Social Conventions

Plate Theory III: Transitioning

You cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.

The following was posted with permission from a consult I did.

Hi Rollo, my name is Akash and I am big fan of your posts. They are always lucid, logical, and insightful.

I discovered the community about 5 months ago after yet another failed relationship characterized by highly AFC behavior on my part. I ended it with a tremendous amount of guilt as I felt that because she was a “good person” I ought to have made it work even though I wasn’t in love with her. I am 27 years old.

Based on your posts I would really appreciate your advice on two issues:
(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree and;
(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

If you would like to post a reply on the forum, rather than by a PM, for the benefit of others that is fine with me. I wanted to direct these queries to you though as I believe I could benefit from your worldy wise opinion.

Sincerely look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Akash

Akash,

I’ll give you a run down of what I can gather from your initial post, but understand that what you’ve given me here is pretty limited as far as information is concerned. I can only assume certain things from the very brief description of your life so take what I write with that in mind. In the future give me a better account of what your AFC behaviors were, how your relationships have ended, family background, where you live, why you’re pursuing a second degree, etc. I can be more accurate and avoid assumptions this way.

To begin with, you’ve only been involved in the “community” for the past 5 months so the first thing I’m going to tell you is that it takes time to mold your personality and unlearn mental schemas you’ve become conditioned to consider integral parts of your current personality. One of the biggest obstacles most men have with accepting the fundaments of a positive masculine mindset is the attitude that personality is static and uncontrollable by them. A lot of this “that’s just how I am” mentality comes from this basic conditioning and needs to be addressed from the outset since this almost universally is an ego-investment on the part of a guy who’s probably emotionally distressed, confused and/or frustrated.

Understand now that personality is ultimately what YOU determine it to be. This isn’t to say that external factors don’t influence personality; indeed these variables and outside influences are exactly the reason men such as yourself do seek out the community. However, it is you who determine what is comfortable for you and what will constitute the traits that makes your personality your own. You are most definitely not a blank slate, but you have the capacity to erase parts you don’t like or are unusable and rewrite new parts that you like and prove efficient.

(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree

This all depends on what your own personal goals are. The best use you can make of this time is to devote yourself completely to achieving the purpose for which you decided to pursue a second degree in the first place. I can only assume you are working for this degree with a set outcome in mind, but is this what you truly want? I ask this because I know far too many men who’ve altered the course of their lives to better accommodate the women in their lives or to facilitate their insecurities and fear of rejection. It’s not an unfamiliar story to me to hear of how a guy opted for a certain university or a career path because he’d convinced himself that it would sustain a relationship that he was fearful of loosing or he felt was his “responsibility as a man” to be supportive of her ambitions at the sacrifice of his own. The conclusion of this scenario, more often than not, ends with a bitter man, mad at himself with the long term results of his choices after the woman he’d strived so long to accommodate leaves him for another man who held fast to his own identity and ambition – which is exactly what makes him attractive.

I’m not sure how or if this fits into your conditions, but let it serve as an illustration for reclaiming and remolding your own personality. Only you have the hindsight to assess why you made certain decisions in your life. I’m only asking you to be as brutally critical of your true motivations for making them. Maybe it’s time you review why you decided to pursue a second degree?

(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

Akash, any reasonably attractive woman knows you’d like to have sex with her. It’s a primal, chemical instinct and to be bluntly honest, there’s nothing wrong with it. In certain Muslim sects men are allowed to take “temporary” wives for a set period of time in addition to their “permanent” wives so long as they support them financially. Some Mormons practice open polygamy in a similar fashion. Some men marry and divorce multiple times (and support them congruously). All of these practices are considered, to a greater or lesser degree, moral. The dissonance occurs when the rationalizations for a behavior conflict with the motivations for it and the associative psycho-social stigmas that get attached to it. Sorry for the $10 words here, but your feelings of guilt or hesitancy in a desire to explore multiple relationships is a calculated result of a very effective social conditioning with a latent purpose meant to curb a natural impulse.

Recognizing this is the first step to progressing beyond it and actually using it (responsibly) to your own advantage. As men, our biological impetus is to have unlimited access to unlimited sexuality with females bearing the best physical attributes. This is a rudimentary fact and on some level of consciousness both men and women understand this. No amount of proselytizing or social conditioning will erase what God and evolution hard-coded into our collective bio-psychological desires and behaviors. Admittedly, social conventions have historically made a good run at limiting this drive, but it can never (nor should it ever) purge this, because in essence it is a survival-ensuring attribute for us.

I wont argue against the utility in the latent purpose of absolute monogamy. No other method proves more valuable in parental investment and developing a strong masculine and feminine psyche in a person than that of a committed, opposite sex, two-parent family. I feel it’s necessary to add here that I am thoroughly unconvinced that gender identity is exclusively a set of learned behaviors as many in the mainstream would try to convince us of. There is simply too much biological evidence and the resulting psychological/behavioral response to gender differences to accept this, making it vitally important that a child (and later a healthy adult) be taught a healthy appreciation for both the masculine and feminine influences in their psyches.

The genders were meant to be complimentary, not adversarial. I certainly would never condone infidelity based on just this principle alone since it seems the most beneficial for healthy adults. It’s when this healthy monogamy becomes clouded by infantile, emotionality and insecure romanticisms with the resulting expectations that are derived by them that it becomes necessary for a man to cultivate an attitude of being the PRIZE. Adopting this mindset broadens his selection of opportunities for monogamy to his greatest advantage prior to committing to monogamy. In other words, if you are essentially sacrificing your capacity to pursue your biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality), pragmatically, you’ll want to choose a partner of the highest quality from the broadest pool of potential you are capable of attracting.

The downside of this proposition is twofold. First, your ability to attract a sizable pool of quality ‘applicants’ is limited by factors you immediately have available. At 37, if all goes well, you’ll be more financially stable and mature than you are at 27. The 37 year old Akash will, in theory, be more attractive to a long term prospect than the 27 year old Akash. Secondly, women’s sexual value decreases as they age, meaning there is no guarantee that your beautiful, vivacious, 27 year old bride will remain so at 37. In fact the odds are she wont.

All of this makes betting your biological imperative on monogamy critically important and thus deserving of the widest possible selection.

Men literally live and die according to their options, so it stands to reason they ought to entertain a prolonged period in their lives where they are open to exploring the most options they have access to while concurrently developing and improving themselves prior to making a commitment of this magnitude.

And this is precisely where most men fail. They buy into and internalize psychological social contrivances (i.e. ONEitis) that are little more than effective means of inculcating a self-expectation of accountability and liability to make this commitment, irrespective of maturity level or personal success (not simply financial success). The saddest ones, the AFC ones are the pitiable men who carry these contrivances into marriage and even old age without ever understanding that they had more potential which they squandered due to an inability to see past these contrivances and learn to be selective based on experience.

A truly powerful Man jealously guards his most precious resources; his independence and his ability to maneuver. In other words his options and his ability to exercise them. True power isn’t controlling others, but the degree to which you control the course of your own life and your own choices. Commitment to anything ALWAYS limits this. When you step through one door, a hundred more close behind you. You’re free to do what you want, right? You can always quit a job, divorce a wife, change your school, etc., but how many men do you know who are what they are today as a result of their own real doing, unfettered by how their choices impact their GF, wife, kids, parents, etc.? By comparison, how many guys do you know who dutifully stick with a dead-end job that’s slowly killing them because it’s better than dealing with the consequences and backlash it would have on his family? Are they free to quit? Sure, but not without an impact on their families and relationships.

So where does this leave you? You have 2 paths as I see it. You can sarge and explore your options with multiple LTRs and, should you decide to become sexually involved, do so while maintaining non-exclusivity with them. Put off and unlearn the expectations you’ve been conditioned to accept through (feminine beneficent) social contrivances and truly explore your opportunities while bettering your own conditions in anticipation for becoming monogamous at some later point. Or, you can remain in your sense of moral doctrine (no shame in this) and still non-exclusively date and explore your options while you continue to better yourself with the caveat that you know you’ll be limiting your depth of experience. I wont denigrate a decision to opt for this, but far too few religious men have the perseverance to stay objective in their decision to ‘hold out’ and overlook major character flaws in women they’d like to be their spouse in a furious rush to marry them and get to “the sex part.” Better to fall short in conviction than make hurried decisions that will alter your life.

And perhaps this isn’t even what you’re driving at? I don’t know if it’s a religious conviction or an internalized social contrivance that passes for one that’s the cause of your hesitancy, but isn’t it interesting that both are so closely associated? I know devout atheists who still believe in the fallacy of the ONE or the soulmate myth. Most women (and far too many men) look at me as if I’d denied the existence of God when I elaborate on why I think their eHarmony, induced fantasy of a soulmate is hogwash and psychologically damaging on a social scale.

Regardless, whatever your reasons, women should only ever be a compliment to a man’s life, never the focus of it. When you start living for a woman you become that woman. Never again compromise your own identity to receive the ever-changing approval she grants you. You have to be the PRIZE at all times, not just while you’re single. In fact, it’s imperative that you remain so into an LTR. My suggestion to you is not to even entertain the idea of monogamy until you are established in your career for 2 years, after your college is complete. Play the field, do whatever, but do not commit even to a girlfriend. Rather make a commitment to yourself, promise yourself you wont allow yourself to let emotionality and conditioned expectations of monogamy dictate what your goals will be or how you’ll achieve them.

It’s called enlightened self-interest; you cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.

Dispelling the Magic

Women get the men they deserve.

One point I try to make in my roaming about blogs dedicated to intergender dynamics is reading articles from many different perspectives. When I have the time, I actively hunt down articles that I know I will disagree with. I think it’s far too easy to get locked into the habit of seeking out bloggers, articles and statistics that reaffirm our own particular views. Even within the circles with which we’d be inclined to agree with there will often be a lot of conflicting viewpoints – such as the recent conflict pitting the MRAs vs. the PUAs, or Game vs. MGTOW.

I began this blog with the intent of studying the reasons why intergender social and psychological dynamics evolve, what functions they serve, and develop contingencies or actionable methods of bettering one’s life using this information – really this is the core of Game. The problem inherent in this, and really unplugging in general, is that it often comes with a healthy dose of disillusionment. Once you strip away the heady fantasies of soul-mates and expectations of ‘happily ever afters”, and replace it with a more practical understanding based on reasonably reliable, empirical explanations, what you’re left with looks a lot like nihilism. Even for the most staunch realists among the ‘community’ there’s still a desire to want to apply, however slightly, some kind of mysticism to the process of connecting with another human being. With other Men it may be some esoteric desire to cast their association in terms of honor, integrity or respect – with women it comes as idealization or predestination.

I’m not saying this desire to spiritualize these connections is without merit, but I can’t help but see the conflict it has in coexisting with the practicality of what we’re learning about ourselves. Just in the last 30 years we’ve come to understand the biochemical natures of our emotions. We know a hormone like oxytocin induces feelings of trust and promotes nurturing. We know that the endorphin / dopamine profile associated with feelings of infatuation, lust and love is chemically similar to that of heroine. Poof! There goes the magic. We have an understanding of women’s ovulatory cycles and the resulting sexual behavioral habits that are induced by them. Only the generations of the late 20th and 21st are privy to this information. Evo-Psychology has only risen to prominence as a field of study in the past 15 years.

Discomfort and Disillusion

All of this makes for some very uncomfortable realizations, particularly when men become aware of the social schemas established to keep them in a female-centric reality. Game is a recent countermeasure developed by men to better adapt to this feminine primacy, but it was only possible through advances in both communication technologies, access to globalized information and new socio-psychological theory. Prior to these advancements, and with the rise of feminization from the late 60s to the late 90s men were clueless as to their social predicament. From the start of the sexual revolution until the beginning of this millennia, western masculinity (and femininity) has been subjected to the greatest deliberate social and psychological restructuring, any generation has ever known. And I shouldn’t limit that exclusively to western culture; now we see this effect filtering into Asia, Japan, even traditionally masculine Latin cultures. As westernization spreads, so too does it’s feminization.

What have men been left clinging to? The pseudo-guilt we’ve been taught to be ashamed of as part of our past “patriarchy” to be sure, but more importantly we were left with the vestiges of that magical thinking. In the face of a yet undefined hypergamy, we wanted to still believe in the ‘Sugar & Spice’ myth, the respect her wishes motive, the marriage goal – all of which were (are) still actively reinforced by a feminine imperative that knew its time had come and men were too stupid in their romanticism to know it. That is until the Meta Game was established.

The great and powerful Oz that was feminization is finally having the curtain pulled back on it. In this new age of communication men can globally “share notes” and come to their own conclusions – and women shriek all the louder as we hit closer to the truth. Thanks to its relative anonymity, no longer is there any social stigma to fear from even broaching the subject of how best to deal with women. The great wailing we hear and read from women is less about current social implications and more about having the 30 year social program of feminization being exposed for what it truly was. Yet even in the face of men seeing the Empress with no clothes, they still make appeals to the romantic, magical association men clung to before they became aware of a hypergamy enabling feminization. We read cries of Man-Up! Accept your previous responsibilities of being a husband and leader, but don’t be overbearing and crush our spirits. And in the back row a new generation of women, the 22 year olds, scream “where’s the party?” as they upload a fresh set of nudes shot in the bathroom from their cell phones.

Women get the men they deserve. For all the crowing and publicity of feminine triumphalism, there’s still a wonderment at why men are increasingly less and less motivated to play along in their feminine reality. As tough as it is for men to disabuse themselves of their romanticism, it’s even more so for women to accept their own natures in the shadow of the experiment that was 20th century feminization. They’re reaping the whirlwind that the Matriarchy of the sexual revolution has sown. It’s all the more ironic to read the same mothers who created this generation of men lament how their daughters are unmarried and childless at 35.

Bitter Misogynists

When men can be convinced to participate in women’s social conventions half their work is done for them.

One of the surest indicators of an AFC-beta mindset is the automatic presumption that anything remotely critical a man would say about women, or the feminine, is by default, equated with misogyny. All a man need do is open his mouth, in the most objective way he can muster, about anything critical of the feminine and he’s instantly suspect of sour grapes. He must’ve been burned, or is bitter and on the verge of desperation just for even a passing mention of some critical observation of women’s incongruent behaviors.

What an amazingly potent social convention that is – when a man will censor himself because of it on his own. The most successful social conventions are ones in which the subject willingly sublimates his own interests, discourages questioning it, and predisposes that person to encourage others to participate in it.

“You’re just bitter because you got burned by some bitch in the past and your misogynist ideology is just your way of lashing out.”

I hear this a lot from both men and women. It’s an easy response to parrot and it’s very useful. It foists the responsibility of confronting one’s critical ideas back on the man, all while shaming him for forming an ideology based on what he (and now a community of many other men) confirms by observations. It’s like a JBY (just be yourself) response; it sounds right, everyone uses it to the point of cliché, and it misdirects and discourages any further critical analysis.

This is a feminine social convention that’s in the same vein as shame. Any guy that has a point about the feminine, no matter how valid, can always have his argument poisoned because he’s a guy, and most guys are frustrated that they aren’t getting laid, and this is his petty way of venting. When men can be convinced to participate in women’s social conventions half their work is done for them. In presuming a default state of male misogyny, it implicitly denotes a default state of  ‘correctness’ or blamelessness of the female. In other words, you’re guilty and must prove innocence.

The protector dynamic has evolved into a beta breeding methodology. It’s like a Darwinistic version of Cap’n Save A Ho – so at the slightest critical word about a woman it’s, “See how quickly I come to a woman’s defense? What girl wouldn’t want a great protector like me? I’m unique. I’m not like those bitter ‘other guys’ so your best emotional/sexual/parental investment would be coupling with me as evidenced by my example.” Of course that isn’t their conscious, cognitively recognized reaction, but it is the subroutine that’s running in their unconscious. When this psychological schema is a practiced breeding methodology it becomes second nature; so much so that when ANY opportunity arises to display it (even under the conditions of anonymity), the guy snaps to attention. It’s really a Beta attempt to DHV (display higher value), and in and of itself it’s not necessarily a bad impulse,it just that it’s used to further a feminized social convention.

Whiners and Losers.

“Game Blogs, PUAs, MRA guys, they’re all a bunch of whiners who’d rather kvetch about feminism and real or imagined wrongs than just get up and get along.”

The problem I think most people have with the tone of what Game has, or is evolving into is that essentially Game is a masculine response to what feminism (really feminization) has evolved into.While I can empathize with the feeling that Game can assume a plaintive tone at some blogs – particularly MRA oriented ones – contemporary Game is really a countermeasure to the social conditions feminist ideology has embedded in our culture for the past 50+ years. However, the social framework has been established as such that even my pointing this out makes me suspect of complaining or “bitter”. See how that works? My belief is still, ‘don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better’, but it’s been built into feminization that to even analyze and have critical opinion of it makes you a whiner.

There is no going back.

NEO: “There’s no going back now is there?
MORPHEUS: “No. But if you could, would you really want to?”

One dynamic I encounter from guys who’ve experienced the ‘community’ in varying degrees is a desire to go back to their previously comfortable, ignorant bliss. The reality they become exposed to is too much to bear and they spit the red pill back up. They want to plug themselves back into the Matrix.

No person both frightens and disgusts me more than one who understands truth, but willfully opts for denial. It’s not the desire to do so that disgusts me, I understand the desire, it’s that there is no going back. Even if you never read another post or blog and regressed back to your old ways, you’ll still make the associations, see the signs of what others have analyzed in your own periphery, in women’s and the world’s behaviors and motivations, and you’ll be reminded (even if subconsciously) of that truth, or at least the uncomfortable push to get at the truth. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done.There is no going back now. Don’t wish it were easier. Wish you were better.

There comes a point of conflict (or revulsion if you want) after a guy has been unplugged from the Matrix long enough where he begins to doubt himself and what he’s seeing go on around him. All of the gender dynamics and the complex, but discreet, interplay between the sexes that’s been such a mystery for so long starts to become apparent to him. The Neg Hits he never would’ve dreamed of attempting in his AFC days become so predictably reliable at sparking interest that it becomes depressing. A backhanded compliment shouldn’t work; it goes against everything any girl has ever told him will endear him to a woman, but once he musters up the courage to experiment, he finds that they do.

What’s depressing isn’t that a well delivered neg, or C&F, or harnessing the attractive Alpha Asshole energy could actually generate sexual interest in women, it’s the principle behind them – the reason why they work – that prompts the internal conflict. Are women, generally, more like this than not? So a guy experiments a little more, and tests other theories, and discovers that with some minor variations, yes, for the most part the principles are valid if not predictable. This then becomes a real tough pill to swallow, especially when you consider ideas like the ruthlessness of feminine hypergamy. It’s very despairing, almost nihilistic, to a man fed on a steady diet of the flowery tropes of feminization for the better part of a lifetime. It’s very hard to measure oneself up and adjust to a new understanding of how women operate. He can’t reconcile what he’d been told and conditioned to believe before (the soul mate myth, pedestalize her, just be yourself, etc.) with this new paradigm. So either he learns to live with this new understanding, benefit from it and grow into a new role for himself, or he rejects it and vilifies it wholesale.

“Women are really not as bad as these misogynists, these bitter, burned men would all have us believe. They’re shallow and soulless to think women are all out to get them. They over-analyze everything when they should all just be themselves and let fate or some divine force pair them up with their soul mates. I pity them, really I do.”

I’ve heard all of these regressive rationales from boys as young as 14 to men as old as 75. It’s a comfortable ignorance to believe that things are just unknowable and beyond one’s control or efforts to really understand. And to make matters worse, there’s a long established system of social conventions ready to reinforce and affirm these rationales; ready to reinsert him back into the Matrix and tell him he’s unique and special (“not like other guys”) and will be rewarded with female intimacy for rejecting it.

Dream Killers

Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.

How common it is today to be married or getting married before we’ve realized any of our potential. For all the articles I read moaning and groaning about what a listless generation of “kidult” males we’ve inherited, that’s far removed from the reality of the young men I do consults with. No, what they want is just enough Game knowledge to connect with their Dream Girl and relax into a blissful beta cocoon of monogamy. They want to commit. Their lifetime AFC psychological conditioning makes commitment an urgency.

It never ceases to amaze me when I talk with these young men in their teens and 20s and they try to impress me with their fierce independence in every other realm of their lives, yet they are the same guys who are so ready to limit that independence and ambition in exchange for dependable female intimacy. They’re far too eager to slap on the handcuffs of monogamy, rather than develop themselves into men of ambition and passion that women naturally want to be associated with.

The truth however is that the longer you remain uncommitted, the more opportunities will be available to you. It’s been stated by wiser Men than I that women are dream-killers – and while I agree with this, I’d say this is due more to the man involved, and their own complicity and apathy, than some grand scheme of women.

It’s actually in women’s best interest that you don’t commit to them for a variety of reasons. I realize how counterintuitive that reads, but in your being so readily available you decrease your value as a commodity to them. Scarcity increases value, and particularly when the reason for that scarcity is something that serves another’s interest (hers in this example). The mid-20s Man pursuing his ambition to become an attorney in law school or the pre-med intern spending long hours at the hospital with aspirations of becoming a doctor is hindered and encumbered with the complications that maintaining a monogamous relationship necessitates of him. His time and efforts need to be applied toward acheiving his goals to become an even higher value Man – not just in terms of financial success but for his own edification and confidence. Needless to say, the constraints and obligations that maintaining a monogamous relationship require – both in time and emotional investment – make achieving these ambitions far more difficult.

I tend to promote the idea that Men should be sexually and emotionally non-exclusive until age 30, but this is a minimal suggestion. I think 35 may even serve better for Men. The importance being that as a Man ages and matures in his career, his ambitions and passions, his personality, his ability to better judge character, his overall understanding of behavior and motivations, etc. he becomes more valuable to the most desirable women and therefore enjoys better opportunity in this respect. Women’s sexual value decreases as they age and it’s at this point the balance tips into the maturing Man’s favor. It’s the Men who realize this early and understand that bettering themselves in the now will pay off better in the future while still enjoying (and learning from) the opportunities that come from being non-exclusive and non-commital make him a Man that women will compete for in the long term.

In your mid-20s you are at the apex of your potential with regards to the direction you will influence your life to go. I’m not going to make any friends by pointing this out, but what pisses off most “serial monogamists” is the unspoken regret of having assumed the responsibilities, liabilities and accountability of what monogamy demands before they truly understood their potential.

If you are single at 35 with a moderate amount of personal success, you are the envy of man-dom because you possess two of the most valuable resources most men your age or older statistically do not – time and freedom. I envy you. You are unshackled by the responsibilities, liabilities and accountabilities that most men your age in marriages, LTRs, with children, or recovering from divorce must contend with daily. Without any intention you are in such a position that you can go in any direction of your choosing without considering the impact of your choice for anyone but yourself. Many other men, in the most ideal of LTRs, do not have this luxury.

When you think of all the responsibilities that are required of most men (and women) in modern life today, you have won the lottery! I was once asked what I’d buy if money were no object, to which I answered, time. Power isn’t financial resources, status or influence over others; power is the degree over which you control your own life, and right now you are powerful. Trust me, this is as good as it gets and this is made all the better because you are old enough to understand and appreciate what is really at work here.

Women are damaged goods for you now? So what? You have the freedom to sample as indiscriminately or as particularly as you choose. Can’t find a good LTR? Why would you want to?! Let her find you! You fear you’ll end up old and lonely? I’d fear ending up so paralyzed by a fear of loneliness that you’d settle for a lifetime of controlling misery in a passionless marriage.

I’m an adherent of the ‘build it and they will come’ school of thought in this regard. Women should only ever be a compliment to a man’s life – never the focus of it.

Is it better to choose the path of least resistance to get to an idealized, prefabricated intimacy or self-develop and get the same intimacy? True, both instances put women as the focus of a Man’s life, and this is a position that most women will find endearing at first, but suffocating in the end. Women want to ‘want’ their men. Women want a Man who other men want to be, and other women want to fuck. She doesn’t want a slave to her intimacy since this puts her in the masculine role. Rather, she wants a decisive mature man who has the confidence to put her off, to tell her ‘No’, in favor of his ambition and passions as this serves two purposes. First, it sets his direction as the one of authority and his development as the primary; the results of which she and her potential children will benefit from. Secondly, it puts her into a position of chasing after him – essentially his legitimate ambitions and passsions become the ‘other woman’ with which she must compete for his attention.

Note that I stated ‘legitimate’ ambitions here. A woman involved with a law student or an intern who have the potential to become lawyers and doctors are fairly solid bets for future security. An artist or musician, no matter how talented or committed to their passions will only be viewed as beneficial if they can prove their case to select women. However this can be offset by singleminded determination, once again, with select women with a capacity to appreciate this. This said, think about the fellow who’s chosen to be a plumber or a mechanic as his calling. The best plumber in the world is only going so far unless he has dreams to own his own business.

All of this is limited by a man’s attitude towards the opposite sex. Women are dream killers. Not because they have an agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.

So yes it is better to develop yourself rather than take the path of least resistance. That’s not to say don’t sarge until you’re out of college, in your 30s and have your career in order. It is to say don’t consider monogamy until you are mature enough to understand it’s limitations and you’ve achieved a degeree of success to your own satisfaction according to your ambitions and passions. It is also to say that women should compliment and support your plans for your own life.

The Burden of Selectivity

 

You get the men you deserve ladies.

The latest hotness in feminine self-righteous indignation in the manosphere this week is the new Atlantic article by Kate Bolick (courtesy of Susan Walsh and her self-impressed 3rd page link). I generally don’t bother myself with bleating, overwritten catharsis articles bemoaning the woes of an HB 5, post-Wall, aging spinster upset with (beta) men not excusing her indiscretions by sharing in her entitlement to provide her with the loving stable relationship she maliciously turned down at 28. However, it did spark an interesting debate at SoSuave with regards to the variance in selectivity in mate selection respective to each gender.

I believe there’s an interesting misconception about the mutuality of shared criteria both men and women commonly seek in a life-partner. Women, steeped in their solipsistic ‘girl-world’ reality, tend to find it inconceivable that a man wouldn’t share in precisely the same life expectations and scheduling that women would. Their feminine imposed reality presume that men will autonomously know that what works best for women is ALWAYS the “right thing to do.”

However, I think we’re kind of assuming false equivalencies in respect to how either sex goes about choosing an acceptable mate for life. On this side of 40 (or hell, even 30) it’s real easy to reflect on our past experiences and presume we as men actually had any clue as to what qualities in a woman we knew were or weren’t deal breakers for commitment. Infidelity notwithstanding, what was really a red flag for you when you were in your mid-20s? Did you even know? I sure as hell didn’t.

Women’s hypergamous natures make them far more exacting in their selection process, far earlier in life, and their list of prerequisite attributes and characteristics more rigid than any man’s would ever be. This same innate hypergamy also makes them susceptible to a constant doubting about any selection they do commit to. Ergo, the biologically hard-wired need to shit test even after 10 years of marriage.

Not so for men. If she’s relatively hot, sexually accessible and marginally loving, we’re usually in. And you know why we’re in? Because it seems like a good idea at the time – and that’s what gets us into trouble in our youth. In fact we’re not encouraged to presume we could actually be selective. That would mean preempting women as the prime selectors for their imposed reality – men even being educated in what would account for a red flag is pretentiousness deserving of shame.. Men are far less prone to turn down a ‘sure thing’ that’s producing semi-regular rewards / reinforcement (sex) in favor of an ‘unsure thing’ that’s an unproven commodity for him. It’s only later in life, when we can remove ourselves from the game and look at things objectively that we get even an inclination of what characteristics a woman needs to possess beyond the physical and sexual for us to decide what works best for us.

And then, God forbid, a Man actually take action based on his personal assessment of the characteristics he does decide upon. From a societal standpoint men will never enjoy the same degree of social support women do for taking action in “doing what’s best for them.” Any Man with the forbearance enough to reject or break up with a woman based on his personal criteria is instantly labeled ‘shallow’ and shamed for daring to reject the poor victimized woman he was “lucky” to have had ever accept him.

The trick of women’s mate selectiveness lays in keeping men ignorant of what qualities (beyond the sexual) might make for the best LTR pairing long enough for her to capitalize on her beauty and youth, but not so long as to push past the expiration date of her hitting the Wall. This is why the 28 to 30 year mark is so pivotal to women. Her decade (or so) long window of prime beauty and selectivity is winding down. It’s not a woman’s mythical biological clock that’s prompting her to consider her maternal instincts – it’s the, now very real, actualization that she needs to lock down a commitment to provisioning from a man who, by the time he hits 30-35, should be awakening to the way women’s game is played and starts to feel more comfortable in qualifying women based on his learned experiences.

Nothing simultaneously frightens and excites a woman more than a Man who’s self-aware of his own sexual market value. This is why every effort is made via social conventions to repress him from realizing this, and every effort is made to shame and ostracize him once he’s conscious of it – and a prime example of this is the duplicitous nature of articles like Bolick’s decrying men’s unwillingness to grow up and give women the life they should know is “doing the right thing” after 20 years of berating men for not respecting them asserting their independence from men.

Compensation

One of the higher orders of physical standards women hold for men is height. There are countless threads in the community that address this, but I think that for the better part it’s not difficult to observe this in the ‘real world’. I should also add that this is one characteristic that is central to the Social Matching Theory in that human’s are sensitive to asymmetrics and imbalances.

Now, before I get told in so many ways that this isn’t always the case or the “not all girls are like that” exceptions to the rule, let me start by saying that this isn’t the point of this thread. I don’t want to debate the logistics of why women prefer a taller mate or the tendency for like to attract like in this respect. No, what I’m on about is really the root of the infamous “short man’s disease.” That’s right, you know who I’m talking about; the ultimate in compensation for inferiority, the dreaded ‘short man’s disease.’ You know the guy. About 5′ 6″, pounding out the weight on the bench press. Bad ass attitude, hangs with the bigger guys (which is pretty much all of them) and throws his ego around. What a tool, right?

But if you think this is only limited to short men (or women), you’re making a mistake. You see, in so many ways we all compensate for deficiencies. I recently read a thread on another “non-community” forum that saw fit to start a topic asking why men lie and it got me to thinking why any of us lie, man or woman. I’ve also been fielding a lot of questions regarding issues we kind of take for granted after having discussed them to death in the manosphere; one of those being the nature of personality and one’s ability to change their own or have it changed by circumstance, or often both. I think it’s a tragic miscalculation on our part to think of personality as static, unchangeable or to question the ingenuousness of that change, but more tragic is the doubting ourselves for that change.

One simple truism that a lot of people love to use as their convenient escape clause is the JBY (just be yourself) notion. This of course is just what ones says as advice when they really don’t know what else to say. Given that though, what is it that makes a personality shift ‘genuine’. Any number of us probably know an individual who began acting differently at some point in their life. This can be the result of some kind of tragedy or trauma (think PTSD) or it can be that the individual felt a need to change their fundamental way of thinking and made the change of their own accord. Usually in these cases we think of them as posers or try-hards, trying to be something they’re not. They reflect this change in their appearance, their regular practices, their friends or the people they associate with, attitudes, behaviors etc. And this is what’s jarring for people who knew their prior personality.

From the 48 Laws of Power:

Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

What makes us doubt the sincerity of a personal change is what’s at issue. If their change is something we agree with or generally think of as positive, we are less inclined to doubt the ingenuousness of this change. But when their change conflicts with our own interests, when it dramatically clashes with what we’ve come to expect of that individual, this is where we doubt their sincerity. We say “dude, stop trying to be something you’re not”, we tear it down, we fall back on JBY platitudes because it clashes with our interpretations. And in this doubt, we fish for reasons as to why a person would want that change; essentially, what are they compensating for? It may be funny to presume someone driving a monster truck down the highway is making up for a small penis, but the root of that ‘compensating’ is what makes us feel uncomfortable in our own internal compensating.

It’s a difficult enough task for an individual to critically assess their own personality, and even more so to effect a change in it, but the final insult is to have other’s doubt the veracity of it. What others fail to see is that at some point in the development of their own personalities, they themselves had to compensate for deficiencies, discontentments and prompts to grow and mature. This is a gigantic hurdle for most AFCs wanting to transition to being something more. On SoSuave we’ve always called that being a DJ (Don Juan), but that doesn’t encompass the entirety of maturing. I like the term positive masculinity, but the crux of all that is the ingenuousness of the actual change. Why are you changing?

There is a saying that AFCs are like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. As soon as one is about to climb out there are always half a dozen ready to pull him back in again. Add to this a self-doubt from societal conditionings that tell him to stay the same, not to aspire to more, he’s doing it right, and it’s amazing that any AFC becomes a DJ. This has been termed the ‘Societal Cockblock’; they tell him he’s compensating, and in a way they’re right, but for the wrong reason. PUA skills, DJ psychology, Positive Masculinity are all compensations for deficiencies. They go beyond behavior modification – that’s the easy answer. PUAs teach a set of behaviors and scripts to be aped in order to mask a deficit. These are easy pickings for the JBY apologists because they are actions that generally don’t match a person’s prior personality. They’re not “really” like that, so they’re posers, or worse, they’ve been duped by guys hawking the PUA brand of self-help tools. What they don’t see is the genuine desire to change and the reasons for it.

When we compensate, we improvise, we fake it till we make it; but who determines when we’ve stopped faking it? We do. I read all kinds of articles doubting the realized capacity a person has to adopt ‘natural Game’ into their personality. It’s an internalization process for sure, but there has to come a point of transition where a Man’s default response IS his Game response. That’s who he IS now.

Would you leave if she got fat?

Tony Romo would.

It appears that the topic du jour in the community this week has been, (how shall I state this?) women of “larger girth” and their oddly commensurate attitudes of entitlement, due to the the ‘love thyself’ body image apologists making their mark on popular culture.

I generally go into great detail on a lot of my posts about the conditions for intimacy women place on men. Roissy codified this as the “436 bullet point checklist’, but I just tend to distill women’s list of stated criteria a man needs to meet in order to be acceptable for her intimacy. He’s got to be attractive, tall, well employed or the potential to be so, he must have status (some call it power), be caring, sensitive, humorous, educated, not overbearing, decisive, confident, a good listener,..etc., etc. and the list goes on and on.

However, rarely do I have the chance to explain men’s one condition for intimacy – physical attraction. She’s GOT to be hot. Guys rarely start thread topics seeking advice in order to hook up with  HB 2s or 3s – they post about HB 7s to 9s.

That said, a Man’s one condition should be pretty important as well as effect the highest standard he’s capable of attaining. Not accounting for Game, men’s individual ability to attract women is based on a number of criteria (including his own appearance) and respective of his own physical conditions – in other words, fat guys are going to be limited in their ability to attract exceptionally fit women, and those that do so by meeting women’s other conditions for intimacy (most commonly wealth) will still be hindered in their ability to maintain a woman’s continuous interest level, genuine desire, arousal and passion. 

The same situation holds true for women only there is a much higher standard for maintaining her physical attraction. His one condition for intimacy is that she remain attractive and to a greater degree, sexually available to him. In order to circumvent this women for centuries have maintained a complex social dynamic that makes his one condition his greatest fault. Thus we hear how ‘shallow’ he is for not seeing her ‘inner beauty’. We are scolded for being ‘superficial’ and ridiculed as being unevolved troglodytes for those men with still enough testosterone to overtly say they’re looking for the most attractive woman they can get.

“It’s what’s on the inside that counts”, or “Beauty is only skin deep” has been the Disney mantra of westernized romanticism and ‘courtly love’ since the Renaissance. And why not? It works in a woman’s biological favor to breed with the male gifted with not only the best genes, but also the best ability to provide for her security and that of her offspring. What better social dictum than one that shames him for recognizing his one condition for intimacy while simultaneously giving her the advantage of better selection when she doesn’t measure up to what his standards would biologically be his preference? Human beings have many social practices that have the latent purpose of thwarting our evolved, biological best interests; this is one of them.



Just as a side note here, I should point out that the two most common reasons cited for divorce in western culture are sex and money, and in that order. Men most commonly complain that their wives are no longer in the shape that they were when they met and women generally complain of reasons relating to his ambition and economic status.

Every married man I’ve known has always expressed feelings that his wife isn’t as sexually available – in frequency or intensity (i.e. passion/desire) in comparisson to when they first encountered each other. Generally this is due to her “letting herself go” after marriage or childbirth and she no longer ‘feels sexy’ so sex becomes less important to her or worse still, it takes the status of becoming another ‘household chore’ to add to her list. This then becomes a vicious cycle; she’s let herself go, sex decreases in importance to her and she makes little attempt to, or has no time to take care of herself physically as she did in her youth when she had a prime motivation to maintain herself in peak physical shape (or as close as she could). Add to this the psycho-social dynamic that stresses that men ought not to be so concerned with the physical or place such importance upon sex, and goes as far as to shame him as a ‘deviant’ if he is unwilling to internalize and accept this. Her lack of desire is characterized as HIS problem.



He of course feels cheated and goes through the frustrating internal turmoil of dealing with a social dynamic that tells him he’s ‘bad’ for recognizing his wife is no longer the woman he married. This is the ‘bait & switch’. Her sex drive and physical condition is more than acceptable during courtship and pre-marital relations, but after the marriage he feels he got a raw deal and is powerless to even mention that she ought to take better care of herself for fear of driving that psychological wedge between them that the dynamic of ‘loving her for what she is and not her physical form’ dictates. Essentially he is stripped of his one condition for intimacy while her conditions remain and are even more pronounced in light of the responsibilities he assumes in marriage or an LTR.

How important does the role of attraction play in a relationship? The funniest thing is you can apply the same idea to women with regards to a man’s level of success. If a guy cheats on his girlfriend or wife after she ‘lets herself go’ and puts on 20 extra pounds he’s called ‘shallow’, yet if a woman, hypergamously, leaves a guy who’s out of work and/or lacks a certain level of ambition she’s just ‘being prudent’. That said, the definition of what is ‘shallow’ is generally defined by women. It’s a man’s biological imperative to mate with as many fit and attractive females, while it’s a woman’s imperative to choose the male who is best capable of providing her with security and by default to ultimately share in parental investment. But, feminized (not feminist) society calls a man shallow and a woman wise for accepting the roles nature has dealt for them. So it’s my advice that we stop accepting this epithet of ‘shallow’ as some kind of punishment for simply being a man.

In terms of life investments and capitalizing upon opportunity and ambition, men have FAR too much on the line in the long term NOT to be concerned with demanding the highest standard from a woman for an investment that goes beyond anything she could hope to genuinely appreciate or match by other means. It’s really up to you to make the judgement call, but by no means should you allow accusations of superficiality influence your decisions in which woman you ‘should’ find attractive. As a Man, you are well within your rights to expect a maintained physique from a woman, considering the far greater sacrifices she expects from you. Would you leave her if she got fat? Damn right you would. Would she leave you if you went beta-listless-unemployed-alcoholic? Damn right she would.

Women & Sex

“Booty is so strong that there are dudes willing to blow themselves up for the highly unlikely possibility of booty in an other dimension. There are no chicks willing to blow themselves up for a penis.”
– Joe Rogan

One of the single most annoying tropes I read / hear from men (more so than women) is the “Women are just as / more sexual than men” canard. Nothing stops me in my tracks more abruptly than reading this line parroted back in some form by a self-effacing white knight trying to convince himself, hope against hope, that it could be true. This is a VERY effective feminine social convention, even internalized and spouted back by the likes of more than a few infamous PUAs. This fantasy belongs among the higher order social convention myths like the Myth of Sexual Peak. Just a rudimentary knowledge of female biology is all that’s needed to deconstruct the myth.

Women are more sexual than men, but they are repressed due to a lack of “trust”.

Patently false. A healthy male produces between 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone a woman does. It is a biological impossibility for a woman to want sex as much as, or as often as men. Trust me, when a woman says, “I don’t understand why sex is so important to guys” she’s speaking the literal truth. No woman will ever experience 17 times the amount of her own testosterone levels (barring steroids). Amongst its many other effects, testosterone is the primary hormone involved with stimulating human libido. I should also add that, on average, and barring environmental variables, a mans testosterone only declines 1% per year beyond age 40, so even at age 60 the average, healthy male is only dealing with an average 20% deficit in testosterone.

Critics of this observation like to argue that, for female sexual response and arousal, testosterone isn’t the only factor to consider. To which I’ll agree, however it is the PRIMARY factor in sexual response. A woman cannot possibly understand what 12 to 17 times their present amount of testosterone could feel like without steroid use. In fact the first effect female bodybuilders report when cycling anabolic steroids is a 100 fold increase in sexual interest and libido. So in terms of natural female hormonal / biochemical response there is no unaltered way a woman could ever make an accurate comparison to what a man’s baseline libido is in relation to her own. Women’s sexual desire is also cyclical. Even at the peak of her ovulatory cycle, when she’s at her horniest, she’ll never experience what men do 24 hours a day. This is the root of the myth, and the source of the social convention.

Other critics would erroneously argue that estrogen plays a part in female sexual arousal. They’d be wrong.

Estrogen does ‘control’ libido – for men: Estrogen Have a look at the Functions section here. And while you’re at it you may want to have a look at Testosterone; and in particular this:

Like men, women rely on testosterone to maintain libido, bone density and muscle mass throughout their lives. In men, estrogens simply lower testosterone, decrease muscle mass, stunt growth in teenagers, introduce gynecomastia, increase feminine characteristics, and decrease susceptibility to prostate cancer. Sexual desire is dependent on androgen levels rather than estrogen levels.

I also understand that female sexuality functions differently than male sexuality, but this only reinforces my point. Women’s sexuality is cyclic, not only on a monthly schedule, but also over periods of a lifetime (menopause, and peak fertility for instance). There are periods over a month and a lifetime where sexual desire waxes and wanes, (healthy) men’s stays relatively constant from puberty to about age 40. Women are slower to arouse, they tend to need more than just visual stimulation, and there is definitely a psychological element (they need a fantasy) necessary. Men only need visual stimulation and minimal feedback to get aroused (i.e. porn).

It should come as no shock that post-menopausal hormone therapies use testosterone to boost women’s flagging libidos too. When women are at the peaks of their ovulatory cycles, low and behold they experience a sharp spike in testosterone levels in order to facilitate pregnancy and then it gets flushed out during menstruation. You can debate about how best to get a woman’s testosterone flowing, but it’s testosterone that’s needed to prompt a sexual response.

Now the real question is, why would such a popular myth be such a useful social convention? Think about it. It sexualizes women, while not making them outright sluts. They can avoid the stigma of promiscuity while presenting the fantasy that they are secretly “more sexual” than they are “allowed” to be, if only they could meet a man skilled enough to bring this out in them. It’s a sexual selection convention. The fantasy is that women are really these wolves in sheep’s clothing for the right guy. To an extent this is true. Studies do indicate that women in their peak fertility window do in fact aggressively seek out Alpha males for conventional sexual encounters. However, again, the root of this social convention is in the presumption that “women are just as sexual as men”, which is simply not the case considering the conditionality of the female sexual response.

No self-interested Man is ever going to be encouraged to refute the idea that women are equally preoccupied with, equally aroused as, or equally desirous of sex as men are. We love the fantasy that women are secretly yearning for sex with us, if only society were more open and accepting of feminine sexuality. Yet, in the same breath we’ll hear about how slutty and aggressive women have become in the fall of western society by the same guys. It’s ironic, but it gives guys hope that if they can find the secret formula to unleashing the sexual beast within every woman he’ll find this insatiable she-devil to pair off with monogamously. If women were men’s sexual equals, why would they not be given to the same drives that conflict with monogamy? Imagine a world where women are as horny as men. Think of a gay bath house and you might have a workable model.

Women of course love to encourage and reinforce this social convention because it sounds like empowerment in the face of patriarchal sexual oppression (yes, we’d be more sexual if you’d only allow us to you evil men), while at the same time tacitly acknowledging that it turns men into white knight sympathizers of the cause (i.e. feminine entitlement and primacy).

The point of my starting this topic wasn’t to debate whether or not women are sexual at all – obviously they are – however it was my intent to draw attention to the canard that women (and their would-be male identifiers) would like everyone to believe, “women are just as / more sexual than men”. No woman can make a realistic assessment about that unless she’s had 12 -17 times her natural testosterone levels increased and lived in a man’s biological condition. Just on the face of it the assertion is silly, but as I said, for women it’s empowering to think that women are “just as sexual” as men. And female-identifiers are all too happy to reinforce that meme because it offers them the hope of getting laid with one of these ‘sexually repressed’ women.