The Wall
Not to belabor the fresh input contributed by new Rational Reader ‘S’, but her recent comment regarding The Wall has made me aware that I haven’t yet gone into too much detail regarding the Wall and its socio-psychological effects upon women:
Yeah, it’s a term I have seen before arriving at this blog but have never heard in reality. I always attributed it to a woman losing her looks but to place it at exactly 30 seems to me to be too precise a calculation…as there are many variable to be taken into consideration I would imagine. For example, a party girl, serial tanner and smoker could probably lose her looks long before she reaches 30, whereas a clean living late bloomer might not even realize her potential until her mid to late twenties. I’ve seen women from my school..the most popular girls (with guys) changed the most in a negative manner and the nerds or just the most unexpected girls have become more attractive over the years. It’s freaking odd.
The infamous Wall a woman reaches (or slams into as the case may be) is somewhat of an ambiguous term that was actually coined by catty women long before the manosphere came into existence. It used to be a relatively less combative term that women used for one another in an effort to disqualify a sexual competitor. A woman implying another woman had “hit the wall” was marginally more polite than calling her a slut, but the latent purpose is still the same – disqualifying a sexual competitor from men’s mating considerations.
The Fear of Decay
Underneath the obvious utility of the Wall as an epithet is a more painful truth; the inevitable decay of women’s sexual appeal – their first, and for most, only, real agency of power they’ve ever actualized over men to ensure their long term security needs. In the heyday of 2nd wave feminism, the sisterhood’s message was all about collective empowerment and solidarity, but beneath that was the intrinsic hypergamic need to compete for the best mate their looks and sexual availability could attract. As I’ve written before, women prefer their combat in the psychological and there are few fears women harbor as deep and as long as losing their sexual agency with men. They know the Wall will eventually come, and they don’t like to be reminded of it.
Women’s intrasexual combative use of the knowledge and fear of the Wall did not go unnoticed by men. Therefore the feminine imperative found it necessary to make the truth about the Wall as socially and individually subjective as possible. As with most uncomfortable truths unique to women’s weaknesses, the feminine creates social conventions and ambiguities to misdirect men from becoming aware of women’s eventual powerlessness over them (i.e. the progressive loss of her sexual agency). The Threat of having men become aware of women’s Achilles’ heel before they could consolidate long-term commitment with their best hypergamic option was too great a risk not to form social conventions about the Wall.
Implications of the Wall
Thus, in an intergender social context, the Wall became individualized and subjective for women, and it’s within this framework that women like S are most comfortable in addressing the reality of the Wall. “Not all women are like that” (NAWALT), the go-to mantra of feminized subjectivity, is a direct result of subjectivizing the inevitability of the Wall. In fact, virtually every operative social convention women rely upon for empowerment and self-esteem finds its root purpose in avoiding the fear of the Wall. The Myth of Sexual Peak, the Myth of the Biological Clock, the social convention that Women are just as Sexual as Men, are all very complex social rationales with the latent purpose of convincing the majority of men and women alike that post-Wall women can still be equally effective sexual competitors with pre-Wall women.
It’s important to bear in mind that all of these complex social conventions are rooted in a fear of the Wall. I’m repeating this point to emphasize the importance this has in a feminized society that’s subjected to feminine hypergamy as its most operative doctrine. When enough women, through cultural forces or personal circumstance, can’t capitalize upon what they think is their due, optimal hypergamic male option, then society must be acculturated to believe that women past their Wall expiration date can and should be just as desirable as those in their prime. Think of it as a retroactive social moving of the feminized goalposts. This is the gravity and extent that the fear of the Wall plays for women – feminized society is literally structured around avoiding it.
Defining the Wall
When I wrote Navigating the SMP, the reason I used 30 as the general age women typically hit the ‘Wall’ is really a combination of factors. Most importantly it represents the threshold at which most women realize their lessened capacity to sexually compete with the next generation of women in their ‘actualized’ sexual peak (22-24). However, there is a male part of the Wall equation that needs to be understood. 30 is also the general age at which men (should) become aware of their own, longer-lasting sexual market value and potential. This affects women’s interpretations of the Wall. Once a Man is aware that he has the capacity to attract the sexual attentions of the younger women he’d previously had limited access and understanding of, his actions and imperatives define the Wall for women who are approaching that threshold. And unsurprisingly this is the point at which Wall-fearing women begin their accusations of men’s infantile ego issues, shaming, etc. for preferring younger women than themselves.
When we (and as women in particular would have us) view the Wall in terms of physical attractiveness we don’t see the full picture and relevancy the Wall has for women. It’s very easy (and often fun) to compare pictures of girls we knew in high school with their current FaceBook profile shots at 40+ years old and get a laugh at how bad she hit the Wall. It’s also easy for women to point out the notable exceptions to the rule and find a hot 38 year old woman with 3 kids competing in the Ms. Fitness USA pageant. It gives them a sense of hope about their own decay.
However the Wall is much more than just the physical; it’s the conditional that accelerates or decelerates a woman’s date with the Wall.
Single mother? Acceleration.
Consistent, bad personal habits? Acceleration.
Careerist obsessive? Acceleration.
Obesity? Acceleration.
Do notable exceptions to these exist? Of course, but they prove the rule. And that rule comes in the form of such an overwhelming fear that contemporary society needed to be restructured to help avoid it. The 38 year old, careerist, single mother of 3 competing in fitness pageants is only a hero because of the fear of the Wall.
Value Added
There’s nothing more refreshing for me than to read the insights of new Rational Readers. Generally it’s not that most offer anything terribly novel (some do), but it’s the predictable, persistent, feminized societal interpretations that keep reusing the same tired rationales which gives me hope that positive masculinity is cracking that shell. In other words, girl-world isn’t really coming up with anything new; it’s just retreads of old tropes.
One new Rational Reader, ‘S’ (maybe for Susan?) decided to take me to task for my graphically detailed essay on Navigating the SMP. Have Hamster, will spin.
While S suffers from the common female malady of reverse rationalizing her ‘circumstances’, she does provide a perspective on a topic I have yet to cover here in her followup response:
Fine, I read that. I just don’t agree with you philosophy that women somehow have no purpose after the age of 30. What if say there were circumstances outside of her control that prevented her from getting married at what a simpleton might deem as an acceptable time…what if she never partied and slept around? There is more to a woman than physicality and it pisses me off that there are men like many of the above (bitter much?) who don’t appear to see worth in a women once her..what’s it called..sexual market value declines…it just strikes me a scarily misogynistic..like some creeped up from of American Psycho shit and it makes me scared for our society.
There is a lot to be said for developing true companionship with someone, having a kind of partner in crime relationship that endures…A woman of any age is appropriate for this.
To paraphrase Roissy’s inimitable words, the closer you get to the truth the louder the feminine will screech. As odd as this is going to sound I actually agree with most of S’s point here. You see, when I was detailing the timeline of men and women’s respective sexual market values, my intent was to provide a raw and unvarnished view of how, in contemporary social dynamics, men and women’s sexual market values differ over the course of time. I made the efforts (loose as they were) to reveal the slow-burn valuation of men’s SMV in contrast with women’s quick-burn SMV.
Emotional Response
Exposing uncomfortable truths is kind of a mixed bag when it comes to the emotional response to those truths. For instance when I read articles about feminist triumphalism regarding how much more ‘advanced’ women are over men today, or I read reviews like ‘The End of Men‘, the analytical portion of my brain gives way to the more emotive response. Why try right? If I’m obsolete, if the cards are stacked in women’s favor before I even get dealt a hand, why not go my own way? There’s a certain hopelessness to that initial emotional response, especially when there’s no hint of sympathy or contrition forthcoming from ‘powerful’ women and all the women aspiring to that empowerment. This is just how the game has shaken out, too bad for you men, you’re fucked now.
I imagine S probably feels the same way when she sees the landscape of the sexual marketplace on display in such Darwinian, graphic terms. Once you’ve hit the Wall ladies, your value begins its decline in earnest, so The Threat then becomes men becoming self-aware enough of their increasing SMV to capitalize upon his increase and your decrease accordingly. This is the nasty part of hypergamy; the countdown to the Wall is ever-present, but so is the subconsciousness-level doubt about having made the optimal hypergamic mating choice before the clock reaches zero. Every SMP opportunity after that point will always be colored by what opportunities she could’ve consolidated upon before it.
I often get called a cynic or uncaring in the delivery of my observations, but try to understand my approach is always about pragmatism. Should women’s overall value mean more than just her physicality and sexual availability? Yes, of course, just as Men’s intrinsic value ought to be more broadly appreciated for the qualities of his character and the sacrifices he makes to facilitate a woman’s reality. I would love nothing better than to think that the human spirit combined with mutual good-will and understanding could lift us above our base, innate drives. I would love to live in a world where men could get a hard-on based solely upon his estimation of a woman’s respective “worth”, and where women swoon for a humble, noble, loyal and devoted overweight and underemployed man with a negative balance in his bank account.
In the manosphere, every day I read about the conflict between what our higher selves should want in a woman. There’s no lack for articles and blog/forum responses making impassioned pleas for women’s fidelity, loyalty, intelligence, grace, femininity, appreciation, and a long list of other ephemeral qualities as being ideal for an LTR prospect. In fact I’d argue that the majority of men’s misreading women comes more from seeing past the red flags and attributing more importance to these qualities than a woman actually merits. For every divorced man who uttered the words “I never thought she was capable of this” I’ll show you a guy who rationalized his attraction to his ex based on what he thought were her ‘value added’ qualities.
Relationships – Nature and Nurture
I would never argue that a man or woman NOT aspire to be better than they are as human beings. There are always going to be human elements to any relationship that transcend what we’d expect the nature of the Game to dictate to us, but underneath that compassionate understanding, behind the flowery sentimentalism, is still the base drives, the feral hypergamy, the cruel reality of the Wall, etc. that we will never be exempt from. On Friday I’ll have been married for 16 years to a beautiful, loyal, feminine, woman. Mrs. Tomassi embodies a great many of the ideal qualities that most men would put on their LTR vetting list – she’s a great partner in crime for me, but my initial attraction to her had far less to do with those qualities and far more to do with how much she turned me on. However, as comfortable as I am with her, as intimate as we are with each other’s identities, warts and all, I still understand the base framework necessary for all of this to take place within.
A relationship based solely upon physicality and sexuality is every bit as weak as one based solely upon esoteric appreciations of ‘higher‘ value-added qualities.
The strongest, healthiest relationships are those in which both parties have a mature, mutual understanding and embrace of both the natural aspect and the nurturing aspect of the SMP. Women will never come to appreciate men’s intrinsic sacrifices made for them without coming to terms with naturalistic side of Game and the SMP. Likewise men need to come to terms with the reality of their conditioning and the fem-centric Matrix in order to appreciate the gravity of their decision to commit to a formalized monogamy / marriage. They need to appreciate the risk of the situation they find themselves in, but have hitherto ben unaware of. For both genders, coming to this understanding is often an ugly prospect.
Likewise it’s important to develop an appreciation for, and an embrace of those value-added qualities which move beyond the naturalistic side of the SMP. While being of primary importance, sex and the feral aspects of the SMP aren’t the only aspects of a healthy LTR. When it comes time to make the transition from spinning plates to informed, committed monogamy, you still have to live with that person and this is when those value-added attributes make or break the LTR.
I understand S’s and so many other women’s frustrations with the Game as it applies to women’s deficiencies. I’ve written at length about how women would rather have the Game changed to better suit their capacities to play it. In this instance S repeats a common moan in that she expects men to appreciate the ‘value added’ elements of a woman’s persona in priority to her base attractiveness. Her fears that men might adopt some policy of neglecting “quality” women in favor of “arousing” women, while understandable in terms of feminine competition anxiety, are really unfounded. If anything it’s the majority of beta men conditioned to believe that “it’s what on the inside that matters” who’ve borne the brunt of women’s social dissatisfaction for the past 40 years.
Guys don’t seek out the community because they’re getting too much pussy from being ‘Nice’ and appreciative of women’s ‘deeper’ qualities and they don’t know how to let down all these women easy. If anything compromises self-respect (assuming an AFC even has a concept of that) it’s a Scarcity/Sniper mentality. Worry less about the guys tapping their “harems” and more about the chump crucifying himself to be the martyr for his singular “dream girl”. He’s far more common.
Is Seduction Real?
From a SoSuave regular:
This has been driving me crazy for awhile so I got to post this question. Can you REALLY, honestly, seduce a girl? When I say “seduce” her I’m talking about taking a girl that just wants nothing to do with you at all for whatever reason that you might have no control over, and literally saying this or saying that and changing her mind?
Here’s what I’ve experienced:
1.) My “presentation” is mostly the same with every girl and really there’s no presentation at all. I’m about all personality. Most girls that I meet say that I’m “cute” (you know how girls talk) in the looks area, I always present myself wearing high fashion and my car is nice.
2.) But here’s the thing, the results I get depend upon the girl. There are girls that will love me, some that will just “go with the flow,” then some that will flat out say boy get lost. But here’s the WEIRD thing. I would have some average looking chick reject me to turn around and have a total dime accept my offers lol. Looking at it, it doesn’t make any sense, but I think it’s coming back to what I’m starting to see in the field and that’s the result of the interaction with the girl has more to do with the GIRL in question rather than you. I mean of course you need to work your Game, look good and do your thing, but what I’m finding is that the results often depend upon the state of the girl and her life and her background, etc.
I mean are guys here seriously whipping out “lines” and player shit to turn girls that are just totally not interested to being interested? I guess from reading the manosphere I’m more in line with the focus on the girl being interested when I show up rather than believing I can create interest.
Are you really seducing the girl or did the girl find you sexy when you walked in the door and already decided that she would fuck you JUST AS LONG as you didn’t come off as a loser, creep, etc?? Which means all this shyt comes down to is having the balls to go up and spark interesting convos, have an interesting personality, and knowing WHICH girl in the room to go up to and which ones not to?
There’s a PUA idiom that states 80% of seduction is simply not fucking up what’s already there. Attraction is not a choice – however, what you do from there is entirely up to you.
I think people get hung up on the word “seduction.” It conjures up melodramatic associations of doing something nefarious to tempt someone into doing something against their own interests. In some instances that may be the case, but far more often seduction is really just selling yourself effectively by manipulating the emotions and psychologies of others. Politicians, religious leaders, salesmen, etc. are all seducers of varying shades. There’s a very blurry line between influence and seduction, but in both cases there’s a willing participant always present. No seduction, or call-to-action was ever consummated with a person who wasn’t already somewhat desirous of being seduced.
Advertisers have known this for years; the best seductions are the ones where the target isn’t aware of being seduced, plays a willing part in their own seduction and are so rapt in their own involvement that they’ll prefer pathological denial when confronted with having been seduced. To varying degrees, people have an innate, limbic level ego-preservation mechanism that protects them from the damages that humiliation might injure them with. No one likes to think that they could be so inured or naive (i.e. suckered) that they’d fall for a seduction, yet whenever they buy a lottery ticket their heads are filled with fantasies of what they’ll do with all that money.
So, given all of that, naturally no one is going to ever get any concrete, totally verifiable feedback as to what produced an effective seduction from the target that was seduced. That’s the subjective nature of all seduction – you can only draw your conclusions from what worked and what didn’t according to your own observations of your own goals, not the target’s.
For instance, I’d argue that it’s a rare woman who’ll admit to having been seduced by a man. It’s a point of pride for women to think that they have some preternatural ability (feminine wiles) to seduce men (really by virtue of having a vagina). And for those women who would admit to having been seduced, it’s always couched in a sense of complimenting herself for being a woman of such value who could attract a man capable of seducing her.
Bear in mind, everyone has Game. Even the worst beta AFC in the world believes his supplication, pedestalization and outright prostration for a woman will separate him from the rest of the herd of “other guys” and increase his appeal to her. Everyone of us, learned or not, has a Game in that we approach our sexual interests in the way we believe will best produce the desired result – sexual response. The average chump wouldn’t think to call it “seduction”, but his ‘Game’ that’s evolved, misguided as it may be, is still an effort in influence and persuasion over a girl to get to sexual response.
Learning from Failure
In terms of learning seduction, failure is more beneficial than success, and this is exactly what guys fear because failure comes in the form of rejection, or in the case of the already committed chump, a fear of rejection. The young AFC will rely on a deductive reasoning (as most males do) which plots something like this:
I have a physical need for sex -> Women have the sex I need -> I must find out what women require for their sexuality -> I ask women what prerequisites they require for this exchange -> I must model my personality, behavior and ambitions to best exemplify these prerequisites -> I must perform these behaviors for her approval -> I get sex.
This is simple male logic and ultimately self-destructive because the women he petitions find it easier to require the dictates of social contrivances that they feel should be expected of him (and modified by their own set of contrivances) than to actually give him the honest truth which would likely set him on his ass in rejection, but moreover would help him better learn how to genuinely develop his own identity.
It’s this failure that teaches most accurately. On several occasions I’ve advised guys to be more wary of their successes than thier failures. Men meticulously pore over and analyze the minute details of why a date went sour or why a woman cheated on or LJBFed them, but the moment they F-Close for the first time, the minute they taste that sweet successs they’ve been aching for so long to achieve, the story changes to “OK Rollo, thanks for all of your help, I can take it from here.” I can think of at least 4 recovering chumps I’ve personally counseled that aped the behavior well enough to get their “ONE” dream girl then crashed and burned in exactly the way I warned them they would because they never paused to question why they succeeded.
The goal of their ambition was more important than the process of understanding how they came to achieve it.
When I was counseling, the single most common complaint I heard from older AFCs was how they got a “raw deal” for doing everything that was expected from them. They did, to the letter, everything that they thought women expected of them. They were “good guys”, they played by the rules (women had set for them), they weren’t ‘Players’, they paid their bills, they were “Supportive®”, sacrificed their own ambitions to benefit their wives and children, they fed the dog and took out the garbage; but these guys were miserable because the fear of rejection, the “I’d lose her for sure if I rock the boat” scarcity mentality was more powerful than recognizing a deficit in appreciation from their wives for the life-sacrifices they made in order to keep the peace and ensure a steady supply of mediocre sexual exchange.
However, for all of their complaints and commiserations they never stopped to look at the process of events that brought them to their condition. The ‘success’ of having found a woman who’d marry them was all that was important to them at the time. Much of that “don’t question it” mentality was due to them having a Scarcity Mentality, but as their relationships decayed the focus became more about repairing it and themselves rather than untangling the process of events that contributed to it. The car was running, the TV came on when they hit the power button, and that’s all that mattered – it’s only when the car breaks down and the TV wont come on that they finally get to the nuts and bolts.
Romantic seduction has never been one-size-fits-all. In fact this is expressly spelled out in the introduction of the Art of Seduction by Robert Greene (required reading for Rational Readers). A lot of men forget what the ‘A’ means in PUA – artist. You can’t just blindly expect one style of seduction to work for all types of women – that’s why it’s called an Art. Being a good artist of any sort requires time, discipline, an ability to improvise, creation, adaptation, attention to detail, etc. There are certain basic foundational principles women adhere to (hypergamy being the most universal) either due to social convention or biology, but the good seductive artist uses these as a basis for an individual seduction. For instance, the seduction of a church mouse and a goth chick require two separate seductive approaches, but they’ll both be influenced by the underlying influences common to all women (i.e. hypergamy, dominance, etc.). A Man’s Alpha prowess will appeal to those biological foundations, but his approach in seduction needs to be measured by the conditions presented by his target.
Denial
In most popular stories Betas may be protagonists, but they’re never really heros. Every movie, that I can remember, that has a beta as a protagonist has been a comedy; beta males are good for laughing at – no one actually admires them.
The same situation exists with Betas/AFCs you know. If you tell them the truth- they’ll say you hate women, or have dated the wrong types, or whatever else they can come up with to protect the mental model underwhich they operate. They’re invested in that mental model and they’re happy with it; to challenge it is to, almost literally, destory the world they live in. Not only will how they view the world be destroyed, but how they view themselves will be destroyed as well.
Ego Investments and Denial
The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. I use this term a lot on my blog so I thought it deserved a bit of explanation.
When a person internalizes a mental schema (see belief) so thouroughly and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such polarization and violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, etc. beliefs – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable evidence that challenges the assertions of their belief.
One common frustration that the Game-aware express is how dificult it is to open an AFCs eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or 2nd dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and the flaws in what is really ego-investments and conditioned internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a catagorical state of denial.
People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof.
Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function.
One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into a state of denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous AFC thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.
Solution: deny the mistake.
Therefore we see AFCs tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc. What they fail to realized, and what becomes cemented for them in denial, is that what they believe are their own, indigenous, self-righteously correct beliefs were designed for them by a fem-centric influence.
The Adolescent Social Skill Set
Having been on vacation recently (sorry for the lack of updates) I took some time in between fishing charters and tequila sampling to look at the overhyped stories about the upcoming olympic games. Unfortunately the games don’t really hold the same appeal they used to, and now especially against the more constant awareness people have of professional sports. So in order to generate advertising revenue for the games themselves it’s become necessary for the media to seed the human interest stories months ahead of time about athletes the public would likely never have been aware of left to their own interests. Knowing who the top javelin throwers in the world are is a pretty niche interest.
So it was with a bit of non-olympic interest that I became peripherally aware of the Lolo Jones story. Grit Artisan had a pretty good breakdown about our newest American feel-good olympic hopeful. Win or lose, expect to see her image plastered on a LOT of sportswear, cereal box and energy drink advertising for the next 8 months.
Before you get the wrong impression, my intent in beginning this post off by drawing attention to Lolo isn’t to eviscerate her. I actually kind of like her. Minus the manjaw, she’s a solid HB 7.5 on the rigorous Tomassi scale, mainly because she got the athletic appeal I like, but she also seems genuinely likable. I use Lolo because she is a prime example of socialization based upon an adolescent social skill set:
From Grit’s post:
-She considers her virginity a gift (!) that she wants to give to her husband. She thinks its the hardest thing she has ever done in her life- harder than college or training for the Olympics. She also realizes and acknowledges the past temptation and opportunities that she could have had sex.
I think it’s important to note that a fem-centric media has used 29 year old Flo-Jo’s Lolo’s virgin status not only as a rallying cry for evangelically defined abstinence, but also as the typical and convenient male-sexual-response shaming device it loves so much. Track & field fans or not, all women can lament in chorus with poor Lolo’s quest to find the Right Guy™ amongst so many immature and uncontrollably sex-concerned boy-men:
It was on Twitter earlier this year where she first announced to her almost 55,000 fans that she was a virgin.
She also said on the program that she has grown accustomed to being rejected by men as a result of her beliefs.
She said: ‘Here’s the two things that happen when you tell a guy you’re a virgin, this is the honest truth. One, you tell them [and they say] “oh ok, I respect that”. But you can already see in their eyes [that they’re thinking] “she’s lying about this and I’ll crack it”.
‘So we’ll talk usually one to three months [later], then they’re like “oh shoot, she was serious”. Time for me to exit.’
I can’t imagine shots like this wouldn’t convey any message to the average guy other than, “I’m a devout christian and I’m waiting for marriage.” Yep, must be those incorrigible men’s sex drives that make ’em bottle out before putting a ring on it. Nothing like the continuation of the ‘there are no good men left’ meme to get the otherwise uninterested ladies into watching the Olympics. Maybe Garfunkle and Oates could dedicate this song to Lolo at the opening ceremonies?
Late Term Virgins
Before I get knee deep in the moral rationales for her ‘decision’, let me begin by stating that in and of itself I don’t necessarily disparage the idea of retaining ones virginity (male or female) when that person is fully self-aware of the long term implications that decision represents. I can already hear the howls from the monogamy minded members of the manosphere, “Why would you discourage women from retaining their virginity? Don’t you know the more dicks she’d had the less likely she’ll be able to pair-bond with a guy? You’re encouraging premarital sex and thus cock-carouseling!”
I’ve covered most of this material in Late Term Virgins, but the salient point here is about adolescent social skills:
Simply put there are experiences and opportunities for personal growth that only embracing our sexuality can offer. One point I regularly make with respect to AFCs is that at some stage in their maturation they became retarded. I use “retarded” in the clinical, not the derogatory sense here; their social maturation becomes held up by their lack of access to experiences that would help them develop new cognitive models. Most of the time this is due to an inability to see past old conventions they learned in adolescence which halts them from passing to the next level so to speak. The problem with saving oneself for marriage becomes apparent in this. I’m not saying there is no merit in it, just that most people subscribing to it blindly do so without understanding the limitations inherent in it.
Whether that person is Lolo Jones or Tim Tebow, the latent purpose of a vow of chastity made in a person’s adolescence is an effort to curb the long-term consequences of the actions that a volatile chemical cocktail of pubescent hormones prompt in them. This ‘decision’ is couched in whatever moralism helps them and their parents sleep better at night, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of educating a 15 year old promised virgin to understand the social implications of that promise when she reaches 30 and is still a virgin.
Wearing our public faces (the ones that look like wisdom and prudence) there will no doubt be a demographic with some reason to celebrate Lolo or Tebow. “Wow, they really do hold to their convictions. They are an example, unlike us lesser people who were too weak to resist our carnal appetites.” And while they finish that sentence there’s still a nagging discomfort in revering ‘celebrities’ for not experiencing something that 99% of the human population has experienced well before age 30.
Call it a Double Standard if you like, but when we encounter a 40 year old virgin male our underlying impression of him is not one of reverence, but rather one of suspicion. We wonder what’s wrong with a guy who’s never had sex. Part of being a total Man is to have had sex; it is to have had consolidated upon our most basic biological impetus. A man incapable of this (by choice or by circumstance) is considered deviant and forces us to wonder at his social maturation. In other words, a normal guy should’ve gotten laid by 40.
Lolo’s is an interesting case. There comes a point when normal women ought to have had sex as well. While we can make the case that sex-positive neo-feminism endorses cock-carouseling as a deviancy, there is also a stage at which we begin to wonder about a woman’s maturity and socialization when she hasn’t had sex by a certain age. By today’s standards, at 30 Lolo is practically a nun. We can cling to the sense of hope she inspires by holding out for marriage, but at what age do we determine that maybe Lolo is still stuck on the idealism of her youthful promises?
Adolescent Social Skills vs. Mature Social Skills
My sister-in-law got pregnant at 18 and married at 19. After about 20 years of marriage and 2 children she went feral. Hypergamy prompted her to divorce the husband who’d ‘done the right thing’ at 20 years old and remarry a millionaire. There’s more to this story, but one annoying aspect of her very brief dating period of the millionaire was her psychological regression back into the only social skill set she’d ever known; the one she’d used right up until becoming a teenage mother. Her phone call conversations with this late 40’s millionaire took me aback at first – it was script taken directly from the worst 80’s Brat Pack movie. Cutesy pet names, and behaviorisms that bespoke a woman whose social understandings were frozen in time since the mid 80’s to be thawed out in 2003.
I shouldn’t really say that she regressed to her adolescent skill set, because she never really had the opportunity afforded by experience to develop a mature way of socializing as an adult (of 40+ years at the time) should realistically be expected of. Her story is a gross, anecdotal illustration that made me realize the larger, much more nuanced, whole of people using their last relatable experience as reference for understanding and applying themselves in novel situations.
One of the most consistent dynamics I deal with when I’m asked for counseling or even just casual advice is determining how much real-world experience the person asking me has. For example, it’s a much tougher task to unplug, and teach a guy Game whose social understanding is rooted in idealistic, adolescent beliefs he’s never had the opportunity to mature past via experience. For many in the manosphere it’s an almost enjoyable act to be the iconoclast of juvenile, Disneyesque plugged-in idealisms, but it really does nothing to help the man (not to mention woman) whose only frame of reference has ever been based in their adolescent social skills and understandings.
With every passing year, by order of degree, it becomes that much more difficult to get a person to accept their social retardation and unlearn their adolescent skill set as their only skill set.. A man of 25 might be willing to come to terms with his lack of referable experience, but the man of 45’s ego, by virtue of age, relies upon that model in order to feel validated. He’s had half a lifetime of experiences, but all of that was built upon, and limited by, a social model he’d learned and frozen at age 18.
Add the feminine rationalization hamster to this equation and it’s easy to see how stories like my sister-in-law’s come to pass. For women there’s little motivation to move beyond the adolescent model that worked so well for them in their teens. Thus we have mid-50’s women who’re easily entertained by television (HBO’s Girls) and stories that allow them to vicariously relive the framework of their adolescent social awareness. I have little doubt that in my sister-in-law’s psyche nothing was out of the ordinary, but to those around she was either cute in her unawareness of her 20 year old social behaviors, or she was an anachronism.
Women can get away with a lifetime of social awareness halted at age 17, but socially, men are expected to know better. This is why Lolo Jones gets a smile and a wry wink at 30, but the 40 year old virgin man is “creepy.”
Social Models
There was a time when the practical merits of virginity made sense. When a person’s life expectancy was about 50 years, an adolescent skill set was much different than it is today. There’s a reason individual cultures had ceremonies for passing into manhood and womanhood at age 15, we needed to be men and women at a much earlier age. Adulthood was literally 18. Since then, our biology and our evolution, physically and psycho-socially, conflict with that older model. We’ve drawn the process of maturation out to accommodate a longer lifespan as well as the contemporary expectations of education, career, family, etc. as per the norms of the societies that foster them.
Yet we still use the older socialization model – the one when more was expected of us earlier – as a base for judging the relative maturity of an individual. For all the handwringing about ‘Kidult’ men not manning up to fem-centric expectations, it’s almost comical to think that those expectations are rooted in a traditional, social model for maturation that hasn’t existed in almost a century in western culture. They want the anachronism of the old model to be relevant to men for exploitative purposes that they’re willfully or blissfully unaware of, yet we’re supposed to congratulate a 30 year old woman for not having sex based on an antiquated social model. Lolo Jones living in 1912 would be an old maid by those social standards; people of that era would wonder what was wrong with her.
Backwards to Zero
Roissy has some definitive gems about Game deniers and haters in general in The Unbearable Triteness of Hating. These articles have to do with the most common forms of hate with regards to Game, but in that hate is an almost universal misinterpretation (or subjective redefinition) of what should be Alpha to the critic making the challenge (i.e. hate). Roissy is a bit flippant with a lot of his responses here – an attitude I can understand considering his standing in the manosphere – but there are the germs of some very important truths in his responses:
6. Unironic Internet Smear Hate
Hater: Alphas don’t blog. They’re too busy meeting women.
Because, you know, alphas don’t have hobbies. *alpha eye roll*
ps feel free to log off the internet any time.
Whenever I write an article with the topic of ‘Alpha’ anywhere in the title I’ve come to assume that all the resulting commentary will be contentions about what is or isn’t Alpha.
One of the most frequent and contentious responses I read is some variation of “No ‘True Alpha™’ would be blogging about, concerned about, or be peripherally aware of his Alpha status. Only losers spend their time so preoccupied with varying shades of Alpha-ness.” Ironically this is exactly the case I make for the Alpha Buddahs of the world – they are blissfully unaware of the latent Alpha ambience they broadcast. It’s just how they are, and you’ll never see a blog, read some ‘how-to’ article, nor ever see an objective opinion about his Alpha mojo. He just is.
What’s funny is it’s just this lack of Alpha self-awareness that infuriates ‘aware’ men – aware men have to work at being aware. If you’re reading this blog, if you’ve delved into the manosphere to any depth, hell, if you read AskMen or use online dating just out of curiosity, you’re not a Natural Alpha. The Corey Worthingtons of the world don’t write books on how to pick up chicks, he’s too busy fucking them (and dealing with the consequences) to have time for insight about himself, much less anyone else.
The Tao of the Natural Alpha may be a satisfying, if shortsighted, way to live, but it’s hardly sustainable. Eventually that Zen Alpha-ness creates circumstances that will create long term consequences. For the rest of us who must mentally work our way back to that feral Alpha mindset there is a lot of understanding and critical thought that goes into it. Personally I think appeals to “log off and get out and sarge” are exactly what most guys need. For all the PUA ‘charm’ readers like YaReally bring to my blog comments, he enthusiastically advocates for more time in the field and less time in the lab (i.e. the manosphere). KrauserPUA is also another favorite of mine since he actively combines Game theory with PUA applications.
The short version is Natural Alphas probably don’t blog or even have the awareness to consider the source, much less the applicability of their being Alpha, but the Learned Alpha, he does consider it, and that guy probably does blog – whether it’s out of vanity or altruism is for the reader to decide.
12. Fallacy of Misdirected Obsession Hate
Hater: A guy who spends his life obsessing over how to get women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over climbing the corporate ladder to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over mastering guitar and playing in a rock band to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over pursuing financial rewards and acquiring resources to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who….. ah, you get the point.
The feminine imperative has used shaming tactics on men for more than half a century now, so it comes as no surprise that the feminine purpose for shaming would filter into men’s own narratives for shaming. When used by women, shaming has a different contextual quality than when used by men. For men, the root of shaming another man based on gender expectations are just as equally manipulative, but the appeal is to a man’s sense of pride and/or the way he’s chosen to live his life. In this context, the shame is used to disqualify a sexual competitor, while providing an ego affirmation for the accuser.
When women use shaming it’s generally used to force some compliance to their imperative. In other words “you should be ashamed for not embodying women’s (and by proxy, fem-centric society’s) expectations.” When men practice shame, either intentionally or unaware, even with the best of intentions, they are enforcing the feminine imperative from the standpoint that it is the societal normative. It “sounds right” for men to shame and discourage other men from learning how to better understand women. Remember, the most successful social conventions are those in which your target becomes an active, unaware, participant in his own exploitation.
By using shame, men dissuading other men from better understanding women serve the feminine imperative’s purpose in limiting The Threat of him becoming aware of his own sexual market value or potential value. Additionally, the shaming man protects the utility of the feminine mystique by perpetuating the myth that women are intrinsically unknowable creatures. “You’ll never figure women out, so don’t bother. Go back to Just Being Yourself and eventually you’ll meet the right ONE.” This is the mantra we’ve come to expect from White Knights, but it’s particularly damning for the Plugged-In when it comes from a Man they respect as an authority.
16. Dancing Monkey Hate
Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.
If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
For all of Men’s best intentions, for all our (dubious) aspirations of ‘higher-self’, what we do, what we are, what we achieve, will always be interpreted through the hypergamous filter of a woman’s perception of us. For all of our attempts to remove ourselves from the Game, Men cannot avoid this. By both biological impulse and social motivators, like it or not we are the performers, we are the approachers, we are the doers, even when (especially when) we think our purpose is not intended to be what we think it is. Abdicating from the Game does not excuse you from participating in the Game.
Whether you believe yourself the princely master of your own destiny or the pitiful victim of circumstance, on some level of consciousness you’re aware of the Game, and it’s a game of perceptions. Alpha’s, betas, Nice Guys, Bad Boys, and every guy in between, they ALL entertain women, even when they think they’ve gone their own way, even when they think they’re exempt from the Game, even when they’ve been married for 50 years.
It is a grave crime to tacitly or implicitly dissuade men from learning how better to master the Game. I can see how this misdirection might be used to disqualify a sexual competitor, but the same guys relying on rationalizations of higher-self-importance only better serve the feminine imperative they would otherwise rage against. Ironically it’s the feminine that’s arrogantly demanded every advantage in expecting society and reality itself to change for them in order better suit their gender’s drawbacks. They want to change the Game to better suit their ability to play it. They want to cheat the Game by playing in ‘God Mode’ and then wonder why it’s not fun to play any more.
I think we make the same mistake as men in our rationalizing expectations of the Game to accommodate us rather than learning to play it better.
Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.
The Origin of Alpha
“Safe sex, safe clothing, safe hairspray, safe ozone layer,…too late! Everything that’s been achieved in the history of mankind has been achieved by not being safe.”
– Lemmy Kilmister, Mötorhead
In the Think Like a Woman post comments Rational Reader Jeremiah presented me with a well worn question:
My question is, Tomassi, do you think alpha traits are usually learned or genetically inherited? What percentage of modern men “get it” and of the men who “get it” how many of them have always “gotten it” and how many of them learned to adapt? It is hard to believe there are still naturals out there when feminism is being rammed up the anus of every man before he sprouts his first tooth.
As I’ve illuminated in past posts, I don’t think distilling the essence of Alpha ‘presence’ in a Man is as subjective as most people feel compelled to qualify, enumerate or otherwise yammer on about in as personally identifying a manner as they can muster. In this humble blogger’s estimation Alpha is a state of mind, not a demographic. The manosphere will endlessly debate the qualifications of what is Alpha, but I think for the most part, the influence of an Alpha mindset (whatever the qualifiers) is more or less agreed upon.
However, with this in mind, I think it’s a perfectly valid question to ask whether an Alpha is born that way or molded into his Alpha mindset. This is actually the classic debate psychology has always always put to its various schools of thought; Nature vs. Nurture – is a dynamic influenced by inherent, biological, environmental prompts or is that dynamic a learned, socialized and acculturated phenomenon? And of course the equally classic conflict comes from people attempting to define various dynamics in terms of absolutes, when to greater or lesser degrees a dynamic is influenced by both nature and nurturing elements.
While the Tomassi school of psychology is firmly planted in the nuts and bolts of behaviorism, it’s also important to take into account that external influences can and too often do modify innate, inborn predilections – even inborn self-preservation instincts.
So with this in mind, my perspective on the origin of Alpha is that biology determines the starting point for Alpha, what happens to it from there is modified by a man’s environmental conditions. Alpha ‘energy’, for lack of a better term, is to varying degrees, part of a male human’s biologically determined “starting package”; from there, through social feedback, it’s either refined and developed by his upbringing, acculturation and social affirming, or it’s repressed, constrained and mitigated by his social environment.
When I was in art school one of my most influential teachers told me, “There are two types of artists; those who were born with a natural, innate gift for art, and those who lack that gift, but possess such a passion for art that it drives them to be good at it. The true masters are the artists that combine both natural talent and the drive that comes from a passion for it.” I’ve always referred back to this model in my creative efforts, but I believe this model can be extended beyond just the artistic sense.
The Learned Alpha
Roosh has an excellent breakdown of The Myth of the Natural that perfectly encapsulates the learning theory of Alpha. The premise behind this is that Alpha behavior, and consequently facility with women, comes as a set of modeled behaviors based upon trial and error.
If I were forced to agree on what a natural is, it would be a man who’s a prodigy of sex—someone who gets laid way above other men with no formal instruction in game. This means he was not exposed to any 12 DVD “Cocky Humor” sets or seminars in a hotel room with three dozen other guys. You look at him and think, “Wow, he gets laid automatically. He was born to get laid!”
But he wasn’t. Just because he didn’t read a book doesn’t mean he didn’t learn through trial and error like you did, practicing his game on a large number of women. It doesn’t mean that he wasn’t conscious and deliberate with his behavior, incrementally improving his moves and tactics over a long period of time. He has experimented like you have experimented, and he has also connected his attempts with results to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
He may not be obsessive about it enough to log his data into a spreadsheet, but he’s mindful and aware of what he’s doing. He understands the mechanism behind charm and can often turn it on or off depending on what he wants. He has learned the type of humor and story-telling that gets a positive response in women. The last thing you can say about him was that he was born into the world with the “automatic” ability to fuck a lot of girls.
Essentially what Roosh explores here is a very basic behavioral psychology premise – macro-psychological dynamics to micro-psychological schema are developed, deliberately or unconsciously, through a process of deductive trial and error management. Whether you’re aware of it or not, everyone has Game to varying degrees. Every man you know has some concept of behaviors and mental attitudes he believes will best help him arrive at sexual intimacy with a woman. Even the worst Blue Pill Beta believes he has some idea of how best to get with a girl.
All of this proto-Game has been in a constant state of trial and error management since you were five years old and had your first interaction with the opposite sex on the kindergarten playground, right up to the point when you discovered the Red Pill. And you will continue to modify your old behavior and mental sets based upon the new information available to you after you adopt formalized Game. In fact, in its rawest sense, the PUA community, the manosphere and all its permutations are really a meta-effort in behavioral modification by way of experimentation and information feedback.
For some this learning process comes easier than it does for others. Again Roosh:
The reason he blows you away isn’t because of his genetics, but because of how early he started. A unique set of circumstances threw him into the sex game years before you, during a time he was lucky enough to be surrounded by giggly schoolgirls. By the time you did your first approach, he had already practiced his game on hundreds of women.
While I do agree with this from a behavioral standpoint, this is where I have to depart from accepting Roosh’s theory entirely. There are far too many biological and environmental determinants involved in developing an Alpha male to ascribe an Alpha status based solely on learned behavior. The simple, observable, fact is that a genetically better looking, more physically arousing male is going to statistically have more opportunities to experiment and develop his Alpha Game prowess than a less physically impressive male. In theory, a man with a more advantageous physical presence will “start earlier” in his process of deductively evaluating behaviors since his efforts will be more frequently encouraged by the women who are naturally attracted to his physique.
Unfortunately all of that assumes developing a behavioral set in a vacuum. There’s literally a world of environmental conditions and variables that would predispose a man towards behavioral development of Alpha status or (more often) limit him from it. Roosh touches on this:
At this point you may be thinking, “Well, there have to be guys who were born with it. Look at Mozart!”
Nobody questions that Mozart’s achievements were extraordinary compared with those of his contemporaries. What’s often forgotten, however, is that his development was equally exceptional for his time. His musical tutelage started before he was four years old, and his father, also a skilled composer, was a famous music teacher and had written one of the first books on violin instruction. Like other world-class performers, Mozart was not born an expert—he became one.
I don’t think this example excludes for a natural, innate talent, but it does help to illustrate the environment’s role in molding a person by limiting or encouraging his behavioral development and ultimately his personality. In the Mozart example we see the success story (the story of a master artist) of a natural talent encouraged and developed to potential by favorable external conditions. Mozart was the perfect storm of natural talent and an ideal environment for nurturing it, thus giving him the advantage of an “early start” in his behavioral trial and error efforts.
Jeremiah laments, “It is hard to believe there are still naturals out there when feminism is being rammed up the anus of every man before he sprouts his first tooth” and of course this is a negative example of an environment (deliberately) averse to nurturing an Alpha mindset. There’s no shortage of examples, but feminization from a behavioral psychology perspective, is nothing less than a socialized effort in deliberate behavioral modification of men’s natural drives and predilections to better fit the feminine imperative. As men socialized in an all-encompassing, pervasive, fem-centric reality, we tend to see “Natural Alphas” as outliers because somehow, through some combination of innate gift and external development, these Men have developed themselves into an Alpha state despite the meta-environment we find ourselves in.
The Natural Alpha
A lot of people call my credibility into question when they read my holding Corey Worthington up as an example of an apex Alpha. Guys who believe that Alpha should necessarily mean “virtuous leaders of men” are understandably insulted by Corey’s indifferent Alpha swagger. As I started in this post, the ‘Qualities of Alpha’ debates aren’t going away, but I think there’s an overall consensus among the manosphere and legitimate psychologists alike that there is an innate (probably testosterone fueled) Alpha drive that manifests itself in human males.
No one has to teach the average, healthy, five-year-old boy how to be Alpha – he gets it on his own. In various contexts that ‘lil’ Alpha’ wants to explore his surroundings, take risks, see what works and see what doesn’t, even when the consequences may be endangering himself or destroying the thing he took apart to see how it worked. It may manifest as a boy attempting to ride wheelies on his bike or a kid tinkering with his dad’s computer, but that unrefined, irrationally confident, Alpha swagger, is by order of degrees, an innate element unique to the male condition.
When a boy is unencumbered with an adult capacity for abstract thinking (ages 3-21 progressively) he is as Alpha as he will ever be. He is unapologetically Alpha and it takes a lifetime, and an entire world of feminized social conditioning to repress and/or crush that Alpha vigor and turn him into the pliable Beta the feminine imperative needs to insure its social primacy. This is precisely why the raw, irresponsible, irrepressible, obliviously un-self-aware Alpha energy of the Alpha Buddah/Corey Worthingtons of the world offend our sensibilities so well.
All of the Game theory, PUA techniques, even feminine-serving appeals to Man-Up! or any other effort designed to help men better mimic or internalize an Alpha behavioral or mind set, all of those efforts’ latent purpose is to return a man back to that primal Alpha energy the five-year-old you had in spades.