beta guy

Body Language

I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in trouble with this post. One thing I’ve learned from sixteen years of writing in the manosphere is that people take the issue of Looks are very personally. I think there’s something engrained in how our minds evolved to make us aware of where we fit in as far as image is concerned. I think maybe that’s the root of where we get the idea of leagues with respect to sexual market value. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my belief that everyone is keenly aware of their personal conditions on some level of consciousness and how we look to others is part of that awareness.

My friend Tanner Guzy wrote a great book this year titled The Appearance of Power and I learned quite a bit from it with respect to the, often derided, subconscious choices we make in how we present ourselves to others. A lot goes into what we think is the very simple task of dressing ourselves each day and the message we’re conveying to other men, women, our families, our coworkers, our church, etc. We all have at least a peripheral awareness of what we’re communicating with our clothes, our behaviors and our speech.

Another great book I’m presently reading is the new title from Joe Navarro, The Dictionary of Body Language. Joe was one of the speakers at last year’s 21 Convention and I had the pleasure of talking with him for a bit there. For 25 years he worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and this book is a very good resource for a lot of reasons. I’m not sure Joe likes being affiliated with the manosphere, but there’s no doubt that what he’s studied and written about for so long can be an invaluable tool for reading the sub-communications of women in Game applications. 

Way back in 2011 I wrote a brief essay called Learn to Read. At that time my focus was on emphasizing the need to be aware of the information a guy could glean from his surroundings, understanding the social environment and also the sub-communications a woman might be relaying to him in that moment. We tend to take it for granted, but there is a lot of information our brains need to process in social settings. For the most part our subconscious minds push out the background noise and less important information to our peripheral awareness so our conscious minds can focus on what we think is most important. Sometimes the part we take for granted, the information that our subconscious processes can be at least as important as what our consciousness is sorting out.

I’m calling attention to this process (as well as Joe’s work) because I want to stress the importance our Instinctual Process plays in interpreting what we see with respect to social interactions, but more importantly for our purposes, when we see men and women interact with one another. For the past 12 years my career in the liquor and gaming industries has put me in the unique position of being able to people-watch and study the unspoken communications that goes on between men and women in settings where they’re primed to apply their interpersonal skills (or lack of). However, it wasn’t until I started contrasting what I was seeing with what I understood about behavioral psychology, evo-psych and the sexual strategies men and women evolved for.

And this, this is the part where I get myself in trouble. In that time I think I’ve developed a pretty good ability to read what men and women are communicating with their clothing, expressions, posture, physical positioning, etc. and interpreting it with a Red Pill Lens. I get in trouble with this because, like I said, people tend to take my reading into things very personally. Even if I’m reading the photograph of a couple they know nothing about they associate something in the image that with how they perceive themselves.

Most of us were taught from an early age never to “judge a book by its cover.” We were taught it’s wrong to be judgmental and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. This has never really sat well with me, but you run the risk of sounding catty when you judge a person by their looks or whatever it is they’re doing in a picture. They say you sound like a gossipy woman, or else it’s supposedly some indication that you’re projecting your own insecurities onto whoever it is you might be critical of. This is unfortunate because our Instinctual interpretive process makes judgment calls all the time in our peripheral awareness. We all make comparisons in our hindbrains, it’s just impolite to give voice to them. This does nothing to help us objectively assess what sub-communications are taking place.

So, fair warning, I’m going to make some reads on some pictures here and if what I interpret seems a little self-serving or judgmental just know that I’m doing my best to stay objective.

For the past 3 months I’ve gotten into the habit of reading the images of various couples that guys on Twitter have been sending me. If you want a brief primer for this I talked about it with Tim Wenger last August here. For the most part these guys wanted me to determine what they were seeing were Alpha Tells or Beta Tells in the body language between the couple. In the majority of these shots, the Beta male body language was fairly evident even to the untrained eye. What was less evident was what the woman’s sub-communications were conveying.

Leaning In

Of the more than a hundred shots I read, the number one most common position for men was the lean in. This posture is something Roissy once called attention to as the hallmark of a Beta subconsciously manifesting his mindset in his body language:

The lean-in is easily identifiable, and while I don’t think it is always a Beta Tell (depends on context) it’s certainly the starting point for other manifestations of men with a necessitous subconscious. What I mean by that is that the lean-in is a physical display that illustrates how a man’s subconscious has decided that his woman’s Frame is the dominant one in the relationship. He feels the compulsion to put himself into her space as his natural impulse.

It’s also important to bear in mind that when we are photographed with others, in this case women, we are, or would like to be intimate with, there is a subconscious recognition that anyone viewing the image will infer a relationship context. More on this later, but for now keep in mind that some of these inferences will be related to mate guarding behaviors.

The reflexive critique of this lean-in is usually “Well, that’s just that one shot” or “The photographer told him to lean in” to which I can only say that the predominance of couples shots, candid and staged alike, most consistently pose a man as the leaner.

Lean out

The counter to this leaning-in is a woman leaning out or away from the man. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken conflict of hindbrains going on. A (Beta) man leans in to find inclusion and acceptance in a woman’s Frame while her own hindbrain instinctively reacts and attempts to lessen any inference of intimate acceptance to a larger audience.

Above are some examples of the lean-out. In some of these the latent message the woman’s hindbrain is conveying is almost “Get him offa me!”, but with a smile so as not to be too obvious. Also notice the positioning of the free hand in most of these pictures. We’d like to rationalize this as a gesture of affection after the fact, but in the context of these shots the unspoken message is a defensive one against the man’s lean-in. Again, this is one more manifestation of a war playing out between the couple’s subconscious.

The Eyes Have It

I also want to draw attention to the facial expressions of these women. Notice the commonalities in gaze direction and the message their eyes and expressions are sub-communicating. Women are keenly aware of the permanency of an image and what that image communicates. I’ve pointed out in many a prior essay that women’s brains evolved to give them a much fuller capacity for communication and a sensitivity to nuances than men. Men prioritize the content (information) of communication while women prioritize context (feeling) of communication. This is a truth we have to consider when we analyze the expressions and physical communication of women in photos.

I joked with the guy who sent me the second image here that she looks like she wants to bang me, not the guy doting on her. There’s more than a bit of truth in that assessment. Women today are hyperaware of how an image can be used to facilitate or handicap their sexual strategy. It’s no accident or casual glance when a woman directs her attention towards the viewer. It’s not a person behind the camera that she has in mind when she knows she being photographed, it’s the potential audience – an audience that’s grown exponentially in the age of social media. 

In all these shots the woman’s attention is on how she will be perceived by any viewer of the shot. In some other images I was sent the woman’s focus was on anything other than the men whose only focus was her. In advertising there’s a presumption that when two or more people appear in an ad the one with the presumed dominance is always the one looking away or out at the viewer. The submissive party was the one whose attention is directed at the dominant person. The dominant person is the one telling the story in the ad. A common complaint among feminists about magazine ads in the 60s through the 80s was that it was women who were always disempowered as a result of being posed in subservient positions where they focused on a male in the ad image. The only exception to this was in what feminists still refer to as the Male Gaze wherein the dominance a woman was afforded was limited to her sexual viability and her capacity to hold the attention of any men in the ad and men viewing the ad. 

These concepts are an interesting contrast to the millions upon millions of photos girls and women post of themselves on social media every day. Think of the gender power dynamics in all these shots. It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but the reflexive impulse a majority of women default to is one of advertising themselves for potentially better options in the sexual marketplace.

Whether or not this is a practiced or unconscious tact, the latent purpose of women’s responses to their men’s Beta Tells is to advertise their sexual availability to the audience. Some guys have said that women default to these expressions as a means of ego aggrandizement and I’m willing to accept that there’s undoubtedly an element of egoism (certainly solipsism) involved. No doubt women often enjoy the envious attentions of other women on Instagram in the right context. However, these ‘ego shots’ almost universally center on the woman in the power dynamic. In each of these images the power belongs to the woman.

Mate Guarding

Another common Beta Tell is the death grip pose many men will opt for in their couple’s photos. This is a position where the man locks an arm around his woman or drapes an interposing forearm barrier between the viewer and the woman who is trying to coyly escape his mate guarding message. 

In a lot of these the woman often has her hand on his hand as if trying to pry him off to release her. It seems like a reciprocation of affection – similar to the hand on the chest pushing him away – but this is afterthought rationalization. Death grip is a clingy positioning, but again the battle between his and her subconscious centers on the guy mate guarding and her own subconscious desire to broadcast her sexual availability in spite of him.

I Love Mommy

In almost all of these images the male is focused intently on the woman. From a Red Pill perspective, I see this as a manifestation of how these men have been Blue Pill conditioned to make their women their Mental Point of Origin.  Even in the images where the man is looking at the camera his sub-communication is one of clear abasement to, or guarding of, his most important priority.

However, the most disturbing trend I’ve seen in couple’s photos is what I’ve dubbed the I Love Mommy pose. Maybe it’s my instinctual interpretation of it or maybe its’ an obvious Freudian connotation, but in these shots the Beta assumes and almost childlike position of kissing on his woman. 

Okay, so the last one is a press shot, but you get the idea. You can see the I Love Mommy positioning in a few of the prior photos above as well.  I could probably dedicate an entire essay to all of the psychological implications of this phenomenon. I had one critic on Twitter ask me if I genuinely thought this tendency was due to unresolved issues these men had with their mothers; it wasn’t until later he admitted he had a tendency to do the same and was honestly concerned. 

I’m sure the possibility exists, but more importantly I think this habit is due to men internalizing the myth that vulnerability is endearing to women. There’s this persistent lie that accompanies the vulnerability myth. That’s the lie that men can let their guard down and ‘relax’ around the woman they feel securely paired with. As a result they mentally revert to the boy who didn’t need to qualify himself for his mother’s love and they regress to a subconscious comfort in that vulnerability they believe will endear them to their woman. They sub-communicate all this in the I Love Mommy position.

I’ll have to return to this Mother Issues concept in a future essay, but for now, how do you suppose a woman’s hindbrain imperative for Hypergamy will perceive this habit, particularly in light of how image conscious women are in the Instagram generation? My first impression is that it would be one of revulsion, apprehension and resistance. Nothing turns off a woman more than a man indicating that he’d rather be her child than her lover or husband.

Alpha Tells

So, if all of this reads like the overly-critical projection and nitpicking I told you most critics will accuse me of earlier, maybe I can assuage your own judgment by presenting some Alpha sub-communications examples here. Finding these examples can be a tall order in an age where any man photographed in a position not entirely focused on his woman runs the risk of being called ‘toxically’ masculine. Today, men who are confident enough to default to body language that communicates they are their own mental point of origin get accused of ‘abuse’ or at least being self-centered. But as you’ll see this isn’t such a bad thing.

The best example of Alpha Tells in couples photos focus on the man being the center of importance in the shot. Yes, this is Vincent Cassel (51) and his wife Tina Kunakey (21). I have no doubt some hater will come up with some reason in the comments why Vince doesn’t align with whatever their interpretation of Alpha is, but for our purposes these images illustrate the opposite of a lot of the Beta sub-communications we just went through. So try to look past the celebrity and see what’s being displayed here.

First off, notice how Tina’s focus of attention is always on Vince. Women who hold genuine admiration for their men consistently make them the story in photos. Even in the shot where they look at each other her focus is on him. It’s not difficult to assess the power dynamic in their relationship, but you can also feel a genuine desire emanating from Tina.

Also, women who genuinely admire their men are unconcerned that their actions in a shot might be read as subservient or ego-abasing by women’s audience. I’d go so far as to suggest that the attention a woman receives from a man her Hypergamous hindbrain confirms as Alpha is far more valuable to her ego than any lower quality attention she might temporarily enjoy by appeasing her audience. Much of this observation is rooted in the Desire Dynamic. Hypergamy cannot afford to have a high SMV man be confused about her desire or motives. A woman who is proud of the association with man she’s paired with is less concerned about the perception other women might have of her actions – in fact, she’ll convert any disparaging opinion of them into a point of pride, if that man is above her own sexual market value.

When a little girl thought a little boy on the playground was cute her reflexive response to him was not something she had learned to consciously control at that age. That response is often reflected in the expressions of adult women when when their peripheral awareness of an attractive man connects with their Hypergamous hindbrain. The biting of the lip, the beaming admiration, the laser eye focus and the hopeful smile followed by a coy embarrassment of what she’s doing when she regains her composure are all the physical cues of a woman whose primary concern is the man she’s with.

Now, contrast these images with the earlier ones in which the men are clearly the hangers-on of the women in those photos. I’ve mentioned before that a natural Alpha man is almost never aware of his own Alphaness and that’s what really stands out in these photos – the men aren’t trying to evoke the reflexive responses of the women. They fluidly (almost Zen-like) prompt these reaction in women. There is no pretense or the obvious mugging for the audience that you see in shots where the Frame is clearly being directed by the woman while the hapless Beta tries to prove how in love he is by kissing on her while she finds something more interesting to occupy herself with. When a woman admires her man he is literally all she can think about.

In closing here I want to reiterate that I’m aware that all of this is going to come off as self-serving or catty. It’s impossible to objectively interpret body language without someone resorting to point & sputter insults about how they think you’re just being petty or you’re jealous of some celebrity’s life. Be that as it may the discouraging of anyone attempting to understand sub-communications only serves the the party that has the most to gain from a larger ignorance of them. So I hope this breakdown has provided at least some useful references to consider your own, or your woman’s, default behavior when the cell phone cams come out at a party.

But if you learn nothing else from this post, and you need one take-home message, please, whatever you do, don’t be this guy in your next couples shot.

Primordial Archetypes

This morning I was made aware of another example of open Hypergamy. A Russian Alpha Widow admitted to her duplicity in switching her Beta husband’s sperm with that of her ex lover’s in her IVF insemination. Now, at the risk of throwing red meat to the wolves here, I wanted to dissect this situation a bit to explain a larger concept I’ve been considering lately. It would be enough to use this situation as one more example of women’s prime directive – Hypergamy before all else – but, there’s more involved here that illustrates the sociological reach that Hypergamy has for women.

You see, Yana Anokhina, 38, couldn’t have pulled off her deception of Maxim Anokhin without enlisting the aid of Dr. Liya Kazaryan and her staff in swapping out his sperm for that of Yana’s former lover; the Alpha for whom she was ‘widowed’. I’m not entirely sure that her former lover (now her current relationship) was aware of the swap, but there’s no question about Yana’s motives.

Ms Anokhina has not spoken about the swap but reports say she wanted the father of her baby to be the man she loved – not her husband.

‘It was found out during the investigation in court that Maxim’s wife Yana was the one who initiated the process of replacing her husband’s biological material,’ reported Vesti.

‘Allegedly, she wanted to give birth to a child by a man with whom she was in love, and her husband was the one who paid the costs.’

So this isn’t just as simple as she got knocked up by her Alpha lover and tricked her Beta husband into believing the inseminated sperm was his own. She had to actually go to the trouble of collecting two samples of sperm, convincing the IVF clinic’s doctor and staff into making the swap (and then withholding the truth from the father) and then carrying the pregnancy to term and keeping her husband ignorant of the ruse for a year. This may seem like the deviousness of a particular woman, but remember, she had to enlist the confidence of Dr. Kazaryan and other clinicians (I presume also female).

And she does all this with a laugh.

I’ve written quite a bit on what I call the Sisterhood Über Alles and this is one more example of how that collective female consciousness intuitively understands and both consciously and unconsciously promotes the interests of the Feminine Imperative – even for unfamiliar, anonymous women.

Now you might say, “Well Rollo, this is just one horrible example of a few women who got in cahoots to deceive a hapless Beta chump. Not all women are like this.” Or I’m sure the more morally conscious of ‘red pill women’ would simply point out that they would never do such a thing and convince us that ‘quality women’ regularly police their own Hypergamous impulses – these Russian women just lack their moral superiority. Well, be that as it may, it’s not too difficult to find online forums dedicated to women collaborating with other women in order to trick a man into marrying a woman via false pregnancy claims. In fact there’s a lucrative black market for positive pregnancy tests sold to women wanting to press their boyfriends into a marriage commitment by way of a false-positive pregnancy scare.

The fact behind all this still remains – women evolved for a subconscious, collective duplicity when it comes to optimizing on Hypergamy.

We can see this in popular culture; a culture defined by the Feminine Imperative now. Dalrock once said we have replaced the monogamous marriage model of child rearing with the child support model of child rearing today. I believe he’s right, but how is that child support model effected today and how doe it align with women’s evolved, instinctual predilections?

Humankind evolved from small tribal collectives, but in each collective there were commonalities of behaviors that developed similarly to solve various personal and collective (tribal) problems. For instance, an instinctive (unlearned) fear of snakes or spiders in women is an evolved part of humankind’s collective mental firmware. A small boys natural propensity to throw an object with strength and accuracy might be another example.

How women interact today in what I call the Sisterhood is a gestalt of the various instinctive behaviors that the women of our tribal ancestors developed to aid them in collective support as well as ensuring long-term security in reproduction. In other words, women evolved to do exactly what Dr. Kazaryan did, and so many other women in various “trick him into marrying you” forums do, to enable another woman’s sexual strategy. From an evolutionary perspective it follows that women who aided their ‘sisters’ in Hypergamy would themselves be aided and insure that this archetypal behavior became a characteristic of women’s collectivist nature.

I once watched a video of some daytime women’s talk show that centered on how women could justifiably trap a man into commitment by essentially lying to him about a faked pregnancy. I apologize for not having a link to it here, but while I was looking for it on YouTube I was inundated with videos of shows on this topic – I literally couldn’t find the one I was thinking of because there were so many returns. Watching this show I was hit by just how many women in the audience rallied behind the women doing the ‘trapping’ and the myriad justifications offered to allay any feelings of guilt, remorse or doubts about having a child.

This is particularly emphasized if the ‘father’ in question fulfills an ideal of women’s collective Hypergamy. To the collective hivemind of women, a woman is, by nature, entitled to a child with the most perfect father (high SMV) she can attract. Remember, shows and online forums like this are only small representative examples of that global Hypergamous archetypal expectation and the support women offer each other to optimize Hypergamy. I’ve stated before the the Sisterhood Über Alles (above all) transcends all considerations of tribe, race, religion and even political stripe. All women are part of ‘team woman‘ before any other affiliation; this is how the Feminine Imperative has remained a social influence since our hunter/gatherer beginnings. As we’ve progressed from small tribalist beginnings to larger collectives, to nations and now to globalism, this female collectivism has expanded to encompass the totality of womankind.

Love Me Vampire, Fuck Me Werewolf

Anyone who’s been reading my work for a while is probably scratching their heads as to why I’m referring to the concept of ‘archetypes’ here. As most of my readers know, I’ve never been a fan of Carl Jung. I’ve written about why this is a few times and I’ll probably write a more comprehensive essay about it in the coming year, but suffice to say that while Jung might be synonymous with the new agey metaphysical concept of archetypes, it was from anthropology that he lifted the term and that’s the basic reference I’m using here. That said, I don’t necessarily disagree with Jungian archetypes, it’s at the point where the concept takes on metaphysical aspects that I part ways with them.

However, the idea of archetypes is necessary to explain the last bit of the puzzle here, because it’s my belief that a primordial understanding of Hypergamy is part of our collective consciousness and unconsciousness. I say collective consciousness because since the time of the Sexual Revolution our global understanding of intersexual dynamics has become part of our social discourse. When I refer to something like Open Hypergamy I’m talking about the almost triumphant, open embrace of women’s sexual strategy. The generations that came after the Sexual Revolution scarcely remember that there was a time when intersexual truths we take for granted now weren’t something that was discussed in polite conversation. Hypergamy, while unconsciously understood, was secretive. A woman who other women called a ‘gold digger’ was disparaged by women not on moral grounds, but rather because she was open about the sexual strategy all women employ and they’d rather be kept secret so as to use it effectively.

In 2018 it’s almost quaint to think that women would be coy about Hypergamy. With the advent of the internet it became impossible for women to keep Hypergamy concealed, and really, why would they care to in an age when the necessary provisioning-side of Hypergamy is veritably insured? But it wasn’t always so obvious. Up until the mid 1960s the understanding of Hypergamy was an unconscious knowledge. Certainly it was discussed and written about by men contemplating the duplicitous nature of women. Ancient religious texts are rife with proverbs warning against the nature of women, so the basics of Hypergamy were something our tribal ancestors we’re well aware of.

I received this Tweet from a reader a few days ago:

This guy’s ‘revelation’ prompted me to consider the primordial understanding we have of Hypergamy. I’ve read dozens of articles by, and listened to dozens more interviews of, ‘popular psychologists’ who explain the commonalities of our classic human stories and myths. I got into this topic in Storytelling. The basic premise is that our common evolution has led to common themes in all human stories. The same elements and the same character archetypes pursue the same motives from culture to culture. Yet all of these commonalities are centered on similar aspects of our evolved mental firmware. The hero, the villain, good vs. evil, the wise old sage, the beautiful damsel to be saved, ect. are all founded on common human development. They are semi-conscious expressions of what our evolution has embedded in our mental firmware.

Now, what if I told you that the reality of women’s Hypergamous nature is also a part of that collective consciousness?

My theory is this: human beings have an innate understanding of the Alpha Seed – Beta Need nature of intersexual dynamics. On some level of consciousness we know, we feel, that it’s true, how it functions and why does. As a result, social institutions (religion and familial) created moral strictures around this unconscious knowledge to buffer against the worst effects of it on society. Only after the Sexual Revolution and men ceding virtually unilateral control of Hypergamy to women did these strictures change.

The concepts of men who represent Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are similarly part of this instinctual understanding of Hypergamy. These too are archetypes, but more so, they form the basis of more complex male archetypes (love me Vampire, fuck me Werewolf). They are the men women want to fuck and the men women want to be provided for by. And we can trace the root of these archetypes through our evolution and even the evolution of other primates. These Hypergamous archetypes then manifest themselves in our era-specific, cultural specific, stories, narratives, mythology, etc.

A Sense of Ownership

When I was studying behavioral psychology there was a point when I came across this phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. A friend showed me this video recently and it reminded me of when I’d studied it.

It’s really fascinating how early our sense of ownership develops. There is a school of thought (one I happen to agree with) that this need for ownership is an innate part of out psychological firmware – it’s something we’re born with. We value things more highly once we believe we own something. It makes perfect sense that this would a selected-for part of our evolution. Individuals that possessed this Endowment Effect, theoretically, might have been more adaptable to their surroundings by having something on hand that would aid in their survival at the cost of a competitor. For early man this was likely to be physical tools, but this Endowment Effect would also extend to our progeny and long-term female partners – more on this later.

By extension, our belongings literally become a part of us. This is observable even on a neurological level. Furthermore, our belongings have an essence that becomes unique to us. In other words, we wont settle for (even exact) imitations of our stuff even when they are exact duplicates.

As you might expect from a TED video, the bias towards making this ownership dynamic one of being a bug, rather of a feature, of human development is evident. The new-agey narrative goes like this – if we’re ever to reach the utopian state of egalitarian equalism the Village would have us believe in, we need to somehow unlearn this innate Endowment Effect we evolved to hold. This anti-materialist sentiment is part of a larger socialist/collectivist message that seeks to disempower us by convincing us that this connection to our things is innately bad. Issues of socialism, communism, collectivism, capitalism, etc. are beyond the scope of this blog, but it’s important to consider the drive behind this ‘anti-materialism’ push and how it affects our sense of ownership in intersexual dynamics.

I think it’s interesting that we have a part of our psyches that evolved for ownership; a part of our nature that is decidedly unegalitarian.

If you’re ever read Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene, you kind of get a clearer picture of it. Selfish, self-concerned, organisms tend to survive better than overly altruistic or egalitarian ones. Now before you tell me, “On no Rollo, Bonobos are the peacenik, free loving hippy example of egalitarianism in the wild” have a read of The Naked Bonobo and you’ll understand how deliberately false that impression is. If anything Bonobos are far better examples of the more visceral side of Hypergamy in humans. Self-interest is the driver of a great many survival instincts and adaptations in all animals.

Getting back to humans here, combine that evolved, adaptive, selfishness with a hindbrain level, intrinsic sense for ownership – one in which we feel as if it has a direct connection to ourselves – and you can see what social constructivists and equalitarians are trying to undo in humans. If you watch today’s video you’ll better understand this deep connection we have with the things we, selfishly, consider our own. There is a neurological connection between our sense of self and our things.

I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in our belief systems many times throughout my past essays. Briefly, ego-investment is phenomenon of being so intrinsically connected with our beliefs and ideologies that they become part of our personalities. So, to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. In a similar fashion the connections we apply to our things also become (to varying degrees) part of who we are. In essence we invest our egos into the things we consider ours – and the greater the effort, cost or the applied significance involved in getting those things the greater the injury is to the self when they are lost, destroyed, damaged or stolen.

In the video there is also a mention of how original items are more valued than an exact copy of those items. Again, this is part of the evolutionary side of humans investing their egos into those things. There is a limbic level need to know that these items are our things because only those things somehow contain the essence of us. Also in the video it’s postulated that the higher price of common items owned by celebrities we admire are a cost we’re willing to pay because we believe part of that celebrity’s essence is somehow contained in that item.

Why is it that we evolved to place such importance in knowing that some thing is ours, and only that thing is ours? Why do we, sometimes obsessively, need to imbue that thing with the essence of us? Why is this (apparently) part of our evolved mental firmware?

The Need to Know

I’m going to speculate here a bit. I think a strong argument can be made for men’s intrinsic need to verify his own paternity being linked to the Endowment Effect. In fact, I’d suggest that this ownership need can extend to not only a man’s children, but also to the women (even potential women) in his life. This isn’t to say women didn’t also evolve this sense – women display the Endowment Effect as much as men – but I’m going to approach this from the male side for the moment.

The video refers to this compulsive need to verify the authenticity of a thing as ‘magical thinking’, but is it really so magical? I think the writer and researcher would have us think this dynamic is silly because it’s ‘just a thing’ right? We shouldn’t place such a high degree of importance on a bicycle or an old guitar. That’s just vulgar materialism, right? Granted, some things, heirlooms maybe, can have sentimental value, but ultimately even those might well be replaceable too. It shouldn’t be so important to know something is magically your own.

Unless the thing that’s your own is your only shot at passing something of yourself into the future.

The butter knife that Elvis used to spread peanut butter on his peanut butter and banana sandwiches could be anything you can find at Walmart, but if his ‘essence‘ was in someway invested in that knife (and anyone cared to know about it) that part of Elvis might go on into perpetuity. That seems like childish magical thinking until you realize that the only part of the average person’s essence that might actually do this is their children. And until just recently, evolutionarily speaking, there wasn’t any completely dependable way to know if a man was 100% invested in his own ‘things’ – his progeny. His kids would carry on his essence, so in our evolved past it made sense to be obsessive-compulsive about the things that we’re one’s own.

As I stated, women also exhibit this effect as well, and I’d argue for much of the same reasons. Though, in none of the research related in this video was this Endowment Effect controlled for by sex – at least none that I’m aware of. Again, this is conjecture, but I would think that with the intrinsic certainty a woman has in knowing a child is her own, and the collectivist communal nature of women in hunter-gatherer society from which we developed, it might be that women place a higher ‘endowed’ value on different things than men do. I think this effect may be more pronounced in an era where women are almost unilaterally in control of Hypergamy.

I recently saw a video of a fertility doctor who had either used his own sperm to fertilize women’s eggs, or completely random samples to father about 40 children. The women, the children (mostly female) were absolutely aghast that he was their father or some donor who they would never know had contributed to half their DNA. The idea that the selection and control of Hypergamy was taken from them was worthy of the death penalty. Yet this is exactly the control we expect men to relinquish in this age. We will pat men on the back for abandoning their evolved instinct to ascertain paternity. We’ll tell a man he’s a hero for wifing up a single mother and “stepping up to be a father” to a child he didn’t sire and at the same time pretend that father’s are superfluous. We’ll change ‘Father’s Day’ to ‘Special Person’s Day’ and tell men they’re insecure in their masculinity for preferring a son or daughter of his own – but try to remove that control from a woman, try to tell her that Hypergamous choice wasn’t hers to make and it’s tantamount to rape.

“She was never yours, it was just your turn.”

I think it was my fellow Red Man Group friend Donovan Sharpe who coined this phrase. I might be wrong. I’ve read this around the usual Red Pill Reddit subs and other manosphere forums, but it wasn’t until last month (July) when I read yet one more story about a husband whose wife was leaving him and was in the process of Zeroing him out when he decided to kill her, their three kids and then himself. You can read the Twitter reaction to this here:

Naturally women were appalled at the deaths of the wife and kids, as they should be. Pre-divorce women will prep months in advance for their new singleness. Often they’ll check out of the marriage and live without any real connection to their, usually Beta, Blue Pill conditioned, husband who languishes in this Blue Pill hell for the duration it takes his wife to establish a new mental persona and finds a way to exit the marriage. She’s already gone from the marriage, but the typical Blue Pill husband believes that he is the source of her discontent and resorts to anything he can to ‘keep things fresh’ or ‘rekindle the old flame’ that a feminine-primary popular culture tells him should be his responsibility. Unfortunately, this guy’s situation is typical of middle aged men today, and I honestly believe is the source that drives suicides and murder-suicides in this demographic. This man was going to be Zeroed Out and he knew it was coming.

That’s when I thought, ‘Was this guy’s turn with her just over?’ Was it as simple as that? If you read this couple’s story there wasn’t a history of him losing his mind. If anything Matthew Edwards was a pretty dedicated and invested father. No history of depression, suicidal tendencies or abuse; just another average frustrated chump who built a life for himself likely based on his Blue Pill conditioning.

But his turn was over and he likely believed the soul-mate myth. How was he supposed to live with out her?

The fem-stream media offers up their standard pablum – “Misogynistic society teaches men that they’re entitled to women’s bodies. Men need to be taught that they don’t own women.” or something similar that goes entirely against a man’s evolved Endowment Effect. What exactly does a man get to think is his own if not his family? When a woman finds out that her Hypergamous choice was made for her by a fertility clinic doctor rather than herself they’re out for blood – again, rightfully so. Then why are we surprised that men, particularly men in Matthew Edwards demographic, resort to murder and suicide when faced with losing everything they’ve invested themselves in.

Now this week we see another, almost identical, tragedy in Colorado this week.

And once again we have what looks like another guy being Zeroed out and another quadruple homicide. How man more of these murder-suicides (or just murders in this case) is it going to take before we collectively see the commonalities in all of them?

I had a conversation with several women in the wake of this latest tragedy and every one of them couldn’t wrap their head around why the guy would kill his kids? They could understand why he might kill his wife – the assumption being her unborn child was sired by guy who wasn’t him – but not his kids. I think this is interesting in the light of how men and women approach paternity/maternity and the Endowment Effect. The best answer I could come up with is that a man doesn’t want that part of him to go on into the future without him. The idea that his kids bear some of his essence and he would rather erase that essence entirely than live or kill himself with the knowledge that his children wouldn’t have him in their lives. Killing a wife might be the result of an uncontrolled rage, but killing your kids takes premeditation – there has to be some point to the act, some reasoning (corrupted as it may be) that made sense to him.

The Strategic Pluralism Theory is from a research study by Dr. Martie Haselton:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).

The commonalities in every one of these murder-suicides is a Blue Pill conditioned, Beta husband who by all indications was playing by the First Set of Books. By all indications these men would fit into the second type of man mention in Strategic Pluralism Theory – they did everything right, they played by the rules, they did their best to invest themselves in their mates and offspring and likely believed they’d earned some Relational Equity from it. But then, their turn was over with their wives. For whatever reason they were faced with a complete loss, a Zeroing Out, of everything they believed they owned. The things they invested so much of their lives in, the things they worked so hard for, the things that retained his ‘essence’, the things they invested their egos in were all being taken away from them. When faced with such a reality men tend to look at only two options; remake and rebuild what they had in the knowledge that this too might be taken from them, or they can simply erase all themselves and all the ‘things’ they were attached too.

Dangers of the Blue Pill

This clip arrived in my Twitter stream a couple of days ago and I was going to dismiss it until I read through some of the comments about this guy on the ensuing Twitter thread. I’m going to give you my take on what I think is really going on here and then I’ll contrast this with how other viewers interpreted this incident. I was about to pass on this until the conversation really made this an interesting social experiment.

I have seen things like this before. Remember, for the better part of my ‘real job’ career I’ve been around a lot of people who are socializing and drinking. I watch guys pick up women, I watch women pick up guys, and I’ve seen a lot of couples argue in public. One thing that these couples all have in common (or at least 90% of them) is the guy trying his damnedest to get his girlfriend/wife to ‘come around to him’. As you may guess, the majority of these men were Betas who ‘just didn’t get it‘ and were appealing to their woman’s reason in order to resolve whatever it is that was making her turn off to him.

Again, most of these guys were oblivious to the fact that their trying to reason with her was only emphasizing the fact that he just didn’t get it, and that she was paired off with a guy who needed to be told how to get it.

The guy with the capacity to call a woman’s bluff with a confidence that implies she is to be worthy of him rather than the other way around is the Man to be competed for. Essentially the ‘chick speak’, ‘chick advice’ phenomenon is a shit test writ large on a social scale. And even your own mother and sisters are in on it, expecting you to ‘get it’; to get the message and see the challenge for what it really is, without overtly telling you.

She want’s you to ‘get it’ on your own, without having to be told how. That initiative and the experience needed to have had developed it makes you a Man worth competing for. Women despise a man who needs to be told to be dominant. Overtly relating this to a guy entirely defeats his credibility as a genuinely dominant male. The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because that’s ‘the way he is’ instead of who she had to tell him to be.

Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he’s not the man for her.

I have been this guy before. I’m not happy to admit that, but in my 20s, during the time I was with the BPD girl she made a habit of airing out her insane jealousy, insecurities and general relationship disorders as publicly as possible. When this becomes a way of life for a guy it changes you and particularly when it’s part of a woman’s personal neurosis. At that point in my life I had fallen very Beta (almost Omega by Vox’s standards) and I made all of the same mistakes I see guys in this predicament make when I’m working. I also know better than to try to correct these guys, because, like myself, they can get really hostile towards you or themselves when you point out the obvious to them.

So, a couple of caveats here; I don’t know for sure what’s transpired before or after this incident, and I have no idea if the guy is imbalanced (I’m being polite). It could be him, it could be her, likely it’s both, but I do know the patterns and I can see that the guy will resort to self-injury to make a point. This is a classic expression of Blue Pill Beta frustration with a girl.

The girl could be blameless and he’s just a nerdy Blue Pill Beta reacting to his frustration in not understanding how to resolve whatever it is that set him off with her. I’ve watched a lot of guys in the ‘Gamer’ social set who fall into this type. They buy into the “open communication is the key to everything” ideal that the Blue Pill told them women want, so when that ‘open communication’ is actually the reason for his problems he gets frustrated. Women are supposed to be reasonable, co-equal egalitarian agents in a relationship and when his appeals to that reason are ineffective, what’s left for the kid?

Again, this is me speculating. What we do know is his reaction. Imagine if this guy had actually broken the window and cut himself (and maybe a few bystanders) to ribbons. I mention this because it’s the reaction I’d expect from the Blue Pill mind that makes a guy believe that killing or hurting himself will in someway emphasize the seriousness with which he wants to resolve the issue he believes is crucial to his happiness with a woman. This is one of the main reasons I’ve always said kill the Beta before it kills you. There’s a very real danger that a Beta mindset will lead to you or someone else’s injury or death.

I’m actually inclined to think that the incident was his own doing though. She seems indifferent to him even after the head bang, but likely that might be due to embarrassment. She’s certainly frustrated with his attempts to get her to “listen to him”.

I’ve mentioned this before, but as women have become more self-assured about their own personal safety they feel more secure in provoking physical altercations. I understand that women love to say that they feel threatened by men all the time, or they have to always think about their personal safety no matter where they are, but I really don’t see this in real life – certainly not at my own promos. In fact it’s quite the opposite. I have seen women on many occasions (both drunk and sober) deliberately instigate confrontations that never needed to be started. All of them did so from a feeling of invulnerability because they know that no man would dare to actually assault her while she could wail on him with impunity. I think this is a new social trend with women today. They understand that if the guy she was hitting actually hit back there would be half a dozen men in the room who would beat his ass for raising a fist, much less his voice, to her. Women know the power that an opportunity to defend a woman has over men; it’s a confirmation of the old social contract that women still expect men to adhere to.

I’ve also seen women start altercations with other women in the same confidence that her man will fight the other woman’s man if the two of them get into a fight. They do so by appealing to their man’s Alphaness (or lack thereof) and having her back no matter what – even when she’s being stupid, catty or drunk. It’s kind of a new play on the ‘Lets you and him fight’ social convention, but if cooler heads prevail and one or both men pull their women away from the other they just look like pussies or less than men. Again, this is one more way women can socially reserve their bestowing or confirming manhood on a man.

Is any of this happening here? Likely no, but it’s important to remember these things in context with incidents like this. That’s important, because a few of the female readers of this Twitter thread seemed to think that, rather than his kid being a potentially terminal Beta, he had the potential to be an abuser. In fact this was their first impression. I guess I can sort of see this from a woman’s perspective, but I really think the Sisterhood Über Alles kicks in when women see something like this. Always take the woman’s side first.

I think women see this through the girl’s eyes. They understand what she’s going through in having the guy try to ‘logic’ her into understanding. They understand the girl’s frustration at just having to deal with this Beta.

https://twitter.com/yourpacrat/status/975455414568587264

I’ve probably done a really bad job at this, but my intent here is not to beat this guy up over this whole thing. When I first watched this clip I thought, “Yep, been there, done that”, and like this guy I was in my 20s when I did. It seems like this is something men must learn for themselves as part of their unplugging. I think one thing that makes unplugging more difficult today is that the stakes are so much higher when a guy just ‘doesn’t get it’. There are guys who never get past any of these Blue Pill trials because they make bad decisions that seemed logical or profound at the time and they have to live with the consequences for failing that Blue Pill trial.

I would bet that this guy is still with this girl today. Even with this going slightly viral I doubt he’s learned anything from the experience and I’m sure he’s still trying to figure out how to make this pudgy little HB 3 happy. His head bang against a window (which he had no idea was plexiglass) is really a manifestation of his own self-loathing. He wont hit her, he’ll hurt himself to make his point. This is what guys like this have been taught, to express his emotions, but in this instance that emotion is angst and frustration.

It’s easy to think that guys like this are too far gone. It’s easy for guys who’ve been Red Pill aware for a long time to dismiss Beta behaviors that they were also subject to, but have been so far removed from now that they think shit like this doesn’t happen.

Transactional vs. Validational Sex

You cannot negotiate genuine desire.

This is one of my best known quotes because it resonates with so many men. There was a time in the early 2000s when I was doing peer counseling for men – most of whom were at least a decade my senior – as part of my undergraduate study and one consistent theme I got from almost all of them was how their marriages (or LTRs) had been so much more sexually satisfying when they were dating their wives or before they’d committed to some kind of exclusivity. That’s always the crux of it for guys. They mistakenly believed that the hot monkey sex they were having with their women prior to “doing the right thing” and getting married or committed was something that would be characteristic of their quality woman into a long term relationship with them.

Why was this the case for guys? I can remember coming up with this quote as part of the advice I was giving while working for one of these men. He, like many of the other guys, had gotten to the point that he would do almost anything to get back to that real desire that convinced him to commit to his wife in the first place. And, like many of these guys, he’d convinced his wife to go to marriage counseling in order to find out what exactly it was that he needed to do to “get her to come around” to wanting to bang him. Nothing was working for him. Even after his sessions he was still either sexless or his wife only begrudgingly would have lackluster ‘starfish’ sex with him. We called that a ‘grudge fuck’ back then.

As a student of behavioral psychology my interest was (still is) in what motivates or incentivizes behavior in people (sometimes animals). What was it that inspires genuine desire as opposed to behavior that still has a purpose, but was more motivated by future outcome. You can make a case that genuine desire is also motivated by a perceived outcome, but in this instance I’m making a distinction between a natural, unsolicited desire as opposed to an incentive based on a preconceived outcome – if all goes according to plan.

This guy broke down in tears with me on at least two occasions. He just couldn’t understand why what was supposed to work (open communication, rational discourse and honest negotiation) wasn’t getting her to “come around” to having sex with him. It was then I thought, you cannot negotiate genuine desire. Either a woman wants  to fuck you or she doesn’t. There are definitely ways to prompt that genuine desire – most of which are behavioral and conditional – but as has been stated many times in the ‘sphere, attraction is not a choice. The key word there is choice. Few men would ‘choose’ to be attracted by an obese woman and in many ways this choice dynamic is why women promoting the ‘body acceptance’ narrative have a tough time of it. For all the nonsense about beauty being a social construct, arousal for men is very much rooted in evolved biology. Men can’t choose to get an erection for a woman they’re simply not aroused by.

The same holds true for women, but the conditions are different. Women can and do have sex for reasons other than genuine desire. Negotiated desire really isn’t desire at all, but women have readily used sexual access to achieve those perceived outcomes I mentioned above here. Negotiated desire only ever leads to obligated compliance. A talented hooker or stripper may be very convincing in her act that she’s really into having sex with a man, but the negotiation that takes place before the act can never make a woman want to have sex with her client. Attraction is not a choice, but really, arousal is not a choice either.

Hormonal

I am presently about half way through my read of Dr. Martie Haselton’s new book Hormonal. I was really anticipating this book’s release, and I had intended to do my first-ever book review of it here, but as I read through I’ve decided not to. I still highly recommend reading it. As you might guess it’s chock full of stats and research confirmation of so much of what I write here that I want to put it at the top of the required Rational Male reading list. I’ve been referencing Dr. Haselton’s (and her colleagues) work since I began this blog, but the delivery of the information was disappointing, and in a lot of instances, very immature and sophomoric. It’s written almost as an apologetic to feminists for having to kill a lot of sacred feminist social convention cows. I feel as if she’s writing ‘down’ to the women who she’ll inevitably market this book to, but, if you can get past her constant attempts to legitimize her feminist credentials, the information is absolute gold.

One aspect of female sexual dynamics that Haselton and her team detail quite a bit is the idea of an Estrus state in human females. I’m not sure how well appreciated this research is in the manosphere, which is one reason I included it in Positive Masculinity, but this concept is really integral to how we define Hypergamy. As most of my readers know, Hypergamy – women’s dualistic sexual strategy (and really life strategy) – is much more than a tendency of a woman to ‘marry up’. In Hormonal the ideas of Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks really solidify with the research.

However, as useful as it is as a catchy euphemism Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks could better be described as Alpha Seed and Beta Need. In a woman’s peak ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle she enters an estrus state and becomes subject to behaviors that can only be defined as a pretext of seeking Alpha seed. In other words, nature and Hypergamy are very practical in maximizing the chances that a woman may get pregnant with the best available genetic specimen. Granted, the true outcome of all of that is subject to environment and a woman’s personal conditions, but the practicality of it remains the same as it has for 100,000 years. It’s also important to keep in mind that a woman’s behaviors, strategies, rationales and her own interpretation of all of them in those various times and conditions are also a part of the overall latent purpose of a woman consolidating on the best Alpha Seed and Beta to supply her needs.

While women are subject to an estrus state they still require the second half of Hypergamy – the Beta need for security, provisioning, protection, comfort and at least the sharing of parental investment responsibilities for any offspring. Estrus in women is concealed, meaning it is (or used to be) nearly, but not totally undetectable in women. There are in fact various ways men evolved to intuitively determine whether a woman is in an estrus state of fertility; most of these today are socially shamed in men so as to further confuse them and advantage women, but that’s a topic for another essay. A concealed estrus aids women in optimizing both Alpha Seed and Beta Need and it’s likely that much of what accounts for women’s sexual strategy is the result of this concealment.

Now, a lot has been written by myself and others about the impact of meeting a woman’s Beta Need aspect of Hypergamy being served by the state and/or direct or indirect transfers of resources from men to women. Most of my readers are well aware of how this side of Hypergamy has been progressively accommodated for over the past fifty years. In spite of this it’s important to remember that this accommodation of provisioning needs doesn’t eliminate the deeper needs that this side of Hypergamy engenders in women. It may be true that women have never been better provided for in history as far as money and opportunities go, but women still look for emotional security, protection, dominance and comfort in men as part of their innate mental firmware.

As a result of Hypergamy and this concealed estrus state women have been put into a condition of evaluating sex in different aspects today.

Validational Sex

When women look for that Alpha Seed in their peak ovulatory (proliferative) phase, the sex they seek is a desired sex with a man who meets evolutionary criteria. He’s the ‘hawt’ guy, or the man who leaves a woman with an perception of danger or excitement. A lot of men who don’t meet this criteria have a tendency to over-exaggerate this type of man as the ‘Alpha Chad’ and make a ridiculous parody of him as an ego protection mechanism for themselves. Let me state for the record here that every aspect and adjective that this type of guy embodies is mitigated by conditions and contexts. It is just as likely that this conventionally masculine dominant guy is only so according to his most immediate social situation. So spare me the “Chad Thundercock” anxieties.

The sex that women give “enthusiastic consent” for is validational for them. The easy assessment here is that women have a genuine desire to mate with conventionally masculine men who look and act the part – yes, behavioral congruency is vital. If you follow the research women consciously and unconsciously will actively put themselves into environments where the likelihood of their meeting a dominant masculine man who most closely matched that masculine ideal when they are in estrus. They openly and discreetly look of arousal cue from men who best embody what can only be described as Alpha Seed.

I should also add that women in “satisfying relationships” (meaning LTRs where a woman is still very hot for her husband/boyfriend) report an increase in sexual desire (proceptivity) for that guy during this phase. A lot of guys mistakenly think ANY woman will want to seek out extra-pair mating (cheating) opportunities when they’re in estrus. This is only true if a woman isn’t into her current man.

I don’t want to get too lost in the descriptions here. Rather, I want to focus on the associative feelings women get in and after having sex with that Alpha man during estrus. I would argue that Alpha Widows are made in the estrus phase. This is the sex women want to have and are enthusiastic in both the hunt and the act itself. This is largely (presumedly) the sex that men have with their wives-to-be before they marry. It’s this validational sex, the sex that women fantasize about, that men and women want to get back to once they are committed to each other monogamously but now have a dead bedroom. This sex validates a woman’s ego in that it proves to herself that a man of this SMV caliber would want to pin her to the bed and have marathon sex with her. Remember, the latent purpose of this sex, on this side of Hypergamy, is to access the sperm from men with high reproductive value as defined by what our evolved nature predisposes women to be aroused by. Validational sex is sex by choice and genuine desire, and is satisfying on both a psychological level and an evolutionary level.

Transactional Sex

One of the benefits of a concealed estrus is that it allows women a few luxuries. One of these was the ability to confuse men of their paternity. Today this confusion is little more difficult because we’ve got DNA figured out well enough to make accurate assessments, but in our evolutionary past it was important to trick cuckolded fathers into second guessing whether a child was his or not before he killed it and impregnated a woman on his own (this is also why men evolved mate guarding behaviors).

The other advantage of concealed estrus was essentially prostitution. Now, to pretty this up a bit, lets say that women who were sexual with men outside of their fertility window found that sex could be leveraged with non-Alpha men (men they didn’t want to have children with) to encourage them to help with a lot of the chores more Alpha men were less willing (but not entirely unwilling) to do. Enter transactional sex.

As mentioned, the most overt form of transactional sex is prostitution, but it’s impolite to call every woman a whore. In fact it’s impolite to even imply a woman may be having sex for other reasons than validational sex. Today women are contemplating whether or not transactional sex is itself rape since it technically meets the definition of rape (sex women don’t want to have). I discussed this “grey area sex” recently in another essay, but it’s interesting to see women wrestle with transactional sex in an era where the Future is Female and women ought to only have the (validational) sex they want to enthusiastically have.

For most men (i.e the 80% Beta men) transactional sex is where the rubber meets the road. In fact, I’d argue that for most Beta men transactional sex is the only definition of sex they ever really know. That’s kind of sad to think about, but most men never really experience the unfettered feral lust of a woman they’ve chosen to spend the rest of their lives with. I got into this in Saving the Best and Hats Off to the Bull, but I think it’s important for the average man today to acknowledge that it’s highly likely that their wives have shared parts of themselves with, and have lost all inhibitions with, men in their sexual pasts they may never know anything about. That’s a cold bucket of reality a lot of men who unplug from all this have to confront.

Marriage today is almost entirely predicated on on the transactional sex side of Hypergamy. I’m not saying it has to be, nor am I saying it always is, but I’m fairly comfortable in speculating that for most married women sex is reward she uses in the operant conditioning of her husband. And the very fact that this is effective with most husbands throws the power dynamic and Frame of the relationship firmly over to the wife. This has the effect of disqualifying that man from ever (or very rarely) being a candidate for validational sex within that marriage. And this too is another aspect of the transactional sex dynamic that modern feminists are contemplating today – if a woman doesn’t want to have sex with her husband, but does anyway, is it rape? But again, NAMALT, not all marriages are like this or have to be like this. I would also argue that a confident man whom a woman admires, who she recognizes as being above her SMV even if slightly and who has internalized Red Pill awareness within that marriage needn’t be doomed to transactional “duty” sex in his marriage.

Unnegotiated Desire

And so now we come full circle to the men I was counseling back in the day. Because all they’d ever known was transactional sex their deductive male brains attempted to solve their “sex problem” in the most logistical and pragmatic way – negotiate with her. If all sex ever is for a guy is a transaction – a quid pro quo – then it follows he’ll try to find the best way to ‘pay’ for his wife’s sexual access. Hunter Drew and I were recently discussing a man who Dean Abbot has been counseling and one thing we’ve all seen a lot of from young and old Blue Pill Beta men is this logical tendency for them to want to ‘sacrifice their way to happiness with their wives’. It’s as if the more they sacrifice the more they pay for that intimacy they seek, but what they never get is that this only buries their sex lives that much more.

One amazing turn around a lot of married and single Red Pill guys experience when they unplug is the attention they receive from women when they switch from a transactional disposition to a validational disposition with regard to sex. When a man unplugs and cuts himself away from his Blue Pill conditioning one change he makes is a shift from viewing sex as transactional to validational. In the beginning, when men are first learning Game and becoming more Red Pill aware about the nature of women they really don’t recognize this shift in attitude towards sex. When I say men need to make themselves the “prize” with regards to sex and their attention what happens is they go from the “how can I pay for sex to qualify for it with a woman” to “women will recognize that I represent and opportunity for validational sex”.

The Blue Pill conditions men to base their understanding of sex on a transactional paradigm. It’s all scarcity, and luck or providence that a woman might want to fuck them. This is why women get aggravated by the presumption that men might feel they are ‘owed sex‘ in exchange for what they do for them. And why wouldn’t men feel that way? They’ve been conditioned for half a life to believe that they should follow the old social contract and become a man with a lot to offer a woman, a wife. This is the transactional paradigm; I build my life to better accommodate a woman and she reciprocates with sex. Women know this too, so all pretenses of indignation about are complete bullshit. What upsets women is that a Beta man would feel entitled to her sexuality for having accommodated her. Alpha men are entitled to it, accommodations be damned, because he’s the man they want to have sex with.

No Prescriptions

On Saturday I had a great discussion with Anthony Johnson, Rian Stone (Married Red Pill Reddit) and “Carl” from Black Label Logic. The topic was a critique of the impact Dr. Jordan Peterson is having on a society of ‘lost’ (mostly) young men and how his message is affecting this generally rudderless generation of men. It’s a little over two hours long, but from the overwhelming response on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other forums it’s definitely struck a nerve. As an aside here, I’m considering making this meet up video format something I may do semi-regularly (like every other week) with some of the men I consider peers in the manosphere.

You can watch this talk at your leisure, but it has taught me a few things. As I mentioned in the chat it’s next to impossible to have any disagreement or critique of people whom other’s believe are your betters. As Rollo Tomassi it’s impossible for me to be critical of any high profile guy in the sphere without the accusations of professional jealousy or sour grapes being the first reflexive response from haters. I got that, but I’ve learned the conversation is more important that trying to convince anyone of it being genuine. In fact, I think it belies a bigger problem when they are above critique.

That aside, I think it was good to finally parse where Red Pill awareness and what Peterson is advocating have some overlap and where we differ. Peterson is a fountain of hope for the ‘lost’ boys, so anything critical of his message is going to sound like it’s endorsing an “enjoy the decline” mentality. I can’t expect everyone to have read up on my own opinion about that, but the short version is that I’ve never been convinced of some inevitable decline and fall of western civilization. In other words, I think it is possible to turn the ship around; where I may differ is in how that might be done.

For the record here I want to say that I have a great respect for Dr. Peterson. I think he’s what the sphere has needed for a while and I think he fits the role of ‘champion’ that a generation of young men have wanted to place on someone. Ideologically I agree with about 85-90% of what he advocates and there’s no doubt that he’s got definite skin in the game. In fact I really hate it when people use that as some catch phrase to disqualify men today. As a man we all have skin in the game now. How much and to what degree may be debatable, but we all live in a feminine-primary social order and as such we all have a lot to risk whether we acknowledge this or not.

Where I differ with Peterson is in his very Trad-Con solutions to turning the ship around. I wasn’t shocked to see him endorsed in videos for Prager University. In some ways what he proposes resonates with young men looking for a direction because their fathers and generations of Blue Pill men haven’t been able to deliver a way out of Hell for them. I go into this in more detail in our talk here, but here are some of my issues with Peterson’s take on things:

• Life is suffering and sacrifice: In every video I’ve watched Dr. Peterson’s founding (zen-like) premise is that life is suffering and the best men can do is to find ways to minimize that suffering. Men (and I’ve yet to see a video addressing women) must sacrifice parts or all of themselves in order to qualify for “genuine” manhood. The degree of that self-sacrifice is relative to how high a status that man can achieve.

I fundamentally disagree with this premise though I do understand why it’s so appealing to a ‘lost generation’ of young men. From my own perspective, life is based on a perpetual discontent, but how a man deals with that discontent – creatively or destructively – is the measure of him. Furthermore, I would argue that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make in order to facilitate their reality.

• Blue Pill conditioning seems to define his perspective of women: Essentially the archetype he has for women was formed for him as a 7 year old boy when he first developed a soul-mate ONEitis for his wife. His reluctance to acknowledge the Alpha Fucks side of women’s Hypergamy in any video (beyond his repeated use of 50 Shades of Grey as a humorous example) leads me to the impression that he defaults to women as innately ‘good’ and above too much criticism. As such he focuses almost entirely on the good provider / parental investment / Beta need side of Hypergamy. This is unsurprising as it follows the same Trad-Con interpretations of women being “closer to God than men” and men must qualify themselves, and sacrifice themselves for women’s (wives) intimate approval. Dalrock has covered this dynamic among male “complementarian” Christian leaders quite extensively.

• Sacrifice of men is a parallel to men’s disposability: Men will blow themselves up for pussy. From what I gather from his talks Peterson endorses male disposability as a form of Honor. He seems to play on the ‘Man Up / Shut Up’ dynamic I talked about in The Honor System. What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny. I’m not suggesting Peterson is accusing men of Patriarchy or Misogyny, rather, like most Trad-Cons, it’s a question of living up to one’s duty as a man in his disposability and his usefulness in that sacrifice.

• “Get your shit together” is also a plea for sacrifice: If a man is less valuable his sacrifice is less meaningful. No one cares about mediocre / average men’s sacrifices, but if a man accepts that he is to improve himself it is so that his sacrifice is more appreciated and important. Thus, the comparisons to Christ’s sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of sacrifice and meaning which Peterson uses in his dissertations on manhood and the Bible. My issue here is that women and a feminine-primary social order lack a capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make because these are taken-for-granted expectations of what a man just “ought to do”.

• Peterson is egalitarian to a fault: The mantra may be for men to sack up and make something of themselves, but this is couched in an egalitarian equalism that’s prevalent today. If I had one question to ask Jordan it would be this; is there a dominance hierarchy in a healthy LTR or marriage? I don’t know for certain. My guess is he would say it passes back and forth between a husband and wife which is to say he falls back on an egalitarian ideal. However, outside the family structure he acknowledges that men and women in a state of egalitarianism choose to adopt traditional gender roles (I think he gave the same example as was covered here).

• Dr. Peterson regularly resorts to shaming language with men, rarely does he do the same with women: This may be a simple question of his delivery, but Peterson is always harder on men than he is with women. In so doing he adopts the AMOGing of only men techniques that a pastor like Mark Driscoll uses from the pulpit. Inso doing he pedestalizes women and absolves them of any consequences of their Hypergamous choices by imploring men to “man up and marry those sluts“. In essence the sacrificial nature of men becomes one that is necessary for the continuance of ‘family’ and western culture in spite of women. I also see how this plays into the idea of women lacking any moral agency, personal responsibility and wiping the bad behavior of women off on the men who have allowed this to happen. Once again it comes back to the hypoagency of women.

• Peterson believes that desire can be negotiated: This is my biggest problem with Peterson’s approach to women. This undoubtedly comes from his being a clinical psychologist, but like most therapists he defaults to the idea that genuine desire can be motivated by a process of negotiation. If there is one example of his lack of experience with women it is this belief. In several of his interviews and podcasts he makes reference to appealing to women’s reason and negotiating terms for acceptable behavior (always a man’s behavior) in exchange for intimacy and/or a stress-free marriage. This is the egalitarian, Oprah Approved, male-sublimated means to achieving transactional intimacy.

As you might guess, I strongly disagree with negotiating intimacy. You cannot negotiate genuine desire. You can obligate a woman to fuck you (now called rape) via negotiation, but you cannot organically inspire genuine desire in a woman. This has always been my main point of contention with the marriage counseling trade for a long time.

What is the Red Pill version of “man-up”?

I had a commenter ask me this in the last comment thread. I think there’s two sides to this question. First, I think there’s a need to keep the Red Pill (in the intersexual sense) as close to an objectivist purpose as possible. That means Red Pill awareness is the result of a continuing praxeology.

I’ve locked horns with a few Red Pill guys recently who seem to think that ‘Red Pill’ is an ideology and it’s just the counter revolt to feminism; basically it is feminism for men. I think that does a huge disservice to everything and everyone that’s brought us to where we are today in Red Pill awareness and all of the work and personal risk that was put on the line to explore what we know as Red Pill awareness now. Not only that it casually devalues the effort and work that’s continuing right now.

Critics and feminists alike want to draw parallels in the manosphere to whatever (fictitious) wave of feminism they think applies to whatever the Men’s Rights Movement is calling Red Pill at the moment. Believing that Red Pill is an ideology is one more casualty of how the term / brand has been bastardized by other ideologies who’ve never had any business referring to themselves as “red pill”.

Presuming Red Pill is just an ideology is juvenile, and unsurprisingly it’s an opinion of some underexperienced men in the manosphere who want for simplistic answers. They don’t want to think about what Red Pill awareness implies on a larger social scale. They want a flag to wave and an easy to understand ideology so they can stick it to their feminist enemies. I get it. They want Red Pill (however they define it) to be that ideology, but to me, I think, and I’ve always said it, the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, areligious and amoral to ensure that it stays true to understanding truth. It needs to remain true to being an aggregate of men’s collected experiences with intersexual dynamics.

What these guys want is a meaning to that truth, but that’s not the Red Pill. Meaning is what men will apply to that truth according to their individual needs, situations and circumstances. This is why Peterson and probably some more personalities to follow him will be popular in the future; they prioritize meaning above truth. If you listen to the first podcast of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson they spend the entire time trying to come to an agreed measure of truth between the two of them so they can move on (in the second podcast) to what is meaning.

You want to know why I don’t do prescriptions on The Rational Male? Because we disempower ourselves when we follow someone else’s path and not our own.

There is a deep need in almost all people to improve or ‘fix’ ourselves in some way. I’ve written essays about it; discontent is is the human condition. That in no way means that life is suffering as per the Peterson (Zen) doctrine, but it is man’s condition to never be satisfied with even the greatest of accomplishments. That is what put us at the top of the species contest on this planet. You can be constructively or destructively discontent, but when you tell me that life is suffering and the only way to lessen that suffering (never to solve it of course) is to sacrifice my way to a better life all that says to me is that you’re out of ideas for a creative solution and you’re all-in on the destructive methods. Either that or you’ll continue naval gazing.

Fuck that.

So, the Red Pill needs to remain a praxeology and it ought to always resist being force-fit into an ideology because it’s always some ideological hack who wants to claim the truth it reveals as proof of his own purpose. The Red Pill has to remain an open source aggregate of men’s experiences. That’s why we’re still here today in spite of the Rooshs who said it would die out 3 years ago – it’s open source and decentralized information.

Now, to the second point, what does ‘Man up’ mean in the Red Pill context? I think this is really for the individual to decide, but I’d say that it would involve a man utilizing and internalizing the awareness the Red Pill represents to him and improving his life with it. In the Safety Net post’s comment thread there are hundreds of examples of how men saved their own lives, often literally. How the Red Pill truth reached them and then manifested in their lives is highly individual. I mentioned the need for a dissociation with ideology because that usually means aligning oneself with the expectations of someone else’s version of truth, not the objective (or as objective as we can make it) truth of the Red Pill.

When I hear ‘man-up’, I identify the context only as derogatory… is there any other definition which is not?

It should, because in almost all contexts imploring a guy to “Man Up” is following someone else’s path, not your own. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not in the business of creating better men, I’m in the business of men making themselves better men. And in today’s world of men seeking direction there is no shortage of personalities who’d like nothing more than to profit from selling men on their paths.

If there is a definition of ‘manning up’ in a Red Pill sense it is living a better way than your previous life that was informed by the falsehoods of your Blue Pill conditioning. Manning up Red Pill is killing off that old Blue Pill-created persona and killing off the false idealisms it taught you. It’s understanding and internalizing that those lies made you a less authentic person because the Blue Pill is firmly an ideology, but one that wears the mask of freedom or choice or individualism. If self-improvement in a Red Pill sense entail some basic tenets, one is that a man cuts himself away from that old Blue Pill paradigm and rebuilds a better life for himself based on a real understanding of intersexual truth on the personal, social and political scales.

Manning up Red Pill begins with rejecting the lies of egalitarian equalism and a commitment to real objective understanding of intersexual dynamics.

 

Hypergamy – The Misconceptions

At the end of September last year I gave two talks at the 10th annual 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. This probably isn’t news to any of my regular readers as it was the only in-person appearance I did last year. My first talk was a familiar one – Hypergamy; Micro to Macro – and was an updated version of the talk I delivered at the Man in Demand Conference in 2015. I’m happy to announce that the video of this dissertation is almost ready to go live on the 21 University site. I should also mention that this video marks the first time I’ve put my real face out in the wild so be gentle.

Before this video is made public I wanted to address some of the more common (and often deliberate) misconceptions about Hypergamy I read floating around Twitter, more than a few Red Pill forums and the blogs of Purple Pill ‘life coaches’ who need to dismiss Hypergamy as a ‘thing’ in order to keep their clientele mired in Blue Pill Disney dreams coming true. Some of these are honest mistakes, and some are just the opinions of guys who only see one side of the Hypergamous equation. A lot of critics think Hypergamy is all there is to Red Pill awareness, and while it’s true that women’s sexual strategies extrapolate a great deal into our social order, there’s a lot more to understanding intersexual dynamics than just wrapping your head around Hypergamy.

I’ve written about Hypergamy for as long as this blog’s existed (I own the google search term) and as new readers become initiated in the Red Pill I can’t expect them to have read every essay describing the ins and outs of Hypergamy. So in the interests of clearing the air and consolidating all of these misunderstandings for everyone benefit – and to refute the disingenuous – I’m going to run down the most common Hypergamous hate I see here.

Hypergamy is a Straightjacket
This is easily the most common misperception I read. Hypergamy is an evolved social dynamic. That is to say it is the behavioral extension of biological factors; most notably Ovulatory Shift. I’ll delve into this in the 21 Convention talk, and I’ve covered this in Your Friend Menstruation, but Hypergamy is a sexual strategy exclusive to women. It is the behavioral manifestation complementary to women’s hormonal and biological realities. Hypergamy at its root level is about the most efficacious, pragmatic, means of women becoming fertile with the best genetic breeding opportunities, and simultaneously pairing in the long term provisioning opportunities available to a woman.

To a strictly deductive, analytical mindset Hypergamy seems a lot like a straightjacket. If you measure up, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re fucked. This reflex is a binary either / or extreme and as such it paints Hypergamy as something insurmountable and very deterministic. I will admit, I’ve read some Red Pill guys either triumphantly or defeatedly cop to this idea about Hypergamy. What both fail to consider is women’s individual capacity to optimize Hypergamy in relative contrast to their own SMV. I’ve seen low SMV Pickup Artists pull off what to this mindset should be impossible. There is so much more to Hypergamy than just what a man’s looks presents. There are factors and circumstances that can circumvent Hypergamy, and there is nothing deterministic about it. Yes, Hypergamy is often ruthless, but resigning oneself to binary extremes about it gets men nowhere.

Hypergamy is only defined as “marrying upward”
This is a pedantic dismissal of a phenomenon based on semantics. Yes, the original term was developed to describe women’s “tendency to marry upwardly into higher socioeconomic strata” by sociologists, but the term deserves a much broader definition in light of the biological and psychological realities we observe in women today. We could create some new term that would describe the phenomenon, but Hypergamy would describe it in the abstract just as well. Critics resorting to this dismissal only seek to discredit the one proposing an idea based on terminology.

Some women are more Hypergamous than others
This is usually trotted out by the ‘not all women are like that‘ critics, and a lot of these are, of course, women. But there are also the ‘Quality Woman‘ seekers who want to believe that their unicorn woman wouldn’t be as Hypergamous as most slutty skanks on a constant lookout for the bigger and better deal. Hypergamy in this case takes on a aspect of social conditioning and becomes a part of women’s personality.

While it is true that acculturation and learned social practices can be a buffer against Hypergamous excesses in women, it doesn’t lessen or dissolve Hypergamy’s influence in women. Just as men’s sexuality is learned to be reigned in, so too can Hypergamy be learned to be controlled. Needless to say in our post-sexual revolution era Fempowerment has effectively unfettered that buffer for women. Learning Hypergamous restraint is viewed as some male chauvinistic repression of women’s sexuality, but the truth is we are expecting women to self-police their own Hypergamy (with no real instruction). We hope that women will effectively select against their Hypergamous best interest in exercising that control, and today men pay the price for that foolishness.

All women are Hypergamous. Some have learned to curb its excesses, some live in a cultural environment that moderates it for them, but all women are Hypergamous to the same biologically inspired degree. All that changes is the context in which Hypergamy is expressed in women.

Both men and women are Hypergamous
I covered this fallacy in False Equivalencies, but to recap it briefly, Hypergamy is a sexual strategy unique to women. Women have attraction floors for men with whom they will breed and/or settle into pair bonding with. Women only consider an equal to, or better than, arrangement with regard to sexual market value of a man in contrast to (what they perceive as) their own. Men will date and have sex with women who are sometimes 2 to 3 steps below their own SMV. Hypergamy never seeks its own level; women seek an advantage in the mating game, men simply want to reproduce. This is what defines each sex’s imperatives.

Men and women are different in various facets. It is the equalist mindset that presupposes we are the same (or more alike than different) and because of this the False Equivalency argument is always the go-to response to Hypergamy in women. The equalist believes that if women are Hypergamous then men, being equals, must also be as well. Really, this is a retort intended to refocus an unflattering truth about women onto men to even the scales and make men’s pointing out Hypergamy an equal shame. This false equivalency is also used for many other unflattering truths unique to women, so don’t be fooled.

Hypergamy is overemphasized in the manosphere
I see this more and more because as women openly embrace Hypergamy in a public sphere this leads to men becoming more sensitive to their (often ugly) roles in that strategy. There’s a real want to mitigate the importance Hypergamy plays in men’s lives because most men don’t like the idea of being controlled. Which then goes back to the straightjacket notion. Men accept Hypergamy, but they refuse to see it’s larger influence on social and political dynamics. I wrote about this in The Political is Personal. It’s almost impossible not to be accused of being conspiratorial, but in a feminine-primary, gynocentric social order it is women’s interests that define what is ‘correct’ discourse.

We read all the time about how western (millennial) society has become overly PC (politically correct), but I would argue that we are overly female correct. When women are afforded unchecked power their first imperative is controlling men to accommodate the Feminine Imperative. Women’s Hypergamous interests influence and dictate legislation and political discourse. It may not be something most men want to consider. Most guys in the sphere are only focusing on women they know personally, but there is a larger social narrative that is inspired by women optimizing Hypergamy.

Hypergamy only applies to men with the best social / provisioning status
I’ve seen this one-sided perspective promoted by Dr. Jordan Peterson. The idea is that, in women’s natural beneficence, they will only be attracted to the man with the best capacity to provide for her long term security and parental investment. This idea myopically ignores the Alpha Fucks side of the Hypergamous equation. This concept is very complimentary to women and usually guys who limit their definition of Hypergamy to the inherent goodness of women also tend to think of Alpha in terms of men being pro-social, leaders of business and community. This is false on many levels, but it’s very virtue-satisfying for men who believe that they’ll eventually be rewarded by women (quality women of course) who will after time think “nothing’s sexier”. I should also say that this fallacy is very popular for Betas in Waiting.

It’s men who are responsible for Hypergamy
This is a reversal of the origins of Hypergamy, but from a socially constructed perspective. I see a lot of well meaning Red Pill moralist men trot this out as a complement to (again) their hope that women might ever find their virtuousness at all attractive. This fallacy presupposes that men are the real power distributors and the nebulous Patriarchy women complain of is something a majority of men are in someway in control of. It also reverses the origins of male dominance hierarchies. It presumes those hierarchies exist separate from the women who actually perpetuate them with their own Hypergamy and upward sexual selection.

This appeals to men who’ve bought into the ‘Man Up for the Red Pill’ ideology. Women are only as Hypergamous as men allow them to be. While there’s some truth in that in certain cultural contexts, it is women who are deciding for themselves how Hypergamous they wish to be today, and they’ve got the full force of the law and social norms to enforce their choices. While I’m all for men establishing a dominant frame that women naturally want from men, I think it’s unnecessarily self-defeating to believe that women don’t understand how their own sexual strategy works and are responsible for it.

Hypergamy means only 20% of men will ever get laid
Newsflash: Beta men can and do get laid. This is one concern that a lot of critics think is promoting self-defeat in men newly exposed to Red Pill awareness. The concern is that, again, men will become despondent because they’ll classify themselves as one of the 80% of guys who don’t get laid or women would rather not sleep with, because Hypergamy. This theme is actually carried over to a lot of these misconceptions; PUAs and Purple Pill ‘coaches’ alike are concerned that their clients will just give up and go MGTOW because that Rollo guy showed them the ugliest side of Hypergamy and they’re hopeless.

First off, nothing could be further from the truth. Second, this fallacy stupidly (binarily) ignores the individual circumstances of women at the various stages of life. Not all women can get with that guy in the 20th percentile for any number of reasons. Thirdly, the primary edict of this blog and the Red Pill in general is using this information to better a man’s life on a by-man basis. If anything, being exposed to Red Pill truths like Hypergamy should embolden men to become more than they are in a new paradigm based on Red Pill truth rather than Blue Pill false hope – hope that, unfortunately, a lot of Purple Pill coaches are selling.

Hypergamy requires trust on the part of women
No, it really doesn’t. What this premise ignores is the dual nature of Hypergamy, and trust has nothing to do with the sexual urgency a woman feels for a guy who represents a 2-3 level bump in SMV compared to her own while she’s in the proliferative phase of her menstrual cycle. Trust, rapport and comfort are post-orgasm feelings. These are reserved for the Beta Provisioning side of Hypergamy and ones women usually associate with their luteal phase of menstruation. This is why the Betas women trust are the first guys they call to cry to about the guy they fucked who had no trust prerequisite. This fallacy is just stupid, but it does illustrate the Hypergamous process from both sides.

Men should stay ignorant of Hypergamy for their own good
This again goes back to the idea that men (usually Blue Pill Beta men) who know too much about the visceral aspects of Hypergamy will naturally become despondent and go MGTOW or worse, kill themselves in the thinking that they’ll never measure up. If you’re at all familiar with my writing you’ll know that I think the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. As I’ve said many times, the truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. It also doesn’t absolve a man of the responsibility that comes along with that truth. I get that guys are hopeful that they can find a magic formula that’ll get them their dream girls without much effort. Telling them that’s not gonna work for them makes them hopeless because they still cling to Blue Pill ideals being resolved with Red Pill truths.

This is where guys get the notion of ‘leagues‘ and that they don’t qualify for certain women because they’re out of their league. As I stated earlier a lot of the “keep the guys in the dark” notion is really a misguided way of supposedly helping a guy become something more by keeping him ignorant.

Hypergamy give women an “out” for bad, evil treatment of men
This is a play on the personal responsibility trope. I covered this in Our Sisters’ Keeper. It really comes down to the capacity men believe women have or don’t have with regard to their personal agency. This returns us to the question of women’s Hypoagency:

Hypoagency – the idea that certain individuals (e.g. women) lack agency in their own actions.They lack control. They are not actors … rather, they are acted upon. The corollary to that argument being that they are not responsible for their own actions. Yet the cultural narrative of the omni-empowered, Strong Independent Woman® is completely at odds with exactly women’s hypoagency with regard to rape. They are powerful and purposeful when it serves and entirely unaccountable and blameless when it’s not convenient.

There was a time when the book The Selfish Gene was being bandied around the manosphere and the concern was men might use the premises of the selfish gene to absolve them of cheating on their girlfriends or used as an excuse to pursue one woman after the other. They couldn’t help it, it was written into their DNA. The same argument is now used by (mainly moralist) men who promote the reverse of the idea that men are responsible for Hypergamy. Thus, women being acted upon by a Hypergamy that’s written into their DNA can use it as an excuse for the worst behavior and ugliest results imaginable to men. The logic then follows that women are either active agents and have moral agency or they lack that agency and need men to provide the self-control women are incapable of.

Personally, I believe its a combination of the two; women do have agency for which they should be responsible and accountable for, but also, men need to provide a confident dominant frame under which women want to submit and be associated with. It is not men’s fault that women are Hypergamous, but if there is to be a healthy control of it for the best interests of both men and women, men must understand it and master it. I would say the same of men’s own sexuality and sexual expression – however, we are already overwhelmingly held accountable for not mastering it.

Women aren’t slaves to Hypergamy
This is one more question of women’s agency. Just as hypoagency and the biological element of Hypergamy can be used to socially absolve women of the responsibilities of it, so too can women’s awareness of their own Hypergamy be another way to excuse bad behavior. Again, it’s about personal responsibility. I’ve never stated that women are “slaves” to Hypergamy. I have explored women’s conscious awareness of their behaviors being influenced by their innate Hypergamy. Most women don’t realize they are giving a guy a shit test, it’s part of their limbic subroutines. Most women don’t consciously plan their girls’ night out around the proliferative phase of their menstrual cycle. They largely do, but they don’t realize the coordination. Women aren’t slaves to Hypergamy, but they aren’t immune to its subconscious influence, and this applies to your “good girl”, your trad-con “Red Pill” woman and your “Quality Woman”.

Women are Hypergamous, men are hypogamous
Here we have another attempt to confirm a false equivalency in the hopes that some egalitarian balance might be found between men and women. I’ve heard Purple Pill men trot this one out occasionally: Hypogamy is the idea that men must marry down, or the increasing tendency for women to marry down in the face of men’s socioeconomic status being less than that of women’s. The salient point is that there is no biological element in men that would suggest anything about men opting for hypogamy. This is simply another effort to balance Hypergamy for an egalitarian mindset. I’m not suggesting hypogamy isn’t a thing, just that it’s a sociological phenomenon. Mens biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality, and this we can see manifested in their own behavior. Men don’t seek out hypogamous circumstances as a point of their imperative. Sometimes that may be the result, but again this is an extrinsic circumstance not an evolved drive.

Hypergamy should end after marriage
Oh man, wouldn’t that be nice? Actually no, it would put men and women into a state of personal stagnation. While I try never to deal in “should be” I do recognize that there are still guys who still believe that all the anxiety they felt in their dating years should fade to unconditional comfort after they get married. This is false for many reasons, but then there is the extreme reversal of this; “Aww man if I’m not the highest apex Alpha in my wife’s world she’ll cheat on me with him as soon as her proliferative phase comes around.”

Some critics like to overplay this stupid binary to prove that “women are people too” and Hypergamy isn’t even a thing for them once they’ve settled in with a great guy like you. Hypergamy is alway in effect for women by order of degree; marriage is no insulation from the sexual market place, you fool yourself in ever getting comfortable (or vulnerable). Guys who buy into this fallacy are usually equalists who believe their Burden of Performance ended when they said “I do”.

Now, that said, it’s not all gloom and doom. If you’ve established a strong dominant frame prior to marriage Hypergamy actually works in your favor. The same studies that showed women in unsatisfying LTRs or marriages sought out extra-pair sex with more masculine men also showed that women in satisfying relationships were more sexually proceptive (horny) for the men they were paired with when in their prime ovulatory phase.

Hypergamy is only about Alpha Fucks
Another type of critic likes to overplay the importance of looks and Alpha dominance in the Hypergamous equation. I’m of the opinion that looks and confident dominance (bordering on cocky arrogance) stimulates tingles in the most natural visceral way, but that’s not the entirety of the Hypergamous equation. As most PUAs will belabor, looks without congruence in behavior can actually be anti-seductive. Looks will cover a multitude of Game sins, but Game and generating an emotional impact in a woman is always the keystone. There are two sides to Hypergamy, Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. In today’s world women’s primary focus is on the Alpha Fucks side of the equation, but it doesn’t mean the Beta Bucks provisioning side has been erased.

Hypergamy isn’t so important, you’re overstating things
I get this from Purple Pill guys, PUAs and women – guys who obsess over Hypergamy are reactionary losers. And to them I’ll once again point out the  story of Daniella Greene, the FBI translator who left her military husband to marry the very ISIS fighter she’d been tasked to investigate. Watch the video at this link and then think about how many Red Pill truths this story confirms. Think about the far greater scope and importance an understanding of Red Pill intersexual dynamics and how Hypergamy factors into what was an international incident that threatened national security. Are we just going to say “well, bitches be crazy, she must be damaged” or do we see the mechanics behind her actions with a Red Pill Lens? This is only one example of the scope of the importance a developed Red Pill awareness should mean to men.

Look at the significance to which Hypergamy influences everything from divorce laws to child custody to even abortion. Hypergamy is a much larger dynamic than most men really want to digest. It’s not being reactionary to see the forest for the trees here.

You pronounce Hyper-gamee wrong, thus you are uneducated and your information is flawed.
Ok, you got me, disregard everything on this blog then.

Men and Suicide

Before I launch in here today I need to confess that this post has been in my drafts folder for a while now. As most of my readers are aware I’ve known two personal friends who’ve taken their own lives as a result of having their Blue Pill conditioned beliefs set them on a path to self destruction. One of the more important parts of my charter when I started writing was to reach the men who were at their wits’ end in figuring out how to deal with their personal, romantic or married lives that had until then been directed by what their Blue Pill acculturation and their understanding of intersexual dynamics were molded to be. Since I started and stopped and then restarted this topic again there have been a few recent developments in my perspective on men taking their own lives as a result of the Blue Pill’s influence on them.

All of this really began about two months ago while I was engaging in a debate (or what passes for debate) on Twitter with a very unsympathetic woman who thought she’d set me straight about why it is men choose to take their own lives at a far greater rate than women. As it stands today, men are statistically between 4 and 5 times more likely than women to kill themselves. For most Red Pill aware men this is a fairly well known stat and one that gets quoted often enough when women trot out their own stats about abuse or whatever issue they think it is that MRA are ‘confused’ about. They usually get owned when this sort of back and forth goes down, but I’m always drawn to the comparative issues women think are equitable to that of men losing their lives.

Men’s disposability is also nothing new to the manosphere. Sperm is cheap, eggs are scarce and men are expected to sacrifice their lives for the security and betterment of women even in the most patriarchal of prior social orders. It’s always interesting to me that issues of mandatory male conscription into the military (potential death) and the unignorable high male suicide rates are something women still won’t accept as being a pretty raw deal for men. Women’s innate solipsism will still compel women to find some “yeah, but;…” rationalization for men’s disposability. Whenever I bring something like this up the reflexive presumption is that I’m bemoaning men’s victim status for being disposable. However, it’s impossible to discuss male disposability without such a connotation. My issues isn’t one of seeking some equitable disposability for women, but rather it’s drawing attention to the way women react and rationalize away their own part in that disposability.

True Powerlessness

I covered a lot of this in Chivalry vs. Altruism, so I won’t belabor that here, but I will point out the inherent power imbalance in this disposability. I’ve stated in the past that true power is not the control we can exert over the lives of others, but rather the extent to which we have control over the direction of our own lives. When we discuss issues of power between men and women the real, ultimate, loss of that control is in the context of our deaths.

There is no greater powerlessness for men than a lack of control over our own disposability.

Again, this isn’t some cry of victimhood for men – I happen to believe there’s an evolved component in the male psychological firmware that actually predisposes us to sacrificing ourselves in lieu of the security of our women and children. That’s not so much altruism as it is an inborn subroutine for protecting women that triggers in life-threatening situations. When a mass shooter opens fire indiscriminately at a crowd of people it is the men, not the women, who instinctively put their bodies between that gun and women or children, even the one’s they don’t personally know.

In the bigger scope of things, men will always be more disposable than women, and on some level of consciousness women’s hindbrains instinctively understand this. As such, women’s conscious process must find ways to reconcile this understanding in order for them to move on from men’s sacrifices. Sometimes this can manifest in the War Brides phenomenon, but I would argue that in today’s social learning environment of mass media, instant gratification of women’ solipsism and feminine-primary social order, this reconciliation takes some even uglier turns. Today, women have become very efficient in consoling each other’s solipsistic rationalizing of men’s sacrifices. In this environment of default female victimization and presumed oppression even men’s ultimate sacrifice, men’s ultimate powerlessness in their own deaths, cannot ever be consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in a state of fempowerment.

While I had this debate it occurred to me that even men’s suicides could never be attributed to anything less than their own ‘male egos’ by women, thus making them victims of their conditioning into “toxic” masculinity. Essentially, women were arguing that men would put a noose around their necks because they were socially conditioned to do so. Their suicide rate was attributable to their self-pity and inability to be ‘real men’ as some nebulous toxic masculinity had predefined for them. I thought this was kind of ironic when you compare this reasoning to the narrative shift away from ‘toxic’ masculinity to masculinity itself is toxic. This is really a stupid argument when you consider that it’s just another social convention used to absolve women of the guilt associated with men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self sacrifice, but likewise women had need to evolved psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger in this respect.

So, in the end, it helps if women can fall back on social conventions that put the associated guilt of men’s sacrifices back on the men themselves. Chivalry and traditional masculinity are fine when they serve the Feminine Imperative, but if a man actually gets killed or kills himself as part of that, well, that’s on him then. And this is what I was beginning with in this debate; there will always be a desire for absolution of women’s guilt or complicity in the deaths of men. I should also add that in terms of war and men being drafted women regularly default to the same asinine presumption that if women were running the world that there would be no wars. I won’t dignify that with any deeper analysis than to say that this too is one more (feeble) way of looking for absolution in the sacrifices men make to facilitate women’s reality.

Suicide Solution

That still left the question, why do men take their own lives in such alarmingly high numbers compared to women? I had to do a bit of research on this, but the demographics for male suicide today show some patterns. 7 in 10 suicides are men (majority white) between the ages of 45 and 65. As expected from gynocentric media, the primary reason always cited is men’s so called stubbornness in seeking out psychiatric help before they attempt suicide – again absolving women’s influence of any complicity – but ignoring what would motivate men, and this demographic in particular, to suicide. Again, there’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide, only a stereotypically easy ‘male-stupid’ answer to absolve women’s complicity in it.

There’s a lot to consider and be sensitive of when it comes to male suicide, but I’m going to speculate about a few reasons here coming from a Red Pill perspective. At no other time in western history has there ever been a generation of more purposeless men. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function. We are innate idealists. We look outward at the world and like to imagine what could be possible. I believe there is also an innate part of our evolved mental firmware that predisposes us to problem solving and improvisation, and much of that comes as an adaptation to women’s own innate need for men who can display cues of competency.

In Competency I made the case for women’s attraction to men displaying signals of competency, confidence, mastery and creative intelligence as a selected-for survival adaptation. In short, our competency in life, whether stemming from physical prowess, social dominance or creative intelligence is integrally linked with our reproductive success as well as overall life success.

However, at no other time in history has men’s competency been so devalued and so debased; other than perhaps in terms of physical prowess and accommodating the short term (Alpha Fucks) breeding imperatives of women. At no other time in (western) history has the equity in what a man can provide or create or solve been so implicitly unnecessary or superfluous to women. When we consider the rates of college enrollment and graduation of women compared to that of men, when we consider the practical problems that men used to solve, our utility has never been less needed – or at least that’s the zeitgeist of today.

We read about how men need to accept this new social reality – that our need for purpose and function is no longer needed or as valued – and we need to change our headspace about it as if it were something men might simply turn off. This is the result of equalist beliefs that anything gender-specific is something learned rather than the innate firmware we were born with. But we cannot simply change our minds about needing a function. We evolved to be problem solvers, women talk, men do, but now we are expected to accept that men are obsolete.

Loss of Utility

In Relational Equity I made a case for men investing too much of their egos into what intrinsic (and extrinsic) value they believe their respective women ought to appreciate about themselves. Under the old books, old social contract this equity may have had some conditional value to women, but as a buffer against Hypergamy today there is very little a man might consider value-added equity (unless it’s exceedingly rare or exceedingly valued) as a hedge against Hypergamy. Before any defeatist critics tell me how not all women are like that, yes, I get it, there are a lot of variables to consider here, but the equation and the reality doesn’t change – relational equity, overall, is no insurance against Hypergamy. It is also no insurance against women’s security and providership needs being met by resources that come from outside that relationship. I’m not considering this because I’m trying to depress any man, but it is vitally necessary to consider when we look at reasons why 45-65 year old men are predisposed to higher rates of suicide and higher rates of alcoholism and opioid abuse.

I would argue that a major contributing factor to high male suicide rates finds its origins in men’s need for purpose, function and accomplishment during this phase of life. Every day I read an article about how men my own age are dropping out of social discourse. I mentioned a Boston Globe article about just this phenomenon in Male Control. In some respects I can understand that despite the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy today men really don’t seek out bonds with other men. This is primarily due to the fact that men need a common purpose in order to form these bonds. Again, this is just how we’re wired. Women intentionally schedule time to simply interact with their same-sex friends just for the sake of communicating and enjoying the act of communicating. Men need function or a common purpose to come together. We need an activity or a problem to solve and then we communicate and form bonds.

Women talk, men do. This is a well studied fact; our brains and, by extension, social networks largely center on purpose and function. Now, lets presume that in spite of having literally all the information in the world at our finger tips we remove all need for the utility that men are wired to provide to not just women, but the larger scope of Society. We get a generation of men on the outside looking in. Only the most creative, resourceful and motivated of men can really utilize, much less master, all that this information has to offer him. And even a portion of those men can really see past the antipathy of their supposed obsolescence to do something truly meaningful or masterful. As the saying goes, most men live lives of quiet desperation, but in the modern era these men are demonstrably useless. And I mean that in a functional sense; once a Beta man has been wrung of his utility to women, he ceases to be able to convince his hindbrain that he can build, improvise or solve things.

Once a man is stripped of his usefulness, once it’s made clear that all of the equity he believed would support his relationship has been erased after so long, men will still resort to practical, deductive solutions. That solution may be suicide when weighed with the prospect of having to rebuild himself in a new context; and even if he did would he just be building a new ‘him’ based on his old belief set?

When my brother in-law committed suicide it seemed to me at the time to be the most logical end he would come to. He was a man very steeped in Blue Pill ideals, but he was also a man who prided himself on what he could do – and if he didn’t know how to do something he was always a fast learner. He literally built his life, and expectations of a future life, around the relational equity he believed defined him as a man. He was very invested in the old books, old social contract that rooted a man’s attractiveness and quality in what it was he could do. What he built for himself and his wife defined his identity.

All of that 20+ years of building equity and an identity based on it was erased for him in the space of about six months. But it was more than the 20 years he’d been saving, building, solving and refining, it was a perceived future he believed would be lived out for the rest of his life that got erased.

To me, at that time, his suicide made absolutely perfect sense from a male-deductive logic perspective. What didn’t make sense was all of the endless rationalizations I heard from his family, friends, his kids, his Ex (my now widowed sister in-law) about why they thought he went through with it when it was plain for anyone who wanted to confront the truth to see. A lot of these rationales were almost verbatim the same that the article I linked used. “If only men would reach out when they have suicidal thoughts”, any and every rationale that might absolve his Ex of the guilt, and still more that were meant to console her (he must’ve been mental ill) though in the end she really didn’t need it.

My brother in-law made a practical decision not an emotional one, and while I wouldn’t presume to say that a guy’s emotional state isn’t very influential in his suicide, how he comes to the decision is very much attributable to men’s deductive nature. He showed no outward signs of emotional distress. In fact, right up to his hanging himself he was in very good spirits and seemingly accepting of the fact that the wife he lived his life for was going to be leaving him soon. He was very matter of fact in a way that men are when they’ve resolved something for themselves. When a guy seems to be taking things in stride we don’t want to create a problem where we see none.

When we look in this context at the high rate of male suicide in this age demographic we begin to see how men come to this decision. Everything they’ve built up to 45-65 years of age is now debased, devalued or simply erased. All of the value and equity they’ve committed their lives to – doing the right thing according to their Blue Pill conditioning – is as if it never mattered. So they’re confronted with a choice, rebuild themselves (hopefully in a new Red Pill aware paradigm), reconstruct a new life and tough it out, or, simply, pragmatically erase themselves.

Personally, I’ve had at least two occasions where I’ve been confronted with rebuilding myself. It’s a tough prospect, make no mistake, especially when you’re Red Pill aware and understand the reality behind having to rebuild a life from scratch after so much investment in plans and projects you truly believed in when you made them. My father had to confront this rebuilding too at around 55 years of age, but rather than rebuild or kill himself I watched him slowly decay into a man I never knew could exist as my dad.

Zeroed Out

I apologize if this topic is a bit of a downer, but I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

To end this I’m going to quote the comment of a man I met when I spoke at the 21 Convention in September. I won’t use his name, but after we talked he confessed that he was the commenter here. He’d made the trip to the convention to meet me face to face, to thank me for my work and gave me permission to use his example in a post. I won’t quote it entirely, but you can read the whole thing here. His situation is an example of, and inspiration for, everything I’ve illuminated in this essay

After a long marriage I divorced the mother of my children. A couple of years later, after some casual dating, I met a woman I would come to describe as my soulmate. I got married young – but this time, with all my infinite wisdom gained over the years – I was finally wise enough to pick a woman I was super compatible with.

We were together for a few years and even lived together. Things started out great and it was mostly smooth sailing until we moved in together – at which time I slowly allowed myself to be betaized in a slow motion, excruciating painful way.

About a month after breaking up with her I fully planned to commit suicide. I wrote a long letter explaining my rationalization and took other affirmative steps towards going through with it. About a week after I wrote the note – with D(eath) Day fast approaching – I took a break from getting my affairs in order to surf the net. I stumbled upon an Ask Reddit thread that was bad mouthing various subreddits. Some feminazi or male feminist mentioned the Red Pill subreddit as an example of a subreddit filled with craziness, and I decided to check what all of the fuss was about. Now

I’m not a religious man, but I will never rule out divine intervention. The timing of finding TRP – by complete coincidence no less – couldn’t have been more fortuitous. I stayed up all night reading the side bar – Rollo’s essays having the deepest effect on me – and everything…just…clicked….Talk about connecting the dots! Wow! It was very much like a come to Jesus moment. It was like divinity revealed secret knowledge to me just when I needed it the most – knowledge that gave me hope and very well may have saved my life. This all went down not really that long ago in actual time – but from where I metaphorically stand now it seems like an eternity.

Stay strong my friends, you can rebuild yourself even in the face of being zeroed out.