Psychology

What Lies Beneath

Stop, wait, don’t click the play button just yet. You need to know a few things first before the rage you’re about to feel clouds your judgement about my intentions for linking today’s video lesson in evolved psychological prompts in gender dynamics. First disclaimer; this is expressly NOT an attempt to agitate any anxieties about misandry, nor is it an attempt to wantonly illustrate what I’m fairly certain is an already obvious double standard for most readers here. Second disclaimer: this isn’t about ‘women are bad, men are good’. Please spare us all the historical analysis  of the evil patriarchy and how bad womyn had it under their male oppression in response to this impromptu study.

OK, click play and watch. It’s short.

My point in linking today’s video (h/t to bodybuilding.com forum) is to really come to terms with the evolved psychology and the socialization that stems from it in this. My point isn’t to start some movement to acknowledge violence against men by women, but rather to illustrate the latent reasons why it’s not addressed in the first place.

One of the foundations of the egalitarian equalism mindset is that traditional gender is a socialized set of behaviors leading to a gender identity. Equalism is based on discarding any preconceptions about innate gender identity, which is one of the primary reasons it’s proponents screech so vehemently against the ideas put forth in evo-psychology. There can be little or no room for questioning an equalist perspective in terms of the very obvious biochemical, biomechanical and ‘hard-coded’ psychology and manifest behavior of these for an equalist approach to push us towards utopia.

But science and equalism are always shocked to come home early and find Mother Nature fucking the mailman. This experiment is an excellent example of this. In the equalist’s nirvana (also see ‘girl-world’) men and women in equal measure should feel equally compelled come to both the woman’s and the poor Omega male’s defense – sadly this isn’t the case. What we’re observing here, while socially uncomfortable, is really an illustration of Darwinian principles and the evolved psychology that manifest from hundreds of thousands of years of socialization. Protect the female, leave the male to his own devices. Women are the protected sex not because of social sensibilities, but because that’s what we’re psychologically hard-wired to do.

There are intrinsic behaviors we have a natural propensity for that no one ever had to teach us. The reason a baby’s cry is so annoying to us is because we’ve evolved sensitivities to it to ensure the baby’s, and, by extension, our own species’ survival. This female protectionist dynamic is one of these intrinsic sensitivities. From either a rational or a moral perspective the social incongruities and seeming injustices of how these evolved manifestations play out are irrelevant – they are still motivated by the same evolved prompts that benefitted our species in the past. Women and children first isn’t a social dictate, it’s an evolved doctrine of survival.

Boys Don’t Cry

First example: have a read and listen to audio from The Rush here. Even when the circumstances publicly, empirically, prove a woman’s duplicity, our first primal impulse is to console a crying woman. A weeping woman intrinsically engenders prompts for protectionism. This is why crying is a default behavior for women, and one that takes a mental effort for them to prevent. Even when we listen to this we have to struggle to keep this woman’s behaviors in perspective in light of her emotional response and the effect it has on our own emotional state. Not so for a man; in fact publicly humiliating men is a sport in today’s media, why? Because we lack that visceral affinity for the masculine. A man crying will never prompt protectionistic instincts – in fact quite the opposite. We have to make a mental effort against our initial, natural, impulses to objectively come to any kind of feelings of sympathy with men, or to deal judiciously with women. In other words, it takes practice to think and feel in counterintuitive ways.

War Brides

War Brides was a seminal post for me in that it brought to light the primal undercurrent of women’s survival instincts and the legacy behaviors that have been socially accounted for in our current society. Rational reader Jim left me a poignant response in the Mrs. Hyde essay that further proved a point.

two books by John Costello; ‘Virtue Under Fire’ and ‘Love, Sex, and War’ in which all too much of the above female psychology manifested itself;

“Of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate – and this wartime phenomenon was not confined to any one section of society. The babies that were born out-of-wedlock belonged to every age group of mother, concluded one social researcher:

Some were adolescent girls who had drifted away from homes which offered neither guidance nor warmth and security. Still others were women with husbands on war service, who had been unable to bear the loneliness of separation. There were decent and serious, superficial and flighty, irresponsible and incorrigible girls among them. There were some who had formed serious attachments and hoped to marry. There were others who had a single lapse, often under the influence of drink. There were, too, the ‘good-time girls’ who thrived on the presence of well-paid servicemen from overseas, and semi-prostitutes with little moral restraint. But for the war many of these girls, whatever their type, would never have had illegitimate children. (pp. 276-277)”

and;

“Neither British nor American statistics, which indicate that wartime promiscuity reached its peak in the final stages of the war, take account of the number of irregularly conceived pregnancies that were terminated illegally. Abortionists appear to have been in great demand during the war. One official British estimate suggests that one in five of all pregnancies was ended in this way, and the equivalent rate for the United States indicates that the total number of abortions for the war years could well have been over a million.

These projections are at best merely a hypothetical barometer of World War II’s tremendous stimulus to extra-marital sexual activity. The highest recorded rate of illegitimate births was not among teenage girls, as might have been expected. Both British and American records indicate that women between twenty and thirty gave birth to nearly double the number of pre-war illegitimate children. Since it appears that the more mature women were the ones most encouraged by the relaxed morals of wartime to ‘enjoy’ themselves, it may be surmised that considerations of fidelity were no great restraint on the urge of the older married woman to participate in the general rise in wartime sexual promiscuity. (pp. 277-278)”

Nor, did this behavior stop with the end of WWII, it was merely rationalized, codified, and approved by society by feminism and their Vichy males.

So much for the Greatest Generation. Here we have some very damning statistics about an otherwise romanticized generation. Again, the scope of this essay isn’t to condemn women’s duplicity, but rather to see the method behind it. Socially we can make workarounds that will turn all of these stats into virtues, but underneath all that is the fact that women will do whatever their hard-coded psychologies necessitate to ensure their survival. Hypergamy is a selected-for survival mechanism.

Survival in the Pack

In the manosphere a lot has been made in comparison about an alpha / beta dynamic in human behavior, but I think in focusing on similarities in primate social structures we neglect to see the pack mentality that is also prevalent in human nature. One of my passions is reconditioning retired racing Greyhounds. There is a peculiarity of this otherwise gentle breed in that they are prone to viciously kill other Greys who display behavioral cues that imply weakness, pain or disability. When an injured Grey yelps or cries from pain on the race track (or in a group setting) it’s not usually the broken leg that kills the dog, it’s the other 7 dogs piling on to tear it apart. This behavior takes a lot of people by surprise because it’s entirely incongruent with the nature of one of the most passive breeds of dog, but in their primal past a yelping dog could give the pack away to prey or otherwise endanger the collective. That yelping became the trigger cue for killing that member of the pack. It may have been a species survival trait in the evolutionary past, but now it’s a liability for the animal.

As social animals, humans are also subject to legacy behaviors from our own evolutionary past. In a normal social context it’s curious in that most men (and women) would willingly cooperate to achieve a common goal. Men will come to the aid of one another when one is attacked. However when a man is beaten or berated by a woman, the behavior is the opposite. That particular prompt does not engender an impulse to come to the man’s defense. In fact there’s almost a revulsion to the act. Why? Perhaps it’s a legacy survival instinct that allows for that member of the pack to be ‘weeded’ from the whole?

Fidelity

I was recently asked by Die Hard to add my personal input regarding fidelity on SoSuave. Rather than post an overwritten essay on the forum I thought the broader readership might be interested in the discussion:

So you guys are married… Rollo recently told me he has never cheated on his wife and I’m pretty sure Slick and Back haven’t either.

My question is: Why?

Before you guys were married, you had (or would have had) absolutely no problem with spinning plates and banging several chicks at the same time. So why do you have a problem with it now? What ADVANTAGE does it bring you to be monogamous with your wife?

I constantly get asked this, “how can you propose the ideas you do and still be married?” It’s actually because of my marriage that I feel qualified to do so. On this blog and in my SoSuave posts I generally make a point not to include too much personal details about my individual experience; first because it contributes to bias in analysis, and second because it always comes off as self-aggrandizing in some respects. However, to answer your question I have to give you some background about myself, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like I’m glossing myself here.

A Brief History

I was a stereotypical, but extroverted beta in my adolescence. I got played and/or rejected constantly until my senior year. I got laid for the first time at 17 with really the first girl who’d be my “girlfriend”. I literally rearranged my life to accommodate us having regular sex, to the point that I would travel from one end of L.A. to another by bus over a weekend. I wont bore you with the beta details, but suffice to say it didn’t end well.

It was after this that my 20 y.o. mind decided I liked getting laid more than I liked playing up to the Nice guy bullshit that got me raked over the coals with my “girlfriend”. I was already playing in bands at that stage and the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80’s and early 90’s was just begging me to come play and at 21 I was finally old enough to realize it.

I was a kid in a candy store. Rail thin, long blonde hair down to my ass, playing in two very popular bands and opening for national acts, doing session playing for Paramount TV shows occasionally; by 22 it was so easy to bang women I didn’t even consider trying to get with them. I had Game at the time, but it was the unpracticed default Game that comes from the confidence in knowing you have instant social proof and women will approach you. Which was funny because for most of it I was flat broke, but somehow managed to have women buy me drinks and all kinds of ‘gifts’ to offset that.

Of the 40+ women I’ve banged, about 38 of them were during the times I was between the age of 21 and 25. And there were all kinds of women; mostly the club sluts that guys in the community like to complain about, but also some nice Latinas, two MILFs (one was a manager for the band I was in), one brief single mother, two strippers, a nice church girl, even a Vietnamese girl who could fuck like a Tasmanian Devil. I had them as young as 17 and as old as 45 . Blondes, brunettes, redheads, big tits, small tits, one fatty, one coke addict, a girl with an MBA, and several from community college. I didn’t give the girls who’d rejected me in high school an afterthought. I was doing naturally what I later came to understand was spinning plates.

It got so easy I could walk into a club in another state, where no one even knew me and could still pull top shelf ass that most guys only whacked off to porn over. But all that came crashing down when I met the BPD psychotic girl I mention here. This was the real test of my true beta-ness, I wanted her to be my ‘dream girl’ but she was the daughter of Satan. Every high I was experiencing at that time turned into the lowest misery I could’ve imagined. It was a living hell, but one I wanted to be in. I had opportunities to get away, I had other women still throwing themselves at me for a time, but I wanted that BPD to be ‘the ONE’.

It was at that lowest point that I knew what it was like to be lower than a beta, I was an abject omega with her.

It wasn’t until mercifully after 4 years that I extracted myself from her web of neurosis, that I gradually transformed myself back into an adult Alpha mindset. I changed my mind about myself and got back on my feet by putting myself first.

Afterlife

In the time before I met Mrs. Tomassi, I’d been the cheater, and the cheated. I banged other guy’s women on GNOs, I’ve had sex with girls within 2 hours of meeting them. And I got cheated on and LDR cuckolded by the BPD girl. I’ve done all of that. A lot of guys drop the line that they’re monogamous because they’re sick of the game, but they never really experienced that game. They settle because they’d rather trade mundane ‘sure thing’ sex for risking more real rejection. From my personal perspective I laugh at this rationalization – especially when I hear a guy married for 3 or 4 years tell me how he’s tempted to cheat on his wife or wonder what banging this new girl would be like if only he hadn’t married so early. They can’t escape the nagging doubt that their lives could’ve been something different if only they’d held out longer.

I think it’s vitally important for guys to ‘get it out of their system’ and experience women in as visceral, emotional and practical a way as possible before even considering monogamy. A lot of my critics like to say, “well we can’t all be like Rollo and get everything right” but I profess what I do because I got more things wrong. I attribute the success of my marriage to having gone through what I did in my 20’s.

When I was considering proposing to Mrs. Tomassi the one overarching concern I had wasn’t about pre-qualifying her for some laundry list of wifely qualities I had in my head. My first thought was “is she someone I can remain faithful to?” That was my primary concern, is she someone I’ll just cheat on? I know me, I’ve seen me do it. I got lucky in that for 15+ years she’s been a great wife, mother and companion, but honestly I wanted a woman who would keep my sexual interest in perpetuity. She’s much more than this, but in all honesty I wanted a woman to stay as hot and sexually available as possible for the longest time possible. Call that shallow if you like, but I’ve never cheated on her in over 16 years because she has, and in my line of work the opportunities are always there.

Infidelity

What most people don’t understand about infidelity is that, for cheating to occur two primary elements must be present – cause and opportunity. Women tend to get caught up in the minutiae of cheating because it stokes their need for indignation; even vicariously through their girlfriends they’d rather wallow in the chemical rush that jealousy, suspicion and betrayal induce for them. Guys do too to an extent, but I think they focus more on the loss of the investment, especially the emotional investment. What both fail to see is the reasoning behind that act of infidelity.

Most men never cheat simply because they don’t have an opportunity to do so. Either they’re not in the correct environment or they just lack Game or aren’t attractive enough to really be a consideration for cheating with. These are the guys who’ll self-righteously declare how proud they are of their convictions in remaining faithful to their wives, when in fact they make their necessity a virtue due to circumstance. When you look at how most infidelity progresses it’s often prompted by the proximity of a willing partner. Opportunity is circumstantial.

Cause to cheat is much more complex. For men it’s often a feeling of not being appreciated, but more so than this is their wife’s lack of sexual interest or their own lack of interest in her because she devolved into something they never thought she would. As I stated before, if you don’t know what you’re missing, you’ll think you’re missing out. I know a disproportionate number of men who’ve cheated as the result of having cashed in on their potential in exchange for the ‘safety’ they thought marriage offered.

There are plenty of men with ample cause to cheat, but never do because they simply lack any real option to do so. That may not be enough for some men and they’ll extend that cause into creating their own options to do so; they hit up a prostitute, or put themselves into situations where they could cheat. Then there are guys like me who have plenty of opportunity to cheat as part of their work, but don’t because they don’t have any real cause to motivate them.

I’d love to speak from some Pollyanna, Promise Keeper’s moral high ground, but I really don’t have a reason to cheat.  That isn’t to say I haven’t been tempted, but in the back of my head I know I’ve nailed some comparative girl in my past. I don’t dwell on wondering what it would be like to bang one of my ‘pour girls’ or the hot receptionist at one of our distributors, because I fondly recall fucking a girl who looked like her 20 years ago. For me, one of the benefits of having lived plate theory (albeit inadvertently) is knowing I climbed that mountain a while ago.

Yes, I love my wife, we have a mutual respect, and were are a good fit, but I don’t feel crushing guilt for finding some other woman attractive. In fact Mrs. Tomassi tells me that when I stop looking at hot women, that’s the day she’ll start to worry. For the last 16 years she’s been someone I could be faithful to. My wife trusts me implicitly; in fact she’s been the inspiration of, or planted the germ of an idea in me about a lot of post topics most of my readers would find surprising. In 2010 I left for a product launch in Aruba. I was surrounded by stunning women, not one of which could be rated lower than an HB8.5. They had put me up in one of the best suites in the hotel. When I told Mrs. Tomassi I’d be gone for 4 days in Aruba she said, “if you’re gonna do any fishing there you’ll need to bring extra cash”. How many married men do you know whose wives would’ve gone ballistic over even the consideration of doing that? How many men’s wives would “forbid” him to go?

Advantages

You also asked if  there’s a particular advantage to monogamy that can’t be achieved in spinning plates, and besides having raised a whip-smart, beautiful, honor-roll-student, 13 y.o. daughter, not really. Does that sound odd or callous? It probably does because I don’t think a comparison of advantage to disadvantage in either lifestyle is really an issue. I think they’re two different ways of living and one is not necessarily better than the other – just different for different people at different phases in life. For the record I’m not anti-marriage, I’m anti-never-saw-it-coming-pollyana-how-could-she-do-this-to-me?-hypergamy’s-a-bitch marriage.

Do I know that marriage is a racket and puts a man legally and socially at an extreme disadvantage? Yes. Am I aware of the divorce fraud industry? Yes. Do I understand that for a woman to achieve her sexual imperatives I necessarily must sacrifice my own? I’ve written volumes about it. Do I know that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to ensure her sexual imperatives? You need to ask? So why get married?

Before he died, I can remember a conversation I had with my father where I was asking him about why he married my mom. I could never get a straight answer out of him, but he wasn’t being elusive. I was younger and unmarried then, now that I’m older I think I understand that he was telling me the truth when he said “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He honestly thought he and my mother could make a life together when they got married in their mid 20s.

The reason I asked him was because I knew virtually nothing about their courtship and how such disparate personalities could come together and thus have me. He passed away back in September of 2010 and I rooted through his old photo albums with my mom. Here was this life my father lived in these photos that I had no inkling of. Shots of my parents years before my brother and I even came into existence. Lots of shots from their sailing days in the early 60s, friends whom I had never heard mention of, and an early life where no children were present. Just from perusing these shots I got a whole new perspective of my old man. He was in love with my mom, my mother who’d left the family in the mid 70s. They divorced when I was about 8 I think, and since then I’ve only ever known them as separate entities.

I think if most guys are honest with themselves, on some level they buy the idea that they and some idyllic woman can live out a plan or be happy together for a lifetime. I honestly couldn’t tell you why I proposed to Mrs. Tomassi. I wasn’t forced by pregnancy or emotionally coerced by some BPD’s neurosis. I can only echo my Dad’s words now, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I still do, and I’m not naive to knowing what could happen, and that women are fully capable of betraying a man after 20 years of marriage. There is no security in marriage.

Men are the true romantics, not women. They talk a good game, but it’s men who are the real slaves to romanticism. It’s men who conceive every romantic gesture. Mrs. Tomassi wears the wedding ring my father picked out for my mom all those years ago. The back story is kind of lost on her, she just loves the ring and life goes on. We want to believe in the fairy tale. We want to believe we’ll be the exception against all odds and every horror story. My father was probably the most uninspired man you’d ever meet when it came to women. He was very analytical, he was very ordered in his life, but he was also a hopeless savior for the women in his life. I wouldn’t call him a White Knight; he was much too rational for chivalry, but he did what he did because even he, the staunch atheist, believed marriage could make you happy. At some point my old man looked at that ring in the jewelry store and thought “yeah, that’s a good one, I could see that on my wife.”

The ‘A’ Guy

 

From the inimitable STR8UP (he knows who he is) in venerated SoSuave archives

Women either HAVE an “A” guy, or they desperately want one. It has something to do with needing that emotional rush.

What does this mean?

It means that if a woman already HAS an “A” guy, you either have to be the right guy at the right time that has what it takes to usurp the crown, or you will be relegated to “B” or “C” status, depending upon her level of attraction.

See, my problem lately is that I have been meeting a fair amount of women who I manage to get to “B” status with, but lately becoming that elusive “A” has proven difficult. I have to give myself credit though. I can honestly say that I DO NOT accept a “C” position, which is basically “friend zone” orbiter, and I am quick to recognize when it’s a losing battle to try to become an “A” guy.

I have seen this play out with women I have been with and even MORE so with other people and their relationships. You meet a chick and get along well. She shows most of the classic signs of high interest when you are WITH her, however when it comes time to get together she flakes. Why does this happen?

Well, lots of times it’s because she might like you, she might even REALLY like you, but unless you got what it takes to dethrone her “A” guy, you are really nothing more than a temporary distraction/ego booster for her.

The “A” guy could be an Alpha ex b/f who cheated on her and dumped her and still calls her from time to time to keep the hook set. Or he could be a guy who she is currently dating who has so far refused to commit to her exclusively. He could even be the guy in the corner office who she has done nothing more than exchanged smiles with, who she has built up in her head to some sort of god-like status. Or, he could be any guy in between.

The point is, there are MILLIONS of women out there who are walking around with their heads in another place, TELLING people they are single, even going on dates, even getting MARRIED TO OTHER MEN, who are actually NOT really single. In their minds they are having a relationship with Tom, Dick, or Harry. Sure, she may be out on a date with YOU. She might even be laughing at your cheeseball humor and touching your leg when she talks to you. But deep down inside she can’t wait to get home to check her facebook or email to see if her fantasy man sent her something.

Basically what I’m saying is that it’s often hard to tell if a woman is secretly longing for another man. All you can do is keep your eyes open, and even then it’s tough when a chick is flipping her hair and leaning toward you and talking about your next date ten minutes into your first one just to flake on you three days later. But this is why you need to be EXTRA vigilant with women, and not invest too much time into a losing battle.

The easy analysis of this phenomenon is the 5 Minutes of Alpha dynamic, but what the ‘A’ guy represents is the feminine version of ONEitis. While a guy may pine away for months or years for a woman who’ll never reciprocate intimacy, he’s more easily self-convinced of another ONE who will be sexual with him. This is how men are wired; at some point the diminishing returns of an emotional investment gradually drop to nothing when presented with another, more viable, sexual opportunity. Not so for women. Women being primarily emotional beings, sex cements that emotional investment in her ONE. This is precisely why the boyfriend (even an abject Beta boyfriend) to whom she loses her virginity tends to become such an overwhelming emotional proposition for her. Barring a forced situation, more often than not he becomes the ‘A’ guy by default.

Even when this isn’t the case, the A guy becomes the benchmark who sets the bar for her B & C guys. As I proposed in Five Minutes of Alpha, be less concerned with a woman’s notch count and more concerned with the impact the last Alpha lover she had etched on her psyche. Bear in mind it was women, the feminine, who first proposed the notion of the Soulmate, or the ONE, in terms of romanticism, not men. Men have only recently bought into this since at first it seemed to prove “sensitivity” as a means to a woman’s sexuality, and then as an ego-invested part of their own personalities to be used as AFC leverage to keep a straying woman around longer. It’s kind of a using her own weapon against her (which never really works because his approach is rational and hers emotional) dynamic in Beta Game.

There was a topic on the Tom Leykis show on (or around) Valentines day where he asked married or LTR female callers to call in and tell him if they were really with their “Prince Charming” – the guy they idealized, dreamed of, swept them off their feet and was the ONE soulmate for them. Of about 30 callers maybe 2 called in to say they were with their ONE. The rest had very emotionally charged testimonials about their ONE who they still ache for and how their ‘B’ guy, the man they settled for (in most cases had children with) doesn’t know it and could never measure up to their ‘A’ Man.

I think there’s a certain degree of mythologizing the ‘A’ guy since he’s unattainable and therefore really unknowable. That casts him in an idealization that can really never be proven. It’s like women who get addicted to romance novels; the rush comes from the imagining, not the actualizing. However this puts the ‘B’ guy in a bad position – particularly if he’s an AFC who thinks his ship’s finally come in and the girl who settled for him capitulates to marrying him because the situation is hopeless with her ‘A’ guy. Of course this doesn’t have to be limited to marriage; I’ve personally known women in live-in situation who’ve left ‘B’ guy to go back to the original ‘A’ guy to have that self destruct and go back again to ‘B’ guy who welcomes her with open arms because he thinks it makes him the bigger man..

Guilt of Conceit

The Grue on SoSuave had a recent encounter with a rebounding woman that I found interesting. Have a read of his story for the details, but suffice it to say that date #2 pretty much killed the vibe. Over all I think he handled the situation by the book, but this last part I wanted to riff on,..

Irene called again on Sunday to apologize for her behavior during our date…I was cool with her but cordial. Then she repeated that she had “nothing to offer…” and I replied that I am more than cool with that because I like to be with people who have something to offer…and then I said goodbye….[ed. Nails!]

She then sent a text message about 2 hours later saying

“I wish I weren’t afraid and could give you an opportunity with me! Thanks for understanding!”

I guess she just couldn’t resist getting a jab in…I don’t think I’ll reply at all…

Grue played this perfectly, but this last text wasn’t a jab, it was meant to affirm for herself that she’s still a good person. Think back to your plugged-in AFC experiences. Ever wonder why a woman who not only rejected you, but completely disrespected your efforts to prove you were the perfect boyfriend felt compelled to making things right after the rejection? Women cannot bear the thought that someone, somewhere might think they’re a bitch, psychotic, or may not actually like them “for them”. It’s like they can’t sleep at night knowing that someone doesn’t like them. Proportionally this can be attributed to women’s innate need for attention and the fear of social ostracization they learn in early childhood, but it goes a step deeper than this.

The problem is that when a woman seeks your post-rejection understanding it’s not a genuine contrition for women. The average guy thinks, “wow, maybe there’s more to her than I thought if she’s self-aware enough to be apologizing to me”, but the latent purpose is to make herself feel better knowing that ‘you’re cool with her’. The apology is for her, not you.

Even for men that a woman has no sexual attraction for, women will still look for this confirmation of their likability.

This is a very common dynamic for women when a Man outright refuses an LJBF rejection, or he ‘goes dark’ on her with a No Contact cutoff. From a behavioral perspective, she’s seeking to reestablish the reward of his attention (which she didn’t have to earn previously), but beyond that she’s looking to protect her ego by getting him to agree with the ‘correctness’ of her assessment of him in having rejected him.

I can do better

Whenever a woman decides that a man isn’t worth her investment of intimacy, she’s making an estimation of him. That estimation may come immediately in that she’s not physically attracted to him, or as part of a process of evaluating his personality, status, social intelligence, social proof, provisioning capacity and/or any number of other criteria, but the end result is always based on the same hypergamous question: “Can I do better?” which is really the root fundamental of every shit test.

Answering this question with a ‘Yes’ will always involve a certain degree of self-conscious conceit for a woman. And because there are only two parties involved in her rejection (her and him), she has to reconcile for herself having come to the conclusion that ‘she can do better’, with the guilt of being conceited enough to reject the guy. As I stated, this is by order of degree; if a guy is so repulsive to her, if she has perceptually better options available or if she’s more predisposed to sociopathy in general, this guilt of conceit may simply be a non-issue for her to internalize. However, if a man has invested himself in being accommodating, sweet, generous and interested in her, this guilt of conceit will be more pronounced, thus requiring her to seek reconciliation for herself and affirmation from him that “she’s not a bad person” for having concluded that she ‘can do better’.

Right about now you’re thinking, “that’s great Rollo, but how do I benefit from this?” Two ways, first being knowledge is power – understanding women’s internal process and the predictable ego-preservation that results from it will give you a much better gauge in reading a woman’s interest level. It’s part and parcel of the Medium being the Message, so be pragmatic in understanding when you’re being rejected and that her pseudo-contrition is NOT a fresh sign of interest or regret on her part. Men with the best grasp of Amused Mastery are the ones who’ve learned women’s internal processes to the point of predictability – and thus find it amusing.

Second, and more useful, is manipulating that process (assuming the reward is actually worth it). Doubt is a key element in stimulating a woman’s imagination about you. Understanding the dynamic of women’s guilt of conceit from the outset will help in consolidating her interest in you. Hypergamy demands resolution so powerfully in women that evolution has hard-coded it into their subconsciousness. But the enemy of hypergamy is doubt; it’s the guess work that women have to do and the subsequent rationalizations for the decisions based on that doubt that confounds hypergamy. If you suspect that a woman is beginning to find you too accessible, adjust your Game to stimulate doubt.

Man’s Last Stand

TV is for women.

It’s that time again gentlemen, all the splendor, the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance that makes the NFL one of the last bastions of American manhood – Super Bowl Sunday! You’ve earned it boys, today is YOUR day, ordained by the divine creator himself (why else would it be on a Sabbath?) to be reserved for beer, brats and belly-bucks. A day dedicated to unapologetic testosterone fueled manhood. We are MEN hear us belch,..pshhhhhhhht,..click,….

Hey, woah! Wait a minute,.. I WEAR PANTS! What the fuck? Who are these neckbeard herbs singing to in the middle of nowhere? These aren’t men they’re,..schlubs,.. Howie, Terry, Shannon, somebody, tell Dockers that the Super Bowl is for MEN,..no more of this crap OK? We need something masculine like a car commercial, yeah hit us with a muscle car,…pshhhhhhht, click,..

Yeaaaah,..nice sound of horsepow,.. Heyyyy,..wait a minute,…what the hell was all that crap about putting the toilet seat down? Clean up the sink after I shave? Carry your lip balm? Hey, I’m starting to get a funny feeling that maybe I’m being pandered to here,…lets see,…how about another car?…pshhhhhhht, click,..

Yep, definitely being pandered to here. It’s almost as if these advertisers know my wife is watching the Super Bowl with me,……pshhhhhhht, click,..

Wow,..I can’t take it anymore,..can someone just get me a beer? Please? A beer? They can’t possibly ruin a good T&A beer commercial,………pshhhhhhht, click,..

The above dramatization, while humorously inspired, was meant to illustrate a point that many in the manosphere will already be sensitive to, but far too few men are even aware of. One, perhaps unavoidable, problem advertisers have faced since the rise of overt feminization is the difficulty in reaching a male-centric audience in a female-centric society. Women are universally known as the primary consumers across virtually all demographics that matter to modern marketing efforts.

Women buy shit, and they buy shit in such volume and with such predictable patterns and frequency that it eclipsed men’s purchasing habits – and specific marketing efforts – over 2 decades ago. There are literally generations of advertisers and marketers who’ve never known a culture that wasn’t solitarily focused on and directed by the feminine imperative.

This has created a unique challenge for advertisers in this century in tapping into that male-centric marketing. Advertisers see untapped dollars in a male market, but how do they reach the male demographic in a media culture that’s ridiculed them for the last 40 years and praised the feminine above all else in that time? The natural answer is not to market to men at all, but rather the women they’re dependent upon to make the purchasing decisions for them.

You will rarely have a more blatant opportunity to experience this female-as-male purchasing dynamic than by watching the multi-million dollar commercial buys during Super Bowl Sunday. I would caution against Men in the manosphere simply attributing these spots to an ignorant misandry rampant in the advertising world. That’s the easy answer. Even your average plugged-in guy can see the male ridicule, but what’s more important is to recognize the method in the misandry. For instance in the Dove For Men commercial, we have a uniquely male, parodied experience coupled with a call to action to purchase Dove body wash – a product few men would buy for themselves. However the target audience for this commercial is the wives and women – the primary purchasers – in men’s lives to buy the product for them. Can’t reach the male demo? Get his Mommy wife to buy him what he needs.

Advertisers are also cleverly making plays to a shame based  Male Catch 22 – Man Up or Shut Up dynamic. As in the Dodge Charger ad, men are uniquely EXPECTED to suffer through a lifetime of servile misery to benefit women, but his reward is her allowing him to drive the car of his choice. Most women aren’t going to directly purchase a car for their husbands, but the inflection in this commercial is that her influence is what makes this car a reward for him.

If you ever had doubts about the veracity of the female-centric social Matrix we live in today, pay attention to the commercials you watch during the game on Sunday. Don’t take the content of the commercials at face value; that’s what women will do. Instead, ask yourself why did the producers choose that particular type of male to play in the spot? What’s the social message behind the commercial? What gender dynamics do the producers assume will resonate with their target audience? You may think this is over-analytical, but trust me, when a company drops $2M on a Super Bowl spot, they’ve put far more analysis into it than I can cover in a blog post.

Borderline Personality Disorder

“Were you just looking at her?!! WERE YOU?!!,..I bet you just wanna fuck her don’t you?,.. DON’T YOUUU!!!”

One curious aspect of the manosphere community is it’s tendency to pick up on what I’d call ‘pet pathologies’. It’s very easy and comforting to ascribe a general lack of social intelligence or a retardation in social maturity on Asperger’s Syndrome. I’m not suggesting that Asperger’s isn’t a legitimate pathology, but I think the frequency with which men will conveniently attribute their social awkwardness to it delegitimizes the real illness. Most Betas often report a discomfort with approaches and Game in general because of varying degrees of social anxiety that they’ve internalized for the better part of their lives.

So, it’s a much simpler premise to attribute this to a psychological disorder than to admit that they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them in unlearning the hinderances the’ve been conditioned to believe about themselves for so long. I’m not saying guys (why is it rarely women?) don’t have Asperger’s, but I think some real introspection is due before diagnosing it for themselves. Another neurosis that gets attributed to women in the manosphere is BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder:

*DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships,  self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following: Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days). Chronic feelings of emptiness. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights). Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

I struggled with deciding whether to write about this because in our current intergender environment, it’s very easy to conveniently ascribe these symptoms and tendencies to the ‘psycho bitches’ that men often complain about. She’s crazy in bed, but she’s also crazy out of bed. I would doubt that there’s a man dating in the last decade who hasn’t encountered one or some combination of neurosis listed in this clinical diagnosis with a woman he’s dating or has dated.

As the gender landscape has developed in the last 40 years, so to has the variety of  psychoses. So it’s for this reason that I think understanding true BPD neurosis in comparison to the common anxieties of insecurity that women are prone needs to be explored.

True BPDs

I had an LTR with a BPD woman for 4 years when I was in my 20s and I can tell you from experience, it’s nothing to laugh at or take lightly. It’s particularly damaging for AFCs locked into a BPDs negative feedback loop, especially when he’s developed a soul destroying ONEitis with her and associates himself as the source of her depression / psychosis.

True BPDs progressively convince their victims that they are the source of her neurosis. You are not yourself, you are who she’s molding you to be, and eventually you’ll come to believe that it’s in your best interest – indeed, your responsibility – to be who she wants you to be to sustain that neurosis.

You will gradually give up on your family and friends (or they give up on you), you will drop all ambitions and passions that directly focus on you, and you will abandon any genuine, independent identity you held for yourself, all because these are threats to the neurotic narrative she constructs for herself and lives out.

She will reward your conversion to her psychosis with the intermittent reward of crazy hot sex, but this is simply the reinforcer to keep you locked into her narrative. The YOU you know will cease to exist and the character she creates for you will take over. This is especially true for beta chumps who see their BPD as their best, only option for a long term romantic prospect. She’s an HB 9 (to him) and he’s never fucked better than a 5 in his whole life, so the risk of catastrophic loss is real and ever-present. It’s fate that brought them together, and if he can only help allay her fears they can live happily ever after.

In the latter stages of a BPD relationship you will get to the point where her overt cuckolding of you is an acceptable situation. You think you’ll mitigate it by negotiating some “open relationship” status with her. You will internalize the reasoning that negotiating for her desire is preferable to losing her. You’ll propose that an open relationship means you’re both free to fuck other parties, when in reality it’s the only way you can rationalize for yourself the fact that she’s going to go fuck other guys, and you’re going to accept it because you’re locked into her neurosis. It’s your fault she feels compelled to fuck other guys – and you’ll believe it.

That, or the mere suggestion of you being interested in sex with another woman will send her into fits of jealous, histrionic rage. You’re living in fear. You’re afraid she’ll commit suicide if you uproot yourself (a classic BPD unspoken threat), but trust me on this, it’ll be you who swallows a bullet long before she ever will. I’ve personally known two men who’ve done just this, and another who hung himself as the result of a BPD relationship.

I know it seems like most of the friends you still do have are simply passing you off by saying “get out” and move on, but your life literally depends on you doing so. Cutting you off and disengaging you from external perspectives about your twisted relationship is essential to a BPD’s neurosis. Eventually your friends and family will give up on the ‘new you’.

Also, I must add this, when and if you do finally muster the self-concern enough to actually leave her, expect a complete about-face in her mentality and behavior. The one thing a true BPD loathes more than her victim is the thought of having to ensnare another. There are plenty of other Beta chumps ready to fill that role, but the comfort and easy predictability you represent to her in the present builds an emotional dependency. BPDs will fight like wild animals not to lose their victim, so expect an extinction burst from her the likes of which are unimaginable.

For a guy so accustomed to her neurotic behavior, his first impression is that she’s making some real change for him in order to “improve the relationship.” It’s not, but so radical a shift in her behavior will convince you otherwise, and cause you to doubt her deception, particularly when you yourself have no options and believe you’ll never do any better than her.