Women & Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War Brides

Reader Nas had an interesting question regarding female duplicity:

“Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism.”

Can you please expand on this Rollo? I find it fascinating.

OK, baton down the hatches, we’re heading for dangerous waters. What I’m getting at here is suggesting that women’s propensity for solipsism is a psychologically evolved mechanism. In other words, it helped women to cope with the harsh realities of the past, to develop a more focused sense of self-interest. To really grasp this you need to understand women’s brain function and chemistry. I’m not going to get too detailed in this, but suffice it to say numerous studies show that a female brain is hard-wired for emotional response and communication on a more complex level than men. I think this is pretty much an established point for my readers, but if you disagree, well that’s going to have be the topic of another post.

Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect be subjected to. Consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child that could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice. Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it’s women’s innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women. Why should that be?

On the face of it you may think that men’s better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness. Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

Men are the disposable sex, women, the preserved sex. Men would simply die in favor of a superior aggressor, but women would be reserved for breeding. So it served a feminine imperative to evolve an ability to cut former emotional ties more readily (in favor of her new captor) and focus on a more self-important psychology – solipsism.

Now, here is where I’ll step off the diving board and into the theoretical. It’s my purview that a lot of what men would complain are duplicitous acts of indifference towards them are really rooted in this innate feminine solipsism. That’s a bold statement, I realize, but I’d argue that what men take for inconsiderate indifference in a break up or in ruthless shit tests is really a woman tapping into this innate, self-preserving solipsism. Combine hypergamy with the chronically hostile environments of the past and you end up with a modern day feminine solipsism. Add to this an acculturated sense of female entitlement, social conventions that excuse this ‘duplicity’, and a constant misdirection of intent by women themselves, and you come to where we are now. As if that weren’t enough, throw in the element of hypergamy and the countdown in terms of fertility and long term provisioning that a woman must deal with before hitting the imminent Wall, and now you have a fuller picture of the conditions and stresses that necessitate this solipsistic nature.

Ever wonder why it is a woman can ‘get over you’ so quickly after a break up from a relationship you’d thought was rock solid for so long? Ever wonder why she returns to the abusive boyfriend she hopes will change for her? Look no further than feminine solipsism.

After reading all of this I can understand if anyone thinks this is a very nihilistic observation. Let me be clear, this dynamic is real by order of degrees for individual women. A woman’s conditions may be such that she’s never needed to tap into this reserve. Also, we are dealing with subconscious elements of her personality here, so it would come as no surprise that feminine solipsism wouldn’t be cognitive for most women – thus offensive and denied. I’m not asking that anyone accept this idea as gospel, just that the dots do connect very predictably.

The Nice Guy – Jerk Spectrum

I know, I know, Nice Guy vs. Jerk has been done into the ground many times, but I just did a consult with a young man about this and I thought you all might like to read my take on it. I think one of the easiest targets for Game hate is the terminology. It’s far too easy to apply subjective definitions to archetypes like ‘Nice Guy’ or ‘Jerk’. The standard binary response is usually, “So, I gotta be a complete asshole all the time or girls wont be attracted to me? Screw that man, I’m not into game playin'”

You can sift back through any number of forum pages of advice I’ve offered and read me over and over again telling young men to “get in touch with their inner A-Hole.” In any of my posts, never do I state to in fact become an A-Hole. The two most common questions I get asked advice for is “Why do girls love Jerks so much?” and the “How do I get out of the friend-zone?” line. Both of these illustrate different ends of a spectrum. Try to think of it this way: On one end of the spectrum you have the consummate Jerk – he’s obnoxious, an A-Hole, borders on abusiveness, but women flock to the guy in droves. On the opposite end of the scale we have the ultimate Nice Guy who does and embodies everything any girl has ever told him he needs to become in order to achieve their intimacy and has internalized this doormat conditioning into his own personality. This is the guy who’ll spend countless hours on the phone being ‘friends’ with a girl or spend fortunes on gifts for her in order to buy her approval.

I think it’s important to look at the roots of the terms “Jerk” and “Nice Guy.” Lets not forget these characterizations exist because women gave them these names and classifications based on their own common evaluations. Women defined these terms, guys simply made the association with them. We tend to see these as parodies or caricatures now; abusive wife-beating Jerk or doormat Nice Guy. These are two extreme ends of the spectrum and when considering them after candid assessments, the mistake becomes falling into a binary all-or-nothing interpretation.

“So I haffta be more of a Jerk then?,..well, I’m just not like that.” says the AFC frustrated at what seems like women’s duplicity of words and actions, but this misses the point. The problem is that if you think of a center point between that Jerk and Nice Guy spectrum, most guys lean towards (if not half way over to) the Nice Guy. That’s the “get in touch with your feminine side, believe women’s words instead of actions” default for the vast majority of men. This is what women are used to because it is so common, and women only encourage it because it suits their gender’s imperative best.
The real extreme Jerk is as rare as the real extreme Nice Guy, so it’s necessary to look at things by order of degrees in this respect. Most men are Betas. They opt for the nice, accommodating, supplicating side of this spectrum. For the majority, they’ve been socially conditioned to suppress any masculine impulse in favor of accommodating and identifying with women’s imperatives (or at least what they’re led to understand as their imperatives) at the risk of intimate rejection. It’s exactly this mindset, this Beta male default to the ‘Nice’ end of the spectrum that 85% of guys subscribe to, that makes the guy who leans into the ‘Jerk’ end of the spectrum attractive.
Yes, confidence and indifference are Alpha traits, but in a world awash in Nice Guys ready to buy a hot girl a drink, it’s the guy who ‘couldn’t give a shit‘ who she marks as sexual potential. It’s just this conditioning over the last 50+ or so years that makes the Nice side of the spectrum the default. That doesn’t mean all Nice Guys are pathetic symps without a spine and groveling at the feet of any ONEitis they happen to attach themselves to. But it is to say that, by comparison, and because the overwhelming tendency to “go nice” is the standard, the guy who leans just marginally to the Jerk side of the spectrum becomes notable and attractive simply by dissociation.
He’s attractive on two levels, the first being the rudimentary Alpha, biological level for a guy who’s decisive, in control, confident and has an attitude of caring less about her, since he realizes (to some degree) his value as a commodity that comes from his having options. The second is that the Jerk-leaning guy is a Purple Cow in a field of bland, colorless Nice Cows. He’s notable, and this too, makes him a male worthy of female competition, which then reinforces his sense of having options. He’s not an abuser, he’s not a manipulator per se, but he tends to put himself before and above (if just slightly) the women who are attracted to him.

Now the irony of all this is that the AFC thinks that this situation is in reverse. He believes that Nice Guys are the anomaly in a sea of Jerks. Of course he believes this because it’s all his female-friends talk about; their “Jerk BFs”, and how Nice they are for being good listeners. So his self-image gets validated and he believes he’s unique and valuable for being “not-like-other-guys” and his patience and sensitivity will eventually pay off – which it very well could once the object of his obsession has had her fun (and possibly bred) with the Bad Boy.

A new world Jerk order.
Another criticism leveled at Game is a fear that nominally Nice Guys will take this lesson to heart and become intolerable assholes. The fear is a new generation of arrogant pricks ‘not being themselves‘ all in order to hook up.  I understand the fear of a mass of men radically leaning their personalities towards the Jerk end of the spectrum as prompted by the PUA or MRA communities. Let me be the first to say those fears are unfounded. Guys don’t search out the community, blogs or forums because they’re getting too much pussy from being archetypically ‘nice’. In fact the observation that more, shall we say, “self-centered” Men seem to be getting laid most consistently is so prevalent that there’s an entire section dedicated to it on the main SoSuave page, leads me to believe that a sudden paradigm shift to Jerk-ness isn’t remotely the threat that anyone should fear. Nice Guys, by definition, have a real tough time effectively pulling off acting like a Jerk, much less genuinely converting their personality’s to that of a Jerk.

Most men WOULD prefer to inch towards the jerk end of the spectrum, if at all, and assuming they come to believing things aren’t as they previously believed. The more common mindset for beta males is to expect that women should appreciate them for being the ‘nice’, dependable, self-sacrificing guy that every woman since his mother has told him he should be. It’s far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want. It’s the lazy man’s path to disqualify or cheapen things that he desperately wants, but lacks the motivation to change himself to get. So the hot, ‘quality’ girl he wanted before, becomes the ‘trashy club slut’ after she rejects him. The real quality girl should love/desire him unconditionally, “for who he is” rather than force him into improving himself, which in this instance means he ought to become the caricatured Jerk archetype he’s been taught to hate. Most people resist becoming what they hate, even if it’s a change for the better.

We ought to worry less about social implications of converting nice guys into jerks than making them self-aware to begin with. The risk of creating a bona fide Jerk in an effort  is a decent trade off.

Duplicity

It’s endlessly entertaining (and predictable) to see how often women’s (and feminized men’s) default response to anything they disagree with in regards to gender dynamics is met with a personalization to the contrary. It’s always the “not-in-my-case” story about how their personal anecdotal, exceptional experience categorically proves a universal opposite. By order of degrees, women have a natural tendency for solipsism – any dynamic is interpreted in terms of how it applies to themselves first, and then the greater whole of humanity.

Men tend to draw upon the larger, rational, more empirical meta-observations whether they agree or not, but a woman will almost universally rely upon her isolated personal experience and cling to it as gospel. If it’s true for her, it’s true for everyone, and experience and data that contradict her self-estimations? Those have no bearing because ‘she’s’ not like that.

Recently I’ve been fielding responses generated from my Wait for it? post, courtesy of Susan Walsh and the Hooking Up Smart audience. What started as some really good discourse has kind of degenerated into the monogamy vs. biology team mentality. There’s a lot of good stuff, but after 300+ responses all that just kind of gets buried. However, Susan had a predictable come back to my (misunderstood) premise of the Iron Rule of Tomassi #3:

Are you saying that all women are prepared to bang a stranger at a foam cannon party on Spring Break? Or even that all women would attend a foam cannon party?

Are there any women who are in control of their lives and actions, in your view? It sounds as if you do not allow for that possibility.

One of the great failings of a good debate is casting your perspective in binary terms – and that’s what’s happening here. This isn’t an all or nothing, black or white premise; intelligent people falling back on binary straw-men arguments is usually a sign that they either don’t grasp the premise (my fault) or that they really have nothing to back up their own (their fault).

That said, lets put it this way, all women have the potential to bang the hot guy in the foam Cannon party. Whether they have the means, or their personal / physical conditions permit them to carry out the behavior is subject to speculation, but the desire and potential is there under the right circumstances.

Now, the next predictable retort will be, “so you actually believe women are unaware of their own impulses?” I’ll save you the time of asking, and just respond with, yes. ‘Lives’ and ‘actions’ are often conscious decisions, however, the motivators behind those decisions are are not. That’s going to seem outrageous to a gender who’s psychological imperative is to preserve an appearance of being worthy of long term provisioning at all times, but empirical study and observations will contradict this.

Have a look at the work of Dr. Martie Hasselton here:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/papers/

Pay particular attention to her studies and experiments regarding female ornamentation during periods of ovulation (high fertility) as well as women’s subconscious propensity for seeking men displaying Alpha cues during ovulation, and Beta male provisioning preferences during menstruation.

You might also look into the works of Dr. Meredith Chivers:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/06/030613075252.htm

In their study, Chivers and Bailey showed erotic films to heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian women while measuring their genital and subjective arousal. They found that women, unlike men, showed the same genital responses to different kinds of erotic stimuli regardless of their sexual orientation, says Bailey. Whether the films depicted two males, two females, or a male and a female engaging in sexual activity, the different groups of women in the study responded similarly.

As I stated previously, hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock, and women’s biology and psychological wiring have evolved to make women extremely adept sexual opportunists. So yes, ALL women have the propensity to want to fuck the hot guy on spring break, and simultaneously maintain the impression (for themselves and others)  that they’re worthy of long term provisioning potential. Women know their first, best, agency with men is their sexuality. On some level of consciousness they’re keenly aware that men’s primary interest in them is fucking – everything else is ancillary to sex. The value a woman has beyond the sexual only becomes relevant after she’s been sexual.

I can hear the gnashing of feminist, and their male identifiers, teeth at this, but don’t take this as some horrible proof of the human condition. The binary response will be to presume I mean women are worthless beyond sex; that is not my premise. What I am illustrating is that there will always be a condition of sexuality between the sexes that influences our dealings with each other.

I’d love to perpetuate the pretty lie that women hold off on sex in order increase their sexual market value to men, but the overwhelming meta-consensus as reported by men online is there are far too many “good girls” who’ll knowingly string along patient, dependable (not necessarily beta) men because “she wanted them to like her for more than that” only to fuck a high SMV Alpha the first night she met him. Opportunism is a universal human drive, but it manifests itself differently in each gender as fits their imperatives.

Self-Shots  NSFW.

Have a look here at the sheer volume and frequency with which average women will voluntarily become sexual here. This is just one collection, there are countless millions more. Remember, no one is coercing these girls to take nude and semi-nude pics of themselves in a bathroom mirror – they want to do this. Are they all sluts? How many of these women have uttered the words ” I want to wait so I know you want me for more than sex?” How many of these women would make great wives in 5-10 years? How many of these women are already (or have been) wife material? How many of these women are thought of as the sweet natured “good girl”? How many guys have considered these girls “Quality Women”? We can look at them with their clothes off and declare them sluts, but would you know the difference if you saw her in church?

Most women are literally oblivious to the underlying motivations of their sexual selections / attractions. Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism. Hypergamy necessitates solipsism.

Virtue

I’ve never had meaningless sex,… I meant to bang every girl I ever did.

Whenever I author a particularly inflammatory post or forum thread that grates on people’s ego-invested beliefs, one of the first accusations I expect to have leveled at me are those that echo a shaming appeal to moralism. I can generally identify a pretty important issue if the response to exposing some uncomfortable truth requires questioning my common sense or ethics. On a larger scale, many a White Knight, and many an ethics-invested woman will simply default to ‘higher self‘ arguments when confronted with simple observations that challenge what they believe – and what they assume everyone else believes along with them.

People with questions don’t frighten me, it’s the people without any that scare the hell out of me.

My problem isn’t necessarily with principles or morals or ethics in and of themselves, but rather men chumpishly clinging to them when in actuality they really had no other options to give themselves a wider perspective on what they believe.

They make necessity a virtue.

For instance, telling yourself you’re remaining (conditionally) celibate in order to hold to some higher ideal is really just trying to prove a negative if you don’t really have any valid options to influence your decision in the first place. If you weren’t get laid to begin with it seems like prudence to convince yourself and others that it’s really by your design. You ‘win‘ by not doing anything.

And it’s unassailable. I can’t doubt the merit of a guy’s convictions when nothing is what’s required to prove them. I read a lot of guys who question the merits of Game. Some reject it entirely or profess some desire to “get out of all the game playing” in order to rationalize their inability to adopt a new, more productive, mindset for themselves. Usually this is accompanied by some qualification as to how they’ve seen it all, banged their fill of “low quality women“, and now have developed some higher sense of self – all while implying those still “in the game” have not – and are now giving themselves ‘permission‘ to exit the game by settling down with some girl in blissful monogamy. They’ve finally grown up and are doing “the right thing.” It’s like all endings to romantic comedies – he’s really a bastard with a heart of gold who met the ‘right’ woman to bring it out in him. For women, this is usually part and parcel of the Epiphany Phase, but for men it’s the virtue signaling that accompanies his following The Script.

Anyone would sound like an idiot for trying to convince you not to be moral – to drop your integrity or demean yourself – but that’s the reason appeals to moralism sound good. Being resolute is admirable, but until your virtue is significantly tested they’re just excuses that look nice on your sleeve. Guy’s who have legitimate harems don’t make announcements about how they’re renouncing them in favor of ONE quality woman. There’s no self-convincing, they just do it, without any fanfare or seeking affirmation from others for having done so.

It’s been my experience that the guys who are the most vocal about the merits of self-esteem and personal integrity trumping sexual experience are generally the same guys who aren’t hooking up with any real frequency anyway. Remember, a sacrifice is only significant when you actually have something relevant to lose.

The points these guys like to make are generally based on common truisms that very few people will argue with – and they know this. We’d all like to think that possessing some basic form of self-control is admirable, particularly in respect to our base impulses, but for as much as we’d like to self-righteously pat ourselves on the back for “resisting temptation“, the fact remains that yes, we are still motivated by those impulses. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to identify with the “sex driven man” label – the guys who lets his dick do his thinking – and certainly not as his recognized source of esteem, however, the physical/biological forces that motivates his libido is still very real.

Flowery prose doesn’t make a personal anecdote a universal truth. It’s interesting that a virtuous Purple Pill guy will make a point of personal esteem being a paramount virtue in one paragraph, yet still equate bedding a “woman of value” with a sense of victory. He did it the right way, right?

It’s interesting to me when I hear appeals to righteousness in the form of deriding the experiences of men (sexual or otherwise) by characterizing them as worth less because they supposedly compensate for some inner failing or need for ‘personal validation‘. One canard is the presumption that a guy with many lovers in his past must somehow be banging his harem to impress himself or others. I’ve honestly never known a guy who didn’t enjoy sex for the sake of sex. Considering the difficulty most men encounter in just banging the handful women they do in the average lifespan, I doubt the few men who actually can enjoy a variety of women do so simply to acquire more accolades from other men for having done so. And that’s the utilitarian aspect of moralistic men shaming other men – it’s not that men with more access to sex need to validate themselves, it’s that moralistic men with less access to sex believe that those men would even care about their opinions enough to be validated.

What’s ironic to me is that the same self-righteous appeal to adhere to convenient convictions is actually done for much of the same reasons they accuse other men of – to garner respect and affirmation for doing so.

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should‘ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to have sex just for the sake of having sex – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning.

It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.

Social Matching Theory

How to spot a rich guy

We laugh our asses off at this joke, but why is it funny? It is funny because human beings, like many other higher order animals, have the innate ability to make cognitive comparisons on a subconscious level. The reason it’s humorous is because we see an imbalance in a system and make deductive conclusions with regard to individual conditions. This is the basis of the Social Matching Theory.

Social Matching Theory, in essence, is defined as follows: All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themself.

Just as an aside, this is a well recognized social psychology theory, not something manufactured by Game theorists. However, in a nutshell it outlines the sexual marketplace dynamic, before adding variables like Game, status, provisioning, etc.

This is a naturally occuring commonality among many specific aculturations and societies. The trick to this theory is of course that ‘All Things’ are rarely equal. However, my point to this isn’t to naively assume that attraction and sexual pairing happen in a vacuum – far from it. It is to illustrate an underlying psycho-biological principle that operates beneath our consciousness that prompts other psychological schemas from an intimately personal (micro) level to the social psychology of an entire (macro) culture.

As I’ve posted in several forum threads with regard to “Why Women Cheat” or why men are so compelled toward sex with archetypically attractive women, the root of this desire is a psychologically evolved  opportunism that is founded on our ability to make and assess these natural comparissons in order to better facilitate our own survival and the survival of our offspring. It has served our species so well over  millennia that this natural comparisson making capacity has become an autonomous and subconscious aspect of experiencing our environment. We understand that eating a large apple is preferable, from a survial standpoint, to eating the small one. We have a tendency to want what our biologies compel us towards and develop idealizations based on what we think would best satisfy these ends.

As I stated, I understand that attraction and intersexual relations do not happen in a vacumm and there are many (generally predictable) variables that influence this, but Social Matching Theory isn’t about the process of attraction or pairing so much as the motivations for selection. I’m often asked about the importance placed on physical appearance, prowess, etc. bearing influence on attraction, and I can speak from my own experience saying yes, it absolutely does. A fat guy is simply not going to attract a Fitness America competitor without some very unique circumstances influencing this attraction. Neither would I support this attraction being based in a qualitative, genuine physical desire for the fat male. It is an imbalance in a system.

All things being equal; socio-economic, intellectual, emotional levels etc. you will have a tendency to attract and be attracted to people of similar physical presence as yourself. This is the root of the psychological schema many men and women apply when they follow the “He/She’s out of my leauge” mentality. They are manifesting this subconscious understanding that the prospects of another person of a more idealized physical presence being attracted to them or pairing with them would be an unlikely match. They self-perceive this imbalance and thus limit themselves to opportunities that have a better likelihood of success in gratifying their need – in this case sex.

Look at the ‘Rich Guy’ picture again. The woman in this imbalance we might presume is a ‘Golddigger’. This too is inspired by an innate understanding of the Social Matching Theory. Why else would an (arguably) attractive woman in comparatively good shape, wearing a thong (indicating sexual availability), be with a morbidly obese male if he didn’t posess some other redeeming variable to inspire the match? We see a picture and laugh, and women make the internalized rationalization that she’s not genuinely interested in the guy, but is ‘in love’ with his provisioning means. Superficial? Perhaps, but it still illustrates this comparative instinct we have, particularly when we know nothing about individual circumstance. The possibility does exists that this woman genuinely loves the guy, or is attracted to him, but this isn’t our first impression. In fact it takes significant, trained, mental effort to consider the possibility because the Social Matching comparison IS our natural default.

Finally, I should add that the Social Matching Theory is also one of the primary foundations upon which AFCism and ONEitis is based. This natural fear of rejection associated with both of these schema stem from a subconscious understanding of this theory. ONEitis in particular can be traced back to this self-perception of imbalance leading to the “I’ll never find a better woman/man than this person” mentality in so much as it represents a limitation of opportunism. In other words, it becomes preferable for a person to stay and accomodate an otherwise intolerable relationship if that person has internalized the understanding that their relationship represents an imbalance in this Social Matching. Abuse endured from the more idealized mate becomes preferable to rejection from anonymous, less idealized sources of intimacy.

At this point you may be wondering what brought this post to the surface. I recently got into a debate with a self-described feminist who entirely rejected notion that a sexual marketplace should even exist in contemporary human society. It wasn’t that she was denying the underlying dynamic of the sexual marketplace, but rather that it was an antiquated and dehumanizing influence in the human condition. Up until this conversation, I’d always taken the idea of a sexual marketplace and sexual market value as applied to individuals as a given. The SMP was a recognized universal framework in which we maneuver – some successfully, others with difficulty. The rejection of this idea, or the desire to alter it sociological, seems absurd to me, even though I would agree that it is a brutal game we play. My counterargument with her was that the SMP is actually more representative of our humanity, in that it’s healthier to accept that the way we evolved as a successful species was due to the harsh reality of the SMP. She wouldn’t hear it.

The Ballad of Clark Kent

When Lois Lane met Superman he was fighting crime, could bend steel in his bare hands, stop locomotives, leap over tall buildings in a single bound; shit, Superman could fly! Then one day he met Lois and swept her away, rocked her world in the sack and fell in love with her because thats what Super-Men do. After a year of this whirlwind Lois starts to feel her relationship with Superman was lacking something, “Why does he have to always be out there fighting crime, huh? Why does he always have to prove he’s so Macho? Does it threaten his Ego? He really needs to get in touch with his feminine side. What about MY needs and why can’t he just grow up and get a real job? I’m not getting any younger you know, he’s got some responsibilities to live up to. When am I gonna see a ring?”

So eventually this wears down on Superman and he submits to Lois’ requests (demands?). After all he ‘should’ really ‘grow up’ anyway, right? It’s the right thing to do. So Superman changes his name to Clark Kent (Super-‘MAN’ was so male self-aggrandizing anyway) and lands a job as a reporter at a great metropolitan newspaper. Clark begins wearing glasses – even though he can see X-Rays, and shoot lasers out his eyes, he wears them because Lois says it makes him look distinguished, intellectual and SHE likes them.

Time goes on and Lois and Clark marry. 5 years into the marriage Lois gets bored. Same old, same old. Clark is so mundane and unassuming. She longs for the days he would fly and do that funny steel bending trick he used to do when they were dating. He hasn’t done any of that for so long; not because he can’t, but because he’s afraid she’ll get upset with him and not put out that evening if he gets ‘cocky’ with her. In fact she’s not putting out even half as much as she used to these days. Clark just doesn’t arouse her as much as he once did and she just can’t seem to put her finger on the reason for it.

Then one night Lois ran into a wealthy fellow named Bruce Wayne at a charity mixer. Bruce was dark, mysterious and in great shape! He couldn’t fly, but he made up for that in so many other ways. He fought crime! He wore a mask and spoke in short, purposeful sentences, never mincing words. He didn’t wear glasses (that was so retro!) and he came and went at the time of his pleasing, not hers. He sent tingles down Lois’ spine (and other places that hadn’t felt tingles in a while) when he began seeing her.

The weeks went by until, after a 60 hour work week at the Daily Planet (swanky apartments don’t rent cheap), Clark made his way home on the subway (since flying had been out of the question for a while now) and picked up a dozen roses to surprise Lois with (he thought she tended to put out when he showed his ‘feminine side’) when he got back to the apartment. However it was poor Clark who got the surprise upon discovering Bruce Wayne bending Lois over the kitchen table when he opened the door. Bruce propmptly toweled off while Clark, slack-jawed with horror, watched speechless.

“How could you? After all we’ve meant to each other!” Clark began to cry as Bruce excused himself from the now estranged couple. Clark was used to crying a lot now to show his sensitivity.

“What could you have possibly seen in a guy like that?!” He shrieked like a school girl.

“Well,..I couldn’t help myself” Lois said indifferently, “Batman is a Superhero.”

And that’s the danger, where do you end and she begins? The reason I wrote Identity Crisis (almost 5 years ago) was exactly this: Men tend to adopt a position of constantly qualifying for a woman’s intimacy, and understandably women reinforce this because to puts them in control of the frame and aids in their sexual selection. Most guys willingly make fundamental changes if they believe it will increase their chances of qualifying for a woman’s intimacy. Are they genuinely inspired, or are they deductively reasoned changes meant to qualify for her acceptance – A+B= sex?

The real insidious part is that the more deprived a man is of that intimacy, the more he’s likely to convince himself that the change is genuine. Whenever I hear a guy or a woman say “we’re working on our relationship” or “relationships are a lot of work and compromise”, it translates to the man changing or compromising to better fit the woman’s ideal. He’s being ‘fixed’, he’s broken and he needs to change. It often gets to the point where the guy will believe that there IS something genuinely wrong with him – it’s her reality he must conform to because the feminine reality is the ‘proper’ reality. The rude awakening comes when she discovers that the man she’s fixed her husband to be is the polar opposite of the Man she was attracted to at the start.

Wait for it?

Iron Rule of Tomassi #3

Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait.

When a woman makes you wait for sex you are not her highest priority. Sexuality is spontaneous chemical reaction between two parties, not a process of negotiation. It’s sex first, then relationship, not the other way around. A woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. She will fly across the country, crawl under barbwire, climb in through your second story bedroom window, fuck the shit out of you and wait patiently inside your closet if your wife comes home early from work – women who want to fuck will find a way to fuck. The girl who tells you she needs to be comfortable and wants a relationship first is the same girl who fucked the hot guy in the foam cannon party in Cancun on spring break just half an hour after meeting him.

If a girl is that into you she’ll have sex with you regardless of ASD or having her friends in the room videotaping it at a frat party. All women can be sluts, you just have to be the right guy to bring it out in them, and this happens before you go back to her place. If you have to plead your case cuddling and spooning on the bed or getting the occasional peck on the cheek at the end of the night, you need to go back to square one and start fresh.

I’m probably going to ruffle a few PUA feathers here, but I’ve never been a proponent of breaking down LMR (last minute resistance) with a woman. Maybe it’s a result of experiences in my rock star 20’s, but at some point I came to the conclusion that sex with a woman who’s turned on by me is always a far better than one where I had to sell her on the idea of sex with me before the act. Now don’t take this to the binary extreme and assume I mean the only good sex you’ll ever have is a first night lay (FNL) with some tart who can’t keep her legs closed. What I mean is that if you’re still trying to figure out what the magic words are to convince some girl that she ought fuck you after 3 dates – or longer – you’re in desire negotiation hearings counselor. You are wasting your time and limiting your opportunity with better prospective women in waiting out a woman who would defer less than 100% of her real desire to have sex with you. The sex will NEVER be worth the wait. A prostitute would be a better alternative.

Genuine desire cannot be negotiated. Once you get past a certain point in the waiting game, what once had the chance to be an organic, sexual desire becomes mitigated negotiation of a physical act. Just the fact that you’re having to make a case for yourself (even covertly) is evidence that there are other factors inhibiting her capacity to be sexual with you. As I stated, barring a physical inability, this is almost always because of an unmentioned agenda on her part. It may be due to a concurrent boyfriend, it may be a natural internal caution, it may be that your process is telegraphing ‘beta’ to her, or it may be that she’s filibustering you while waiting to see if another, more preferable guy pans out for her, however, none of these are insurmountable if she has a genuine desire to bang you. Many a cheated on boyfriend knows this is true. In any circumstance, sex with you is not an urgency for her. If  she’s perceiving your value as as high as it should be, she wont hesitate longer than a few dates to become sexual – and she certainly wont tell you she’s making you wait. Hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock.

One of the more frustrating situations I often encounter comes from guys who’ve been OVERTLY told that they’re being made to wait for sex until some circumstance or criteria is met for the woman. The standard filibuster (or loss-leader as the case may be) usually comes with the reasoning that she “needs to feel comfortable” before she has sex with a guy. Even more distressing is the guy who was getting laid, only to be told the same thing by an existing girlfriend. If you find yourself in either of these situation there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

First and foremost, sex, by it’s nature is uncomfortable. Sex that is motivated by mutual, genuine desire is a tense affair, fueled by testosterone, anxiety and urgency. When two people get together for a first dance ( a precursor to copulation), it’s rarely if ever an intimate slow dance. It’s salsa, it’s grinding, it’s pumping, it’s heat and it’s sweat. What it’s not is comforting and familiar. It’s not a nice warm bathrobe fresh out of the dryer. Don’t take this the wrong way, but sex is threatening. It needs to be, and you need to be considered a sexualized player in her personal sphere. Overtly agreeing to wait for her to become sexual is anti-seductive. It confirms for her that you aren’t a sexualized player to her; an Alpha wouldn’t wait for sex and she knows this. Worse still, it devalues her SMV as being worth less than of your utmost urgency.

Secondly, always remember why women resort to OVERT communications (the language of men) – so there is no, or less, margin that her message will be misunderstood. If a woman, point blank says, “I’m not having sex with you until X,Y, and Z happens”, what is her MEDIUM telling you? That there is a precondition that’s more important to her than fucking you with genuine, uncontrollable passion. You want her to be so into you that she’s willing to break the rules. The ideal situation is for her genuine passion to be so uncontrollable for you that she’d renounce her religion and throw her convictions to the wind to be with you. That might seem a bit dramatic, but you get the idea. The good news now is that she’s being overt, which means she’s exhausted her reserves to be covert and, assuming you’re not so desperate as to delude yourself, you can NEXT her and move on.

Rapport ≠ Comfort

A lot of “waiters” find all that a tough road to hoe. They want to stick it out and see if things “might develop”, and NEXTing their ‘waiting girl’ seems a lot like throwing the baby out with the bath water after all the time they’ve invested in building what they think is rapport. Usually this is due to the guy not spinning (enough) other plates that would bear more fruit. However, keep this in mind; waiting for sex isn’t building rapport. There’s a lot of confusion about rapport, most of which is due to well meaning PUAs conflating rapport with comfort. It’s a pretty esoteric term, but rapport is a connection; it’s an implied trust between two acting agents who previously had never met or only have limited knowledge of each other. You can have rapport with an animal – that’s the connection, it’s instinctual.

Comfort comes from familiarity and predictability; all decidedly anti-seductive influences. And while comfort has it’s own merits in interpersonal relationships, it is not the basis for genuine, passionate sexual desire. For people (myself included) involved in a marriage or LTR, it’s serves our long-term best interest to convince ourselves that sex is better when your comfortable with your partner, however, the reality of it sings a different tune. Here’s an easy illustration: As reported by both men and women alike, which of these circumstances provokes the most intense, memorable sexual experiences ? When a couple plans and arranges a romantic “date night” to ‘keep it fresh’ and reconnect? Or is it the ‘make-up sex’ after a horrible breakup, or narrowly averted breakup, where long dormant competition anxiety is brought back into being a very real possibility again? If you said the breakup, you’re correct! One scenario is comfortable, the other uncomfortable. One has the element of predictable certainty, the other is chaotic and uncertain, however in both situations there is definitely a working mutually connective rapport operating.