biological predisposition

She’s Not Yours

My colleague and friend, Rian Stone, took it upon himself to breakdown the brilliant simplicity of a common Manosphere idiom:

She was never yours, it was just your turn.

This phrase has been around since the earliest days of the Pickup Artists’ (PUA) online communities. And like many of the old wisdoms of that time the reasoning for it gets distorted by the various factions of what’s become the Manosphere today. In 2020 the more extreme end of MGTOW communities – Black Pill, Doomers, and VolCels – are what most mainstream audiences conflate with Red Pill. What they, along with Success Porn niche marketers, have done is pick and pull the parts of Red Pill praxeology that resonates with their personal beliefs and circumstances and demonize what doesn’t. Both factions have an interest in misconstruing what the Red Pill has taken 20 years to develop. It doesn’t really serve the ends of either perspective to spend too much time thinking about a contentious Red Pill principle when misrepresenting it is more valuable in confirming their belief sets – especially when doing so generates views, subs and ad revenue.

To the Doomer mindset She’s not yours… is confirmation of women’s duplicitous, fickle or evil nature. That’s not to say the nihilistic perspective doesn’t approach women’s nature from an objective Red Pill understanding, it just means they focus on surrendering to it and giving up on women. This confirmation bias also gets mixed up in the Doomer understanding of Hypergamy. Hypergamy resonates with them because it confirms the idea that all women will dump a guy at the first sign of his losing an Alpha Frame veneer; an act which he must constantly maintain in a world of endless options and online attention for women. Slip up once too often and at the first opportunity she’s gone. It’s the fallacy of Hypergamy as a straight jacket, and She’s not yours… justifies the defeatism. You will never find a lasting contentment with a woman because she holds first right of refusal in any intimate relationship (i.e. Briffault’s Law). Ergo, sooner or later your turn will be over and all the effort, time and emotion you invested in her will be for nothing (i.e. Sunk Cost, Relational Equity). In fact, it may be worse than nothing when you consider the opportunity cost of having bothered with trying to make her yours in the first place. While the juice might taste really good in the short term, it’s never really worth the squeeze in the long term. This conclusion is what really upsets the Success gurus because it’s a hard logic to refute – at least from their own Man Up! perspective.

That’s the Doom Pill interpretation. It’s based on reflexive, immutable binary extremes – the default reaction of this generation – because it confirms a hopelessness that defines them. Ironically, it was the very PUAs of the 2000s they despise so much who originally coined the phrase. Back then it served as a reminder to guys to never get too attached to one particular woman while dating several women concurrently. It was almost a mantra to ward off ONEitis because they were spinning plates and “catching feelings” for one girl tended to end up destroying them. It was a maxim that worked best as a preventive medicine since most practitioners of Game saw it as a means to achieve the monogamy their Blue Pill social conditioning convinced them was possible. Average men build lives around serial monogamy; it’s always been the surest way to solve the average man’s reproductive problem. So when you open them up to an abundance of sexual/intimate potential via Game they tend to use it to get their Dream Girl and ignore what the Red Pill says about women’s nature.

In today’s ‘sphere, She was never yours, it was just your turn is a salve for guys who’ve already invested in a woman and she dumped or divorced them. The presumption is that despite all their best Blue Pill qualifications or their Game savvy, Hypergamy gets the best of all women and she’ll move on to the bigger and better deal. This perspective presupposes a stable monogamy, not spinning plates, is the goal-state for every guy. Notice the maxim here is cast in the past tense. She was never yours,…At some stage a man believes she is his (or should be) and she no longer is now. Thus, She was never yours becomes a post-facto rationalization to the guy who’s probably feeling gutted by his breakup. The real issue is the guy’s want for a permanent solution to his desire for intimacy. We see this all the time among simps who spend small fortunes (monthly) to achieve some kind of virtual intimacy with his favorite OnlyFans cam-girl. In this case, She was never yours is reconfirmed for simps over and over as they move from one cam-girl obsession to the next.

For the Success Porn guru, all this is grist for the mill. On one hand, men struggling with confidence (see social skills), achieving intimacy/sex and finding purpose are their bread and butter. On the other hand, what they’re usually selling is the Blue Pill ideal of a sustainable contentment for otherwise discontent men. That contentment includes the hope that a permanent, loving and monogamous relationship with one woman is not only possible, but is also a sign of his authentic manhood. When Dr. Phil sells this hope we write him off as a naive Pollyanna and old order thinker. However, this same Blue Pill hope is repackaged and sold online as a return to masculine virtue by today’s Life Coaches in the Hustle Economy. The permanence of your contentment amounts to your ability to qualify for it and sustain it with their (usually repackaged) concept of masculine virtue. Any discontent on the part of the client is reflective of his own lack of determination or hard work to achieve it. 80’s Televangelists and 90’s Multi-level Marketing hustlers used similar graft. It’s really a monetized version of the philosophy of personal responsibility — which has always been a darling of traditional conservatism and now a staple of personal development. Any failure of the concept is always attributable to the man’s deficient effort and investment, which can then be attached to his character. This isn’t to say that all personal development guys are unscrupulous hustlers, just that the true responsibility of education rests with the student.

She’s not yours, it was just your turn, and other unignorable truths that the Red Pill makes men aware of, defeats the self-reinforcing circular logic of the personal responsibility hustle. It forces the hustler to admit that something outside men’s control might have an effect on a their lives. Rather than accept this and work within the framework, the response is more of the same; deny the phenomenon exists, or presume that even acknowledging it is indicative of a defeatist mentality – thus, a shirking of personal responsibility which completes the circular logic.

This is the origin of the “Truthful Anger” fallacy. Around 2015 the instructors working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD) started getting a lot of questions about the material in The Rational Male from students attending RSD seminars. At some point they had to address these questions, but to do so would mean acknowledging the validity of the concepts in my book – concepts that challenged the positivity grift they were rapidly converting over to during this time. The solution was to acknowledge the truth in my work, but tacitly disqualify it by presuming it came from a place of anger. They then cautioned against internalizing it at the risk of becoming angry or bitter against women — both presumptions commonly used by mainstream gynocentric norms. It was misconstrued as “truthful anger”; poignantly true, but best not to dwell on it if a guy wants to be happy. In other words, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Happiness is always easier to sell than truth.

Now that we understand the opposing sides of the impermanence of women debate, we also have to consider the Lie of Individuation that usually gets thrown into the mix to dismiss the She’s not yours maxim. The Individuation Fallacy is most easily understood as:

“People are all individually special cases; each a unique product of their environments and experiences, and are far too individually complex to understand via generalizations according to sex, etc.”

The individual supersedes any commonalities attributable to biology or evolution, and usually focuses solely on social constructionism and personal circumstance as a basis for motivating behavior, developing personality and influencing others accordingly. The supremacy of the individual is the natural extension of an underlying belief in The Blank Slate. When you start from a belief that we’re all functional equals everyone is an angel or a devil according to the choices they made. But depending on the person’s circumstances they can be forgiven or damned for the consequences of those choices according to how we interpret their character as individuals. This is how we get rationales like, not all women are like that and “People are too complex to categorize” to dismiss the unignorable commonalities we see in men and women in the information age. No one likes to think they aren’t in some way unique as much as they don’t like to think determinism has influenced (in some way) what they think makes them unique. And since I’m sure you’ve made this connection already, yes, the Individuation Fallacy dovetails nicely into a doctrine of personal responsibility.

When we read some example of a woman opting out of a relationship (or sex) with one guy to take up with another, the reflexive response is to individualize her behavior according to her individualized circumstances. She’s damaged, she’s got Daddy Issues, she’s insecure because you weren’t Man Enough, etc. — any and every consideration that points away from categorizing her actions as commonalities in women’s innate nature are the reflexive thought process. She’s not yours, it was just your turn defines her actions in a concrete visceral understanding of women’s nature that conflicts with the Blank Slate‘s individualism. In this case the maxim is a description, not a prescription.

Men have an evolved need to know paternity. Unhindered by social strictures or women’s Hypergamous filtering men would opt for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality as our innate and preferred mating strategy. I’ve written a lot about this so I wont belabor it here, but a majority of men, over the course of history, will never be able to actualize this strategy. Ergo, socially enforced monogamy became the best mating strategy compromise for men as modified by the selection pressures of women’s mating strategies. The risk in this compromise is the assurance of paternity. If a man is going to compromise mating opportunities with many women to parentally invest in one woman, the deal must come with one condition: the child must be his genetic stock or the compromise invalidates his existence (evolutionarily speaking). To ensure this men evolved a mental firmware that predisposes us to jealousy, mate guarding and desire to possess a woman. This is why we develop a A Sense of Ownership with our girlfriends, wives and children. The dynamics of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism all find their root in men’s imperative to ascertain their paternity and protect their genetic legacy.

The need to control women’s sexuality is nothing less than men’s evolutionary compulsion to ensure that their compromise in parental investment is not for nothing. In a social order where masculine responsibility to wife and children was balanced with a commensurate masculine authority to enforce those responsibilities, men could nominally control the reproductive process. Part of that process included possessing a woman. This was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative.

Every man loves a slut, he just wants her to be his slut.

In today’s gynocentric social order the thought of owning a woman is an affront to the female-primary sensibilities that stem from individuation. Feminism and gynocentrism have conditioned generations of women to believe they are autonomous ‘things‘ with no need for anything outside themselves – least of all men – to find true contentment. They are Strong Independent® women who believe their fulfillment comes from self-ownership. Eschewing a man’s surname in marriage, or even marriage at all, is a sign of independence and stiff middle finger to the idea of passive femininity or notions of ever submitting to a man’s authority. The evolved complementarity between men and women is replaced with the social contrivance of an idealized egalitarianism. Husband and wife is replaced with “Equal Partners“.

For women, the problem with this equalist fantasy is biology and evolved impulse are excused, if not encouraged, in a social order that prioritizes women’s mating strategies. Literally anything goes when the worst consequences of women’s Hypergamy can (enthusiastically) always be attributed to men’s inability to accept them as individuals.

The problem for men is that we still have an innate want to possess a woman to ensure our paternity and invest in our genetic legacies. As mentioned, this desire for permanency with one woman was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative in a patriarchal social order. In a gynocentric social order the evolutionary imperative to possess a woman still remains, but the social imperative says…

She was, is, will, never be yours, it was just your turn.

And that is why this maxim rubs so many men the wrong way.

Why We Fight

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

In the almost nine years of of this blog I have only hit upon violence on a couple of occasions. I’ve only been in a physical altercation a handful of times in my life. And by that I mean real fights; the kind of violence that requires you to physically harm another person. I’ve been in lots of sparring fights and martial arts tournaments, mostly when I was in my 20s and 30s. While I’ve been hurt and caused hurt to my opponents, I can appreciate that there is a qualified difference between competitive sport fighting and real violence. The one mutual interest my younger brother and I had when we were growing up was beating the shit out of each other. By the time I got to high school I was no stranger to taking a fist to the chops or various headlocks and “wrassling” holds.

Most of the times I’ve been in real fights were in high school. It’s interesting just how Darwinistic our teenage years really are –we’re just too immature to appreciate it then. Unless you grow up in a sheltered family, learning about sex and violence is usually part of our adolescent experiences. After high school I got into a few fights when I was playing gigs in the late 80s-90s Hollywood scene. Depending on where we played and who we happened to piss off, those kind of fights were something you had to keep in the back of your head as being a possibility. Usually you had friends or bandmates who had your back, but not always.

Of those scuffles most of them were versus a drunk guy who presumed he could kick my ass, or my bandmate’s ass, because, well, we weren’t exactly the most physically imposing guys to be honest. And a lot of those fights were initiated in one of two ways; the guy was fed up with guys like us because the women (usually in some sexy outfit) preferred to fuck guys like us – or, the fight was provoked by a woman and the guys fighting were coming to blows over who’d fucked whose girlfriend. Often enough it was the girl herself who’d later admit she “made a mistake” and one or the other found out.

All of that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. Things have definitely changed with respect to how violence is initiated, normalized and respected (or delegitimized) today, but the basis of that violence will never change. Violence is part of human nature. We do ourselves no favors in denying this simple fact. I can remember in 2001-02 when I did casino promotions for this new ‘sport’ called King of the Cage. It was the forerunner for today’s MMA fighting, but back then it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it is now. I believe Nevada was one of the only states that could legally host such an event. The outcry then was that it was an underground ‘bloodsport’ and legitimizing it as a true sport was the first step towards degenerate social savagery. Or something like that. People used to be appalled by it.

Now MMA fighting is something I’ve seen some Evangelical Christian churches use as a draw to get their men to attend a ‘masculine revival’ weekend. Warriors for Jesus with a ‘saved’ MMA fighter speaking about using his sport as a ministry. I think there’s a primal, evolved side of men’s nature that makes violence attractive. And like love and respect, violence is another aspect of the human experience where men and women’s approach and understanding is innately different.

Boys and men are innately drawn to competition, combat and violence. We make ‘guns’ out of our fingers. We craft weapons from scraps we find in the garage to defeat our ‘foes’. We love our plastic army men and G.I. Joes, our cowboys & indians, and we play ‘war’ with our friends. Our video games from the first coin operated arcades to our immersive virtual reality consoles are about combat and strategy. Even sports have been called a “proxy for war”. Team sports are a facsimile of tribal competition. Human males’ physiology, by and large, evolved for combat and physical stresses. I realize that might be hard to believe by today’s standard of masculinity, but the evidence is there.

The male Burden of Performance began with a need for testing that performance against our primal environments and some very real opponents. I have read some interesting research that suggests human beings are innately risk averse. Most humans would rather avoid conflict than voluntarily engage in a fight that they could very well lose, if not die from. The logic is that humans’ success as a species is at least partly due to our evolved sense of caution for life and limb. If you cooperate and play it safe it’s likely your risk-averse genes would propagate into future generations.

Of course the flip side to this can summed up in an old Latin proverb,…

Fortune Favors the Bold. 

There’s also research that shows men experience a spike in testosterone levels after defeating a rival in combat, and/or killing their opponent. This doesn’t even have to be actual violence; some studies show men experience a similar spike when their sports teams win a significant game. So, while in some instances avoiding conflict and backing down from a dangerous engagement has survival benefits, risk taking and enacting one’s will by force also has some reproductive benefits. 

For as much as they rail to the contrary, women do have an affinity for violent men. Women get turned on by men with a capacity for violence. Modern psychology attempts to pathologize this arousal prompted by dangerous men (hybristophilia), but, by order of degree, women evolved to select for men with at least the perceived capacity to do harm to another man. I would speculate that this attraction stems from women’s evolved need to seek security and protection from men, and sympathetically, men evolved an innate protectionist aspect to our own evolved firmware. Competing with rival men for sexual access, sometimes violently, is part of our ancestral programming. As we developed into a more ‘civilized’ species that competition shifted to contests of performance between men, but the old violent firmware is still part of humans’ starting package.

Let’s You and Him Fight

On Twitter and a few past livestreams, I’ve pointed out that women today have developed a false sense of security with respect to the potential of real violence. This is equally a result of the masculinization of women as it is our accommodating the Feminine Imperative in mainstream cultures. In the age of social media, as the globalization of women’s entitlements have spread, so too has women’s entitlement to personal safety. 

One very real downside to the Fempowerment narrative is that it has convinced women that the fantasy of the “strong female” is something they can aspire to personally. This is what I’ve called the Warrior Princess fallacy: Over the course of generations our feminine-primary social order has convinced women that they can realize the same warrior role as men. Via storytelling in various media the ideal that physical differences in men and women are relative, and women can be “just as tough and dangerous as men” is pervasive. This is a dangerous precedent, and one that is a direct result of old order beliefs in, and popularization of, Blank Slate equals. 

In the idealized fantasy society of equalism, masculinized Amazon Warrior Princesses can give as good as they get from any man. But in the real world, men evolved for physical performance, competition and combat; women evolved to endure the rigors of childbearing and nurturing. And as the introduction of transgendered biological males into biologically female sports divisions is proving, the realities of our physical differences is unavoidable.

However, the idea that women are always entitled to physical protection in the new order presents some interesting dichotomies. Women mix an entitlement to personal safety with an expectation of clichéd female bravado. Remember, this all happens in the context of women’s innate solipsism; add a bit of alcohol and the social posturing of a group of women all vying for attention on a Friday night and you begin to see the volatile potential. Today’s women have grown accustomed to initiating or escalating inherently unsafe circumstances for themselves – to say nothing of the men they’ll involve.

Women have a limbic understanding that, for the most part, they can be violent with relative impunity. If a male ever strikes a female, even in self-defense, she can be assured that a mob of random males, following their evolved protectionist directive, will spontaneously form to beat the shit out of the guy. In today’s Blue Pill engineered society, even the most passive male waits for an opportunity to prove his quality to womankind by becoming ‘justifiably’ violent in defense of a woman. It’s what most men are conditioned for for most of their lives.

“Sorry babe, I don’t know what came over me. I just can’t abide by any man assaulting a woman!”

The old, vestigial, evolved response of violence is something our male hindbrains know will trigger ‘gina tingles in women. The primal ideal of the nobleman with the capacity to unleash justifiable fisticuffs is Blue Pill conditioned psychological red meat. That the woman provoked or escalated an unsafe situation isn’t even an afterthought – the guy raised a hand to a woman, opportunities to prove a legitimate capacity for violence are rare for low SMV men.

As such, women presume safety. Women will raise hell about feeling unsafe around men. They’ll bleat about fantasies of enforcing a ‘male curfew’ (only for undesirable Betas of course) out of safety concerns. We’ll hire security staff to walk a woman across a dark parking lot and install emergency call boxes on college campuses. But in social situations (particularly when drinking) will escalate inherently unsafe situations knowing that men will play by the old order rules.

There is an old PUA maxim that picked up on women’s penchant to provoke men to violence. It was called the Lets You and Him Fight dynamic. Whether women are aware of this and deliberately provoking a fight between men, or, their subconscious motivates the conflict is a debate that’s been around for a while. But the LYHF dynamic is a shit test women will use in assessing a man’s Alpha status. Women need indignation as it is, but in this dynamic is a woman’s hindbrain wants a visceral response from a man.

I first became aware of the LYHF shit test when a friend had told me how annoyed he was by his girlfriend starting fights with guys that she expected him to finish. She would honk the car horn from the passenger seat if someone had even slightly cut them off in traffic. Even flip off other drivers if the opportunity presented itself. She would start fights with other women which would provoke their boyfriends to step in on their behalf and he was tacitly expected to kick their ass to defend her provoking them. “What are you a pussy? Go beat his ass!”

I’ve tackled the subject of shit tests numerous times on this blog so I won’t belabor them here, but this test plays upon some very deep, evolved, intersexual and intersocial dynamics. On some level of consciousness a woman wants to know her man can get violent. Most Blue Pill men find that suggestion appalling. We’re supposed to be “above all of that”, right? For the most part I’m sure the majority of men would rather not be put into a position of taking a fist to the face. As such we build social conventions and rationales around not engaging physically in a real sense. So, to consider a woman might desire a man with a predilection for violence prompts them to qualify that woman for his own safety.

Intrasexual Competition

“Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

When a group (tribe) of primates reaches a certain number of members the potential for ‘hostile takeover’ by lesser males becomes almost a certainty. Beta male primates form coalitions to overthrow an existing Alpha leader. Most dominant Alphas instinctively cull this coalition building to ensure their position. A smackdown, abuse, punishment for anything that looks like a challenge to his position from lesser male troop members is something Alphas do to infrequently teaming up on him. Partially this is a display of dominance (social proof reinforces it), but it is also a curbing function.

Eventually the Alpha becomes weaker and less effective at enforcing his dominance, and the Betas grow in number until such time that they can band together and depose him. Then the cycle repeats with the most dominant male among them assuming the Alpha role. He gets access to the most fertile females, kills off his rivals’ offspring (which prompts the females into estrus) and reproduces for as long as he’s able to remain in that position.

And yes, I’m aware of the theory that pro-social Alphas that build loyalty-exchanges among other males, and display a willingness to share resources with females, tend to make for better ‘leaders’ within a tribe. What most of that research conveniently leaves out is the element of envy and jealousy that develops (even among primates) in the Beta male population until the sentiment reaches a point of challenge. Even the good-guy, prosocial Alpha has to watch his back.

As you might guess, many of these behaviors are paralleled in humans. Alpha displays of violence, even if by proxy, are ‘sexy’, but mostly we manifest male prowess in social displays. Athletics, resource acquisition, peacocking, conspicuous consumption, really any costly signaling of high sexual market value. To compete with these Alpha displays, lesser males must either: 

  • Increase their own value, and learn to display it effectively, 
  • Find ways to convince other men, (coalition building) and reproductively viable women, that those displays are worthless, while propping up his own displays as more valuable.

In the age of social media and mass communication Beta males are constantly reminded of their lesser positions. There’s no respite. Even the most well-meaning, prosocial Alpha’s presence is a reminder of Beta male inadequacies. High school bullies and ‘Jocks vs. Nerds’ is a constant theme across human cultures because the evolved human male experience is always one of competition and a Burden of Performance. To be male is to compete, and as such there will be winners and losers.

Deposing, or disqualifying, an Alpha – much in the same way primates do – is also a constant theme in human cultures. Beta males enacting ‘justice’ on an ‘evil’ Alpha or an Alpha proxy has always been a teenage fantasy for boys. Spiderman, Captain America, the wimp who incredibly transforms into a powerful Alpha himself will prove to the world how that Alpha power should be ethically used. The geek who gets the girl because she magically sees his superior quality that aligns with the terms he’s establishing as valuable is also a fantasy. All of these cast the Alpha as ‘oppressor’.

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” – Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Why is using strength, displaying value and exercising will an act of ’tyranny’? Why is restraint of power a moral imperative? How did we come to disqualifying value displays? I’ve seen a few talks by Jordan Peterson where he promotes the idea that a real man is a dangerous one who possesses the capacity for violence and oppression, but has the strength of will not to use it. This then begs the question, how does anyone know a man even possesses this capacity if he’s not to display it? Concealing strength is awesome, but it is, by definition, indistinguishable from weakness. No one knows if you’re a black belt or a white belt until you get in the ring and fight. However, the moral consensus is that it’s unacceptable for men to display value.

This then is the global, social coalition that was formed by the majority of lesser men. To continually disqualify the merits of superior men is individually taxing and makes lesser men look worse for doing so. But build a social order around men self-policing their displays of value; then you have higher value men doing the heavy lifting for lesser men. You may be powerful, but the social mores of the time (created to serve the majority of lesser men) will tell you to conceal it. In fact, they’ll build social conventions to convince the whole of men that displaying vulnerability, not strength, is a display of value.

Most of what I’m digging at here is old order thinking. Socially enforced monogamy has primarily served the greatest number of Beta men. And while it’s definitely been a stabilizing factor for civilization, I can’t ignore that the social expectation of monogamy is also the result of society-wide coalition building among lesser men to ensure that greater men wouldn’t out-breed them. Most male-specific social conventions are designed to control men’s innate directives. Their latent purpose is to teach rules that limit displays and usage of strength.

And in the new order we see this old order intersexual competition struggle to keep pace with a global sexual marketplace that centers on women’s innate mating strategies reseting context of intersexual dynamics. Open Hypergamy incentivizes men’s overt displays of higher value – and now on a worldwide scale. In response, men form online coalitions to disqualify those displays in an attempt to devalue the strengths of men they couldn’t hope to compete with in the old order. Meanwhile, women in the global sexual marketplace continue to reward men who display genuine value according to their mating strategy’s needs. 

Unconscious Contempt

Today’s essay was inspired by the lead image you see here and the subsequent exchange I had on Twitter about it. What you see here is a rather nebbish looking husband, I presume post-surgery, recovering from his vasectomy in bed. He is surrounded by cutesy post-it note jokes his wife left him (kind of like the notes your mom might put in your school lunch when you were a child) on a plethora of sugary snacks from the pantry.

The number of kids we’ll be having in the future – Zero

Forgive me if I Snicker

Sorry your dong got dinged

Good-bye to your swimmers

Mini Nonuts

Your berries got crunched

These are just a few of the ‘jokes’ his wife spent an awful lot of time creating.

Beta men and their wives joking about their vasectomies has become the meme du jour on all the usual social media sites where women congregate to appease their egos, gloss their girlfriends’ and commiserate about their fates of being wives and mothers. Before I dig in here I think I need to point out the utility that social media has evolved to serve in most women’s lives now. There was a time when a woman’s indignation needs could be met by daytime television, talkshows and romance novels when living vicariously through their girlfriends’ lives wasn’t sufficient. Today, women’s innate need for indignation is provided on-tap courtesy of the internet, social media and cutesy-but-insulting images of a husband are almost passé. I know, I’ve discussed this topic on a few podcasts, but it’s becoming increasingly more important for a man to understand what social media is providing to women’s nature and how their relationships are indirectly influenced by the exchanges their wives and girlfriends are having online.

I’ve seen a few of these “I got a vasectomy and my wife thinks it’s funny” social media posts before this one. Creating little post-it note jokes to apply to the snacks in the pantry might seem cute, but why is this even a thing? Why is it women/wives think it’s cute to publicly ridicule their partner about the impotence he elected to have? Amongst the Facebook and Instagram shots of her life, amongst the motivational quote memes, and among the complaints about kids, marriage and domestic life a moment of ridiculing their husband seems par for the course. And it’s all acceptable so long as the context is one of being ‘all in fun’.

Marriage today is a dicey proposition for men. I talk and write a lot about the overwhelmingly high risks of life and livelihood men should consider when it comes to how we do legal marriage in this era. MGTOW or not most men understand that marriage is basically for women now – at least with respect to the legal protections and the win-win incentives that are advertised for women. If all a woman ever did was read about marriage from social media and popular culture one would have to wonder why she would ever want to sign up for a lifetime of dealing with a husband, or the caricatures of average men, at all. The contempt for men, even in the most good natured, humorous, ways is palpable on most social media. It’s entirely acceptable, even expected, to deprecate the foibles of men in marriage. We literally can’t do anything right in a ‘female correct’ online world.

And like the “child-in-a-man’s-body” that women complain about, most of these average husbands are okay with being the butt of the joke. In fact, most are enthusiastic about their self-deprecation because they’ve been conditioned to think that doing so endears them to the women who married them and proves they’re “secure in their masculinity”.

Can’t you take a joke?

The first thing any woman, and any Beta male, will say is, “C’mon Rollo, it’s all in fun. Imagine being so humorless as not to get this? Who hurt you?” I think there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the passive aggressiveness that inspires this ‘humor’. When a comedian like Dave Chappell throws caution to the wind and does a 90 minute comedy routine that is funny as hell, but attacks the unassailable ‘correctness’ of our present social narrative we laugh along knowing the latent message of the humor. So, what is the latent message of making a man’s (elective) impotency a joke?

Imagine what the outrage would be on social media were you to make ‘cute’ jokes in the same way about your wife’s uterine ablation or tubal ligation. At the very least women wouldn’t think it was funny. No one tells women, “Lighten up. What, are you so insecure in your femininity that you can’t take a joke?” When a woman is rendered infertile it doesn’t occur to anyone to make light of it, but for a man to be neutered – and at the mutual agreement with his wife – we find the hit to his masculinity hilarious. Why is this?

I realize I’m focusing on one incident here in this image posted on r/funny, but this is an example of a larger dynamic. It’s socially acceptable to ridicule the impotency of Beta men. As I detailed in Selective Breeding, women will openly attack men’s genitals as a reflexive response to the possibility that a lesser man might try to fool her Hypergamous filters. A guy getting kicked in the nuts by a woman is always funny.

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her.

In Selective Breeding I made the argument that women’s existential fear is the possibility of having her Hypergamous filter (feminine intuition) fooled by a Beta male and becoming saddled with his shitty genetics for the rest of her life. This is a primal, evolved, fear for women that manifest itself, often unconsciously, in many of women’s behaviors that we either take for granted or we have social conventions that accommodate them. Decidedly gynocentric societies will legally mandate against this existential fear.

But what about women who are already married or pair-bonded with men that their evolved subconscious knows is a suboptimal choice for her? What about women who are trapped in a marriage with a guy that her hindbrain confirms is not the ‘best she can do’? How does that primal fear of being saddled with a faithful Beta manifest itself? 

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Sigmund Freud

Unconscious Contempt

I would argue that women today have never been more comfortable in expressing their contempt of the men they married. My recent essays on Polyamory and the deconstruction of men’s Paternity imperatives have been an exploration of how a feminine-primary social order is reimagining itself with respect to how men and women will come together and form families in the future. People will claim that women’s lack of respect for the masculine is the result of generations of men not living up to some old-school ideal. That might be so, but women have no respect for the masculine, the male experience, simply because they have no need to. 

Why do women feel comfortable – to the point of taking it for granted – in expressing contempt for their husbands? We can argue the basis of where this passive-aggressiveness comes from, but why is it okay to veil this contempt in humor?

Before I get run up the flagpole for being a humorless boor let me reiterate that I’m not saying men ought to read more into things like this. My point is the bigger picture here; why do we find this funny at all? I believe it’s a form of anxiety release for women who’ve committed to a lifetime of parental investment with a man that her hindbrain knows is less than what she believes is best for her.

These images were pulled from an Instagram account called Motherhood Through Letterboards. What’s interesting about this is the contempt for fathers and husbands that bleeds through what we should probably have a sense of humor about. You can have a look at some of these to get the context, but the latent purpose of this exercise is a release of the anxiety created by women’s pairing and reproducing with men that their hindbrains cannot accept as Alpha.

Again, we talk a lot in the Manosphere about how social media contributes to the gross overinflation of women’s sense of self. It’s easy to see how women overestimate their sexual market value, and then conflate it with their personal value, but there’s more to this than just the woman on OKCupid who thinks she’s a 9 when she’s really a 6. There comes a time when that woman with the overblown sense of self must “settle” on a man who her hindbrain believes isn’t the best she could do. The metric by which she judges what is the best she can do is also subject to this ego-overinflation.

The main reason most women agonize over the question of whether she should “settle” for Mr. Good Enough is rooted in this Hypergamous conflict that usually comes at a time in her life where her SMV and her options with men are decaying. Today, the reason we see the age of first marriage being pushed later and later in life for women is due to women prolonging this indecision. She knows she can do better than the less-exciting Beta who seems like her best option in her Epiphany Phase because she’s had better in her Party Years. She also knows she can do better because social media and a constant steeping in the new Global Sexual Marketplace has convinced her she’s actually a 9, not a 6, and anything less than perfect is a waste of her potential. All of this plays on women’s primal, Existential Fear of pairing with a suboptimal mate choice – for life.

But now she’s committed. She married the only guy who would date her in that phase of her life given her circumstances. She married the Beta in Waiting, who’s overjoyed that he’s finally found his Quality Woman who appreciates his type. He’s thanking God for bringing him a woman who tells him “I’m done with the Jerks” and wants to do the ‘right’ thing now – while her hindbrain is contending with her existential fear becoming reality due to her own necessity. Now add 1-2 children into this mix (his or not) and you get this passive-aggressive manifestation of her existential angst.

Fortunately for her there’s an unending number of women experiencing exactly the same unconscious contempt for the men they married online in dozens of popular social media groups. The desire to “punch him in the face” is always tempered with “love”, humor and platitudes about relationships always being “hard work”.

End Note: Vasectomies

I feel it’s incumbent upon me to address what will be the predictable binary responses of literalist critics here:

• No, I’m not saying don’t get a vasectomy.

• No, I’m also not saying that if you did get a vasectomy you’re a pathetic loser Beta.

I will however point out that when I see stories about how a Beta husband did come to the decision to get a vasectomy there are always a lot of subconscious reasonings that go along with it. For all the notions of egalitarian marriages and self-praise for being rationally evolved above the hindbrain interpretations, on some level of consciousness a man electing to sterilize himself is a confirmation of the value he puts in his masculinity. This is why women think it’s funny to ridicule your impotency. Her hindbrain has 100% confirmation that you know your reproductive viability has no value.

A man’s reasons for getting a vasectomy may be valid and in some ways empowering for him. I imagine there’s at least some confidence to be derived from knowing you wont be held responsible for any “accidental” pregnancies. I get why men would opt for it, but the way a woman’s feral brain interprets a man sterilizing himself is what I’m getting at here. You may think, “Well, I don’t give a damn what women think about it.” Fine. Totally valid, but I’m outlining a woman’s instinctual response to a man permanently preventing his own reproduction. There is a subcommunication underneath this decision that denotes emasculation, and this is what women resent.

In some ways I see wives celebrating their husband’s vasectomy for reasons that have nothing to do with improving their sex lives. In the original Twitter thread I had men tell me that they got a vasectomy at the suggestion of their wives, believing it would lead to greater sexual frequency (or any sex in a sexless marriage) only to admit that it never improved anything for them. So, why the goading to get a vasectomy? The dots I keep connecting are a subconscious desire on the part of women to geld a husband to ensure he never reproduces with other women. It’s almost like a service she’s doing for the Sisterhood. She’s making sure that her mistake never becomes any other woman’s mistake.

Selective Breeding

Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?

The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the most recent Avengers movie Starlord (Chriss Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story) permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness; a kick in the nuts.

We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.

 If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rodgers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc. are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the next “Thor” movie. And this is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Woman® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that’s been written for them to fill.

Manspreading

Earlier this year I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured what we were told was a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye you can sort of tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve see similar protests before, and if you look at the linked video here today you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in commercials. 

Recently there was another woman who’s won some sort of design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys just sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man so I need to take up space.”

But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. It’s a hindbrain signaling of confidence in men. Now, before you write me off here, think about this; if women’s primary concern was about men taking up space, then why attack a man’s genitals to force him to close it up? Why not simply ask him to close up a bit? Why is pouring water (bleach) on his crotch an acceptable punishment? Why is a hit to the balls a reflexive retaliation?

Women’s existential fear is having their Hypergamous filters bypassed by a clever Beta male impersonating an Alpha, breeding with him, and thereby saddled for a lifetime of support with the child of his inferior seed. Women’s evolved sensitivity to this filter extends to subconscious cues men display in their posture. Ergo, a man ‘spreading’ is perceived by a woman’s hindbrain as a false signal of Alpha by a Beta male. This triggers the existential fear response, thus attacking his manhood is doing all of womankind a favor by humiliating him for his attempt to deceive women’s filters.

I’m sure there’ll be some women (and their ‘allies’) who’ll think this is a stretch, but then, why is it acceptable to kick a man in the nuts when he’s spreading? Why is it that Starlord gets kicked in the balls and we laugh? Because a Beta male tried to pass himself off as an Alpha and retaliation was due. If a guy like Jason Mamoa was sitting spread-legged on a bus it would serve as an arousal cue for most women. Alpha status recognition is an automatic subconscious subroutine, fine tuned over millennia of evolution, in women. Women’s subconscious awareness instinctively reads SMV status and prompts behavior accordingly.

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

Or your shitty genetics for that matter. Patrilinear surnames are a symbolic stamp of ownership for men. They give a name to his genetics – a surname is associated with a specific genetic line. A man’s legacy is his genes and those genes need an identifier. One of the more controversial topics I debate online is the refusal of men’s surname by their wives. Women keeping their last names or hyphenating them in marriage is now a common sign of their independent spirit. Marriage is only acceptable to the Strong Independent Woman® when it looks more like an egalitarian business arrangement rather than a complementary pairing of a man and a woman who understand (and accept) the nature of their own gender. Traditional marriage looks too much like “ownership” for feminist wives and nümale husbands.

Blue Pill conditioned men are far more likely to be okay with their wives’ decision to keep her name, hyphenate it, or even take her name. After all, it’s the progressive thing to do and most believe on some level of consciousness that his accepting her independence in this way will make him more appreciated by her. The truth is this: his acquiescing to her in this way only reinforces what her hindbrain has already confirmed – she’s paired with a Beta male who wouldn’t give an afterthought to insisting his genetics bear his name. He confirms the low quality of his genetics to her hindbrain.

There are a lot of convenient social conventions that come along with a woman’s insistence on keeping her surname. Just like the excuse of men “taking up space” warrants terms like “manspreading”, women and nümales will appeal to pragmatism:

“She’s a doctor, lawyer, soon-to-be-famous-person and she need to maintain her identity for public relations reasons. Otherwise she’d totally take my last name dude.”

“I don’t want her to have a crummy last name like ‘Butts’ or something.”

“Taking a man’s last name is an antiquated symbol of patriarchal ownership of women. Haven’t we evolved past this yet? Are you so insecure in your masculinity that you’ll insist on her taking your name?”

These are a few of the cover stories, but the latent purpose is the same; women’s hindbrains must hedge their Hypergamous bets with men they know are Beta before pretending to commit to a lifetime of breeding and parental investment with them. For a woman marrying a man whom her subconscious acknowledges as Alpha, not assuming his name isn’t an afterthought to her. Women paired with a man who is a confirmed Alpha will often say “I didn’t want children, but I wanted to have his babies.”

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

We’re getting into sexy sons theory here, but the idea is that a significantly high SMV male can inspire women to become submissive/supportive wives and mothers. See my essay on Alpha Widows for more about this.

A woman in a good Hypergamous pairing accepts – desires – his authority, but also his genes. She doesn’t just want children, she wants his children. This then is signified (codified?) in his name passing on to her and their children. Even in ostensibly egalitarian marriages the kids generally retain the name of the male who fathered them (unless single-mom throws useful step-dad a bone and the kids change their name to his). Human beings are innately tribalistic (sorry Jordan). This tribalism is expressed in Selective Breeding practices extending from the personal to the social.

In 2019, and in the reproductive aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, these tribal distinctions are now left to women to determine in a confusing global sexual marketplace. Men’s innate drive for paternal certainty falls away in this environment. The existential fear and frustration that manifests from that drive still persists in men, but the practice of it gives way to women being the primary influencers in selective breeding – and how it will or won’t be expressed. It’s now a common practice for a woman to change the surname of children of a genetic ‘asshole’ father to that of the adoptive step-dad-who-stepped-up. Or the noble Promise Keeper son and holy protector of his single mom (and by extension all of womankind) who changes his last name to something else. 

But why? Why bother to go to that trouble if names are unimportant? If paternity doesn’t matter anyway, why go to the trouble of changing a name?

What Happens When She’s the One Who’s Out of Options?

As I mentioned, women’s existential fear is pairing herself with a Beta male who, through guile and deceptions, convinced her he’s an Alpha. But what happens when that woman runs out of options in her  Epiphany Phase? What happens when she’s forced to settle on the good-enough Beta (the guy Sheryl Sandberg assured women “nothing’s sexier”) because she can’t lock down the Alpha whose babies she wants to have?

She can continue searching indefinitely. The social conventions established by the Feminine Imperative convinces women that their sexual market value (SMV) is unending and imperishable. Those conventions also combine with others that shame men for being so infantile in preferring women who are ‘younger, hotter, tighter’. This shaming gets extended to convincing Beta men they should “align their dating strategies” to prefer mature women who “now have their heads on straight”. The idea that an older woman is more mature and therefore ought to be considered more desirable by men is conveniently positioned in women’s Epiphany Phase – so is the Myth of the Biological Clock.

Or she can settle for the less-than-ideal Beta male she’d never have opted for in her Party Years. Women have various psychological and sociological mechanisms in place to help them rationalize this settling on a Beta in Waiting.

  • Plan B: There’s always a fallback guy. Generally this is one Beta for another, better positioned Beta though. If one were “alpha” he’d already be the Plan A. (Be the A Guy). It’s important to note that if the Plan B Beta eventually ‘alphas up’ in some perceivable way, this generally throws a woman into a psychological conflict.
  • She convinces herself that ‘settling’ is really who she is in that moment. Most women genuinely believe in their Epiphany Phase rationales. Most would probably pass a polygraph test if you asked them if they genuinely felt the way they do about their decisions during this time of their lives. However, Hypergamy and its fundamental rules don’t change for women even when they believe something new about themselves. And often enough that ‘genuine’ belief is motivated by their subconscious understanding about their state n life as a result of their mating strategy.

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

This is a fundamental understanding for Red Pill awareness. It’s one of the easiest indicators men can use to determine a woman’s interest in them, or her subconscious understanding of your status as a man. Is she making more rules for you to obey, more hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for her ‘love’ (i.e. sexual access)?  She probably sees you as a Beta. Is she breaking her rules, the rules she believes she needs to follow in her new (Epiphany) phase of life, in order to get into situations where she can facilitate sex with you? Is she putting off responsibilities in order to enjoy herself with you? She probably sees you as Alpha.

This rule-setting or breaking is a basic litmus test for genuine desire. Women’s hindbrains grasp this  too. If a woman is setting rules for a man, her subconscious understands that he’s predominantly Beta. Because she needs to set rules, because it seems like logic to refuse his surname (another rule) and because he accepts these rules – even encourages them in himself and other men – his status is confirmed as a Beta. Only a Beta would need rules. Only a Beta would comply with those rules.

I should add that this is the basis of all transactional relationships. Jump through hoop (obey rule), get sex. An Alpha, by nature, would have options to replace a woman who made rules for him. Furthermore, it wouldn’t occur to a woman to issue rules with an Alpha man whose babies she wants to have. Hypergamy can’t afford to issue rules to Alpha men.

The Inner War

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her. There are more than a few Purple Pill “relationship experts” who cater to this demographic of women, and they do very well marketing new age magic and cutesy aphorisms to resolve this inner war.

I characterize this war as a conversation between a woman’s Id and her Ego. 

The Epiphany Phase forces her sensualism-seeking, ‘hawt’, short-term sexual (breeding) opportunism to come to terms with the necessity of her long-term security needs. Alpha Fucks (her Id) wars with Beta Bucks (her Ego) in her head – and all with the urgency of knowing that her SMV is decaying to the point where she must either take action or convincingly rationalize why she doesn’t need to take action. Her Ego knows her SMV is in decline and long-term security / parenting / family is becoming less and less available to her. But her Id still wants what it wants; ‘hawt’ sex with ‘hawt’ guys. And she’s still ‘hawt’ too – the feminine-primary world says it all the time “Never Settle Gurl!” – she ‘deserves’ only the best.

Thus, the conversation leads to varying degrees of compromise to outright self-delusions prompted by outside influences (i.e. social media). Plan B is a compromise. Refusing his last name is a compromise (or hedging of her Hypergamous bets). Making rules for, and endlessly testing, a Beta to assuage the Hypergamous doubt (“is he the best I can do?”) is a compromise.

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

Today, the new fascination with ‘Poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is also one more methodology women are using to make a compromise between the Alpha Fucks her Id needs and the Beta Bucks her Ego knows is necessary for her future security and happiness. “Alternative relationship strategy” is the latest euphemism for Poly, but it really distills down to a means for women to find a way to balance the Hypergamous equation. She’ll marry the Beta, but it should necessarily mean she has to have sex with him. Poly relationships are a compromise.

Ideally women would love to give themselves to a worthy man. To follow his plan for their lives,…and she’d like to feel the kind of attraction to him that would inspire the trust that he would do so for her and her children’s benefit. 

“I wanted to have his babies.” — this is Hypergamy balancing Alpha Seed with Beta Need perfectly.

Today though, women wait too long. They believe the lies of their own Blue Pill, that their SMV is never depleted. They don’t look for this balance anymore. They don’t even expect to find it; one man is for a same night lay, the other is boyfriend material. 

The Global Sexual Marketplace

Before I launch into today’s essay I want to throw out a few caveats. The first is a reminder of my long-time policy of dealing with issues of race, politics and religion; and that’s to say it’s my practice leave these topics to other blogs and other writers unless those topics cross over into intersexual dynamics that are pertinent to Red Pill awareness. I feel like I need make this clear as I’m going to get into issues of race and how intersexual relations are modified by these issues today. It’s always been my belief that the shared input and related experiences of men of all races, cultures and nationality is one of the greatest strengths of the Red Pill. So it’s with this in mind that I think we need to address some of these experiences.

What got me on to this topic was the video I’ve linked above here today. As most of you know I’m not a proponent of the idea of a “Black Pill”. That is the ‘black’ part of understanding the harsh realities of what Red Pill awareness opens men’s eyes to. Accepting the uglier nature of intersexual dynamics and how it plays into today’s sexual marketplace is often something that drives some men to a kind of despondency. It can be really depressing to have Red Pill awareness destroy your long-held Blue Pill ideals – particularly when those ideals helped to give you a sense of hope in spite of your instincts telling you something different.

When I was at the 21 Convention last October I had a discussion with Dr. Shawn Smith about the nature of the Blue Pill. His question to me was something like “Don’t you think that some guys need at least a little Blue Pill to keep them going?” I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve actually touched on this in a few prior essays. In essence, it should follow that human beings can’t handle too much ‘reality’. This is why we look for escapisms and turn our otherwise rational minds to something like faith. The human mind tries to remain hopeful in the face of dire realities; which also follows evolutionarily. Those humans who stayed optimistic in the face of crushing reality didn’t off themselves in despair and consequently passed on their genes.

That’s the nuts & bolts of it (yes, I know there’s more to it), but is this a feature or a bug in today’s realities? Willfully choosing conscious ignorance while your rational mind knows the truth can lead to despondency and depression. It’s the observer effect – observing a process will change that process – only, you’re playing that game with yourself. So, is a little bit of our Blue Pill conditioning a good thing if it gives us a hope that keeps us alive?

I’d have to say no. Because once you unplug from the Matrix going back to that ignorance is really impossible. Something in your hindbrain knows the truth about the fantasy you construct for yourself. Again, it’s playing the observer effect on oneself. And it’s just this simple truth that makes a lot of guys who are unprepared for the anger and nihilism that comes from Red Pill disillusionment to come up with things like a ‘Black Pill’.

But this essay isn’t about dealing with that despondency. I’ve already written that essay in A New Hope. This essay is about one of those ugly truths that Red Pill men have to evolve new adaptations for. You see, there is no ‘Black Pill’ – there is only the space in between a man dealing with his despondency about a harsh Red Pill truth and his crossing the abyss to accepting that truth and doing something with that information to better his life.

Local vs Global SMP

Watch the video I linked here. It’s by Black Pill 101, a channel that specializes in exactly the harsh realities of Red Pill awareness I mentioned above. It doesn’t pull any punches and for that I’m in agreement with them. Men deserve the unvarnished truth; without it they founder. This video outlines the innate difficulties Asian men face in the Global Sexual Marketplace. One of the most common requests I get for counseling is from Asian or Indian men asking me to help them improve their game. Many of them believe I have some Game solution to their getting laid with an SMV 6-7 they know from work. Many of them think they might have a chance with a modest SMV 6 if they either had some specialized technique or they could simply earn another $250K annual salary.

I honestly feel for Asian/Indian men in this respect. When I read about Aziz Ansari’s #MeToo’ing I read with morbid fascination watching his story play out with another ‘cute’ (SMV6-7) white girl. This is the stereotypical interaction. With my Red Pill Lens I saw a girl conflicted by her attraction to Aziz’s social proof (celebrity) with her visceral reaction to becoming intimate with a guy she simply wasn’t all that aroused by. This is just my personal experience, but I’ve counseled Indian (and a few Asian) men who all share a very similar frustration – they really want to get with a white American girl but they are sexually invisible to the vast majority of them.

Black Pill 101 lays out this frustration from Asian men’s perspective. If you happen to be an Asian or Indian man I’d encourage you to add your own experiences in the comments here. But from my own interactions with these men the story revolves around their investment in locking down an average white woman. They aren’t looking to spin plates. They want an LTR with a girl and most of them tend to fixate on one they know from work or a friend of a friend. Maybe that lean towards monogamy is a cultural thing, but they all seem to set their sights on the average, seemingly attainable, American girl. And almost universally they are relegated to the ‘friend zone’ or the go ‘Black Pill’ in frustration.

I’m going to look at the bigger picture here while I try to answer why this is so commonly case. In our tribalist, hunter/gatherer ancestral past our naturalistic sexual marketplace was limited to what a very localized group of individuals had to offer. We might’ve lived in groups of 100-150 ‘natives’ of our tribe. In that tribe maybe there were 10-12 females who would’ve been potential breeding/pairing candidates for a young man.

There are general arousal cues that are universal to all humans across cultures. Natural cross-culture beauty standards is something that’s been widely studied since the mid seventies – globalized beauty standards and physical prowess cues – however, the context in which those cues are expressed are (were) buffered by whatever that localized sexual marketplace (SMP) can realistically manifest.

Example: Height in men something universally agreed on as attractive/arousing for women. This is a globalized attraction cue in women. Girls all over the world overwhelmingly prefer a man to be taller than they are. This is an evolved preference because the survival implications are that a taller man is (generally) an easily identifiable aspect of physical prowess. Height implies a capacity for protection, an imposed dominance, and is a signifier of presence in a male dominance hierarchy. Whether this is the actual case is irrelevant. All that matters is that a woman’s preference for tall men to breed and pair with.

The average height of a Filipino man is around 5′ 4″. Prior to the Spanish colonizing the Philippines all Filipino women knew of men was that 5′ 4″ man. And to the 4′ 11″ average Filipino woman that was attractive. A 5′ 6-7″ man was a giant by the local SMP standards.

But the global SMP standards are simply ‘taller men are more attractive’. So when the Spanish/Western peoples came to the island it introduced Filipinas to a new standard: the 5′ 7″ Spanish man. Now the globalized SMP began to modify the local SMP. Then, eventually, along came the first 6 foot tall Caucasian European guy. Then the first Black man, etc. Gradually the localized (previously tribally-defined) SMP to include the new possibilities of women breeding/pairing with men outside their own tribe.

Localized Contingencies

This is only one easy example of how a globalized standard of what defines the whole of the sexual marketplace redefines, and often replaces, the localized standard of attraction/arousal for women. There are many other ways this out-tribe influence introduces a new global standard for the SMP. This can include force as well as by invitation or local social norms shifting to accommodate the new global SMP. When a tribe is conquered by another it forcibly alters the other’s sexual marketplace standards (War Brides).

As such, societal standards shifted to favor social practices that defended the local SMP integrity of that tribe. This is nothing groundbreaking – tribalist humans have been creating social and religious contingencies to buffer agains women’s Hypergamy, and to solidify the integrity of the local SMP for millennia. And these norms affect both the men and the women of that culture.

Cultural norms that forbid intermarriage (really interbreeding) of women with out-tribe men are common, but there are also:

  • Prearranged Marriages
  • Guarding/Prioritizing Virginity
  • Buffering Against Hypergamy
  • Socially Enforced Monogamy

I should also add that there is the Samson Contingency which is a buffer set against (powerful) men taking out-tribe wives. It may’ve been acceptable to have sex with out-tribe women (rape or prostitution), but for the integrity of the tribe, that man was only to form lasting bonds (via marriage) from within that tribe. This kept vital resources within that tribe.

A Modern SMP

In an upcoming essay I’ll be exploring the deeper reasons why Blank-Slate Equalism is so difficult to purge from our present-day social order. However, I need to detail a bit of this now. We live in a feminine-primary social order (the Gynocracy), but without the Blank-Slate much of the preconception of it collapse. One reason Blank-Slate Equalism remains a social norm (despite a world of empirical proof that destroys it) is because it serves to disguise the ugly realities of a sexual marketplace defined by human evolution. Particularly so in an age of expanding SMP globalism. It’s not just culture, politics, ideology and socioeconomic considerations that are tied to globalization; a global scale sexual marketplace is following among all of this.

In the age of global mass communication our localized (tribal) SMPs are replaced with a global standard. That global standard destroys the old local SMPs, but it also selects-out the men who don’t measure up to its standards. This is something I think most MGTOWs and all Incels instinctively know: according to the global SMP selection criteria there are some men who will simply not be selected-for. If the Black Pill 101 video about how Asian women don’t select Asian men for mating opportunities is any indicator, I think Asian and Indian men are facing this head on today.

Now, I expect the first rebuttal to this proposition will be that the present, global SMP is a reflection of Westernized beauty standards and horribly distorted expectations. Asian/Indian men seem to want nothing to do with the native women who are ruthless in expressing that they want nothing to do with them. What globalized demographic is really left for these men? The same might be said about socially inept white men seeking an easier sexual marketplace in Asian women. All of this is simple deductive adaptations men will naturally resort to when it comes to solving the problems of sex and reproduction.

I’m totally accepting that there is a societal influence in all of this. However, I think the incentives to look into the opportunities that a larger global SMP offers is still based on Darwinistic principles. Even Western romanticism is still founded upon natural female arousal cues that define the larger SMP. The global SMP is rooted in the naturalistic, evolved (not socialized) elements that trigger arousal, incentivize parental investment and play off women’s dualistic sexual strategies (Alpha Seed/Beta Need).

The Global Social Order

Finally, I want to point out that while our expanding globalization has given rise to a global SMP, that expansion is rooted in Gynocentrism. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution an unfettered, unconstrained Hypergamy has dictated this global sexual marketplace. The world-scale SMP is driven by women’s prime-directives, not men’s. As women are afforded more authority to direct society, their reproductive interests are what defines the global SMP. And all unchecked and unbalanced by any male interests. This is important to consider when we see the old tribalist, local SMPs decay to extinction. The checks and balances on Hypergamy that existed in the past were the creations of a smaller localized SMP. One that was familiar with the risks and results of allowing men and women of that particular tribe to reproduced without thought to the integrity of the tribe.

This is why Blank-Slate Equalism, as big a lie as it is, is so necessary to maintaining the unfettered Hypergamy that the global SMP is based on. Without its social constructionism, without its presumption of coequal agency, the Gynocentric power base is replaced with conventional, evolved gender norms that would favor men’s influence in the global SMP. Gynocentrism needs Blank-Slate Equalism to disguise its authority and influence. Notions of ‘Equal Value’ and social constructionism are needed to cover the ugly Darwinsim that unchecked Hypergamy thrives in.

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.

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.

Transitioning

As most of my readers know I’m presently editing the final draft of my third book. A very large part, almost a third, of this new book will be dedicated to Red Pill Parenting. I’ve written several series-posts about parenting from a Red Pill perspective and I felt it was an important enough topic to deserve a category itself in my sidebar links. I’ve expanded significantly upon these essays in the book as well as adding more material and some general advice for Red Pill aware men in their parenting efforts.

One thing I’m asked of from men who are Red Pill aware fathers is what to look out for and what to apply themselves to in raising a son or daughter using a Red Pill Lens. While prospectively it will give women some parenting insights, I’ve written this section with the intent of informing men about what they can expect from a feminine-primary social bent on conditioning a man’s children to assimilate to a Blue Pill mindset.

Without giving too much away, I’ve tried to express the dangers of a system of feminine-primary acculturation that contributes to what we term ‘Blue Pill Conditioning’ in the manosphere. What defines a ‘Blue Pill‘ mindset means different things to different men, but what conditions him to literally think, and invest his ego into that feminine-primary identification is initiated at a very early age. One thing I think gets lost on guys becoming Red Pill aware is just how much of his very natural-feeling sense of self is the result of a conditioning that’s taken the better part of his lifetime to develop in him.

The main reason I began developing a Red Pill parenting dialog is because it’s vitally necessary for Red Pill fathers – really any father with a sense of conventional masculinity – to come to terms with how his sons’ and daughters’ upbringing will be defined by what I call ‘The Village’ in the book. I coined this from the popular meme that “it takes a village to raise a child”, and the Village we have today is one that is dead set on instilling and normalizing a state of deliberate gender confusion – and hopefully perpetuate that state into a person’s adulthood.

The Village

This Village is a catch-all term and I mean to have it represent all of the influences a child receives in its upbringing that contributes to its Blue Pill sense of self. This includes the influences of media, popular entertainment, academia, their pre and grammar school education, popular culture that actively seeks to instill its own ideological base, etc. These are fairly recognizable sources of the Village’s systemic influence, but it’s also important to understand that this influence will be reinforced by your child’s peers, their Village family and relatives.

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

The Village will raise your daughters to perpetuate the same cycle that devalues conventional masculinity, the same cycle that considers a father’s presence as superfluous and their sacrifices as granted expectations. It will raise your daughters to over-inflate their sense of worth with unmerited confidence at the expense of boys as their foils. It will teach them to openly embrace Hypergamy as their highest personal authority (publicly and privately) and to disrespect anything resembling masculinity to be less than some silly anachronism or reverse it into being all about men’s insecurities.

The good news is that for all of these efforts in social engineering, the Feminine Imperative is still confounded by basic biology and the psychological firmware evolved into us over millennia. That basic root reality is your greatest advantage as a father. If there’s one underlying truth upon which to base your parenting it’s this; children are still motivated by evolved influences that are relatively predictable. Begin from the root truth that we evolved our psychology and our behaviors from intergender complementarity that made us the preeminent species on this planet. It takes a global Village to distort this by teaching failed notions of egalitarian equalism.

Useful Tools – Blue Pill Fathers

Although the Village would assert its influence to be the primary one in your child’s life, and although it would have women believe that father’s are both necessary when convenient and superfluous, father’s are not without their uses. The Feminine Imperative (by way of the social system of the Village) needs fathers to help reinforce its feminine-primary influence in their children’s lives. Thus, Blue Pill fathers must also carry the feminine-primary water in their parenting. They must be taught to believe that parenting a daughter is preferable to parenting a son:

I realize that everything I could do with a boy I can do with my daughters (i.e. play basketball, teach them how to throw a punch, and play in the dirt). Yes, I know that’s a big fat “duh” for many of you, but I’m a recovering knucklehead with minimal relapses, so please humor me. And yes, I’m going to teach them much more than those three things – but I promise you that I will teach them those three things.

The Feminine Imperative needs men to constantly reaffirm the fallacies of egalitarian equalism, but it is The Village that needs a father to instill them into the minds of their own flesh and blood as well as those of other fathers. The meme is always a pretense of gender-neutral equity, but the latent purpose is one of devaluing the very existence of boys, and, by extension, conventional masculinity.

And this is the crux of the effort to enlist fathers in the system of the Village; masculinity and maleness are always portrayed as problems to be solved – the solution always being more feminine identification. The main goal of the Village is to destroy and redefine conventional masculinity in a way that only benefits the feminine.

I realize that being “girly” is just a myth. What does that mean, anyway? Would my kid be less girly if she dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween instead of a princess? (and that’s exactly what she did, by the way). Would she be less girly if she wanted to tackle little boys on the football field instead of taking ballet classes? Not to me.

This is precisely the degree of gender obfuscation the Village requires fathers to endorse. The squid ink here is the idea that masculine and feminine, boys & girls, male and female are all one, undifferentiated whole; in fact the old ideas of gender differences that brought the human race to where it is today, we are taught, were nothing more than “myths”. The underlying note is that girls are the functional equals of boys, but girls have the social and sexual advantage of being female.

The social narrative of the Village, the one it needs fathers to internalize and parrot back, is one of Fempowerment, but simultaneously one of male disempowerment. The idea then evolves into a sense of conventional masculinity being a defect of men; men are just unperfected women who are in need of women (or their daughters’) innate correction.

The idea here is that men with daughters make for “better men” as defined by the Feminine Imperative and approved by The Village. What Red Pill fathers need to acknowledge in this that their sons will be taught that their maleness is inherently flawed. All of the attributes and evolved instincts that make him a boy will be connected with his masculinity being “toxic”.

“Toxic Masculinity” or “Hyper-masculinity” are common tropes in the Village. We’ve gotten to a point that any form of traditional, conventionally masculine behaviors are now equated with a character flaw in men. So thoroughly has the Village distorted the old books definition of manhood that anything resembling a characteristically masculine behavior is, by default, an act of ‘hyper’ or “over-the-top” masculinity. This, of course, makes characterizing those acts as toxic, or ridiculous.

The Preferred Gender

In my essay, Environmental Stresses I added this quote from the book The Red Queen:

Contrary to popular belief a preference for boys over girls is not universal. Indeed, there is a close relationship between social status and the degree to which sons are preferred. Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan noticed that, in feudal times, lords favored their sons, but peasants were more likely to leave possessions to daughters. While their feudal superiors killed or neglected daughters or banished them to convents, peasants left them more possessions: Sexism was more a feature of elites than of the unchronicled masses.

[…]Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today: A poor son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a rich man. In modern Kenya, Mukogodo people are more likely to take daughters than sons to clinics for treatment when they are sick, and therefore more daughters than sons survive to the age of four. This is rational of the Mukogodo parents because their daughters can marry into the harems of rich Samburu and Maasai men and thrive, whereas their sons inherit Mukogodo poverty. In the calculus of Trivers-Willard, daughters are better grandchildren-production devices than sons.

These quotes are a part of a much more in depth look at how both environmental and social stresses contribute to a ‘preferred gender’ dynamic in both animal populations and human social structure. As I was reviewing this book recently it hit me how western cultures have blatantly been endorsing ‘female’ as the preferred gender for the past 60-70 years now.

I realize this assertion grates on popular culture’s sensibilities when it comes to gender, but as I stated in that essay, at no other time in human history has it been more advantageous to be female than today. Whether you want to argue that assertion from socioeconomic, education, gender identity, social ‘progress’ or any other metric, women in this era enjoy a condition that places their sex as the primary one in terms of social advantage. Women today live in a social condition that advantages, ensures their relative successes and directly or indirectly provisions for their personal security while simultaneously seeking to handicap being male and ridiculing the conventionally masculine.

In many a prior essay I’ve made the assertion that this effort in feminizing boys – in “perfecting” them with feminization – has been a long effort in social engineering. And while I still believe this is true, I think that in recent years the adaptive response to this preferred gender dynamic for Blue Pill fathers, men and boys is now an effort in socially engineering boys to imagine their gender identity as being transitionable to that of girls. Needles to say this push for gender self-reassignment has been embraced by the Village.

Olivia loves Disney’s Frozen princesses, all things sparkly, bright tights and ballet. During her family’s Cuban vacation last summer, she danced in the children’s “mini-disco” before the evening shows, twirling and leaping across the stage. One night another guest turned to her parents, exclaiming, “Your daughter is the girliest girl I’ve ever seen!”

Olivia was born a boy.

She “socially transitioned” from male to female, in nursery school last year. She was four years old.

Today, she attends kindergarten at a Montreal primary school. Only her teachers and the school board know she is transgender, for now.

Olivia (not her real name to protect her identity) is part of a growing phenomenon that is being celebrated but which is also raising strong emotions: an increasing number of children as young as preschoolers appearing at gender identity-clinics across the country, convinced they are of the opposite sex.

The new push to normalize transgender acceptance relies solely on the presumption that gender identity is a social construct rather than influenced by biological, and evolved psychological dynamics inherent in both sexes. The idea again comes back to the egalitarian presumption of a blank-slate equalism and a rejection of gender as a binary determination. Yet in over 90% of transgender identity shifts we see it is boys who opt to “become” female in their self-reassignment. Left to their own non-abstract decision making – and reinforced by Blue Pill parents and the Village – boys will, in the binary, shift to a female / feminine gender identity in overwhelmingly greater numbers than girls shifting to a male / masculine identity.

I would argue that this greater transgender preference for boys is a direct result of the Preferred Gender dynamic and reinforced by the Village conditioning boys for it while normalizing the idea of it in a larger cultural respect. This is the next step in cultural feminization of boys and men that began in the touchy-feely days of men needing to “get in touch with their feminine sides.”

It is no longer enough for boys just to be educated in a feminine-correct manner. It is no longer enough to teach them to despise the gender they were born into, “hoping their penises will fall off”, and it’s no longer enough to condition them to defer to girl’s perfectness. Boys must literally be transitioned to be girls from as young an age as 4 years old.

This is the degree to which the Village and the Feminine Imperative will go to condition future men into a Blue Pill mindset. I outline this in the upcoming book, but this is vitally important for Red Pill fathers to understand because these will be the ‘boys’ they may eventually need to mentor and unplug from their very early psychological damage. Many voices in the manosphere call this damage child abuse and it’s easy to understand why; this damage works on a boy’s most intimate part of his sense of self.

Red Pill fathers need to recognize this perversion of conventional masculinity for what it is and protect their sons (as well as daughters) from it while still anticipating the fall that will result from the “men” this re-engineering of gender will create.