Size Matters

I generally don’t go where I’m going with this post today, but one consistent theme of my writing has always been about exposing the latent functions of social conventions. Although I do try to be fair and spread out the analysis between men and women’s specific social conventions, living in the age of feminization usually brings the focus back to the feminine imperative where it originates.

To look under the hood of a social convention – to see how and why it works – often involves asking some uncomfortable questions. Social discomfort is actually an integral part of any effective social convention. Discouraging questions about the latent purpose of a social convention by means of fostering impropriety about it, or putting the questioner in the place of social awkwardness, is how social conventions perpetuate and normalize into a culture.

So when you pose the question “why is it considered rude to ask a woman about her age or her weight?” the ‘common sense’ answer is that it just is, because not knowing so makes the questioner look like look like a fool for not knowing it just is.The real answer of course is rooted in competition anxiety, because a majority of women can’t afford to have their sexual market value qualitatively compared in such overt measures. However, this is how a social convention becomes normalized and promoted to the realm of ‘common sense’.

So, if you will, please indulge me while I look under another hood that may not be the most comfortable place to go.

Mark Minter, a regular RM contributor dropped an excellent introduction for today’s topic in last week’s Amused Mastery post:

My niece has a cute friend, a 20 year old HB7 who thinks that she is an 8 and is grooming herself to be a “trophy wife”. I think she is gonna be disappointed. But she is very status and money motivated in her choice of men. But anyway, the last I had heard from this girl was that she had met this “Ideal boy” who had a winning smile (I had met the guy) and his family owned a restaurant.

A couple of months later, my niece mentions that some other guy was trying to hit on this girl last night. I asked “So what happened to whats-his-face”.

She answered, “He turned out to be a creep. He was very possessive and controlling. Constantly texting her at work, knowing she couldn’t get texts at work.”

SOOOO. The Rollo Tomassi voice in the back of my head says “BULLSHIT. There is more to this than that”.

I asked, “What was she doing to make this guy insecure and also when women have GENUINE DESIRE for a man, his texts don’t bother her, even if she is at work. It’s text and no one knows except for her. So why was she backing away. She was COVERTLY COMMUNICATING her disinterest through her actions.”

There were a couple of other “things” the guy had done with once again, things that if the woman had GENUINE DESIRE, they would not have been “firing offenses”. But I sensed she was looking for a reason to pull away from the guy. So I kept pressing. I had thought maybe he had failed some shit tests or something, had kissed ass a little too much on a 20 year old cute girl. It was far more basic than this and certainly warranted this girl creating a cover story for dumping the guy

So it turns out the guy has about a 3 or 4 inch dick but little Miss Trophy Wife couldn’t broadcast to the world that she would actually dump a guy because he had a little dick. She couldn’t admit that the size of a dick was important to her like it was to “those other sluts”. No, he had to be controlling or possessive or something from femcentrically acceptable than having a little dick.

So the rationalization hamster cooked up this other less slutty behavior from the guy to justify dumping him.

The funny thing is that even though all the girls in the circle knew the dude has the tiny dick, the publicly repeated excuse from all the hens in the coop was “controlling creep”.

Tools

I can remember reading a section of the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts where the authors cited studies about the relative importance the size of a man’s penis had for women. The long and short of it (uh,.heh) was that the women surveyed reported a “general satisfaction with the size of their partners penises”, and then went on to make the case that it is in fact men who are more concerned with the size of their cocks than women are.

Something just didn’t sit right with me after I’d read through this. From a porn-search specific statistical analysis it would follow that since men are the primary consumers of pornography that men would have more interest in the various details of the sex act, thus a preoccupation with the size of their own tool, but this doesn’t exclude the ‘interest’ women have in penis size. I could go into the Red Queen / Selfish Gene details about how women would evolutionarily prefer a larger cock to a smaller one (virility, sexual prowess, sexy son theory, etc.), but that wouldn’t cover the social convention aspect of women’s handling of this issue (sorry, you can’t write about this topic without a bad pun every other line).

I can remember a discussion in a mixed gender group of friends I had when I was in my early 20’s. Whenever the topic of sex came up (which was often) there was always a careful, almost tacit acknowledgement among the women to hold back a bit when it came to revealing their wants when it came to the particulars about sex. I’m using this as an illustration because it’s been my experience that  the woman you talk to about sex in the company of men and women is not the same woman who talks about sex amongst only women. When questions about the size of a guy’s cock came up (sorry), the timeless classic trope is almost always sure to follow “oh it’s not that important, size doesn’t matter, it’s not size of the ship, it’s the motion of the ocean” or “it’s not the length of the wand, it’s the skill of the magician” or some other cutesy aphorism with the latent purpose of moving beyond that particular detail in the conversation. Even sufficiently feminized men will parrot this same fem-speak unprompted to reassure themselves (does AskMen even employ male writers anymore?).

Discreet Requisites

You see, publicly, as Mark’s story illustrates, it is counter productive for a woman’s long term provisional interests to be compromised by qualifying a potential provider (see Beta chump) by his sexual prowess. Based on sight and imagination (pre-sex conditions) there’s no more graphic an indicator of this prowess than a guy’s length. Certainly height, muscularity and all of the feral, instinctual level physical cues play a part of the total package, but women know that not only do they measure a man’s virility in this regard, but they also know men do as well.

I had wanted to illustrate this dynamic further by making the presumption that women, generally, would either be offended by the very topic, or at the very least be coy about their denying that ‘size matters’, but I can’t go there. As the sex-positive aggressiveness of feminization has taken hold of western culture for the past 60+ years, there has been a gradual decay of this sense of prudence, replaced by the new utility of using men’s insecurities about size as leverage in optimizing feminine hypergamy.

Just in recent memory I’ve had ‘pour girls’ mention to me privately and to other girls that they wanted to leave a boyfriend, or they wouldn’t consider a second sexual encounter with a guy who ‘wasn’t packing’. Furthermore, as women have less and less to lose in their post-Wall SMP reality, mature women (the Cougar generation) place more emphasis on their partner’s equipment. It has coincided with the socio-economic End of Men and the Rise of Women that feminine hypergamy become less and less secretive. Gone are the days when women needed to use subterfuge to keep a less than adequate man enthralled in order to secure his provisioning. So it follows that the truth about the details of that visceral hypergamy be relaxed to the point that women no longer feel the need to cover it up. There may be a token effort in a public context to misdirect the importance of size (Mark’s example), but privately, women know size is important.

Consider the ‘thesis’ power point presentation of Karen Owen’s retrospective sexual safari at Duke University. We can debate the relative criteria upon which she rates each sexual encounter in her thesis, but I would draw your attention to the importance she places upon the penis size of each of her ‘study subjects’ as an indicator of quality (or lack thereof). As most Game-aware men (and women) ought to know already, the Medium is the Message and it’s women’s behavior, not their words that should be used as the only reliable basis for determining inent or motivation. According to the research of the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts and the respondents in their cited studies, penis size should be irrelevant to women, if it’s considered at all. Yet here we have a woman quantifying and qualifying sexual merit using length as a factor in sexual satisfaction.

You could make the argument that this is an isolated case, and only sluts worry about your girth, or you might think ‘women say one thing and mean another, well duh Rollo’, but you have to understand the utility, and the latent purpose behind those presumptions. Whenever a guy is slapped with the default ‘bitter misogynist’ label, the follow up line is almost universally “yeah, and I bet he’s got a little dick too.” Even guys will use the “he’s compensating for something” line as a sexual disqualifier when presented with an overt demonstration of higher sexual value from another guy. He’s got a $75K car? Must have a little dick then. If penis size wasn’t a consideration for women in their optimal hypergamy it wouldn’t be the go-to, schoolyard taunt it’s become. Ridicule a man’s penis and you disqualify him as sexual competitor. It’s interesting that men will acknowledged height as a physical prerequisite for most women, but will readily reject the size of his tool as being one as well.

Amused Mastery

I think a lot of guys get hung up on the term “aloof”. The word conjures up the idea that a guy has to pretend to be looking down his nose at some girl he’s interested in a lame effort to get her to qualify to him. When people read “aloof” they tend to think “haughty” or feigned disinterest. Throw that term away right now, because you don’t want to be “aloof”. What you want is AMUSED MASTERY.

Roissy made this distinction a couple years ago; there’s a difference between an arrogant ‘aloofness’ and a confident Amused Mastery.

A presence of Amused Mastery puts you into a position of maturity while still remaining playfully approachable and forcing her to qualify to you by acknowledging your mastery of her (really all women by association). An attitude of Amused Mastery implies to a woman that by virtue of your maturity and/or authority you’ve “seen it all before”, you already know what women mean when they say or do what she is, and it’s amusing to you. You’ll play along, but only so far as to cleverly poke fun at her attempts to get you to qualify to her. It means you never take her seriously, like a bratty younger sister, but also with the presence of mind of a senior Alpha male who knows her game before she plays it.

I’ll admit, I never fully appreciated the potential of Amused Mastery until I had a daughter. I found myself naturally using it with her because that’s the actual, unforced relation I have with her. When she was younger this added to my Daddy-Alpha credentials, but now that she’s 14 theres a history of my Amused Mastery she finds comfort in. However, I also noticed my wife finds Amused Mastery just as appealing, to the point that she includes herself in my Mastery over my daughter.

Amused Mastery is particularly effective for older men / younger women Game. Assuming you’re in reasonably good shape and have some degree of affluence, being older gives you a degree of authenticity. With maturity comes an expectation of knowledge and experience for Men. I’ve used Amused Mastery with my “pour girls” at promo events and it’s like cat nip for them. You become that Father figure to them (FILF?) that they crave, but can’t seem to get from younger guys. There’s a certain Alpha security dynamic at play between a woman and a Man who emits an ambient vibe of having been with enough women to be able to predict her shit tests, and then pass them with a casual roll of his eyes and a knowing smirk. When a man is giving off the cues of Amused Mastery theres an unspoken presumption by women that he “just gets it” when it comes to dealing with women.

Dominance

Another term that gets very abused both in the manosphere and the feminine Matrix is the word ‘dominance’. That word also conjures up a lot of preconceptions in people because it carries the same negative connotation the word ‘power’ has been associated with. Women will rarely admit to wanting a ‘dominant’ man or male influence in their lives because the word seems so binary and absolute. In the feminine defined equalism of the Matrix, if one partner is dominant the other must necessarily be submissive. After having been fed on a steady diet of “independent woman” tropes for the better part of the century, to admit to desiring a dominant man is to admit dependency upon him. Dominance is synonymous with aggression and oppression to this mindset, and women and feminized men have a pavlovian reflex response at even its mention.

On the red pill side we look at the truth of the dominance need women have for men. We can evidentially see women’s desire for dominance in their behaviors and the latent meanings of their words, but I think, at present, the manosphere also has a somewhat absolutist idea about what constitutes dominance. We classify it as ‘social dominance’ in that it indicates an Alpha status, but it really goes beyond this. Ideally I think most guys imagine dominance as having his particular woman present when he’s issuing commands to the underlings which he has power over as some form of social proof she’ll want to fuck him that much harder for.

After 50 Shades of Grey became a best seller it became sort of an ‘ah ha!’ moment even for the men still plugged into the Matrix. Women really do get off on being dominated, but this too is a very narrow facet of masculine dominance. Obviously the popularity of that particular type of fem-porn is enough to reinforce that women do in fact harbor fantasies of dominant men, but does it require a sex dungeon and bondage paraphernalia to confirm masculine dominance?

Personal dominance, social dominance, doesn’t have to be cast in such extremes. I am the dominant personality in my marriage and in my family, but that doesn’t mean Mrs. Tomassi plays step-and-fetch-it or wants me to include zip ties in the bedroom. Dominance is much more than making demands and issuing commands. I display it in my speech (even my silence), the way I dress, the status of my career, my attitude towards people on either end of that status spectrum, my tolerance and my intolerance, etc. As Men we have a tendency to think that the more overt our displays are the more women will take notice, but women are far more sensitive to the nuances of our actions than most could imagine. A little goes a long way, and what we think are useless gestures are often the most memorable for women.

Amused Dominance

I got ran up the flag pole by femosphere pundits when I wrote my essays on Dread and Dread Games. Women don’t like overt dominance, just as they don’t like overt objectification or adoration. It’s when it’s covert that they respond most favorably – women love to be objectified, dominated and adored, but only by men who know better than to remind her of it. I’ve always advocated the positive effect of maintaining an ambient threat of competition anxiety with women, but this form of dominance cannot be an overt display. Dominance must be playing in the background, only occasionally being amplified as situations warrant. Women need to know it’s there, but her imaginations of that masculine dominance are more useful to a man than a constant, present, overt reminder of it.

And thus we come full circle; Amused Mastery is a form of social dominance. That sense of knowing the answer before the question is asked, but still giving the answer with a smirk is a very effective form of demonstrating higher value (DHV). An attitude of Amused Mastery begins from a default position of social dominance.

Of Love and War

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

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

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

Yohami breaks this down thusly:

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

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

And then you build everything on top.

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

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

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

Yohami continues (emphasis mine):

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

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

A Place to Rest

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

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

We want to, so badly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reconciling

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

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

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

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.

Women Studies

Last week Heartiste had some excellent play-by-play Game analysis of this video. The guy doing the approach in the video is Steve, who is a friend of Krausers, and before I go into today’s post I just wanted to take a moment to say that Steve’s confidence and Game savvy is impressive. Whether he’s consciously aware of how well he’s internalized Game or if it’s a practiced effort, just like Krauser he gets a lot of points in the Tomassi book for application.

I’m not going to speculate as to whether Steve tapped into some natural reserve of Alpha mojo, or if he’s got his Game down to the point that it’s been internalized into his personality, or that his choice of woman in this instance was more advantageous to his personality type. Nor will I speculate that it may have been his Look and physique that led to a 5 minute kiss-close. I don’t have to because all of this was predictably scrawled across Roissy’s post comments. I say ‘predictably’ because when we observe a process we do so in terms of how it fits our own internal narratives.

As would be expected, the accusations of fraud and the disqualifications of how hot Steve’s target was started the hit parade, but amongst the “it was a set up” and “how much did it cost her to go along with it?” were some very interesting (though equally predictable) responses from The Chateau’s host of regular female commenters. The responses ran the gamut between “that’s so disrespectful”, “He’s so desperate. He comes across as a stalker and a lunatic” and “wow, did I just watch video documentation of sexual harassment?” to “that would never work on me! I have self-respect” to “yeah he’s kind of cute and has good Game.”

Geisha Kate summed it up best:

Its a simple matter of perception. An onlooker cannot feel what the people in the video felt. To them it was an awesome experience. The onlooker can’t tap into that and so it appears silly, etc. (no offense). Girls can look at this video and say, “that wouldn’t work on me,” but it likely would, and guys can look at the video and say it was because of his looks, which may be part of it, but its not the whole picture.

Kate’s was far and away the most objective of the female input; the rest of which were mostly an effort in plausible deniability of women’s universal attraction/arousal cues (NAWALT and “we’re attracted to different things”) to their, now expected, self-important anecdotal experiences absolving women of the obviously effective results Game had on one of their sisters.

Women Studies

The rest of what followed was essentially a debate between women (and less Game savvy men) coming to terms with Steve’s close and the red pill community’s dissection of the social and psychological dynamics observed in the video. The feminine side qualifies, disqualifies and personalizes the reasons why Game works, while the red pill side builds workable theories upon concrete analysis. All of this comes as the result of observing a process.

Steve’s approach video has everything the community and women alike could ask for. In it’s shot-on-video, raw genuineness it appeals to feminine indignation, the likes of which even Cheaters or Tyra Banks pale next to. Yet at the same time it is titillating enough to women’s arousal process that they’re drawn into casting themselves in the role of Steve’s Columbian target (not unlike the Twilight Dynamic). For blue-pills and white knights, it’s easily dismissed as some girl who “has no respect for herself” and they’ll continue their quest for the Holy Grail (a Quality Woman®) with a twinge of self-doubt that all women are in fact ‘like this’ and Steve’s approach might actually have merit. And that of course leaves the red-pill community with a lot of red meat to consume in verifying proposed dynamics and how well this girl’s response aligned with what’s already been established in our own version of ‘women studies’.

The manosphere is prescient if it’s anything, and as if on cue Vox fired off a very relevant post in light of the video debate at the Chateau – The logical fallacy of female attraction. As per usual, Aunt Giggles is still soft-selling the ‘betas-are-the-sexiest-of-men’ trope that only women in their 50’s can afford to invest themselves in. I say this is relevant to the debate over Steve’s video because the women (and manginas) commenting about it are uniformly conflicted amongst themselves in defining what characteristics, qualities, physique, attitude, behaviors, etc. empirically constitute attraction/arousal cues for women.

As I detailed in the Feminine Mystique, from a social perspective, the feminine imperative can’t afford men understanding the methods behind the madness with regards to optimizing hypergamy. A persistent sense of feminine ambiguity and female unknowability must constantly be reinforced for men by women. Thus women (and less enlightened men) perpetuate the myth that “women just don’t know what they want”, but is that the truth of it? Are women really unaware of their own attraction triggers? Or is it that they are so preoccupied with optimizing hypergamy (in a short window of SMV peak) that they’re simply never bothered by an inquisitive thought about what factors contribute to their being turned on enough to fuck one guy, but conversely being attracted to another for a long term commitment? Are women ever really prompted to observe their own process?

Observing a process will change it.

From the end of Vox’s Logical Fallacy post:

“Showing no emotion and saying absolutely nothing is an excellent way to avoid interrupting the process.”

Vox mentions that more sociopathic men, being entirely self-concerned and outcome indifferent, are primarily the types of men women feel the most arousal for and attraction to. In other words, the sociopath, in his self-importance, can’t be bothered to observe the process of attraction in women.

That said, I can’t help but find a similar parallel in women’s cognitive ignorance of their own attraction cues. Women’s innate solipsism (further reinforced by fem-centrism), like the self-importance of the sociopathic man, predisposes her to be oblivious to her own pluralistic sexual strategy (Alpha vs. Beta attraction). A woman’s solipsistic nature suggests she can’t be bothered to observe her own process.

In fact I would argue that evolution and hypergamy has selected-for women who are more predisposed to being oblivious to their own attraction cues, thus allowing them more cognitive brain-space to be devoted to filtering for the best mating option and the best long term provisioning option among prospective males.

By its very nature, women’s strategic sexual pluralism – Alpha Cads and Beta Dads – creates an unresolvable internal psychological conflict. Women cannot consciously reconcile the sexual impulsivity that drives them to (want to) fuck the hottest genetic Alpha with the drive for the security that a Beta provider represent with respect to parental investment. This dichotomy is even hard-coded into women’s hormonal cycle, impelling women to the sexual prowess of Alpha dominance in the follicular phase, and to Beta comfort in the luteal phase of menstruation. The solution? A healthy female psyche pushes this irreconcilable conflict to the peripheries of her conscious awareness.

The rationalization hamster we know today was psychologically evolved to mitigate the mental anguish that results from women’s pluralistic sexual strategy.

One of the contentions women participating in the manosphere have with red pill Men is that those men are observing women’s process and bringing it to conscious light in a globalized, meta perspective. Thus the scramble back to NAWALT, or women mature into new ways of knowing what they want, or “silly man, don’t try to figure out women, you’ll never figure us out.”

Recently Professor Mentu had a twitter debate with a manosphere-aware female wondering if there were in fact ‘red pill women’. Naturally in her self-congratulatory solipsism she wanted credit as a woman figuring out the Men who’d figured out women. I got a good laugh out of this, as I do with bloggers like Aunt Giggles and a few select other manosphere women because in truth, all women are red pill women – it’s dragging the truth of the red pill out of them that’s the trick. On some level of consciousness, and as evidenced by behaviors and the construction of larger social conventions, women are aware of their own hypergamy. The Threat, again, is men looking under the hood for women and then overtly attempting to get women to confirm the realities of the observations they’ve drawn conclusions from. The problem is that the feminine imperative will NEVER allow a consensus of women to confirm men’s piecing together of hypergamy. Men observe the process and thereby change it.

Play Nice

Overheard this past weekend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girls on the Side

 

Not to be outdone by the tired ‘Man-Up’ tropes begun by Kay Hymowitz, nor the upstart success of Kate Bollick – who’s managed to parlay her chronic, unconsolidated hypergamy into a career and a new TV series – we again hear the feminism triumphalist wailings from Hannah Rosin. Apparently it wasn’t enough for Hannah to allow her End of Men article to fade into the annals of feminine primacy on the pages of The Atlantic, no, she’s extrapolated her tales of anecdotal misandry into a new book of the same title. And here I was concerned about compiling the better part Rational Male into book form (*eye roll*).

I would generally pass off of Rosin as I would the ‘concerns’ of any long post-Wall, solipsistic yenta, however in her book advertisement article Boys on the Side (h/t Aunt Giggles) there was so much feminine primacy tunnel vision it made me wonder if she’d ever read the word ‘hypergamy’. When I read the complaintive screeds of neo-feminists I expect to read a certain degree of self-confirming, self-important concerns for the female condition all reinforced by anecdotal evidence, and Rosin doesn’t disappoint. Her entire article is filled with op-ed personal vignettes of how the brutality of the contemporary sexual marketplace has reduced ‘dating’ (for women) to a series of passing fuck buddies until such a time that a (westernized, upper middle class) woman feels ‘complete’ enough in the professional realm to want to shift into marriage and mommy mode.

For all of her analysis Rosin simply doesn’t grasp the totality of feminine hypergamy and the social influence it has effected upon men and women. I can’t imagine Hannah would be ignorant of the dynamic of hypergamy, but from reading this article, it’s apparent that the feminine imperative makes acknowledging hypergamy’s influence an inconvenient truth that needs to be danced around, all while complaining that men are ruthlessly capitalizing upon it and enjoying some new boon for their own sexual strategy.

I’ve brought this up on Susan’s echo chamber more than once, but what Rosin (and really any woman) doesn’t get is that from the mid 60’s to 2012 we’ve been living in a social reality defined by feminine hypergamy. Since the sexual revolution and the advent of exclusively female controlled birthing, men have progressively become ancillary to the female reality. So when women run headlong into the negative social consequences of their own unfettered hypergamy – such as the evolution of hook up culture – the reflexive response is to presume that the downside of that hypergamy must necessarily be the results of men refusing to play by the social rules they constantly and conveniently rewrite for themselves.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about the rationalizations of the feminine imperative.

Every observation, every personal account of frustration, in Rosin’s article can directly be attributed to a modern sexual marketplace (SMP) that was formed by women’s unrestrained hypergamic impulses. The college women she interviews don’t mention ‘hooking up’ with average betas, they mention banging the hot guys on Ivy League lacrosse teams. In reality, there are likely far more average frustrated betas lining up to get with these ‘poor girls’ who are more than willing to take them out “for frozen yogurt and a $3 date.” Hook up culture or not, these aren’t the guys women are motivated to fuck. Frat guys, cads, indifferent Alphas, PUAs, incarcerated murderers, these are the guys that get the reflex response from a 23 y.o. girl.

Hannah’s mistake is in presuming, in classic feminine-primary myopia, that hook up culture is the result of men sexually exploiting women’s new life schedule for career with a side of family later. Never is there an afterthought that it is in fact women’s innate predisposition to fuck and secure commitment from the best male her sexuality can afford her has  almost singlehandedly created the environment which developed the hook up culture she and her poor college girls lament. As I’ve said before, Game is the logical countermeasure to evolve under the condition of unrestricted hypergamy. This in turn contributes to creating a new socio-sexual environment that changes the rules of engagement for how men and women relate to each other.

 

Year One

Well, it’s been a year now.

I started Rational Male on August 19th, 2011at the suggestion of so many patrons of SoSuave wanting me to collect my writings there into one cohesive section. My intent a year ago was simply to compile all I’d written into a blog and refine those posts, case studies and Iron Rules into more concise essays and allow easier access.

That was the easy part. I had so much material built up at SoSuave over the previous 9 years it just became a matter of picking which topic to focus on and develop it beyond what I could expect the average forum reader to have the attention span for. I’ve never kept a journal or anything, but as I sifted back through my forum posts – some of which were almost a decade old – I began to see how my perspective on things had evolved over the years. In some respects I suppose it’s how people who keep a diary go back and read how they used to be and what they thought at the time, only I found my 2011 self using that groundwork I had laid in 2002, and into the decade, as the basis for broader ideas in the now. I had the benefit of 8+ years of evolving my perspectives as the manosphere itself evolved.

On August 19th, 2011, I had no idea who a good 80% of the bloggers you see in my blog roll were, and that’s not mentioning the ones I read, or locked horns with, regularly who aren’t in that last. I had no idea who Dalrock was, or Krauser who I’d unknowingly inspired to so much insight. I knew Roissy before he adopted Heartiste and of course I was familiar with Roosh before I began blogging. I was welcomed by them as well as Ferdinand from the gone but not forgotten In Mala Fide. Before October of last year, I had no idea who Aunt Giggles was until she fired a shot across the bow at me in Wait For It?

It’s been kind of strange to be accounted as one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere in less than a year. I passed the 1 Million views mark on August 16th and my traffic, while not comparable to the likes of the other R’s (or even Dalrock for that matter), grows exponentially each month. It seems like the blog’s a meteoric rise to manospheric celebrity, until I consider I’ve been writing ‘red pill’ material for almost a decade now.

I’ve been approached on several occasions to monetize Rational Male, but I’ve held off from that. I’d still ask readers to anonymously donate to my charity fund, but I will never monetize RM. That said, I am in the process of compiling the material here into a book I hope to publish in 2013. I’m still figuring out best practices for this, and distilling down 228 blog posts into concise chapter topics is a challenge to say the least. I don’t even have a working title for it yet, but I’ve decided to put in the effort because the most common request I get is for a publication of my material that other Men can use to help their plugged-in friends unplug.

There’s just something about having a book in your hands, or perhaps on an e-reader, that represents legitimacy for people that reading the same material or ideas online doesn’t. When I get linked to from Reddit as a reference for some guy attempting to help his friend unplug it’s almost always followed by a stream of troll posts or blithering AFC crabs in the barrel pulling him back into their Matrix conditioned group-comfort. I’ve had a significant number readers ask if I had a book they could just hand to their friends (sometimes their sons) so they could digest what I’ve compiled for so long.

And that’s one obstacle I see in my blogging: I have a library of posts on so many topics that it’s difficult (even for me) to specifically reference what might address the troubles of someone seeking individualized help. Like any blogger, I try to make things easier; I have the categories on the side bar, the standard search query, and I always make a point of cross linking to past articles to aid in referencing what I think people might find most useful.

However, it’s really hard to be everything to everyone. Personally I think some of my most relevant posts were published in the first few months of this blog going live, but the million-plus readers who’ve more recently become regulars here may have no idea about them. So as I’ve been reviewing the past year’s material for book publication I thought I’d post a ‘best of’ list for today’s post to make newer readers aware of topics that might address a particular issue they have questions about.

So without further ado, I give you,..

The Best of Rational Male – Year One

The Basics

Plate Theory

Plugged-In

Unplugging

Game

Communication

Social Conventions

Hypergamy

Iron Rules of Tomassi

Mythology

The Feminine Imperative

If you have any other favorites that really spoke to you, but didn’t make my list, please link them and tell me how it helped.

Here’s to another great year of RM.