respected in name, but it’s by no means the path to earning potential – at least in the short term.

I occasionally encounter the critic who will claim I don’t site sources or my own work is speculative or just opinion. Wherever possible I do in fact cite sources, stats and research, but in the new order information age quoting stats or correlating studies has become an exercise in “dueling research”. And that’s assuming a critic has the time and interest enough to consider what you’re citing and counter it with their own. If you’re diligent enough it’s likely you can counter even the most basic of scientific presumptions with some research, TED talk or meta-study data. The truth is most people simply don’t develop their personal belief sets based on the data of multiple peer-reviewed, independently funded, experimental research PDFs someone links them online. They usually go with experience, emotional resonance and what “sounds right” according to how they were raised. If anything, rationality and critical thinking – the kind of mental presence sorely needed in higher education – is distrusted above all else in the Hustle Economy.

So, I can certainly see the frustration most old order career professionals have with the online template success models of their new order competitors. Add to this that they are both vying for the very sparse attention of the same customers – all of whom are little experts themselves – and you begin to see the practicality of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. Thus far I’ve used psychology as the illustration, but this Hustle Economy dynamic applies to all old order businesses, academia, government systems, and religion. Religion in particular (as I’m writing about) was, and is, one of the first spheres to eagerly embrace the Hustle Economy. With everyone online being a little expert and everyone having some relative platform on which to prove it, religion, spirituality and magical thinking were easily monetized and template-formed. And their profitability is made all the better when one sphere’s template (religion) complements or amplifies another (government, psychology, fitness, sex, etc.).

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Kicking and screaming will the old order thinkers be dragged into the Hustle Economy of this new age of digital enlightenment. Back in the late 2000s I can remember being told that to make ends meet a family needed two incomes and a side hustle. Now that side hustle is the main thing. The old plan of going to 4, maybe 8 years, of college to get a good job that paid well is hard to sell in the age of hustles that can pay far more than a formal degree does. Don’t think for a moment I’m in any way celebrating this development. A good education should be its own reward. Being well versed in a variety of areas, and understanding critical thinking and how to learn should be a priority for well-educated people. But even our institutions of higher learning, our esteemed universities, must also contend with the Hustle Economy. As COVID forces us to stay home, and classes, and jobs, are moved online, people are only now realizing just how unprepared their schools and employers are to deal with the new order way of learning and working. They’re beginning to see how many hours of their lives they waste in pointless formalities and commutes, but more so, they see how antiquated the old order systems they relied upon for security for so long really are. And in turn, those universities and corporation must now enter the Hustle Economy themselves if they want to survive.

This is the essence of the Red Pill. While I believe that Red Pill ought to only be used for intersexual dynamics, I do see the parallels in transitioning from a reliance on old order thinking to seeing how deceptively false the premises of that thinking are in light of new order, readily accessible, information today. We are presently in a state of radical transition – made all the worse because most of the last 4 generations neither realize it nor understand how to deal with it – and the old systems based on old presumptions are failing right before our eyes. These generations are ill prepared because all they know, all they’ve been taught, are failed, failing or outmoded ideas of the old order.

Pro Revenge

Several years ago I wrote the essay Rejection and Revenge. Eventually this piece found its way into my third book Positive Masculinity, but I had considered it for inclusion in the first book because it covered a core principle I had discussed on the SoSuave forums years prior. A desire for revenge is something innate to the human experience. Most higher-order animals have some rudimentary sense of what’s fair. Even dogs have a sense of fairness and can experience some form of jealousy. The study of altruism in animals, to say nothing of humans, is a complex affair. However, somewhere along the evolutionary path a species did better if they cooperated and had some investment in promoting the survival of their kin.

That leads to an innate understanding of fairness and unfairness. Human’s add ethics and morality to this equation, but the root is the same; on some level of consciousness we make comparisons, and from them we evaluate what is equitable according to our own interests. It serves a species’ survival interests to evolve pattern recognition and make reasoned judgments about those patterns.

Collectivists will argue that this dynamic is proof of a need for an idealized egalitarianism to promote the greater good, while selfish gene individualists will argue that it’s evidence of unconditioned self-concern for one’s own survival. Either way, human beings are very motivated by the emotional response to a perceived injustice – so much so that we will raise those feelings to metaphysical significance. Even our gods rage over injustice; Revenge is mine sayeth the Lord. A tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye might make the whole world blind, but it’s the foundation of our evolved sense of fairness.

And why wouldn’t fairness be so impactful for us? Our lizard brains associate that imbalance with a threat to our survival, our wellbeing and our reproductive efforts. Our limbic system detects some unfairness – usually via our peripheral awareness – we get a squirt of some hormonal cocktail into our system, and now we can’t shake this feeling that we ought to feel jealous or suspicious of someone or some environmental condition where we’re getting the short end of the stick. We are literally wired (and piped) for making judgement calls. Even when those judgement calls prove unfounded, and maybe detrimental to us, to err on one side or the other of that innate judgmentalism served our ancestors well enough to get us to where we are now.

It’s easy to consider this evaluating, judgmental nature in terms of simplistic right or wrong choices. Right being what ever benefits the individual in equal measure to another, wrong being whatever thoughts or behaviors conceal the interests of individual self-concern. The Seven Deadly Sins are all fundamentally about this evolved fairness equation. Greed might be a benefit to the individual – and their kin by association – but to our limbic evaluation it’s unfair to the greater, necessitous whole of society. Ergo, greed becomes a sin, and social conventions like do unto others as you would have done unto you becomes a counterbalance to the unfairness. However, most of the choices we make in life are not simple right vs. wrong equations. Some of the greatest stories ever told by humans are about right vs. right and wrong vs. wrong (or maybe less wrong) choices. While dogs may feel jealousy, and chimps may give a banana to another who didn’t get one, they’re rarely confronted with the nuances of justice that humans have to consider.

Why We Love Revenge

When we attach this innate sense of fairness to biological imperatives things get dicey. The purview of my work is intersexual dynamics, so I’ll be focusing on that imperative here. But remember that concepts like fairness, jealousy, revenge, rivalry and the indignation that accompany these and more are not just limited to solving one’s reproductive problem. That said, human beings love revenge. We fantasize about it. We write epics about revenge. Some invest their lives in creating fictions to find some psychological catharsis for an injustice they will never actually resolve in their lifetime. I would argue that humans enjoy the chemical cocktail, and associated emotions, that stem from a desire for revenge.

To be clear, I’m not talking about some ephemeral sense of justice. This is root-level, squirt of adrenaline, desire to balance a perceived or actual unfairness that threatens the individual’s (or associated group) survival or propagation. I’ve written extensively about women’s innate need for Indignation and the associated chemical-emotional response they derive from it. Primarily I believe this need stems from the way women (neurologically) prioritize and process emotion, but it also serves as a confirmation of their Hypergamous filtering. No indignation is more satisfying for women than the feelings they derive from thwarting the sexual efforts of a false-Alpha male. This indignation response, and the good feels that reinforce it, serves to aid (sometimes trick) women’s sexual selection imperatives and avoid their existential fear. Ultimately, what’s fair for women is whatever serves the Sisterhood’s Hypergamous best interests.

For men, and particularly the young men of this new order generation, revenge fantasies hold a similar, indignant appeal. As we’ve systematically feminized the males of the last 4 generations, we’ve also conditioned them to prioritize the same emotional responses we would expect in women. As I’m fond of saying, we raise boys as defective girls who then become parodies of defective women. Part of this conditioning is training young men to identify with the female experience, but also to want to become a part of that experience. The female experience is always the “correct” experience. So it follows that the prioritization of emotion as a peak experience is something this generation of men have internalized. Feels before reals. A common lament of women and feminized men today is that if men could be more expressive in their emotions (the emotions women are comfortable with) then the world would be a better place. Thinking and feeling like a woman makes for a better “man“, right? That’s today’s gynocentric logic.

But indignation (the result of inherent unfairness) based on reproductive imperatives works very differently in men. Men’s evolved existential fear is based on ensuring his own paternity. Determining that a child is a man’s actual genetic progeny has been an imperative evolution has embedded in men’s mental firmware. Until DNA testing arrived men had relatively no empirical way to determine if he was a cuckold (a female mating strategy) and his parental investment and evolutionary imperative had been wasted. Thus, indignation, prompted men to create social conventions to provide at least the semblance of socially enforced parental certainty. The deal is, if a man is to invest his reproductive potential in a woman and their children she should be bound by social expectations that the child is his genetic progeny. It’s only fair.

But, life’s not fair. And men and women’s reproductive strategies are inherently adversarial, so what constitutes justice in the sexual marketplace is often defined by the gender with the most social power at the time. In every age prior to the Sexual Revolution that was men, now it’s women.

Men innately process emotion, particularly negative emotion, differently than women. Again, this is how evolution wired men, but the social dictates of this time go to great lengths to condition men to believe that the way they process emotion is “incorrect”. Their natural proclivities make them bad humans when their innate way of being emotional conflicts with the “correct” female way of experiencing emotion they were taught. As a result of this conflict we have recent generations of men who seek the same indignation rush women have an innate attraction to. However, these young men get their endorphin rush from revenge scenarios that align with their innate imperatives – exposing paternity fraud, cuckoldry and exposing the duplicity of women’s innate mating strategies.

Comeuppance

Revenge is an expanding topic of interest for average frustrated young men. Closing in on almost a million subscribers, the Reddit sub-forum r/prorevenge is one of the fastest growing topics on the platform today. I was only made aware of the sub after doing some research on the popularity of tags for YouTube videos. ‘Pro Revenge’ is a Black Pill (and MGTOW) sweetheart tag for what I referred to as the Doom Pill in my video Red Meat for the Red Pill. The Pro Revenge concept is simple; guys in the forum relate stories about how ‘deserving’ people got their comeuppance. Justice or Karma is served up to cheaters, scammers, liars, thieves and other assorted attempts to offend our innately human sense of fairness. To be fair, all Pro Revenge topics are not about cheating or duplicitous women – there are loads of stories about bad employers, plagiarists and Success Porn gurus – but real-world revenge stories about women’s duplicity being thwarted by a smart Red Pill guy or just blind circumstance are clearly the most popular themes.

The popularity of young men experiencing revenge either in fantasy or vicariously through others is becoming a very lucrative profit model for agile YouTube channel hosts as well as Lifestyle Coaches. When I consider the ceaseless hunger for Red Meat topics in the Black Pill, MGTOW or just the Manosphere in general the source of that hunger always comes back to the emotional rush attendant to indignation. When a woman “gets hers” because her mating or empowerment strategy was foiled, men get a sense of righteous indignation; particularly guys who enjoy commiserating in their shared sense of powerlessness. And that commiseration has never been easier or more organized than in our new order technological world. Pro Revenge is just one of many innovations that cater to men’s desire to see things put straight and experience the endorphin rush that comes with it. It feels good to see “justice” served.

Of course, women turned the revenge fantasy into various art forms long ago. Carrie Underwood sings openly about vandalizing and destroying a cheating (now ex) lover’s expensive four-wheel drive truck and countless commiserating women (even today) can recite the lyrics verbatim. In a gynocentric social order, destruction of personal property is entirely acceptable if the perpetrator is a woman who discovered her duplicitous lover was not the man her Hypergamous instincts believed him to be. Women’s existential fear meets justice. And women and feminine-sympathetic men all nod in agreement. Essentially, Pro Revenge has been a thing for women for ages. Courtesy of centuries of bastardized Chivalry and the romantic ideal we just accept it more because Beta men reinforce it as a form of Game. Thus, we have women manufacturing their own indignation in fiction and daytime talk shows that expose an incorrigible pickup artist getting his comeuppance and confirm women’s Hypergamous intuitions. And yet, even this openly embraced double standard only serves as fuel for the Pro Revenge instincts of more young men today.

For all the hopelessness and despondency the information age has brought to men and women it’s also revealed the evolved motives beneath our want for what we think is justice. The Doom Pill is becoming the logical extension of this nihilism and the players in the Hustle Economy are now perfecting ways to profit from it. Exploiting the Gender War for fun and profit has never been easier – because this new generation of men and women enjoy the indignation derive from it so much they become oblivious to their own exploitation.

The Mystery of the Red Dress

Today’s quote is from the Biography of Steve Jobs. I did read the book in its entirety in 2010, but recently had this bit sent to me from a reader as an example of ‘How an Alpha should treat a Gold-digger‘. Mmm? No.

As an example of “alpha behavior” or an illustration of equal justice I can see why this incident might be construed as such, but there’s a much more valuable lesson to be learned in this exchange. The incident took place between Steve Jobs and singer Joan Baez, a woman who Jobs eventually had a relationship with.

In 1982, Jobs was introduced to Joan Baez by her sister Mimi Farina. He was 27 and she was 41. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” said Jobs. Some of his friends believed that one thing that drew Jobs to Baez was the fact that she used to date Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” said Jobs’ college friend Elizabeth Holmes.” The relationship fizzled out when it became clear that Jobs wanted children and Baez did not. 

Rolling Stone, 2011

Using a Red Pill Lens on this situation, we see a few apparent truths. The age difference was definitely a factor, but Jobs was well-known for what was called his “Reality Distortion Bubble“. In effect Steve Jobs had an intrinsic understanding of himself as his Mental Point of Origin. A lot of Type-A personalities have this in common – they innately make themselves the first thought they have in virtually all decisions they make. For some this can border on sociopathy, but most people we consider successes or geniuses had this sense of self as their starting point. Let me make this clear, you don’t have to be a sociopath or a solipsist to make yourself your Mental Point of Origin, but that is where these states begin.

Practically every very wealthy man I’ve ever worked for, or with, had himself in mind before a thought was give to anyone else’s consideration in his decision making process; family, spouse, employees, friends, we’re subordinate to his Mental Point of Origin. For most the process would start and end with themselves and their interests. These were the sociopaths. For a few that process started with themselves and ended with the consideration of others, but the process was a pragmatic one that facilitated a maintaining of power balance. As I’ve said in the past, I’m a proponent of enlightened self interest: I cannot help others until I help myself. Nor can I help others as effectively as when I help myself first. It’s not that you ought to become a selfish prick – you should think of the interests of others – but only after you’ve considered yourself in the scope of your own interests and how your interests facilitate the interests of others.

Now that this is settled, let me say that by this metric, Steve Jobs was none of this. According to the people he worked with, his family and friends, Jobs had all the characteristics of a solipsist. Yes, men can be solipsists too, though it’s more of a learned process rather than the innate proclivity women have to be solipsistic. From a business perspective, from a single-minded determination perspective, Jobs was certainly an Alpha. His mindset was that of an Alpha. His relationship history, however, was grossly influenced by Blue Pill idealism. One commonality you’ll find among men we consider great innovators, inventors, discoverers and entrepreneurial geniuses is they are almost invariably Blue Pill idealists with respect to their romantic lives. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two current examples of this commonality. Argue their greatness if you like, their personal lives are classic examples of what happens to the Nerd, the autist, the high IQ guy, who’s afforded the money and success to live out their Blue Pill fueled impression of what a relationship with a woman should be like. And predatory women, with the savvy to understand (and have the patience for) the nature of Beta men, make these guys their bread and butter.

“There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not sure I would describe Jobs as an autist, or being on the Asperger’s spectrum, but he was certainly on the sociopath spectrum. Try not to conflate ‘sociopath’ with something negative in this instance. Sociopathic behaviors and character attributes can equally be attractive survival traits as they are evidence of megalomaniacal tyranny. Sociopathy is really by order of degree. Jobs most certainly began and ended his thinking with himself in mind.

My Red Pill Lens read on this is as follows: Something in Steve Job’s subconscious was testing Joan Baez for genuine desire.

I’m fairly certain most of my readers will understand the ovulatory shift implications of a red dress being the item in mention here, but there is a method to Job’s madness in this.

“I said to myself, far out, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.”

Joan doesn’t get it from the start here. She presumes that a rich man would want to purchase her affections via the transaction of a gift. Not uncommon for even 41 year old women, and yes, her thinking here is exactly the solipsistic mental point of origin women have a natural default for. Indignant guys will call her a Gold Digger, which is accurate, but moreover you have to look at the process here. She presumes that rich men buy expensive gifts for the women they’re interested in. But in typical Jobs fashion Steve flips the script without knowing that’s what he’s doing.

When they get to the store Steve points out the dress and says, “You oughta buy it.” She looked a little surprised, said she couldn’t really afford it, he said nothing and they left.

“Wouldn’t you think if someone (a rich man) had talked like that the whole evening they were going to buy it for you?”

It would be easy to dismiss this part as default female entitlement, but remember this was 1982, and while women (particularly attractive and famous women) did expect things from well-to-do men, the entitlement levels weren’t anything like they are now. I think she was genuinely confused. She really didn’t get it.

“The mystery of the Red Dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.”

He would giver her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he would be sure to say they were leftover from an event in the office.

“He was both romantic, and afraid to be romantic.”

This end part is Baez’s last attempt to explain why an ‘eccentric‘ rich man wouldn’t buy her a dress he thought she’d look good in. I’m often asked how to go about vetting a woman for a long term relationship, and I’ve written essays about how most men simply never actually have the luxury of holding (much less developing) standards by which to ‘vet‘ a woman’s commitment-worthiness. Most men are not rich men, most men are Betas. Fewer still have the sense of self-value, or the access to so many optional women, as to presume to test a woman’s interest in him in any meaningful sense. Steve Jobs was not a necessitous man, he had, or could easily realize options when he wanted to. But even though he was idealistic in a Blue Pill conditioned sense, his subconscious wanted something it couldn’t buy – genuine desire from Joan Baez.

It’s easy to dismiss the Red Dress Incident as just another quirky personality flaw of a borderline sociopath who didn’t have the Game or the social intelligence to know he was offending or turning off a girl he kind of liked. Indeed, Joan tries to insert her own pop-culture psychoanalysis of Steve in the end; He was afraid to be the romantic she just knew he wanted to be. I expect this kind of rationalization from women who miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to optimize Hypergamy. But what if Steve wasn’t afraid? What if it was a form of his shit testing Joan to determine her genuine desire for him?

As I said, most men don’t have the luxury to shit test women at all. For low SMV men, which is to say most men, the thought of experimenting with testing a woman for desire, much less long term suitability is never a consideration. Most guys can’t believe their luck that a woman actually expressed interest in him because they’ve lacked romantic options for most of their lives. So to consciously experiment with determining honest signals from a woman seems like tempting fate. The Thirst is such that most men would do damn near anything not to screw things up with a girl who’s showing interest in him. Just be thankful your ship’s finally come in, right?

I’ll add again here that most women, particularly in this social media era, are well aware that most men will never vet them for anything beyond baseline arousal and sexual availability. Thirst serves the Feminine Imperative very well, but what about men who are Blue Pill idealists, that can actually afford the options? Men for whom money and access are no object, but still persist in the fairytale the Blue Pill told them was possible?

What I see happening here is Jobs’ request for Baez to buy the dress for herself was a test of her genuine desire for him. Steve could’ve easily bought her the dress, even the whole store, but that wasn’t the point. What Steve wanted was for her to want to please him. His expressing a like for the dress was his subconscious testing her desire to please him.

“I think you’d look good in this; It’s perfect for you” isn’t an offer, it’s a request. Will you sacrifice something to please me? 41 year old Joan Baez, could’ve afforded the dress. Hell, Ralph Lauren would have probably given it to her. But she expected Steve to buy it for her; that was her expectation then and it was the source of her confusion right up to Jobs’ biography interview. Her affinity for Jobs was transactional, not based in genuine desire. She failed the test.

Whether subconsciously or by design Steve wanted what most well-conditioned Blue Pill men want today: a genuine connection with a woman based on genuine (preferably unmitigated) desire. The Desire Dynamic is synonymous with The Rational Male. You cannot negotiate genuine desire is a foundational principle of both my work and all Red Pill awareness that follows from it. Steve’s ego wouldn’t allow him to negotiate for Joan’s real desire. His Mental Point of Origin and marginally sociopathic nature wouldn’t conceive it. But consciously or unconsciously he would test her (and other women he was involved with) for her desire to please him.

What is Your Red Dress?

It’s a cliché now for wealthy men to test women’s true interest in them. “Does she love me for me or because of my money/fame/status?” is a Blue Pill fantasy script for Beta men. This has been the plot of many popular stories and movies for centuries now (Coming to America with Eddie Murphy), but it’s a cliché because it accurately describes men’s subconscious coming to terms with women’s mating strategies and opportunistic concept of love. Women don’t fall in love with who a man is, they fall in love with what that man is. If a woman ever falls in love with who a man is it’s only after loving him for what he is first.

That’s some real cognitive dissonance a man has to confront in his life. The indignation that dissonance produces is very much the Red Meat most low SMV men love to wallow in, and commiserate in.

“She doesn’t love me! She loves what I can afford her! She’s a Gold Digger, I knew it!”

We love having women’s duplicity confirmed for us as men. It means we dodged a bullet by not investing in, and wasting our reproductive potential with, a woman who would be a bad bet for our future paternity. It provides the same chemical exhilaration and relief women feel when they think they’ve figured out a man’s “true” nature (Alpha Cad/Beta Dad). In the same way women get off on the indignation of discovering of men’s attempts to deceive women’s existential fear of false signals, so to do low SMV men get off on the indignation of discovering a woman only wants him for his money – not the real him.

What our subconscious truly wants is a pairing with a woman who has a genuine desire for us. Hot, unmitigated, Darwinistic monkey-sex is usually the manifestation of that genuine desire, but there are many more nuanced ways our male psyches will try to determine it. In past essays I’ve had men and women run me up the flagpole for suggesting a man never buy lingerie for his girlfriend or wife.

“How’s she supposed to know what I like if I don’t buy it for her?”
“I love getting something sexy from my man, sucks to be you.”

These, and more like them, are usually efforts in remaining self-ignorant of never having experienced genuine desire from a woman. If a woman has genuine desire for you she will be interested enough in you, and have the desire enough, to know how to please you without you explaining it to her. Genuine, organic desire is the foundation of all healthy relationships between men and women. Women who have genuine, unobligated desire for a man don’t ask him if they can go to Vegas for a girl’s weekend – her desire is for her man. Plates don’t require an active ‘spinning‘ on your part when she has real desire to be part of that man’s life. Women will eagerly share a worthy Alpha (rather than be saddled to a faithful Beta) if she has genuine desire for him.

…and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Genesis 3:16

When a woman has genuine desire for a man she Just Gets It when he suggests that a Red Dress would be “perfect for her” and she buys it, borrows it or steals it to wear it for him.

If Steve Jobs had purchased the Red Dress for Joan Baez, every time she wore it she would be wearing it for her, not for him. Something inside Steve knew this, and something in you does too.

Heirs of the Blank Slate

“Yeah, well, not all women are like that. Men do it too and they’re even worse!”

“People are people. Everyone is different, you can’t predict human behavior because we all have freewill.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

“Everyone is born equal.”

“If women are hypergamous, men must be too.”

“Double standards are so unfair.”

The legacy of the Blank Slate has been one of the most pivotal influences on understanding intersexual dynamics for over the last century. In the time I’ve been writing I’ve covered egalitarianism’s influence on Blue Pill conditioning on at least 5 occasions. In all of these essays I’ve made the case that what we consider the Blue Pill, and the perceptions it instills in us, is firmly rooted in a preconception that an egalitarian state between the sexes is not only possible, but eminently desirable. In fact, I would argue that the presumption that an egalitarian state between men and women is ideal is the foundational premise of a Blue Pill social order.

Since I began writing on these topics one thing I’ve experienced that underpins people’s understanding of intersexual dynamics is an established belief that men and women are functional equals – or ideally they ought to be – who exist in a state of disequilibrium. This equalism (my term) is akin to a religious belief, albeit one most people are unaware they believe in. I first encountered this belief when I was in college. Around the same time I discovered that among the most rational of my fellow students and professors in behavioral psychology, most clung to the soulmate myth, I also noticed that most of them held to the hope of an “equal partnership” with whomever their ‘soulmate‘ turned out to be. Here I had some very empirical minds who would write thesis papers on human nature according to what we knew about evo-psych, evo-bio, anthropology and sociology, yet they would revert to the Blank Slate hope that ‘people are people‘ and we’d evolved past our innate natures when it came to finding their ‘One‘.

The idea that humans have ‘evolved beyond’ our animal natures is the lynchpin in the modern belief of the Blank Slate.

What we know as the Blank Slate, as a concept, evolved from the Enlightenment era idea of Tabula Rasa. Originally it was Aristotle who came coined the term, then it passed through the Stoics, then other notable minds of antiquity, but the root of what it has become today began in the Enlightenment era with John Locke.

On paper it’s a very ennobling idea. All people are born with the same intellectual (and later spiritual) potential; we’re all the same except for what society, environment and circumstance writes on the slate that is our intellect and personality. The object of this essay isn’t to give you a history lesson, but if you’re really interested in the development of how we got to our default, equalist, concept of the Blank Slate I’ll refer you to Steven Pinker’s great book The Blank Slate.

From the time of the Enlightenment the concept of the Blank Slate has been embedded into our core cultural beliefs about human nature. It dovetails very nicely into the concept of freewill and it also satisfies the of hopefulness human beings need to combat the determinism that might lead to nihilism. It’s exactly this human need for hope that makes the Blank Slate so appealing. People who hold a belief in the Blank Slate take it for granted to the point it becomes an ego-investment, and internalized thoroughly, it becomes the subconscious point from which people begin when it comes to understanding human nature. So, challenging the validity of whether human’s have innate, evolved, aspects of their natures – and their influences having a bearing on our decisions – borders on attacking their religion or who they are as a person.

From a Red Pill perspective, proposing that men and women are different physically and mentally, and that we’re subject to evolved influences as a result of these differences, is also sacrilege. The Blank Slate ideal is what defines every aspect of what Blue Pill conditioning would have men and women believe about intersexual relations and gender ‘equality’. In fact, as James Damore found firsthand, the Village forbids even the discussion of questioning the Blank Slate. The religion of the Blank Slate is also the state-approved religion, and this has implications in social realms that go well beyond intersexual dynamics.

With the rise of feminism and a feminine-primary social order, social adherence to the Blank Slate ideal became vital to the survival of feminism’s power base. Once the modern research and understanding of human beings’ evolved nature became unignorable the social institutions founded on the Blank Slate were challenged. Today, Red Pill awareness in men is one of those challenges.

A Blue Pill, equalist, mindset doesn’t coexist well with empirical evidence that shows men and women are more different than alike on fundamental levels. Today’s Blank Slate is, as Dr. Pinker describes, a ‘modern denial of human nature‘. The Blank Slate belief set is codependent on Social Constructionism. The idea is that we are all just empty vessels that a nebulous ‘society’ builds through media, culture, school, religion, family, etc. And while all of these outside influences certainly mold us, by necessity the Blank Slate ignores the import of our mental ‘firmware‘ – the innate proclivities that come standard in males and females.

The Human System

I use the term “evolved mental firmware” a lot in my writing. I look at it like this; we have the hardware that is our biological reality, a firmware that is our in-born, evolved proclivities (and the psychological aspects of how men and women’s hardware affects it) and the software that accounts for the social programming we learn from our environments and circumstances. From the perspective of my theory on perceptive processes (Instinct, Emotion & Reason) our firmware influences all three of these processes.

Blank Slate equalism would condition us to believe that our biology (hardware) is insignificant, our firmware is non-existent or inconsequential, and our programming (social learning) is the only thing that makes us what we are. If this sounds like progressivist boilerplate you’re not too far off. Modern concepts of social justice use exactly this social constructionism to justify their positions on a great many issues – and especially gender issues.

However, it’s a mistake to think the Blank Slate is a religion only for leftists and feminists. Equalism is the starting point for the beliefs of many well-meaning Blue Pill conservatives too. Feminism depends on egalitarian ideals setting the intersexual ‘Frame‘ for selling its ideology.

“If only men would cooperate and help smash the Patriarchy we could live in an ideal state of egalitarian equalism.”

The cover story of a ‘push for equality’ all depends on the Blank Slate notion that men and women are functional equals and all this inequality is the result of social doctrines (and plenty of evil men). If it’s all about social constructionism then all that’s needed is to change everyones’ programming and thus an idealized gender neutral world ought to be possible.

Male feminists, Mens Rights Activists and Masculinity Apologist organizations all have this in common – they buy into the Blank Slate and the feminist lie that gender equality is an achievable goal based on it. Most of them don’t realize they’re carrying feminist water in their egalitarian beliefs. They just believe in the hope of an “equal partnership” in their marriages and ignore or demonize the influence our evolved firmware exerts in themselves and their wives. So even when they accept intersexual differences and the influence of our firmware, the next defense of the Blank Slate is moralism.

Moralism for Rationalists

The Blank Slate is a lie, but it’s a lie that’s pregnant with hope. Men and women are different; and our differences are too significant to ignore. But even when the Blank Slate is effectively challenged and our evolved natures are acknowledged, the next rationale is that, if we’re only moral enough, intelligent enough, or “evolved” enough, we ought to ideally be able to effect the ideals of the Blank Slate above our base natures. The appeal to rising or evolving above the influences of our evolved natures is always the path of the moralist and the intellectual. Shouldn’t we strive for Equality? Would an equal state between the sexes not be a good thing? If we were good enough, and exercising our powerful freewill, men and women should be able to be more equitable, right?

The question isn’t whether we can overcome our evolved natures – we do this all the time actually – but whether we should strive for the egalitarian ideal. In the most egalitarian societies on the planet human being still opt for “traditional” (conventional) gender roles. Given the freedom to believe in a Blank Slate ideal and choose their roles in an egalitarian social order (or its best approximation) men and women still prefer the roles we’re supposed to believe are so constraining for us. The roles we’re supposed to believe are foisted on us by social constructionism.

I would argue that much of the gender conflicts we experience today are the result of force-fitting men and women into an egalitarian ideal with the expectation that our evolved (or designed) proclivities are ‘unnatural’ creations of a nebulous society. We’re told that gender is not binary and it’s really a social construct, yet we still need hormone therapy to alter the biochemistry of children to help them ‘transition’ to another binary gender.

I find it kind of ironic that a mindset, a social force and a belief system that would otherwise call for a natural balanced harmony in life is the most disharmonious with respect to a natural evolved order among men and women. The conclusion I come to then is that promulgating the Blank Slate social religion is more about power dynamics than a real push for an equalist harmony.

In 2019, after decades of advancements in the cognitive sciences, neurological study, anthropology, sociology, etc. we can lay the Blank Slate to rest, but so much of our social and intersexual understanding of human nature (or even the denial of it) is dependent on it being an ideal to strive for.

When I make an unflattering observation of women’s nature the first response from conditioned men and women is to firing back with some equal-but opposite-reaction. Our natural, human inclination is to look for symmetry and balance in things. The default belief is to think that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, or to distract from the observation by making value judgements.

Well, men do it too, only worse.

Deal with the plank in your own eye before you pluck the mote from mine.

If it’s true for one, there’s an opposite truth for another.

The reflexive need for a symmetrical balance – even when there is none – is a human default. ‘Men and women are different’ is a radical statement in this era, not the least of which because it contradicts the Blank Slate religion that persists in spite of itself. When people ask me whether I believe men and women are equals and I answer ‘no’, they look as if I pulled the wings from a butterfly. I believe men and women are complements to each other and we’re better together than apart, but we are not equals. We are different, with differing motives and strategies that are part of who we are. We could achieve a far more harmonious social state by accepting and embracing these differences.

Paternity, Promiscuity & “Poly”

Nature is cold and ruthless when it comes to reproduction, human reproduction is no exception. Rollo’s essay carries with it some pretty heavy implications. As has been pointed out before, monogamy is a male institution masquerading as a female institution, it ensures some level of paternity and stable bonds and expectations in order to arrive at a semblance of order among males in a community, it’s a tradeoff for order/security/reduced violence among males while at the same time providing sex at a limited scale to a majority of males, it’s a check/taming of nature invented by man that most likely allowed for the rise of civilization. This area yet again is not really about women but about a male structure to reduce intra/extra tribal violence.

We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of monogamy and indirectly the family unit. You can see the beginnings of the violence with the mass shootings by kids without a dad among whites. We see the black community in certain sectors/areas of the U.S begin to disintegrate as a stable social unit now that the family unit is absent. This is not a race issue as the black community in certain areas of the U.S remains solid/stable(the American South is one example), so it is not a race question, it’s a question of pressure brought to bear on certain sectors/areas. Any race is vulnerable to this, the Hispanic community is beginning to face headwinds among the current 18-30 generation, the number of single moms in the community is pretty high, I suspect the numbers in time will exceed that of the black community. This however doesn’t negate that the current inner city black community is the canary in the coal mine, and a picture of a possible future.

Foxguy

I thought these were some really good comments to start today’s essay off with as you’ll read in a moment. I’m going to try something a bit different in this post. There’s a lot to digest in what i’ve been working on lately with respect to evolved and social aspects of men’s innate drive for paternity. So rather than come out with a tightly packed essay on these individual topics I’m going to just throw out some of the concepts I’m working on at the moment. This will be a rare insight into how my writing process works, but I hope these topics will fuel further discussion in the comments and elsewhere.

As I stated in last week’s essay I’ve been reading my way through Tim Birkhead’s book Promiscuity. If you want to know what’s inspiring these ideas this is (still) it. I don’t want to call this book a ‘slog’, but I’m having to take my time with it in order to really digest it in a Red Pill sense. Any of my readers know that I’ve done a lot of work on Hypergamy to the point that I get criticized for being overly focused on women’s sexual strategy. I’m going to change this today and focus on men’s sexual strategies and how they fluidly adapt to women’s strategies.

The rise and acceptance of single motherhood over the past 50 years is a Reproductive Strategy

In The New Polyandry I proposed that with the rise of women’s independence from men, and the social unfettering of their sexual strategy (Hypergamy), women have shifted the prevailing social norms from socially enforced monogamy to a female-initiated form of polyandry. In a social environment where Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks is openly embraced, what follows is the breakdown of women’s old strategy of looking for men who best embody the both genetic and provisioning qualities and focusing primarily on one or the other in separate men depending on her state of need. A state of Open Hypergamy can only result from a social shift from enforced monogamy to female-primary polyandry.

Our feminine-primary social order then (Blue Pill) conditions men, via social reward and punishment, to fulfill these roles to be serviceable to women at various stages of their reproductive and life needs. I’ve joked that today women see men as either breeding stock or draft animals, but there’s truth to this. And men fulfill these roles in an effort to effect their own reproductive strategies that they’ve been socialized and acculturated to believe are in their best interests.

In the wake of the Sexual Revolution western cultures have removed all social stigmas that used to surround single motherhood – and even elective single motherhood. This is the necessary result of transitioning from male-primary monogamy to a female-primary polyandry and social support mechanisms designed to maintain it. Men are only now learning how to maneuver and adapt their own sexual strategies to this transition.

However, in order to accept their roles in this female-primary sexual marketplace they must sublimate their evolved drive to ensure their own paternity.

Open Cuckoldry is a Beta Male Sexual Strategy

In a socio-sexual state of Sandbergian Open Hypergamy the next logical step is convincing men to repress their innate need to know paternity and teach them that cuckoldry (and in particular, self-initiated cuckoldry) is in their reproductive interests. I’ve written about this in Open Cuckoldry. The definition of cuckoldry is tightly controlled to only mean “a woman deceiving a man to believe the children she’s born are his when they are in fact the progeny of another man.” When defined this way “cuckoldry” is perceived to be rare – though even this is changing with the advent of home DNA tests like 23 and Me. However, the latent purpose of cuckoldry is to effect women’s sexual strategy in securing the best genetic material (and validational sex) from one man while procuring the best provisioning and parental investment (and transactional sex) from another man. Socially accepted Cuckoldry is how this is effected in a feminine-primary social order.

In fact, cuckoldry is only socially acceptable when it happens in a gynocentric social framework. In just 60 years cuckoldry has become an accepted reproductive strategy for both men and women. By shifting the social norms to encourage men to sublimate their innate drive to know paternity we prioritize women’s sexual strategy above mens’. By reinforcing women’s ‘cuckolding’ men via socially acceptable means we encourage men to see adopting women’s sexual strategy as their own.

We convince men that this is a “lifestyle choice” when in fact it is social engineering that selects his genetic interests out.

  • Single Mothers —> Stepfathers
  • Female Promiscuity —> Polyandry
  • Open Cuckoldry —> “Poly” Lifestyles

To better come to terms with this shift in contemporary intrasexual strategies I propose that “cuckoldry” be defined as ” The state in which a man, either by deception or being socially convinced, assumes the parental investment responsibilities of a child he did not biologically sire”. Men adopting children due to impotency, and doing so of their own volition might not meet this definition because their choice is considered first in the decision and not as a result of seeing their choosing to be a foster father as an extension of their sexual strategy.

That’s an important distinction; having the choice to adopt versus adopting a single mother’s children as a means to his own reproduction. Many men who involve themselves with single mothers initially do so as a means to reproducing with her himself; ergo, a sexual strategy.

Wifing up a single mother and adopting the children sired by another man is a Beta male sexual strategy that has developed in the wake of feminine-social primacy. The cost of his own reproduction, assuming this occurs is, is an exchange of his reproductive efforts and resources invested in another man’s genetic legacy – a choice that was made for him, via a woman’s sexual strategy, before he ever entered the picture. As reproductive stresses continue to escalate in modern (western) societies, more Beta men will see (subconsciously) accepting their own cuckolding as a necessary state if they are to reproduce at all. With 43% of children being born out of wedlock today it’s easy to see that an ever increasing number of men will chose to exchange their innate drive for paternity for reproductive access.

“Poly” Lifestyles are being socially reinforced to facilitate women’s sexual strategies

Men’s drive for paternity is more difficult to sublimate in Alpha men than Beta men. In Promiscuity Tim Birkhead details the innate drives male animals have with respect to ensuring their own paternity:

The issue of paternity is at the core of much of men’s behavior – and for good evolutionary reasons. In our primeval past men who invested in children which were not their own would, on average, have left fewer descendants than those who reared only their own genetic offspring. As a consequence men were, and continue to be, preoccupied with paternity and this has shaped not only many male behaviors but, perhaps surprisingly, some female behaviors as well. The most obvious way in which men’s preoccupation with paternity manifests itself is in jealousy – watching a partner and keeping her away from potential competitors.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 33-34

In my counseling I have had to deal with the constant of jealousy in every man I’ve talked to about a breakup or divorce.

“Rollo, why can’t I get the thought of her fucking another guy out of my head? The thought makes me physically sick.”

There is a physical aspect to jealousy for men and particularly so for deeply pair-bonded Beta men whose sexual strategy it is to invest more fully into one partner due to a scarcity mentality (see strategic pluralism theory). When I talked about men committing suicide in Zeroed Out I should’ve stressed the importance that mate guarding and jealousy play in a man’s physical condition when he’s had his ‘soulmate’ leave him for another man.

There are two latent purposes in men evolving a capacity for this physical distress – fomenting parental investment and ensuring paternity via mate guarding. Why is it that men take so much longer to get over a woman than women for men? For women the War Brides theory explains this neatly, but for men the long physical disconnection comes from our innate drive to ensure paternity and the confirmation of mate loss to a rival male. This is the degree of preoccupation with paternity Birkhead describes above – it is so existentially important men evolved physical manifestation for it.

Now, if you can stomach the new age sophistry and rationalizations of Dr. Geoff Miller for a “Poly” lifestyle you might want to watch a bit of this video to grasp the next concept I’m developing here:

I’ve included this here because it’s a prime illustration of the cognitive dissonance necessary today to justify a Beta male’s acceptance of his own cuckoldry and laundering it to convince himself that it’s actually in his own best interests. After all the confirmation of the importance of, and preoccupation with, male paternity, (and the sometimes violent fallout that results from it) it seems counterintuitive for a man to convince himself that sharing his woman is at all a good idea.

Have a look at the collage of images I’ve used for today’s header picture. This is a collection of relatively recent articles promoting the idea that “poly”, if not outright cuckoldry, is a positive, progressive trend. Why is poly in its various forms so important to us socially? The free love generation and 70’s swingers didn’t have anything like the impetus we see now. We have more than enough research showing that women’s capacity to pair bond with men in the long term decreases with every new sex partner. We know that (Beta) men can feel a natural, physical jealousy at just the thought of their pair bonded mate copulating with another man. Even Dr. Fleischman admits she struggles with “feelings of jealousy” in their “poly marriage”. But here we have the promotion of the idea that cuckoldry actually makes a man ‘more secure in his masculinity’. Why?

Why pretend to monogamy while openly practicing open cuckoldry? Why not simply stay single, practice non-exclusivity and honestly spin plates?

Because unfettered Hypergamy is the preeminent sexual strategy in this era. And men have adapted their sexual strategies to be contingent on it.

I believe what were observing in all this is men adapting to the changes women have installed in the global sexual marketplace according to feminine social primacy. In Strategic Pluralism Theory, lower SMV men are by necessity predisposed to investing their reproductive efforts in a single woman (K selection) rather than applying himself to spreading those effort to various women (r selection). Across the animal kingdom female sexual monogamy is the exception rather than the rule.

Monogamy can occur either because a female chooses to remain faithful to one male, or as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 43

In today’s global sexual marketplace Beta men are socially rewarded for abandoning their sexual strategy and to abandon their innate need to ascertain paternity. This is done by promoting social and status rewards for compliance with the objective roles women need men to play in their sexual strategy. We saw exactly this last Fathers Day. Step-fathers, the dutiful cuckolds, were celebrated while biological fathers are largely vilified. Single mothers who assume the role of “father” are likewise celebrated.

But (Beta) men adapt themselves to the role that they believe will best serve their reproductive interests. Thus, we have a chorus of men police their thoughts and the thoughts of other men to affirm their beliefs in that strategy.

We have men write sanctimonious, self-affirming essays about how they believe they are more “secure in their masculinity” for allowing, encouraging, the women’s they’re ostensibly bonded with to have sex with other men. Then they wait for their male peers to pat them on the back for ‘evolving above their biology’ and their naturally jealous impulses.

This is not seeing the forest for the tree though. What is the larger function of all of this? Why is the ‘progressive’ take on self-affirming cuckoldry one that Beta men are supposed to find rewarding?

Because it’s necessary to perpetuate the unilateral control over the human reproductive process men ceded to women after the Sexual Revolution.

Women’s Existential Fear

One of the primary perspectives of the Red Pill as a praxeology in understanding intersexual dynamics is evolutionary psychology. Even the ‘Classic Era‘ pickup artists referenced evo-psych, often without realizing it, in explaining various aspects of Game. Mystery Method itself was fundamentally rooted in the understanding of women’s (and men’s) evolutionary ‘circuitry’ as a basis for developing modern Game techniques. These were the first forays into women’s evolved mental firmware as a means to understanding the mating game we experience today – and how to use it to our best advantage as men.

However, that was really just the starting point. The Red Pill is much more dynamic than Game applications. As I’ve developed in other essays (and talks), the fundamentals of how the sexes relate with one another follow our biological realities, but also the environmental and social realities of our ancestral past. We’re still using the same circuitry in this era that our ancestors did in the past, only the context has changed. Today I want to explore the influences the legacy of this ancestry places on men and women, and also attempt to answer some questions as to why men and women fear certain aspects of the other’s evolved nature.

In my last article I made a distinction between our ancestral, localized, sexual marketplace versus the globalized SMP we find ourselves in today. This is a good starting point. In our hunter-gatherer beginnings our potential mates either came from within our tribal groups, or, when our tribe managed to overwhelm another tribe, we took war brides to breed with. This is what defined our localized SMP in the past. In fact I’d argue that a deficit in ‘marriageable’ females from within a local tribe was actually a prime motivator for going to war with an outside tribe. This is an important distinction because a lot of those same motivational dynamics are reflected today’s global SMP, and how modern intersexual dynamics have evolved.

A Need for Control

A lot of the need for social control we see coming from women and feminism today is part of an ancestral, evolved desire on the part of women to seek security in a chaotic world. Ever since the advent of unilaterally female-controlled contraception, the Sexual Revolution, and the rise of the Gynocracy, an unprecedented power over the birthing process of the human race has been transferred to only one of the two sexes necessary to perpetuate our species.

“Abortion is Eugenics” (or dysgenics) is a saying I’ve been seeing on Twitter recently. Since the Sexual Revolution we’ve not just ’empowered’ women, but men have systematically ceded any claim to our own paternity while at the same time presumed that women should, by default, be trusted with knowing what’s best for the human birthing process and raising new generations. But it’s not just abortion that is eugenics, it’s also Hypergamy and the dozens of other aspects of intersexual dynamics that western societies just presumes women should know best how to proceed with. We took the women of the Baby Boom generation at their collective word that they’d be more merciful rulers than men if we just gave them the option to be sexual with us. We foolishly believed women would police the worst aspects of their own sexual strategy after we willingly ceded power in exchange for sexual access.

Last month a reader sent me a link to a story about how Ireland had just ceded more of its own authority over their country’s reproductive fate to women by legalizing abortion. The very Catholic island of Celts has made Hypergamy its ruling motive after many years of feminist pressure. Irish women celebrated the decision to allow them to kill their unwanted children. In fact many Catholic countries all over South America are in various stages of legalizing abortion. But the sentiment about abortion in this decade is no longer one of it being a necessary evil as it was in the time of Roe vs. Wade. Today it’s cause for overt celebration among women and men alike.

Before I get run up the flagpole by critics here, my opposition to abortion does not (primarily) stem from moral reasons, it stems from objectively following the power dynamics involved and the latent purpose for abortion. Abortion is eugenics; it is the ceding of any claim to influencing paternity that men may have had for the past 100,000 years of human evolution.

So, why will women fight tooth and nail for the ‘right’ to free and safe abortion over the course of multiple generations? Why is the right to end her (and the father’s) child’s life in utero such an imperative for women?

Ask women and the feminist boilerplate answer is always “My body, my choice!“, but why is it so important to cut men entirely out of the reproductive process? What is the motivation for legally disenfranchising men from even 1% of a say in a child that is at least half his genetic legacy? This is also one of the greatest of offenses to women; that a man might have some control over women’s bodies. “Hands off my uterus!” that too is another rallying cry, but why is it such an abhorrent thought that men might have some influence in who gets born and who doesn’t?

Existential Fears & The Hypergamous Filter

There are certain fears that human beings are born with. Our evolved mental firmware is highly attuned to our own survival. That may seem simple, but we’re born with certain instinctual reservations about our environments. Snakes, spider, animals with sharp pointy natural weapons are critters we don’t have to be taught to stay away from. That fear, that caution, is part of our onboard system when we leave the womb. The same is generally true of heights and tight confined places. We also have a very defined natural instinct for revulsion. There’s actually an entire area of evo-psych study devoted to the human revulsion response. Part of our innate firmware makes us disgusted by feces, dead carcasses and putrefaction. If it’s unsanitary and might make us sick or diseased ourselves we’re repelled by it – unless we’re conditioned not to be.

The above are some pretty basic existential fears most people have. We have evolved inbuilt firmware that does its best to keep us alive, but there are other, more complex fears and accompanying revulsions that look out for our wellbeing too. The one I want to focus on here is what the Red Pill refers to as the Hypergamous Filter. That’s kind of a loose way of saying women have innate revulsions and distrusts of men who would otherwise like nothing better than the experience of having sex with them.

From our ancestral past right up until the Sexual Revolution in the mid-1960s a woman having sex was fraught with dangerous consequences. For about 100,000 years evolution wrote a breeding subroutine into the hindbrains of every human female – always doubt a man’s quality.

The Hypergamous Filter has many ways of determining quality. Last week I mentioned that women universally use a man’s height as a physical qualification for arousal/attraction. That’s one obvious criteria; check the height box, move on. I have mentioned in other essays that Hypergamy is always based on doubt – doubt that a man is the best she can do – but also the doubt as to whether that guy will stick around and stay committed to parental investment.

This Hypergamous doubt is an existential fear for women.

“What if he’s faking it?”
“What if he really isn’t who he claims to be?”
“Will he stick around after sex?”
“What if I get pregnant with his child?”

These questions, these doubts, do not stem from a woman’s Rational Interpretive Process, they are deeply rooted in her Instinctual Process.

These questions are asked beneath a woman’s cognition, and as such they comprise part of an unconscious Hypergamous filtering process that is linked to both the revulsion instinct and genuine sexual desire. This is a risk aversion instinct that has very real, life-threatening, implications to it. This is a self-preservation skepticism on the limbic level and it is the primary existential fear a woman has. And women will do anything to alleviate it. Women will do anything to ensure they have failsafes against the life-threatening consequences of having that Hypergamous filter deceived.

Why is there a ceaseless effort to criminalize PUAs approaching women on the street? Because it implies a deception of a Beta male impersonating an Alpha male for the purposes of sex. This is a crime against the 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.

In our ancestral past, pregnancy, and/or parental investment, could be a death sentence if a woman’s Hypergamous Filter wasn’t supremely sensitive and obsessively refined. The Hypergamous Filter also evolved as a contingency against men’s biological imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.

That’s not to say pair bonding wasn’t a feature of our ancestral past, it was also a foundational aspect of mating, but it is to say that a man’s investment cost was much lower than a woman’s when it came to reproduction. That’s simple biology defining a sexual strategy for men. Pair bonding would usually last as long as it took for that child to reach survival autonomy (4-7 years). And that’s not accounting for men’s proclivity to seek extra-pair mating opportunities while pair bonded. I’ll explore this in the next essay.

Fast Times in the 21st Century

Now lets fast forward the Existential Fear and the Hypergamous Filter up to the last 60 years or so. One of the most socially destabilizing inventions of the 20th century was affording women the option to invest herself, or not, in the choices she made about her own sexuality. Unilaterally female-controlled birth control was effectively the greatest Hypergamous failsafe ever invented. It released women from the responsibility of a bad Hypergamous decision. But what it didn’t do is erase that filtering process from women’s psyches. We take it for granted, but HBC (hormonal birth control) unfettered Hypergamy for the first time in human history. And as a result men ceded more and more of their paternal interests in the human reproductive process over to women in exchange for the promise of pregnancy-free sexual access. Ostensibly, unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Needless to say this also exacerbated women’s sexual strategy to tactically filter out unwanted males and emphasize sex with chosen males.

But the greatest sexual bargain of the 20th-21st century catastrophically backfired on men because, for all the boons of HBC, it couldn’t rewrite 100,000 years of evolved Hypergamy. And, if anything, it exacerbated women’s desire for failsafe’s against the Existential Fear of having her Hypergamous Filter fooled by deceptive men.

The social and political power men ceded to women in the wake of the Sexual Revolution has been used for one unitary purpose by women – to ensure against the Existential Fear. Why is abortion now something to be celebrated rather than mournfully accepted as necessary evil of this century? Because it alleviates the Existential Fear of bearing and raising the product of a bad Hypergamous choice.

Why did no fault divorce morph into the misandrous divorce industry we have today? It alleviates the Existential Fear. A one-sided divorce industry ensures security, support and resources that would’ve otherwise been her undoing in times before the pill. Why are the stigmas of single motherhood that existed just 60 years ago now replaced with rewarding women for their choice to become single mothers? It alleviates the Existential Fear.

When women were afforded unprecedented power and influence their first order of business was directed at changing laws to alleviate the Existential Fear. Virtually every social change, every political change, every egoistic “you go gurl” self-entitlement since the Sexual Revolution that women have initiated has had one latent purpose – alleviating the Existential Fear.

And finally, why is it that Red Pill awareness, practicing Game, a united Manosphere, and yes, even MGTOW, are perceived as an existential threat to the Feminine Imperative?

Because it all threatens to upset the security that women believe they’re entitled to in creating failsafes for women’s Existential Fear. Exposing the machinations of the Blue Pill and teaching men to unplug from a system that makes them a utility in a female-correct social order is an intolerable threat to women’s security from the Existential Fear, but it is also a new challenge the power base that security is built upon.

This is part one of a blog series.

Remove the Man 2019

In October of 2017 I wrote an essay titled Male Control. It was actually the second time I’d covered the topic of how a feminine-primary social order (a Gynocracy if you will) seeks to control its male population by deliberately sowing confusion about masculinity into multiple generations of boys, and later men. Prior to this I’d written another seminal post titled Remove the Man in which is outlined the ways in which that Gynocracy makes efforts to systematically remove men from our language. Usually this takes the form of ‘erasing’ the letters m-a-n from the English language wherever it appears in an official capacity (i.e. state bylaws, universities, legislative documents), but also in gender-neutral translations of the Bible now. The only real constant in all of this the deliberate erasure of ‘man’ and/or ‘men’ from that language.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

I wrote Remove the Man back in 2013 in response to one such effort by the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who passed a bill to make state laws gender neutral. The effort actually began in 2007, but in 2019 a simple search for ‘gender neutral language’ will show you the extent and scope of this much larger effort. This essay served and the starting point for a larger awareness for me – that of the push to remove men and masculinity from more than just our language, but rather the removal of all things conventionally masculine. As Orwell states here, the thought, the thinking, about masculinity and men is the focus of the corruption.

But language is only one way that the concept of what is masculine is distorted for a purpose.

Today the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with boys/men’s. In it the concept of conventional (traditional) masculinity is outlined as ‘harmful’.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.

It would be easy to refute this basic presumption with countless examples of how all of these traits, most of which are innate parts of men’s evolved mental firmware, have been key in developing a civil society as well as healthy masculine identity. But what we’re seeing in this is a corruption of language that is leading to the standardization of the corruption of thought.

Stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are evolved aspects of the male psyche that have served men for millennia. To the Red Pill aware man this is self-evident. What is less evident is the new context in which these ‘educated’ men apply meaning to these terms. Academia has been so thoroughly assimilated by the Feminine Imperative that the men making official decrees about psychological principle no longer have the insight to understand that their perspective is informed by ‘female-correct‘ thought.

There are two presumptions being made here:

First, is that men’s predisposition for stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are the results of a patriarchal societies adverse influence on boys and men.

The belief is founded in blank-slate social constructionism. I addressed this in Old Lies:

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. 

Now, granted, the men responsible for these psychological practices and their standardization tried to walk back the idea that conventionally masculine attributes weren’t “all bad”. This is expected because an aspect like stoicism can still be considered useful to a feminine-primary social order. It’s just that the larger social order wants the aspects of masculinity to manifest on its own terms and serving a female-centric utility.

A determined hard-driving man is what they want when the floodwaters start rising and women need to be carried to safety, but when a man uses that aspect of his masculine nature for his exclusive benefit, or a purpose that conflicts with feminine primacy, that’s when the aspect is defined as dangerous. However, the overall preconception is that there is some sinister influence of an old-school chauvinistic patriarchy teaching boys and men to be ‘toxically’ masculine. I addressed this fallacy in Old Lies, but this is one more example of how fem-centric society must cling to a clichéd parody of how boys must be being taught in order to cover the fact that boys are raised like defective girls today.

What is glaringly ignored is that these traits, and many more, are endemic parts of men’s evolved nature. Our emotional natures are not the same as that of women’s. Our brains are not wired the same as women’s. Men and women process emotions differently from the other, particularly negative emotions. This is a feature of the male brain, not a bug. But today the APA has decided unilaterally that men’s way of dealing with emotion is “incorrect”. Incorrect because the only correct way would be one that aligns with the women’s interests they’ve been conditioned to believe are only beneficial to larger society. To the APA, masculinity itself is a bug.

Secondly, this deliberate misconception relies entirely on social constructionism and almost entirely ignores the biological factors that contribute to masculine gender identity. I’m presently working on another essay that explores the dependency on blank-slate equalism as the basis for virtually every presumption the mainstream has about gender identity, so I don’t want to give too much away. However, the whole presumption of gender in humanist psychology depends on the falsehood that men and women are functionally coequal.

Accepting that failed notion of blank-slate equalism is what scaffolds the entire premise of this standard of masculinity. Masculinity is something that cannot be removed from society if its source is something that is unique to only men by virtue of their biology. They cannot ensure female-correctness as a societal standard if men and women are different. People like those in authority at the APA know this. It’s why merely talking about those innate gender differences is deemed a hate-crime today. Inspiring doubt in the blank-slate standard risks destroying the scaffolding for all their preconceptions of gender.

In the end this is one more, I think significant, effort in removing men and conventional masculinity from our collective thought. This standardization of how men should be ‘dealt with’ in therapy, or colored by in just considering men’s role in psychology is an ideological power play. Modern psychology officially doesn’t ‘get men’ anymore.

The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) will now officially list ‘traditional’ masculinity as a hazard or a disorder for male humans. They can’t be called ‘men’ because that would gender them.

I read a few Twitter threads about this change to the DSM and I think they’re worth reading to get a better grasp of the gravity of this standardization:

On December 29th, 2018 I made some pretty ominous predictions about what I thought the manosphere and men in general could expect to see in 2019-2020. We’re not eve a week into the first month and a lot of what I expected is starting to develop. The gender divide is now a gender ‘Cold War’ and going forward I see the polarization between the sexes becoming even uglier than the 2016 election cycle.

This issuance from the APA is a foundation for how psychology – our Lords of the new church – will define what is acceptably ‘male’ and what is not. Furthermore it defines what aspects of masculinity is officially hazardous based on social constructionism and science denial.

Going forward I think Red Pill aware men will have to view mainstream psychology with even more suspicion than we do already. My Red Man Group colleague, Rian Stone, has mentioned that this equivalent of a “Papal Bull” from the APA represents a call to action for the Red Pill community and the manosphere in general to help men understand that conventional, “traditional” masculinity is not a disorder.

The Red Pill saves lives. I can only see this standardization as a net negative for men who are already five times more likely than women to take their own lives. Men seeking psychological help will only find their problems compounded by psychologists trained to believe masculinity is inherently toxic. And as a result we need to be prepared to help our Blue Pill brothers unplug and show them their inherent worth as conventionally masculine men.

The New Polyandry

About five years ago I wrote a post called You Need Sex. In that essay I asserted a few key points about the importance of a healthy sex life for men. If I’m honest I kind of expected most of the reactions I got from that post and even now it remains one of my more contentious pieces. Even when I was in my Blue Pill youth in the 80s and 90s I’d run across the guys who always wanted to deemphasize sex in some reverse-psychology effort to get women to believe that they were deeper than the guys who just wanted to bang them. These were the guys who’d listen to a girl say something like, “I don’t see why sex is such a big deal to guys” or “Am I just a piece of ass to you?“, they’d take it to heart, and then construct some kind of personalized Game around how they respected women and wanted to really relate with them ‘beyond the sexual’.

That’s exactly what the Blue Pill teaches guys; they should always defer to, empathize with and identify with the feminine. This is Blue Pill conditioning at its most basic. It is a boy/man’s imperative to place women’s existence as more important than his own – and with men’s innate protection instincts for women this Blue Pill training is key to establishing a gynocratic social order.

But guys also have to find some way to set themselves apart from the competition in the Blue Pill sexual marketplace. They have to find someway to make themselves unique in how unlike ‘typical‘ guys they are. The miscalculation is, of course, the belief that the more alike, the more they identify, with (as?) women the likelier a woman would select them for intimacy and reproduction. 

Men are natural problem solvers. It’s part of our evolved firmware to look for solutions to challenges in our environment. This makes us constructive, creative, often innovative and more ready to take risks. It also makes us competitive and that competitiveness extends to the sexual marketplace. So it’s not too much of a stretch to see how Blue Pill conditioned young men might look for creative ways to outdo one another in the ‘female-identification olympics. 

One way this identification competition gets pushed to new heights is in how well a man might better devalue and abase his own sexual strategy to better accommodate that of the woman he believes will appreciate it. Taken to the binary extreme this means finding some way to devalue all men’s sexual natures. What better way to set oneself apart from other guys than to not be a guy? What better way to empathize with the feminine than to tear down the gender women say they despise?

Does all that seem kind of ridiculous? I used to think this way when I was younger. There was a time I might’ve even jumped on the “masculinity is toxic/confusing/outdated/outmoded/ridiculous” train because I truly believed it was the way to a woman’s vagina heart and mind. Even in the 80s and 90s this was a popular misconception. It wasn’t until I’d been through my first bad breakup that I realized the truth. Then I had nothing to lose by making myself more important than the women I was idealizing and behold! The women I wanted, wanted me – sexually to be sure, but they wanted to lock me down in commitment.

In my 20s I had unwittingly shifted from one sexual strategy to another, and I liked the change. It didn’t happen overnight. I had to learn to adopt the attitude, the swagger, the character that would get me laid, but I found that the most important part of playing the game well was putting my own desires well above those of any woman.

Suddenly I discovered I could easily nail the girls I could only jerk off to in my younger years. I can remember the time I first had sex with a girl I thought was the apex of hotness when I was in my teens. She was the best friend of the girlfriend of the drummer in the band I was in then. Both were swimsuit models and I thought I’d finally reached the goal. It wasn’t until after I dumped her to get with a centerfold model that I knew I’d set my sights too low.

Does that sound like a humblebrag? If you’re still held back by a Blue Pill mindset it probably will. I mentioned on a podcast recently that a majority of men will never know sex as anything but a mitigated, compromised transaction. They’ll never know what it’s like to have a woman lust after them. They’ll never experience the dilated eyes of a woman that would give anything to please him in that moment. Not because she’s obligated, but because her ego is validated at the same time her body is aching to have sex with him.

Strategic Pluralism Theory

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 a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

from Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

The latter quote here is a simple outline of Hypergamy, but the first part, Strategic Pluralism Theory is what I want to focus on today because this is where the “sex is no big deal” cop out derives from for men.

The first sexual strategy, the one in which a higher SMV (sexual market value) male can enjoy the sexual experience of many women is a strategy predicated on what our most basic, evolved, biological instinct directs us to. It served ancestral men better to ‘hit it and quit it’ and move on to the next girl as expediently as possible for a variety of reasons. This is also a reason why women’s Hypergamous filtering is a base part of women’s sexual selection process today. The investment cost of becoming pregnant was so high that it became part of women’s evolved firmware to be hypersensitive to reproduction cues as well as parental investment cues (provisioning resources) to ensure survival of herself and her offspring. If you ever wonder why rape is such an existential fear for women you have to understand that this fear is written deep into women’s evolved mental firmware because of men overriding this filtering process by violence.

The first archetype of Strategic Pluralism Theory we could day is the Alpha archetype. This is the guy who has the luxury, by effort or genetic lottery, to pursue what I’d speculate was our ancestors’ pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer sexual imperative. This is what guys like to call the “Natural” with women. Thanks so any number of intersexual advantages (looks, Game, social proof, preselection) it serves him best to spread the seed and women are only too happy to enjoy him as well. He represents the 20th percentile in the 80/20 Pareto distribution of the sexual marketplace.

This side of Strategic Pluralism Theory reflects the r aspect of the r/K reproductive theory. A lot of well meaning Red Pill theologians seem to think that r/K reproductive selection is only limited to the female side of the equation. I’d also point out that this applies to the male side as well. Hypergamy is women’s evolved sexual strategy, however, I would argue that men’s innate, default sexual strategy is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. This r strategy is manifested today in our base predilection for pornography. Untempered by societal restraints, Alpha sexual strategy is what men a majority would default to if given the choice. 

More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring.

I’m establishing this perspective to better illustrate the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism Theory. For sake of convenience I’m labeling men who fall into the ‘more attractive men’ category as Alphas. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch for most of my readers, but if you have a problem with this just consider the statistics laid out in the book Dataclysm. A majority of women rate 80-85% of men as “unattractive”. That last 15-20% are our ‘more attractive’ Alphas here.

This then leaves the remaining ‘less attractive men’ as the Beta cohort. 

…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.

This then is the Beta mating strategy and if it sounds like the conventional idea of monogamy you’re not too far off. This is the K side of the r/K selection theory. Before I continue I want to stress that monogamy or non-exclusivity is not a value judgement in this essay. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks has male sexual strategy implications beyond women’s Hypergamy. I refer to Alpha and Beta as placeholder terms here.

For the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism the reproductive strategy is one that, in part, aligns with one side of Hypergamy. The 80% of ‘less attractive’ men find it necessary to compromise their biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality) in order to successfully reproduce. This is the nuts & bolts of what is today being called “enforced monogamy”. While this idea is taken to absurd extremes by critics, the premise is rooted in Strategic Pluralism. Since monogamy serves the largest block of men’s reproductive efforts it follows that it would be the institutionalized standard for ‘civil’ society.

Monogamy is Beta

Monogamy is a social norm, if not an evolutionary norm. A lot has been written about how monogamy in its present incarnation – one man, one woman – is really the result of a post-agrarian social order that optimized the sexual strategy of Beta men. In essence socially-enforced monogamy serves the largest population of Beta males.

However, the tradeoff for women was long term provisioning, protection (in as far as the man was capable) and parental investment – all thing conducive to sustainable futures for women and their children. All that was expected of women was a compromise on the Alpha arousal side of Hypergamy. And naturally, Alpha men and most women found ways to circumvent this socio-sexual adaptation that benefitted women in spite of Beta men. 

Monogamy serves Beta men. Alpha men still get sex, broke or not.

I had the above video passed along to me by a Twitter follower about 2 weeks ago. I think he expected me to take issue with how she was defending ‘gold-diggers’ but, ironically, she unwittingly detailed the basics of Hypergamy and Strategic Pluralism Theory. She’s not wrong. Women’s sexual strategy is optimized in conditions of polygamy and polyandry, while men’s sexual strategy – the Beta sides anyway – is optimized in a condition of socially enforced monogamy. 

What’s really ironic is that this girl discounts what so many men discount when they consider Hypergamy. She couches her total perspective on the Beta Bucks, long-term provisioning side of Hypergamy while conveniently omitting the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. The only consideration she has is for resource transfer – again perpetuating the Beta sex experience – and ignoring the fact that even poor men still get to bang women like her if they’re “hawt’. ‘Monogamy is made to benefit men‘, no it’s made to benefit Beta men; Alpha men solve the reproductive problem irrespective of (in spite of) socially enforced monogamy. ‘Broke men don’t get women‘,…unless they’re hot broke men.

I’ve seen Jordan Peterson and more than a few notable evo-psych professors make a similar mistake. They deliberately make Hypergamy solely about the Beta Bucks side of a dualistic mating strategy. Mostly this misdirection is due to personal bias or a want to present the feminine in a positive light. But likewise we also tend to see focus of men’s sexual strategy centering on what long term resources a man has to measure his worth by. Historically, women have generally been the losers in a social order based on a monogamy that tries to ensure that the most men (majority Beta) are solving the reproductive problem. Because women lacked the same resource generating capacity of men, because up until 50 years ago women needed men to solve the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, monogamy was a at least a workable solution to their own reproductive problem.

In 2018 this is no longer the case. For all of the bleating of women wanting a ‘good man’ once they exit the cock carousel, the reproductive problem they’re trying to solve isn’t founded in the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy it’s on the Alpha Fucks side. For as much as the women in this video tried to defend their mercenary sexual strategy of being justifiable gold diggers they really didn’t need to. All of the provisioning needs side of Hypergamy is relatively provided for for women in western cultures today.

The monogamous priority – the one that tried to ensure that most Beta men reproduced – that priority has now shifted to a neo-polyandry. This new social mechanic attempts to solve the Alpha Fucks side of the reproductive problem for the largest number of women. Just as patriarchal monogamy attempted to aide men who wouldn’t otherwise reproduce, the new polyandry seeks to ensure that even the lowest SMV women are entitled to breed with an Alpha male of their choosing.

Once all social stigma and religious buffers were removed from Hypergamy (since the Sexual Revolution) it has been a rapid shift from a male-beneficial monogamy that’s been the social norm for millennia to a form of polyandry that benefits the female sexual strategy.

I’ll be continuing this post in the next essay, but before I leave this essay let me reiterate the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies: For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. Think of this on a sociological meta-scale.