Beta Bucks

Post Selection

post-selection

Anonymous Reader on Dalrock’s thread had an interesting observation about women’s (wives’) dumbfounded response to discovering that the Beta chump they believed would be entirely optionless and adrift after they divorced, in fact, had far more SMV capital than her solipsism would allow her to acknowledge:

So, dear Lisa, you (a) had a husband but (b) decided you did not want him anymore and now (c) other women do want him? Whose fault is this, again? Great display of a version of preselection that ought to be called “post selection” (if Rollo or Heartiste or someone else hasn’t already thought of that).

Reminds me of a divorce I saw from a moderate distance a few years ago. Wife got a couple of promotions at her work, while her salesman husband just plodded along with the usual feast or famine of that business. She apparently got “married” to her job, putting in long hours serving the situational alpha men she worked for. Then at home made up for the long hours by showering attention on the kids while stiffarming “whats-his-name”. When he had an affair she was, by all accounts, surprised. When he had a second affair she divorced him. Both were churchgoing, and I agree that she had Bible-based grounds for divorce, there was no question he was cheating. But he wasn’t the roving-eye type for the first 5 to 10 years of marriage, so perhaps a certain lack of something tempted him to cheat? What could it have been?

Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds complacency.

I’ve stated in many prior thread that familiarity, comfort, rapport, vulnerability and security are all anti-seductive attributes when it come to women’s sexual response. I’m not saying those elements aren’t intrinsically good or bad, just that men shouldn’t buy the boilerplate sexual filibustering of women who would have them believe they are in anyway arousal cues for women.

As Roissy’s maxim states – “‘Gina tingles are born in the defensive crouch.”

Iron Rule of Tomassi #3

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

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

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

The problem most husbands and LTR live-in boyfriends experience in this respect is that there is no opportunity for a fresh start once that pattern of familiarity and comfort has been established and is what’s expected from him.

This principle is easy for us to understand from the man’s side, but what about the woman’s?

Anonymous’ observations here tell a broader story. Dal’s quick-hit post and the article he linked there is well worth the read, but it essentially illustrates a common regret women are forced to acknowledge when they’ve opted out of a relationship, or were opted out of by their men as a result of their protracted dissatisfaction with those women – they simply cannot fathom that the Beta man they cut loose has a sexual market value that other women would not just appreciate, but jump at, far quicker than they imagined.

Considering that 70%+ of all divorces are initiated by women, women opting out is usually the case. If you track along with the time line I presented in Preventive Medicine you can also see that this opt out (first divorce) window usually coincides with the time a man is (should be) experiencing his SMV peak.

After 7 or so years of marriage the familiarity, the routine and the comfort a woman expects from her statistically Beta husband are cemented for her. Reliable, sensible, comforting and responsible make for a great security prospect, but a boring ‘fuck prospect’. Unless that woman is casually, but frequently put into the defensive crouch (via passive dread) that man’s Archetype is set in her mind for her. His behavior is predictable and familiar, and boring to the point that she suspects no woman but her would ‘tolerate’ him.

In fact this perception is reinforced for her, not just by a fem-centric culture, but her husband’s constant self-deprecating praise of how “lucky he is to have a woman like her who’d put up with a guy like him. Haha, LOL.” In spite of all this supplication, women still affirm that man as the unexciting Beta chump who she subconsciously pegs would be entirely optionless in the SMP were (when) he to be re-released back into the wild.

Women want to get with a man that other men want to be, and other women want to fuck.

This is an easy maxim for a woman who’s single, but it takes on new imperatives when that man is fighting against the familiarity and comfort elements that come with long term monogamy and living together. That familiar complacency combined with Hypergamic social expectations makes women doubt that the man they thought other women might compete for has morphed into an optionless schlub only she would have the patience to constantly tolerate.

One of the reasons I advise against men and women shacking up is because the comfort and regularity of that living situation eventually becomes a disincentive for women to maintain a consistent sexual desire and urgency for the man she’s paired with. Women are at their ‘sexual best’ when men keep them at arms reach, and this is primarily due to the anxiety she experiences in the doubt over whether she’ll be able to consolidate on an optimized Hypergamy with that guy.

Post Selection

As Anonymous hints at, there is a form of social proof a ‘released’ man enjoys once he’s been cut from women’s Hypergamous equation. To understand how this works we need to remember that Hypergamy is fundamentally rooted in doubt:

The Abdication Imperative

Hypergamy is rooted in doubt. Hypergamy is an inherently insecure system that constantly tests, assesses, retests and reassesses for optimal reproductive options, long-term provisioning, parental investment, and offspring and personal protection viability in a potential mate. Even under the most secure of prospects hypergamy still doubts. The evolutionary function of this incessant doubt would be a selected-for survival instinct, but the process of hypergamy’s assessment requires too much mental effort to be entirely relegated to women’s subconscious. Social imperatives had to be instituted not only to better facilitate the hypergamous process, but also to reassure the feminine that men were already socially pre-programmed to align with that process.

Dumping a woman is the highest form of social proof for a man.

In no uncertain terms he demonstrates to her that he has the supreme confidence he can find another woman with better prospect than her. Even if this isn’t the pretext of the breakup, this is the message in the medium that she understands; she doesn’t measure up to his expectations.

This then is further compounded by the unconscious knowledge that it should be women who are socially in charge of the sexual selection and approval process. When a man dumps a woman he demonstrably takes that agency away from her.

However, the effectiveness of that social proof for the dumped woman is only proportional to the doubt that he may have been a better, more optimal Hypergamic choice for her. We understand the effectiveness even a fabricated perception of preselection has on women, but depending on the psychological impact a man has, post-selection and the uncertainty of his long term fitness can be so powerful it can create an Alpha Widow of her.

Hypergamous doubt makes women creatures of constant comparison. Thus, when (if) she makes another intimate connection after that breakup, the new guy is held next to the comparison of the previous one. Once that comparison is made, that post-selection value of the previous guy (or lack thereof) becomes reinforced for her.

Starting Over

Women have a biological imperative to restart the Hypergamic process far more rapidly than men when they’re younger and closer to their SMV peak. They have more time to capitalize on it.

However, once they are on the opposite side of the Wall and men are ascending to their own SMV peak, “getting over” the relationship is equated with remarriage because men have the SMV advantage. That previous husband or LTR lover has the power of selection and confirmation she no longer holds as she did in her youth.

Women have far less marketability and prospect to restart that Hypergamic process once this agency exchanges hands with men. They’ve lost on a perceived long-term investment. Thus her brooding fixates on his ease of finding a new mate, with his remarriage being the context of finalizing that break with her.

I should also add that rarely is consideration is given to the incentives and reasons for the breakup whatsoever on her part. Convenient social conventions aid her in thinking she is blameless in the circumstances that led to the split and he is heartless for “getting over’ her at all, much less quickly. We are left to presume that it’s he who should suffer the same or more. He should be pining for her, he should be regretting the split.

It’s far easier for a man to move on with new women when his benchmark for intimacy was set by a sexless marriage to an authoritarian, shaming, shrew. Maybe it’s that thought that really hurts – it was easy to get over her because the opt out for him is sooooo much better a prospect than a lifetime of having to untangle her hangups about him.

Final Thought

Bear in mind this post-selection dynamic is only effective insofar as a man’s SMV can be actualized outside of his previous relationship.

Women only contemplate whether a man has moved on from her quickly when they care to concern themselves with it. If it was she who initiated the breakup with her Beta husband/LTR women are simply indifferent to what the guy is doing a year or so down the road.

Nothing is more satisfying to a woman than to believe she’s figured a man out using her mythical feminine intuition. This works in a positive sense when a man leads her to believe she’s genuinely got inside his head, but it also works in the self-convincing negative sense when she dismisses a guy who no longer qualifies for her long term (or short term sexual) hypergamic interests.

The satisfying feminine indignation comes from convincing herself he was never really as invested as he led her to believe he was. Thus the loss of investment is converted to betrayal and becomes a source of self-righteousness despite any circumstance she contributed to the break herself.

The Quick Fix

quick_fix

Becoming the Captain of My Boat dropped this comment in the This is now thread (emphasis mine):

You know, I found the RP about a year and a half ago. I’ve been working on applying things to my life, and for the most part things are going well.

Most of the articles though are about what to avoid, what to look out for, or how to think about women when you’re in your 20’s. The difficult thing is now being aware and seeing it all around you and being married.

I see the Sandberg quote, I hear it all the time from women in one form or another, and then my wife says similar shit. Like she dated the assholes, or had to find herself. Now I’m like, shit, I’m the nice guy she married. I don’t want to be that guy.
I was the asshole in college, what the fuck happened to me and how do I fix it quick? But there is no quick, once you’re in this it’s an uphill battle, a necessary one, but an uphill battle none the less.

I read the Rational Male, I’ve read a number of the books, but it get’s tricky when you’re already in it.

My wife isn’t a terrible person, and I can see firsthand how all this applies to her, but she isn’t malicious. This is subconscious shit reinforced by all their surroundings. Hell, my own betaization was subconscious shit reinforced by my surroundings.

I can say without a doubt that if your’e not already in a LTR or married and you’re younger than 30-35 don’t get in one. Read this stuff, make yourself a better man, fuck around and “find yourself” then you can get into a LTR, because it’s much harder to take control of a ship and right the course with your now demoted wife psychologically kicking and screaming than it is to captain a boat from the get go and then find a hot, willing first mate along the way when you’re already a seasoned salty captain.

He can only speak for himself of course, but Captian’s situation is not an uncommon one. Far too many men discover too late that the great relationship they swore they had with their wives was founded on their having fulfilled a Blue Pill set of achievements.

This belief is part of the plan Hypergamy had intended for him to follow, but as women’s sexual strategy has become more visible (if not outright flaunted) to him he begins to see the code in the Matrix he’s been a willing participant of. The machinations of Hypergamy are unignorable, or soon will be, but it’s one thing to be single and young enough to be able to leverage that plan to your own benefit when you still have the options and maneuverability to do so – it’s quite another to become aware of your own participation in it once you’re committed legally, emotionally and familially to going along with the plan.

For men, one of the more unfortunate consequences of Open Hypergamy is the degree of comfort their wives have in revealing the part their husbands play(ed) in their sexual strategy. As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, in a previous social order it was simply a matter of course that women should keep the mechanics of Hypergamy secret from the men they paired with in the long term.

Amongst themselves women were (and are) very open and frank about their sexual exploits both in the short term sexual and the long term provisional. I’ve always been convinced that women’s insistence on proliferating the trope of men’s “locker room talk” or ‘Humble-Bragging’ about their sexual conquests is a distraction from their own peer clutch groups congratulating themselves on the successes of their sexual strategy.

In a prior social climate keeping these ‘hen house’ Hypergamous revelations to themselves made sense. There was little point to informing the men they depended upon for parental investment and security that they were really the best available option to be their means to an end.

Not so in the present social climate. There is an eager brazenness on the part of wives to openly explain the part their husbands play(ed) in her Hypergamy. I’d attribute most of this to a social climate that encourages women to believe they have nothing to lose by doing so, but there’s also a want to participate (even if vicariously) in the single-woman peer clutch that has openly embraced revealing the ins and outs of Hypergamy publicly.

It’s a rough transition for men to have their Blue Pill idealisms dispelled by the Red Pill community, but it’s far more devastating for men steeped in Blue Pill merit badge accomplishments to have their wives openly confirm what the Red Pill aware have been trying to awaken him to for some time.

Open Hypergamy isn’t just a game for single women; it’s made its way into contemporary marriages. It’s now part of the egalitarian equalist expectation of men in marriage – that in order for men to truly be men worthy of marrying a co-equal ‘modern woman’ he must dispense with any notion of ownership of her, forgive the worst of her Hypergamous indiscretions as part of her “finding herself” and then accept his role as the Plan B, Beta provider for her in the nick of time to help her fulfill her sexual strategy in the long term. All of this coming with no expectation of any reciprocal value on a woman’s part – in fact to believe so is tantamount to marital rape.

I see the Sandberg quote, I hear it all the time from women in one form or another, and then my wife says similar shit. Like she dated the assholes, or had to find herself. Now I’m like, shit, I’m the nice guy she married. I don’t want to be that guy.

I was the asshole in college, what the fuck happened to me and how do I fix it quick? But there is no quick, once you’re in this it’s an uphill battle, a necessary one, but an uphill battle none the less.

This is the revelation men in this situation find themselves in. Even the men who may have fulfilled the role of “a great living dildo” for women in their 20s can still find that their role may have shifted to that of ‘non-threatening relationship material guy’ who she’d never have sex with on the same night she met him.

Now granted, all of this comes back to the subconscious expectation of cuckoldry women place on the men they cast in the passive, supportive role. Women don’t expect the Beta Bucks men they pair with will ever be the Alpha Fucks men their biochemistry predisposes them to want to fuck. But ‘great Dad’ must believe he was chosen as her best option, her best choice for the balance of the two. Only later, once she’s consolidated on him with family, children, financial and professional liabilities to her, is she comfortable in letting him in on how the game was really played.

As I said, the truth of that is hard enough to hear from Red Pill writers on the internet, but to have it viscerally confirmed by a wife without the social filters of an older social climate is a much harder pill to swallow than the red one.

The Fix is In

That sounds like an awful lot of gloom and doom doesn’t it? I can’t speak for Captain, but a woman delivering the confirmation that a guy is really a Blue Pill consolation prize is rarely couched in so melodramatic and sinister delivery. I’ve had many men (mostly disillusioned husbands from MMSL) relate similar stories as Captain’s and none of them were screaming confessions of deceit on the part of their wives. Most were simply matter of fact comments in passing that aligned with their suspicions about themselves.

I hate to harp on Pixar’s Inside Out cartoon, but it’s the simple everyday open Hypergamy that goes unnoticed by Blue Pill idealists. It takes a Red Pill lens to even be sensitive to it, but when you see how casually the wife/mother in this movie fantasizes about her widowed Alpha, the Alpha fantasy she couldn’t consolidate on, and how frustrated she is every time her Beta husband fails a shit test, you begin to understand the passive nature of an overt Hypergamy in women.

Women get frustrated that Blue Pill men Just Don’t Get It. The Blue Pill idealism blinds them to having the insight needed to realize the role they’re supposed to play and the frustration comes from their being over-supportive and over-engaging in order to make things right for their women. Blue Pill men will graciously ‘play equal’ in their marriages in order to live up to the equalist goal-set they were taught would pay off for them for a lifetime if left uncheck or unchallenged.

It’s my belief that wives will use a married form of open, or certainly casually overt, revelations of Hypergamy in order to rouse a man to a Red Pill awareness in the hopes that he’ll Just Get It.

And to answer the inevitable question, yes, this is a meta-scale shit test on the part of wives. However, it’s important remember that Hypergamy is rooted in existential and life-security doubt for women – “Is he really the best I can do?” – and that the shit tests associated with this vary depending on the influences of a woman’s phase of maturity as well as which part of her menstrual cycle she happens to be in.

Revealing the machinations of Hypergamy to a husband has potentially disastrous consequences, or at least it used to. As I said before, women generally don’t sprout horns and a forked tail and say “Ha ha, sucker!” when they reveal Hypergamy; it’s usually a casual inference. If a Blue Pill husband isn’t Getting It about his participation in women sexual strategy from outside means (media, social networks) then the passive or overt shit tests about his awareness of it need to be implemented.

In a previous social order making men aware of this could just as likely result in a woman being divorced or ostracized socially. Today, in men’s never ending quest to satisfy “equalism’s” approval, men are less likely to even believe their role when a woman confirms it for them. Ego-investments meets cognitive dissonance. Not only does he not get it his ego refuses to get it.

This then is the pathetic state of 80%+ of contemporary men. Men so inured by Blue Pill conditioned idealism that they’ll entertain ‘open marriages‘ in order to make themselves ‘better husbands‘ according to an emasculated equalist ideal.

Help! Quick!

So now we come to a situation like Captains – one where that husband Just Gets It only he’s gotten the message, received the awareness, from his wife (either passively or overtly) and he’s both pissed off at his state and equally wants to improve it. I expect most men would advise Cap to sack up and dump that bitch; and they’d probably be right in that assessment. She was duplicitous and then felt so self-assured in her position (reinforced by feminine primary social influences) that she was comfortable in revealing it to him. What’s he gonna do about it, right?

The right answer is to preemptively detonate the marriage. When you consider he’ll be cast in the role of villain no matter who files for divorce (he’s an asshole, or he’s the asshole who couldn’t meet her needs) why not, right? Any kids, any family discord, certainly the financial liabilities, should all be small shrift, collateral damage, when we look at this in terms of justice. It’s just revenge for her double-cross.

And yet that’s not what the vast majority of men in Cap’s situation first consider. Their first thought is “How do I fix this? I’ve lost Frame! How do I get it back fast! Help?” For all of the duplicity inherent in Hypergamy, for all of the insult that comes from a wife confirming he’s her Beta ‘sure thing’ (not the ‘hawt’ college asshole), that guy still wants to make lemonade from lemons, knowing full well she deserves piss.

That husband wants to still be all things, the mythical Good Guy balance, to his wife. There’s something in men’s romantic natures that wants this to work for themselves and in spite of women who fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate it.

The first question I think men in this situation need to confront is whether it’s worth the effort to attempt to change their wives’ impression of them. If you’re 35 and (should be) entering your SMV peak years, this open Hypergamy revelation is particularly tough to accept since it’s likely you’ve invested 7-8 years in a woman who’s just told you what you are to her (and confirming it’s not who you are that’s of primary importance to her). As I’ve stated many times before, going from a Beta character to an Alpha (or more Alpha) one is always an uphill battle:

How many of the simpering, socially conditioned, Betatized men these women seeth about would make for believable Alphas once they had a red pill epiphany? It is precisely because of this impressionistic, binary solipsism that women will never be happy with ‘fixing’ their Beta. This is why he has to Just Get It on his own.

It is a far better proposition to impress a woman with an organic Alpha dominance – Alpha can only be a man’s dominant personality origin. There is no Beta with a side of Alpha because that side of Alpha is NEVER believable when your overall perception is one of being Beta to begin with. This is why I stress Alpha traits above all else. It’s easy, and endearing to ‘reveal’ a flash of Beta sensitivity when a woman perceives you as predominantly Alpha. If your personality is predominantly Beta, any sporadic flashes of Alpha will seem like emotional tantrums at best, character flaws at worst.

Women may love the Beta, but they only respect the Alpha.

That’s not to say a real transformation isn’t possible, but rather it’s a question of whether the juice will ever be worth the squeeze. There is no ‘quick fix’, no magical formula that will reverse Frame to your favor. Even if you won the lottery tomorrow, you’d still be a Beta with more money to your openly Hypergamous wife now. Frame establishment (not re-establishment if you never had it to begin with) takes time and active, practicable Red Pill awareness.

As I was telling Goldmund in my interview, that awareness needs to become a man’s internalized nature. He needs to become his own self-important mental point of origin; that and a Red Pill aware nature take time to develop. Anyone telling you they have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ Red Pill solution that ‘guarantees results in your marriage’ is selling you something.

I say they’re selling you something because of one simple truth – no quick fix that could make you seem more Alpha, more like the asshole college guy your wife loved to fuck back in the day will ever be believable to her if it happens overnight. On a root, hindbrain level, your Beta designation was set for your wife when she was having her Epiphany Phase. She knows and is comfortable with what she expects your nature and your character to be.

As I illustrated in Archetypes , women need consistency in behavior – they expect you to be Beta and are so comfortable in that assessment that they feel no guilt and have no fear in revealing to you the role you play for her. Thus, any radical shift in that comfort doesn’t seem genuine, and in fact it seems childish that you wont accept your designation.

So, is it worth it? I think my advice in this instance would be this:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #7
It is always time and effort better spent developing new, fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to reconstruct a failed relationship. Never root through the trash once the garbage has been dragged to the curb. You get messy, your neighbors see you do it, and what you thought was worth digging for is never as valuable as you thought it was.

Once your wife has openly revealed your part in the plan, you’ve effectively broken up. Logistically that may not be the case, but I think most guys need to see this for what it is; a rejection of a husband’s authority, masculinity, his decisiveness and his capacity to read the nuances in behavior and a society that’s been (sometimes literally) screaming to him to Just Get It.

Your wife’s garbage can was dragged to the curb by your wife’s admissions, only the trash truck never comes for it because you’re committed to that can staying on the curb until you walk away from it. If you go digging through it to find what you think is valuable, prepare to get real dirty and look for a long time.

You’ve effectively been ‘friend zoned’ in your marriage. You may still have sex, you may still share special moments, but never forget, her confessions make you ‘just a friend’ in your marriage.

 

*Standard disclaimer: Yes, men should forego marriage altogether and/or stringently vet women for virginity, homemaking and childrearing. Importing wives from third world countries is duly noted. Rollo Tomassi has been married for 19 years to a magical unicorn he found after being a semi-pro rock star and lives an idyllic life of riches and extravagance. NAWALT. Your milage may vary. See dealer for details.

This is now

this_is_now

Razorwire had another great comment about the “wait for me at 30” social convention that was this week’s topic (emphasis mine):

The thing with the “wait for me” or “in x years” lie is that it truly does reveal the pervasive dominance of the Feminine Imperative (FI). Sure, an 18 y/o woman will drop this on her high school beta BF as a kind of preemptive moral relief from confronting her true sexual agenda (alpha fux) but what I find to be worse – through my own experience, is how the lie is not just the cagey maneuvering of a woman in her sexual peak but rather something all women invoke with the full backing of the entire supporting cast.

Its not just the individual woman dropping this pretty little lie, but it is the how the lie is supported by the entire culture and propagated such that this little lie becomes the big lie, which is that her sexual strategy must remain paramount, her magical journey of womanhood must not be subordinated or impeded in any way by a man – or men, or even her own choices.

So even by 18, she has learned early and often that these little lies are not like most lies; they don’t lurk about like so many contingent liabilities, or like writing bad cheques about town that will soon enough come back to bite her. No they are more like swiping her EBT card, fully backed by the FI.

Its not coming out of her moral account, so the weight of these lies are carried by the recipient. And not only is he expected to accept this charge but he is actually paying for it on the other end as well through the various extractions and taxes the FI upholds.

It is at this other end where the little lie turns big; it becomes too hard to ignore, when the other Jimmy Choo falls. When a man actually gets to that point “in ten years” and has watched as the truth reveals itself over and over in the interim he is still expected to accept her EBT without hesitation.

He is again asked to accept the lie that “those mistakes/other men/experiences made her who she is today” that she is “finally ready” and thus he should see this as equity accrued to him.

The lie on the font end is a lesson learned. But it is the fact that the lie is perpetuated over all of those years and choices, only to be eventually re-heated and served up lukewarm when she decides to change lanes that is so damaging.

And the normalcy whitewashed over this is astounding, to the point in which a man might hear his own mother instructing him to accept it for all kinds of reasons and rationales that pave over his own experiences and observations. He might also get his ear bent by his dutiful beta husband friends, parroting similar platitudes of man-up. It can be a solitary place for a man, residing at the other end of the lie.

There’s more to the comment, but this was the grist of it I wanted to address. I’ll confess I had a hunch that if I let the comment thread go on long enough some good brother would scoop me on this next post. Razorwire didn’t disappoint.

More so, the very next comment by Adam Man added some more cement to the mix:

I’ve been seeing this picture pop up in my facebook feed

beautiful

Do women really believe this? Apparently yes. If not for Rollo and Dalrock, I would have had no idea that intelligent (I’m convinced there are many intelligent women) women actually believe this.

Are women really that clueless? I feel like I need to ask this every month to be reminded that there are many many clueless people out there, but stuff like the picture above is absurd.

Tropes and memes like this are only absurd if, as a man, you haven’t accepted the most salient part (bolded) of what Razorwire observed in his comment, her sexual strategy must remain paramount. This is the essence of the feminine primacy I’ve explained in countless posts, but it bears repeating that this primacy is firmly root in 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.

Not to belabor it yet again, but it will also serve my point here to restate the Sandbergian declaration of Open Hypergamy as well:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

I’m contrasting these two points to illustrate the circumstances men will find themselves in when they arrive at the point at which women will find themselves the most necessitous in consolidating their own sexual strategy (Hypergamy) in the long term.

I mentioned in That was then that the Break Phase is a very critical point for a young man’s life-decision making due to his Blue Pill conditioning and Disney naiveté about where he ought to serve women’s interests best. Naturally this is a precarious time because, for the majority, those young men are predisposed to sublimate their own ambitions and sacrifice their best interest because they cling to a Blue Pill hope; a hope that those sacrifices will engender a young woman’s attraction and she’ll reciprocate with something like his misguided concept of a mutual love.

The Plan

That was then. Now at 30 and (hopefully) with a learned and earned degree of merit, success, developed judgement, character and a reasonably well kept physique, a man finds himself in a position like no other – his options and agency to enjoy the attentions of women seem to suddenly be at an apex.

The planning women had at 19 when they told him to “wait for me at 30” now becomes more urgent as she becomes more viscerally aware of the Wall.

She knew this day would come when she was just entering into her peak SMV years.

As I’ve outline many times, women between the ages of 29 and 31 will enter the Epiphany Phase in which the rationalizations of their 20’s Sandbergian plan sexual priorities conflicts with the provisioning necessity and parental investment needs necessary for her long term security.

For men entertaining women embroiled in their Epiphany Phase inner conflicts, not only is this a very confusing phase for the uninitiated Beta, but it is also an equally precarious period with regard (once again) to the consequences of his life’s decisions with her. Most men find themselves players in women’s meta-sexual strategy at this time because they believe that their perseverance has finally paid off. All of that sacrifice and personal achievement has finally merited him the genuine interest of a “quality woman”.

For the men who never learn a Red Pill awareness what they fail to understand is that it’s at this point they’re are expected to abandon their own sexual strategy in order to complete that of the (now Epiphany Phase) woman they’re considering a pairing with. Whether they were literally asked to wait for a woman until she was 30, the effect is the same, they have waited their turn, they have waited to be of service, they have waited to fulfill a feminine primary sexual imperative.

You’ll notice I’ve bolded “over time” in Sandberg’s quote. This is an important, and not so subtle, detail to consider in the selling of a mandated and feminine-correct strategy to men.

The plan was never to find a man who “wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.” The plan was to create and ensure a Beta provider is waiting for her when she needs him most – one pre-whipped and pre-willing to forgive the indiscretions of her fucking the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys, on her ‘journey of self-discovery’.

To effect this, not only must he be convicted of his righteous purpose in that plan, he’s got to be convinced that when he arrives at this juncture in life “nothing is sexier” than him. His Beta, Blue Pill conditioned ignorance about his true role in this planning is of the highest importance.

In prior generations, the ones before the sexual revolution, the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies could be balanced in both sexes mutually compromising those strategies to ensure the complementary benefit of both men and women. Those days are no more. They’ve been replaced with men’s planned (subconscious and aware) abdication to women’s Hypergamous sexual strategy. That compromise in strategy has been replaced with women’s solipsistic expectation that men will, by default and by right, abandon their own sexual strategy and sublimate their own self-interests to ensure the strategies and interests of women.

Red Pill awareness and contingent strategies on men’s part are the only recourse to this ‘plan’.

Our Sisters’ Keeper

sister's_keeper

“Men are to blame for women’s behavior. The Feminine Imperative only has as much power as men have allowed it to have. Hypergamy (open or otherwise) wouldn’t be the unrestrained social juggernaut it’s become without men’s complicity or accomplice.”

This quote is a go-to rationalization I read a lot from women just coming to terms with their first taste of the Red Pill. Unfortunately it’s also become a common refrain among certain sets in the manosphere; this rationale is usually particular to the moral absolutist strains of the manosphere.

When I read it from women it’s kind of ironic considering it usually comes from women who share in the same moral absolutism, who were “so different when they were in college”, but they’ve had their Epiphany and “got right with God.” They often cling to the Strong Independent® identity for themselves, but turn over a rock and show them the visceral, observable, ugly truth of unfettered Hypergamy and then, then it’s men’s partial or total responsibility for fostering women’s conditions.

It becomes men’s fault for not having the fortitude and presence of mind to correct them when they needed it – never mind the lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning that taught them judging women made them misogynistic assholes. I understand axiom that men and women get the men and women they deserve, but I wanted to explore this blame game dynamic a bit more.

From Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany:

The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.

As I was writing the Adaptations series it occurred to me that men on the ends of both the Alpha and Beta spectrum adapt their own sexual strategies in accord with the sexual marketplace and how that environment dictates the approach to what seems the most efficient.

As I stated in the last post, Hypergamy is nothing if not pragmatic, and efficient. However, men’s adapting to the “market” dictates of Hypergamy has to be equally efficient if that guy is to fulfill his own sexual imperative. Pragmatism doesn’t have time for how things should be. You make the best play with what’s in front of you.

Just to illustrate, for about 25 years or so, popular culture strongly pointed men towards a sexual strategy that could be defined as Beta Game. Play nice, respect a woman by default, be supportive of her self-image and ambitions to the sacrifice of your own, don’t judge her and do your utmost to identify with the feminine, was the call to action that, deductively, should make a man more attractive to a woman.

Furthermore, the intrasexual combat amongst men for sexual qualification was (at least ostensibly) focused on out-supporting, out-sympathizing, out-emoting and out-identifying with the feminine more so than other men. To set oneself apart from “other guys” the seemingly most strategic tact was to accept what women said they wanted from men. To pragmatically effect this men gladly joined the chorus of ridiculing conventional masculinity; denouncing and resisting the very element that would in fact have set them apart from the nebulous “other guys“.

So while this is an illustration of men’s deductive pragmatism in their adapting to the SMP, it’s also an illustration of how that adaptation can work against men’s best interests. Between the 80s, 90s and into the early 2000s this adaptation involved men following women’s lead to systematically turn conventional, positive masculinity into ridiculous or gay-associations of “macho-ness”. Later, defining the very idea of masculinity would progress from ambiguousness to women being the sole authority of what masculinity should mean to a man.

Women and Moral Agency

For as long as I’ve read and commented on Christo-Manosphere blogs a common thread has cropped up again and again; the debate as to whether women have the same moral agency or the same accountability for it as men. I’ve always found it fascinating because for all my dealing in cold harsh observable facts I’ve never paused to consider that women might have some excusable reason for their ethically challenged behavior. In my own estimate Hypergamy isn’t inherently bad or good – it just depends on whether you find yourself on the sharp end of it.

My point here isn’t to reheat that debate, but rather to see how it feeds into the rationale that men are in some way responsible for what contemporary women have become, and how they’ll progress if men don’t assume some responsibility for women’s behaviors.

Hypergamy is pragmatic, but it’s also inherently duplicitous. It’s unjust and unforgivable to a guy who doesn’t measure up to his burden of performance. When you consider the War Brides dynamic it’s downright reprehensible, but we have to also consider the pragmatism in that dynamic. From a male perspective we want to apply masculine concepts of honor and justice to women’s action – and in the past there was a high price to pay for infractions of it – but are we presuming our concept of justice is one that’s universally common to that of women?

Much in the same way we were Blue Pill conditioned to presume that our idealistic concept of love was mutually shared by women I would propose that men’s concepts of justice, honor, and (from an intrasexual perspective) respect are dissimilar from those of women.

For women, whatever actions serve Hypergamy are justifiable actions.

All that needs to be sorted out is reconciling those action with the concept of justice held by men. In the intersexual arena, what best serves men’s imperatives is justice. Up until the sexual revolution the balance between the sexes’ concepts of justice was mitigated by mutual compromise – each had something to lose and something to gain by considering the other sex’s imperatives.

For roughly the past 70 years this balance between the two concepts has listed heavily to the feminine. Our age has been defined by women’s unilateral and ubiquitous control of Hypergamy, and as such it is women’s sexual imperatives that is biologically and sociologically setting the course for future generations.

Along with that unprecedented control comes the prioritizing of women’s concept of justice above that of men’s. We can see this evidenced in every law, social convention or social justice movement that entitles women to rights and privileges that free them of any accountability for the negative consequence their Hypergamously based behavior would hold them to in a concept of justice that men would have.

I would also argue that women’s inherent solipsism reinforces this separation of concepts of justice between the sexes.

Rivelino had a good take on this on Twitter:

1 The woman is always the victim

2 Nothing is her fault

3 She is not responsible for her actions

4 A man is to blame

To which I’ll add a 5th: Any fault is always a ‘strength’.

The problem I see in assigning the blame of women’s behavior to men’s lack of control is that, presently, men have no real control nor does men’s concept of justice align with that of women. There’s a manosphere idiom that says women are the gatekeepers of sex while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. I’m not sure I completely agree with that.

That’s not to be defeatist, or an endorsement of a MGTOW course of action, but it is to say that if a man has neither the sex appeal to be a short term sexual prospect nor the provisioning appeal to be a long term investment, women feel entirely justified in acting in the best interests of Hypergamy and controlling his capacity for commitment as well.

And yes, that’s pretty fucked up if you, again, find yourself on the sharp end of it. Men’s adapting to the intersexual conditions set by women isn’t some deterministic prospect, but the idea that the mass majority of men would be responsible for the state women find themselves in is ludicrous. There will always be men willing to accept the sexual dictates of women because it serves their breeding imperatives. It’s good for him personally and it’s good for the species.

There will never be some global Lysistrata where men organize in solidarity, promising not to fuck another woman until they comply with demands that would place the Masculine Imperative above that of the feminine’s. Our own biology guarantees it.

Personal Responsibility

On a final note here, whenever I delve into the ethical implications of Red Pill awareness I invariably run into the personal responsibility equation. I do my best to make as coldly rational an observation of dynamics I see and allow my readers to make their own judgements. However, those observation are never intended to excuse the behaviors men and women find themselves prone to acting out.

There is always a want on the part of either sex to see their concept of justice enacted on those who would act against it. Thus you get honor killing in the Muslim world, and you have men’s access to the DNA testing of children they suspect aren’t their own denied in the “best interest of the child.”

So are men to blame for the conditions they find their women in? Are we our sisters’ keepers, hamstrung by our own culpability to actually help them be better women? Or do they bear the responsibility to conform to our perspective of justice and police the worst impulses of a Hypergamy most are only peripherally aware of?

 

Hats Off to the Bull

open_hypergamy_cartoon

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

The following is a story from the Red Pill subredd:

My all too true story goes like this: years ago in my divorce my wife basically stopped having sex with me. The lack of sex was in line with her seemingly having a problem with anything I did (be it how I dressed, how I told jokes, and more). …Note: sex was once every two months or so if that.

I tried to talk to her about how it seemed we just weren’t getting along that well. She said we were getting along just fine. The only problem was me. Per my wife I had UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS about married life after 15 years of being together and with kids running around. Her work demands also helped make sex a low priority for her. She was too tired in the evening. The kids were up in the morning. The weekends were needed to catch up on house stuff and spend time with the kids. Vacations were also “kid” time. The twist she put on it was DIDN’T I LOVE THE KIDS?

Another problem I had (per my wife) was that was I was TOO SENSITIVE. My “whining” about the lack of sex and closeness was proof of this.

[Game note: If I were to consider another Iron Rule of Tomassi it would be this: Never complain, whine, negotiate, or otherwise attempt to appeal to a woman’s reason by explaining your need for sex, intimacy or “closeness”. Nothing demonstrates lower value and reconfirms a woman’s Beta perception of you than openly complaining, or explaining, about your sexless status.

This is not exclusively for married men. Rank Beta men will often make these “dryspell appeals” to female friends who then talk to their other friends and pass on your DLV impression to them.]

Unfortunately, I bought her story line and internalized it. I self-censored, essentially stopping my complaining about no sex and just accepted it. I was less accepting of her poor day-to-day treatment of me but even on that point I tried not to complain too much (not wanting to come across as “whiny”).

And I was pro-active about trying to make our marriage better. I tried my best to be positive about things. I even kept a diary to keep myself honest. I did more chores around the house. I more and more let her have things her way. And I was already in quite good physical shape. I made myself even more so.

And the end result of all this? Turns out my wife had been having secret affairs for years. She was having sex 4 or 5 times a week with her lovers (lunch time, quickies after work in a park, the beach locker, the driveway at night, etc.) Her story line on “my problems” had mostly just been bullshit to keep me at bay so she could continue her secret affairs. As she told me at the tail end of our divorce in a moment of candor, the “forbidden fruit” of extramarital sex was “very exciting”. Her longest term lover (3 years) had just been a play thing and only ended when he asked her to marry him (not realizing he was also being “cheated” on with another lover my wife had).

Next up is TRM reader Razorwire who came strong with this comment from the Adaptations II thread:

[…] I’d say by now the societal and personal risks are negligible for pretty much any decision made by women. So these days, the delay of the beta-bucks model is extended to encompass a starter marriage or having children. The cuckold window is wide open.

I’ve seen this in fellow genXers who actually married young (by todays standards) but of course those men turned out to be jerks or were too irresponsible or selfish (all of the things that got her wet) so they divorced and she quickly locked down the beta-bux who was likely her “friend” back in college or some “nice” co-worker she met in her three-year career with the insurance company.

I went to one such wedding a couple of summers ago. Now that they have a kid and she’s realized the full potential of the AF/BB transition, she can’t (or doesn’t bother to) hide her disdain for his niceness and general lack of alpha behavior. He’s a dead man walking.

On that note, I caught a trailer of an upcoming Will Ferrell film: “Daddy’s Home.” Frames it up nicely.

While I’m sure they will have some hollywood make-believe ending in which the biological dad realizes his loss, has to confront manhood (as defined by the FI), and is jealous/admiring of the stepdad for his honorable provisioning of the kids, the interesting part of the trailer was how it focused on the two “dads” competing for the love and attention of the kids. I’m sure it is funny, but also telling.

Not only is the Sandberg stepdad supposed to be a just-in-time dad to fulfill the equalist needs of the post-wall (and in this case – post reproduction) wife, but he is also expected to pedestalize and perform for the offspring of the cad in order to earn (and keep) his place as the settle-down guy in the eyes of the wife. He must keep winning his way through the consolation bracket for a wife who has not just achieved the AF/BB transition, but has done so after capturing the genetics of the Alpha. He doesn’t even “get” the beta bucks prize of breeding.

The dwindling societal pressure to honor marital commitments and minimal shame of divorce has allowed the delay of beta bucks to blow past birth control in terms of prevention into what is now birth control in terms of actualizing female preference for the AF offspring – with rapidly decreasing risk/impact on her ability to secure the Beta Bux stepdad or post-baby-daddy husband (because now marriage means something to her.)

With, of course, big daddy gov’t as a stand in. But I’d reckon that the attractive single moms are not struggling at all to parlay into BB.

Because they aren’t his kids the stepdad’s burden of performance includes purchasing/exchanging resources for the children’s love which is one more condition he must continually meet in order to maintain her conditional love. Talk about a fleeting proposition.

Peruse any online dating site and you will see the teaser advertising for this coming from all single moms. It’s really just “must love dogs” on crack but often with more bait n switch mechanisms.

Meanwhile the perpetual competition (between you and him) merely deepens the resource pool for her to leverage into her lifestyle and security.

One man is operating under the threatpoint of divorce, the other under the legal extortive aspects of the post-divorce financial fatherhood model. Both must pay to play. Both are subject to her approval, her terms – backed by the social and legal structure. As such, neither are actually fathers, but just offshoots of motherhood channeled through provisioning and conditional exchanges.

I’d say even with the extensive provisioning (the kids in this flick have it all), the kids are still getting the shit end of it. Two marginalized dads is still less than one Father, one marriage. They are just being indoctrinated into the consumerist, fem-centric, self-indulgent model of modern marriage.

A mom who goes full AF/BB with kids in tow may get sold as the heroines journey, but it still strikes me as deeply selfish.

We had an interesting discussion in this thread about modern cuckoldry and the rise of it becoming ‘fetishized’ for men as some new form of ‘alternative’ lifestyle. I’ll get into the grisly biological nuts and bolts of this later, but before I do the practical reasonings for a societally acceptable cuckoldry need to be highlighted.

I chose Razorwire’s comment and the story above to illustrate a fundamental Red Pill truth – Hypergamy is nothing if not pragmatic.

In a larger respect, a woman optimizing Hypergamy follows a predictable schedule, but as Razorwire points out, on a psychological level it also builds fail-safe contingencies into that schedule. Root level, largely subconscious, survival/parental investment insecurities and long term insurances against them drives this pragmatism. Thus we see operative social conventions carefully prepared to excuse and absolve women’s duplicitous behaviors in both a social and personal scope.

What benefits a female sexual strategy is forgivable and prudent in a fem-centric social order no matter what the personal consequences are. Women’s default victimhood status is their strongest insurance against those consequences while what benefits men’s sexual strategy is characterized as selfish, juvenile or criminal. These characterizations, and the social conventions that are an extension of them, are part of the pragmatism of Hypergamy.

When you look at the time line I presented in the Preventative Medicine book and series, and you get to the stages just before and just after a woman’s Epiphany Phase – the phase at which a woman’s subconscious understanding that her SMV decline has begun in earnest – you begin to see a bigger picture; a meta overview of the necessity of keeping Blue Pill men ignorant of their long term role in that strategy.

While women increasingly embrace Open Hypergamy and become increasingly more confident of their capacity to satisfy both sides of it (AF/BB) due to a presumed expectation for men to also openly support it, there comes less expectation to try to optimize Hypergamy with only one man.

The Future of Hypergamy is Cuckoldry

The following quote came from a fantastic essay one of Heartiste’s readers, Chris, submitted regarding the recent gay marriage ruling:

I don’t know many men who would sign up to an institution where the partners are expected/morally obliged to be emotionally faithful but not sexually faithful. It is much easier for women to get casual sex than men, so any man signing himself up to that deal would be signing himself up for cuckoldry and cuckoldry is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a man pursuing a long-term mating strategy, (and it is the evolved moral norms surrounding the long-term mating strategy which marriage as a cultural institution is/was developed around/for.)

Of course, if people became more knowledgeable about evo-bio/evo-psych and instead started calling marriage essentially what it is, the social-codification of the long-term mating strategy in humans, then this concern wouldn’t really matter. (No worrying about importing norms anti-thetical to the reproductive interests of one party in the relationship and subsequently which disincentivizes the pursuit of the strategy from that party as its definition is strictly evo-bio/evo-psych.)

In The Myth of the Good Guy I put forth the idea that while women would ideally like to have both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy satisfied by the same man, women today don’t even have the expectation that this is in anyway possible, much less is it preferable to them anymore. The expectation becomes one of the Sandberg plan; expect to bang the bad boys, the Alphas and the thrill providers while your SMV is high, and expect a good, persistent and reliable ‘Dad’ to be ready to forgive and forget all that before you’re 30.

What Chris digs into in that essay isn’t so much about gays being married, but rather the fundamental restructuring of the nature of marriage. Religious issues only serve as a convenient distraction, the nuts and bolts of it is that this edict fundamentally restructures the legal aspects of male/female marriage. When this restructuring questions and impedes the access to long-term resource provisioning for divorced women (initiators of 70+% of divorces), that’s when you’ll see a truly misandric inequality in hetero vs. homosexual marriage arrangements. Men will still need to be forced into indenturement and forced to cooperate with a binding commitment to Hypergamy in the face of alternative marriages not based on monogamy.

Indeed, what man would sign up for that arrangement? Particularly in an era when women (not the Red Pill) blatantly lay bare the duplicity of their sexual strategies.

Limiting Dick

Around the time I was writing the second book I’d gotten into a Twitter debate with several feminists on a hashtag called #askmenanything or something to that effect. The pretense was of course to “ask men” all the insipid meme questions and answer them for men with feminist boilerplate. Once the Red Pill forums and manosphere proper got involved the tag quickly switched footing and feminists lost interest.

It was during one of these exchanges that I’d quoted Heartiste’s maxim from the start of this post to a particular feminist; Feminism’s end goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

Her response was an incredulous, “So you think all feminism is about is limiting dick?!”

It was of course the type of simple dismissive I’ve come to expect from the fem-powerment generation, but it sums up the dynamic pretty well. It’s always been my take that feminism in all of its waves has always been another social arm of the Feminine Imperative; which has always been an imperative driven by the best interests of optimizing women’s Hypergamous choices.

So yes, feminism is in fact about ‘limiting dick’ by socially, legislatively, personally and psychologically facilitating the selecting out and opting in on what best serves a woman’s short term and long term sexual strategy needs – throughout her entire life, not just around her Epiphany Phase. She needs the Alpha bull for his raw sexuality, dominance and confidence, and she needs the Beta comfort, investment and reliability that her bull is unwilling or unable to give her.

In this new age of proactive and reactive cuckoldry, men are expected to put up and shut up with playing the role of one or the other. In our thread conversation about cuckold fetishes the idea was put out that there’s some sick or deviant mindset in which a man gets off on watching his wife get pounded by another man. Keep in mind the possibility that the rise in popularity of cuckold porn may be an extension of this new paradigm.

The cuckold fetish narrative follows the same Hypergamous script as any other “alternative lifestyle”. As I mentioned in the Adaptation series, even within the ostensibly Free Love paradigm the same Hypergamous imperative was played out. In cuckold porn there is always an Alpha bull, a ‘superior’ sexual competitor that fucks that man’s wife; an inferior Beta sexual partner is never the tingle generating center of that fantasy. Thus that husband plays his expected passive, supportive role within that “fantasy” and thus is that wife’s dualistic Alpha Fucks sexual strategy completed.

That’s the messy nuts and bolts of it, but it’s all too easy to get caught up in the sensation of our blood boiling in righteous indignation than to see the larger perspective. This too is a part of the pragmatism of Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry is not simply about who got to breed with a woman before or after she settled into a committed monogamy; it’s about the consistent impulse to optimize Hypergamy. It is cuckoldry for a man to assume the parental investment responsibilities of another man that a woman previously bred with. It can be proactive or it can be reactive, but the purpose it serves is the same.

Few people really grasp how outrageous it is for a man to take part in his own cuckoldry. We call those men heroes for playing savior to a woman who made “bad choices” and invests himself in a child he didn’t father, but even this association has become yet another expectation of the dutiful Beta’s role. A conditioned White Knight disposition makes him feel good about it, but it’s a woman’s strategy that comes to completion, not his own. A bull was in his bed long before him.

Adaptations – Part III

chart7

Today’s chart comes courtesy of Time’s recent analysis of how Americans met their spouses (h/t to Heartiste). Heartiste provides the most obvious reasoning for these stats:

Every inception source of romance is down over the past 70 years except for bars and online. What happens in bars and online that doesn’t happen in the normal course of events when couples meet through the more traditional routes? That’s right: Intense, relentless, and usually charmless come-ons by drunk and socially clumsy men, that pump girls full of themselves. We’ve entered the age of the narcissistically-charged woman who houses in the well-marbled fat of her skull ham a steroid-injected, Facebook-fed hamster spinning its distaff vessel’s place in the world as the center of existence.

Not to be outdone, but what CH doesn’t address here is the adaptive strategies men are pragmatically employing in order to facilitate their sexual strategy. What this chart illustrates is a graphic representation of the adaptive sexual strategies of the sexes over the course of 70 years.

Granted, in contemporary society women’s attention and indignation needs are as ubiquitously satisfied as men’s need for sexual release (i.e. internet porn) is . This of course leads the mass of women to perceive their social and SMV status to be far greater than it actually is – and when that inflated SMV is challenged by the real world there are countless social conventions already established to insulate women and simultaneously convince men that their perceived status should be the fantasy they believe it is.

It’s important to keep this in mind because men’s adaptive strategies key on women’s self-impressions of their SMV (and often personal worth). I start with this for the last installment of this series because the intergender conditions we’re experiencing today were seeded by the adaptive strategies men used in the past and the contingent counter-adaptations of women employed then too.

From The Abdication Imperative:

The Abdication Imperative

Hypergamy is rooted in doubt. Hypergamy is an inherently insecure system that constantly tests, assesses, retests and reassesses for optimal reproductive options, long-term provisioning, parental investment, and offspring and personal protection viability in a potential mate. Even under the most secure of prospects hypergamy still doubts. The evolutionary function of this incessant doubt would be a selected-for survival instinct, but the process of hypergamy’s assessment requires too much mental effort to be entirely relegated to women’s subconscious. Social imperatives had to be instituted not only to better facilitate the hypergamous process, but also to reassure the feminine that men were already socially pre-programmed to align with that process.

In an era when women’s sexual selection has been given exclusive control to the feminine, in an age when hypergamy has been loosed upon the world en force, social conventions had to be established to better silence the doubt that hypergamy makes women even more acutely aware of. And nowhere is this doubt more pronounced than in the confines of a monogamous commitment intended to last a lifetime. Thus we have the preconception “Happy Wife equals Happy Life” pre-programmed into both gender’s collective social consciousness. It’s as if to say “It’s OK Hypergamy, everything’s gonna be alright because we all believe that women should be the default authority in any relationship.”

When you disassemble any operative feminine social convention, on its most base, instinctive level the convention’s latent purpose is to facilitate and pacify hypergamy.

Heirs of Free Love

Over the course of this series I’ve mentioned the “Free Love” movement. When most people hear that term their first mental impression is usually something like the picture I posted for part one; hippies at woodstock smoking pot. Later it quickly morphed into the 70’s adaptation of socially permissive promiscuity. However, it’s very important to understand that this most recent Free Love social push is by no means the first in human history.

Our impression of Free Love today was colored by the Baby Boom generation, but there have been many Free Love “movements” in the past. This was a fascinating read in light of the SCOTUS recent ruling on gay marriage:

A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. An Early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage. They practiced nudism and believed themselves to be without original sin.

In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage,[15] and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership

[…] The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where ideas such as free love could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins), who supported the French Revolution developed early ideas about feminism and free love.

Notable among them was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine’s apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.[19] His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as “Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?” and “Earth’s Answer” seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem “London” he speaks of “the Marriage-Hearse” plagued by “the youthful Harlot’s curse”, the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the “frozen marriage-bed”.

There are certain manosphere writers of note who believe that our current state of “social degeneracy” is unprecedented in human history. And while it’s certain that no prior generation did it in the same manner as the one before it, ours is simply one more chapter in a Free Love flareup that’s punctuated history for many cultures, not just the west – all prompted by the underlying bio-evolutionary / psychological impulses our race has always been subject to.

That said, it’s important to consider the residual social after effects of our most recent Free Love incidence. I can’t speak to the era in the past, but the Free Love ideology is very much an evident part of the egalitarian equalism ideology that’s rooted itself in our contemporary culture. As western culture spreads, so too does that equalism rooted in Free Love.

The Rise of Fem-powerment

By the time the 80s had begun the redefinition of conventional masculinity – masculinity adapted to capitalize on women’s short-term, Alpha Fucks, sexual strategy – was beginning to take shape. By the mid 80s gone were the Captain Kirk and Han Solo archetypal machismo characters. They were systematically replaced by sensitive, supportive, asexual and unthreatening Dr. Huxtable and increasingly contrasted with laughable parodies of conventional masculinity; these roles redefined to fit into shaming and obfuscating any former idea of masculinity and the men who’d attempt to embrace it.

The action heroes of the era abounded, but the expectation to accept a new archetype, the Strong Independent Ass Kicking Woman® was coming into its own.

Granted, the feminization process was gradual. Throughout the 80s this feminization was primarily reinforced by men (or men like them) who’d borne the brunt of the ‘macho men’ of the 70s sexual opportunism. Beta men of the post Disco Generation and the men who identified with them adapted their own Beta Game of increased identification with the feminine, and thus began the rise of the era of fem-powerment.

A new paradigm was evolving; a social environment founded on the same ‘higher selves’ faux-equalism of the Free Love generation(s), but one predicated on Beta men’s enthusiastic supportiveness of women’s imperatives. Gradually the Free Love narrative was sublimated by a one-sided expectation of male supportiveness and self-identification with women.

From Identity Crisis:

Far too many young men maintain the notion that for them to receive the female intimacy they desire they should necessarily become more like the target of their affection in their own personality. In essence, to mold their own identify to better match the girl they think will best satisfy this need. So we see examples of men compromising their self-interests to better accomodate the interests of the woman they desire to facilitate this need for intimacy (i.e. sex). We all know the old adage women are all too aware of, “Guys will do anything to get laid” and this is certainly not limited to altering their individual identities and even conditions to better facilitate this. It’s all too common an example to see men select a college based on the available women at that college rather than academic merit to fit their own ambitions or even choose a college to better maintain a pre-existing relationship that a woman has chosen and the young man follows. In order to justify these choices he will alter his identity and personality by creating rationales and new mental schema to validate this ‘decision’ for himself. It becomes an ego protection for a decision he, on some level, knows was made for him.

Beta Game is predicated upon this effort to become more alike, more in touch with a calculating feminine ideal men they were being conditioned to believe was equitable to their concept of love and would be reciprocated with appreciation and intimacy. Into the 90s, men built their lives around the ‘high self’ hope that if they could just relate more to the feminine – supporting their girlfriends and wives in equalist endeavors women of the past never had access to – they could out-support the ‘ridiculous cad’ parody straw men they’d created for themselves.

The burden of performance that the men of the Free Love eras had hoped to avoid with higher self conditions of love were replaced with a burden of more accessible Beta supportiveness. Thus, into the 90s we had more and more characterization of masculine competition become associated with men out-supporting one another. Stay-at-home Dad became a socially lauded life choice to be proud of. Tootsie, Mr. Mom, Friends, and the culmination of total abdication to feminine identification, Mrs. Doubtfire, became apex examples of men adapting to a socio-sexual environment they’d been conditioned for – a burden of support.

Mrs’ Doubtfire was a particularly egregious depiction of this male to female transition. The apex Beta Father Provider versus the social and sexual Alpha ‘great guy’ in a battle for the genetic rights to the Beta’s children (which he eventually concedes and accepts). This story epitomizes the subtle undercurrent of socially acceptable cuckoldry that would define men’s adaptations during this era.

By assuming the female role, by identifying with the feminine they’d been convinced was so lacking in themselves, men reinforced, aided and abetted the rise of contemporary women’s default entitlements; not just to support, but to conventional masculinity when convenient, and equalist independence when convenient.

There’s a presumption in the manosphere that women have become more masculinized today, and while this is true, the Hypergamy that’s defined every era for women is more dominant now than in any other age. There is nothing that defines the feminine more than the Feminine Imperative’s want for the security of provisioning and sexual optimization that the masculine provides for women.

As men we’re prone to believe that if we’ve become more feminine women have become more masculinized, but is it this or is it the expectation that women need to adapt a masculinized outlook to counter men’s conditioned Beta passivity? Even staunch feminists get tingles from conventionally masculine, unapologetically Alpha men.

Adaptations – Part II

Studio 54

When I first published the comparative SMV graph a few years ago one of the first criticisms was that the age comparisons between men and women seemed too concrete and too specific to contemporary times. I tried to make concessions for this then, but when I was writing that post it was at first meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Still, I try to write with the presupposition that critics will take things either too literally or too figuratively. I knew that the literati then and now would think, “…well, yes it’s a good outline, but you’re looking at the SMV from the perspective of 2012 and society was much different 50, 70, 100, 2,000 years ago so this graph is flawed…”

My SMV graph was never meant to be some canonical tablet handed to me from the almighty. I thought of it then, and still think of it now, as a very good workable outline for how men and women’s comparative SMV relates to the other. This has been borne out in many other statistics from individual studies sent to me by readers or just my coming across them since I created that graph.

That said, and in relation to where I’m going with this Adaptations series, those critics aren’t wrong to suggest that this outline would be subject to the social environments and simple physical realities of earlier times, and likely some times yet to come.

Take what I’m about to delve into here with a bit of salt; I’m not a historian. One of my favorite figures from the civil war ear was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. If you’ve seen the movie Glory you know who I’m referencing here. This young man was 23 when he enlisted and 25 when he was promoted to Major and then Colonel. In that time Shaw saw some pretty grisly shit, including the battle of Antietam.

I’d seen the movie when it first came out in 1989, but after watching it again for a class assignment I had a new appreciation for the real man who was Robert Shaw. I saw the film using what was just becoming my Red Pill lens. It struck me that the realities of that era forced men to become Men much sooner than men do today. The realities of our times give us a leisure the men of Shaw’s age simple couldn’t imagine. The realities of that time necessitated a quick maturation to bear the burden of heavy responsibilities. Those burdens were much more imperative then, but a 23 year old is still a 23 year old.

I thought about how I’d spent my own years between the ages of 23-25 when I was at the peak of my semi-rock star tail chasing in the late 80’s Hollywood scene. I began to really think about the differences in the social and physical environments of the 1860s and the 1980s-90s. I’ve always joked that men don’t become Men until they’re 30. Even on the SMV graph the point at which I attribute men’s real ascendency to their peak SMV at around age 30, but this wasn’t always the case in the past.

Men (comparatively) live longer lives as a result of health and medical advances, but (at least in westernizing culture) it takes much more time and personal investment, as well as acculturation for men to realize their personal potential. Men’s burden of performance wasn’t much different in prior eras, but the timeframe necessary to reach a man’s peak potential was much more accelerated.

So to address the concerns of the temporal critics of the SMV graph, yes, this graph might look a bit different to the men and women of the 19th century. Considering lifespans of the era and the social conditions then, the ages during which a woman would reach her own peak might be around 17, and a man’s may be 25, however the same curves of the bell wouldn’t change drastically. Men adapted to the conditions their environment dictated to them then in much the same way they did before and after the sexual revolution. And this adaptation came as the result of what was expected of them as their burden of performance, as well as what their social leisures would permit them.

Love American Style

Into the 70’s the new social contract of the Free Love generation began to take a new shape. Bear in mind that this new equalitarian contract was based on the hopeful presumption that both sexes would mutually honor the “what’s on the inside is what counts” normalization of attraction. Under this contract women’s Hypergamous natures could flourish, while men’s unlimited access sexual strategy could ostensibly be realized.

Of course these lofty, higher-consciousness, presumptions  were meant to supersede human nature and an evolved sexual arousal function based on human biology. One thing that still thwarts ideological feminism today is that its perceived goal states contradict human beings’ natural states. This contradiction gets narratively blamed on men not wanting to cooperate with feminism, but even the most ardent feminist is still guilty of her own biology and arousal triggers contradicting herself.

Biology trumps conviction. People get fidgety when I apply this in a religious context, but it’s equally applicable to feminism and really any ideology that under-appreciates human nature and the realities of its conditions.

As the new sexual landscape began to solidify, men began to adapt their own sexual strategies to the conditions of this fast and loose environment. Just prior to the Disco Generation hardcore pornography began its path to the ubiquitous porn we know today. The sexual restraint necessitated by the realities of prior generations loosened in light of widespread hormonal birth control and safe(er) legal abortion.

While Hypergamy was effectively unleashed, the women of this era hadn’t fully grasped the scope of it being so or what it would become. Acceptable premarital sex, abortion and unilaterally feminine controlled birth control meant that women had an unprecedented degree of control over their Hypergamous decision making. I doubt many women of the time understood this, but the only real control men had (and still have now) over women’s breeding and birthing outcomes was now grounded in the psychological (Game) or the physical (arousal). Provisioning was still a consideration for women, but the division between short-term and long-term pairing became more stark.

As I mentioned here in the beginning, a slowing of the maturation process was the inevitable result of women’s freedom of Hypergamous choice. Short-term Alpha Fucks no longer posed the same societal and personal risks of a pre-birth control generation, thus long-term pairing choices (Beta bucks) began to be delayed. The ideological cover story was one of women expecting men to “love their insides” despite their age, psychological baggage or physical condition.

Women’s preoccupation with The Wall was ostensibly mitigated by the Free Love social contract that men would honor their end of the higher-consciousness equalitarian dream of a mutually agreed attraction based on intrinsic qualities. The biological realities for both sexes was much different.

Women trusted they could be sexually ‘free’ without social stigmatization, but the reality was that the long-term needs of Hypergamy could be postponed in what would eventually become a Sandbergian sexual strategy. The more Alpha men of the time – ones in touch with the visceral nature of women and themselves – understood the incredibly boon this represented to them.

It’s important to bear in mind that Hypergamy was not the openly embraced dynamic it’s come into today. Thus, the unspoken, secretive nature of Hypergamy was something a man who ‘just got it’ instinctively understood and women were aroused by it.

Machismo

During the 70s ‘Macho’ men began to adapt to a new paradigm. They adapted to the reality that women were conflicted by the Free Love paradigm. These men embraced both the sexual openness expected of women, but they also understood that in spite of the social contract of love being based on intrinsic qualities, women still wanted to fuck (with abandon) the men with extrinsic arousal triggering qualities. The physical began to take priority above the emotional pretentiousness.

The macho quality could take different forms. Whether is was the good ole boy of the south or the Tony Manero at Studio 54, understanding the mindset is what’s important here.

Macho men in the discos and key parties of the 70s figured out they could ‘Game’ the old paradigm of non-exclusivity paired with birth control by re-embracing (with disco era gusto) a masculinity that had been abandoned just a decade earlier. Unlimited access to unlimited sexuality was for men who overtly challenged the Free Love preconditions. They enjoyed the rewards of its expectations of women while rebounding off the self-expectations of the Beta men who were still cooperating with the Free Love social contract.

This era is an interesting parallel to our own. I think much of the Red Pill resentment coming from men still plugged into a Blue Pill mindset is rooted in a similar perception that they’re playing by an acceptable set of rules that “men with Game” are exploiting for their own selfish ends. What they don’t realize is that their Blue Pill interpretations are a designed part of a social paradigm that supports feminine primacy. Game works because, like the macho men of the 70s, it’s primarily based on women’s inborn psychology and the visceral realities of women’s biological impulses.

Beta men in the 70s still believed that the Free Love mindset was equally and mutually beneficial for both sexes since it was supposedly based on a freedom from performance for themselves while freeing women from sexual repression and (covertly) from the reality of the Wall. In reality the Free Love paradigm put men at a disadvantage by giving women almost total control of Hypergamy and the time in which to realize short term mating and long term provisioning.

So these men’s resentment of the Alphas of the era is understandable when you consider that their visceral attractiveness was observably and behaviorally arousing to women who were supposed to idealistically love them for who they were not what they were. These men represented a return to that burden of performance they’d hoped to avoid in the Free Love contract.

These Alpha men understood women’s base impulses then, and that understanding became an integral part of their “just getting it” attraction. However, as we’ll see in the next part of this series, these men would eventually become the butt of their own joke as the Feminine Imperative fluidly transitioned into a new social paradigm of Fem-powerment developing in the 80s and reaching its apex in the 90s.

The arousing ‘macho’ men, the Alphas of the era, would systematically become the most ridiculed parodies and caricatures of masculinity as women came into a better understanding of the power they were only beginning to realize and the Beta men took their perceived revenge. And likewise men adapted to this new paradigm based on the same visceral reality women’s sexuality is fundamentally based on.

Adaptations – Part I

age-of-aquarius-woodstock

Prior to the post-Sexual Revolution era men adapted to their socio-sexual and relational realities based on a pre-acknowledged burden of performance. I’ve outlined the expectations of this period in The Second Set of Books,

[…] when men transition from their comfortable blue pill perspective into the harsh reality that the red pill represents, the experience is a lot like Ball discovering that the set of books (the set of rules) he’d believed everyone was using wasn’t so. Likewise, men who’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that women were using a common set of rules – a set where certain expectations and mutual exchange were understood – were in fact using their own set. Furthermore these men ‘just didn’t get it’ that they should’ve known all along that women, as well as men’s feminization conditioning, were founded in a second set of books.

During the eras prior to the Sexual Revolution that first set of books was more or less an established ideal. Men were every bit as idealistic as they are today, but the plan towards achieving that ideal (if it was in fact achievable) was preset for them. Even the worst of fathers (or parents) still had the expectations that their sons and daughters would follow that old-order rule set as they had done.

For men a greater provisioning was expected, but that provisioning was an integral aspect of a man’s Alpha appeal. The burden of performance was part of a man’s Alpha mindset or was at least partly paired with it.

The danger in that mindset was that a man’s identity tended to be caught up with what he did (usually a career) in order to satisfy that performance burden. Thus when a man lost his job, not only was he unable to provide and meet his performance expectations in his marriage, he also lost a part of his identity. Needless to say this dynamic helped incentivize men to get back on the horse and get back to his identity and his wife’s esteem (even if it was really her necessity that kept her involved with him).

A lot of romanticization revolves around the times prior to the Sexual Revolution as if they were some golden eras when men and women knew their roles and the influence of Hypergamy was marginalized to the point that society was a better place than the place we find ourselves in today. And while it’s undeniable that cultural shifts since the sexual revolution have feminized and bastardized those old-order social contracts, men will always adapt to those new conditions in order to effect their sexual strategies.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for these idealized periods in the manosphere at the moment; seemingly more so as its members mature past their “gaming” years and begin to feel a want for something more substantial. Men are the true romantics of the sexes so it’s no great surprise that their romantic / idealistic concept of love would run towards romanticizing a hopeful return to what they imagine these eras were like.

It’s kind of an interesting counter to how feminism and the Feminine Imperative paints these eras – rather than some idyllic place where women appreciated men, feminists exaggerate and deride these times as oppressive; the sexual revolution akin to the Jews leaving Egypt. What both fail to grasp is the realities of these eras were still just as susceptible to human nature – the human nature described by what we call Red Pill awareness – and both sexes adapted to the social environments of the times to effect their natures.

Condoms were widely available in the 1940’s and men painstakingly painted half-nude pinup girls on the noses of their bombers. Women too adapted to that environment; from What Lies Beneath:

two books by John Costello; ‘Virtue Under Fire’ and ‘Love, Sex, and War’ in which all too much of the above female psychology manifested itself;

“Of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate – and this wartime phenomenon was not confined to any one section of society. The babies that were born out-of-wedlock belonged to every age group of mother, concluded one social researcher:

Some were adolescent girls who had drifted away from homes which offered neither guidance nor warmth and security. Still others were women with husbands on war service, who had been unable to bear the loneliness of separation. There were decent and serious, superficial and flighty, irresponsible and incorrigible girls among them. There were some who had formed serious attachments and hoped to marry. There were others who had a single lapse, often under the influence of drink. There were, too, the ‘good-time girls’ who thrived on the presence of well-paid servicemen from overseas, and semi-prostitutes with little moral restraint. But for the war many of these girls, whatever their type, would never have had illegitimate children. (pp. 276-277)”

and;

“Neither British nor American statistics, which indicate that wartime promiscuity reached its peak in the final stages of the war, take account of the number of irregularly conceived pregnancies that were terminated illegally. Abortionists appear to have been in great demand during the war. One official British estimate suggests that one in five of all pregnancies was ended in this way, and the equivalent rate for the United States indicates that the total number of abortions for the war years could well have been over a million.

These projections are at best merely a hypothetical barometer of World War II’s tremendous stimulus to extra-marital sexual activity. The highest recorded rate of illegitimate births was not among teenage girls, as might have been expected. Both British and American records indicate that women between twenty and thirty gave birth to nearly double the number of pre-war illegitimate children. Since it appears that the more mature women were the ones most encouraged by the relaxed morals of wartime to ‘enjoy’ themselves, it may be surmised that considerations of fidelity were no great restraint on the urge of the older married woman to participate in the general rise in wartime sexual promiscuity. (pp. 277-278)”

Women of the “greatest generation” were still women, and Hypergamy, just like today, didn’t care then either. Dalrock made a fantastic observation in a post once, and I regret I don’t have the link on hand, but paraphrasing he said “Every generation in bygone eras dated differently than the ones before it. Your parents dated in a social condition that was very different than your grandparent or their parents. No one in this generation is going to date like they did on Happy Days.” I think it’s important we don’t lose sight of this, but it’s also important to consider that in all those eras men and women’s sexual strategies remained an underlying influence for them. All that changed was both sexes adapted to the conditions of the times to effect them.

Post-Sexual Revolution Adaptation – The ‘Free Love’ Era

While there’s a lot to criticize about the Baby Boomer generation, one needs to consider the societal conditions that produced them. Egalitarian equalism combined with ubiquitous (female controlled) hormonal birth control and then mixed with blank-slate social constructivism made for a very effective environment in which both sexes sexual strategies could, theoretically, flourish.

Women’s control of their Hypergamous influences, not to mention the opportunities to fully optimize it, was unfettered by moral or social constraints for the first time in history. For men the idea of a ‘Free Love’ social order was appealing because it promised optimization of their sexual strategy – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.

The new Free Love paradigm was based on a presumption of non-exclusivity, but more so it was based on an implied condition of non-possessiveness. Men adapted to this paradigm as might have been expected, but what they didn’t consider is that in this state their eventual cuckoldry (either proactively or reactively) amounted to women’s optimizing their own Hypergamous impulses.

The social contract of  Free Love played to the base sexual wants of permissive variety for men, or at least it implied a promised potential for it. Furthermore, and more importantly, Free Love implied this promise free from a burden of performance. It was “free” love, tenuously based on intrinsic personal qualities on the inside to make him lovable – not the visceral physical realities that inspired arousal nor the rigorous status and provisioning performance burdens that had characterized the intersexual landscape prior.

It should be mentioned that ‘free love’ also played to men’s idealistic concept of love in that freedom from a performance-based love. The equalist all’s-the-same environment was predicated on the idea that love was a mutually agreed dynamic, free from the foundational, sexual strategy realities both sexes applied to love. Thus men’s idealism predisposed them to being hopeful of a performance free love-for-love’s-sake being reciprocated by the women of the age of Aquarius.

That’s how the social contract looked in the advertising, so it’s hardly surprising that (Beta) men eagerly adapted to this new sexual landscape; going along to get along (or along to get laid) in a way that would seem too good to be true to prior generations. And thus their belief set adapted to the sexual strategy that, hopefully, would pay off for them in this new social condition.

For women, though not fully realized at the time, this Free Love social restructuring represented a license for optimizing Hypergamy unimpeded by moral restraint and later unlimited (or at least marginalized) by men’s provisional support. For the first time in history women could largely explore a Sandbergian plan for Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks and, at least figuratively, they could do so at their leisure.

The problem inherent in the Free Love paradigm was that it was based on a mutual understanding that men and women were functional equals, and as such a mutual trust that either sex would hold the other’s best interests as their own. That basis of trust that either sex was rationally on the same page with regard to their sexual strategies is what set the conditions for the consequent generations to come.

This trust on the part of men was that these “equal” women would honor the presumption that it was “who” they were rather than what they represented to their sexual strategy at the various phases of their maturity that would be the basis for women’s sexual selection of them.

In part two I’ll continue this exploration through the 70’s and into our contemporary socio-sexual environment.