Beta Bucks

A Teachable Moment

Teachable

While I’d had another post on deck for today I simply couldn’t let Divided Line’s most recent comment go unanswered. I was going to riff on his comment in that thread, but it occurred to me that his concerns would be educational for many new readers and what I tell him here might give even my regulars something new to think about.

This is the part I can’t get. I can look back and see how my beta behaviors made it impossible for my ex to respect and love me. I see those behaviors for what they are, but what I can’t do is internalize a competing value system, or a competing idealism, one which would allow me to judge myself in the way you’re judging yourself here. I still get stuck on “but she *should* have loved me for those behaviors,” even if I understand on an intellectual level why she didn’t. Even if I game myself into believing I feel differently about it, I know that on some level, I’m still going to be hoping that every girl I get involved with will prove to be capable of fulfilling that blue pill idealism. I fully expect to just fall back into oneitis and needy supplicating behaviors whenever I meet somebody. they just creep up on you without you even realizing it.

When I go into the intricacies of men’s innate sense of idealism this is what I mean. In a Blue Pill context there will always be an expectation of some possibility of an ideal state with a woman. The problem here isn’t men’s idealism, but rather the conditioning of it to expect an idealized Blue Pill outcome.

From a strictly deductive standpoint DL’s ex should have loved him for the idealized, pro-social, pro-family, pro-parental investment, pro-providership and pro-egalitarian that were some of the most integral parts of his life’s Blue Pill conditioning.

The reality is that he’d been convinced of a Blue Pill social order founded on an Old Set of Books.

Let’s get real about it. It’s not like women have good reason to behave the way they do. Whatever evo-psych explanation we can come with, it doesn’t provide them with an excuse. They’re not stewards of the gene pool, there is no greater good that is served by hypergamy. In a modern context it’s a liability, not an asset. At the limbic level they’re screening for traits that would have been advantageous 20,000 years ago, not in a modern industrial or post industrial society. Should I try to convince myself otherwise and judge myself according to my evolutionary fitness or something? It seems absurd.

When I wrote Our Sisters’ Keeper I delved into the question of whether it could be expected of women to take responsibility for their own decisions, moral or otherwise. It generally comes down to a question of the seeming determinism that Hypergamy represents, and the deductive male-logic that, idealistically, expects women to take personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

In this respect Hypergamy doesn’t provide women with an excuse for the consequences, but the question of personal responsibility still doesn’t change the the underlying motivators, incentives and influences that Hypergamy exerts over women. The devil biology made me do it is the same alibi for Hypergamy as it is for men’s Selfish Gene.

While the software may change with the environment, our firmware and our hardware are still very much based in the evolution that benefitted our prehistoric predecessors. What measure you personally choose to judge yourself by is up to you, but again, the hardware and the firmware doesn’t change.

Under our modern social environment women have an unprecedented, virtually unilateral, stewardship of the gene pool. So much so in fact that women’s sexual selection strategy, Hypergamy and feminine social primacy are enforced by law and ensaturated into our social fabric. Whether this is for ‘the greater good’ or not all depends on who’s agenda defines what ‘good’ is.

For a very long time men had at least some measure of being able to direct the course that the gene pool was going. Men’s influence today is only as potent as women’s legislated sexual selection will allow them.

Women aren’t dogs, they’re human beings. They’re perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – anybody who can think at an abstract level should be. Women are unaware of themselves because the bar is so low for them, because they are profoundly privileged and everything is handed to them on a silver platter, not because they’re incapable of treating men in a way that would have made the blue pill equality ideal possible.

It really just boils down to a profound form of inferiority, their unwillingness to empathize or give a shit. They don’t care because they don’t have to. It’s a fundamental hollowness at the core of their character.

You’re presuming an egalitarian inspired similarity between men and women, and once again I’ll refer you to what I proposed above; you’re expecting software to override firmware and hardware. There are simply evidential and provable physical and cognitive differences between men and women.

I believe you’re correct – women are perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – however, this is not women’s firmware directive. It is not their initial mental point of origin.

True, women can learn to be empathetic, learn to be idealistic, and yes, learn to sublimate their innate solipsism, but their capacity to learn to override their firmware doesn’t erase the root conditions they must learn and practice to override.

And yes, we’ve reached a (western) social order that prioritizes and privileges women by setting the bar very low for them, thus making this ‘learning’, or even the desire to learn, to override their neural firmware not just a challenge, but entirely unexpected of them.

The capacity fro women to realize that Blue Pill ideal is there, but what this does is pit women’s innate dispositions against what men think would be an ideal state for both sexes, and then holds women personally responsible for not ‘learning’ to override their firmware.

Dalrock has a series of posts about feminism that blames men for the failures of feminism. Feminism would work if not for uncooperative men; the same is true for Blue Pill men – Blue Pill idealism would work if not for uncooperative women. Both blame the failures of their goal-states on the other sex’s personal / social character flaws without consideration of the hindbrain, firmware that always rebels against those states.

How do you just accept that and blame yourself for being beta? I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m saying I want to be able to do the same thing. I just can’t access that mindset.

What was so terrible about the blue pill equalism really? We all regard it with contempt, but we’re just being pragmatic, since it’s unworkable, a cruel lie we were all fed from birth. I get all that. But in and of itself, what was so terrible about it? Had it been possible – which it is not – would the idea been worthy of such contempt? I can’t convince myself of that.

Again, men’s idealistic root note wants some kind of cooperative Blue Pill harmony to exist in a mutually shared, mutually negotiated and mutually agreed upon state between men and women. Yes, Blue Pill equalism seems very pragmatic, that’s what makes subscribing to it so seductive, and potentially so damaging for idealistic men. The Feminine Imperative figured that out a hundred thousand years ago – men are the True Romantics, and that’s been their thumbscrew for millennia.

All I did was treat my ex the way I wanted to be treated. In fact, that’s all I did in any of my relationships. And not even because I was trying to be Ghandi or live according to some conscious code, but simply because that is what came naturally. That’s what made the relationship appealing and worth investing in in the first place. Feeling that way about her cultivated a selfless aspect of myself, one that I actually *like.* I miss feeling that way. I loved her because she inspired me to treat her the way I did, or to want to treat her that way. I can look back on it and see it as beta, and if I regard women like robots running an evo-psych script, I can see that it would have been impossible for her to love and respect me, I guess. So is that what it boils down to? Thinking about women as if they are children or dumb dogs and accepting it?

There is great power in the Golden Rule. I don’t mean that from the sentimentalist, “do unto others” perspective, but rather how available you make yourself to exploitation and manipulation when adopting that mindset. There is no position more vulnerable than an expectation of equal treatment from another for like treatment from yourself. It presumes a mutually shared acknowledgement of how that other would perceive treating you as they would themselves.

The fundamental differences between men and women (idealistic vs. opportunistic love concepts) virtually ensure that a conflict will occur when you pair this expectation of equal treatment and equal appreciation with the cardinal rule of sexual strategies:

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

Men’s predilection for idealism make them the logical candidates for this compromise or abandonment of their own imperatives, however, in doing so they fall prey to self-sacrifice in the hopes of mutual appreciation, earning relational equity and all while idealistically affirming for themselves their own righteousness of that sacrifice. The more you suffer the more it shows you really care, right?

The problem then becomes one of women fundamentally lacking the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate her own reality.

And thus we come back to the software vs. firmware conflict again.

This is what I mean when I say that women are “awful.” I don’t even have words for it. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get past the contempt or sense of being wronged. You can tell yourself “stop being beta, bro. Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better, etc.,” or anything you like, it doesn’t change the reality or the fact that I recognize the reality. It’s like trying to convince yourself that 2+2=5.

My idealism was co-opted to serve the FI, but what is competing idealism? Stoicism and being a badass who can take it? Beating myself up for being beta and striving for what? It’s like I’m supposed to improve myself, but I can’t see anything that I would actually regard as an improvement, just traits that would appeal to women’s hunter gatherer libido.

The first step is giving up hope on the Blue Pill ideals you’ve been conditioned to believe are desirable, much less achievable. You need to accept that Blue Pill idealism will never be achieved in a Red Pill paradigm.

The next step is to accept that you can create new hope and a new ideal founded on Red Pill awareness rather than succumbing to a nihilistic despair that’s based on the hope for Blue Pill falsehoods.

Men’s idealistic nature can either be his greatest vulnerability or the source of his greatest strength and drive. It’s the context and conditioning of that idealism that makes it a danger or a boon. Stoicism is a practical measuring of that idealism based on self-knowledge and a truthful understanding of the state in which a man lives (Red Pill awareness).

Why are we so much more idealistic and imaginative in our youth? Because we have very little life experience with which to measure that idealism against. This is exactly why the Feminine Imperative must condition men from an early age – to direct that idealism to its own Blue Pill ends before a man learns enough about his reality to reject the imperatives’ ends in favor of his own.

And that is why undiluted, uncompromised Red Pill awareness being widely available is a threat to the Feminine Imperative.

Women ‘Improving’ Men

Improving_men

“I’d honestly love if the manosphere would actually focus on helping men in relationships and self-improvement.”

I had this comment offered in a recent thread. It’s a common gripe from women who believe they’re in some way Red Pill and want to divert their new acceptance of Red Pill truths to serve the same tired ends of the Feminine Imperative. The operative, of course, is always whose definition do we base the measure of ‘improvement’ on? For most women the term ‘improvement’ always aligns with whatever best serves a female sexual strategy – because from a feminine-solipsistic perspective whatever serve women should necessarily serve men.

As with most uneducated women’s concerns I’d already addressed this long ago in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

A lot gets made of the Dark Triad or the Dark Side of Game where a skillful player can sadistically use his newly learned red-pill super powers for evil instead of for the greater good of mankind. Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, Hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” –an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form  (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

In her trolling ignorance she fails to understand that she and many “Red Pill Women” before her all want a better Beta. They want a Beta with a side of Alpha – in essence a better slave; one that’s just ignorant enough of female nature and the consequences that ignorance represents, but one who also Just Gets It and satisfies their need for amused mastery, masculine dominance (when it’s convenient and affirming), and ‘just gets women’ so well he never needs to be made aware of women’s nature.

The difference in this case is that the ostensibly “Red Pill” woman now looks to the manosphere’s best and brightest to provide them with such men via some distortion of Red Pill social proof. Not only that, but, in their entitled hubris, they are all too willing to pander to exactly the male idealistic nature I described in the last post. Their appeal is to Red Pill aware men’s sense of duty, honor or integrity in mentoring other Blue Pill Beta men (the ones they hope to improve) in an acceptable Purple Pill fashion – just enough ‘self-improvement’ to serve women’s sexual strategies, but just enough watered down ignorance of women’s feral nature to serve as what they believe would be their ‘right guy’.

You’re just not a “Man” if you don’t promote a feminine reviewed and approved version of the Red Pill to other men.

Many of the wives and women that participate in formerly Red Pill married forums follow this invasion into that previously male space and then turn it to similar ends.

The worst part of this bastardization of course is that they only need to encourage the parts of Red Pill awareness that serves their ends. They feel entitled to Red Pill men educating the plugged-in in how to become the ‘improved’ men they believe they deserve. Thus it’s an easy bandwagon to get aboard so long as their redefinition of what actually is Red Pill jives with what they feel is their due in men.

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

The ideal situation for Red Pill women here is to have a group of respected Red Pill men educate the next generation of plugged-in men to provide the attractive aspects of this awareness while stifling the uncomfortable threatening aspects that might require women to actually prove their own worthiness of those men.

Sexy Psychopaths

My good friend Dagonet had a bit of a misguided hope in this tweet today:

https://twitter.com/TheQuestForever/status/686981982014668800

Once again, male idealism gets the better of one of our own. I wish it were in fact the case that women’s innate, evolved Hypergamy could be overridden so they would find men’s higher-order virtues and ideals to be arousing and attractive. This, however, is not the reality we are dealing with.

Reader Gregg brought up an interesting, and as you’ll read timely, comment about why Dag is in error:

Men think that women want “confident, strong” men. Why do we think that way? Because women told us so, or we have read it in some “wise” 500 pages psychology book. Our old provider needs to believe this, so that he has some “noble” manly goal he can pursue. Of course it is very beneficial for women to have STRONG, CONFIDENT slave that protect her. Put aside our male ego, our goals and aspirationas when we want to understand women. They know that our male ego will side with them, will help them in their game. Unhampered by ego, woman can easily enslave man like that.

Male ego tells us – we have to be strong and confident..cos it is “manly”, it’s “respectable” and women SHOULD respect that! So it is a given that they respect that! While in reality…nothing is further from the truth. She wants strong and confident men as her protecting slaves but she tingles and craves for emotionally unstable man. Like attracts the like. Is Tyler Durden a strong, confident man? He is unstable, knows weak spot of women, he can live in a moment, is more unpredictable than woman. He is emotionally intelligent, more so than typical women. He behaves more like a woman than like a man. Therefore he HAS POWER over them! Is Mystery a strong, confident man? Anyone who’s read “the Game” knows how he was driven mad by one, single chick.

What are the traits of men, women are madly enslaved to? Is it confidence, is it strenght? NOPE. It is unpredictability, unstability, emotional COLDNESS, psychopathy! In this case he is more unstable than her, so SHE is trying to fix the relationship, she is trying to give them some rules, some stability, some “security”. She must do all the work, otherwise there is nothing. She fills the void. He who cares less…..

We still do not want to confess hard, dark truth about women and about ourselves. We still talk about this burden of performance, confidence, strenght, emh..POSITIVE masculinity. We still discuss with women, try to persuade them with logic, try to impress them with our “performance”, knowledge, experience. So can our man with innate need to perform rule/care less about, the realtionship? How? He is enslaved by his very need to perform which performance will be judged by women!

Ultimate lotharios are neither strong, nor confident. They behave more like women than like men. They do not feel the need to perform, to protect, to build, to be confident, to answer, to be responsible. Take Charlie Sheen as an example. This man is emotionally damaged, unstable, irresponsible, weak. Majority of women are much more stable than him. Yet he has fucked more then 5000 of them. You think it is due to his fame? I am sure each of us know weak men, psychopatic men with no fame, yet with harems of women.

It is still the same…discussion of slaves how to be worthy of women. Maybe mentality, maybe genetics, do not know which one more. And new generations of lambs arises…primed for slaughter as the last. We are loosing my friends, big time.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll drop a two of the responding comments before I do. YaReally provides some counterbalance here:

YaReally:

And here we come to two different results because Gregg isn’t entirely inaccurate that a lot of fucked up damaged dudes are catnip for girls (and not just damaged fucked up girls, hi madonna/whore complex). Whenever we get two different results we have to drill deeper to find the commonality.

It comes down to the guy having an emotional impact on the girl. It doesn’t matter whether you make her feel good or bad emotions (ideally you make her feel both at various times), all that matters is that you have emotional impact on her. The damaged basketcase hot & cold guy who treats her like a princess one minute then tells her to fuck off because his life is falling apart the next is giving her a full range of emotions. So is the super confident guy with his shit together who’s running push/pull on her.

The biggest thing no one will talk about because it sets guys on a bad path is how fucked up and falling apart your life can really BE and you can still attract and keep hot poon around. Ideally we want men to go the TRP route where they build their careers and hit the gym and don’t booze it up etc. But the reality is you can be a fucking MESS and still get hot girls, as long as you have emotional impact on them. It’s why chicks will whore themselves out for ugly pimps and go back to abusive relationships, and on the flip side it’s why they’ll leave dependable boring guys who give them an emotional flatline day to day.

Personally I think that in the old days a chick had a baby at an early enough age to fulfill her need for crazy emotional impact drama to keep her happy and not craving it, but these days since they don’t want kids till they’re 30+ they fill that voice with the cock carousel, cats, Eat Pray Love adventures, hundreds of hours of Netflix (shows/movies full of emotional ups and downs), fucking guys like me, etc.

And finally I’m going to paraphrase SJF’s comment here for another perspective:

What makes you think “lothario” is the kind of man some of us want to be? (although I’m not sure if you are advocating being one or not.) A lothario is an unscrupulous seducer of woman. Unscrupulous means having or showing no moral principles; not honest or fair.

Just because a man has an innate desire (not need) to perform, doesn’t mean he is enslaved. The Rational Male certainly confesses/explicates/describes truths about women and ourselves. Some of us aren’t shackled by knowledge of the burden of performance and having confidence, strength and positive masculinity. Some of us have found that not to be a burden. To be a low hurdle to real power. With low downside and potentially huge upside.

As an aside here I would also point out that Gregg’s focus on men’s Burden of Performance is entirely on serving women’s interests rather than a natural order of male idealism. This is a common mindset among Blue Pill, plugged-in men, they can’t imagine an existence where their finding of an idealistically male purpose or passion in life is set in a context that doesn’t relate to how women perceive it. It’s a logical trap that most MGTOWs find themselves in – they want a world where their performance burden is removed with regard to women, but still refuse to accept that this burden exists independent from women’s perceptions.

In other words they can’t exit the Game, the fundamental rules persist; whether they choose to play or not the Game proceeds in spite of their involvement.

That being what it is, I’ve set these two concepts together here for a reason. First we have a set of Red Pill women seemingly desirous of Red Pill aware men that serve their imperatives within their acceptable frame of what “Red Pill” ought to be for them. Second we have a parallel between Gregg’s take and YaReally’s take on what women are honestly seeking in an ‘improved’ man – a more perfected slave; one who can embody the worst contradiction to positive masculinity (from Gregg’s perspective), and one who despite his performance burden is really only required to provide emotional polarity to generate tingles and genuine desire.

Toxic Masculinity

Liz’s comment from the last thread (emphasis mine):

Masculinity is not bad, it is good.

The poster responded that toxic masculinity refers to behaviors that cause distress (telling a son not to cry and so forth). I didn’t go further into the argument with her, we didn’t see eye to eye enough to really engage anyway […]

Juxtapose this with the feminine way of going things. He is told everyone has his or her own unique specialness and he just needs some encouragement.

Sometimes I think our idea of “bad” and “good” are skewed, and that’s just feminist poisoning.

Toxic masculinity is yet another narrative buzz word the Feminine Imperative has made endemic in the same way it repeats the “rape culture’ meme. By adding the term ‘culture’ to any article you find offensive you make that article an endemic phenomenon – Rape ‘culture’, Bro ‘culture’, a ‘Culture’ of Corruption, etc.

‘Toxic’ Masculinity is another such exercise. It presumes a universally agreed upon definition of what exactly is toxic – very similar again to the good and bad uses of Game in the Dark Art / Dark Triad associations I made at the beginning of this article. And in Liz’s exchange that definition is whatever male-specific behaviors women find “distressing”.

However as we see in Gregg’s example of ideal masculinity, those distressing attributes are in fact the most arousing attributes of men. I’ve used this example before, but the most pussy I’ve ever enjoyed, the most freely given and most genuinely sought after of myself by women was when I was virtually penniless. I didn’t need to signal parental investment and provisioning cues to get women’s sexual interest, I just need to fit the bill for what YaReally defines as the “fun guy” – or as Sheryl Sandberg agrees, “the bad boy, the crazy boy, the cool boy, and the commitment-phobic boy in order to prompt a woman’s genuinely inspired sexual best.

Women & Altruism:

Altruism plays a role in mate choice, particularly in women’s preferences and in long-term (LT) relationships. The current study analyzed how these preferences interacted with another important mate choice variable, physical attractiveness. Here, female participants were presented with photographs of men of varying levels of physical attractiveness, alongside descriptions of them behaving either altruistically or not in different scenarios. The results showed women preferred altruistic men, particularly in LT relationships and that this interacted with physical attractiveness such that being both attractive and altruistic made a man more desirable than just the sum of the two desirable parts. Also, being altruistic made low attractive men more desirable but only for LT relationships. Finally, men who were just altruistic were rated more desirable than men who were just attractive, especially for LT relationships. Overall, these findings are discussed in terms of the role of altruism in mate choice, particularly in LT relationships and directions of future research.

There’s subsection of Red Pill thought (Athol Kay in particular) that believes that Beta attributes align with the effects oxytocin has on men and women. I’m adding this here to provide a balance to that misguided idea:

It has been suggested that the degree of compassion—the feeling of warmth, understanding and kindness that motivates the desire to help others, is modulated by observers’ views regarding the target’s vulnerability and suffering. This study tested the hypothesis that as compassion developed to protect vulnerable kinships, hormones such as oxytocin, which have been suggested as playing a key role in ‘tend-and-befriend’ behaviors among women, will enhance compassion toward women but not toward men. Thirty subjects participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study. Following administration of oxytocin/placebo, participants listened to recordings of different female/male protagonists describing distressful emotional conflicts and were then asked to provide compassionate advice to the protagonist. The participants’ responses were coded according to various components of compassion by two clinical psychologists who were blind to the treatment. The results showed that in women and men participants oxytocin enhanced compassion toward women, but did not affect compassion toward men. These findings indicate that the oxytocinergic system differentially mediates compassion toward women and toward men, emphasizing an evolutionary perspective that views compassion as a caregiving behavior designed to help vulnerable individuals.

Those example might seem a bit abstract, but I’m putting them up here to make the point that women’s sexual selection filtering is a two-fold prospect rooted in the dual nature of women’s Hypergamy. What best serves Alpha Fucks is contradicted by Beta Bucks.

Thus we have notions like the attributes that make up “Toxic Masculinity” being arbitrarily whatever aspects of the male nature women find themselves most lacking in men. And by way of that we get a definition that fluctuates according to the Feminine Imperative’s needs. Because of this women, Red Pill or otherwise will never be honest arbiter of ‘improving’ men’s states of masculinity.

Ladders & Snakes

Br-gYXWIgAA6Xec

All men are created equal. What you do from there is up to you.

Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but always take the credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you an aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

When I was first introduced the the 48 Laws of Power the seventh was the one I had the most trouble accepting. I should really say I have trouble ’employing’ this law, because I’ve spent my entire life as an artist in some capacity and I’m very particular about the integrity and character of what it is I create. Obviously we have rights management and plagiarism laws to ensure against the more blatant ‘stealing’ of ideas, but a lot of what accounts for taking unwarranted credit occurs in more nuanced social situations.

It’s usually in these social circumstances that the average person makes use of Law 7. It’s hardly a law at all considering how naturally humans will use it. In a purely ethical sense it’s kind of a no-brainer; don’t assume credit that you’re undeserving of, but bending the perceptions of what we base our estimates on is where the real art comes in.

On a personal level, my investment in what I create and how that creation is received is what matters most to me. I understand the want for a quick reward, but I’m more concerned with a cheap imitation of what I’ve created debasing the quality and effort it took to create it. For instance, I’ve spent the better part of my career creating products and brands for people with a lot of money who really had no real investment in what it was I was making for them. All they wanted was a “product” that they could promote and sell.

Naturally the quality and integrity of that brand or product had to be something they could get behind (the horse must at least look like it could win), but not be held too personally accountable should that product end up being less than ideal. That’s a nice way of saying most salesmen I’ve known love a widget if it’s something that sells, but they’re never really on the hook for if it sucks – that accountability rests with the creator.

While we were dining after the Man in Demand conference we had discussion about exactly this dynamic. I make an effort to keep my business endeavors as businesslike as possible, but there are brands and things I create that I will personally invest myself into. I have to be very careful of this because it took me a long time (and more than a few failed attempts) to develop the discernment to know what’s worth putting myself into. However, it is especially satisfying for me to travel to another country and see one of my bottles in the duty-free stores at the airport and then be at a bar & grill somewhere on vacation and see one on the backbar.

I explained to the guys that what I create (and own) are not “products” to me. I dislike that term in that sense. I understand the utility of that word to salesmen; product is an easy unit of measure, but to the person creating that thing it’s a measure of the quality of their idea. To refer to that creation as a product impersonalizes that creation and allows the seller to remain at arms distance should the creation be wildly popular or a horrible failure.

That pride of ownership or the abandoning of it is a convenience for someone only invested in promoting that thing, but on some level it is never really theirs with the same responsibility as the one who created it. So ultimately the noncommittal position of selling, promoting, endorsing, etc. becomes an arrangement of convenience since the creator’s idea is where the ‘product’s’ strengths lie – and also where the real accreditation should too.

I’ve occasionally been accused by the ignorant on Twitter of being dependent on The Rational Male for my revenue. Most of my regular readers know what I do for a living and understand why that’s silly, but I don’t think it’s any real secret that what I write here and in the books is something very personal to me. The Rational Male has always been something I’ve invested myself in for obvious reasons, but I’ve always resisted turning it into a brand per se. There wont be any TRM T-Shirts coming in the foreseeable future.

I’m proud to be responsible for what I do here and I will never be beholden to making what I create into a ‘product’ for others to sell. One of the best things about being in the position I am is being anti-fragile enough to write what I believe is important while still keeping myself solvent on what I do apart from it. This allows me a much greater freedom than needing to write something to stay solvent.

Bargain Debasement

You’ll have to forgive my intro here, but it got me to thinking about a larger point I had in mind about how and why a man invests himself in various endeavors in life. I’ve worked hard to get to a point in life where I can say my personal successes (and failures) are my own and not the result of others’ funding or some fortunate dispensation, but rather based on the strength of ideas and responsibly owning them as the creator. Yet another reason I have a problem with Law 7; for as much as you may gain by employing it you rarely develop the insights that failing of your own accord teaches you. Experience teaches harsh, but it teaches best.

I think one of the reasons men find the popularized, feminist, social convention of ‘male privilege‘ so disingenuous is because we want to be appreciated for the sacrifices and perseverance needed to even have what looks like a meager, hand-out, kind of privilege. An atmosphere of default privilege debases what men have honestly invested themselves in. I’ve always held that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate their feminine-primary reality, but that’s not to discount men’s want to still be appreciated for them.

Whether that’s manifested in financial wealth, personal freedom, status or earned wisdom there’s a fundamental want for an appreciation that is rarely ever forthcoming. One reason I believe many men have a self-fulfilling definition of what it is to be Alpha is because they feel they’ve earned that identification through hard work and playing by a set of rules everyone else should, but get frustrated when their efforts go unappreciated, if not outright exploited. Again, Law 7. It’s galling to see others rewarded for exploiting what you think should be appreciated.

There’s a subset of MGTOW reader/writers who question every man’s motive for doing what it is he does thinking that appeasing women is at the root of every effort. Nothing is a genuinely inspired passion if the end result is women’s affectations. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, but what exactly is a genuine motive in that sense? If the byproduct result of my genuine interests is having sex with gorgeous women and/or a beautiful wife and a couple of well adjusted kids should that then discredit my unique talents and interests in what I do?

What if, after all a man does, he seeks an appreciation that will only rarely be unsolicited on his part? It’s one thing to command respect; it’s quite another to demand it.

Institutionalized Success

In this sense I think what is most egregious about the present state of marriage is that, for the greater part, all of the personal equity a man invests in himself over the course of his lifetime is only a divorce settlement away from being halved for him (if not more so). A man’s personal equity (not to be confused with relational equity) is only one false rape allegation away from ruin. This is the institutionalization of Law 7: that a woman can largely and legally get a man to do all the work and then take (at least half) the credit from his own success – or at least that’s the social expectation.

Granted, a woman can also be on the hook for her lack of character judgement should she pair with a man who becomes a burden to her. There are rare instances when a woman may find herself financially beholden to a bad choice in marriage, but then it’s a situation of that man’s genuine achievements in life and usually an inability to take his burden of performance and make the most of it. For the most part, the role of support falls to the man in societal expectations; women and feminized men are the ones supported.

In fact, it’s a point of shame for men to be supported in such a fashion. Whether that’s warranted of not, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves than what they started with. A needed provisioning from women only puts his achievements’ validity in question. Like it or not, men should avoid the perception of themselves not pulling their own weight.

Doing More

A while back I was asked why the Burden of Performance should be called a “burden” at all. Should it not be a “challenge” or a “opportunity”? All optimist semantics aside, it is uniquely men whose character is judged on what he started with and what he made of himself.

I’m sure equalist critics will want to cast women into the same performance role, but in a uniquely male sense, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves. To be a ‘man’ is to produce in excess of what you consume – thus having the potential to support a family, an extended family, ensure security, give back to his community and/or reinvest that excess in greater endeavors or passions. While it may be part of the Feminine Imperative’s media campaign to popularize the character of the Strong Independent Woman® there is still room for women to expect the best out of a man while being provided for herself. In other words women have both the option to strive for independence while also retaining the option to be provided for by her husband or an LTR. And failing either of these, they retain an institutional right to Law 7.

Men must be independent resource providers, they must make more of themselves than what they began with, independent of dispensations or special privilege. There is no safety net, no other socially acceptable option to be provided for and still retain his being definitively a ‘man’. One of the hesitations I have with endorsing the Red Pill idea of going ‘Monk Mode’ is less about the isolation and more about the motivation men need to find within themselves to better themselves.

We look down on men who are dependent on women. Whether that’s financially, emotionally or physically, there is no option for dependence. One of the primary complaints professional, educated, independent women bemoan is their inability to pair off with a man of ‘like’ (or above) status. They’ll make euphemisms to characterize the men who would be their ‘equals’ who wont date them, but what they fail to acknowledge is the fundamental, root level truth of men’s burden of performance. For all the high-minded hopes of equalism, women’s Hypergamy still wants to filter for both sexual and provider acceptability in men.

Back in 2012 I based a post on Creative Intelligence from a study about how improvisational skills and creativity factored into a woman’s Hypergamous considerations. I wont quote it in length here, but suffice it to say that there is a measurable difference in how women perceive men with a trained or innate ability to improvise in, and overcome, times of adversity. As might be expected a man with a proven capacity to produce more than he consumes – especially when he’s had to come back from failure or misfortune – tends to be a more attractive mate choice that the man who chances into his own affluence.

Bear in mind that attraction and arousal are different sides of the Hypergamy coin (AF/BB), but many cross-cultural studies suggest that a capacity for creative, innovative, adaptive intelligence has been an evolutionarily selected-for socio-sexual trait in men – much less so in women. That’s important for the MGTOW critic to remember, it’s not as simple as a feminine-primary social order dictating men being slaves to their burden of performance. Just as gender is primarily biological, and not a social construct, neither is women’s evolved, Hypergamous sexual filtering.

Filters

Now, with the evolutionary basis of attraction in mind, it’s also important to consider that in our evolutionary past women evolved to take calculated risks in optimizing their Hypergamous sexual selectivity. The utility such Red Pill concepts as social proof, dread, Game, amused mastery, etc. are evidenced because they work with (or sometimes against) this Filter.

From The Curse of Potential:

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes.

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

As I’ve mentioned in many prior posts, Hypergamy demands assurances. In fact so paramount is that need for Hypergamous certainty that women have evolved peripheral awareness to be sensitive to psychological and socio-sexual cues that confirm a man’s Hypergamous acceptability to her. Furthermore, so important is this need of assurance that in a society founded on feminine social primacy, the Feminine Imperative will legislate legal institutions to prevent men from misrepresenting themselves as a more optimal Hypergamous choice – as well as legislate penalties that insure women against both Hypergamous fraud and less than optimal mating choices.

As you might guess, the development and evolution of Game is one such psycho-social contingency men refine and use to workaround this Hypergamous filtering; and one that the imperative is still making efforts to restrict. However this doesn’t discount the way men have, in the past, built themselves up based on both social expectations, but also genuine interests and passions. Naturally, if a man is the genuine article and as a byproduct attracts women as a result of it, that might be preferable to ‘faking it till you’re making it’ – but if that’s the route you go be sure that you do in fact ‘make it’ because it’s what you feel passionate about.

Warnings

The primary reason I wrote Preventive Medicine was to help men avoid having women’s institutionalization of Law 7 ruin their long term personal efforts and achievements. Many critics want to lock horns with me as to when a man’s Peak SMV generally occurs in life. That’s fine, but whether or not you agree with my accuracy in this regard the fact remains that it takes much more concentrated, long term effort to reach that peak than women’s fast-burn peak SMV. I don’t just mean this in terms of his professional status, but also his maturity, his acquired wisdom, his judgement of others’ character, the lessons learn from the bruises of his failures and near misses.

All of this requires an investment in oneself that simply the having of resources handed to you will never satisfy. That personal investment in oneself, as it should, amounts to a lot of internalized equity – an equity that will never be appreciated by women whose Hypergamy is looking for a pre-made man. Hypergamy doesn’t care about the effort and perseverance required to achieve the status you (should) enjoy at your SMV peak.

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to short term sexual selection, the most wanton sex I had was at the time in my life when I was the poorest. As an underemployed semi-rockstar I used hit it with the best of them, and from a purely sexual perspective, it’s true, criminal and Alpha cads will still fuck 80% of women. But there’s more to the worth of a man than just his notch count. Sexual experience constitutes a very important measure of that, but a man should want more for himself as a man, as a father, as leader, as a creator, even as a cad.

Life experience and the benefits that a man should draw from it are personally valuable. In fact, men feel the equity of these efforts are so valuable that men will commit suicide at 5 times the rate of women; and in particular between the ages of 45-49. Why do you suppose that is? What assurances of long term security does the common man have for himself? What is he faced with when the plan he sets forth for himself in his life is destroyed in one precarious instance?

Once again, using the male deductive logic, it may seem a better option for him to hit the reset button than to be faced with having his life’s equity, his largest investment, his creation, stolen from him. This is a graphic illustration of men’s Burden of Performance, a burden women simply don’t face.

Open Relationships

Functional_cuckoldry

During the last post’s comment thread I sort of went back in time to when I’d first heard the term ‘open relationship’. It was back in the mid 80s and I’d heard it being proposed to me by my first girlfriend when I was around 19 and she’d grown bored of my predictable Beta perfection. Needless to say this moment preceded my semi-pro rock star 20s and the natural Alpha-ness I matured into. So at the time I was thoroughly steeped in the dutiful Beta conditioning of believing that ‘going steady’ monogamy and only banging the ONE girl was the right thing to do.

I also believed that women’s motives were reliably based on what they said rather than what their behaviors implied (and their contradicting behaviors were the result of being confused by nebulous ‘society’s’ unfair expectations of women). So it was with a great deal of confusion that I was forced to wrap my head around exactly why my ‘girlfriend’ would want to retain me as an intimate orbiter while she pursued other guys to bang and become potential intimates with.

She suggested an “open relationship” – all the same non-sexual intimate expectations with no expectation of reciprocal sexual fidelity –  an idea she’d no doubt been familiarized with from her former hippie ‘free love‘ parents. And not unlike the simpering Beta in today’s cartoon, I too was uncomfortable with sharing my 18 year old girlfriend with any other guy. Looking back it was quite the conflict to my 19 year old, Beta conditioned mind. On one hand I was taught to respect the independence of a woman and didn’t want to be the guy to tell her what she could or couldn’t do, but I also bought into the Disneyesque sacrifice all for true love narrative.

I suppose now I owe her some gratitude since my rejecting this “I want to play the field” episode was instrumental in setting me on a course for my Alpha 20s and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude that unintentionally served me so well with women then.

Today there are cutesy synonyms like ‘poly’ to describe a woman who believes it’s in her multiple lovers’, as well as her own, mutual interests that they obligate themselves to what really amounts to her attention, emotional and sexual needs independent of each guy who fulfills that role for her. The problem arises in the degree of investment those men believe that an above board ‘poly’ woman will be able to appreciate. I had this situation presented in last weeks’ comments:

Why does an open relationship favor women and not men? It’s only cuckoldry if you don’t approve of it. If you agree to an open relationship for both of you, then it seems like an equal footing.

The cuckoldry Devil is in the details; and in this case that Devil is in the perceived ‘agreement’ and who’s doing the agreeing. Contemporary Open Cuckoldry and the social conventions of ‘free love’ era faux-idealisms in ‘open relationships’ work in tandem today to promote the sexual selection strategy of women’s Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry, in its most visceral, Hypergamous sense, favors women because there is no margin for error on a man’s part. Bear in mind that an ‘open’ relationship only serves a woman’s sexual imperative because she benefits from comfort, rapport, security and likely provisioning of the primary man with whom she’s come to this agreement with. In all honesty I’ve rarely met a guy in an open relationship who wasn’t a Beta at the mercy of his wife or LTR’s proliferative phase, Alpha Fucks, Hypergamous impulses.

Most of them understand their optionless condition and resign themselves to the women they’ve committed to, wanting to, and acting on fucking more suitably, conventionally, masculine men than themselves. Arguably, most stay at home fathers fall into a sort of contextual form of an open relationship for much of the same reasons even if their wives are only getting a vicarious Alpha ‘fix’ by working among higher status men who haven’t abdicated on their burden of performance by adopting the feminine support role.

What About Those Assholes?

Now I am aware of the often domineering men who insist on fucking women outside of their commitment to a monogamous lover. I also understand that the reverse can and does apply. I’m also aware that when a man’s SMV exceeds a woman’s it places her into a similar position to that of the Beta men I’ve just described.

Bear in mind that the issue I’m on about here isn’t one of fault, but rather how an effectively polygamous relationship serves the interests of either genders’ sexual strategy.

It’s vitally important to consider how both of these ‘open relationship’ formats are popularly perceived in a cultural context. For a woman, being ‘poly’ may hold some stigma to it. She may be considered a de facto slut in some sense – remember she’s maintaining the pretense that she’s committed to one or more men, rather than a booty call where there is no pretense of exclusivity – but the social (not to mention legal assurance) efforts being made to ‘normalize’ what amounts to her cuckoldry of that ‘primary’ partner is reinforced because it seemingly serves as some kind of new-age feminine-primary family unit. And after all, he too is ostensibly free to exercise his sexual strategy in this arrangement. A win-win, right?

In the case where the ‘primary’ partner is the woman and the high SMV man leaves her no choice but to adopt his sexual strategy as the dominant one in the relationship, that ‘open relationship’ is considered dysfunctional and socially frowned upon. He’s a cad or a philanderer at best, and an abusive self-absorbed inconsiderate monster at worst. Reverse the sexes in today’s cartoon and imagine what the feminine-primary social response might be.

Force Fitting Sexual Strategies

What we’re observing in a modern interpretation of ‘poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is a conflict between the normalization of unilateral control of sexual strategy within a monogamous relationship context. I know that sounds like a mouthful but consider…

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

No doubt many Blue and Purple Pill readers will (in the interests of “equality”) remind us that there was a time when it was socially expected of (high socio-economic status) men to “keep” a mistress (or use prostitutes) as well as a wife, or even have many wives. All socio-economic Apex Fallacies aside, this being an outlier rather than a norm, those arrangements still put that man into a position of maintaining support for both (all) women in order to satisfy his sexual appetites as well as the relative wellbeing of them.

In the modern instance where western(ized) women are a protected class in a feminine-primary social order, the priority of sexual strategy changes hands. I cover this exchange in the Adaptation series of posts, but to paraphrase, Free Love, open relationships or now, ‘poly’, has really become an increasingly acceptable methodology for women to optimize both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy while still enjoying a semblance of the security that old order monogamy provides for women’s emotional needs.

Now lets review The Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

In an economic state where women are less financially dependent on (or autonomous from) men, the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy will take priority. That’s not to say the Beta comfort and rapport appeal becomes worthless as an emotional investment, but it’s less likely for a woman to need to prioritize that aspect while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect. Beta comfort and security have a value, but that value requires less urgency than pursing Alpha sexual experience (functional breeding opportunities).

Consider the poor Beta symp in the cartoon. That caricature is of a Beta conditioned man struggling with the Old Set of Books, with the old order ruleset expectations from a woman who will never recognize them because she’s never needed to. It’s his investment in her, his necessitousness, his optionlessness and his inability to see it’s the source of his frustration and his anxiety. He needs her, expects more from her, than she needs him.

The lie inherent in the humor of the cartoon is that women possess the capacity to compartmentalize their emotional investments. The Medium is the Message; women can only compartmentalize their feelings for men they don’t see as Hypergamously optimal men (i.e. Alpha, higher than their own SMV men). For men who embody that optimization, women simply cannot afford to feel anything more than submission (a submission to a dominant man they innately desire) to him and are thus unable to consider anything like compartmentalizing their emotions for him.

And from Schedules of Mating:

For a female of any species to facilitate a methodology for breeding with the best genetic partner she’s able to attract AND to ensure her own and her offspring’s survival with the best provisioning partner; this is an evolutionary jackpot.

‘Open’ relationships, and the social narrative reinforcement of the concept, are one such adaptation to facilitate this methodology.

All of this may seem a bit pervasive coming from the guy who advises men to spin plates and date non-exclusively for as long as it takes (if ever) to attain the depth of experience to become a relatively good judge of women’s innate nature, and then if he so chooses, decide how best to pair and parent with her.

The difference in this approach is characteristic of the differences in men and women’s sexual strategies. In Plate Theory, while there is an above board implication of non-exclusivity, there is never an implication that a woman is (or should be) more than a non-exclusive dating opportunity. There should never be any pretense of there being an established, invested relationship as we see in the ‘poly’ concept of women.

In fact this is the primary distinction in non-exclusivity; who’s Frame is the predominant one? In a woman’s ‘poly’ Frame there is a retainership implied in what she believes should be an accepted non-exclusivity.

Ask yourself this, why would a man persist in an ‘open’ relationship? What unique advantages does he get in this arrangement that he couldn’t by simply staying single, practicing Game and spinning plates? Then ask yourself what unique benefits does a woman receive from the same ‘polyamorous’ arrangement?

When you’re contemplating this, try to divorce yourself from the emotional investments and focus on cold hard evolved Hypergamy and how it would function for either sex in that arrangement. Keep in mind that as far as feminized society is concerned, and for all of the triumphalism of independent women, the onus of committed relationship responsibility still defines the worth of a man.

Beta “Manhood”

From MoodyPrism had an interesting observation about the social acceptance of cuckoldry:

I’ve seen men make the mistake of mentioning that they would never raise another man’s child on FaceBook. Shit storms ensued. The usual shaming tactics were trotted out such as manning up. Interestingly enough I’ve heard a woman (on one of those absolutely dreadful day time talk shows such as the View) say that a woman in a relationship with a man with his own kids was a fool for wasting her time on his kids instead of hers. The framework for open cuckoldry is already there, we just need to see the push that makes it completely socially acceptable.

Open Cuckoldry is already in its developmental stage in a social respect. When you consider the Sandbergian plan for Open Hypergamy, the logical implication of this is what’s described here – prioritizing the sexual selection and Hypergamous optimization of women on a societal level while maximally restricting (via social shaming and disapproval) the sexual strategies that would ever serve male interests,…so long as that male is anything less than an optimal Alpha.

Open Cuckoldry has many euphemisms now, but in the Red Pill aware perspective it’s just a matter of time until the social plan of prioritized Hypergamy and outright cuckoldry becomes a social norm.

TuffLuv also presented me with a related question in the last comment thread:

A little too black and white on this stuff Rollo. Sure cuckoldry, as you call it is becoming the norm.. the euphemism being “mixed family”. But I see the majority of instances not being a chick who had the child of some alpha bad boy, or even alpha good boy.. I just see fickle chicks who dumped the baby daddy cuz she either found something better or went looking for something better. The poor dad is just an every day average guy who got his heart broken by the bitch.

So, ponder if you will, if there is a difference between a man raising another man’s child(ren) where the bio father is less alpha (possibly by far) than the new suitor, and a beta man raising the child of one of the woman’s former studs.. I think in the real world you find the former far more than the latter, except in cases where the married or committed woman actually went out and cheated and got pregnant with another man’s child. Maybe that happens a lot but that is not *open* cuckoldry.. That’s classic cuckoldry, and perhaps the only thing that should be called cuckoldry.

I think there should be another designation for the former case. It’s still a bit shameful, but not nearly as much as the latter, eh?

Definitely something to consider, but this situation also implies a change in conditions or context with regard to the woman doing the cuckolding. The fundamentals don’t change – that woman may have bred with a less than optimal man, but the Hypergamous sexual selection impulse still drives her to seek out the Alpha fucks aspect of Hypergamy. She’s Making Up for Missing Out and still she has the provisioning and support she needs in order to pursue the opposite side of the Hypergamous equation she missed out on courtesy of the Beta father.

Open Cuckoldry

forever

During the Q&A section of the Man in Demand talk I gave back in September I was asked about where I believed the social dynamic of Open Hypergamy would lead. In specific the idea was proposed, and I agree, that the logical next step for a social order founded on feminine Hypergamy and one that prioritizes the female sexual strategy as preeminent would lead to a state of openly accepted cuckoldry.

Although I can’t say it’s an accepted social dynamic as yet, there are many social indicators that are revealing this push towards a normalized cuckoldry. I’ll explore these for a bit in this essay, but for now these indicators are about a move away from conventional monogamy in the hopes that a ‘soft cuckoldry’ might be a precursor to instituting a more accepted open cuckoldry.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind a couple of primary principles about this shift. First is the fact that, initially, an openly accepted state of feminine-controlled cuckoldry will never be called ‘cuckoldry’ proper. If we use the example of a socially accepted (if not celebrated) open Hypergamy as a model, open cuckoldry will be sold as a more logical, more humane sexual strategy for men and women in light of divorce statistics, romantic boredom and other sexual studies that indicate men and women weren’t evolved for monogamous commitment.

The second is that open cuckoldry is the extension of a unilaterally feminine controlled Hypergamy. That is to say that as Hypergamy becomes more normalized as a social imperative that sexual strategy will extend to optimizing Hypergamy across genders. If that optimization is taken to its logical end it will require men not just to adopt cuckoldry as a norm, but to socially reward them for advocating it among their own sex.

Cuckoldry By Any Other Name

As I said, it wont be called ‘cuckoldry’; the connotations are negative, so a redefining will be made in order to make the practice more socially palatable. The Feminine Imperative wont recruit the very men it needs to perpetuate cuckoldry as their own sexual strategy if the term is derogatory. Thus we’ll get euphemisms for alternative lifestyles, ‘open marriages’ or a “Designer Relationship“:

We live in an era when everything is customizable. Relationships are no exception. Some people will continue to practice their grandparents’ form of monogamy, and others, probably the majority, will be serially exclusive and pair-bonded. Still others will explore some form of non-monogamous expression that encompasses one or more of the facets we’ve discussed or may flow in and out of being exclusive based on what the relationship requires. (We’ve done this ourselves.) Having the ability to customize a relationship means having the freedom to respond to life’s vicissitudes.

The first time I came across the concept of ‘soft polygamy’ I was in a behavioral psychology class exploring the practices of modern marriage and contrasting them with the long term sexual behaviors of men and women. As you might imagine the context of the study focused entirely on the ‘bad behaviors’ of men who essentially transitioned from serial monogamy to serial marriage. The idea was that in the process of moving from one LTR to another men were establishing a soft form of polygamy.

In a social respect, men have far more to lose from serial marriages than do women. The financial liabilities of divorce are well known to the manosphere, but so are the emotional and familial accountabilities. So from a strictly male perspective, serial LTRs are a dicey prospect, but from a female perspective, in a feminine-primary social order, institutionalized Hypergamy and the soft polygamy that results from the Sandbergian sexual strategy, soft cuckoldry becomes pragmatic in optimizing Hypergamy for women.

At this point we should consider the Heartiste maxim about feminism again:

The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality

Institutionalized cuckoldry is the logical means to restricting male sexuality, but we have to consider what function that restriction serves for women. From an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks perspective the plan is simple; restrict that sexuality as women find need for a particular man’s service.

Diamonds and Rust

While I’m reluctant to prognosticate, my guess is that future generations of men will be conditioned to accept their role in this cuckoldry as part of their socialization. The above Forevermark diamond advertisement is one illustration of this. Open Hypergamy and its acceptance has already made its popular debut in mainstream media and advertising, and likewise open cuckoldry is just now finding a social foothold.

It takes the Red Pill Lens to appreciate the efforts as they’re being made by a large society. The Forevermark ad is intended to be funny or cute, but it belies a deeper, more poignant truth about Alpha Widows, Hypergamy and the long term sexual strategy Plan and roles women expect men to play in it.

I was made aware of this ad being circulated from a reader on Twitter and at first thought it was a reworked joke. It is however legit and billboards with this campaign are up in major cities. Without the benefit of a Red Pill Lens I can see how most men would laugh it off or women might giggle sardonically about it, but the the fact remains that a clever copywriter is aware of the sexual dynamics that make it funny.

I pulled the following quote from Deti on one of Dalrock’s more recent post:

“I think what we will continue to see is growing disengagement.”

Yeah, this has been discussed here and elsewhere in the almost 5 years I’ve been around here.

I think that what will happen is that things will continue sliding in the same direction they’re going now, until a critical mass is reached. I don’t know what that critical mass is, what will trigger it, or when it will be reached.

We live in a mostly free society with a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. We have maximum freedom and autonomy right now, with both sexes being free to pursue pretty much whatever they want, however they want to. That is the prime characteristic driving the current circumstance — that, and up to now, there’s been enough money taxed, borrowed and stolen to pay for it.

A growing number of men are not getting as much sex as they want. A growing number of women aren’t getting commitments in the form they want — when they want or from the men they want.

So things are going to keep sliding that way. More and more men will walk away and direct what energies they have left elsewhere — into work, or beer/bros/Xbox/porn, or travel/leisure. (Oddly enough, this might make many of them more attractive to women, since they’re spending less time directing their attentions to women.) More and more men will earn just enough to support themselves, since they don’t plan on marriage, and fatherhood is out of the question. They will lack the skills to improve their lives. They will not get nearly as much sex as they want, but they will learn to live with it — mostly through porn, the occasional hookup, and the even more occasional prostitute. The price of prostitutes will skyrocket as demand increases; and a few more women will go into high-end call girl work to earn side money.

More and more women will direct their attentions into their work, travel/leisure, and having children without men. (This will definitely make more of them less attractive to men except as on again, off again sex partners.) They will not get the commitments from men they want, but they will learn to live with it. They will complain about it with increasing volume and shrillness, but they’ll learn to live with it.

Until something happens to cause the tides to turn. Again – don’t know what, or when, or how. But something will happen to cause a hard reset. And it will be exquisitely painful for everyone. I don’t want it to happen, nor do I relish it. It’s not something to desire or look forward to because of the pain it will bring. But I do think it will happen. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime or my kids’ lifetimes. We could easily slide like this for another 50 to 100 years.

I think one consequence of this separation of the genders will include a socially normalized institution of cuckoldry. To take hold it will need to be termed something different, but in effect the process of women conceiving with one man and then expecting another man to parentally invest himself in that child will be a casual expectation of women. With so many men effectively (if not intentionally) going their own way, the idea that any man wouldn’t be expected to serve as a surrogate parent will become commonplace.

Genders divided by feminism or feminine social primacy will need a ‘customized’ form of cuckoldry that allows for the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy to be reconciled with the Beta Bucks side by enlisting different men for either purpose.

The Pink Pill

I want to end here with an essay I read recently on the fallout of the new female form of Viagra:

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realized what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restore without really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

To develop drugs to boost libido is like ‘giving antibiotics to pigs because of the shit they’re standing in’

The American psychologist Christopher Ryan argues that the institution of modern marriage – meaning an exclusive couple bound by romantic love – is antithetical to long-term excitement. Ryan is best known for Sex at Dawn (2010), a book authored with his wife Cacilda Jethá, that makes the case that sexual monogamy is deeply at odds with human nature. He is among a growing number of researchers suggesting that the rift between women’s purportedly limitless sexual potential and their dulled actuality might owe to the circumstances of intimacy. Accordingly, the conjugal bed is not only the scene of dwindling desire, but its fundamental cause. The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust. While love angles toward intimacy, desire flourishes across a distance.

The entire article is very insightful if not a bit depressing, but with the Red Pill Lens we can begin to understand the latent purpose behind the message. I’ve gone on record about the pushback against clearing the pink pill for use as being a direct threat to women’s control of their own Hypergamy. The concern, ostensibly, is that a libido stimulating drug might be used to induce a woman into having sex that her otherwise sober sense would prevent; effectively it could be a ‘rape’ drug.

What’s finally being addressed in this article however is what I’ve been saying since I was aware of the drug’s trials – a chemical that induces libido in women removes an element of their control in sexual selection and compromises Hypergamy. I’m not entirely sure the author was aware of the points she was revealing in this, but she succinctly makes the case for both institutionalized cuckoldry (or certainly a ‘customized’ soft polygamy for women) and advocates for women maintaining control of their Hypergamy unclouded by a drug that would remove that control by chemically inducing them into sex that isn’t of their own choosing.

The ‘cure’ to women’s low libido is holistic, not biological. Women’s sexual deficiencies are presumed not to be the result of a ‘broken’ biology, but rather a lack of proper motivation. I should point out that all of this validates all the points I was making about Dread in marriage last month on Biblical Gender Roles – maintaining a condition of proper motivation (i.e. Dread), the holistic cure, is exactly what even femosphere authors are tacitly advocating.

The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust.

Yet now, even when a pharmaceutical solution to the lust problem is made available the ‘cure’ is rejected. Why? Because on a root, limbic level women’s hindbrains know that Hypergamy cannot be optimized with a drug that removes Hypergamous choice. The real solution has never changed and women are now put into a position of having to openly acknowledge that for all of the pretense of “mismatched libidos” or “sex just declines after marriage” social conventions, men’s cuckoldry is the real plan for Hypergamy.

When presented with a pill that will make them sexual, when given a cure to their low sex drives with the men who’ve made lifetime commitments to them, women will still refuse to take it. Hypergamous doubt can’t be quelled with a pill.

Christian Dread

christian_dread

A couple of interesting things happened over the last week and a half that made me think it might be time to reconsider the principle of Dread once again. The first was a comment I made over at Biblical Gender Roles which Larry Solomon then devoted a blog post to address. This was my comment to him:

While I might not endorse overt Dread for Christian men I would advise they become more aware of the opportunities that passive Dread represents in their marriages.

Most Beta Christian men (which is to say 90%+) will proactively try to diffuse the sexual anxiety and tension necessary to inspire the ‘desired’ sex you describe here. They believe the pro-feminine lie that rapport, comfort and familiarity is what leads to sexual desire so they make every attempt to convince their wives that they have no need to worry or feel insecure that any other woman would want them sexually, much less appreciate them for being ‘good christian men’.

What they fail to grasp is that passionate sex inspired by genuine desire is the result of insecurity, anxiety and sexual tension. Most Christian men are conditioned to bypass this phase in seducing their wives, thinking that comfort and security are what will prompt her to being more sexual, but in doing so they kill the vibe before it can build. Comfort and rapport are post-orgasm, oxytocin effects, but Christian men believe they are prerequisites for sex. For the most part they are deathly afraid to embrace and exaggerate the uncertainty, spontaneity, anxiety and tension women need to feel sexual urgency.

You make sex another chore for a woman when you negotiate for her desire. Genuine desire cannot be negotiated. If you find yourself in a sexless (or passionless sex) relationship with your wife you need to embrace using soft dread situations to prompt her imagination. A woman’s imaginings are the best tool in you seduction toolbox, learn how to inspire them.

Make your wife unintentionally uncomfortable. Sexuality is spontaneous chemical reaction between two parties, not a process of negotiation. By its very nature passionate, desired sex is a result of being uncomfortable, uncertain and urgent. It might be an uncomfortable truth to most Christian men, but the best, most memorable, married sex you have won’t be the result of a pre-planned “Date Night” where you stage manage every event and nuance in advance; it will be the rough, hard-core, make-up sex you never thought you’d have after a near breakup inspired by the anxiety of the thought of never having you around anymore.

Just to give you a quick run down here, I found BGR quite by accident. One of Solomon’s post actually got shared in my FaceBook feed by a notorious Christian feminist I follow just for such stories. I’ve written about it in the past, but I find contemporary evangelical Christianity (or ‘Churchianity’) to be one of the most fertile grounds for egalitarian feminist mores to propagate.

Standard disclaimer: I don’t do religion on this blog, but I do intersexual dynamics and sometimes these have effects that are very intertwined with religion, politics and social orders. It’s long been my own and Dalrock’s observation that Christianity has been co-opted by the same feminization that secular society has been saturated by.

As things progressed, this post and my exchanges with Solomon in the comments were picked up on by Raw Story and at least 4 other reblogs from various culture news “journalists” happy to pull anything and everything out of context, provided no links to the actual article and, as would be expected, deleted any post of my own from the Disqus comment threads I vainly tried to leave. I was happy for what spillover traffic came in from it, but I know the indignation crowd’s flavor of the minute doesn’t really count for much.

However, for all of that, I did reexamine my two previous posts on Dread: Dread Games and Soft Dread. It was interesting to see the knee-jerk response to ideas like “passionate sex inspired by genuine desire is the result of insecurity, anxiety and sexual tension”  from the Blue Pill commentariat. The problem I see is that there’s only one manner in which terms like ‘insecurity’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘sexual tension’ are really interpreted by those steeped in the Feminine Imperative. They are always going to be viewed from a position of absolutism; therefor the drive-by impression is that myself or Solomon were advocating for heavy handed abuse of wives by their husbands.

And as expected, the straw men got more blown out of scale, and then it was a story of how Christian husbands ought to force themselves on their wives irrespective of their actual desire, and then comes ‘Rape! Rapety rape rape!’

How to Get Your Wife to Want to Fuck You

I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with Solomon’s writing, but from what I gather on his blog it’s fairly heavy on the “how to get your wife to have the Biblically mandated sex the Lord obligates her to” posts. I fully understand the ease with which the “spiritual, but not religious” crowd would have a field day with a majority of his posts.

As some of my readers are aware I’ve been an active reader of Dalrock’s blog for years now. I don’t do religion, but if I were to I expect a lot of what I’d write would be better done by Dal. A handful of commenters on his blog think I’m the Devil for laying bare the frustrations they observe in the church in the secular, nuts & bolts, psychology and intersexual dynamics. I think most there have a pretty good grasp of the feminization and egalitarian efforts that have taken root in a religion that still preaches the old set of books to men while simultaneously expecting them to recognize the new set of books for women.

I imagine a lot of contemporary Christian men would embrace some degree of the MGTOW mindset if marriage weren’t the only doctrinal means for them to have ‘ordained’ sex. Mainstream, pop-culture Christianity loves to adopt and ‘sanctify’ christianized versions of secular social trends, and the Red Pill is no exception. One theme I see repeated on sites like BGR as well as Focus on the Family is a push for married Christian couples to have more sex. Solomon’s tact is literally enforcing Biblical gender roles on couples and therefor obligating wives to ‘Duty Sex’ they apparently are reluctant to have. For the Focus on the Family side, there’s an embrace of men’s constant need to qualify themselves for their wive’s intimacy; ergo making it their fault for their sexlessness.

I imagine this situation doesn’t bode well with the contemporary Christian young man who actually takes his conviction with some degree of seriousness. Not only does his Burden of Performance include a constant qualification to women in a sexless pre-marriage state (to say nothing of the hormones of youth), he “struggles” with rubbing it out to porn, and then has a sexless marriage waiting for him on the other side of the marriage contract that is all down-side risk for him.

The Quest for the Righteous Fox will always persist, but I can’t say that sounds like a great opportunity for an 18 year old guy raised on Purity Rings and taught to defer all authority to the woman who will become his only source of sexual release for a lifetime. So the appeal of a christianized form of the Red Pill should be obvious.

My comment to Solomon was motivated from the perspective of wanting to help these men better understand their Christian conditioned Blue Pill predicament. I know a common refrain of more traditionalist Christians is that Christianity was already Red Pill before there was a Red Pill, and in an Old Testament respect I guess I can relate, but the problem isn’t one of doctrine, it’s about the readiness with which the church has adopted egalitarianism as doctrine. I get that it’s largely a business decision – appeal to the feminine or go out of business – but after several generations the same Blue Pill conditioning of the past 60+ years is only amplified in a religious context.

Religion is no insulation against Hypergamy. I understand that in the past religion was used as a control on Hypergamy, especially in respect to men’s burden of performance and the necessity of their provisioning to women.

There was a section in the London Real video interview of Nick Krauser where he explains the distribution of labor aspect of how religion and the 80\20 aspect of the Pareto Principle interact with Hypergamy and intersexual dynamics. I may explore this in another post, but the idea is that monogamous marriage in a Christian sense relatively ensured that the 80% Beta men could reasonably expect to get a woman for exclusive sex and pass on his genetic lineage.

Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are still the order of the day, but that Beta could, through a social and religious contract, be pacified with a wife and the responsibilities inherent in his burden of performance as a father and husband. Thus the distribution of labor could be maintained without the fear of a ‘Beta Uprising’ to claim control of more Alpha dominant men.

Stay at Home Dad Documents His Sex Life on a Fitbit

Unfortunately with the advent of the sexual revolution that Beta Christian man’s sex life is far more likely to resemble this guy’s. Egalitarianism has saturated itself not just into the social structure of the church, but it has reshaped the very doctrine upon which this old set of books and monogamous marriage was founded upon.

Thus we see men looking for answers to their sexless marriages and the hope that Red Pill awareness can bring to them. Old order marriage only exists with regards to men’s responsibilities under it. These husbands must balance those old order expectations with a new order egalitarianism that the church has embraced for their wives. And few are ever aware of their balancing act.

The Red Pill would have to be made Christian Kosher®, but the psychological and sociological underpinning of Red Pill awareness clashes with the ‘traditionalism’ of old order Biblical gender roles based on that old division of labor/monogamous marriage model.

Complementarity

complementarity

At the Man In Demand conference I briefly got into the topic of egalitarian equalism and its relation to complementarity during my talk. On my flight home I was jotting down my thoughts about the seminar and one thing I now have plans to do for the next one* is base an entire talk and group discussion about the distinctions between equalism and complementarity as I understand them.

However, for now, consider this post a primer for that talk. I’ve done my best to explain the differences between equalism and complementarity in Equalism and Masculinity and Positive Masculinity vs. Equalism. My detailing the social dynamics and psychological influences men face in an equalist headspace has been a recurrent theme in many of my posts. On occasion I’ve made contrasting comparisons to Complementarity, but until the Red Pill Parenting series I hadn’t gone into the detail I’d like to.

Guy starts us off:

As many of you have already mentioned in the stories you’ve shared, it is usually the father who pushes their children towards a higher standard of success. This is critical for the child to develop into a successful adult that excels in society.

It is usually the mother who coos and coddles their children. This is also necessary, as it’s vitally important for children to feel loved and accepted by their parents. This shows the necessity of the roles of both mothers and fathers in the development of children. If a child faces only criticism, it may have lasting effects on their self esteem. If a child is never criticized, they may never grow up into an adult.

The negative effects of too much coddling are so widespread, that we actually have sayings that illustrate it.
“A ____ only a mother could love”

To understand the dynamic of complementarity first it’s important to consider the theology behind egalitarianism. I tend to use the term egalitarianism and equalism interchangeably, but I do so because I see them both as stems from the same tree of blank-slate humanism. In the first Red Pill Parent essay I made the following case against of a single parent, single gender upbringing of children:

Parenting should be as collaborative and as complementary a partnership as is reflected in the complementary relationship between a mother and father.

It’s the height of gender-supremacism to be so arrogantly self-convinced as to deliberately choose to birth a child and attempt to raise it into the contrived ideal of what that “parent” believes the other gender’s role oughtto be.

This should put the institutionalized social engineering agenda of the Feminine Imperative into stark contrast for anyone considering intentional single parenthood. Now consider that sperm banks and feminine-specific fertility institutions have been part of normalized society for over 60 years and you can see that Hypergamy has dictated the course of parenting for some time now. This is the definition of social engineering.

The idea that a single mother is as co-effective as a father stems from the blank-slate belief that gender is a social construct rather than the physical and psychological manifestation of humans’ evolved mental firmware. While the foundations of this blank-slate theory originated with John Locke in in the 17th century it would be the anima/animus theories of Carl Jung to cement egalitarian equalism into the popular conscious with regard to gender relations.

Tabula Rasa (blank-slate) refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. With the scientific and technical advancements of the 20th and 21st centuries we now have a better understanding of how the human brains of men and women operate from a far more advanced perspective than either Jung or Locke had knowledge of. To be fair, Jung’s presupposition was one that human’s possess innate potentials for both the masculine and feminine (thus the “get in touch with your feminine side” trope for men), but those potentials derive from a presumed-accepted egalitarian base.

Yet still, from a meta-social perspective, western(izing) culture still clings to the blank-slate theoretical models from Jung inspired by Locke and other tabula rasa thinkers of old.

Why is that? Why should it be that for all of our greater understanding of the biomechanics of the human body and it’s influences on behavior that the greater whole of society persists in the belief that men and women possess co-equal gender proficiencies based on an outdated, largely disproven Tabula Rasa model? I would argue that resisting the more obvious and practical model of evolved gender differences presents an uncomfortable proposition of biological determinism to people conditioned to believe gender is a nurture, not nature, proposition.

I’ve opined about Carl Jung’s contributions to our present state of feminine social primacy in the past.

One of the key elements Jung introduced into western culture’s popular consciousness is the theory of anima and animus; that each individual, irrespective of sex, possesses greater or lesser degrees of association and manifested behavior of masculine and feminine psychological affiliations. In 2012, when you hear a 6 year old girl tell a 6 year old boy “you need to get in touch with your feminine side” in order to get him to comply with her, you can begin to understand the scope to which this idea has been internalized into society’s collective consciousness. So long and so thoroughly has this theory been repeated and perpetuated that we can scarcely trace back its origins – it’s simply taken as fact that men and women possess varying degrees of masculine and feminine energies. First and second wave feminism founded their psychological premises of gender on Jung’s ideas and so evolved the reasonings for a push towards the social feminization we know today. The seeds for the feminine-centrism we take for granted today were planted by a Swiss psychiatrist in the early 1900’s.

It’s important to consider Jung’s bi-gender individualities within the individual person in context with Locke’s Tabula Rasa theory because in tandem they constitute the basis of the egalitarian equalism which feminism and our present feminine-primary conditioning rely upon. To the modern egalitarian mind, inequalities in social dynamics, gender conflicts and economic disparities are the result of a deliberate (if not malicious) intent on the part of individuals to limit the presumedly equal potentials of others. Social ills are the conflict between the selfish need of the one versus the equalized need of the many.

There is very little headspace given to the material, innate, mechanics that make up the condition of the individual. Natural talent, innate ability, in-born predispositions, and physical and adaptational advantages stemming from evolved differences – whether a boon or a burden – are either disqualified or marginalized in an egalitarian mindset. The egalitarian, while very humanistic, leans almost entirely on the learned behavior model of human development. It’s Tabula Rasa, and the zeroed-out-at-birth content of the individual is filled by the influence of a society that is corrupted by those who don’t agree with an idealized egalitarian imperative.

Complementarity

Complementarity acknowledges the importance of the inborn differences between the sexes that egalitarianism marginalizes or outright denies exist while recognizing and embracing the strengths and weaknesses those differences represent.

There are many well documented, peer reviewed, scientific studies on the neurological differences between men and women’s brain structure. The easiest evidence of these differences is the cyclic nature of women’s sexuality (versus men’s always-on sexuality) and the neurological/hormonal influences on beliefs, behaviors and the rationalizations for those behaviors prompted by the innate drive to optimize Hypergamy.

Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

Stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.

Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women’s brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, in contrast to men’s brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions.

Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men’s brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women’s for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.

“If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there’s a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better,” Verma said. “Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved – they will listen more.”

Ironically, in an egalitarian gender-neutral social order, a college professor publicly suggesting that men are more adept at mathematical thinking gets him fired from a lengthy tenure, but when a female researcher suggests the same she’s rewarded with professional accolades and grant money.

As you might expect, this article focuses primarily on the triumphant advantages of the female brain structure, but the studies themselves are revealing of the empirical evidence that men and women are not the functional equals that egalitarianism would insist we are.

The scans showed greater connectivity between the left and right sides of the brain in women, while the connections in men were mostly confined to individual hemispheres. The only region where men had more connections between the left and right sides of the brain was in the cerebellum, which plays a vital role in motor control. “If you want to learn how to ski, it’s the cerebellum that has to be strong,” Verma said. Details of the study are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are,” Ruben Gur, a co-author on the study, said in a statement. “Detailed connectome maps of the brain will not only help us better understand the differences between how men and women think, but it will also give us more insight into the roots of neurological disorders, which are often sex-related.”

These distinct neurological differences between men and women are evidence of a an evolved intersexual complementarity that has manifested in both the personal and social dynamic of intergender relations for millennia. Conventional gender roles where there is a defined interdependence between the sexes is reflective of precisely the hardwired “stereotypes” researchers were so shocked to discover in men and women’s neural wiring.

Talents and Deficits

I’m often asked what the complementarian model looks like and it’s all too easy to not want to fall into the perceived trap in defining gender roles for men and women as they’ve been for centuries before our own era. Conventionally feminine women and masculine men are ‘shocking’ stereotypes to a society steeped and conditioned to accept the egalitarian model as the norm. The simple fact is that equality is only defined by the conditions and environmental circumstance that make something equal or unequal.

Men and women are biologically, physiologically, psychologically, hormonally and sexually different. This presents a very difficult proposition to an egalitarian mindset – men and women are simply better suited for, better wired, better enabled and better physically capable of succeeding in different tasks, different environments, different socialization, different mental or emotional demands as those circumstances dictate.

We simply evolved for symbiosis between the sexes; the strengths of one compensate for the weakness of the other. Depending on the challenge presented, yes, this means that in our complementarity the difference between a man and a woman are going to be unequal. Much of the gender discord our present society suffers is due primarily to the intentional rejection of this evolved, symbiotic complementarity and its replacement with the fantasy of uninfluenced, independently sustaining equalism. From the egalitarian mindset, the genders are self-sustaining and independent, thus men and women simply have no need for the other.

Though egalitarians will argue it does, complementarity doesn’t imply a universal superiority of one gender or the other. Rather, depending on the task at hand, one sex will be better predisposed to accomplishing it. Furthermore this isn’t to say that the gender-specific deficiencies of one gender cannot be overcome by learning, practice and brain plasticity to achieve the same ends – it is to say that men and women’s brains, and the task specific adaptations of them, predispose them to being better capable of achieving them.

Fighting Nature

For the better part of this blog’s history I’ve outlined the process of how the Feminine Imperative conditions men to embrace their “feminine sides” and create generations of ready Betas. Most Blue Pill men will fail to identify with the more masculine specificity I’ve outlined above. It’s important to remember that learning to be better at non-gender specificity in an attempt to override this natural gender-wiring is not always a voluntary effort on the part of a person – especially when egalitarian Mom and Dad are in on the conditioning.

When we see the recent popular social effort to embrace transexual acceptance what we’re being asked to do is accept a learning process that countermands a male or female’s evolved neural architecture. Brain plasticity is a marvel of evolution, but it is subject to external manipulation and the ideologies of those doing the manipulating.

There’s been a criticism of western public education’s push to force boys to learn like girls – we treat boys like they are defective girls. This is a prime example of not just a social engineering effort, but an effort in reprogramming boys to override their natural, neurological maleness. Thus they become less effective girls because they are required to think, emote and react in way their brains never predisposed them to.

Likewise there is a popular push to encourage girls to adopt male modalities of thinking. In the hopes to make mathematics and technology fields more gender equal egalitarian society will make special compensation and establish exclusive academic rewards for girls who teach themselves to override their intrinsic mental proficiencies and find intrinsic reward in adopting those of boys.

The egalitarian mindset simply denies the foundational truths that decades of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology and anthropological research indicate about our present state of intersexual relations. Inso doing they reject a complementary model and embrace an egalitarian one. Their mistake is presuming that evo-psych necessitates a biological determinism and thereby absolves an individual of personal responsibility for their behavior. It does not, but it does provide a framework that more accurately describes the mental state, sexual strategies and social environment in which men find themselves with women.

When you hear or read the trope that “women are just as sexual as men” what’s being related to you is founded in the same egalitarian root that teaches us to believe that “women are just as good at fathering as any man”. All are equal, but men’s sexuality seems a boon that egalitarian women would like to adopt.

One reason egalitarianism is an appealing cover story for feminism is because its primary goal is leveling the sexual competition playing field for all women to optimize Hypergamy at the expense of men’s own sexual strategy interests. If all is equal, if men’s basic biological impulses are reduced to shamed criminality, if women can expect men to be aroused by their perceived value of their self-defined self-worth, then all material and physiological deficits can be effectively dismissed.

Under the guise of egalitarianism, feminism has effected feminine social dominance for over half a century now.

Egalitarianism is likewise appealing to evo-psych detractors because a belief in egalitarianism should mean that men can escape their burden of performance. I touched on this in the first post of the Adaptations series. The presumption is that if the more intrinsic, ephemeral aspects of men’s higher-order thinking and personal worth is appreciated as a sexual attraction, then all deficiencies in meeting his naturalistic burden of performance can be rescinded. Game, physique, personality, status, success, achievement, etc. are superseded by his equalist belief system and this is sold to him as the new order upon which women should find him attractive.

Complementarity is the evolved interdependence between the sexes and it’s been a responsible element of how the human race has risen to be the apex species on this planet, but it doesn’t ensure an optimal breeding schedule for either sex. So long as men and women are mired in a denial of the evolved psychological differences between the sexes, their only alternative is to embrace egalitarianism.

The reason feminism hates the Red Pill – in its concrete sense – is because it more accurately predicts human behavior than feminism and equalism have ever been capable of.

Red Pill Parenting – Part II

Father-Son1

What I’m about to detail here will be a revolutionary act; I’m going to give men some prescriptive advice on how I believe they should go about raising their children from a Red Pill perspective. As most of my readers know I do my best to provide observations and connect dots, from there I expect men (and women) to form their own takes on what I’m seeing and either challenge those observations or develop some actionable practice that best suits their own circumstances.

I’ll be breaking that protocol here, but the premise still applies; what I think might be universally applicable to raising and mentoring the next generation may need to be modified for what your experience and circumstances dictate.

That said, the very idea that I would inform or instruct men (and by association women) on how I think a healthier, more durable generation of men might be developed in a Red Pill awareness is tantamount to being a hate crime today. My suggesting that boys and girls would benefit greatly from a Red Pill aware father is a frightening, seditionary act in a feminine-primary social order.

As things stand on a societal level now, just the mention of Red Pill truths in casual conversation will engender either ridicule or hostility. As Red Pill awareness spreads it will be considered subversive, particularly in a social order founded on the Feminine Imperative and feminine-primary social prioritization.

I don’t have too much positive to say about Roosh these days, but one thing I had to agree with was his recent assessment of how it’s necessary for men to meet in secret gatherings and maintain (as best as possible) a state of constant anonymity if they wish to discuss anything counter to feminine-primary social doctrine. Main stream media in feminine-primary society will characterize this need for anonymity as indicative of cowardice or a lack of conviction; bitter men just contenting themselves in their private anger and poisoning the minds of whomever will listen to them.

They need this characterization for now because men have something to lose. They fear having their bread taken away from them – the same bread that feminine-primary society expects men to provide the very women who would use it to extort a desired complacency from men. Cowardice is rooted in the fear of having something to lose. Once men become largely indifferent to that bread being forthcoming, that’s either when they snap, or that’s when they start a revolution.

ScribblerG (a.k.a. Glenn) had a good reminder for men in the last thread:

Being a dad isn’t all that great in many ways these days. At best it’s mostly thankless, but for most men they are fathering into a culture that denigrates them, laughs at them and is hagiographic of motherhood. If you think this won’t effect how your children see you as a father, you are fucking kidding yourself.

I used to ride the train back and forth to the city – leaving my home at 6:30 in the morning and returning at 7:30 or later, wondering if my daughter would ever realize all I sacrificed to provide for her and her mom? I’d wonder if she’d ever get that I sacrificed being as close to her as her mother is to her for her wellbeing? That her closeness with her mom as a result of having a stay at home mom until she was 5 was a consequence of my efforts, not her Mom’s?

Guess what – nobody wants to hear it. Nobody gives a shit what sacrifices you make to be a good father and provider – it’s all about Mom. It’s all about the kids. Dad’s are at best seen as second best Moms most of the time. And even when we are “in charge”, we can be dismissed as superfluous in myriad ways.

Many men adapt by becoming second mothers and wives in the household – and the entire culture encourages this. Try being a traditional male at parent teacher night or at the pre-school or even the Boy Scout troop…Fatherhood and a family is not what it once was either. Trust me, learn from my experience. Your kids will very likely not appreciate all you’ve done for them.

Of course, I excuse all the fundo-christian-demi-god-uber-alpha-ripped-11 inch cock-men of steel™ here from this commentary. For you guys, it’s 1956 and your life is like Wally and the Beav…

Just like men subscribe to two sets of books – old and new social rule sets that contradict the other – I think our ideas of marriage fall into this same contradiction. When marriage was a social contract and not so much a legal one involving the state, the old set of books applied well to that institution. This old set of rules about marriage and what men could expect from that largely socially-enforced institution worked well and in a complementary paradigm. From the Little House on the Prairie days up to the post-war era, the first set of books worked well with regard to marriage and fatherhood.

After the sexual revolution, the second set of books took social preeminence. Optimizing Hypergamy and all of the social and legal paradigms that make it the foundation of our present social order took priority. Yet, both men and women still cling to the old order, the first set of rules when it comes to a man’s role as a husband and a father, and simultaneously expect him to adopt and promote the feminine-primary interests of the new feminine-primary order.

Fathers are expected to follow the edicts of conventional masculinity with regards to their provisioning for a family, but are also expected to adopt, embrace and internalize their popularized role of being superfluous, ridiculous or even angry and abusively resistant to the second set of rules.

In other words, the expectation is that he should  be happy in his sacrificial role of provider, happy in his lack of appreciation for it or his presence, and happy to have the ‘village’ of society raise his children into the next crop of confused, frustrated adults while he’s doing it. He should be happy in his presence being devalued, but be held responsible for his lack of presence that his sacrifices demands.

Oh, and he should also feel a sense of smug pride when he see another man being pilloried for the same lack of his superfluous presence in his family’s life.

Raising Kids

I’m sure all of this sounds like a bridge too far for most men. Yes, the prospect of becoming a father is depressing, and I can see how these truths would make the average man despondent about becoming a new parent. However, I feel it’s incumbent upon me that I’m honest with men about what they’re up against before I advocate how to be a Red Pill aware father.

You will never be appreciated for your sacrifices, and certainly not while you’re making them. Your presence is only as superfluous as you allow it to be. While you will never be appreciated for it in any measurable sense, you will be liable for it, so my advice is to make the most of it in a Red Pill respect. Your reward, your motivation, for being a Red Pill parent and a positively masculine example in your kids’ lives needs to come from inside yourself because it will never be rewarded by a feminine-primary social order. If you don’t think you will ever find being a parent intrinsically rewarding, get a vasectomy now because it will never be extrinsically rewarding.

Understand now, the Feminine Imperative wants you to be despondent about your role.

Understand this, your presence, your influence, will only be as valuable or as appreciated as you are willing to make it to yourself. Your Red Pill aware influence in your kids’ lives needs to matter to you first, because it will never be appreciated in your time, and in fact will be actively, hostilely, be resisted by a world saturated in feminine-primacy.

Being a mother and birthing a child is a constantly lauded position today. By virtue of being a mother, women are rewarded and respected in society. Men must add fatherhood to their burden of performance just to avoid the societal default of being vilified.

The Feminine Imperative wants you to give up and allow the ‘village’ to raise your sons and daughters to perpetuate the cycle of the second set of rules. It wants you to feel superfluous; the Feminine Imperative’s maintenance relies on you feeling worthless. The reason men commit suicide at four times the rate of women is due exactly to this sense of male-worthlessness cultivated by the Feminine Imperative.

In Preventive Medicine I detail part of our present feminine-primary conditioning and how the imperative raises boys to be Betas and girls to be caricatures of Strong Independent Women®. Part of this was based on the essay Teach Your Children Well and the early ages at which this begins. The first, most primary truth you need to accept as a father is that if you don’t teach your children Red Pill truths there is an entire western(izing) world that is already established to raise them in your absence.

‘The Village’ will raise your kids if you don’t. You will be resisted, you will be ridiculed, you will be accused of every thought-crime to the point of being dragged away to jail in your imparting Red Pill awareness (in the future I expect it to be equated with child abuse). The Village will teach your boys from the most impressionable ages (5 years old) to loath their maleness, to feel shame for being less perfect than girls and to want to remake their gender-identity more like girls.

The Village will raise your daughters to perpetuate the same cycle that devalues conventional masculinity, the same cycle that considers men’s presence as superfluous and their sacrifices as granted expectations. It will raise your daughters to over-inflate their sense of worth with unearned confidence at the expense of boys as their foils. It will teach them to openly embrace Hypergamy as their highest authority and to disrespect anything resembling masculinity as more than some silly anachronism.

The good news is that for all of these efforts in social engineering, the Feminine Imperative is still confounded by basic biology and the psychological firmware evolved into us over millennia. That basic root reality is your greatest advantage as a father.

Raising Boys

I’m often asked when I believe would be the best time to introduce a boy to the Red Pill. A lot of guys with teenage sons want to hand them a copy of The Rational Male before they hit 18, or maybe when they’re 15, some even say 12 is really a good time. While it’s flattering for me to hear men tell me how they gave their teenage sons a copy of my book, I have to think that this is too late.

I’ve been a father to a teenage daughter for a while now and in my 20’s I was a mentor (big brother figure) to a young man I watched grow from a 10 year old boy to a 30’s man today. One thing I’ve learned from dealing with kids as I have is that the Feminine Imperative conditions children from the moment they can understand what’s playing on a TV or in a movie. By the time that kid is 10 they already have the ideological conditioning that came from a decade of meme’s and messaging taught to them by schools, Disney, Nickelodeon, popular music, feminine-primary parenting from their friends parents, even your own extended family members.

By the time that kid is 10 they’ve already internalized the stereotypes and social conditioning of the Blue Pill and they will start parroting these memes and behaving and believing in accordance with that conditioning. By the time they are in their tweens and beginning to socially interact with the opposite sex, the Blue Pill feminine-primary conditioning will be evident to any man with a Red Pill lens to hear and see it. That Blue Pill internalized ideology will seem natural and logical to them even though they couldn’t tell you how they came to their formative beliefs.

The time to start exemplifying Red Pill awareness in a parental capacity is before you even have kids. As I detailed in the first of these posts, an internalized Game that results from strong Red Pill awareness and a positive, dominant Frame control are imperative before you even consider monogamy. That Frame becomes the foundation for your parenting when your children come along.

I realize this isn’t exactly helpful for men who came to Red Pill awareness after their kids were in their teens, but it needs to be addressed for men considering becoming a father. Ideally you want to impart that same Red Pill awareness during a boy’s formative years. Children completely lack the capacity for abstract thought until their brains fully form and they learn to develop it. The age of 5 is the time when kids are most impressionable and learn the most, but they do so by watching behavior. So it’s imperative for a Red Pill father to demonstrate positive, conventional masculinity during these years.

Include your son in male-space, where only men are allowed to participate. Even if all he does is sit and play, it’s important for him to understand male tribalism. Eventually, as he gets older, he’ll feel more a part of that collective. In a feminine-primary world that is bent on his devaluation as a male human it’s important for him to feel valued in male-space and to institute his own male-space as he gets older.

Within this male-space your son needs to learn about his eventual burden of performance.I’d also advise you institute some kind of rite of passage for him from being a boy to being a man. There needs to be a delineation point at which his manhood is marked. This is important because it not only teaches him to value his masculinity, but also to accept the responsibilities of his burden of performance.

Most Beta men are uncomfortable even calling themselves ‘men’, so the earlier a kid understands this the better he is in accepting his manhood. The Feminine Imperative is all too ready to teach him his masculinity is a mask he wears; something he puts on and not the ‘real’ him. He needs to proudly reject this notion that his masculinity is a show.

He needs to learn that men and women are different and only deserving of earned respect, not a default respect granted to the female sex. Eventually he needs to learn to accept his own dominance and mastery in a world that will tell him his sex is a scourge on society.

Your presence in his life is an absolute necessity if you are to thwart the efforts of fem-centrism. I was asked about Red Pill fathering in my last Christian McQueen interview and my first inclination was to say do things with your son. Even if that’s playing chess, being the man, his model for masculinity is vitally important and to impart this to him you need to have a mutual purpose. As I’ve written before, women talk, men do. Men get together socially with a purpose, an action, a hobby, a sport, a creative endeavor, etc. and then they communicate while working towards that purpose.

Your son must learn this from a very early age, particularly when he’s likely to be forced into feminine-primary social structures and conditioned to communicate like girls do in school as well as in popular media. One of the tragedies of our age is a generation of Blue Pill men raising their sons to adopt feminine-primary communication preferences because they themselves had no experience with conventional masculinity. They can’t teach what they don’t understand.

Demonstrate, do not explicate is true of dealing with women, but it is also an imperative of Red Pill parenting. Your son (and daughter) needs to see his mother’s deference to your dominant Frame and beneficent authority. He needs to understand on a rudimentary level that his mother responds to your positively masculine Frame. Again this is imperative since your kids will see a much different narrative being displayed in popular culture and their schooling.

Show him how a man presents himself, how a man reacts to a threat, how a man commands a dog, how a man interacts with, and helps, other men he values. Do not think that you’ll start teaching him Red Pill awareness when he’s old enough to understand it. By then it’s too late, he’s resistant to it and thinks his Beta Game is more appropriate. Your son will follow your lead, but that must start from day one, not age 12. I have a good friend now who’s 16 year old son is literally following the same path his Beta father; he’s moved in with his estranged ex wife because he was closer to his ONEitis girlfriend. Now she’s bailed on him and he’s stuck with his neurotic mother.

The consequences of a Blue Pill conditioned mindset also start early. I’ve seen 10 year old boys despondent over not having a girlfriend. I’ve counseled a girl who’s former teenage boyfriend stabbed and killed her new boyfriend 32 times because she was his ONE. They get ONEitis because they are taught to be predisposed to it.

As your son moves into his teenage years that connection you began in his formative years should strengthen. You can begin to introduce him to Red Pill awareness, but in all likelihood you’ll notice him using his own Red Pill lens when it comes to dealing with girls. His grasping the fundaments of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, Hypergamy and how this will be used against him in the future is something imperative that he learns later.

This is the time to reinforce that Red Pill sensitivity and capitalize on his own awareness by introducing him to Red Pill ideas he wasn’t aware of. Bluntly, overtly declaring Red Pill truths might make sense to you, but plucking out bits of his own Red Pill observations and expanding on them in his teen years will probably be received better and more naturally.

One thing I know about teenage boys and girls is that if you try to tell them something profound they roll their eyes and blow you off, but if you wait for the right moment to let them come to that thing you want them to learn on their own then they’re receptive to it. Your demonstrating Red Pill awareness doesn’t stop when they’re teens.

Raising Girls

Much of what I’ve outlined for raising boys would cross over into raising a daughter, however there are some differences in approach. Exemplifying a Red Pill ideal, and demonstrations of positive, dominantly masculine Frame control are still the highest priority, but more so is the modeled behavior of the girl’s mother toward you and that Frame. If your wife resists, ridicules or mocks your Frame, this is the lesson your daughter will be taught about masculinity. You must model her perceptions of masculinity while your wife models the aspects of femininity – for better or worse.

A lot of how you approach raising a daughter can be based on your Red Pill understanding of how to deal with women, and based on much of the same basic gender-complementary foundations. The same Game principles you would use with women are actually founded on behavior sets that little girls learn and enjoy while they’re growing up. Amused Mastery is a prime example of this.

You will notice that root level Hypergamy manifests itself in girls at a very young age. In Warren Farrell’s book, Why Men Are The Way They Are he notes that girls as young as 7 already have a a definition of the (celebrity) “boys they’d like to kiss and the boys they’d like to marry.” No doubt girls’ acculturation influences their preferences, but the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks archetypes are part of their mental firmware.

As a father, your primary role will be one of modeling the provider security seeking aspect of the Hypergamous equation. While that comfort and control is necessary it tends to be a trap for most Betas. The challenge most Beta fathers fail at is embracing and owning the very necessary Alpha / Dominant role that makes up the other side of that equation.

The challenge is exemplifying Amused Mastery with your daughter, but in such a way that it balances Alpha dominance and control with rapport, security and comfort. In my post Myth of the Good Guy I make the case that adult women don’t really look for this balance in the same man. Alphas are for fucking, Betas are for long term security, and men who think they can embody both are neither sought after nor really believable. The root of this AF/BB mental separation of Hypergamous purpose-specific men can be traced back to the impression of masculinity that woman’s father set for her in her formative years.

Lean too far toward Alpha dominance and you become the asshole abuser who domineered poor mom while she was growing up. Lean too far to the Beta, permissive, passive and feminine side of the spectrum and the future men in her life will be colored by your deferring to the feminine as authority – thus placing her in the role of having to create the security she never expects men to have a real command of.

The challenge of raising a boy is modeling and exemplifying the positive, dominant masculine role you want him to boldly embrace in spite of the same fem-centric world arrayed against yourself. The challenge of raising a girl is embodying the dominant masculine man you will eventually be proud to call your son in law. Your daughter needs to be able to identify that guy by comparing him to the masculine role you set for her.

Most contemporary men (that is to say 80%+ Beta men) are very uncomfortable in asserting dominance with their daughters for fear of being perceived as misogynists according to their feminine-centric acculturation. The zeitgeist of this era’s approach to fathers parenting girls is one of walking on eggshells around their little princesses. The fear is one of avoiding instilling a crushing of their independence or limiting their future opportunities by being more permissive with girls. The gender-correct hope is that in doing so they’ll all go on to be the future doctors and scientists society needs, but that permissiveness and coddling does them no favors in the long run.

If you were uncomfortable experimenting with Red Pill concepts while you were single, you’ll be even more so in raising a daughter. The most important impression you need to leave her with is that men and women are different, but complementary to the other. She needs to know that your masculine dominance is beneficial to both her and her mother, and your personal mastery of you conditions and environment as an aid to her and the family. She needs to understand that girls and women are, sometimes, excluded from male-spaces, particularly if you also have a son. In fact it’s boon if you have a son to teach while you bring up a daughter as she’ll see his upbringing as a model for positive masculinity.