Psychology

First Man Awake

As most readers know I rarely engage in political discourse unless it has relevance to intergender dynamics. This video is an exception. If you need a clear example of a feminist controlled state, this is it.

I actually went through Women’s/Gender Studies course when I was in college. The main reason I took the class was because there were only 2 classes being offered on campus that completed a Capstone, Humanities and Diversity requirement in a single class – Holocaust Studies and Women’s Studies. That’s basically the estimation most women want you to think their ‘sufferage’ is on par with; the Holocaust. I chose Women’s Studies because I basically wanted to put my money where my mouth has always been (literally and figuratively ) and also get inside what popular media, and the feminization that it’s gone through for the last 40+ years, has been selling both men and women. I enjoyed debating these ladies as I was one of 2 guys in the Women’s Literature class.

I didn’t know it at the time, but one of the beacons of positive masculine hope I had back in the days before the internet, before understanding Game and even the term ‘red pill’ was reading Why Men are the Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell. It opened my understanding of intergender relations in a way I’d never understood. If I had a red pill moment in my past reading this books was it. It was published in 1986 so the specifics might be a little dated for a modern reader, but for an overall perspective of how our gender landscape has evolved it will always be on my ‘must read’ list for guy just now taking the red pill.

My phone-it-in feminist stepmother and beta-confused father had picked up the book in order to eviscerate it in some proto-SWPL home book club they belonged to at the time. Oddly enough it ended up on their bookshelf after that (replete with my stepmother’s penciled in margin notes), and I remember picking it up in the hope that it would give me some self-effacing insight into how I could be a more accommodating beta schlub for my BPD girlfriend who was slowly eroding the last vestiges of my former Alpha self.

What it did was enlighten me.

Farrell is anything but a rape apologist, I would compare him with the first man to wake up in the Matrix. Most of his insight, research and writing were prompted by his involvement in the early 70’s feminist movement. He even self-identified as a male feminist back then, but it was this experience that brought him to a fuller understanding of the feminine imperative.

Intellectual Lethargy

What offends me about this protest isn’t the actual protesting, but the sheer ignorance behind it. If it were the easily digestible blatherings of Rush Limbaugh they were protesting I could understand it, but Dr. Farrell isn’t even in the same universe. All this is is an example of intellectual lethargy, which is really a shame because I would expect that the young men and women involved in the protest, all students at U of T, would be acquainted with research and critical thinking skills necessary before formulating such strong opinions and visceral reactions.

To be educated takes a constant effort. Most people in modern society simply do not have the time, inclination or motivation to be in any way knowledgeable about more than a peripheral understanding of the world around them. The ridiculously ironic part is that we live in an era when communication of information has never been more easily accessible to us.

Now add to this that we’re expected to be at least somewhat well informed due to this access. Our ego-investments with regards to politics, religion, social dynamics, gender relations etc. all depend upon a belief that we’re actually well informed enough know what we’re talking about and draw our own conclusions. We would have to be, right? It’s expected of us as intelligent human beings.

The truth of the matter is that unless we are immediately benefitted by educating ourselves about a particular subject (i.e. as short term a profit as easily manageable), for the vast majority of modern society, educating oneself is a hobby at best. We live in a fast-food, fast-information society. We can’t be bothered to, or in some cases really afford to, develop critical thinking skills – particularly when they might challenge our own ego-investments. This is why the feminine Matrix flourishes today, it’s easier not to think about things that are counter to our social conditioning.

But we want to be right, and to be right we have to believe that we have these critical thinking skills. In fact our personalities and well being depend upon being correct in our beliefs. This is an age of ego-investment. Ego investments are beliefs we associate with, and internalize, so strongly that they literally become elements of our personalities. So to challenge that belief is to literally attack the personality of the person with that ego-investment. It would make no difference how empirical your evidence to the contrary of that belief might be; you attack the belief and you attack the person. Religion, racism, political affiliation, gender dynamics, social dynamics, world view, all find their roots in individual ego-investments in those beliefs.

Needless to say this has an extremely polarizing effect upon lazy people who’d rather not put forth any effort to objectively educate themselves in ways that would ever challenge their core ego-investments. So we see a factionalizing of people into camps where those ego-investments are reinforced in spite of any controverting evidence. Thus a team mentality evolves; our red team is better than your blue team irrespective of any factor that might be contrary. So long as my team wins and your team loses my ego-investments remain validated. It becomes a clash of who’s ego-investments get validated and any value the “other’s” might have had are never acknowledged.

This is a shame because Dr. Warren Farrell has dedicated his life –most of it spent in the feminized cultural wastelands of the late 80’s and 90’s – to researching, understanding and revealing the uncomfortable truths of intergender dynamics. He’s the godfather of the manosphere that most red pill men aren’t even aware of.

The Epiphany Phase

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When I was detailing the landscape of our contemporary sexual marketplace in Navigating the SMP there comes a point on women’s SMV (sexual market value) progression where she becomes cognizant of her SMV decline and impending date with The Wall. Generally this occurs in women’s late 20’s and possibly early 30’s but as a rough estimate on the graph I provided in that post, this is the point of transition at which women realize their decaying capacity to hypergamously compete with women in their sexual primes, and the point at which men are beginning to realize their own increasing SMV potential. I dubbed this intersection the point of Comparative SMV. It’s also important to note that this phase conveniently coincides with the social convention of women’s mythical biological clock. (more on this later).

The Epiphany Phase

I’ve previously described this phase as a parallel to men’s feminine-redefined midlife crisis. This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain to her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in their prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

For the spiritually inclined woman (which is to say most women) this may manifest in a convenient return to convictions she’d disregarded since her adolescence. For other’s it may be some kind of forced celibacy; a refusal to have sex under the hypergamic auspices of her ‘party years’ in the hopes that a well provisioning male (the ones not realizing their own potential SMV as yet) will appreciate her for her prudence – so unlike herself and all of the other girls who rejected him over the last decade.

The self-affirming psychological schema is one where she’s “finally doing the right thing”, when in fact she’s simply making the necessity of her long term provisioning and security a virtue she hopes men will appreciate. And if they don’t, then there’s always shaming them to think they’re ‘less-than-men’ for not living up to her eating her cake once she’s had it.

The Shifting Point

Case in point Hephzibah Anderson, author of the book Chastened, The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex. Here we have a graphic insight into the inner workings of women’s rationalization at the crossroads of acknowledging her decaying SMV, the need for long term male security, provisioning and intimacy, and realizing the necessity for a new psychological paradigm to justify her shift in behavior.

It’s easy to dismiss this interview as just another 3 women allowing their hamsters to colate on camera, but when you view this clip in a red pill context a surprising amount of information is revealed about the Epiphany Phase women experience.

We begin here with the now clichéd Kate Bolick Brand® former boyfriend-in-love regretfulness as the catalyst for Hephzibah’s newly gained insight. He’s serendipitously buying a ring for his new fiancé and the Alpha Widow mojo takes root in her psyche, “some girl found him valuable enough to marry.” She then proceeds through the predictable, “I’m 30 and need to reprioritize my life” boilerplate that’s made more than a few women authors a good deal of money writing for The Atlantic.

As I noted earlier, this phase also coincides with a woman’s sharp decline in fertility and childbearing capacity, so the instinctual urgency to breed, reinforced by the myth of the biological clock contributes to this internal crisis. All of this coalesces into some amazing feats of rationalization hamster acrobatics.

I’d thought those thoughts once or twice, but it would never have occurred to me that I’d actually go ahead and voluntarily eject sex from my life. It took a bizarre serendipity, a torrid affair and a chance anecdote to make me realize that the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a post-feminist, 21st-century Western woman — a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy — was not working for me.

Better late than never right? Unfortunately no. While I’m sure this realization will seem ennobling to the more moralistically predisposed  mindset, what you see now is the expectation of a new appreciation for her insight which was prompted by her need, not a genuine introspective. It’s kind of ironic in that the Chastening Hephzibah is so proud of was prompted by her own necessity.

All right, in most circumstances it’s still just about required for life’s perpetuation, but we can lead perfectly healthy and, indeed, happy existences without nooky, whoopee or bonking. People can — and do — go decades without sex. Some live their entire lives without it.

Side Note: In Girl-World a woman can electively forego sex for an entire year and it’s recognized as a sacrifice worthy of writing a book to be published by a major print publisher, while the only way a man can be recognized for his 40 year celibacy is when he enters a fitness center and guns down 7 women in a pilates class. As I’ve stated before, when a woman tells you “I don’t understand why sex is sooooo important to guys“, she’s telling you the literal truth.

Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen, and there was nothing metaphorical about the title, history assures us.

Robert Dudley and a long list of the Queen’s confirmed lovers disagree. What follows here is an attempt by Hephzibah’s rationalization engine to affirm what she’d like to think is her radical decision to go abstinent – plenty of luminaries from the past have gone without and lived perfectly fine lives. What she’s in denial about is the necessity of sex in a mature human experience. Sex is the glue that holds a relationship together; without sex a woman becomes a man’s mother, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, but not his lover, and certainly not his wife. Deemphasizing the importance of sex, actively desexualizing yourself in the hopes that it will make you more sexually arousing is an effort in self-defeat.

What follows here is yet another overwritten self-examination of a woman facing the Wall and attempting to reconcile a past of eschewing offers of genuine intimacy with (albeit probably beta) guys and her own hypergamous impulses during her 20’s. When a pre-Wall Anderson makes a conscious effort to remove sex from the equation in order to bring her more “clarity” about a man’s long term value what she’s doing is attempting to dissociate hypergamy from that process. In doing so she devalues the important sexual aspect of a relationship and turns off the men she’d probably fit well with because she believes that sex is the foil in her past failures, not herself, not her ego-investments, not the delusions the feminine imperative has saddled her with. Sex isn’t her problem, her innate hypergamy will eventually reveal this to her, but it’s how she’s been doing it and the late hour at which she’s come to her “new” epiphany with all of its urgency.

Hephzibah is easy pickings for the manosphere Men with a bent for shaming women about riding the Cock Carousel (she even alludes to this in the article). That’s a given, but it’s not the operative issue I’m on about here. What her story illustrates for us is the psychological machinations behind the reconciliation of her unfulfilled hypergamy and her need for future intimacy, security and provisioning.

For red pill, Game-aware Men, this is a supremely important stage in women’s maturation to consider. A woman in the Epiphany Phase is looking for a “fresh start” for a much more visceral reason than some newly inspired sense of self. This motivation prompts all kinds of behavioral and social conventions to facilitate a man’s commitment to forgiving her past indiscretions. As Roosh has pointed out more than once, it’s women in this phase of life (or the mothers of women in this phase) who most vocally complain about men’s lack of interest in committing to them. As Hephzibah is painfully aware of, women in their peak SMV years don’t complain about a dearth of marriageable men– “Man Up” is the anthem of women in the Epiphany Phase.

People are People

One of the most predictably common responses I get when I read comments on other blogs or forums linking back to one of my own articles goes something like this:

“He’s a great writer, but it’s all such bullshit because people are people, everyone is different. We’re all individuals, there is no universal ‘human nature’.”

I will admit there was once a time when I would’ve had the same response. An integral part of our feminized, equalist conditioning teaches us to reject propositions of ‘human nature’ – really even venturing to guess about it – in favor of a blank slate philosophy. Equalism, the religion of feminism, cannot exist in a world predicated upon even a margin of common influence determined by our biology’s, our evolved psychology, or even evidence of the mechanics which account for that collective influence on human beings.

It’s not that most people subscribing to this wont admit to extrinsic influences on the individual when pressed, it’s just that they believe that freewill, conscious effort and determined conviction will lift the individual above their biological limitations and therefore the greater collective. And, in focussed concentration, on a by-person basis they’d probably be right. What they don’t account for is acknowledging the subconscious influence of extrinsic and intrinsic prompts that motivate human beings to hold those convictions in the first place. The evolutionary, innately biological limitations they wish to rise above aren’t “bugs” they’re “features”

The standard rationale fallback of the feminine mindset, NAWALT (“not all women are like that”) finds its roots in the individuated, experiential reasoning of the blank slate, “people are people” equalist reasoning. While I think that a wholesale rejection of individual personality development is an extreme, it’s merely the other side of the extreme coin compared to a wholesale rejection of environmental and biological influences on personal development – then extrapolated to social and cultural extremes. This is where the “people are individuals” mindset flourishes.

Peripheries

When I was in college I was a competitive fencer (Epée and Sabre if you must know), and it was from my fencing coach that I learned a very valuable lesson in psychology. He told me, “When you are facing your opponent, concentrate your vision directly at where his eyes would be behind his face mask. You cannot possibly track the tip of his weapon with your eyes, and neither can you focus enough attention to follow all of his body movements.”  What I learned was that when you apply focus to that central point, your peripheral vision aids your subconscious understanding of what your opponent is doing. It’s in the uniting of this gestalt, peripheral awareness and a focused awareness that makes for the best competitors.

Human beings have an amazing capacity to multi-task, but a real trained focus on multiple sources of stimuli was problematic for us in our evolutionary past. Too much constant stimuli leads to sensory overload and a breakdown in functionality, which then proves fatal if we’re distracted from reacting to a lethal threat. Thus we evolved psychological mechanisms to push less (though still) important information to the peripheries of our conscious awareness, to afford us a mental acuity on information of more importance.

An entire world goes on around us that we are only peripherally aware of, and in some senese only exists in our peripheral consciousness. For instance, at this moment you’re probably focusing your attention on this text on a computer monitor or maybe a mobile device, but in your peripheral vision you interpret and understand that there are other things in the environment with you, pictures on the wall, a cabinet, maybe a nearby printer, etc. You’re reading this text, but you know they’re there. If someone threw a ball at your head right now you’d reflexively react to it by focusing your awareness on the incoming projectile.

Our conscious awareness works much in the same way. We push less pressing information and conditional awarenesses to the peripheries of our awareness and concentrate on more pressing information until such time (if ever) that we choose to adress those issues. Sometimes we call this insight, but it’s really the focused effort of applying our consciousness to conditions, thoughts and self-acknowledgements that we have pushed to our peripheral awareness. For instance, I’m typing and concentrating on what I’m writing here, but in my peripheral awareness I know I have a meeting to attend in a few hours, and deeper than that I know I’m a 44 year old married father and how am I going to make a significant impact on the world in my next 10 years?

One of my personal, foundational theories about psychology is that people are intimately aware of their own conditions.

On some level of consciousness people understand what has influenced them, what has motivated or demotivated them. They may only be peripherally aware of those conditions, they may be more introspective of them, but they understand that those influences exist for them. For as much as a single mother may say she’s not looking for a supportive father figure for her child, she still knows, if only peripherally, the reality of her condition as a single mother. A post-Wall, childless never-married woman of 38 is intimately aware of her condition and the reality that comes from that.

This isn’t to say that people are all-knowing about what creates these conditions, but it is to say that we are aware of them. In fact I’d argue that for the better part most people are unaware of the origins of their conditions until someone or something with a broader perspective can bring them into an awareness of their origins, but they realize the conditions that contribute to their present state.

The Devil Biology Made Me Do It

A large part of the red pill perspective leans on evolutionary psychology. Of course evo-psych isn’t the only factor in red pill awareness, but for the vast majority of Game deniers (people unaware of the origins of their conditions) this poses a problem of convenience. When the revelations of evo-psych agree with our comfortable social models and ego-investments we’re all too happy to embrace the science. But when the science shows us the more uncomfortable truths about evolved human nature, the reaction is to either question the ‘science’ or blame the moral conviction, resolve and character of the person/people expressing that aspect of human nature.

Presently we have an active debate on SoSuave all sparked by a woman decrying the evils of ‘men behaving badly’ (i.e. not in accordance with the feminine imperative), and her presumption that those men find a convenient absolution for that behavior in blaming how nature has made men ‘the way they are.’ This of course is the inconvenient flip side to the War Brides phenomenon, but the basis of her argument is rooted blank slate individuated equalism.

Hypergamy (an evolved species-survival schema) doesn’t care about personal conviction, freewill or definitions of moral behavior, it just is.  So in the interests of perpetuating the best interests of one sex (and by extension the entire species) social and cultural norms fluidly evolve around it to accommodate what’s really an uncomfortable aspect of our humanity. Can Hypergamy be controlled? Can men’s sexual impulses be tempered? Of course, but not without the effort of freewill, conviction and social structures. I know of precious few men who’ve blamed their infidelity or sexual impulsivity solely upon their biological makeup. With the exception of the more natural Alphas, more often than not it was a carefully calculated (Game) and coordinated event.

People don’t like the idea of not being in control of their lives and themselves, and they certainly wont tolerate the uncontrollable extrinsic reasons for other’s behaviors. We like the idea of personal responsibility, because it implies order in an otherwise chaotic world. In fact, due to this, people are far more likely to attribute their failings to their own personal decisions. It may be a confession of a lack of their own control, but it still implies that they once had that same control to lose and can again regain it.

I’ve written in the past that nature trumps conviction, and I still hold to that estimation. People have called me to the carpet over that assertion, but I don’t think they really understand what I mean by it. The nature is the environment in which we live in, the nature is the condition. Conviction, freewill or even notions of morality cannot exist if ‘nature’ isn’t the dominant, operative environment we exist in. It’s not that we can’t rise above our natures, it’s that we should have to in the first place.

The Soul Mate Myth

With apologies to Dalrock for thread-jacking his “The one” vs “my one and only” post. After reading Dal’s take on the fallacy of the ONE and picking back through the comments on Casualties I thought I might clarify a few things about the concept of the ONE.

There is no ONE.

There is no ONE. This is the soulmate myth. There are some good Ones and some bad Ones, but there is no ONE. Anyone telling you anything else is selling you something. There are LOTS of ‘special someones’ out there for you, just ask the divorced/widowed person who’s remarried after their “soulmate” has died or moved on.

This was one of my earliest posts back on the SoSuave forums from around 2003-04. I was finishing my degree then and had the Fallacy of the ONE graphically illustrated for me in a psych class one day. I was in class, surrounded by (mostly) much younger students than myself, all very astute and as intellectual as they come for mid twenty-somethings. At one point the discussion had come around to religion and much of the class expressed being agnostic or atheist, or “spiritual, but not religious”. The rationale was of course that religion and belief could be explained as psychological (fear of mortality) constructs that were expanded to sociological dynamics.

Later in that discussion the idea of a ‘soul mate’ came up. The professor didn’t actually use the word ‘soul’, but rather couched the idea by asking for a show of hands as to how many of the class believed “there was a special someone out there for them?” or if they feared “the ONE that got away.” Damn near the entire class raised their hands. For all of their rational empiricism and claims to realism in regards to spirituality, they (almost) unanimously expressed a quasi-Karmic belief in connecting with another idealized person on an intimate level for a lifetime.

Religion of the Soul-Mate

Even the Frat guys and hook-up girls who I knew weren’t expressly looking for anything long term in their dating habits still raised their hands in assent to a belief in a ONE. Some later explained what that ONE meant to them, and most had differing definitions of that idealization – some even admitted to it being an idealization as the discussion progressed – yet almost all of them still had what would otherwise be termed an irrational belief in ‘destiny’ or, even amongst the least spiritual, that it’s just part of life to pair off with someone significant and there was “someone for everyone”.

This discussion was the catalyst for one of my red pill realizations – despite all odds, people largely feel entitled to, or deserving of, an important love of their life. Statistically and pragmatically this is ridiculous, but there it is. The feminized Disney-fication of this core concept has been romanticized and commercialized to the point of it becoming a religion, even for the expressly non-religious. The shakespearean longing for the ONE, the search for another soul (mate) who was destined to be our match has been systematically distorted beyond all reason. And as I elaborated in Casualties men will take their own lives in the delusion of having lost their soul-mate.

Soul-Mate Men

This perversion of the soul-mate myth is attributable to a large part of the feminized social conventions we deal with today. The fear of isolation from our imagined soul-mate, or the fear of having irrecoverably lost that ‘perfect ONE’ for us fuels so much of the personal and social neuroses we find in the Matrix. For example, much of the fear inherent in the Myth of the Lonely Old Man loses its teeth without a core belief in the Soul-Mate Myth. The fear of loss and the delusions of Relational Equity only really matter when the person men believe that equity should influence is their predestined ONE.

The feminine imperative recognized the overwhelming power the Soul-Mate Myth had over men (and women) from the beginnings of its rise to ascendency as the primary gender social imperative. Virtually all of the distortions of the core soul-mate dynamic evolved as a controlling schema for men. When it is soul-mate women who are the primary reward for a soul-mate necessitous man, there are a lot of opportunities to consolidate that power upon. To be clear, don’t think this is some fiendish plot of a fem-centric cabal socially engineering that soul-mate fear into men. Generations of men, raised to be oblivious to it, willingly and actively help perpetuate the Soul-Mate Myth.

Soul-Mate Women

Although Hypergamy plays a large role in determining what makes for an idealized soul-mate for women, they aren’t immune to the exploitations of that core fear. Though it’s more an unfortunate byproduct than an outright manipulation, I’d argue that in some ways hypergamy intensifies that neurosis. Alpha Widows know all too well the languishing associated with pining for the Alpha that got away – particularly when she’s paired off long-term with the dutiful, Beta provider after her SMV decline.

For women, the soul-mate represents that nigh unattainable combination of arousing Alpha dominance matched with a loyal providership for her long term security that only she can tame out of him.

Hypergamy hates the soul-mate principle, because the soul-mate is an absolute definition, whereas hypergamy must alway test for perfection. Hypergamy asks, “Is he the ONE? Is he the ONE?” and the Soul-Mate Myth replies, “He HAS to be the the ONE, he’s your soul-mate, and there’s ONLY one of those.”

Building the Mystery

Due to this core concept and soul-mate mythology, both sexes will seek to perfect that idealization for themselves – even under the least ideal of conditions and expressions. We want to build our intimate relations into that soul-mate idealism in order to relieve the fear and solve the problem, and most times so badly that we’ll deftly ignore the warnings, abuses and consequences of having done so. For women the impact of the most significant Alpha is what initially defines that soul-mate idealization. For men it may be the first woman to become sexual with him or the one who best exemplifies a woman he (mistakenly) believes can love him in a male-defined orientation of love.

However, these are the points of origin for building that soul-mate ideal upon. This ideal is then compounded upon with layers of investments in the hopes that this person “might actually be the one fate has prescribed for them.” Emotional investment, personal, financial, even life-potential investments and sacrifices then follow in an effort to create a soul-mate.

This process is why I say the Soul-Mate Myth is ridiculous – it’s psychologically much more pragmatic to construct another person to fit that ideal than it ever will be to “wait for fate to take its course.” People subscribing to the myth would rather build a soul-mate, consequences be damned. So women will attempt to Build a better Beta, or tame down an Alpha, while men will attempt to turn a whore into a housewife, or vice versa.

One of the most bitter aftertastes of having taken the red pill is abandoning old paradigms for new. I’ve described this before as akin to killing an old friend, and one friend that needs killing is exactly this mythology. Disabusing yourself of this core fear is vital to fully unplugging, because so much of fem-centric social conditioning is dependent upon it.

Dropping the Soul-Mate Myth isn’t the nihilism a lot of people might have you believe it is. If anything it will free you to have a better, healthier future relationship with someone who is genuinely important to you – a relationship based on genuine desire, mutual respect, complementary understanding of each other and love, rather than on a fear of losing your one and only representation of contentment in this life.

Up the Alpha

As expected the Alpha to Beta trait dichotomy was inferred from Last weeks post courtesy of commenter Ad Fortitudo:

Do you disagree with Athol Kay that the best option for a woman is a man with both alpha and beta traits?

That is to say, wouldn’t a man with great genes/physicality/confidence as well as financial stability and kindness be the “perfect man” for a woman?

Wouldn’t that satisfy both her short term and long term mating strategies?

I get the sense that it is in absence of men that have both traits that women seek out these different qualities in separate men under short and long term circumstances.

I covered this a long while ago in Schedules of Mating and as recently as Your Friend Menstruation. This want for the perfect amalgam of hot Alpha and parentally invested Beta is literally hard-coded into women’s brains and endocrine system. From the most rudimentary level, the conflict that  hypergamy instills in women is due to this want of fusing together the arousing Alpha with the attractive Beta in the same man. Thus was women’s pluralistic sexual strategy evolved.

The problem that confounds hypergamy is that the arousing Alpha and the attractive Beta rarely exist in the same male, at the same time and at the most opportune time for women to appreciate and capitalize on it. By this I mean that as women proceed through their peak SMV years, they place higher priorities and higher mating value upon predominately Alpha traits. These are the ‘fuck me now’ party years, and Alpha seed far out-values Beta need. As I wrote in Schedules of Mating, on a macro level this translates into a proactive form of cuckoldry. Even if it doesn’t result in a pregnancy, the latent urgency in a woman’s peak is to ‘get the seed first, find the provider later’ (i.e. protracted cuckoldry).

The fantasy for women of course is to ‘tame the savage Alpha’ and convert him into a parentally invested partner by encouraging Beta traits in him as he matures, and hopefully prospers. Many a thwarted single mommy knows the unfortunate outcome of attempting to ‘fix’ their Bad Boy Alpha into the Good Dad Father, but this is the emphasis assuming a woman pauses long enough to invest in one particular Alpha during her peak years. The base schema is to maintain that hot Alpha arousal, while developing him into a more attractive Beta provider.

As a woman approaches the downturn of her SMV that hypergamic urgency shifts to favor Beta providership traits as the prospect of long term security alters the priorities of her hypergamy. Now the script changes to one favoring the nice, dependable, and necessarily resourceful man with all the attractive features she needs for a commitment to long term security. It’s not that she doesn’t still become aroused by the physicality and charisma of a predominately Alpha male (particularly in her proliferate menstrual phase), but she is more aware of the balance between her lessened ability to attract that man (post-Wall) and the need to pair-bond with a man who can provide for her and her offspring. Women will mitigate this arousal-attraction imbalance with their own forms of pornography or self-initialized rationalization about their ‘deeper maturity’, but in essence the doubt that hypergamy seeds in them has to be held in check either through self-repression or by dread of loss.

The fantasy for women in this instance is the hope that their predominately Beta partner will “Man Up”, Just Get It on his own and develop more arousing Alpha traits as he matures. The base schema here is to maintain the sweet Beta provider attraction, while developing him into a more arousing Alpha as her needs demand.

Beta with a Side of Alpha

The inimitable Geisha Kate then helps solidify this analysis of her ‘Perfect Man’:

Great point. That ^ is the true manicorn. That is what I mean when I say I’ll take a “greater beta with fries.”

Be careful what you pray for Kate, the women (and Manboobz) who kvetch about the ‘overly sensitive men’ they committed to probably wished for the same. In fact I’d argue that the majority of married men now looking to Athol Kay for insight believed they were Greater Betas with a side of Alpha.

Kate’s in a  stage of life when the Beta providership male makes far better practical sense to pair off with. Just like Aunt Giggles, her definition of attraction and ‘a good relationship’ is biased by the personal conditions of her present SMP valuation. She understands this from her age, SMV and necessity perspective, but this undoubtedly wasn’t her perspective when she was in the prime of her SMV years.

This is the ‘build-a-better-beta‘ paradox:

The overarching  point is to create a more acceptable man for a female defined goal, NOT to truly empower any man. There is no feminine opposite to this; there is no counter effort to make women more acceptable to men – in fact this is actively resisted and cast as a form of slavish subservience. This is the extent of the feminine reality; it’s so instaurating that men, with the aid of  “concerned women”, will spend lifetimes seeking ways to better qualify themselves for feminine approval. That’s the better Beta they hope to create. One who will Man-Up and be the Alpha as situations and use would warrant, but Beta enough to be subservient to the feminine imperative. They seek a man to be proud of, one who’s association reflects a statement of their own quality, yet one they still have implicit control over.

Whether the reasonings are moral, entitlement or ‘honor bound’ in nature the end result is still feminine primacy. The sales pitch is one of manning up to benefit yourself, but the latent purpose is one of better qualifying for normalized feminine acceptance. What they cannot reconcile is that the same benefits that are inherent in becoming more Alpha (however you choose to define that) are the same traits that threaten his necessary position of subservience as a Beta. This is precisely why ‘real’ Game, and truly unplugging, cannot be sanitized. This social element wants to keep you plugged in; more Alpha, more confidence, more awareness, is a threat to fem-centrism. “It’s great that all this Game stuff has finally got you standing up for yourself, but remember who’s got the vagina.“

I have a lot of respect for Athol, and not so much for Aunt Giggles, but the problem I see with both of their approaches in balancing Alpha with Beta is that they begin from a fem-centric origin. Athol seems to have the better take of the two, but by and large the men seeking his advice are Beta men who’ve been red-pill enlightened to the fact that they need to up the Alpha – presuming they had an Alpha element to start.

Aunt Giggles simply wants a Beta, who’s an Alpha of a woman’s convenience. Aunt Sue had a grand mal seizure orgasm when she’d thought Roissy was actually advocating that men genuinely become more Beta. She force fit it to comply with her build-a-better-beta narrative (CH suggests using Beta as an in-context Game tactic), but it only better illustrates her latent imperatives about a post-Wall, fem-centrically defined preference for Beta with a side of Alpha.

There is no side of Alpha. The conflict both Kate and Giggles don’t grasp is that Alpha demands dominance, and this doesn’t fit very well with the feminine imperative’s false religion of equalism. Athol understand this with his Captain and First Officer analogy; in any relationship one partner is the dominant personality, the other the submissive. Even homosexual couples recognize this order, but the women and men of the feminine Matrix resist this with the delusion of an equalist utopia amongst the genders.

So when I read about a desire for achieving some balance of Alpha to Beta traits in the ‘perfect man’ I realize that this is an extension of this feminine-primary equalist want for balance amongst the genders; which really equates to women wanting a perfected security. In their need for control (dominance) they want hypergamy definitively settled in the perfect man, for the perfect occasion, and at every stage of their SMV maturation. Men, mangina sympathizers or otherwise, are simply the means to that end. That end may be with the perfect husband, or via cuckolding or through fem-side pornography, or any other methodology women’s sexual pluralism will help her invent.

Up the Alpha

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: for men wanting to change their lives and relationships, working up from Beta to Alpha is a far tougher road to hoe that tempering Alpha dominance with a personalized touch of Beta. As bad as Hugo Schwyzer is in his abject feminization, have a read of a few of the female commenters in this article. How many of the simpering, socially conditioned, Betatized men these women seeth about would make for believable Alphas once they had a red pill epiphany? It is precisely because of this impressionistic, binary solipsism that women will never be happy with ‘fixing’ their Beta. This is why he has to Just Get It on his own.

It is a far better proposition to impress a woman with an organic Alpha dominance – Alpha can only be a man’s dominant personality origin. There is no Beta with a side of Alpha because that side of Alpha is NEVER believable when your overall perception is one of being Beta to begin with. This is why I stress Alpha traits above all else. It’s easy, and endearing to ‘reveal’ a flash of Beta sensitivity when a woman perceives you as predominantly Alpha. If your personality is predominantly Beta, any sporadic flashes of Alpha will seem like emotional tantrums at best, character flaws at worst.

Women may love the Beta, but they only respect the Alpha.

Of Love and War

As might be expected yesterday’s post regarding the love differentials between men and women drew a lot of commentary. I probably should’ve added the caveat that readers have a look at Women in Love as a prelude to reading Men in Love before posting it, but by far the most disconcerting part of Monday’s revelation was in my outlining exactly how men expect to be loved prior to actually entering into a love relationship with a woman.

Generally people of either sex don’t like to have love defined for them. The concept of love is loaded with subjectiveness, and not unsurprisingly you’ll offend people’s interpretations and sensibilities by trying to contain their idea of love in a defined box. This is one of the reasons love is such a great and human idea, but its ambiguity is also the primary cause of much of the human tragedy and suffering we experience. We see love in religious contexts, personal interpretations, philosophical essays, biological dynamics and a whole slew of other arenas, so it’s very easy to understand how universally convoluted, manipulative, and yet also how binding and nurturing love can be according to how well, or how ill our concepts of love aligns with that of others.

In outlining (not defining) a male perspective of love in contrast to a female perspective it’s necessary to understand how a man’s understanding of love shifts as he matures. A lot of commenters wanted to find the base root of that concept in their relationship with their mothers. As Freudian as that rings I wouldn’t say it’s a bad start. Men do in fact learn their first impressions of intimate, physical and nurturing love from their mothers, and this then forms the foundation of that expected love from their potential wives (or lovers). Even as children are unable to think in abstract terms, there is an innate, base understanding of the conditionality that must be met in order to maintain that motherly love. Yohami posted a great illustration of this with the still face experiment.

Yohami breaks this down thusly:

That circuit gets printed before we learn to talk = before we are able to form abstract and concepts. It’s a basic four piece, emotional / behavioral circuit.

There are many ways that circuit can be imprinted “wrong”. One is to have the mom (or dads) on the receiving end, making the kid the giver. Other is having him owning the frame. Other is to have the mom (or dads) respond only when the kid acts out. Other is making the kid act out and then silence him / punish him for it. Etc. Shortly, the kid understands the game and starts to play it.

And then you build everything on top.

Your experiences from ages 12-21, of course helped forming you, because you’re 35 now and this is a sum accumulative game. But honestly, what happened to you from 12-21, are the same mechanics that were already happening, only adding more external world influence, sex drive, and additional pressures.

Im trying to locate the source of the pain, and is this: like a compass or a geometrical piece that wants to find equilibrium, the pain wants to find the “good” again (from the good the bad and the ugly), but it only knows to reach that “good” by balancing violently between the bad and the ugly and episodes of rage and if that doesnt work, splitting / self mutilation ( cutting out the undesired parts of you, your past, identity, emotions, people, relationships, blocking stuff out, etc)

It’s a constant look out for the elusive “good” part of the dynamic.

Yohami continues (emphasis mine):

[But] you werent confident / self reassured about your needs and wants, because you were still negotiating how to even feel “good” and safe, so you didnt develop game nor saw girls / relationships for what they were – but you just added this to the previous unresolved mix, like, seeking the “good” (basic, maternal, paternal love where you’re defenseless and you’re intimally loved and taken care of and safe) from girls, mixing the defenseless and the sexual aggressive drive and the long time affection longing and the sense of dispair of never feeling safe, etc.

From the moment we’re born we realize love is conditional, but we want for it to be unconditional; our idealized state is unconditional love. To be a Man is to perform, to excel, to be the one for whom affections are freely given in appreciation and adoration. On a base level it’s this constant striving for that idealized love-state that helps us become more than we started as, but it comes at the cost of a misguided belief that a woman is capable of, much less willing to love us as we think is possible.

A Place to Rest

Peregrine John summed it up best on Jacquie’s blog comments recently:

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

We want to, so badly.

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

This is a realization that men don’t make until they are in a ‘love relationship’ with a woman. For men this is (should be) the catalyst for maturing beyond that want for an idealized unconditional love. At that point they come full circle and understand that the conceptual love they’d hoped they could return to (or could be) with their mother doesn’t exist in the woman he’s ‘in love’ with, and ultimately, never really existed between he and his mother from his infancy to adulthood.

There is no rest, there is no respite or reprieve from performing, but so strong is the desire for that unconditional love assurance that men thought it prudent to write it into “traditional” marriage vows – ‘for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and obey, forsaking all others until death do you part’ – in other words, a pledge of unconditional love in spite of all circumstance. Those vows are a direct plea for insurances against a female hypergamy that would otherwise be unfettered were it not made in the context of being before God and man.

In my post What’s Your Problem? I mention a 65 y.o man whom I used to counsel who’s wife had emotionally blackmailed him for over 20 years. He’d been married once before and divorced from his first wife after 12 years due to “not living up to her expectations” of financial provisioning. He never made the connection that the women he was ‘in love’ with had different concepts of what love meant to him. Rather, he evolved his previous concept of love wholesale to match that of women he ‘loved’, and thus his idea of love was one based upon an endless quest for qualifying for that love. In the first year of his second marriage he lost his job, and was unemployed for about 5 months, leaving his wife as the only revenue source for them. At the end of month 4 of his unemployment, after returning from an interview, he came home to find the locks changed on his home and two duffle bags “full of his shit” were waiting by the door. On top of them was a note written by his 2nd wife which, to the effect, read: “Don’t come back until you have a job.”

I remember him proudly recounting this story to me at the time, because he said, as pissed off as he was at the time, he was ‘grateful’ for her kicking him in the ass to be a “better man”. By this point his concept of love had been completely altered from his almost identical experiences with wife number one into a model that was entirely dependent upon his capacity to earn his wife’s love. Gone were the idealizations of unconditional love for the sake of love, to be replaced with the tactical, opportunistic concept of female love of his new wife. And, he was grateful for it.

After 20 years, at 65 (now 69) and in failing health he had come to realize that his efforts to secure her ‘love’ indefinitely had never been appreciated, only expected; so here he was facing the very cruel reality that he was losing his health and thus the means to maintain that incessant qualification for her love and affection.

The Reconciling

I get a lot of email and correspondence about the ruthlessness of my, I guess seminal, War Brides post. Guys have a hard time accepting the amorality of women’s inborn capacity to bond with their own captors as a psycho-socially adaptive survival trait, and how this evolved into women’s pronounced facility with which they can ‘get over’ former lovers so much faster than men seem to be capable of. Women don’t like me detailing this phenomenon for obvious reasons, but I think men dislike the notion of their easy ‘disposability’ because of that same inconsistency in gender concepts of love. Even as martyrs, even in death, that unconditional male concept of love is rebuked by women’s, by-necessity, fluid and utilitarian concept of love. As I stated yesterday, coming to terms with this is one of the most difficult aspects of taking the red pill.

I get that this seems overly nihilistic, but that’s the point. All of the very positive, very beneficial aspects of accepting a red pill reality come at the cost of abandoning the blue pill idealisms we’ve been conditioned to for so long. Leaving behind that polyanna, expectant, blue-pill dream seems like killing an old friend, but unlearning that old paradigm allows you to benefit from a far more hopeful red pill existence.

I’m not debating the genuineness or sincerity of women’s capacity to love. What I’m positing here is that women’s concept of love isn’t what men would be led to believe it is.

Play Nice

Overheard this past weekend:

“Nice guys are the real jerks if you ask me. They put up a front, acting differently when talking to women, deceiving them into getting them into bed.

And if they fail to get them in bed with them, they go on the internet and rant about their misogynist views on women.

Real men act the same with everyone. They’re not there to put up a front nor do they bitch about their failures with women.”

I’m reading this a lot lately. The Nice-Guy-as-ruse rationalization would be laughable if not for so many women using the trope to explain their misgivings or lack of judgement with a guy that pumped and dumped them. Furthermore, the False-Flag Nice Guy is also a ready-made social convention used to excuse the worst behaviors of women when a man might (albeit immaturely) make a public example of that behavior. Not surprisingly this cad-in-sheep’s-clothing rationale really pisses off the genuine beta Nice Guys, and for exactly the reason less attractive women get upset when their more attractive sisters mistreat the Men they could never hope to pull themselves.

So with this in mind I thought I’d pick apart this meme in detail.

“Nice guys are the real jerks if you ask me.”

When truly nice guys (80-90% of the masculine sphere) read a line like “Nice Guys are the real jerks” something snaps in their heads. Black is white, up is down and Nice Guys are Jerks. Most Nice Guys have been playing the self-internalized Beta Game, identification scenario out for so long that to read something like this is akin to blaspheme. “Great now all these women I’ve been trying to be so nice too (like they all say they want) really think I’m a jerk?” One would think this would be a moment of clarity for the Nice Guy and he’d realize the truth of what his ‘misogynist’ Game-aware friends had been trying to enlighten him about for so long. You’d think, until,..

“They put up a front, acting differently when talking to women, deceiving them into getting them into bed.”

Ah! Well there you have it! They’re really just Alpha cads playing at being nice in order to bed these women ,..how fiendish! Now, not only are women jaded by the players, but they’re also more wary of the ‘Nice’ men due to the players utilizing their own Beta Game. Dammit! The Jerks have poisoned the Nice well!

What they fail to realize is the inherent ridiculousness of the premise – niceties never got a man laid – and of all men, the Nice Guy knows the difficulty of actually consolidating sex upon ‘niceness’. While I have no doubt that many a Game savvy man has gotten laid by misrepresenting himself as being more interested and pleasant than he actually was, it’s understandable that no woman would ever want to admit to her active participation in that deception. Solution? Paint Nice Guys with the broad brush of the Bad Boy Jerk.

“And if they fail to get them in bed with them, they go on the internet and rant about their misogynist views on women.”

Well, we could debate the social implications of women defaulting to the easy epithet of ‘misogynist’, but that’s an old post for me. You know the more I pick this apart the more I have to empathize with the truly Nice Guy; his is a particularly cruel hell. The Nice Guy in this definition isn’t necessarily the Alpha in sheep’s clothing. This is the guy who, most likely, believed he was going about ‘courting’ his woman-to-be by the rules he knows were established as the sensible proper means to arriving at a woman’s intimacy. The fact that he plays by those rules is integral to his sense of not-like-typical-guys uniqueness.

He subscribed to the Sniper Mentality, played friends, and unfortunately after taking his big shot, got rejected by his (most likely ONEitis) target girl. If men of this stripe are one thing, it’s dedicated to their personal investments into a particular girl they know will one day appreciate their stand-out qualities,..some day. What they fail to grasp is that hypergamy doesn’t care about the equity he believes he’s building for a future relationship. That’s one thing to realize when you’re deep into an LTR, but it’s really a lesson that should be learned when you’re the chump trying to prove to your paramour how perfect a boyfriend you’ll be for her – once she’s done fucking the Jerks she can’t get enough of.

This is a tough lesson for a guy who’s ideology about women and dating is virtually a mirror of his ideology on a ‘strong work ethic’. Work hard, pay your dues and you’ll be rewarded compensatory with your efforts. So, again, it’s unsurprising that this guy would get upset (maybe vindictively so) when his ‘dream girl’ proves to him that hypergamy doesn’t care about compensating all his efforts.

“Real men act the same with everyone. They’re not there to put up a front nor do they bitch about their failures with women.”

In the meantime, back in solipsistic girl-world the narrative, as always, continues to revolve implicitly around how his ‘pseudo-niceness’ impacts her reputation and her, now damaged, self-impressions. Because, of course, no genuine Nice Guy would ever feel slighted enough by her rejecting him intimately so as to feel the need to broadcast his displeasure on FaceBook. ‘Real’ Nice Guys would just shut the fuck up and accept her rejection; which then completes the circular fem-logic of being attracted to guys with the wherewithal to stand up for themselves, speak their minds and not stand for the injustice of being sold one message and having another’s intent proved for him. Sometimes, we call those guys Jerks.

You see, behavioristically, what women mischaracterize as ‘nice‘ is usually the male-methodology they misinterpreted when they couldn’t find a way to reject a guy in an efficient fashion. So yeah, Nice Guys, you’re the real Jerks and Alpha Jerks, you’re the truly nice guy’s because you “act the same with everyone.”

Ladies, stop complaining about the sheep when you’re looking for a wolf.

Dry Spell

From Sosuave member Flatnose:

Has the PUA community sent me delusional?
Ok I’m 47, well toned still have a 6 pack. 5’11. Ok looks. Well dressed, Good conversationalist Good job, full head of hair, hobbies are climbing potholing[?], playing guitar weight training etc. I’ve worked hard on body language, can approach ok. Often get glances and flirted heavily with.

Not getting laid though!

In a real dry spell at the moment guys, I am beginning to think that banging anyone under 30 who turns me on is just an impossible dream and that I am deluded to believe it.

I guess I am seeking some objectivity about this, are my expectations unrealistic?

Are you fishing where the fish are?

When I read some guy use the term ‘dry spell’ it’s usually due to one of two things: He’s either an AFC or a recovering AFC with only a tentative grasp of Game and is in the learning stages of applied Game, OR, he’s got Game, has a workable estimation of his SMV and knows how to demonstrate it (DHV), but due to logistics and/or his environment lacks the opportunities to effectively hook up as he’d like to.

From your description here I’m inclined to believe the latter. Even with marginal Game application a guy such as yourself could be expected to be reasonably attractive enough to generate interest in the right arena. Maybe you need to change up your environment? Find a new venue to meet women?

It’s been my experience from counseling that when men complain of being in a proverbial “dry spell” it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for them. In psychological terms this is known as a negative feedback loop. When you’re in a condition of deprivation you’ll manifest behaviors that cue others about that deprivation. Even declaring that you’re in a dry spell (really an appeal to pity) is evidence enough of your deprivation. The frustrating thing for men is that these deprivation behaviors become a subconscious default action – usually in the hope that some girl will take pity and end his period of desperation.

The Loop

“No mortal man can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” – Sigmund Freud

The trouble with a self-acknowledged dry spell is that most guys are unaware of the subtle deprivation cues they telegraph to the very women who’d break them of the deprivation that causes it. When a beta chump is resistant to the truths of Game this feedback loop is simply a frustrating aspect of his self-denial, but don’t think that dominant, Game-aware Alphas aren imune to the dry spell loop. The inherent danger is to start believing that the dry spell is the result of bad posturing, or caused by a false impression of women’s response to Game, or worse still, due to fate or karma (“it’s just beyond my control, the gods want me celibate”). These are all rationalizations for not recognizing and making a conscious effort at controlling the cues that women read as sexual deprivation.

While it is important to be self-aware of your dry spell feedback loop, the worst thing you can do is admit to the dry spell with a prospective woman. As I wrote in Sorry,..

Iron Rule of Tomassi #9 Never Self-Deprecate under any circumstance.

Apologizing for a lack of Game isn’t Game. Women want a man that other men want to be and other women want to fuck, and that guy, by definition, is already getting laid when a woman first meets him. Being necessitous isn’t an aphrodisiac, it’s a turn off in subtle ways that men don’t realize, but women register even when they’re not trying to. This is the first mistake the dry spell man makes – he attempts to leverage his dry spell into a form of Beta Game, thinking that a pity-fuck will lead to something more substantial.

While ‘slump busting’, or paying for sex, or falling back on a lesser plate may aid in regaining some confidence to break out of those dry spell behavioral tells, leveraging that dry spell for a pity-fuck is not only bad sex, but the girl who would bang you for pity’s sake will only resent herself and you more in the long term.

Breaking the dry spell loop relies upon recognizing it and changing the variables that are perpetuating it. As I advised Flatnose, a change in venue goes a long way, especially if you’re dependent upon some kind of social circle Game. Move to a new environment, meet new prospects. Most guys wont entertain this because it forces them from a comfort zone; a comfort zone which has ‘dried up’.

Changing variables is usually the key. Change in dress, attitude, doing something out of your preconceived Game routine, that may have produced fruit before, is essential. In body building there is a principle known as muscle confusion. When you do the same workout routine for months, muscle memory will find its level and plateau your gains. However, by varying your work outs, by doing new exercises and consistently forcing your muscles to adapt to unexpected condition you break through that plateau for new gains. Breaking a dry spell requires that same principle – variation, adaptation, improvisation.