Romance

Intersexual Hierarchies – Part I

One of the withdrawal symptoms of unplugging from the Matrix is usually an overwhelming nihilism that results from being torn away from the previous blue pill preconceptions a man has been conditioned to for most of his life. It’s my hope that in the future red pill men will make the necessary interventions and apply what they’ve learned from their unplugging and red pill truths in general towards their sons (and daughters) as well as other men they know or are related to. Until then, the process of breaking away from that conditioning is usually going to begin as the result of a traumatic breakup, a divorce, or having had the relational equity he thought he’d built a long term relationship on proved worthless in the face of hypergamy.

It’s a sad reality of unplugging that it most often starts as a result of emotional anguish, but to pour salt in those wounds is then having to live with the harsh realities that the red pill makes men aware of – that more or less everything they’d held as an ego-investment up to that point was founded on a feminine-primary conditioning. I summed this up in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Try to keep this last part in mind as you read what I propose in these next two posts. I read a lot of guys in various forums getting despondent after having the red pill make sense to them, but that despondency is really a simple lack of not having a path already preset for them to follow. Instead of the easy answers and prerequisite responsibilities that the blue pill and the Feminine Imperative had ready for him to follow, now in his new awareness he’s tasked with making a new path for himself, and that’s both scary and exciting at the same time.

Love Styles

In almost 3 years of blogging and a book written, my three most popular posts have been the Love series – Women in Love, Men in Love and Of Love and War. Though my SMV graph gets the most link backs, these are easily the most viewed posts on Rational Male. Unfortunately they’re often the most misquoted and misunderstood.

One of the toughest revelations of the red pill is coming to terms with the difference in experience and concept that men and women apply to love. The core principle in Women in Love is often misunderstood. For different reasons, deliberate or otherwise, both men and women critically misunderstand the main premise of that post:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

Most critics of my differing assessment of how either sex interprets and considers love tend to blow past this last part. They oversimplify my meaning and sputter out something to the effect of, “That Tomassi guy thinks that women can’t ever really love men, what preposterous crap!”

Of course that isn’t my assertion, but I understand the want to dismiss this notion, particularly for men and women invested in the ideal of equalitarianism. It’s a threat to the ego-investment that men and women are anything less than fully equal and rational agents who come together for each other’s mutually agreeable benefit. The simple fact of women’s innate hypergamy puts the lie to this presumption, as well as confirms the relevancy of women’s constant, qualitative conditionality for whom (really what) they’ll love. I think it’s ironic that the same people who disparage this concept are among the first to readily embrace the pop-psychology notion of Love Languages.

I get why that premise pisses off women (and feminized men); it’s very unflattering to be accused of loving men from a position of opportunism. However, it’s important to understand that I don’t make this observation to condemn the way women approach love – although I’m sure it will follow, my point isn’t to presume a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for women to love men or vice versa. There are beneficial and detrimental aspects of both women’s opportunistic approach to love, and men’s idealistic approach to love. That said, I happen to believe that the differing ways men and women love each other evolved to be complementary to the other and for the betterment of our species.

For all the “OMG I can’t believe this red pill asshole thinks women can’t really love men” misdirection, I should point out that well intentioned men, especially the newly red pill, are also guilty of the same oversimplification. Theirs is an attempt to find validation in the (usually recent) trauma of having been cut away from their prior blue pill conditioning. A similar, “Rollo says women can’t really love men, of course, it’s all so clear to me now” satisfies a simplistic need for confirmation of their former condition.

And again, it’s not a right or wrong way of loving, it’s the lack of recognizing the difference and being on the punishing side of that lack. Most men will want to apply their concepts of honor or justice in assessing how ‘right’ men’s idealistic love is, while women will still see the inherent value in loving what a man is as a prerequisite for loving who a man is. Hypergamy doesn’t care about men’s idealistic expectations of love, but neither does men’s rationality make concessions for what facilitates women’s opportunistic approach to love.

Romantic Souls

From The Red Pill subreddit:

My whole life, I’ve had it nailed into me that I would be able to find true love if I was honest and hardworking. As I grew older it was, “If I’m somewhat fit and have a good job making 60k-80k a year, I’ll find that beautiful girl that loves me as I love her“.

As I’ve stated on many occasions, it is men who are the True Romantics. Granted, it’s the unthoughtful result of centuries of evolved ‘courtly love’, but in the realm of what qualifies as a true act of romance, it’s men who are the primary actors; it’s men who ‘make’ (or want to make) romance happen. And of course therein lies the problem, a man cannot ‘make’ romance happen for a woman.

For all a man’s very imaginative, creative, endeavors to manufacture a romance that will endear a woman to him, his ‘trying’ to do so is what disqualifies his intent. For every carefully preplanned ‘date night’ after marriage, there’s a college girl swooning to bang her boyfriend living in a shithole, sheets over the windows, furniture from the dumpster, pounding shitty beer and sleeping on a soiled mattress on the floor. Romance isn’t created, romance just happens, and it’s a tough, but valuable, lesson when men come to realize that a happenstance bag of skittles, or a ring made from a gum wrapper at the right time meant more to a woman than every expensively contrived ‘romantic getaway’ he’d ever thought would satisfy her need for lofty romance.

An important part of the red pill is learning that the most memorable acts of love a man can commit with a woman are acts of (seeming or genuine) spontaneity and never apparently and overtly planned (and yes, that applies to sex as well). This is a source of real frustration for a man since his blue pill conditioning expects the opposite from him, and his romantic nature – the nature that wants her to love him as he loves her – conspires with his problem solving nature, thus prompting him to ever greater romantic planning for what he hopes will be an appreciated, reciprocated love.

The Hierarchy

The true source of a man’s frustration lies in his misdirected hope that a woman’s concept of love matches his own. His ideal is a beautiful girl that loves him the same way he loves her. The presumption (a romantic one perpetuated by the myth of egalitarian equalism) is that his concept of idealized love is a universal one which women share with men in general and him in particular.

Thanks mostly to men’s blue pill conditioning, what most men fail to ever consider is that women’s hypergamic based love always considers what he is, before who he is. For a more detailed explanation of this I’ll refer you to my post Love Story. This is the root of the intersexual hierarchy of love.

Hierarchy1

Before the rise of feminine social primacy, the above ‘flow chart’ of love prioritization would hardly have been an afterthought for a man. Through any number of evolutionary and sociological progressions the base understanding of how Men’s love began from a position of protecting, provisioning for and directing of the lives of both his wife and children wasn’t a concern worth too much of his consideration. Neither was a prevailing desire for a reciprocal model of love an overshadowing concern.

To be sure, a baseline requirement of a returned love, sex, respect and fidelity were important elements, but this wasn’t the originating basis of male desire for being loved; there was no expectation of a woman loving him as he loved her (and by extension their children). To be a man was to have the capacity to provide a surplus beyond his own provisioning.

“A man provides, and he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it, because he’s a man.”

Gustavo’s monologue in my opening video may seem like an anachronism, especially in the light of a red pill awareness of the potential for injustice and the veritable certainty of a provisioning arrangement that will almost always be a one-sided proposition for a man – whether he’s loved, respected, appreciated, married or divorced.

Undoubtedly there’ll be men reading this bristling at the idea of a non-equitable model for love, but I’d argue that the idea of an equitable model is the result of the conditioning an egalitarian equalism has predisposed men to believe is even possible.

Before the rise of feminine primacy, a man’s expression of love through his support and guidance simply weren’t things women or children had the capacity to reciprocate. The advent of women’s independence, real or imagined, has served to strip men of this core understanding of the differences between male and female concepts of love. In the effort to feminize men more fully, and position men in a condition of confusion about what constitutes masculinity, this concept of love was replaced by a feminine-primary model for love.

While a woman’s respect, and a degree of love may flow back to her man, her primary love and concern is directed towards her children. One reason we’re still shocked by women who kill their children (pre or post natal) is due to an inherent acknowledgement of this natural dynamic. Women’s brain function and biochemistry largely evolved to predispose them to bonding with their children, and thus ensure the survival of the species. Beyond the rigors of physically gestating a child, raising children to self-sufficiency required a considerable investment of effort and resources – not to mention a constant attention. Nature selected-for women with an innate capacity to nurture and direct love primarily towards children.

The internal psychology women evolved to vet for men who displayed traits for both Alpha physical prowess and parental investment / provisioning potential are a result of children being a priority for a woman’s love. While a degree of maintaining a man’s continued commitment to the family unit requires her attentions in the form of sex and affections, a woman’s primary love focus is directed towards children.

Granted, not all women are capable of having children (or some even desirous of them), but even in these instances substitute love priorities still supersede directing her primary attention towards a man. It may seem like I’m attempting to paint women’s love as callous or indifferent, but this ‘directioning’ isn’t a conscious act, but rather due to the innate understanding that a man is to direction his love towards her as a priority.

 

This should give readers a bit to chew on for a while. In Part II I’ll detail the alternative hierarchy models prevalent for modern, post-feminine primacy relationships.

V-Day

Time again for the annual re-post of this Classic:

_____________________________________________

Nothing says “I love you” like saturated fat and slutty lingerie.

In the U.S. businesses expect men to spend on average $186 for Valentine’s day – over three times the average a woman spends on a man. Explain to me why women own V-Day? If it’s a “celebration of romantic love” why should it be an annual shit test?

Lets clarify a few things about Vagintines Day since it’s become probably the most irksome manifestation of westernized/commercialized romanticism. V-Day is far and away the most vulgar display of female entitlement. On no occasion – even a woman’s birhtday or her wedding anniversary – is this sense of entitlement more pronounced and our refined commercialization of this entitlement/expectation simply twists the knife in further for men to live up to this with ZERO expectation or entitlment to any reciprocation. He gets ‘lucky‘ if his romantic offerings are sufficient to appease her (social) media fueled expectations of ‘good enough’ to reward him with sex.

And exploit the media does. I can’t get away from it; Every radio station, every TV show, every newspaper and magazine article. Go to askmen.com right now, I guarantee there’s a “how not to fuck up this year’s V-Day for her” article there.

I listened to a talk radio show that I regularly tune into on my commute home on Friday; it was about what not buy this year. “Don’t buy lingerie, she knows it’s really a gift for you” or “Don’t pick up flowers at the gas station, women know they’re cheap”, and “God forbid you pick up some cheap jewlery or stop at one of those roadside urchins selling prepared flower baskets or arrangements – women know you didn’t think about it until you were on the way home.” On my way to work this morning, different show, same list. [Side Note: Never buy a woman lingerie, she will never be happy with it. A woman has to do this on her own to “feel sexy”, make sure it fits her right, and it’s HER IDEA. When you buy it for her it’s contrived and it is overt and overt is often the kiss of death for a try-hard guy.]

Why wouldn’t women have these expectiations? They’re relentlessly marketed to as the primary consumers in western culture. V-Day isn’t a celebration of romantic love, it’s a machine that drives a wedge of expectation and entitlement in between otherwise happy, relatively contented couples.

I’m not down on the idea of a special occasion to celebrate love (I actually proposed to Mrs. Tomassi on V-Day 18 years ago), I am down on the twisted expectations that have been perverted into it that puts a woman on some pedestal of entitlement by commercialized popularization of this feminized ideal. Why isn’t there an official “fuck your boyfriend like a wild animal” holiday or a list of criteria to meet that’ll make his day special? “Show him how appreciative you are of all his dependability and hard work this year – buy some lingerie ON YOUR OWN and pretend that you like him cuming in your mouth on his special day!” If women are so liberated and interested in equality, one would think this would be the first thing to occur to them. We need a special day to make us apprecitae each other?

Gentlemen, beware of falling into the trap of negotiating desire for Valentine’s Day performance. Don’t be lulled into thinking Game is any less necessary on V-Day. In fact, I can’t think of a more direct illustration of how the feminine encourages the transaction of men’s goods and services in exchange for a woman’s sexuality than reserving a ‘special day’ just for it. Remember, you cannot negotiate genuine desire; and with the right art, a bag of Skittles can be a more romantic gesture than all the sonnets, flowers and jewelry your inner romantic soul will ever be appreciated for by her.

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.

V-Day in the Matrix

Just in case you weren’t already convinced of the complete totality of media control that the Matrix has, let me offer yet one more Valentine’s Day example:

I was in a grocery store this weekend picking up something to grill and thought it would be a convenient time to pick up a Valentine’s Card for my wife since it’s coming this week. So I meander over to the greeting cards section to sift this years crop of mushy sentiment.  Much to my disgust the only cards available in the “For My Wife” section of the Valentines Cards (and I mean ONLY cards available) come in two types:

A.) The sentimental, “My life was nothing before you and would be nothing without you”, tripe that reduces a man to a simpering, codependent who owes his very existence to the woman who deigned to marry the poor soul.

B.)The “humorous” Valentine that is essentially the greeting card equivalent of Everybody Loves Raymond or Family Guy. These are basically intended to beg for a wife’s forgiveness for all of his uniquely male faults and foibles, that only she can solve by virtue of her infallible feminine wiles. Judging from the ‘humorous’ intent of these cards, no man is capable of feeding himself much less ask for direction or leave a toilet seat down, but on “her special day” this card is meant to prompt an appologetic laugh.

Needless to say I’ll be making my own card this year, but for fuck’s sake, how can we ever get a break from this shit when we’re ankle-bitten at every opportunity? You simply cannot buy a card that doesn’t force a man to be self-depricating.

Love Story

Blue-Valentine-stills-blue-valentine-25345256-1280-852

Among my more controversial essays is my series on the differences in interpretations of love as specific to each gender. As I’ve elaborated before Men approach love from idealistic foundations, while due to their innate hypergamy, women’s approach to love is rooted in opportunism. The easy rebuttal to this that often comes from women is to presume that either sex’s life experiences are going to necessarily be different. Women cannot fully appreciate the male experience (much less validate it) unless they can actually become men and live in a lifetime of their experiences, their upbringing, their biology, their acculturation and societal conditioning.

Yes, I am aware that it works both ways, men cannot fully appreciate women’s existential experiences either and for the same reason, however that doesn’t excuse either gender from making an effort to better understand the other’s experience. In a social environment where the feminine perspective has primacy, it has been women who have been the arbiters of what should universally be the socially agreed upon definition of what love means to both sexes.

However, this hasn’t stopped men from trying to define love for themselves, and make efforts to make women see how they would like their love to be in idealistic terms. History is rife with examples of men, in every culture, venturing to make women understand and really grasp their idealized notion of love. From ancient love poems, to epic stories of one woman launching a thousand ships, to Romeo and Juliet, Men have attempted to educate women on how they would be loved, and how they would like to love.

As I’ve detailed before, once a man really unplugs from his feminine conditioning he becomes more sensitive to the world that’s been pulled over his eyes. Hearing common terms in conversation that belie a feminine mindset, listening to songs that drip with male self-sacrifice for women, understanding why certain themes in popular media resonate with culture is all part of this new sensitivity. One thing the red pill has has made me keenly aware over time is the difference in storytelling that applies to each gender.

It would be too easy an assumption to say that I have a better awareness as to which gender is telling a particular story, but rather, I have a keener sensitivity to which gender perspective a story is originating from now – and particularly when that story involves specific gender approaches to love. I could single out the stories of Emily Bronte and compare them with the formulaic themes of modern romance novels or romantic comedy movies, but that would be easy and expected. Any women’s studies major could tell you this. What I’m interested in is how the genders interpret each other’s idealized concepts of love.

Example 1

Titanic, 1997. Arguably one of the greatest love stories ever put on film. I can remember adult women of the time who literally were incapable of going to work or doing much of anything else the day after watching this movie. I can remember women I dealt with professionally bursting into tears because they were so wracked with vicarious imagined grief – this is the psychological impact Titanic had, don’t even get me started on the teenage girls of the time.

A lot went on in Titanic from a feminine-romanticized perspective. It’s definitely an epic fairytale, and one that has all of the formulaic elements of a classic love story. Rich beautiful girl, scrappy-poor-but-Alpha-and good looking hero who draws girl into his reality. Tragic, but sacrificial death of said hero to save her and ensure her a better life.

I’ve linked the last few minutes of Titanic here because it’s really the summation of the entire story. The former beauty, now old woman, Rose still pines for her Alpha she lost so long ago. This scene epitomizes the concept of the Alpha Widow — As the heart that was given to her by her Alpha sinks to the bottom of the ocean, we pan across photos of all of her life experiences afforded to her by Jack’s sacrifice; the beauty queen, the mother, the Amelia Earhart-esque (have it all fantasy) pilot, horseback rider and finally she can return to her Alpha in death.

Example 2

Saving Private Ryan, 1998. Released just one year later, Saving Private Ryan debuts. Also, arguably one of the greatest, heroic and epic stories put to film from an unarguably masculine perspective. Where Titanic relies on a clever retelling of classic and tested romantic themes, SPR explores distinctly male themes of honor, duty, courage, service and also sacrifice. Captain Miller’s sacrifice is of a decidedly different nature, but the premise is the same — self-sacrifice for the betterment of another individual. As Captain Miller dies his last words are “Earn this.” Merit this, be worthy of this.

Granted, more men than just Captain Miller die on Ryan’s behalf, but he’s the protagonist and the one we really care about as his death is personalized for us. In an almost analogous ending to Titanic (linked) we see the elderly Ryan contemplating his life and wondering if he’d “earned it” with what he’d done with his life. And in classic form he seeks that affirmation from a woman, his wife.

“Tell me I’ve led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.”

We can tell there’s no connection, no familiarity of Ryan’s experience shared with his wife. Her response is just this side of a patronizing dismissal of the imagined concerns of an old man. We can presume Ryan has led a somewhat good life, he’s still married, probably has kids, but nowhere is the have it all fantasization that an elderly Rose enjoys. We still don’t know if Ryan had ‘earned it’, if his life’s performance was good enough; the pat on the cheek from his oblivious wife doesn’t confirm it, but that’s the operative difference between Ryan’s character and Rose’s — Rose’s good life was never expected to have been earned.

Almost serendipitously Mac commented on my Sorry,.. post this evening:

I was picked on as a boy and decided at a very young age to fight back by outdoing all my naysayers. All the people that tell you your not good enough, smart enough or talented enough… So I became the antithesis of their projections and surpassed all my personal goals. It’s more than just getting the girl… It’s about conquering “your” world!

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

There is one final movie that I would use as an illustration of gender-differential love approaches and that is the movie Blue Valentine. I would link some clips here but I think it’s probably best to watch it in its entirety to really understand the principle differences between men and women’s idealized love.

The Feminine Imperative – Circa 1300

chivalry

A lot of shit got slung at me last week about making comparisons of chivalry being an antiquated social extension of the Feminine Imperative. I’ve written about the concept of chivalry and its impact on the intergender landscape of today, but as I read through certain select comments in Sanitizing the Imperative and after reading the misconception about chivalry on other blogs I felt the idea of chivalry deserved a bit more attention.

Over the course of my travails in the manosphere one common misperception I read a lot coming from well meaning red pill men, as well as the predictable blue pill white knight is this broken and romanticized notion of what chivalry means to them and should mean for everyone else expected to “play by the rules.” I originally touched upon the convenient use the modern Feminine Imperative has made in making appeals to anachronistic idealisms like chivalry and honor in The Honor System. I then revisited this in a bit more detail after the Concordia shipwreck with the women and children first debate even staunch jezebelers couldn’t resist in Chivalry vs. Altruism:

Chivalry is simply one of many ideologies that was subsumed by westernized romanticism. Chivalry also applied toward things such as not hitting a man while he wasn’t looking or attacking a blatantly undefendable, inferior or even a respected foe. It was originally intended as a code of etheics determined by the Roman Catholic church to control the otherwise lawless and violent natures of soldiers and knights who, understandably, had a tendency for brigandism in the middle ages. What passes for most people’s understanding of chivalry is actually a classic interpretation and bastardization of western romanticisim and the ideologies of ‘courtly love’, which ironically enough was also an effort by the women of the period intended to better control the men of the early and high Renaissance. Essentially it amounted to a taming of the over-dominating masculine influence of the time by laying out a system of prescribed appropriate conditions necessary to satisfy a womans access to her intimacy.

You’ll have to forgive me for indulging in a history lesson for today’s post, but it is necessary. What I find most common in men’s interpretation of chivalry is an almost Disneyesque mental return to knightly virtues of the past that only ever existed in films like Excalibur. My first amazement is that concept of romanticized chivalry have endured as long as they have. This is not due to some provable merit, but rather that the expectations of the more useful aspects of chivalry have benefitted the Feminine Imperative for so long that they’ve become ubiquitous expectations of men – even while coexisting beside a feminism that actively derides them.

So  bear with me while we return to the foggy days of medieval Western Europe to search for the true roots of chivalry.

Origins of Chivalry

The year is around 1060 and over the last 100 years or so (i.e. the ‘dark ages’) a feudal system of moneyed landowners and their personal militias have made a mess of things. In spite of the best efforts of containment and control by the Holy Roman Empire, constant violence and sporadic wars amongst these small states have led to a breakdown in the fabric of society. Brigandism and outright barbarism are common amongst these militias – what they lacked was a common enemy, and what the church lacked was resources.

The Holy Roman Empire would provide that common enemy in the form of the Muslim (Moors) infidels to the south and a series of bloody crusades ensued. The Moors of course possessed the resources the church was desirous of, but the church lacked a cohesive social / religious order under which to unite the various militias they needed to process their crusades. Thus was born the code of chivalry.

This code appealed well to the martial pride of the evolving noble class, but further cemented the ideology into the commoners by pairing it with the religious doctrine of the era. The code was thus described as the Ten Commandments of chivalry:

  • Believe the Church’s teachings and observe all the Church’s directions.
  • Defend the Church.
  • Respect and defend all weaknesses.
  • Love your country.
  • Do not recoil before an enemy.
  • Show no mercy to the Infidel. Do not hesitate to make war with them.
  • Perform all duties that agree with the laws of God.
  • Never lie or go back on one’s word.
  • Be generous to everyone.
  • Always and everywhere be right and good against evil and injustice.

Not a bad code of ethics under which to unite factions who previously had little better to do than smash each other with maces and steal each other’s resources. It’s a difficult task to get a man to die for another man, but give him an ideology, and that he’ll die for.

The chivalric code worked surprisingly well for over three centuries and was instrumental in consolidating most of the countries that evolved into the Western Europe we know today. However, as with most ‘well intentioned’ social contracts, what originated as a simplistic set of absolute rules was progressively distorted by countervailing influences as time, affluence and imperatives shifted and jockeyed for control.

Courtly Love

For all of the influence that the church exerted in using chivalry as a social contract, it was primarily a contract played out amongst men. With the notable exceptions of a few select Queens and Jeanne d’Arc, it was only men who had any true social input either publicly or privately during this time. It wasn’t until the mid-thirteenth century that (noble) women would insert their own imperative into the concept of chivalry.

At the time, chivalry was a mans’ club, and unless she was a widow, women were more or less insignificant in the scope of chivalry. A nobleman might take a wife, but rarely were these marriages romantic in nature. Rather they served as political alliances between states (and often consolidating church control) and a man’s romantic and sexual interests were served by mistresses or the spoils of his conquests. In fidelity was expected in noble marriages.

Enter the French noblewomen Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne. Both of these Ladys were instrumental in attaching the concept of courtly love and romance to the chivalric code that we (somewhat) know today. The wealth and affluence that Western Europe enjoyed from the late medieval to the high renaissance provided the perfect environment into which high-born women were feeling more comfortable inserting their imperative.

Both of these noble women had a love for the traveling troubadours of the time, espousing acts of love and devotion as merits for a new aristocracy. Originally courtly love was a much more pagan ideal, but like the church had done centuries before, when ideologically fused to the chivalric code it gradually proved to be an amazingly effective source of social control over men.

In it’s earliest form, courtly love was much more salacious than the socially controlling device it evolved into:

Properly applied, the phrase l’amour courtois identified an extravagantly artificial and stylized relationship–a forbidden affair that was characterized by five main attributes. In essence, the relationship was

  • Aristocratic. As its name implies, courtly love was practiced by noble lords and ladies; its proper milieu was the royal palace or court.
  • Ritualistic. Couples engaged in a courtly relationship conventionally exchanged gifts and tokens of their affair. The lady was wooed according to elaborate conventions of etiquette (cf. “courtship” and “courtesy”) and was the constant recipient of songs, poems, bouquets, sweet favors, and ceremonial gestures. For all these gentle and painstaking attentions on the part of her lover, she need only return a short hint of approval, a mere shadow of affection. After all, she was the exalted domina–the commanding “mistress” of the affair; he was but her servus–a lowly but faithful servant.
  • Secret. Courtly lovers were pledged to strict secrecy. The foundation for their affair–indeed the source of its special aura and electricity–was that the rest of the world (except for a few confidantes or go-betweens) was excluded. In effect, the lovers composed a universe unto themselves–a special world with its own places (e.g., the secret rendezvous), rules, codes, and commandments.
  • Adulterous. “Fine love”–almost by definition–was extramarital. Indeed one of its principle attractions was that it offered an escape from the dull routines and boring confinements of noble marriage (which was typically little more than a political or economic alliance for the purpose of producing royal offspring). The troubadours themselves scoffed at marriage, regarding it as a glorified religious swindle. In its place they exalted their own ideal of a disciplined and decorous carnal relationship whose ultimate objective was not crude physical satisfaction, but a sublime and sensual intimacy.
  • Literary. Before it established itself as a popular real-life activity, courtly love first gained attention as a subject and theme in imaginative literature. Ardent knights, that is to say, and their passionately adored ladies were already popular figures in song and fable before they began spawning a host of real-life imitators in the palace halls and boudoirs of medieval Europe. (Note: Even the word “romance”–from Old French romanz–began life as the name for a narrative poem about chivalric heroes. Only later was the term applied to the distinctive  love relationship commonly featured in such poems.)

Last week Dalrock had an outstanding summation of romantic love – Feral Love – that got lost amongst his other posts. This is unfortunate because virtually every thing he brings to light here finds its roots in exactly the romanticized courtly love rituals outlined above. What we consider acts of romance today, what we consider our chivalric duties to uphold in their regard, are all the results of a 13th century feminine imperative’s attempts to better effect women’s innate (and socially repressed) hypergamy. When we think of noble acts of self-sacrifice for women this is where the origins are. One of the more cruel acts of devotion a ‘lover’ may ask of her paramours was to bleed themselves for her; capturing the blood in a vessel after slicing his foram and comparing the amount therein.

In the doldrums of a well provided-for existence, women will actively create the elusive indignation they need to feel alive. The women of the early courts were effectively perfecting the art of maintaining a bullpen of beta orbiters willing to address all of her unmet emotionalism while being fucked raw by their badboy knights to sire royal Alpha children when they returned from campaigns. The courtly love practices of the 13th century served the same purpose for women as Facebook does today –attention – balancing the Alpha seed with the beta need.

Feminism 1.0

As I wrote in last week’s installment, while the Feminine Imperative remains the same, its social extensions for exerting itself change with conditions and environment it finds itself in. There’s been some recent discussion in the manosphere that feminism can only exist in an affluent society that provides sufficient internal social controls to protect the extensions of the Feminine Imperative. For instance, while Slut Walks may be encouraged in Sweden, there are very few in Egypt at the moment. One socioeconomic environment supports the expresion of the imperative, the other does not.

The concept of chivalry, in its original, intent was the result of a social control in an otherwise lawless environment. Later, when affluence accumulated and an upper class evolved, so too do the social extensions of the Feminine Imperative.

Fusing the philosophy and rituals of courtly love with the chivalric code was one such extension of the time – and a more enduring one I’ll add. The major failing most White Knights and moralistically leaning red pill men have today is understanding that the modern concept of chivalry, and all their feel-good Arthurian idealism bastardized for the last millennia, sprang from the want of a  more exercisable hypergamy for the women of the era.

It should then come as no shock that the old model of romanticized chivalry would conflict with the more overt social extension of today’s feminism. A want for that old, socially coerced, masculine devotion clashes with the ‘do-it-yourself’ feminism of today.

The Couch

Romance according to Tomassi, A Field Report

Oddly enough this happened last weekend so it’s still pretty fresh in my head. Friday night I was going to meet up with my partners for a holiday drink promo, but due to a scheduling error we cancelled it. Rather than call my wife to tell her I’d be coming home (which would only make her expectant of me), I waited until I was about 2 blocks from my home to call her on my cell phone. I said to her, “I’m thinking about doing something, if I blow off this thing tonight, I want you wearing that hot, white lingerie I like when we fuck.” (presume the sale) I could tell I’d caught her off guard and I was telling her we were going to have sex later that evening (no asking permisson or “can we please fuck tonight?”). She laughed and said “uh sure,..”, this was right as I pulled into my driveway and I still had her on the phone when I walked in the door and said “OK, here I am.”

Our daughter was at a friend’s place so I made martinis for us and purposely only had a light one for myself. I used C&F on my wife while we chatted on the couch. Now, she’s used to this from me, but because I’d prefaced the evening with giving her the impression that I was taking time away from other things to come home and knock it out with her. She was eating it up and mirroring my advances back to me. I never saw the lingerie that night because we were too busy going at it right on the couch and then moving to the bedroom. I kept up the C&F while we were at it and there was no “let me get cleaned up before we do it” there was no “we better hurry it up so I can be asleep by 10:30” – it was Game On and we had some fantastic sex all because I was setting the frame.

This is how you “keep it fresh.” Understand, this is the same woman I married 16 years ago. There were no roses, there was no ‘date night’, no wine or a candle lit dinner. There were martinis in my home and me setting the frame. And Monday I brought her a few flowers to reinforce a desired behavior.

Primary Focus

There’s a part in American Beauty where it looks like Kevin Spacey’s character is going to actually reconnect with his sexually ambivalent wife (actually she’s cheating on him, but we don’t discover this until later). They’re getting hot and bothered with each other for the first time in a long time on a very nice (and apparently expensive) couch.

This is significant because the guy and his wife are on the verge of divorce due to their lack of a sex life and for the first time in a long time she genuinely responds sexually for her husband, and you think for a moment there’s some hope for them.

As they get more into it his wife becomes fixaed on her husband’s hand holding a beer and almost spilling it on the couch that they’re on. He is totally focused on her, kissing her and not thinking about the beer in his hand. Her eyes are locked on the beer though until he finally notices what is distracting her from him – the beer.

He tries to take her mind off it by focusing more on her, and she becomes even more concerned that he’ll spill beer on the couch while they’re going at it. She says, “Lester you’re going to spill beer on the couch,..” he says, “it’s just a couch,..” she then gets indignant about how expensive it is and then he yells, “IT’S JUST A COUCH!”

Do you see what this gets at? This is the real challenge of marriage. Making desire and passion go beyond the mundane. That is what needs to be kept fresh in the face the routine. Single people in the throes of passion don’t care if a bottle of wine is spilled on the carpet in the process, married people do. Most marriages aren’t destroyed from the outside, but rather the inside. External temptations are easy to resist; it’s when it’s coupled with internal conditions that predispose us to it that it happens. Telling right from wrong is easy, determining right from right is difficult.

This is the perfect illustration of what marriage has become for most women – there is more attention directed toward externalities and little or none devoted to genuine desire. People experiencing genuine desire for one another don’t care about externalities. Nothing else exists to them but the object of their passion (and consummating it); there is no dirty laundry, no stain on a carpet, no neighbors who may hear them fucking, there is only them. Today’s couples don’t have a problem with trust or comfort or logistics, or even respect for the most part – what they have a problem with is desire. Men forget how to create it, women for get how to respond to it.

The New York Times had a recent article detailing the short shelf life of love (particularly in marriage). It’s essentially a fluff piece written by a woman obviously looking for an answer to her failing desire by expressing a similar lament for other women in her position. The irony of this article is that when men consider the biological / psychological reasons for why they want to bang other women, they’re shamed for lacking self-control or personal conviction. Let a woman do the same and it’s a new scientific discovery of self-enlightenment. I also thought the reframe about women actually being the more ‘novelty seeking’ of the sexes only lacquered on yet more irony.

Be that as it may, it’s interesting that the aspect of desire-killing familiarity is finally entering the popular consciousness in our feminine defined world. When you’re single, women love to prattle (mostly to betas and themselves) about how necessary it is for them to feel comfortable with a guy before having sex. Of course Alphas learn the lie of this earlier than most, but how telling it is then when the same comfort and familiarity that single women cry for is the marriage-killing factor that married women lament.

Men in Love

Dalrock had an interesting post last week – She’s the Victim – and as is the nature of Dal’s conversation the post served as the tree trunk for various branches of very interesting off-shoot discussion. Starviolet, a regular commenter (some would say troll) dropped what was a seemingly innocuous question:

“Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

As would be expected, the male responses to this and her followup comments ranged from mild annoyance of her naiveté to disbelief of her sincerity with regards to her “want to know.” However, her original wonderment as to whether men did in fact know when a woman doesn’t love them, I think, carries more weight than most guys (even manosphere men) realize. So I thought I’d recount my comments and the discussion here.

Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?

No, they can’t.

Why? Because men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the romantic ones.

Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves. So yes, men can’t tell when a woman doesn’t love them, because they want to believe women can love them in the ways they think they could.

From Women in Love:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation. Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of an ability for women to love Men as Men would like them to.

HeiligKo responds:

All right, I keep hoping your rule #6 is wrong, but it hasn’t proven to be. So is the big lie that men miss not that women can provide this, but that we don’t invest this energy into fellow men? That we don’t find men we can be vulnerable with, so that we are emotionally prepared for the trials that women will create in our homes. Is this why so many women tend to isolate their husbands or boyfriends from their male friends early on in marriage or dating?

Presuming Starviolet was genuinely confused (and I’m half-inclined to think she is) this is exactly the source of Starviolet’s confusion. Women’s solipsism prevents them from realizing that men would even have a differing concept of love than how a woman perceives love. Thus her question, “can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

I don’t necessarily think it’s a ‘big lie’, it’s just a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. If it’s a ‘lie’ at all it’s one men prefer to tell themselves.

Bridging the Gap

Later in the discussion Jacquie (who is one of the two female writers to make my blogroll) brought up another interesting aspect of bridging the lack of mutuality between either gender’s concepts of love:

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing? Or is it something she should strive for continuously with the hope that she can at least move somewhat closer to this idealized love? Is it even too much for her to comprehend?

As I was telling HeligKo, it’s more a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. Starviolet’s question about whether a man can determine when a woman doesn’t love him goes much deeper than she’s aware of. I think a lot of what men go through in their blue pill beta days – the frustration, the anger, the denial, the deprivation, the sense that he’s been sold a fantasy that no woman has ever made good upon – all that is rooted in a fundamental belief that some woman, any woman, out there knows just how he needs to be loved and all he has to do is find her and embody what he’s been told she will expect of him when he does.

So he finds a woman, who says and shows him that she loves him, but not in the manner he’s had all this time in his head. Her love is based on qualifications and is far more conditional than what he’d been led to believe, or convinced himself, love should be between them. Her love seems duplicitous, ambiguous, and seemingly, too easily lost in comparison to what he’d been taught for so long is how a woman would love him when he found her.

So he spends his monogamous efforts in ‘building their relationship’ into one where she loves him according to his concept, but it never happens. It’s an endless tail-chase of maintaining her affections and complying with her concept of love while making occasional efforts to draw her into his concept of love. The constant placating to her to maintain her love conflicts with the neediness of how he’d like to be loved is a hypergamic recipe for disaster, so when she falls out of love with him he literally doesn’t know that she no longer loves him. His logical response then is to pick up the old conditions of love she had for him when they first got together, but none of that works now because they are based on obligation, not genuine desire. Love, like desire, cannot be negotiated.

It took me a long time, and was a very tough part of my own unplugging when I finally came to terms with what I thought about love and how it’s conveyed isn’t universal between the genders. It took some very painful slap-in-the-face doses of reality for this to click, but I think I have a healthier understanding of it now. It was one of the most contradictory truths I had to unlearn, but it fundamentally changed my perspective of the relations I have with my wife, daughter, mother and my understanding of past girlfriends.

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing?

I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible, but it would take a woman to be self-aware enough that men and women have different concepts of their ideal love to begin with, which is, improbable. The biggest hurdle isn’t so much in women recognizing this, but rather in men recognizing it themselves. So, hypothetically, yes you could, but the problem then becomes one of the genuineness of that desire. Love, like desire, is only legitimate when it’s uncoerced and unobligated. Men believe in love for the sake of love, women love opportunistically. It’s not that either subscribe to unconditional love, it’s that both gender’s conditions for love differ.

Pathologizing the Male Sexual Response

Rollo, I just saw the movie ‘Shame’ starring Michael Fassbender and felt the need to recommend it on here.

The main character is addicted to sex, it’s basically the main focus in his life. He is constantly pursuing it one way or another, picking up women he meets in his daily life, getting behind his laptop to engage in internet porn, ordering an escort girl, or just jerking off on the toilet.

He’s good with women, runs pretty solid game. But it’s all superficial, he just knows how to push the right buttons and make their ginas tingle, then fvcks them. He’s unable to establish something like a “connection” with them, fvcking is a purely individual experience for him, just as masturbation. Only, instead of using his right hand, he uses a woman’s body.

It seems as if the guy is empty inside and is trying to fill his inner emptiness by engaging in sexual activities all the time. Of course, it doesn’t get him anywhere, but he can’t help himself. He just keeps repeating his cycle of sexual activities, he’s a slave to it. The moment he would stop doing it, he’d become very uneasy, like a drug addict going through withdrawal.

Fassbender’s portayal of the main character is quite brilliant. Nothing of what I wrote above is being told explicitly, you just deduct it from his actions and body language while the movie lets you be a spectator to the main character’s daily life (so, in fact, you might disagree with certain parts of my analysis of the main character and give a slightly different meaning to his behavior, although I’m sure you’ll agree with it for the most part).

Anyway, it’s a pretty raw and engaging movie, and upon viewing it, I realized I have more in common with the main character than I’d like to admit… I suspect many of you would feel the same upon watching it. It also reminded me of Squirrels and the problems he spoke of in many of his posts. Squirrels could be this guy, lol. So if you could relate to the things Squirrels was struggling with, you’ll probably find this movie interesting.

Love to hear your thoughts if you watched it!

One of the most common themes in human storytelling is the quest for meaning in what’s essentially meaninglessness. This story has been retold for centuries in different contexts, but it’s essentially the same plot; the person with the unfillable void inside that prompts them to great acts of creative passion or horrible deeds of self-destruction. It can be a tragedy or a comedy.

Sex addiction is just the meme du jour of this century. Feminization has taken this cliché for its own purposes. Every romantic comedy, every ‘love story’ in the past 50 years, all revolve around men’s inability to fill the hole in their heart that only a special woman can. Literally, everything else in the world is just a cheap, superficial substitute for the inexplicable magical element a woman completes a man with. He literally cannot live without her piece of his puzzle.

Sex addiction is simply the new pathology of the male condition so we make the leap from Pretty Woman and the Hooker with the Heart of Gold in the 80’s to the more sinister sex addict of the new millennium who’s so hopelessly flawed he’ll burn away to hell before he sees the healing light of submitting to the feminine imperative’s medicine.

Women like it because they feel superior in their capacity to control themselves sexually (dubious, yes) in comparison to men, but also because it provides them with a self-righteous sense of pity; “If only men would just see us for our beautiful insides and be less obsessed with our bodies they’d find peace.”

Men like this narrative because it gives them a feeling that as bad as they are, they’re not THAT bad. There’s a self-righteous sense of qualifying to women based on how much better they are in controlling themselves, and again this contributes to their “not-like-other-guys” sense of uniqueness they hope women will recognize, appreciate and want to ƒuck them for. That sex addict in the story can’t make a human ‘connection’ with women, but I can, so fuck me instead.

The fact that a thought about a movie about a ‘sex addicted’ man occurred to someone and was created is proof enough of its cultural relevance for our time. The zeitgeist of this period is evidenced in what we think others will find relevancy in, regardless of any intended purpose. The story wouldn’t exist if the cultural interpretations weren’t already pre-established to make it relevant.

The Cure

One of the more insidious social narratives that the feminine imperative has convinced us of is that the inherent flaw(s) of maleness can only be ‘cured’ by uniquely female means. This is an easy narrative to follow since most modern storytelling (TV, movies, books) revolves around women’s influence being the only solution to men’s moronic, uniquely male, self-inflicted problems.

As with most other social narratives embedded into our collective consciousness, even Beta men pick up this ideology and attempt to use it to their Beta-Game-feminine-identification advantage. Convince men of an innate incompleteness, and sell women’s mystical element, women’s home-spun wisdom, women’s presumptive intuition as the completing factor he’s unable to comprehend he needs due to being a male and therefore ignorant of his deficit. Every romantic story, comedy or tragedy, has revolved around this narrative for centuries. Only recently has it been used as a social tool of feminization, as well as a commercialization of men’s presumptive inherent lack.

Women, on the other hand, are portrayed as self-contained, self-sufficient entities, and even when the story develops upon a woman’s flaws it’s never due to her ‘femaleness’, and the solution to her conflict is usually resolved through the influence of other women. There is rarely, if ever, any contrition that a man might solve a woman’s problems – and when he does, it’s usually through employing feminine means to do so (i.e. he “gets in touch with his feminine side” to resolve the conflict). Feminine primacy needs this narrative to ensure its lasting predominance as a social influence.

The first thing Tiger Woods did after his sexual appetites came to public attention was to commit himself to therapy for his ‘problem’. To the feminine imperative, the male sexual response is a ‘problem’ requiring therapy, medicalization, a cure. There has been no better means to maintaining feminine primacy than to collectively convince society that the effects of testosterone and male sexual response is aberrant social behavior. Men being men is vulgar, lewd and often violent – this is the meme. When men such as Tiger’s first response is to agree with that meme and institutionalize himself, he adds one more affirmation to the feminine social narrative of men’s ‘problem’.

Women & Regret

Paradox on the SoSuave forum had an interesting question after reading War Brides:

I’ve seen it mentioned here in passing but I would like to know how women handle regret.

How do they handle decisions that may affect their destiny?

Moments like:

Seeing someone on a train, bus, coffee shop, grocery store but not saying hello when the moment comes.

Meeting someone great at a party but not exchanging numbers.

Not calling back a guy

I have seen low IL changed to high IL but do women generally waver in their interest level all of the time?

The funny thing about regret is, it’s better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven’t done.

Any observational answer I could offer here is going to have to be adjusted to account for women’s inherent solipsism – everything is about her, and everything confirms her assessments as the default. As such, you have to bear in mind that regret, for women, usually begins from a point of how a missed opportunity could’ve better benefitted themselves. The root of this is grounded in women’s constant, in-born psychological quest for security. Hypergamy, by necessity, makes for solipsistic women in order to best preserve the survival integrity of the species. That’s not to say women can’t sublimate that impulse as necessity dictates, but just as men must sublimate their sexual imperative, women begin at a point of tempering the insecurity that results from hypergamy.

Guilt and Regret

Using hypergamy as a woman’s point of origin, this affects how women process regret. At this point I should note that guilt and regret are not cut from the same vine. You can feel guilty about something you did or didn’t do, as well as feel regret for something you did or didn’t do, but the two are not synonymous. I want to avoid that confusion here from the outset, because guilt is associated with a lingering negativity, while regret comes from different motivations. If you did something you feel guilty about, you probably regret it, but you can regret something you have no feelings of guilt about.

After you finish reading this post check out the ‘Missed Connections’ section on your areas Craig’s List. Read the differences in tone, vernacular and purpose of both men and women lamenting a missed chance at something they hoped might develop. There’s no guilt involved in this wishful thinking, only a regret for not having taken an action.

Women’s Regret

Women’s experience of regret depends upon the degree or intensity of the encounter in relation to their own conditions. I know that sounds like psycho-babble, but let me explain. If, and to what degree, a woman experiences regret in the situations Paradox is describing, these are directly proportional to her self-worth versus the (perceived) value of the encounter.

At the risk of coming off as shallow again, the fat chick who thinks she blew a shot at a Brad Pitt will regret it more than the HB 9 who happened to lose an “average” guy’s phone number. I’m going to catch fire for this I’m sure, but it’s really an autonomous response for human beings to make subconscious comparisons and employ a natural ego preservation. While it’s latent psychological function is to help us learn from experience, generally regret is painful, so our natural response is to defend against it. We tend to regret not capitalizing on situations where the perceived reward value is high. The psychological buffer of course comes in rationalizing the actual value potential of that missed opportunity or minimizing the negative impact of the taken opportunity.

So the debate is really how do women in particular process this reward valuation with regard to men? Again, I’ll say it breaks down to subliminally recognizing their self-worth, modified by social affirmations and then comparing it with the value of the encounter. Even semi-attractive women (HB 6-7) have a subconscious understanding that most intersexual encounters they have are mediated by their frequency – how rare was that opportunity? Meaning if a girl is constantly reinforced with male attention (guys asking her out all the time, social media influences, etc.) the rarity of any one encounter is compared against the frequency with which guys are hitting on her. This is female Plate Theory in action. If you happen to be one among many of the throngs of her suitors she’s less likely to regret not following up with you in relation to the extraordinary (see Alpha) guy she perceives has a higher value than she’s normally used to being rewarded with.