Psychology – Page 5

September 2, 2015

Solipsism I

“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.” – Hillary Clinton

I had planned on using Hillary’s now infamous quote for an upcoming post outlining the distinction between women’s innate solipsism and an acculturated narcissism, but fate delivered me a much more profound use for this quote last week (we’ll get to that in part II).

Before I dig in here I feel it’s kind of incumbent upon me to point out that I in no way align with, nor endorse Hillary’s political or ideological perspectives, and I think it should go without saying that I diametrically disagree with her feminine-primary social agendas.

That said, if you ever need a better quote to explain the realities of feminine solipsism I think I’d be at a loss to give you one. A lot of men, even Red Pill aware men, have a hard time understanding how solipsism fits concretely into the feminine psyche. The social conditioning and upbringing that predisposes us towards an egalitarian equalist mindset rebels against thinking women and men would have different psychological firmware. Equalism teaches us to expect that men and women’s needs share mutual origins and our impulses are so similar that any difference is insignificant.

That egalitarian frame predisposes us to consider that ‘not all women are like that‘ or to disassociate the idea that men and women could be anything but functionally equal agents. As a result we get convenient distractions to confuse our looking for comparatives to should anyone (or thing) challenge an equalist answer.

Simply put, we get rationales like “Oh well, men do it too”, or worse, or any opposite comparison that leads us away from considering the truth that men and women are psychologically, biologically and sociologically different; with different motives and different strategies which they employ to meet their different imperatives. And often these imperatives are at odds with the best interests of the other sex.

Separating Differences

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

It is the fundamental differences in either sex’s imperatives, acculturation and biology that creates this conflict. Of course, men and women have come together for each other’s mutual benefit (and love, and enjoyment) to create families and sustain our race for millennia, however, this mutually beneficial union does not originate from mutual imperatives or sexual strategies.

When I explain how women hold an opportunistic concept of love, while men hold an idealistic one, the resistance to accept that observable, behavioral, reality is rooted in a blank-slate belief that men and women are fundamentally the same. So, when we read a statement from a woman (to say nothing of a high status one) such as Hillary’s, we either scoff at the oblivious audacity of it because it is so counter to our (male) imperative’s interests, or we nod in ascension in the feminized belief that what best serves the female imperative necessarily is the best interest of the male imperative.

This is an illustration of the fundamental difference in the interpretation of experience between the sexes.

From a solipsistically oblivious female perspective what Hillary is expounding on here is entirely true. From a perspective that prioritizes feminine Hypergamy above all else, these three sentences make perfect, pragmatic sense. The idea that men losing their lives in warfare would make them victims at all (much less the primary victims) isn’t even an afterthought; all that matters is the long term security and continued provisioning of women and their imperatives.

Solipsism, not Narcissism

A lot of newly Red Pill aware men get confused at my using the term ‘solipsism‘ when I refer to this female-specific obliviousness to any concern – or lesser prioritized concern – of anything outside their immediate existential needs. The confusion comes from men who want for a similar justice to the one I outlined in Our Sister’s Keeper. Self-importance or narcissism would seem to be a more appropriate term for this dynamic, but I disagree.

Female solipsism in and of itself is not necessarily a net negative in the larger scope of human survival and evolution. On the surface that may seem a bit outrageous, but it’s only outrageous insofar as women’s solipsistic natures come into conflict with the biological and social imperatives of men. This solipsism is the necessary result of a feminine survival instinct that’s helped preserve women and their offspring in a violent, chaotic and uncertain evolution.

Recognizing the importance of feminine solipsism is not an endorsement of the anti-social, and often cruel, byproducts of it.

No doubt, men who’ve been on the sharp end of this will grind their teeth at the inevitable narcissism that becomes an extension of women’s solipsism. I’ll agree. Socially we’re living in an era of unprecedented (western) narcissism manifested in a vast majority of women.

At no other time in history have women become more accustomed to perceived entitlements of personal security, ubiquitous social control and relative assurances of optimizing Hypergamous imperatives. At no other time have women’s sexual strategies been of such primary importance to society. However, this narcissism is the result of an acculturation and learned social priorities that predispose women to expectations that border on arrogance. Over recent generations that narcissism has become learned and fostered in women to the point that narcissism is openly embraced as a feminine strength – women believe it’s their due after a long suffrage.

Women’s solipsistic nature however is an integral part of their evolved psychological firmware. Solipsism is the evolved, selected-for result of self-preservation necessities that ensured the survival of our species. As men we get frustrated by this intrinsic nature; a nature that puts women’s imperatives as their primary mental point of origin. As any newly aware Red Pill man will attest, coming to this realization is a very hard truth to accept. It’s cruel and contrary to what the First Set of Books have taught him he should expect and build his life around.

Furthermore, it’s cruel in the respect that this solipsism neither aligns with the romantic, Blue Pill hopes he’s been raised to accept, but also the egalitarian, equal and level playing field ideology he’s been conditioned to believe he should alter his priorities to accommodate for women; and in turn he can expect from women. As I stated earlier, coming to terms with men and women’s differing concepts of love is a tough disillusionment, but this difference in concept is simply one of many a man must come to terms with.

When I wrote Empathy I got taken to task about women’s capacity to feel empathy to a greater degree than do men. It’s not that women cannot feel empathically (a shared experience), my argument was that the idea that women feel a ‘greater’ empathy than men was a social convention with the latent purpose of masking women’s innate solipsism.

That wasn’t a very popular idea. The notion that women are the mothers and nurturers was predictably spelled out, but with regards to empathizing and caring for men the primary concern of women was worry over their own and their children’s well being before that of their men should they become incapacitated. Again, this is a cruel truth, but also a pragmatic and survival based one.

Mental Point of Origin

Women’s mental point of origin begins with their own self-importance, and the overriding importance of their own and their offspring’s survival. I’ve had women readers lambast me that they couldn’t possibly be so influenced by solipsism because they put their children’s wellbeing before their own. However it is just this solipsism that predisposes women to seeing their children as extensions of themselves and their own identities. And the good news is that this dynamic is one reason the human species has been so successful.

The following was a comment from Starve the Beast on the TRP subredd:

Women are bad at reasoning, but good at rationalization.

Let that sink in for a minute. One cannot rationalize without the faculty for reason. So are women really bad at reasoning? No, actually they’re great at it.

The difference is that women don’t place as much value on Truth as they do upon self-preservation, and therefore their reasoning processes do not abort when self-contradiction is reached. They’ll just rationalize their way out of that too, if exposed.

Ultimately, the so-called hamster reflects an underlying difference in value systems more than in reasoning ability.

Women can learn to sublimate their solipsism. In fact, cultures and progressive societies have been founded on sublimating female solipsism. Women can and do learn critical thinking quite regularly. Women can learn and function within a society that forces them to compromise their sexual strategies and mitigates the worst abuses that solipsism would visit on men (and themselves). Women can learn to be empathetic towards men as well as live within a social order that looks like mutual justice and fairness.

But the fact that these civil dynamics should need to be something a woman learns only reinforces the biological and evolved influences of female solipsism as women’s mental point of origin. The parallel to this is men’s learning to sublimate intrinsic parts of themselves – primarily their sexuality – to reinforce prosocial interaction in society.

Women dislike the idea that their experience is colored by solipsism. It sounds bad, and it runs counter to what they believe are sacrifices on their own part to help others. That may be so, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to discount those investments, but they come from a learned compassion that must overcome an innate solipsism. That ‘me and my babies first’ mental point of origin isn’t necessarily a bad thing either – it’s only when that learned compassion and humility are superseded by it that anti-social behaviors and hubris arise.

I expect the predictable criticism will be that men are also self-important, and / or all humans are intrinsically selfish fucks. In part II I’ll elaborate more on this, but for now it’s important to grasp that female solipsistic nature is less about selfish individualism and more about pragmatic survival.

Many a male reader of my Hierarchies of Love series grated against the idea that a conventional model of love would progress from Men to women, women to children, children to puppies, etc. That model is a direct reflection of a uniquely female solipsism that seemingly discards men’s reciprocal emotional investment in women. However it is also the same dynamic that predisposes women to desire men who can decisively control their environment as well as dominate them sexually and emotionally.

In part II I’ll outline more examples of feminine solipsism, how it’s reflected on the individual and societal level and how a man might best use an understanding of it to his advantage.

June 22, 2015

Adaptations – Part II

When I first published the comparative SMV graph a few years ago one of the first criticisms was that the age comparisons between men and women seemed too concrete and too specific to contemporary times. I tried to make concessions for this then, but when I was writing that post it was at first meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Still, I try to write with the presupposition that critics will take things either too literally or too figuratively. I knew that the literati then and now would think, “…well, yes it’s a good outline, but you’re looking at the SMV from the perspective of 2012 and society was much different 50, 70, 100, 2,000 years ago so this graph is flawed…”

My SMV graph was never meant to be some canonical tablet handed to me from the almighty. I thought of it then, and still think of it now, as a very good workable outline for how men and women’s comparative SMV relates to the other. This has been borne out in many other statistics from individual studies sent to me by readers or just my coming across them since I created that graph.

That said, and in relation to where I’m going with this Adaptations series, those critics aren’t wrong to suggest that this outline would be subject to the social environments and simple physical realities of earlier times, and likely some times yet to come.

Take what I’m about to delve into here with a bit of salt; I’m not a historian. One of my favorite figures from the civil war ear was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. If you’ve seen the movie Glory you know who I’m referencing here. This young man was 23 when he enlisted and 25 when he was promoted to Major and then Colonel. In that time Shaw saw some pretty grisly shit, including the battle of Antietam.

I’d seen the movie when it first came out in 1989, but after watching it again for a class assignment I had a new appreciation for the real man who was Robert Shaw. I saw the film using what was just becoming my Red Pill lens. It struck me that the realities of that era forced men to become Men much sooner than men do today. The realities of our times give us a leisure the men of Shaw’s age simple couldn’t imagine. The realities of that time necessitated a quick maturation to bear the burden of heavy responsibilities. Those burdens were much more imperative then, but a 23 year old is still a 23 year old.

I thought about how I’d spent my own years between the ages of 23-25 when I was at the peak of my semi-rock star tail chasing in the late 80’s Hollywood scene. I began to really think about the differences in the social and physical environments of the 1860s and the 1980s-90s. I’ve always joked that men don’t become Men until they’re 30. Even on the SMV graph the point at which I attribute men’s real ascendency to their peak SMV at around age 30, but this wasn’t always the case in the past.

Men (comparatively) live longer lives as a result of health and medical advances, but (at least in westernizing culture) it takes much more time and personal investment, as well as acculturation for men to realize their personal potential. Men’s burden of performance wasn’t much different in prior eras, but the timeframe necessary to reach a man’s peak potential was much more accelerated.

So to address the concerns of the temporal critics of the SMV graph, yes, this graph might look a bit different to the men and women of the 19th century. Considering lifespans of the era and the social conditions then, the ages during which a woman would reach her own peak might be around 17, and a man’s may be 25, however the same curves of the bell wouldn’t change drastically. Men adapted to the conditions their environment dictated to them then in much the same way they did before and after the sexual revolution. And this adaptation came as the result of what was expected of them as their burden of performance, as well as what their social leisures would permit them.

Love American Style

Into the 70’s the new social contract of the Free Love generation began to take a new shape. Bear in mind that this new equalitarian contract was based on the hopeful presumption that both sexes would mutually honor the “what’s on the inside is what counts” normalization of attraction. Under this contract women’s Hypergamous natures could flourish, while men’s unlimited access sexual strategy could ostensibly be realized.

Of course these lofty, higher-consciousness, presumptions were meant to supersede human nature and an evolved sexual arousal function based on human biology. One thing that still thwarts ideological feminism today is that its perceived goal states contradict human beings’ natural states. This contradiction gets narratively blamed on men not wanting to cooperate with feminism, but even the most ardent feminist is still guilty of her own biology and arousal triggers contradicting herself.

Biology trumps conviction. People get fidgety when I apply this in a religious context, but it’s equally applicable to feminism and really any ideology that under-appreciates human nature and the realities of its conditions.

As the new sexual landscape began to solidify, men began to adapt their own sexual strategies to the conditions of this fast and loose environment. Just prior to the Disco Generation hardcore pornography began its path to the ubiquitous porn we know today. The sexual restraint necessitated by the realities of prior generations loosened in light of widespread hormonal birth control and safe(er) legal abortion.

While Hypergamy was effectively unleashed, the women of this era hadn’t fully grasped the scope of it being so or what it would become. Acceptable premarital sex, abortion and unilaterally feminine controlled birth control meant that women had an unprecedented degree of control over their Hypergamous decision making. I doubt many women of the time understood this, but the only real control men had (and still have now) over women’s breeding and birthing outcomes was now grounded in the psychological (Game) or the physical (arousal). Provisioning was still a consideration for women, but the division between short-term and long-term pairing became more stark.

As I mentioned here in the beginning, a slowing of the maturation process was the inevitable result of women’s freedom of Hypergamous choice. Short-term Alpha Fucks no longer posed the same societal and personal risks of a pre-birth control generation, thus long-term pairing choices (Beta bucks) began to be delayed. The ideological cover story was one of women expecting men to “love their insides” despite their age, psychological baggage or physical condition.

Women’s preoccupation with The Wall was ostensibly mitigated by the Free Love social contract that men would honor their end of the higher-consciousness equalitarian dream of a mutually agreed attraction based on intrinsic qualities. The biological realities for both sexes was much different.

Women trusted they could be sexually ‘free’ without social stigmatization, but the reality was that the long-term needs of Hypergamy could be postponed in what would eventually become a Sandbergian sexual strategy. The more Alpha men of the time – ones in touch with the visceral nature of women and themselves – understood the incredibly boon this represented to them.

It’s important to bear in mind that Hypergamy was not the openly embraced dynamic it’s come into today. Thus, the unspoken, secretive nature of Hypergamy was something a man who ‘just got it’ instinctively understood and women were aroused by it.

Machismo

During the 70s ‘Macho’ men began to adapt to a new paradigm. They adapted to the reality that women were conflicted by the Free Love paradigm. These men embraced both the sexual openness expected of women, but they also understood that in spite of the social contract of love being based on intrinsic qualities, women still wanted to fuck (with abandon) the men with extrinsic arousal triggering qualities. The physical began to take priority above the emotional pretentiousness.

The macho quality could take different forms. Whether is was the good ole boy of the south or the Tony Manero at Studio 54, understanding the mindset is what’s important here.

Macho men in the discos and key parties of the 70s figured out they could ‘Game’ the old paradigm of non-exclusivity paired with birth control by re-embracing (with disco era gusto) a masculinity that had been abandoned just a decade earlier. Unlimited access to unlimited sexuality was for men who overtly challenged the Free Love preconditions. They enjoyed the rewards of its expectations of women while rebounding off the self-expectations of the Beta men who were still cooperating with the Free Love social contract.

This era is an interesting parallel to our own. I think much of the Red Pill resentment coming from men still plugged into a Blue Pill mindset is rooted in a similar perception that they’re playing by an acceptable set of rules that “men with Game” are exploiting for their own selfish ends. What they don’t realize is that their Blue Pill interpretations are a designed part of a social paradigm that supports feminine primacy. Game works because, like the macho men of the 70s, it’s primarily based on women’s inborn psychology and the visceral realities of women’s biological impulses.

Beta men in the 70s still believed that the Free Love mindset was equally and mutually beneficial for both sexes since it was supposedly based on a freedom from performance for themselves while freeing women from sexual repression and (covertly) from the reality of the Wall. In reality the Free Love paradigm put men at a disadvantage by giving women almost total control of Hypergamy and the time in which to realize short term mating and long term provisioning.

So these men’s resentment of the Alphas of the era is understandable when you consider that their visceral attractiveness was observably and behaviorally arousing to women who were supposed to idealistically love them for who they were not what they were. These men represented a return to that burden of performance they’d hoped to avoid in the Free Love contract.

These Alpha men understood women’s base impulses then, and that understanding became an integral part of their “just getting it” attraction. However, as we’ll see in the next part of this series, these men would eventually become the butt of their own joke as the Feminine Imperative fluidly transitioned into a new social paradigm of Fem-powerment developing in the 80s and reaching its apex in the 90s.

The arousing ‘macho’ men, the Alphas of the era, would systematically become the most ridiculed parodies and caricatures of masculinity as women came into a better understanding of the power they were only beginning to realize and the Beta men took their perceived revenge. And likewise men adapted to this new paradigm based on the same visceral reality women’s sexuality is fundamentally based on.

June 9, 2015June 9, 2015

In Defense of Evo-Psych

You’ll have to forgive this exceptionally long post here, but for many critics of (and in) the manosphere of evolutionary psychology the following post articulates things better than I could. Some in the ‘sphere seem to think a reliance on evo-psych is some form of blind faith at worst; some sort of creative, purpose-built guesswork at best.

It is not.

When I apply anything regarding evolutionary psychology on Rational Male I approach it in the most deductive manner I can see fit insofar as connecting the behavioral dots with the social apparatus I observe. While Red Pill awareness isn’t reliant upon evo-psych it is founded upon a similar observationally deductive methodology.

Evo-psych is a very broad school of psychology that is not just limited to intersexual relations. While I do largely embrace the foundations of evo-psych, it’s important to remember that my particular education revolves around behaviorism.

The following re-blog here is a collection of ten answers to common criticisms of evolutionary psychology by Dr. David P. Schmitt. I’ve pared it down a bit for readability, but do see the link for all the sources cited.

Emphasis my own.

A few years ago, I was giving an invited presentation to an audience of mostly sociologists and family studies professors on the topic of evolution and human reproductive strategies. I mentioned that some social scientists hold false beliefs about “evolutionary psychology,” such as the mistaken assumption that evolutionary psychologists think all men are interested in bedding as many women as possible (often called short-term mating), whereas all women are only interested in marrying a single man and staying faithful to him for a lifetime (i.e., long-term mating).

When I tried to dispel this common misperception by noting, for instance, that evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized women are just as designed for short-term mating as men are—in some ways even more so such as women’s heightened desires for cues to genetic quality in short-term mates—an audible gasp swept through the conference hall. I kid you not, I could see rows of people who looked genuinely horrified. I was a little taken aback, so I asked an audience member near the front row who had her hand over her mouth if something was unclear, to which she proclaimed, “that’s not the evolutionary psychology I know.”

When I tried to explain that women’s evolved short-term mating desires have been studied by evolutionary psychologists since the early 1990s and the topic remains a very active area of inquiry today, heads swiveled in disbelief. My subsequent Power Point slides chock-full of studies confirming women’s specially designed short-term mating psychology were falling, I feared, on an auditorium of deaf ears (or blind eyes, I suppose). Alas, this stereotype about evolutionary psychology wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

It seems to me many critics of evolutionary psychology cling steadfastly to false stereotypes of the field, both theoretical and empirical. This is partly because so much evolutionary psychological research has been produced over the last 25 years it is hard for even evolutionary-informed scholars themselves to keep up (for an up-to-date review, I recommend Buss’ new edition of The Evolutionary Psychology Handbook[1]). Add to that the methodological breadth of different techniques used by evolutionary scholars to test hypotheses about the adaptive design of the human mind, and it is understandably difficult to know what all evolutionary researchers have been, and currently are, up to as active Darwinian scientists.

Perhaps more than other social scientists, evolutionary psychologists use an incredible variety of research methods, ranging from self-report surveys and behavioral field test experiments, to investigations involving genetics, hormones, and neuroscience, to cross-species and cross-cultural comparisons, to ethnographies of foraging societies and computer modeling of artificial intelligences[2] [3] [4]. To be aware of contemporary evolutionary psychology requires broad and deep knowledge of many scholarly disciplines, and a lot of evolutionary psychology’s critics simply do not know what they do not know about the field as it is practiced today.

Beyond simply not knowing about the empirical breadth and methodological richness of modern evolutionary science, many critics exhibit a certain kind of “empirical nihilism” toward any psychological findings even remotely portrayed as supporting evolutionary hypotheses. For instance, when one points to a set of studies that respond to a specific criticism, some critics reply with a “yes, but” attitude and set forth new criticisms requiring more evidence (sort of a serial “moving the goalposts” maneuver).

Now, in science extreme skepticism is generally a good thing. For scientists, there are no capital “T” Truths, and every claim about reality is tentatively true with a small “t” and is always adjustable as more evidence is accumulated over time. Sometimes, though, this attitude is more than healthy skepticism about a particular empirical finding and is, instead, clearly an attitude of irrefutable empirical nihilism toward evolutionary psychology studies in particular. As an example of this type of unshakeable attitude of disbelief, I list below 10 of the more common “yes, but” criticisms of evolutionary findings on women’s long-term mate preferences. It’s an illustrative (not exhaustive) list of just how impenetrable some scholar’s beliefs are when it comes to considering evidence that our evolved human mind might be something more than a domain-general learning mechanism writing on an asexual, ungendered blank slate.

Women’s Long-Term Mate Preferences

Looking across the animal kingdom, one cannot help but notice that members of most species tend to mate non-randomly. Whether it is peahens preferring peacocks with more elaborate trains[5] or female common chimpanzees preferring males who possess higher social dominance[6], males and females of most species display adaptive forms of preferential mate choice.

Evolutionary psychologists were among the first to propose similar sex differences might exist in human mate preferences. For instance, evolutionary psychologists hypothesized that women may possess specially-designed long-term mate preferences for cues to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources to her and their offspring[7] [8] [9]. Such cues include a man’s status and prestige which, depending on local culture, may involve hunting ability, physical strength, or other locally-relevant attributes, as well as his ambition, work ethic, intelligence, social dominance, maturity, and slightly older age[10] [11]. Not all women desire the highest value long-term mate at all times, of course, but it is expected that women’s long-term mate preferences should be marked by some degree of “special design” that is reliably observable using the methodological richness of modern evolutionary psychological science.

One way to evaluate whether women possess long-term mate preferences for cues to status-related traits is to directly ask people whether they prefer those attributes in long-term mates (via methods such as self-report surveys), and then compare the intensity of responses of women and men. When doing so, psychologists typically evaluate the degree of sexual differentiation using the dstatistic, with an observed d value of ±.20 being considered a “small” sex difference, ±.50 is a “moderate” sex difference, and ±.80 is a “large” sex difference[12]. Negative d values typically indicate women score more highly on a particular preference, whereas positive values indicate men score more highly.

Buss and Barnes[13] were among the first to evaluate whether women (more than men) prefer cues related to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources. For instance, they found women more strongly prefer long-term mates who have a “good earning capacity” (a large sex difference, d = -0.82), “are a college graduate” (d = -0.60), and “possess intelligence” (d = -0.19). Obviously, these findings are not definitive proof that men and women differ in the evolved design of long-term mate preferences. The findings are merely tests of evolutionary-guided hypotheses, and the tests were supportive of specially-designed sex differences existing in human mate preferences. Still, some critics challenge these results, arguing yes, but…

1) Yes, but…that is just one study. One cannot trust the results of just one study. Evolutionary psychologists need to conduct many more studies before I am convinced these effects are legitimate, let alone evidence of evolved psychology. I’m sure many other studies wouldn’t find sex differences in mate preferences.

Actually, most investigations of sex differences in mate preferences have been supportive of these hypotheses (to be honest, virtually all studies have). In 1992, Feingold[14] meta-analytically reviewed the extant literature (including 32 independent samples) on self-reported mate preferences across college students and community samples and found women more greatly desired socioeconomic status (d = -0.69), ambition (d = -0.67), and intelligence (d = -0.30) in potential long-term mates. Numerous additional investigations have since replicated these basic sex differences in long-term mate preferences among college students[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]. For instance, a recent study focused on women’s mate preferences for men with the ability to invest in them, revealing that college women desire a man who has earned his money (compared to other sources), ostensibly reflective of the aforementioned qualities (ambition, work ethic, intelligence), and that this effect is strongest in the long-term mating context[23].

2) Yes, but…those studies are mostly with college students. People in the real world (e.g., representative samples of adults) won’t display these stereotypical sex differences of youth.

Actually, yes they do[24] [25] [26]. For instance, Sprecher and her colleagues[27] examined sex differences in mate preferences across a nationally-representative sample of the United States and found women, more than men, valued a long-term mate who had a steady job (d = -0.73), earned more than they did (d = -0.49), was highly educated (d = -0.43), and was older by five years (d = -0.67). Young or old[28] [29] [30], gay or straight[31] [32], sex differences in long-term mate preferences for status-related attributes tend to reliably emerge.

3) Yes, but…many of those findings are from decades ago. Sex differences in mate preferences are probably not historically stable. They may have existed many decades ago (in the era of Mad Men), but sex differences in mate preferences are surely not present in more recent times.

Actually, yes they are. In a cross-generational analysis of the same mate preference questionnaire administered to Americans from 1939 to 1996, both men and women increased their valuing of good financial prospects and decreased valuing ambition/industriousness over time, but the degree of sex differences in these items largely persisted in strength across more than 50 years[33].

4) Yes, but…that is only when you have people self-report their ideal mate preferences from a pre-chosen list of traits given to them. If you ask them what they really want, say at a minimum, or maybe let them freely design their ideal potential partners, status-related traits aren’t emphasized by women more than men.

Actually, yes they are. Researchers have questioned people about their long-term mate preferences using a wide variety of self-report methodologies. Kenrick and his colleagues[34] asked people what the minimum threshold of possessing a particular attribute would need to be to agree to marry a person. Women, on average, required men’s earning capacity to be in the 70th percentile to be marriageable, whereas men required women to be in the 40th percentile (overall d = -1.41).

Using another nuanced form of self-report, Li[35] compelled men and women to engage in tradeoffs among various cues when intentionally designing a desirable long-term mate. Women devoted the most of their limited budget toward their mates’ social level (33%), whereas for men social level was of moderate budgetary importance (17%). Across a series of studies[36], researchers using this tradeoff paradigm concluded that women, but not men, consider a long-term mate’s social status a “necessity” and not a “luxury.” Indeed, when forced to make decisions with very limited budgets, sex differences in long-term mate preferences are stronger than with typical self-report surveys.

Self-report surveys also reveal men, more than women, appear effective at displaying status-related traits to the opposite sex[37]. Overall, self-report methods (via ratings, rankings, trade-offs, nominations, or open-ended questions[38]) consistently support the hypothesis that women possess long-term mate preferences for cues to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources.

5) Yes, but…this is only because women are denied access to resources themselves. If women have higher status themselves, they would not prefer men with high status. It’s just basic rationality, not evolved psychology, causing these sex differences in mate preferences for status.

Actually, it is a compelling test of women’s long-term mate preferences for men’s status-related traits (including their ability and willingness to provide resources) to evaluate whether their expressed preferences disappear when women have ample resources of their own. It could be women only prefer cues to men’s ability and willingness to provide resources because women are structurally denied access to resources[39].

Addressing this alternative explanation, Townsend and his colleagues have found women in medical school[40] and law school[41] are more selective of a future mate’s financial status, not less. Similarly, Wiederman and Allgeier[42] found college women’s expected income was positively associated with their ratings of the importance of a potential long-term mate’s earning capacity. Regan[43] found as women’s mate value goes up, so does their insistence on men’s high status and resources (i.e., they “want it all”; see also[44]). Having higher personal status and resource-related traits appears not to attenuate women’s preferences for cues to men’s ability and willingness to provide resources. Instead, at least in the USA, women achieving high status themselves appears to make their long-term mate preferences for men’s high status even more intense!

6) Yes, but…that is only true in the United States. Americans happen to live in a culture with conspicuous gender stereotypes about mate preferences that the rest of the world does not share. If you look at more gender egalitarian cultures, in Scandinavia for instance, sex differences in preferences for status-related attributes “disappear” (as claimed by Marks[45]).

Actually, no, they do not. Numerous studies have found sex differences in mate preferences for status-related attributes are prevalent across cultures[46] [47] [48]. Lippa[49] conducted an internet sampling of 53 nations and Zentner and Mitura[50] conducted an internet sampling across 10 nations and both studies found 100% of cultures displayed expected sex differences, with women demonstrating especially heightened long-term mate preferences for good financial prospects, social status, ambition, and older age.

Some researchers have found the magnitude of sex differences in mate preferences for status-related attributes shifts from a large/medium effect size to a more moderate medium/small effect size in nations with higher gender egalitarianism. Zentner and Mitura found exactly this pattern of results after placing nations into three groups, low gender egalitarian cultures (within which women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more than men, d = -0.65), medium gender egalitarian cultures (women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more, d = -0.53), and high gender egalitarian cultures (women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more, d = -0.48). Hence, sex differences in the preference for Ambition-Industriousness in long-term mates were reduced (though not by much, and were still medium in terms of effect size) in nations with higher levels of gender egalitarianism.

Most other sex differences in status-related mate preferences also were attenuated from larger to more moderate levels in Zentner and Mitura’s sample of nations that were higher in gender egalitarianism (e.g., Good Financial Prospects went from d = -1.04, to d = -0.84, to d = -0.55; Favorable Social Status went from d = -0.67, to d = -0.42, to d = -0.31). In most cases, these reductions were caused by women preferring status-related traits less in high gender egalitarian nations, though in many cases men’s preferences for status-related attributes also were reduced in high gender egalitarian nations (which seems counter to the logic of men appreciating women’s status-related traits more as women enter the workforce in high gender egalitarian nations). One thing is clear, sex differences in long-term mate preferences for status-related traits do not “disappear” in gender egalitarian cultures. They may only be moderate in size, but we see them just fine.

Importantly, Zentner and Mitura also found in low gender egalitarian nations, men valued Good Looks only a little more than women, d = 0.24; in medium gender egalitarian nations, men’s valuation of Good Looks was higher still than women’s, d = 0.43; and in the highest gender egalitarian nations, men’s valuation of Good Looks was the most different from women’s, d = 0.51. Thus, contrary to the expectation that gender egalitarianism always reduces sex differences, Zentner and Mitura found sex differences in Good Looks are largest in nations with the highestgender egalitarianism. What!? Actually, these findings are not unusual, as high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51]. If the sociopolitical gender egalitarianism found in Scandinavian nations is supposed to produce smaller psychological sex differences, it’s not doing a very good job of it.

7) Yes, but…all these studies showing men and women want different things in potential partners are merely evidence of gendered narratives as measured by self-report surveys. If ever tested in the real world, women would not preferentially choose or be affected by a partner’s status-related attributes more than men.

Actually, there have been dozens of studies of real world mating and mating-related cognition, and almost all find that women do choose and are affected by a partner’s status-related traits more than men are.

Feingold[52] meta-analytically examined what women ask for and what men advertise in public, real-world personal advertisements and found, as expected, women more than men ask for cues to willingness and ability to provide resources (e.g., 27% of women ask for high socioeconomic status compared to 7% of men). Men who advertise such status-related cues actually receive more responses from women, as well. For example, in a study that experimentally manipulated real-life personal ads, ads placed by men noting they were financially successful elicited the most interest, whereas for women physical attractiveness was the key[53]. In a study of Polish personal ads, the top four cues displayed by men that received responses from women were good education, older age, high resource levels, and tall height[54]. In a study of mail order brides from Colombia, Russia, and the Philippines, women universally listed ambition, status, and wealth as among their most desired attributes in a future husband[55].

Numerous studies of marital patterns also have found women tend to desire (and actually marry) men who are slightly older than they are, regardless of women’s own age[57] [58]. As men get older, in contrast, they tend to desire and marry younger and younger women[59]. Women have been found to preferentially marry higher status men across such diverse cultures as the Kipsigis of Kenya, the Hausa of West Africa, Trinidadians, and Micronesian islanders, among many others[60]. It is true that some speed-dating studies in urban settings find women do not choose higher status men more often as dates, but these studies are limited by having only high status men in their samples (no homeless men allowed) and potentially including those who are interested in short-term mating (women’s short-term mate preferences focus more on gene quality, not status). In speed-dating studies with low status men included, and when the context is explicitly long-term mating only, women do pick higher status men more often for dates[61].

There also are a wide range of cognitive studies that test for women’s desires for status-related traits without explicitly asking them what they want. For instance, as part of a study ostensibly helping a university develop a dating service, Kenrick and his colleagues[62] experimentally manipulated whether already-mated men and women were exposed to a target date either very high in dominance or very low in dominance. They found women, but not men, were less committed to their current long-term mating partner after being exposed to a high dominance member of the opposite sex. Merely being experimentally exposed to a man with very high dominance lowered women’s commitment to their current mate, and did so without consciously asking women about their preferences for dominance.

Similarly, exposure to physically attractive women appears to evoke in men desires to fulfill women’s evolved preferences, such as increasing men’s attention toward and desires to possess resources and to display ambition, creativity, independence, and risk-taking[63] [64] [65]. And when exposed to men who are high in dominance, men tend to rate themselves as lower in mate value[66] and men’s feelings of jealousy are more strongly evoked[67]. All of these cognitive processes occur differently in women and men without explicit, conscious awareness of why they are doing so. Surely, to an open-minded scientist these types of non-survey findings should buttress the view that women possess mate preferences for men’s status-related attributes…

8) Yes, but…even though evolutionary psychologists may study real life cognition, emotion, and behavior, they fail to study the most important Darwinian outcome…fertility. If women evolved mate preferences for status-related traits, then women who marry men of high status men should have more children. Evolutionary psychologists haven’t even bothered to look at these outcomes, lazy-headed daisies…

Actually, several studies by evolutionary psychologists have found women who marry higher status men tend to have more children, and to have children survive to an older age. In a study of pre-industrial Finland (from the 1700s), women married to wealthier men had more children and decreased child mortality[68]. In another study, marrying a man four years older was associated with maximum levels of fertility among women[69]. Bereczkei and Csanaky[70] conducted a study of 1,800 Hungarians over 34 years of age and found women who married older and better educated men tended to have more children. These are important findings, as it is critical that women’s mate preferences for status-related attributes lead to reproductive success, or at least likely did so in our evolutionary past[71] [72].

One may also look at the effects of high personal status on men’s versus women’s reproductive success. Nettle and Pollett[73] and many other scholars have found men’s higher level of personal status is related to higher fertility, but the same is much less true (or not at all true) for women’s higher level of personal status. In fact, modern women who have higher personal incomes themselves tend to have fewer children[74]. Jumping Jehoshaphat…yes, but…

9) Yes, but…ancestral men were foragers and could not accumulate wealth, so these mate preferences for “good earning potential” are largely irrelevant to evolved mating psychology. Evolutionary psychology findings are extremely limited because they only apply to modern materialistic cultures.

Actually, it is correct that large masses of “material wealth” were not present in our ancestral past when we lived as foragers, but it is likely ancestral men did accumulate social capital or “status” (from among other things, hunting ability). Several studies have documented this form of male status as being the subject of selective pressures (i.e., high status men—whether that status comes in the form of land, livestock, money, physical prowess, or hunting ability—have more offspring[75][76]). Evidence of selection for men’s status has been found in many types of cultures, including studies of men’s hunting ability among the Aché, Hadza, and Tsimane[77]. Apicella[78], for instance, found men’s hunting reputation and upper-body strength both predicted reproductive success among Hadza hunter–gatherers.

Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that women’s preferences in modern nations do not seem to be calibrated on money, per se. Instead, women may view money as a proximal cue to the underlying qualities that they have evolved to care about, such as status, prestige, social dominance, ambition, work ethic, and intelligence[79]. So it is certainly true that ancestral men did not accumulate financial wealth, but focusing too much on the importance (or not) of money or wealth across all cultures is missing the adaptive forest for the trees.

10) Yes, but…I know so many people who strongly believe that sex differences in mate preferences simply cannot exist. The idea of evolved sexual desires of any kind are a theoretical impossibility from my point of view! Evolved sex differences in mate preferences have to be just a figment of the imagination of evolutionary psychologists bent on maintaining patriarchy. If the evidence is, on balance, supportive of women possessing long-term mate preferences for men with high status, why do so many post-modernists and social constructionists insist evolved sex differences are not, indeed cannot, be real[80]?

That’s a big question requiring several responses. First, the evidence of evolved sex differences in mate preferences is accumulating, but it is certainly not definitive. Evolutionary psychologists evaluate evidence of psychological adaptation in many ways[81], including cross-species, neurological, hormonal, genetic, and epigenetic evidence that has not been reviewed here (some examples of such evidence, see[82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87]). Nothing in science is ever set in stone, and more evidence could emerge that would cast serious doubt about evolved sex differences in mate preferences (though it would take quite a lot to tip the scales against the existence of this particular set of mate preferences). Scientists are skeptical and open-minded, so anything is possible.

Second, it is a mistake to pit post-modernism and social constructivism against evolutionary psychology as though they are in an intellectual death match that only one side can win. This tribalistic, us-versus-them thinking isn’t helpful to science. Much like partitioning the causes of human behavior into nurture versus nature or culture versus biology or learned versus innate, social constructivism versus evolutionary psychology is a false dichotomy that may feel intuitively correct but should not be utilized very often by serious scientists (exceptions include behavioral genetics studies). As insightfully noted by Tooby and Cosmides[88],

“To say a behavior is learned in no way undermines the claim that the behavior was organized by evolution because the behavior was learned through the agency of evolved mechanisms. If natural selection had built a different set of learning mechanisms into an organism, that organism would learn a different set of behaviors in response to the very same environment. It is these evolved mechanisms that organize the relationship between the environmental input and behavioral output, and thereby pattern the behavior. For this reason, learning is not an alternative explanation to the claim that natural selection shaped the behavior, although many researchers assume that it is. The same goes for culture. Given that cultural ideas are absorbed via learning and inference—which is caused by evolved programs of some kind—a behavior can be, at one and the same time, ‘cultural’, ‘learned’ and ‘evolved’.”

Mate preferences in humans are certainly to some degree cultural, learned, and evolved. Ultimately, the adaptations of the human mind unearthed by evolutionary psychologists will likely play key roles in explaining precisely how and why human social constructionists have the mate preferences they do[89].

Third, some scholars believe, based on strict ideological commitments, that evolved psychological sex differences must not exist[90] or even if they do exist, studies of sex differences should be evaluated in ways that favor certain political ideologies over others, such as raising the evidentiary bar for evolutionary psychology hypotheses[91]. As a consequence of these political beliefs, many scholars chauvinistically dismiss or ignore much of the extant evidence accumulated by evolutionary psychologists.

This is a mistake on several levels, not the least of which is that even if evolved sex differences in mate preferences do exist, that does not make them “desirable” or “good” or “inevitable” in any way. Thinking like that is fallacious, it is wrong. Even though humans have likely evolved to be omnivorous, that doesn’t mean we should eat meat. What is natural is not inherently connected to what is desirable and thinking that way is committing the so-called naturalistic fallacy (actually more related to the is-ought problem and appeal to nature fallacy).

Instead of this false point of view, evolutionary psychologists take the position that by knowing what our evolved psychological adaptations are, and precisely how they are expressed (e.g., how they are specially-designed and which environments especially accentuate or attenuate their expression), we will be more capable of creating effective tools for altering human behavior in ways we do find desirable. This includes utilizing the socially-constructive psychological adaptations in our mental toolkit to do so. Evolved sex differences are not to be ideologically feared, they are to be scientifically evaluated and, if they exist, knowledge about their special design can be used to more efficiently create the healthy society within which we wish to live[92] [93].

Lastly, there are some scholars who are actively deceiving people about empirical findings in evolutionary psychology (e.g., claiming that sex differences “disappear” in egalitarian cultures[94]). Many of these thinkers spread doubt about evolved mate preferences by alluding to a highly popular study by Eagly and Wood[95]. People’s memories of Eagly and Wood’s study, however, are often quite at odds with what they actually found, and with the hundreds of empirical findings since.

Eagly and Wood related the size of sex differences in mate preferences for “good financial prospects” to sociopolitical gender equality measures across nations (actual mate preference data came from a large cross-cultural study by Buss[96]). Eagly and Wood examined four indicators of sociopolitical gender equality and found only one indicator (that’s right, only one of four tests) was significantly linked to smaller sex differences in long-term mate preferences for good financial prospects. Based on that rather meager empirical finding, a generation of scholars seems to have fallen for a “Jedi mind trick” (these aren’t the sex differences you are looking for) and have been convinced that sex differences in mate preferences completely disappear in more gender egalitarian nations. Indeed, Eagly and Wood’s study has been cited over 1,000 times and has led to many to believe all psychological sex differences disappear in gender egalitarian cultures. Not true then, not true now.

To the contrary, most cross-cultural studies find nations with the highest sociopolitical gender equality (e.g., Scandinavian nations) exhibit the largest psychological sex differences in the world. You read that correctly. Higher gender egalitarian nations tend to have larger sex differences in mate preferences for Good Looks, in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[97]. If sociopolitical gender egalitarianism is supposed to reduce sex differences to the point where they “disappear,” it’s doing a terrible job. In fact, it’s most often doing the exact opposite. Without the constraints of patriarchal sex role socialization, it appears men and women are freer to follow their evolved desires in ways that lead to even greater psychological difference[98].

April 17, 2015

Dancing Monkeys

From the Unbearable Triteness of Hating:

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.

Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

After this week’s post the expected debate of who are you really being you for came up. In managing your expectations in accord with the reality of women’s nature there’s always going to be some indignation for needing to do so. The perception of having to cater to the ~~whims~~ needs of women in order to broker some reward that’s never going to be an equitable trade is not only senseless, but it pisses off men who spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to better themselves for themselves and not be appreciated for it.

I’m cursed with a broad spectrum of interests, passions and hobbies. At the risk of glossing myself, I’ve been blessed with a lot of natural gifts and talents, and I developed the skills to better enjoy them, to profit from them and to explore things I simply find fascinating. For the greater part I don’t do these things for me, but rather because I’m genuinely curious and interested in them. I didn’t get into competitive fencing in college because I thought chicks would dig it. Nor did I pick up the sport as some “doing it for me” personal validation – it just looked like a hell of a lot of fun and even when I have my ass handed to me I still enjoy it to this day.

The outcome of having developed those competitive skills combined with the physical prowess I also developed, provided some side benefits to my enjoying fencing, lifting, martial arts and all of the other sports I’ve engaged in over the years. The good peripheral rewards are fairly obvious when it comes to physical interests, but I have hobbies and artistic pursuits that would probably surprise even my readers here.

I use those to my benefit in my personal and professional life, but some are most definitely not the things women would be drawn to in a guy. Of course, I don’t really care, but that doesn’t erase the preconceptions women (or anyone really) have of those interests. It’s easy to say, “well, that’s just me, take it or leave it”, but the fact remains that there are always going to be things you like that will never be an attraction for women – in fact, they’re likely to be an obstacle to attraction.

The Intelligence Paradox

There’s a subset of Blue Pill men who’ve bought into the social advertising that women find intelligent men more attractive. Attractive for long-term security and dependability as a provider? Yes. Arousing as a Hypergamous sexual prospect? Doesn’t matter. The Feminine Imperative likes to promote the ‘intelligence is sexy’ meme so as to have better prepared providers dutifully waiting for women once they’ve had their bad boys and are ready to cash out of the SMP.

That’s kind of bitter medicine for men who’ve invested themselves in intellectual interests they were at one time genuinely fascinated by. Once the imperative takes what it can benefit most from those interests and labels it ‘sexy’ they cease to be genuine fascinations and places them into the realm of sexual attractions. The question then becomes “Who are you really doing this thing for? To be a better prospect for women, or do you do it for you?”

Most intelligent men eventually come to realize that their interests simply aren’t sexy to women; if anything those pursuits usually become an insufferable bore to women. While the idea of a ‘hawt’ intelligent lover is appealing to the female hindbrain, the application of that intelligence is another thing entirely. Hypergamy doesn’t care about your grasp of philosophy, your love of mathematics, your Master’s degree in political science or that you can recognize impressionist painters from cubists. Hypergamy does care about your capacity to apply that intelligence in the service and fleeting contentment of women.

The opportunistic side of Hypergamy might enjoy the benefits that intelligence generates for a woman’s security, but your intelligence itself is not ‘sexy’. If intelligence by itself were a sexual predictor guys like Stephen Hawking wouldn’t find women to be “such mysteries.”

Unfortunately for most men this realization only comes after they’ve played to the script the Feminine Imperative had set for them and they’ve committed themselves to a woman he believed found his beautiful mind so attractive.

I detailed a bit of this dynamic in Compatibility:

However, I do think the desire of finding a common interest prior to, or in order to hook up with women is an interesting one. The MGTOW crowd will of course use this as a prime illustration of how men autonomously shape themselves to the ideals of women. And in the terms of living in the feminine reality they’d be right. You see, whenever a Man engages in any leisure activity, passion, hobby, etc. that doesn’t directly benefit his wife or girlfriend it’s always perceived as a waste of time. If she cannot realize a tangible result that benefits her – or by way of her, the potential “family” or the “relationship” – your effort is pointless and frivolous in contrast to engaging her, entertaining her or relating with her. Again we see the hypergamous feminine imperative of girl-world. If it’s not directly benefiting women, it’s not benefiting humanity in general.

It’s easy to apply this dynamic to something that’s directly relatable to women’s arousal/sexual interests. I covered this in Crisis of Motive; men ostensibly lift weights for their own personal validation – they do it for them – but when it’s obvious that a man can leverage that motivation and good physique to arouse women that’s when his motives become suspect:

I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard guys at Gold’s tell me the same thing as to why they workout.

“I do it for me! Yeah, of course, chicks check me out more now that I’ve dropped the fat and bulked up, but this is all for me man.”

I’ll admit, I was that guy at one time. For a guy it makes sense to cop the story of singularity of purpose since it implies that he’s his ‘own man’ and not improving himself to become more acceptable to the women he observably and admittedly wants to get with. This is the paradox of self-improvement – are you doing it for yourself or because you want to others to respond more positively to you? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both.

When your personal interests can be directly relatable to attracting women that is when your motives will come under scrutiny. Saying I enjoy reading books on astrophysics in my leisure time wouldn’t draw the same suspicions of my motives as my saying I’ve been a bodybuilder for most of my life because I just enjoy it and like to maintain my health.

Thoroughbred had a good comment about this:

JCL – “If I didn’t know any better I’d think the Red Pill is feminism for men, even though women are shit you still have to perform under the new agenda.”
See…

This is the subtle distinction where I think most of us get it drastically wrong. There is a huge chasm between performing for a woman and performing for yourself. Hell, I’m still guilty of the former at times still, but I at least recognize it now and am doing a better job of putting myself at the center of the frame rather than a woman. A woman’s love, attention, loyalty (such as it exists), empathy, sympathy, etc. are all *byproducts* of a man who unapologetically takes care of himself, his needs, his desires first. Here’s what I’m getting at… Flip the script on each of these:

“Women want alphas – become a top tier man.” — Become a top tier man for YOURSELF and only for YOURSELF. Women’s attention, loyalty, etc. will be the byproduct of you putting yourself at the center of the frame.

“Women want promiscuous sex – plate them.” — I’m married and was as blue pill as they come before discovering these hallowed halls two years ago. So, this one is modified for the married set.

Bottom line: Sex with wife sucked for years. Rollo’s concept of dread game has literally saved my marriage, but again there’s a subtle and very important distinction. When I initially conceptualized dread game it was with my wife in the center of the frame (in other words “If I use dread on the wife, she’ll want to fuck me more”). The results were meh. However, when I put MYSELF in the center of the frame as in “If I were suddenly single tomorrow how quickly could I get laid?”, the results were dramatic. The difference is this: In the first scenario I was counting on my actions causing a change in someone else (the wife). In the second scenario, my actions caused a radical change in MYSELF and in my conceptualization of myself.

Thoroughbred speaks to two issues here. A Man must place himself as his own Mental Point of Origin. In doing so he prioritizes himself as his primary importance which women find attractive, but you see the dual nature of this prioritization. Thoroughbred making himself his first priority has the effect of improving his life from an overall personal perspective and has the effect of attracting / arousing female interest in him. Does it matter what’s motivated that change in his performance?

Men must perform; and even when they’re performing as the result of genuine curiosity and interest they will make an impression on women. You cannot remove yourself from the Game. There’s a misnomer that Red Pill advocates believe all men need do is be good looking, aloof and let women come to them, but the truth is that even if you’re not approaching you’re still performing, you’re still presenting a presence that women (and other men) will evaluate.

The genuineness of your motive is only realized by you. One thing I addressed in Just Be Yourself is the you others would like to make of you:

We are who we say we are

We can alter our own personalities and have them altered by our conditions or any combination of the two, but to suggest that personality is static is a falsehood. The trap is to think that altering personality is in anyway disingenuous – there are certainly teriffic ‘actors’ or ‘poseurs’, and the like, that when we are confronted with them we sense (or even know) that they are pushing an envelope that they may not be entirely comfortable with, but there is merit to a ‘fake it till you make it’ doctrine. We only percieve it as being ‘false’, ‘superficial’ or as “trying to be something your not” when we have a concept or knowledge of a previous set of personality behaviors. If you met a likable cocky-funny guy at a club this weekend, how are you to know whether he’s the real deal or stretching the limits of his personality if you’ve never met him before?

If you have a look at the picture I used for my post Idealism you can get an idea of how men and women experience their existence. This masterfully encapsulates the mental directions of the genders. For men’s part, it’s their outward looking interests and curiosity that not only make them better Men, but also makes them attractive. Their attractiveness is a byproduct of a curiosity that is indifferent to the inward, self-importance of women.

As I’ve repeated many times, women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life never the focus of it. This is because women’s focus is primarily on themselves and once your primary focus becomes women they quickly lose interest. Men’s attractiveness lies in the results of that outward facing fascination that excludes women from its attention.

Focus on the things you genuinely find interesting, not the personal validation you think they represent. Saying you do things for you only echoes the self-importance of women’s self-focus. It alludes to a desire to be perceived as more attractive for a self-conscious awareness.

April 14, 2015

Managing Expectations

One question I was asked during the Christian McQueen interview was what my perspective on a “healthy” kind of love would look like. Anyone familiar with my writing understands that, to the best of my objectivity, I try to be as descriptive as I can when it comes to the dynamics I analyze. The Rational Male will always be an endeavor in descriptiveness, not prescribing what I think anyone ought to be doing. I’ve run down my reasons for this in the past, but the solutions to your problems begin with your understanding the nature of those problems. I’ll give you tools, observations and suggestions, but my hope is you’ll use them in your life according to your need.

As I said in the interview, my interest isn’t in making Rollo Tomassi clones, and anyone telling you they have a customized plan to lead you to the relationship of your dreams is selling you something (likely a $1200/month ‘counseling’ retainer). That said, I’m going to break protocol here for a moment and see if I can provide you with some general observation about what I believe are the foundations of a heathy love relationship.

From a Red Pill perspective I’d say the first and most important thing for a man to grasp is coming to terms with realistic expectations with women based in Red Pill awareness.

In a Blue Pill paradigm men are conditioned to believe that Blue Pill goals are both attainable and worthwhile in the effort needed to achieve them. Deferring to feminine primacy, deffering to feminine correctness and essentially enabling and facilitating the ends of women’s sexual strategy are all the hallmarks of that conditioned thinking.

In Mental Point of Origin I explain how a man’s origin of thought is conditioned to default to a feminine purpose; he puts his first thought to the benefit of the feminine rather than himself and it takes either a very traumatic personal episode or a Red Pill awakening for a man to realize how thorough his conditioning has been.

I’m reviewing this Blue Pill mindset because the expectations a man has of a woman while he’s trapped in that mindset is radically different when he moves into (and accepts) a Red Pill awareness. That may seem a bit remedial for Red Pill men now, but it’s important to be reminded of how much your expectations of women have shifted since you came into that new awareness.

There was a time when you were Blue Pill and not taking a woman seriously at her word – as opposed to understanding the primary importance of her actions – was probably offensive to you. Any White Knight you encounter in life is still basing his expectations of women in that same egalitarian equalist premise that women are rational agents with an equal interest in men’s goals and purpose. The mistake being that they put faith in the idea that men and women have intellectually risen above the influences of their evolved psychology and can be relied upon to behave reasonably and in each other’s best interests.

Ironically a Beta /White Knight’s methodology for qualifying for women’s intimate attentions are still rooted in performing to the standards of what he believes is a pre-understood social contract between men and women. However, his expectations of women and how they’ll reciprocate his feminine-identifying efforts is where he’s gravely in error.

It’s my belief that Red Pill men need to come to realistic expectations of women based on their Red Pill awareness in order to come to a loving relationship with women. Accepting that reality also means accepting the differing concepts men and women have with regard to love. That’s a very tall order for men still coming to terms with the fact that their Blue Pill conditioning made them hopeful they could sustain a love based on Blue Pill expectations of women. Their idealistic concept of love has an end-goal of that concept being mutually reciprocated by a woman; this is the Blue Pill hope for love.

Love in the Age of Equalism

Egalitarian equalism between the sexes is nominally based on an acceptance of agreed terms, but love, like desire, is not the result of a process of negotiation.

What’s more ironic is that the more pronounced the efforts in gender parity are in society the more pronounced the men and women in that society cling to traditional sex differences:

To the contrary, most cross-cultural studies find nations with the highest sociopolitical gender equality (e.g., Scandinavian nations) exhibit the largest psychological sex differences in the world. You read that correctly. Higher gender egalitarian nations tend to have larger sex differences in mate preferences for Good Looks, in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[97]. If sociopolitical gender egalitarianism is supposed to reduce sex differences to the point where they “disappear,” it’s doing a terrible job. In fact, it’s most often doing the exact opposite. Without the constraints of patriarchal sex role socialization, it appears men and women are freer to follow their evolved desires in ways that lead to even greater psychological difference

It’s important to recognize truths like this because our acculturation in an equalist doctrine of gender parity is often never considered with regard to how the sexes interpret a loving relationship. How a society perceives love on a meta level is greatly influenced by the degree to which that society considers and acknowledges sex differences. I’ve stated in the past that androgyny is not a goal-state for any species – it leads to stagnation and an inability to adapt. Androgyny becomes homogeny; an evolutionary dead end, and the statistics seem to back this up. When a society idealizes a state of homogeny between the sexes that society presumes love is also homogenous.

Play with her, and play with her

I’ve mentioned in the past that revealing Red Pill truths to women you want to become intimate with is ultimately a self-defeating effort. The same can be said for women you may be involved with at the moment and are attempting to convince of your new Red Pill identity. Once you let a woman in on the Game it changes the game. Observing a process will change that process. This is known as the observer-expectancy effect, or the Hawthorne effect which is a “form of reactivity in which subjects modify an aspect of their behavior, in response to their knowing that they are being studied.”

In my perspective this is the main reason couples’ therapy, marriage counseling and Purple Pill couples’ coaching is ineffective. Those negotiations that are supposed to lead to a better relationship and a “healthy” love are founded on Blue Pill goals and Blue Pill expectations of an equalist understanding that men and women are fundamental equals with an equal interest in rational problem solving.

Why am I inserting this here? Because your Red Pill expectations of women must remain stoically within yourself.

Once your expectations of women are out in the open the process has changed. Women love Men who Just Get It, but explaining how you Get It disqualifies you from being the Man who does. Demonstrate, never explicate.

In a way I pity the women who identify themselves as Red Pill women. Not because I think their efforts are misplaced, but because they become privy to Red Pill truths and now have a different awareness of that observer-expectancy effect. The process is changed with regard to how they deal with men, maybe their husbands, and now they can no longer play the Game without some peripheral awareness that they are playing a game. The machinations of it are revealed so the context becomes one of identifying aspects of those truths and being self-conscious of men’s and their own behaviors being influenced by them.

In coming to terms with Red Pill expectations of women a man must embrace some ugly realities. Those realities that used to be denied or sugar coated with the pretty lies of the Blue Pill can rub you raw. Among others, Hypergamy, women’s sexual and love opportunism and the potential of damning a man to a life of indentured servitude are tough expectations to have to weigh against the idealistic want of a healthy loving relationship with a woman.

There will be a contingent of men who’ll insist women be held accountable for the worst of these behaviors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, there will always be a want for personal accountability and justice for women’s actions from men, however, this belief is still rooted in the idea that women are coequal and rational actors. That personal accountability desire is based in an equalist mindset. That’s not to say women shouldn’t be held accountable for the results of their impulses, or given license to them – Hypergamy is not itself an excuse for the worst of its consequences. Moreover, it is to say that a Red Pill aware man needs to base his expectations of women on the Red Pill foreknowledge of what her instincts and impulses will lead her to.

Conventional Love Model

I posted the following comment in response to Girl With a Dragonfly Tattoo’s recent plea for women to embrace empathy and / or sympathy:

Sympathy / Empathy flow downward from men to women and then to children. Men who understand and accept this never expect empathy from women to begin with. For that man, either a woman meets his criteria for his investment or he drops her for a better prospect.

Only in a feminized equalist society do men expect in-kind reciprocation from women. As a man, your “needs” are only important to you. Men’s disappointment comes from expecting a balanced return on his emotional investment and relational equity; this is the result of his egalitarian equalist conditioning. It sucks and it’s offensive to men because they’ve believed for most of their lives that there should be an equitable exchange of emotional and personal investments – his woman should have his needs and his best interests in mind in a like fashion that he has for her; this is not and has never been the case.

In fact it’s a recipe for failure, since it puts men into a position of neediness, and thus forces him to negotiate for his woman’s desire.

I’ve made an attempt in today’s post to address this last part. A great deal of men’s frustrations with women finds its root in an equalist expectation of a like-for-like exchange of intimacy. In A New Hope I explained how a man might cast off his former hope for a Blue Pill solution to the problems inherently created by an egalitarian mindset. I think it’s vitally important for men to keep that in mind – the source of those problems offers the false hope of a solution to those problems.

As a man it is important to understand that love will always, necessarily, be an unequal exchange of sacrifice for a woman. You simply don’t share the same concept of love with a woman. There are complementary benefits, but never assume your investment with a woman will be an equitable tradeoff. Men weren’t designed for that, this is why notions of relational equity is a real tough ego-investment for a man to abandon when he comes to Red Pill awareness.

In closing, what I find interesting in all of this was recalling how my Vulnerability post was received. That was an important post because it described the expectation of submissiveness and surrender that the Feminine Imperative and egalitarian equalism inculcate in men. Even the definition of the word was recreated to fit the doctrine – weakness is strength – and more than a few critics still clinging to that Blue Pill boilerplate wanted to re-redefine it in some way to be palatable to both the manosphere and that old Blue Pill hope. That’s the essence of the Purple Pill.

What they fail to realize is the inherent vulnerability men face in loving a woman at all. All risk, with no realistic expectation of reciprocation of his emotional investment and even greater risk of rejection for expressing that expectation – now that’s vulnerability. Egalitarian equalism always stresses the importance of men and women meeting each other’s needs to achieve a balanced loving relationship. This is a fundamentally flawed premise in the context of feminine social primacy. In a Blue Pill paradigm a man’s needs are always subordinate to a woman’s. That is vulnerability – a man putting faith in the presumption that a woman’s sustained long-term interests will ultimately serve his own.

Men will always be the risk takers in all aspects of life.

March 16, 2015

Making Up for Missing Out

Back in February I had an interesting exchange with commenter TuffLove. The conversation focused on his recent singleness due to his wife of 20-some years feeling the call of the Alpha and decided cheat on him, later divorce him and then take up with an even more Beta fellow not long after her ‘fling’ (his story). You can read the whole exchange here if you like, but what TuffLove describes is a textbook example of the Alpha re-interest impulse that defines the Development and Redevelopment/Reinsurance phases I outlined in the Preventative Medicine Series.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but you and your ex’s story is a cliché now. It’s the “making up for missing out” story. Woman marries early, cashes her chips in before she knows better, lives vicariously through her single girlfriends until such time that the “Alpha” she knew at 20 is the hapless Beta she’s saddled with at 39.

Divorce porn media convinces her to bail out and get with the Alpha she’s always missed for all that time. She did everything in reverse – Beta comfort and dependability through her party years, to be traded for Alpha excitement before it’s too late.

I was inspired to sift back through my comments for this conversation, because I was also made aware of a new example of both this phase’s dynamic and the divorce-porn industry that will inevitably find some very fertile soil to plant itself in.

This example comes to us courtesy of Robin Rinaldi, author of The Wild Oats Project. This book and the “experiment in cuckoldry” such as it was, centers on, you guessed it, a 40-something woman who abandons her marriage for one year to bang the random men she was prevented from fucking by being married to her dependable, unexciting Beta husband. Granted, the husband didn’t want children and this contention resulted in him getting a vasectomy – his only act of Alpha with her as far as I know. Her childlessness is of course her go-to victimization card she hopes will endear feminine sympathy for her taking matters into her own hands for a year.

The de rigueur rationalizations and appeals to womanly “self-discovery” are handed out like the M&Ms any Red Pill man will come to expect, but I’m drawing attention to this book because it has the potential to be the next step in the 50 Shades of Grey evolution of Open Hypergamy:

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project.” And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

On a social scale it seem like the next deductive next step – blend a justifiable Eat Pray Love narrative with the more visceral (yet unignorable) sexuality of 50 Shades and women will readily consume it. I expect there will be the same hamster spinnings of NAWALT and most women respect their marriage vows, but it still wont wash with the overwhelming ‘guilty pleasure’ popularity that 50 Shades exposed on a large scale.

Writers like Rinaldi and E.L. James have tapped into the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks anxiety rooted in women’s primal insecurity inherent in doubting their optimization of Hypergamy. If appealing to visceral sex sells products to men, appealing to the inherent ‘you-only-live-once’ insecurity of feminine Hypergamy sells to women – and women being the primary consumers in western society, sell it does.

Commenter jf12 related something Ballista posted on his blog recently:

Ballista asks, on his site, “why is divornography (divorce pornography) marketed exclusively to women? Why are there articles in women’s magazines and romance novels for women like Eat Pray Love that glamorize divorce, but nothing of the sort exists or is marketed to men? Why is there no male divorce porn, no stories of men divorcing their obese, aging harpy wives, liberating themselves from their marriage vows, and ending up living happily ever after banging large-breasted 21 year-old lingerie models?”

Can you imagine the uproar? Can you feel the Love yet?

Since the start of the sexual revolution there’s been a social undercurrent of excusable, justifiable comeuppance for any gender related imbalance women have been taught to believe that men are enjoying or benefitting from. Whatever male-specific indignation that would reflect negatively on men becomes a form of empowerment for women – particularly if that indignation facilitates men’s sexual strategy at the expense of women’s. Thus a woman taking a yearlong break from her marriage to bed as many men as she cares to indulge (fully expecting to come back to her dutiful Beta husband afterwards) is cast as an iconoclastic hero for casting off “patriarchal sexual repression.”

Furthermore, it’s only a small step to wipe the accountability of her actions off on the horrible man who wont cooperate by doing his duty to fulfill her sexual strategy. There is no more permanent a devotion to the male sexual strategy than to get a vasectomy and thus deny a woman the ultimate culmination of her own. If you ever want to experience just how close to livestock the Feminine Imperative considers men to be, just try getting a vasectomy before you’re married or without a wife’s explicit and written consent. Legally it’s easier to geld horses or neuter dogs.

It’s important to consider how the doubt over past hypergamous choices effects a mature woman. When a woman has passed through her Epiphany Phase and become a never-married woman into her late 30s the mindset becomes one of self-justification. This is similar to the Kate Bolick effect whereby a woman has very little choice but to live with her past intimate decisions and convert necessities into virtues. She embraces a ready-made empowerment narrative wherein she convinces herself that her choices were the bold, unconventional ones she needed in order to grow.

Next and most commonly is the woman who consolidated on a man’s commitment once she’d become less sexually competitive just prior to 30. I can’t be sure, but it’s likely that Rinaldi falls into this demo, the schedule more or less plays the same.

From Preventative Medicine IV:

Redevelopment / Reinsurance

The Redevelopment phase can either be a time of relational turmoil or one of a woman reconciling her hypergamous balance with the man she’s paired with.

The security side of this hypergamous balance has been established for her long term satisfaction and the Alpha reinterest begins to chafe at the ubiquitous certainty of that security. Bear in mind that the source of this certainty need not come from a provider male. There are a lot of eventualities to account for. It may come from a ‘never married’ woman’s capacity to provide it for herself, the financial support levied from a past husband(s) or father(s) of her children, government subsidies, family money, or any combination thereof.

In any event, while security may still be an important concern, the same security becomes stifling for her as she retrospectively contemplates the ‘excitement’ she used to enjoy with former, now contextually Alpha, lovers, or perhaps the “man her husband used to be”

The Soul-Mate Mistake

Vox had an astute observation about this phenomenon not too long ago:

Alpha Widowhood is a description of an observed behavior, not a cruel invention of the Game theoreticians meant to plague BETA husbands and give them sleepless nights:

“Steve has been with me for the past 50 years and Ron for 47. Neither is the man I am married to, nor have I seen or spoken to either since our love affairs ended in my 20s. All the same, there is no denying they have both messed with my marriage to Olly, the man who has been by my side for the past 40 years.

I found myself thinking about them both as I read recent research that suggested women who played the field before marriage are unhappier with their lot than those who entered matrimony virginal.
Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man

Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man.”

I think it’s important to remember that an Alpha Widow doesn’t even necessarily need to have slept with a man she considered ‘Alpha’ from her past to feel the Alpha Widow effect:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Sometimes being an Alpha Widow means hypergamic ‘rumination’ over a better Alpha option a woman missed or was rejected by in her past in comparison to the guy she “settled on” for marriage. This is particularly significant if that guy was a woman’s Plan B husband. It’s not just the actual Alphas she banged back in the day, you’re competing with an imagined ideal and the more women are empowered and encouraged to feel secure in exploring their hypergamous options (i.e. correct their ‘soul mate’ mistake) the more you’ll read stories like this.

However, for all intents and purposes my instincts tell me Rinaldi falls into the “making up for missing out” demographic. On whole this demo of women can eventually become the worst self-inflicted Alpha Widows in their latter years. I let Rinaldi explain…

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

[…] One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

As I illustrated in Preventive Medicine, there’s a root insecurity inherent in women’s Hypergamy. From an immediate perspective this can manifest itself as a battery of women’s psychological and sociological filtering mechanisms for Hypergamous optimization with a man she’d just met, to the husband she’s been married to for 20 years. However, it’s vitally important for men, particularly married and LTR men, to understand that the confines of a committed relationship is never any insurance against Hypergamy in the long-term, and the rationalizations of that Hypergamy evolve as women mature.

Of course the first, best advice is the simplest “just never get married”, but even if you are a single man entering your 50s you will encounter women who’ve experienced (or never experienced) a crisis of Hypergamy and the incessant drive for Alpha optimization of it. If you are a younger man dealing with an older woman (why, I don’t know) you will likely encounter women like Rinaldi and women with similar mindsets as Robin Korth. It’s important to know what you are, or will be, dealing with.

February 13, 2015

Lonely Hearts Club Game

Just a blog / book update here first: I’m ass deep in the final edits of the second book so if my comments attention seems sparse now you know why. I’m not a full time author so I have to balance my work life with completing-a-book-life and when it gets down to the final phases it closes me off to all leisure and personal time. This is only the second time I’ve done this and I’ve come to realize it’s best to put in the extra effort now than have to go back and reedit and update errors later.

Unfortunately this also forces me to concentrate on aspects and concepts of prior topics with a magnifying glass and I have to make a real effort not to get repetitive in my blog posts. Once the book drops my focus will be on the blog more intently.

Zip asked from this week’s post comments:

For single men the situation is a pussy bonanza if you can play the ‘lonely hearts club’ Game correctly. On any other V-Day I’d suggest men capitalize on GNOs and women commiserating about how inadequate men are these days while they tie one on. The likelihood that an order of 50 million women will have seen 50 Shades just prior to hitting the bars with their girls on this night only makes your efforts that much easier with better sexual dividends.

While not overtly playing the Christian Grey role, if you cop the dominant energy (or if that’s what you’re about already) you can help a girl work off that energy. It would be too easy to say these women will be primed for Game, but remember, feminine-primary acculturation has taught her to justify the action of her sexual self apart from her real self. Saturday night may be the one time getting a girl to sign a sexual consent form will work in a man’s favor.

What is “lonely hearts club” game?

I’m probably not the best guy to ask about the particulars and techniques – Christian McQueen or YaReally might be better professors here – but I can give you a basic outline and the mechanics behind LHC Game.

The idea is pretty simple: Single women have a penchant to get together with the express purpose of commiserating about their sex lives, complain about the substandard men who are in their lives, complain about the men whom they wish were in their lives and to generally open themselves up to opportunities of meeting new prospective men all at the same time. I suppose I shouldn’t limit the Lonely Hearts Club just to single women since when you “get any group of women together and you can be sure they’ll talk about their husbands — and it will rarely be complimentary.”

I should point out that a GNO is not necessarily a Lonely Hearts Club because the dynamic and purpose is different. Girl’s night out may be a pretense for the LHC, but not always the purpose (think bachelorette parties, etc.). Valentines Day get togethers and “Hen’s Nights” however are prime examples.

As I’ve illustrated before, women talk, men do. Women’s gatherings are arranged for the purpose of relating to one another and in this instances it’s to commiserate. One reason I advise men to keep their mouths shut and work a ‘breadcrumb‘ line with women is exactly because of this dynamic – women cannot keep a secret and particularly if it relates to a man she’s interested in or involved with.

The Lonely Hearts Club is a unique situation for a guy and represents some real advantages for sarging. Women in these ‘peer clutches’ may seem like they’re in bad moods and resistant to men intruding on their set, but the ‘lonely’ predisposition actually makes women far more approachable for a smart player.

Try not to think of these women as being ‘lonely’ (though they might be) so much as being discontent with their lives, the men in their lives or the type of man they wish was in their lives. It’s this emphasized state of discontent in which you’ll capitalize.

From V-Day:

Note to PUAs

Valentine’s Day is ripe with opportunity for an enterprising Man with the ability to see it. Go hit the clubs tomorrow night, particularly the ones that cater to a 25-40 y.o. affluent crowd. There’s a million different venues you can hit, all with promotions to help single ladies feel better about not having a date – usually with genderist drink specials to help your approach too. You’ll notice impromptu GNOs (girl’s night out) set up just for this occasion to prove to themselves “they don’t need men to have a good time.” A good PUA couldn’t arrange a better opportunity to hook up in multiple sets.

Don’t go play ‘pity friend’ with any girl on V-Day, don’t be the “you’re such a great friend” consolation date.. Call up your best wing man and sarge on the best night of the year to sarge. Wedding receptions aren’t even as good as V-Day for this.

This dynamic will be even more pronounced tomorrow after these LHCs / GNOs are let out from the debut of 50 Shades of Grey and make a beeline to their favorite martini bars. Modified versions of the Boyfriend Destroyer approach I mentioned in The Art of AMOG will do well for PUAs if you tweak it to presume these women are out in groups with the express purpose to ‘get revenge’ on no-good boyfriends or substandard men who don’t compare to Christian Grey’s sexual and personal dominance. You’ll find Lonely Hearts with bad (see Beta) boyfriends are already doing most of the ‘destroying’ work for you.

Law 32 – Play to People’s Fantasies

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Being that oasis after Lonely Heart Club women have worked themselves into a proliferative phase, ovulatory lather from watching 50 Shades of Grey with their reaffirming girlfriends will make for a pickup environment that you’ll rarely find so easy to accomomodate.

In fact I’d suggest that your opportunity for managing a three-way might never be better. If you play to one woman’s fantasies in the LHC you’re likely hitting the right buttons for a few others in the group too. That’s not to get your hopes up, but rather to illustrate that, if you can manage even a marginal amount of social proof with the clutch, one or more women in that group will likely preselect you for their approval and affirm their girlfriend to go make out with you in the parking lot. The socio-sexual dynamic is charged if you can present yourself as ‘close enough’ to the fantasy one or more girls associates you with.

The trick of course is not to overplay that fantasy so much as to tip your Game hand. If you are Christian Grey (the prevailing fantasy), you dress the part, talk the part and act the part, even drunk women will call your bullshit. If you’re subtle in playing to her fantasy, you’re commanding, you’re focused, well dressed (but in a casual way) you’ll be able to close, pull, whatever with a facility you wouldn’t be able to under normal conditions.

As I stated in Art of AMOG, know your environment and know your quarry. Be prepared to avoid women who are too drunk. Issues of consent and rape-fraud not withstanding, a sloppy drunk woman is never a good intimate experience. And intoxicated they will be; drinking is a good indicator of an LHC, but they won’t be in the over-the-top drink mode of a GNO or a bachelorette party.

The key to managing drunk women is to catch them after the first drink, but before the third one. Women commiserating aren’t trying to relive their sorority days, but I think most guys severely underestimate the drinking habits of modern women. Take it from a guy who’s worked in liquor branding for the last 12 years, women are far more prone biologically and habitually to drinking more than they believe is their actual tolerance threshold. In an age where women believe they should be the equals of men, alcohol tolerance is a glaring example of the real physical differences between the sexes.

So, feel free to discuss this over the weekend. I’d love to see some ‘live’ comments from the field on Saturday night if you’re so inclined. I’m actually working a cocktail promo for most of the night, but I’ll keep an eye on the iPhone. Field reports are encouraged.

February 9, 2015February 9, 2015

Topping from the Bottom

In last week’s post I had an exchange with yet another attention seeking girl of 25. I wont be giving her any more than what she already thinks is her due writing for XOJane, however the topic of BDSM came up and I wanted to explore that a bit this week.

It’s no coincidence that the movie adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey is opening on Valentines Day this Saturday, so rather than my annual V-Day post I figured I’d also do a bit of early prognosticating about the knots the fem-stream media will be tying themselves into by this time next week.

Just as a recap, the exchange with this girl centered on her dissatisfaction with her boyfriend’s assertiveness and dominant status with her. At her insistence he Alpha’d up for her, but I was incredulous about her believing he’d done so, and with any amount of genuineness. For a man to Just Get It, he must get it on his own. Any woman inserting herself into the process of him just getting that he ought to be more dominant with her defeats the legitimacy of that change with her.

Observing a process will change that process. Just as genuine desire cannot be negotiated, neither can genuine change in a man’s mindset be negotiated at a woman’s insistence.

Hypergamy only believes the dominance of a man that a woman finds in him, never the one a woman needs to create in him.

During this exchange our goth girl mentioned she was into BDSM and the whole picture came into perspective:

Now I got it.

Sub in the dungeon, Dom in public. Most women into (overt) BDSM have issues with reconciling their desire for being dominated by a man and submitting to him in any other aspect of life.

I’m not surprised you felt the need to ask him to be more dominant. It’s not about his asserting himself with others it’s about your need for a genuinely dominant man giving you tingles. You want him to dominate you, but it doesn’t come naturally to him.

It sounds better to promote the image of him being a socially dominant character who’s come into it because you want that guy to be the character you fantasize he is in the dungeon.

You want a guy who’s genuinely dangerous, objectifying and powerful when you’re having sex, but you want the security and trust that comes from knowing he’s really safe, in control and socially dominant enough to ensure your security with his decisions.

That’s why BDSM is appealing to feminists. The dominance gets them off because it’s wrong, a taboo they shouldn’t really like because the feminist dogma says it’s disgusting to submit to a man (especially for an “empowered” woman), but the fantasy aspect of it legitimizes the desire and separates the “real” woman from the “sex act” woman.

I’m using the term “dungeon” metaphorically here, but I think it’s apt for any sex environment we put ourselves into with another person. One of the many aspects of masculine ridicule is the caricature of the strong, dominant business man paying for and playing the role of pathetic, tortured submissive to his vinyl-clad dominatrix with a whip, knee-boots and a bad attitude. The cliché serves the purpose of male ridicule of course, but it also reinforces the the latent message that those CEOs who rule the world, in their sexual selves, are really pathetic ass lickers who get off on humiliation from strong, independent women. Their sexual identities is who they really are.

Commenter 447 followed me up in that thread:

Things/actions that are called BDSM or can be put into that category (which can even be acts without any fetish objects, basically even normal, hard sex where the man just has his way with a female can be put there by twisting semantics) just *concentrate and thereby CORNER* all of femininity into ONE corner of the spectrum of life: Sex.

That explains a lot – from the massive number of Shades of Grey-Copies sold to the (sometimes almost comical) attempt of many young women to be “sexually perverted” even if they are not:

It is the only socially acceptable form known to them to be truly female today: By being a “whore”.

Only banged one feminist – can just add +1 to the description above – the more feminst bullshit they talk, the more they desire to be a sex slave or even an abused victim(!) in the bedroom. +1 to “explanations for rape hysteria” btw.

Roleplaying Games

As women find themselves coming into the open acceptance of Hypergamy and recognizing the social control they wield, the overstated perception they have with regard to their sexual market value will inflate with their collective egos. We address this often in the manosphere about how women’s self-perception of their SMV is grossly, unrealistically, inflated by social networks, media and popular culture. My assertion here is that BDSM – not just the overt kind, but the interplay of dominance and submission in any sexual intercourse – will become women’s fantasy outlet for a natural desire to be dominated by men.

In the case I illustrated with the CEO relegating himself to his mistress as a slave, so too will women’s sexual selves be a role they’ll play, and that role will be normalized for women through a feminine-primary social order. While men can be comfortably ridiculed for their desire to be dominated, women are sold the idea that their sexual selves are not their real selves, thus the need to be submissive can be forgiven of the strong independent woman® because her sexual self is not “who she really is.”

The Feminine Imperative defines for men that his ridiculous sexual identity is who he really is, but for women her sexual identity is a role she plays that insulates her from her real ’empowered’ identity. Through this roleplaying, women can reconcile and satisfy their real need of masculine dominance while maintaining the strong independent woman® identity that feminine-primary society expects of them.

In this sense women are put into a socially acceptable, socially expanded, form of topping from the bottom. The idea is that women can safely control and accommodate that want of sexual submission without losing self-respect by challenging the feminine social narrative of female state control. So long as that desire and the act are considered a fantasy that they can separate their true selves from, the sexual submission to a dominant man they desire can be balanced and reconciled if that act isn’t who they really are.

Furthermore there is a tantalizing sexual wrongness to engaging in submission only in a sexual theater. This is what fem-stream media will twist itself into knots about in the week following the opening of 50 Shades of Grey. In an era of Yes Means Yes consent forms and fantastical, falsified, rape hysteria, the go-to rationale for the runaway success that 50 Shades of Grey will undoubtedly be will be exactly this “its a fantasy so it’s ok, it’s not the real woman” separation of desire and ego preservation.

This is how the rape fantasy elements will be dealt with in the aftermath of so wildly popular a movie. It turns women on because it’s not supposed to turn them on. What fem-blogs will confront is the true nature of women’s Hypergamy being openly (likely proudly) embraced, but at the same time conflicting with the rape culture messaging that’s been pounded into our collective consciousness for the better part of 2014. Feminine duplicity will be on display and women will either say it’s their due, it’s “not for real” or that it’s Patriarchal sexual repressiveness that’s brought them to this (male shame).

Dalrock delivered this fantastic comment in one of my threads years ago, but I’m reminded of it now:

These women don’t just want to build a better beta, they want to tame the alpha. In fact, I think the former is just another way they are trying to approach the latter. They want to take an inherently unsafe activity and make it safe. They want to submit to a man without having to submit; they want a man who can tame their feral self. They want him to trip their danger signals. Even better if he is a stranger from a strange land.

They want this all to happen without giving up their freedom; they want to play this out in the context of serial monogamy, so they can feel loved while also claiming their promiscuity is moral. They want to lose control to a string of strangers who have all of the hallmarks of very dangerous men, and they want a promise that this will always end well.

They want to know that this will be safe, without it losing the excitement of it feeling unsafe. They are telling men to build a sort of serial monogamy amusement park where they can ride the roller coaster and experience the fear of falling or crashing, while knowing that just behind the scenes grown ups are actually in charge and are responsible for them safely feeling unsafe.

One more thing. As I mentioned above they don’t want to be hemmed in. So instead of building an actual amusement park, they want roller coasters to spring up randomly in the same exact circumstances where the real danger they mimic would appear. They want to be driving their car on the freeway one instant, and the next experience the fear of careening out of control the next. They want to impulsively jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon and have a parachute appear and deploy at the last minute. And all they ask is your guarantee that all of this will be safe.

The safeness women hope to effect for themselves can’t be entrusted to men. The dominant Alphas are inherently dangerous, and the more Beta men are too commonplace and less empowered than women themselves. The solution then is to rig the social structure to accommodate women’s thrill-seeking by socially expecting men to accept being topped from the bottom irrespective of “who a woman really is.”

The main reason ‘goth girl’ will never be content with a boyfriend she had to encourage to be more dominant is because his passivity was his mental point of origin for him. He’s already safe, before he’s allowed to play the role of dominance by her.

A Note About V-Day

If you haven’t read my previous V-Day post you may want to before Saturday. Considering it falls on a weekend and the impending “we’re just as sexual as men” lather women will likely work themselves into over 50 Shades, it might be a good refresher. I understand that some of my manosphere contemporaries are getting onboard with the billing that 50 Shades’ release will make for orgy-like conditions on V-Day, and while I’ll concur for the most part I think there are far more significant considerations men need to be aware of.

For the married or LTR man who’s wife insists on taking him to see the movie, or one who insists on a GNO with her semi-monogamous girlfriends there will be no post-movie orgy. One of the most common rationales I hear from men when their woman wants to go off with her friends to a male strip ‘revue’ is “hey, let her go have a good time, she’ll just bring that sexual impulse home to me, right?” These men are only rationalizing their part in their own cuckoldry.

The real question is how into sex do you think your wife would be after your coming home from hitting the strip club with your boys, downing three $12 appletinis and smelling like stripper perfume? Or better yet, perhaps you suggest you both hit a strip club together after you watch 50 Shades? You’re only taking that sexual energy home for each other after having outside sexual cues turn you on. Christian Grey will be the man fucking your wife while you sit on and watch.

For single men the situation is a pussy bonanza if you can play the ‘lonely hearts club’ Game correctly. On any other V-Day I’d suggest men capitalize on GNOs and women commiserating about how inadequate men are these days while they tie one on. The likelihood that an order of 50 million women will have seen 50 Shades just prior to hitting the bars with their girls on this night only makes your efforts that much easier with better sexual dividends.

While not overtly playing the Christian Grey role, if you cop the dominant energy (or if that’s what you’re about already) you can help a girl work off that energy. It would be too easy to say these women will be primed for Game, but remember, feminine-primary acculturation has taught her to justify the action of her sexual self apart from her real self. Saturday night may be the one time getting a girl to sign a sexual consent form will work in a man’s favor.

All that said, the opportunity for observing open Hypergamy in the field will be hard to ignore. Enjoy the mental-hamster contortions women will use to justify behaving exactly like the cads they claim to hate, and their sad sack Beta men sitting dutifully at home changing diapers while the girls are being girls. My advice would be to use that open Hypergamy environment to your advantage, but demonstrate it, don’t explicate it to them.

Be aware. You will see a great many Red Pill truths come to light in a short time frame. It may be a shinning opportunity to make your Blue Pill friend Red Pill aware.

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