dread game

Adaptations – Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Evo-Psych

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You’ll have to forgive this exceptionally long post here, but for many critics of (and in) the manosphere of evolutionary psychology the following post articulates things better than I could. Some in the ‘sphere seem to think a reliance on evo-psych is some form of blind faith at worst; some sort of creative, purpose-built guesswork at best.

It is not.

When I apply anything regarding evolutionary psychology on Rational Male I approach it in the most deductive manner I can see fit insofar as connecting the behavioral dots with the social apparatus I observe. While Red Pill awareness isn’t reliant upon evo-psych it is founded upon a similar observationally deductive methodology.

Evo-psych is a very broad school of psychology that is not just limited to intersexual relations. While I do largely embrace the foundations of evo-psych, it’s important to remember that my particular education revolves around behaviorism.

The following re-blog here is a collection of ten answers to common criticisms of evolutionary psychology by Dr. David P. Schmitt. I’ve pared it down a bit for readability, but do see the link for all the sources cited.

Emphasis my own.

A few years ago, I was giving an invited presentation to an audience of mostly sociologists and family studies professors on the topic of evolution and human reproductive strategies. I mentioned that some social scientists hold false beliefs about “evolutionary psychology,” such as the mistaken assumption that evolutionary psychologists think all men are interested in bedding as many women as possible (often called short-term mating), whereas all women are only interested in marrying a single man and staying faithful to him for a lifetime (i.e., long-term mating).

When I tried to dispel this common misperception by noting, for instance, that evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized women are just as designed for short-term mating as men are—in some ways even more so such as women’s heightened desires for cues to genetic quality in short-term mates—an audible gasp swept through the conference hall. I kid you not, I could see rows of people who looked genuinely horrified. I was a little taken aback, so I asked an audience member near the front row who had her hand over her mouth if something was unclear, to which she proclaimed, “that’s not the evolutionary psychology I know.”

When I tried to explain that women’s evolved short-term mating desires have been studied by evolutionary psychologists since the early 1990s and the topic remains a very active area of inquiry today, heads swiveled in disbelief. My subsequent Power Point slides chock-full of studies confirming women’s specially designed short-term mating psychology were falling, I feared, on an auditorium of deaf ears (or blind eyes, I suppose). Alas, this stereotype about evolutionary psychology wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

It seems to me many critics of evolutionary psychology cling steadfastly to false stereotypes of the field, both theoretical and empirical. This is partly because so much evolutionary psychological research has been produced over the last 25 years it is hard for even evolutionary-informed scholars themselves to keep up (for an up-to-date review, I recommend Buss’ new edition of The Evolutionary Psychology Handbook[1]). Add to that the methodological breadth of different techniques used by evolutionary scholars to test hypotheses about the adaptive design of the human mind, and it is understandably difficult to know what all evolutionary researchers have been, and currently are, up to as active Darwinian scientists.

Perhaps more than other social scientists, evolutionary psychologists use an incredible variety of research methods, ranging from self-report surveys and behavioral field test experiments, to investigations involving genetics, hormones, and neuroscience, to cross-species and cross-cultural comparisons, to ethnographies of foraging societies and computer modeling of artificial intelligences[2] [3] [4]. To be aware of contemporary evolutionary psychology requires broad and deep knowledge of many scholarly disciplines, and a lot of evolutionary psychology’s critics simply do not know what they do not know about the field as it is practiced today.

Beyond simply not knowing about the empirical breadth and methodological richness of modern evolutionary science, many critics exhibit a certain kind of “empirical nihilism” toward any psychological findings even remotely portrayed as supporting evolutionary hypotheses. For instance, when one points to a set of studies that respond to a specific criticism, some critics reply with a “yes, but” attitude and set forth new criticisms requiring more evidence (sort of a serial “moving the goalposts” maneuver).

Now, in science extreme skepticism is generally a good thing. For scientists, there are no capital “T” Truths, and every claim about reality is tentatively true with a small “t” and is always adjustable as more evidence is accumulated over time. Sometimes, though, this attitude is more than healthy skepticism about a particular empirical finding and is, instead, clearly an attitude of irrefutable empirical nihilism toward evolutionary psychology studies in particular. As an example of this type of unshakeable attitude of disbelief, I list below 10 of the more common “yes, but” criticisms of evolutionary findings on women’s long-term mate preferences. It’s an illustrative (not exhaustive) list of just how impenetrable some scholar’s beliefs are when it comes to considering evidence that our evolved human mind might be something more than a domain-general learning mechanism writing on an asexual, ungendered blank slate. 

Women’s Long-Term Mate Preferences

Looking across the animal kingdom, one cannot help but notice that members of most species tend to mate non-randomly. Whether it is peahens preferring peacocks with more elaborate trains[5] or female common chimpanzees preferring males who possess higher social dominance[6], males and females of most species display adaptive forms of preferential mate choice.

Evolutionary psychologists were among the first to propose similar sex differences might exist in human mate preferences. For instance, evolutionary psychologists hypothesized that women may possess specially-designed long-term mate preferences for cues to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources to her and their offspring[7] [8] [9]. Such cues include a man’s status and prestige which, depending on local culture, may involve hunting ability, physical strength, or other locally-relevant attributes, as well as his ambition, work ethic, intelligence, social dominance, maturity, and slightly older age[10] [11]. Not all women desire the highest value long-term mate at all times, of course, but it is expected that women’s long-term mate preferences should be marked by some degree of “special design” that is reliably observable using the methodological richness of modern evolutionary psychological science.

One way to evaluate whether women possess long-term mate preferences for cues to status-related traits is to directly ask people whether they prefer those attributes in long-term mates (via methods such as self-report surveys), and then compare the intensity of responses of women and men. When doing so, psychologists typically evaluate the degree of sexual differentiation using the dstatistic, with an observed d value of ±.20 being considered a “small” sex difference, ±.50 is a “moderate” sex difference, and ±.80 is a “large” sex difference[12]. Negative d values typically indicate women score more highly on a particular preference, whereas positive values indicate men score more highly.

Buss and Barnes[13] were among the first to evaluate whether women (more than men) prefer cues related to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources. For instance, they found women more strongly prefer long-term mates who have a “good earning capacity” (a large sex difference, d = -0.82), “are a college graduate” (d = -0.60), and “possess intelligence” (d = -0.19). Obviously, these findings are not definitive proof that men and women differ in the evolved design of long-term mate preferences. The findings are merely tests of evolutionary-guided hypotheses, and the tests were supportive of specially-designed sex differences existing in human mate preferences. Still, some critics challenge these results, arguing yes, but…

1) Yes, but…that is just one study. One cannot trust the results of just one study. Evolutionary psychologists need to conduct many more studies before I am convinced these effects are legitimate, let alone evidence of evolved psychology. I’m sure many other studies wouldn’t find sex differences in mate preferences.

Actually, most investigations of sex differences in mate preferences have been supportive of these hypotheses (to be honest, virtually all studies have). In 1992, Feingold[14] meta-analytically reviewed the extant literature (including 32 independent samples) on self-reported mate preferences across college students and community samples and found women more greatly desired socioeconomic status (d = -0.69), ambition (d = -0.67), and intelligence (d = -0.30) in potential long-term mates. Numerous additional investigations have since replicated these basic sex differences in long-term mate preferences among college students[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]. For instance, a recent study focused on women’s mate preferences for men with the ability to invest in them, revealing that college women desire a man who has earned his money (compared to other sources), ostensibly reflective of the aforementioned qualities (ambition, work ethic, intelligence), and that this effect is strongest in the long-term mating context[23].

2) Yes, but…those studies are mostly with college students. People in the real world (e.g., representative samples of adults) won’t display these stereotypical sex differences of youth.

Actually, yes they do[24] [25] [26]. For instance, Sprecher and her colleagues[27] examined sex differences in mate preferences across a nationally-representative sample of the United States and found women, more than men, valued a long-term mate who had a steady job (d = -0.73), earned more than they did (d = -0.49), was highly educated (d = -0.43), and was older by five years (d = -0.67). Young or old[28] [29] [30], gay or straight[31] [32], sex differences in long-term mate preferences for status-related attributes tend to reliably emerge.

3) Yes, but…many of those findings are from decades ago. Sex differences in mate preferences are probably not historically stable. They may have existed many decades ago (in the era of Mad Men), but sex differences in mate preferences are surely not present in more recent times.

Actually, yes they are. In a cross-generational analysis of the same mate preference questionnaire administered to Americans from 1939 to 1996, both men and women increased their valuing of good financial prospects and decreased valuing ambition/industriousness over time, but the degree of sex differences in these items largely persisted in strength across more than 50 years[33].

4) Yes, but…that is only when you have people self-report their ideal mate preferences from a pre-chosen list of traits given to them. If you ask them what they really want, say at a minimum, or maybe let them freely design their ideal potential partners, status-related traits aren’t emphasized by women more than men.

Actually, yes they are. Researchers have questioned people about their long-term mate preferences using a wide variety of self-report methodologies. Kenrick and his colleagues[34] asked people what the minimum threshold of possessing a particular attribute would need to be to agree to marry a person. Women, on average, required men’s earning capacity to be in the 70th percentile to be marriageable, whereas men required women to be in the 40th percentile (overall d = -1.41).

Using another nuanced form of self-report, Li[35] compelled men and women to engage in tradeoffs among various cues when intentionally designing a desirable long-term mate. Women devoted the most of their limited budget toward their mates’ social level (33%), whereas for men social level was of moderate budgetary importance (17%). Across a series of studies[36], researchers using this tradeoff paradigm concluded that women, but not men, consider a long-term mate’s social status a “necessity” and not a “luxury.” Indeed, when forced to make decisions with very limited budgets, sex differences in long-term mate preferences are stronger than with typical self-report surveys.

Self-report surveys also reveal men, more than women, appear effective at displaying status-related traits to the opposite sex[37]. Overall, self-report methods (via ratings, rankings, trade-offs, nominations, or open-ended questions[38]) consistently support the hypothesis that women possess long-term mate preferences for cues to a man’s ability and willingness to devote resources.

5) Yes, but…this is only because women are denied access to resources themselves. If women have higher status themselves, they would not prefer men with high status. It’s just basic rationality, not evolved psychology, causing these sex differences in mate preferences for status.

Actually, it is a compelling test of women’s long-term mate preferences for men’s status-related traits (including their ability and willingness to provide resources) to evaluate whether their expressed preferences disappear when women have ample resources of their own. It could be women only prefer cues to men’s ability and willingness to provide resources because women are structurally denied access to resources[39].

Addressing this alternative explanation, Townsend and his colleagues have found women in medical school[40] and law school[41] are more selective of a future mate’s financial status, not less. Similarly, Wiederman and Allgeier[42] found college women’s expected income was positively associated with their ratings of the importance of a potential long-term mate’s earning capacity. Regan[43] found as women’s mate value goes up, so does their insistence on men’s high status and resources (i.e., they “want it all”; see also[44]). Having higher personal status and resource-related traits appears not to attenuate women’s preferences for cues to men’s ability and willingness to provide resources. Instead, at least in the USA, women achieving high status themselves appears to make their long-term mate preferences for men’s high status even more intense!

6) Yes, but…that is only true in the United States. Americans happen to live in a culture with conspicuous gender stereotypes about mate preferences that the rest of the world does not share. If you look at more gender egalitarian cultures, in Scandinavia for instance, sex differences in preferences for status-related attributes “disappear” (as claimed by Marks[45]).

Actually, no, they do not. Numerous studies have found sex differences in mate preferences for status-related attributes are prevalent across cultures[46] [47] [48]. Lippa[49] conducted an internet sampling of 53 nations and Zentner and Mitura[50] conducted an internet sampling across 10 nations and both studies found 100% of cultures displayed expected sex differences, with women demonstrating especially heightened long-term mate preferences for good financial prospects, social status, ambition, and older age.

Some researchers have found the magnitude of sex differences in mate preferences for status-related attributes shifts from a large/medium effect size to a more moderate medium/small effect size in nations with higher gender egalitarianism. Zentner and Mitura found exactly this pattern of results after placing nations into three groups, low gender egalitarian cultures (within which women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more than men, d = -0.65), medium gender egalitarian cultures (women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more, d = -0.53), and high gender egalitarian cultures (women valued Ambition-Industriousness moderately more, d = -0.48). Hence, sex differences in the preference for Ambition-Industriousness in long-term mates were reduced (though not by much, and were still medium in terms of effect size) in nations with higher levels of gender egalitarianism.

Most other sex differences in status-related mate preferences also were attenuated from larger to more moderate levels in Zentner and Mitura’s sample of nations that were higher in gender egalitarianism (e.g., Good Financial Prospects went from d = -1.04, to d = -0.84, to d = -0.55; Favorable Social Status went from d = -0.67, to d = -0.42, to d = -0.31). In most cases, these reductions were caused by women preferring status-related traits less in high gender egalitarian nations, though in many cases men’s preferences for status-related attributes also were reduced in high gender egalitarian nations (which seems counter to the logic of men appreciating women’s status-related traits more as women enter the workforce in high gender egalitarian nations). One thing is clear, sex differences in long-term mate preferences for status-related traits do not “disappear” in gender egalitarian cultures. They may only be moderate in size, but we see them just fine.

Importantly, Zentner and Mitura also found in low gender egalitarian nations, men valued Good Looks only a little more than women, d = 0.24; in medium gender egalitarian nations, men’s valuation of Good Looks was higher still than women’s, d = 0.43; and in the highest gender egalitarian nations, men’s valuation of Good Looks was the most different from women’s, d = 0.51. Thus, contrary to the expectation that gender egalitarianism always reduces sex differences, Zentner and Mitura found sex differences in Good Looks are largest in nations with the highestgender egalitarianism. What!? Actually, these findings are not unusual, as high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51]. If the sociopolitical gender egalitarianism found in Scandinavian nations is supposed to produce smaller psychological sex differences, it’s not doing a very good job of it.

7) Yes, but…all these studies showing men and women want different things in potential partners are merely evidence of gendered narratives as measured by self-report surveys. If ever tested in the real world, women would not preferentially choose or be affected by a partner’s status-related attributes more than men.

Actually, there have been dozens of studies of real world mating and mating-related cognition, and almost all find that women do choose and are affected by a partner’s status-related traits more than men are.

Feingold[52] meta-analytically examined what women ask for and what men advertise in public, real-world personal advertisements and found, as expected, women more than men ask for cues to willingness and ability to provide resources (e.g., 27% of women ask for high socioeconomic status compared to 7% of men). Men who advertise such status-related cues actually receive more responses from women, as well. For example, in a study that experimentally manipulated real-life personal ads, ads placed by men noting they were financially successful elicited the most interest, whereas for women physical attractiveness was the key[53]. In a study of Polish personal ads, the top four cues displayed by men that received responses from women were good education, older age, high resource levels, and tall height[54]. In a study of mail order brides from Colombia, Russia, and the Philippines, women universally listed ambition, status, and wealth as among their most desired attributes in a future husband[55].

Numerous studies of marital patterns also have found women tend to desire (and actually marry) men who are slightly older than they are, regardless of women’s own age[57] [58]. As men get older, in contrast, they tend to desire and marry younger and younger women[59]. Women have been found to preferentially marry higher status men across such diverse cultures as the Kipsigis of Kenya, the Hausa of West Africa, Trinidadians, and Micronesian islanders, among many others[60]. It is true that some speed-dating studies in urban settings find women do not choose higher status men more often as dates, but these studies are limited by having only high status men in their samples (no homeless men allowed) and potentially including those who are interested in short-term mating (women’s short-term mate preferences focus more on gene quality, not status). In speed-dating studies with low status men included, and when the context is explicitly long-term mating only, women do pick higher status men more often for dates[61].

There also are a wide range of cognitive studies that test for women’s desires for status-related traits without explicitly asking them what they want. For instance, as part of a study ostensibly helping a university develop a dating service, Kenrick and his colleagues[62] experimentally manipulated whether already-mated men and women were exposed to a target date either very high in dominance or very low in dominance. They found women, but not men, were less committed to their current long-term mating partner after being exposed to a high dominance member of the opposite sex. Merely being experimentally exposed to a man with very high dominance lowered women’s commitment to their current mate, and did so without consciously asking women about their preferences for dominance.

Similarly, exposure to physically attractive women appears to evoke in men desires to fulfill women’s evolved preferences, such as increasing men’s attention toward and desires to possess resources and to display ambition, creativity, independence, and risk-taking[63] [64] [65]. And when exposed to men who are high in dominance, men tend to rate themselves as lower in mate value[66] and men’s feelings of jealousy are more strongly evoked[67]. All of these cognitive processes occur differently in women and men without explicit, conscious awareness of why they are doing so. Surely, to an open-minded scientist these types of non-survey findings should buttress the view that women possess mate preferences for men’s status-related attributes…

8) Yes, but…even though evolutionary psychologists may study real life cognition, emotion, and behavior, they fail to study the most important Darwinian outcome…fertility. If women evolved mate preferences for status-related traits, then women who marry men of high status men should have more children. Evolutionary psychologists haven’t even bothered to look at these outcomes, lazy-headed daisies…

Actually, several studies by evolutionary psychologists have found women who marry higher status men tend to have more children, and to have children survive to an older age. In a study of pre-industrial Finland (from the 1700s), women married to wealthier men had more children and decreased child mortality[68]. In another study, marrying a man four years older was associated with maximum levels of fertility among women[69]. Bereczkei and Csanaky[70] conducted a study of 1,800 Hungarians over 34 years of age and found women who married older and better educated men tended to have more children. These are important findings, as it is critical that women’s mate preferences for status-related attributes lead to reproductive success, or at least likely did so in our evolutionary past[71] [72].

One may also look at the effects of high personal status on men’s versus women’s reproductive success. Nettle and Pollett[73] and many other scholars have found men’s higher level of personal status is related to higher fertility, but the same is much less true (or not at all true) for women’s higher level of personal status. In fact, modern women who have higher personal incomes themselves tend to have fewer children[74]. Jumping Jehoshaphat…yes, but…

9) Yes, but…ancestral men were foragers and could not accumulate wealth, so these mate preferences for “good earning potential” are largely irrelevant to evolved mating psychology. Evolutionary psychology findings are extremely limited because they only apply to modern materialistic cultures.

Actually, it is correct that large masses of “material wealth” were not present in our ancestral past when we lived as foragers, but it is likely ancestral men did accumulate social capital or “status” (from among other things, hunting ability). Several studies have documented this form of male status as being the subject of selective pressures (i.e., high status men—whether that status comes in the form of land, livestock, money, physical prowess, or hunting ability—have more offspring[75][76]). Evidence of selection for men’s status has been found in many types of cultures, including studies of men’s hunting ability among the Aché, Hadza, and Tsimane[77]. Apicella[78], for instance, found men’s hunting reputation and upper-body strength both predicted reproductive success among Hadza hunter–gatherers.

Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that women’s preferences in modern nations do not seem to be calibrated on money, per se. Instead, women may view money as a proximal cue to the underlying qualities that they have evolved to care about, such as status, prestige, social dominance, ambition, work ethic, and intelligence[79]. So it is certainly true that ancestral men did not accumulate financial wealth, but focusing too much on the importance (or not) of money or wealth across all cultures is missing the adaptive forest for the trees.

10) Yes, but…I know so many people who strongly believe that sex differences in mate preferences simply cannot exist. The idea of evolved sexual desires of any kind are a theoretical impossibility from my point of view! Evolved sex differences in mate preferences have to be just a figment of the imagination of evolutionary psychologists bent on maintaining patriarchy. If the evidence is, on balance, supportive of women possessing long-term mate preferences for men with high status, why do so many post-modernists and social constructionists insist evolved sex differences are not, indeed cannot, be real[80]?

That’s a big question requiring several responses. First, the evidence of evolved sex differences in mate preferences is accumulating, but it is certainly not definitive. Evolutionary psychologists evaluate evidence of psychological adaptation in many ways[81], including cross-species, neurological, hormonal, genetic, and epigenetic evidence that has not been reviewed here (some examples of such evidence, see[82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87]). Nothing in science is ever set in stone, and more evidence could emerge that would cast serious doubt about evolved sex differences in mate preferences (though it would take quite a lot to tip the scales against the existence of this particular set of mate preferences). Scientists are skeptical and open-minded, so anything is possible.

Second, it is a mistake to pit post-modernism and social constructivism against evolutionary psychology as though they are in an intellectual death match that only one side can win. This tribalistic, us-versus-them thinking isn’t helpful to science. Much like partitioning the causes of human behavior into nurture versus nature or culture versus biology or learned versus innate, social constructivism versus evolutionary psychology is a false dichotomy that may feel intuitively correct but should not be utilized very often by serious scientists (exceptions include behavioral genetics studies). As insightfully noted by Tooby and Cosmides[88],

“To say a behavior is learned in no way undermines the claim that the behavior was organized by evolution because the behavior was learned through the agency of evolved mechanisms. If natural selection had built a different set of learning mechanisms into an organism, that organism would learn a different set of behaviors in response to the very same environment. It is these evolved mechanisms that organize the relationship between the environmental input and behavioral output, and thereby pattern the behavior. For this reason, learning is not an alternative explanation to the claim that natural selection shaped the behavior, although many researchers assume that it is. The same goes for culture. Given that cultural ideas are absorbed via learning and inference—which is caused by evolved programs of some kind—a behavior can be, at one and the same time, ‘cultural’, ‘learned’ and ‘evolved’.”

Mate preferences in humans are certainly to some degree cultural, learned, and evolved. Ultimately, the adaptations of the human mind unearthed by evolutionary psychologists will likely play key roles in explaining precisely how and why human social constructionists have the mate preferences they do[89].

Third, some scholars believe, based on strict ideological commitments, that evolved psychological sex differences must not exist[90] or even if they do exist, studies of sex differences should be evaluated in ways that favor certain political ideologies over others, such as raising the evidentiary bar for evolutionary psychology hypotheses[91]. As a consequence of these political beliefs, many scholars chauvinistically dismiss or ignore much of the extant evidence accumulated by evolutionary psychologists.

This is a mistake on several levels, not the least of which is that even if evolved sex differences in mate preferences do exist, that does not make them “desirable” or “good” or “inevitable” in any way. Thinking like that is fallacious, it is wrong. Even though humans have likely evolved to be omnivorous, that doesn’t mean we should eat meat. What is natural is not inherently connected to what is desirable and thinking that way is committing the so-called naturalistic fallacy (actually more related to the is-ought problem and appeal to nature fallacy).

Instead of this false point of view, evolutionary psychologists take the position that by knowing what our evolved psychological adaptations are, and precisely how they are expressed (e.g., how they are specially-designed and which environments especially accentuate or attenuate their expression), we will be more capable of creating effective tools for altering human behavior in ways we do find desirable. This includes utilizing the socially-constructive psychological adaptations in our mental toolkit to do so. Evolved sex differences are not to be ideologically feared, they are to be scientifically evaluated and, if they exist, knowledge about their special design can be used to more efficiently create the healthy society within which we wish to live[92] [93].

Lastly, there are some scholars who are actively deceiving people about empirical findings in evolutionary psychology (e.g., claiming that sex differences “disappear” in egalitarian cultures[94]). Many of these thinkers spread doubt about evolved mate preferences by alluding to a highly popular study by Eagly and Wood[95]. People’s memories of Eagly and Wood’s study, however, are often quite at odds with what they actually found, and with the hundreds of empirical findings since.

Eagly and Wood related the size of sex differences in mate preferences for “good financial prospects” to sociopolitical gender equality measures across nations (actual mate preference data came from a large cross-cultural study by Buss[96]). Eagly and Wood examined four indicators of sociopolitical gender equality and found only one indicator (that’s right, only one of four tests) was significantly linked to smaller sex differences in long-term mate preferences for good financial prospects. Based on that rather meager empirical finding, a generation of scholars seems to have fallen for a “Jedi mind trick” (these aren’t the sex differences you are looking for) and have been convinced that sex differences in mate preferences completely disappear in more gender egalitarian nations. Indeed, Eagly and Wood’s study has been cited over 1,000 times and has led to many to believe all psychological sex differences disappear in gender egalitarian cultures. Not true then, not true now.

To the contrary, most cross-cultural studies find nations with the highest sociopolitical gender equality (e.g., Scandinavian nations) exhibit the largest psychological sex differences in the world. You read that correctly. Higher gender egalitarian nations tend to have larger sex differences in mate preferences for Good Looks, in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[97]. If sociopolitical gender egalitarianism is supposed to reduce sex differences to the point where they “disappear,” it’s doing a terrible job. In fact, it’s most often doing the exact opposite. Without the constraints of patriarchal sex role socialization, it appears men and women are freer to follow their evolved desires in ways that lead to even greater psychological difference[98].

You Never Forget Your First

first

I thought this was an interesting comment from CaveClown from a few posts ago. Needless to say the commentariat has increased in the last 6 months and I wanted to air this out rather than have it buried five pages deep:

Rollo, question if you have time.
After unsuccessfully searching the archives, and having read your new book, i wonder if you have a post that further explains:

1. Why a “good girl” would skip the party years.
2. Why that good girl would become an early consolidator, and settle for a beta provider.

I understand that the “good girl” persona is just an attempt at seduction through differentiating herself from the “sluts”

I also understand that the “promise” of dropping the good girl act ‘for him’ is what snags the beta. The promise of her “sexual best” and all. (which is why women that do ride the carousel go “born again” later, no?)

At first glance, it seems like a solid strategy for hypergamy. If she can sell herself as virtuous, pure, and virginal, then she should have higher SMV.

Then why settle for a beta?

I’m trying to reconcile the “good girl” persona, and the manosphere trope about marrying a virgin. Seems a lot of men think that “if I could just find a virgin” things would be ok for them. (which is just a variation of blue pill/soul mate stuff)

 

I detailed a bit of the first question in Making Up For Missing Out and Good Girls Do. It’s important to make the distinction between a ‘good girl’ in that she’s nominally following the old-set-of-books traditional social contract, and the Good Girl strategy I went into in the latter post.

Bear in mind, no woman actually “skips” the Party Years. She may participate to greater or lesser degree in the opportunities those years open up to her, but she’s still keenly aware of those opportunities and realizes the window for them closes as her beauty and fertility fade. She sees her girlfriends, maybe sisters, indulge those opportunities, or she may live them vicariously through media that panders to them, but regardless, she’s feeling the pull of knowing she could potentially realize them.

One of my best friends married his first wife very early – him 21, and her 19. The guy was very Alpha (military), but had the White Knight script firmly coded into him courtesy of his Blue Pill conditioning. He did everything by the old set of books and knew he wanted to marry her after they’d been together for about eight months. He wasn’t her first lay, but she didn’t have more than 1 previous boyfriend, so while not a virgin she hadn’t been on the proverbial carousel for long at all.

They had three kids, early and out of the gate right after they married. She ‘played house’ well enough all through her 20’s while her sisters and girlfriends had their Party Years and urged her to come along for their GNOs. Once their youngest was old enough to be self-sufficient she started joining them. By the time she was 33 the marriage was over because she’d decided to follow the making up for missing out dynamic. She ended up cheating on him and then doing her version of the Wild Oats Project.

Virgin Brides Alpha Widows

There’s a wishful contingent of guys in the ‘sphere who think finding a young virgin bride before the world’s corrupted her pure soul is (or at least should be) a tenable goal. I understand the want and logic behind that, but even with a virgin bride there is no insulation from the sexual marketplace or the realities women experience as they mature.

By all measure this guy’s wife was as close to that ideal as was practical. He’s also one of more than a dozen men I’ve known who’s “good Christian wives” detonated their marriages in a similar fashion. Generally all went along with the divorce-porn fantasies after their dutiful husbands had become boring Betas in their esteem.

2. Why [would] that good girl would become an early consolidator, and settle for a beta provider.

Religious conviction, LSE (low self esteem), definitely cultural or economic motivations, a fear of men in general leading to security issues. You also have to consider the likelihood that the guy she settles on early is possibly the most Alpha guy she’s ever experienced.

Of the 40+ women I’ve had in my sexual past, two were virgins. Both of these women sought me out on Face Book 15-20 years after we’d went our separate ways. They are definitely not the same girls I knew back then, but I think this is an interesting illustration of a larger dynamic. Then and now, both of these girls surprised me with their attachment to me – I think that’s part of a bond you make with a woman when you’re her first.

It’s the “never forget your first” dynamic. There’s a presumption that any guy a “good girl” grants access to her pussy must be a top tier man to qualify for it. This is an ingrained psychological schema for women with the self perception of being a “good girl”.

So she consolidates on what she perceives was Alpha for her at 18. That perception is markedly different from what she’ll perceive as Alpha at 29, right as she enters her Epiphany Phase. If you read back through the Preventive Medicine series (or the book), I specifically outline a phase on women maturation timeline called the Break Phase. This is generally around the late teens (17-19) and I noted it in particular because it’s a moment in a young man’s life when his Blue Pill idealism is most commonly first tested.

The flip side of the Break Phase for women is the “never forget your first” dynamic conflicting with the opportunities her rapidly approaching peak SMV phase present to her. There may be an emotional investment on her part with a man she up to that point esteemed as the most Alpha man she was likely to ever pair with.

The Jig is Up

The danger inherent in these arrangements is that both young men and women make life-altering  decisions based on their adolescent social skill set – not what will be their (hopefully) matured adult social skill set based on their experiences and acculturation. Thus you have the common situation my now-divorced friend experienced. I say common because one of the most frequent situations I get asked advice about from divorced men in their mid 30’s to early 40’s is how to initiate Game and wisely use their new Red Pill awareness after having been married since 23 or so.

For the most part they’re still confused how the woman who’d found them so Alpha at that age could toss off all of the relational equity he’d thought he’d earned with her and leave him for the ‘douchebags’ she’d always claimed to hate. What they don’t (or didn’t) realize is the root level resentment they’re experiencing with a woman they may have been married to for 15 years. That resentment stems from coming to terms with their Hypergamous filtering having been ‘fooled’ all those years ago; and the crush loss of not having been able to capitalize on the opportunities of those years.

It’s not that she’d settled for what she thought was a Beta in her early twenties, it’s that he was what she thought was Alpha then, but learned later that he wasn’t. This is the risk inherent to Hypergamy – that a woman might miss out on more optimal sexual selection choices while still in her peak SMV phase and able to choose from the broadest pool.

It’s almost a reversal of women who follow the Sandberg plan of Hypergamy and make disclaimers of how different they are now from how they used to be in college. The sentiment is still the same, but the roles are reversed – she’s different now from how she used to be because she (thinks) she has a better grasp of what is Alpha now and he ain’t it.

If there’s a silver lining to this it’s that this post-marriage Epiphany Phase generally happens earlier in a man’s life. If he’s made a lot of his potential up to then, and the divorce wasn’t too devastating, he’s in a far better position as far as life stage is concerned than the Beta guy a woman settles for at 29 after her Party Years. That fellow gets the Beta boot in his 50s and it’s a tall order to recover and have a Red Pill awakening.

Building Better Worlds

building_worlds

I had an interesting conversation this week with my good friend Ray and a couple of my designers, Sadie and Sam (names changed to protect the innocent). Just a little background first; Sadie is the Japanese woman I mention in Mental Point of Origin. She’s been divorced once and her relationship history is one punctuated by her involvement with Beta men.

She’s is the definition of the opportunistic concept of female love, but her frustration comes from never having been able to consolidate on an optimized Hypergamy – she simply doesn’t have attractiveness or feminine pleasantry to generate the Alpha interest that would satisfy her. Thus, she attracts Beta orbiters looking for some low hanging fruit, and force-fits them into a contextual Alpha frame. In other words, she opportunistically entertains the Betas with provisioning potential and hopes they’ll man up into dominant Alphas. Thus far she’s been disappointed.

Sam is a gay man in his early 30s who makes a good living afforded by not having children and possessing a high calibre technical skill set. He’s got the outgoing, “look at me, I’m special because I’m gay” exuberance I expect from gay men, but he’s not flamboyant and can still be professional when he has to be. He’s been “dating” a new guy for a while now and has moved this guy into his home recently. He took part in our conversation because the issues of sharing resources, money and picking up half the rent (in his case mortgage) in a relationship came up.

Ray has been one of my best friends for over 15 years now and he’s the guy I mention in Good Girls Do. He’s worked for me directly or indirectly for most of that time and he’s notorious for starting conversations like this when we have downtime. He’s a firestarter, it’s what I like about him, and among the three he’s the only one who knows my online reputation. Ray is Red Pill aware so he knows how to prompt a controversial conversation with me when we’re in mixed company.

Ray: “RT, hypothetical question…”

RT: “Do I have to?”

Ray: “Let’s say you move your girlfriend in with you…”

RT: “Let’s say I don’t and I would never do that. End of hypothetical.”

Ray: “No, I know, but, say you did, and let’s say your rent is $1,000 a month. Would you tell your girlfriend ‘Hey the rent is $1,000 a month how about you pay $300 and I’ll pay $700 or would you say 50/50?”

RT: “No. I’d pay it all myself. I’d also be sure that only my name was on the lease.”

Sadie:”What? Why, that’s silly?”

Ray: “You wouldn’t expect any contribution?”

RT: “No. I wouldn’t turn it down if she took it upon herself to contribute, but I wouldn’t expect it from a girl I (foolishly) brought into my living arrangement.”

Sadie: “You wouldn’t expect her to pay half?”

RT: “No. If I can’t provide my own $1,000 rent or food, or to keep the lights on, I have no business bringing a woman into that arrangement. If I have more than enough for myself I don’t need her paying. Besides, if she’s that into living with me, she’ll want to contribute in other ways and I wont have to ask.”

Sam: “You don’t think it should be an equal split? Maybe that’s a man and a woman thing…”

RT: “Yes and no. I’m sure between you and your boyfriend there’s a more dominant personality right?”

Sam: “Yeah, me.”

RT: “And you probably make more money too. So there’s really no ‘equality’ when it comes down to it.”

Sadie: “I expect my boyfriend to pay half the rent.”

RT: “Of course you do, because women think in terms of equality when it works to their advantage. What if your ‘boyfriend’ could pay for all the rent, utilities and most of everything else? Would you still try to pay half?”

Sadie: “Yes of course.”

RT: “What if he only paid just half and you knew it was a better deal for him?

Sadie: (tentative) “Yes,…”

RT: “I doubt that, but what you’re saying is that you’d limit improving your way of life to maintain a belief in equality.”

Sadie: “All the guy’s I’ve lived with have been mooches.”

RT: “Which explains why you’re not living with them any more. It goes both ways, women don’t respect men they need to support. All this stuff about equality in relationships is nonsense.If your boyfriend could easily make rent while you struggled to come up with it you’d resent him for it. There is no equal division.”

Sam: “I guess I see what you’re saying, but the expectation is still the same even for me and [boyfriend].

RT: “There is no equality in a relationship, but there can be complementarity where either person’s benefits can offset the needs of the other.”

Ray: “So you and Mrs. T aren’t 50/50?”

RT: “Ray, I make about 4 times the money that she does, how is there ever going to be anything like equality with that kind of balance?”

Ray: “But what about chores and shit?”

RT: “I take care of the outside of the house, she takes care of the inside. I do the smelly dirty jobs, she keeps the fresh cleaning ones, it’s not rocket science.”

Sam: “Sounds like you just want to stay in the power position.”

RT: “Yes, but it’s only a power play if you’re exploiting your partner. Women like to say they want an equal partner, but they don’t, do they Sadie? They want someone to respect and look up to. So when that comes down to numbers, to money, what’s really holding you together? Love? Mutual interests? (at Sam) Right now you can’t help but be the more dominant one in your relationship. So do you stop being so just to balance things? Do you expect [boyfriend] to pick up the slack more?

The Cardinal Rule of Relationships

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

This principle isn’t so much about ‘power’ as it is about control. This might sound like semantics, but it makes a difference. It’s very easy to slip into binary arguments and think that what I mean by the cardinal rule of relationships is that one participant must absolutely rule over the other – a domineering dominant to a doormat submissive. Control in a healthy relationship passes back and forth as desire and need dictate for each partner. In an unhealthy relationship you have an unbalanced manipulation of this control by a partner. Although control is never in complete balance, it becomes manipulation when one partner, in essence blackmails, the other with what would otherwise be a reinforcer for the manipulated under a healthy circumstance. This happens for a plethora different reasons, but the condition comes about by two ways – the submissive participant becomes conditioned to allow the manipulation to occur and/or the dominate initiates the manipulation. In either case the rule still holds true – the one who needs the other the least has the most control. Nowhere is this more evident than in interpersonal relationships.

When I was writing this post many years ago I hadn’t fully considered how this rule interacts with, and contradicts, many of the tenets of egalitarian equalism. The idealistic state of that equalism is one in which two co-equal, yet independent people come together in a perfect union of balance. In theory that balance should account for resources, emotional investment, family considerations, as well as intellectual and social status aspects of either partner.

These considerations alone should be enough to illustrate equalitarianism as the manipulative farce it is, however, all we really need to do is take into account the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. It’s very easy to be accused of being controlling when you embrace the truth of this rule – and particularly so when the reigning social undercurrent is one in which everyone ought to be co-equal rational actors.

I expected to have that leveled at me in this conversation, but it’s important to bear in mind the real nature of power. By my own definition, power is the degree of control we exercise over the direction of our own lives. As I mentioned, I don’t mind being the more powerful partner in terms of resources in my marriage because I accept that stupid notions of maintaining anything like “equality” is simply infeasible. I know more than a few men who’ve sold their lives’ potential away in the belief that they should lessen themselves in order to support a more balanced, equalist ideal. Ultimately their relationships, marriages and families suffer because they never own that potential – just the idea of owning it is a source of guilt and shame.

For all of the bleating about more equitability being needed between men and women. the fundamental truth is that it’s neither a realistic nor workable state. I’ve used money for my illustration here, but this applies to many other facets of an intersexual relationship. From an equalist perspective this sounds a lot like a want for creating a condition of dependency, but in truth it is an unachievable state of egalitarianism that creates a never-satisfied state of dependency.

Her World or Yours?

If you go back and look at the video from Bachelor Nation you can see the dichotomy that presumptions of “equality” sows in western(izing) women today. Within the first 6 minutes of the video we see the internal contradictions inherent in women. There is a want for an idealized equal pairing, but yet a desire for a man to be a Man. The documentary finds the root of this dichotomy in modern resource imbalances between the sexes, and makes the predictable appeal to men not living up to their burden of performance. The male shame comes in contrasting women’s taking on what should be men’s performance burdens – the male obligation to which ironically flies in the face of anything like true egalitarian equalism.

Stay-at-home dads, house husbands, and anything relatable will always have a stigma attached to them in spite of any weak attempts to make them socially acceptable. That stigma is founded in a limbic-level understanding of men’s burden of performance; to be a Man is not just to produce sustainable resources, but to provide a surplus of those resources.

I recently read a poll sponsored by Forbes magazine that listed men’s top goals in life and for the first time in that poll’s history “a good physique” outranked all personal and financial ambitions for top executives. The predictable shame then followed that men aren’t “Manning Up” any more, and they’ve become vain, self-absorbed narcissists for a new focus on what image they present.

The obvious Red Pill conclusion is of course a realignment with the prevailing social perceptions (courtesy of the Feminine Imperative I might add) that women are out-earning men financially and educationally; thus the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy takes precedent. If America’s top execs are heeding the message of Open Hypergamy, why bother establishing yourself financially, academically, ambition-wise or otherwise?

The problem with this equation is evident in the Bachelor Nation video. I can understand the sentiments of MGTOW; if the opinions expressed by the quality of woman represented in the video are any indicator of a female zeitgeist it makes the idea of abandoning the Game altogether that much more appealing.

That said, and I’m going to dare to get prescriptive here, I believe that establishing yourself as an independent Man should be your top priority. I have no doubt that that sentiment will get convoluted with feminism’s Strong Independent Woman® meme, but lets clarify something first – the ideal that men ought to be strong and independent has always been the precursor to his quality as a man. Independence, self-sufficiency and determined ambitions have always been the hallmarks of a man comfortable with his burden of performance. Only in women is independence a novelty.

Yet now, in men, this independence is not just a novelty, but it’s been distorted into being an obsessive-compulsive sign of a man’s imagined insecurities. The very strength and independence men have always been expected to embody is the domain of women, while any hope for it from men is a sign of a fragile ego.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #1

Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.

I firmly believe Alpha is a mindset. That mindset can get the poorest son-of-a-bitch laid with the right application, tact and circumstance. That’s a tough pill to swallow when you work your ass off in the belief that your affluence and status should be the metric Alpha is judged by and women respond to. That’s also not to say affluence and status won’t get you laid by their own merit, it’s just the context in which that happens that makes the difference. There are many men who’ve found their retroactive cuckolding after having based their personal successes on the presumption that those successes should be the basis of his quality to women.

The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we’re painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame. What concerns us in terms of inter-gender relations however is the way in which frame sets the environment, the ambience, and the ‘reality’ in which we relate with both the woman we sarge at a bar and the relationship with the woman we’ve lived with for 20 years. One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is NOT power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ‘reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender’s internalized concept of  frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you’re operating in hers. Also understand that the balance of frame often shifts. Frame is fluid and will find its own level when a deficit or a surplus of will is applied to change it. The forces that influence that lack or boost of will is irrelevant – just know that the conditions of an operative framework will shift because of them.

We can go back and debate the Crisis of Motive once again – who do you really do it for? – but in terms of Frame, even if you subscribe to a MGTOW perspective, it’s important for a Man to have a world into which a woman might enter. Not for her sake, but for a Man’s edification.

Establish your world; you shall make your mission, not your woman your priority. Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.

The Dangers of the Red Pill

redpill_danger

I came across an interesting thread on Roosh’s forum recently that linked very well with some experiences I’ve been having over the course of the last few weeks. Eldelwiess was the OP here and he just hints upon a greater whole of the danger of the Red Pill:

It’s a very tough choice to make, yet inevitable. You HAVE to.

But it’s a difficult pill to swallow.

The side effects are really nasty.

Ever since I did it, my life changed to the better, but alas, to the bitter too.

The thing is I now SEE. I’m not blind anymore. But I don’t LIKE what I see.

Because what I see is hypocrisy, degeneration, mediocrity, ignorance and mental slavery.

When you see the world in red pill eyes, you see the ugly reality.
It makes you stop enjoying many things in life.
It makes you find the majority of the people boring, uninteresting and frankly stupid. You pity them.
It makes the bulk of the women unworthy of your time.
It makes you can’t stand your colleagues.
It makes many jokes not funny anymore.
It makes you question everything.
It makes everyone untrustworthy, even your physicians.

It makes you…a better person ! And I love it.

But I understand why the majority of the people ignore the red pill and decide to remain in blue pill slavery and mediocrity. It’s easier. And you get to still enjoy life as you knew it, keep the friends who do the exact same thing, sympathize with your colleagues who complain about long working hours, date the same women who feel entitled to everything, watch the same TV programs which numb your mind and make you lose IQ points, vote for the same politicians who control the strings that make you move…

It’s easier.

Eldelwiess is just coming around to acknowledging The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill, but the inherent danger he’s hinting at here goes a little further beyond the perception of a Red Pill aware man being “bitter”, and into the social dynamics that center on creating and interpreting him being such. The danger in this context is not just a bitter perception, but rather one of personal, professional and familial ostracization for expressing Red Pill truths.

I touched on these liabilities in The Secret of the Red Pill, but this was more from the perspective of women having their Game explained to them and what Red Pill aware men might expect for having confronted them with it. The impact of that may only be the perception of you being a presumptuous asshole by an individual woman, however, there are broader implications and consequences for “living” the Red Pill in a larger social sense.

Wutang from Roosh’s forum:

I actually had a falling out with a group of casual acquaintances when my association with RP was revealed among the group so there is a “danger” with it affecting your social bonds. I put danger in quotes because you really should see it as more of an act of filtering out who you associate with rather then any sort of great harm; the exception being if these are people who you work with or who can put a wrench in you advancing in your goals. If the only real harm is losing a few acquaintances or even friends then you should ask yourself if these are really the sort of people you want to associate with. Do you want to surround yourself with people that are apparently so mentally weak that mere words and difference of opinion can drive them into bouts of wailing and sobbing?

While we promote self-sufficiency and being beholden to no other man or system in our particular subculture we need to keep remembering that no man is an island. The people you associate with are going to determine where you are heading. Surround yourself with people who possess beliefs that lead to perpetual victimhood and you’ll become a victim yourself. Associate with people that can’t stand up for anything except a spineless tolerance that refuses to make any sort of value judgements and make the tough choice of saying ‘A is simply better then B when it comes to accomplishing C” whether A is an idea, an action, or even a type of person and you will soon lose your own spine; being afraid to fight for anything for the fear that it’ll make someone somewhere unhappy.

That said this was still a lesson in knowing when is the right time to drop RP knowledge. Naturally I’m a very open and sharing person when it comes to my beliefs and opinions but after this incident I’ve learned to be a lot more careful. In this case I didn’t really lose much since I was already growing to dislike quite a few of the people in the group but it definitely was a warning – what if this has happened with people who I actually respected and who were in positions and had connections that could either help or hinder me in my personal goals? Be careful out there guys.

I quoted this today because I find myself having to temper and measure my Red Pill evangelism with people I know personally or interact with professionally. I say evangelism because, in spite of any measured explanation, this is what it comes off as to most uninitiated Blue Pill plugins. There’s a degree of diplomatic tact you have to practice the more Red Pill aware a man becomes.

Sometimes that’s tough, especially when you’ve gone through personal changes and development that’s benefitted your life as a result. Red Pill awareness may have even saved a man’s life, so just shutting up about it, or having a hesitancy to help out a fellow man in need of that awareness becomes a real conflict.

In June I’ll have been back in Nevada for two years and in that time I’ve reacquainted myself with old friends I haven’t seen since I left for Florida almost ten years ago. All of them I find in similar (if not identical) states in which I left them. Some of these men are long time close personal friends I’d kept in touch with over the years, but with the exception of maybe one out of a dozen, all are still foundering in the same Beta mindset, lifestyle and behaviors they had ten years ago. All of them still complain of the same Beta-relationship issues they had with their wives (some now ex-wives) they confided in me then.

The Rule

NEO: I can’t go back, can I?

MORPHEUS: No. But if you could, would you really want to?  I feel that I owe you an apology. There is a rule that we do not free a mind once it reaches a certain age. It is dangerous. They have trouble letting go. Their mind turns against them. I’ve seen it happen. I’m sorry. I broke the rule because I had to.

You’ll have to forgive my using the Matrix metaphor, but every time I’m tempted to awaken a man I think may desperately need the truth of Red Pill awareness I’m reminded of this exchange. I understand why this would be a rule. Granted, I’ve broken it myself many times; usually when I think a man is a danger to himself, but I do so with the knowing that I’ll need to invest myself personally in his conditions and that’s where that cautious hesitation comes from.

There are friends I have who I know would outright reject Red Pill truths, but more so their lives would be turned upside down by having to confront those truths. I have a very good friend who’s remarried and living a new life with his second wife, who is still clinging to all of the internalized Beta illusions and behaviors that contributed to his first brutal divorce.

I could make him aware of all the factors that led up to this very painful episode in his life. I could run down the list of how the woman he married early in life followed the time line I put forth in Preventive Medicine to the letter, why his daughters are both following her footsteps and why his son will grow into being a martyred Beta White Knight like himself.

I could also explain all the factors that led to his new wife’s need for him (who by his Beta measures he’s thrilled with), but I ask myself, why destroy that bliss for him? He’s not now, nor likely will be, ready to have any of that explained. My concern is that he’s too far along in life to bear the burden of that truth. He’d have trouble letting go. His mind would turn against him.

If he were to reach that point of desperation again I’d certainly be compelled to reach out to him and offer the Red Pill to him, but as I’ve said in the past, unplugging men from the Matrix is a lot like triage – save the ones you can, read last rites to the dying. But this guy’s not dying and giving him the medicine might be worse than his conditions.

Law 10 – Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.

Though your compassionate, charitable side may compel you to associate with the sad and downtrodden, if power attainment is your goal then avoid such people. Their bad vibe and energy-draining demeanor are too often infectious. You run a very serious risk of falling into line with their misery. Instead spend your time with people who are happy and successful. You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as disease.

When I quote Law 10 it’s usually in response to a guy dealing with troubled, toxic women dragging them down into the quicksand of their own making. The Savior Schema usually warrants this truth; it’s a want in a belief that a woman will appreciate and reciprocate for a man ready to be the solution to her problems. However, the same can apply for men who attempt to free the minds of other men.

In both volumes of The Rational Male I make a specific effort to address that Rollo Tomassi doesn’t want to be a savior – I want men to be their own saviors because, although I may present Red Pill truths, it’s ultimately a man who needs to be the director of his own life. If the true measure of power is the degree of control a man has over his own life, relying on a savior, relying on how well one conforms to his plan, is really a limit on that power.

As I state in the books, I’m not interested in Tomassi clones, this is why I’m humbled by every man’s story I’m emailed or commented on about how they changed their lives with what I put forth in my writing.

From the Roosh forum again:

The only ‘danger’ the red pill presents is one’s own inability to let go of previous beliefs when confronted with truth. The red pill makes you look in the mirror and come to terms with your own ego and the lies it convinced you of.

“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Our ego is what we’re ultimately protecting. Most people don’t have an identity beyond their ego, that’s why most of the population can’t handle the red pill. Unless you were born with red pill parents, being raised blue pill and transitioning to red (altering your very reality) will always be traumatic on some level.

I’m of the opinion that trauma and crisis are necessary components to arriving at a point where a man is open to Red Pill awareness. I realize how distorted that sounds. It should be that a rational laying out of Red Pill truths should be self-evident, but it’s important to contrast that hope with the lifetime of feminine-primary conditioning men receive since their infancy.

There will always be people who will never accept even to most base and evident Red Pill fundamental truths. I completely understand Wutang’s premise for wanting to create our own manospherean tribes. We’ve had a good bit of commentary regarding Jack Donovan’s (Way of Men) call for organizing in like-minded collectives of men, and while I agree and find that laudable, I also know that isolation is dangerous.

Even by Law 10 it makes sense to surround oneself with the “happy and successful”; that’s a pretty deductive truth. However, I can’t ignore that many of the most condition-blinded people are also the most happy. I know multi-millionaires who are among the most abject Betas with regard to their intersexual relations.

So I guess what I’m saying is that there needs to be a level of discernment and discretion in this regard. I reach over half a million viewers / readers every month on TRM without advertising, without proselytizing, and men seem to find my works more and more. When the student is ready the teacher will appear – these men are seeking out the Red Pill and I suspect more will as Open Hypergamy and the machinations of the Feminine Imperative become unignorable.

You can’t teach those unwilling to learn – maybe it’s less about being convincing and more about being ready to help when the opportunities arise? That’s not me being magnanimous, that’s me being practical.

Strength of Interest

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I had a couple of questions from the SoSuave Forum‘s (yes, I’m still a mod there) Judge Nismo I thought I’d take a crack at:

G’ morning Rollo. I got a couple questions for you that I don’t think you touched on in your book…or I may have overlooked.

1. What is your opinion on the Celebrity Maxim?

That is, I know you see it a lot in your Rational Male comments and on this board (i.e. Would she flake out on Brad Pitt? Would she make George Clooney wait for sex? She wouldn’t confuse Channing Tatum, etc.) I’ve even used it a lot on here, usually saying you wouldn’t fall asleep if you had a date with Katy Perry, and you wouldn’t pull a last minute flake text with Kate Upton, and you wouldn’t have to babysit if you had Shakira ready to bang!

If there’s three things I’ve learned from writing in the Manosphere for the past 12 years it’s this; no matter how apt, never use an allegory to illustrate a point, never try to relate a fictional story, movie or character to a real world dynamic and never hold up famous celebrities as common reference examples of broader, mundane dynamics.

The temptation to do so stems from a want for a common point of reference. However, appealing to a highly recognizable exemplar of a dynamic only makes picking apart the known particulars about that individual a priority – not on really grasping the dynamic itself.

I see this in the ‘sphere occasionally, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never committed these sins myself. For the most part, and certainly as far as my own readership goes, I think many of the best writers and the commentariat of the ‘sphere are very intelligent men. That’s not to account for the occasional troll, but I’ve found that even an OCD troll still needs to be clever in the ‘sphere.

That said, it’s just this preponderance of intelligence that makes men take illustrative examples as face value facts. Using celebrities as examples of commonality in purpose just smacks of the Apex Fallacy.

“….the Apex fallacy is the idea that we assign the characteristics of the highest visibility members of a group to all members of that group.”

If you’re at all familiar with the controversy surrounding the Apex Fallacy, feminists and manginas alike decided to commandeer wikipedia to paste this as a Men’s Rights misappropriation of the definition, but in actuality the true definition cuts both ways. So while women misappropriate the highest visibility men to associate a totality of the “patriarchy”, men, on the other hand, misappropriate the highest echelon men with examples of common inference of a dynamic.

In English, those celebs aren’t you or me or any layperson you deal with daily. I get the inference of course, and the message is usually one about incentives being strong enough to prompt behaviors. However, what Nismo is getting at is really less about the validity of those illustrations and more about genuine desire:

I ask since it’s quite a big trope in the manosphere…

2. What is your take on the one strike rule?

You do have a 3 strikes article on Rational Male, and I did read it. On this board, it’s quite common to see situations with chicks go like this:

– She flaked on me, she is deleted.
– She stopped responding to my texts and calls, automatic out.
– She wants to bring some friends along, sorry this is one on one.

I could go on and on, most of these situations often get read by red pill men as low interest, thus move on or become a beta orbiter. Yes, I do online dating and work 2 jobs, but I do have a one strike policy.

Sure, sometimes life will truly get in the way, but most men who are red pill will likely move on if there’s low interest. We all know not to waste time with uninterested chicks because they won’t put out. Heck, the sick excuse is often times a blow off, and lately, death in the family has been disguised as blowing someone off.

Zero Tolerance

The problem most men have with a Zero Tolerance policy is that you’re not George Clooney and you’re not Brad Pitt, but moreover, most men still cling to Blue Pill idealisms and the conditioned hope that women will see the “real” men they think women have a magical sensitivity to detect. Thus, they play by the script and hold out for the real desire they believe women should have a capacity for with them.

This is why Blue Pill men get angry at the 3-Strikes rule; that scarcity mentality colors their interaction with women to the point that anything counter to playing the patient, devoted, “prove-my-quality” white knightery role invalidates everything they’ve sacrificed and waited so patiently for up to that point.

They’re afraid of throwing the baby out with the bath water, and damn it, if you suggest doing anything other than what makes their patience worthwhile you’re a misogynistic prick.

If these men could pause with any insight they’d understand that any threshold – one strike, three strikes – suggested by myself or the manosphere isn’t about punishing a woman’s indecisiveness, but rather a pragmatic vetting meant to be efficient for men. That tolerance policy is about conservation of resources and time, not so much retribution (though I’me sure some men entertain that).

  • She flakes on you with no counter offer or marginal reframe? –
    Message: Insufficient interest
  • Stops responding to communications (and possibly resumes after a period)? – The Medium is the Message
  • Wants to bring friends along to a date? –
    Message: you are a rich resource to be exploited, or her interest is so low that she foresees a need to bring friends along to make her date with you entertaining.

The Prince with Interest

What Nismo is comparing here is really an evaluation of interest a woman has in you. I’ve gone into this in the past:

Women with high interest level (IL) wont confuse you. When a woman wants to fuck you she’ll find a way to fuck you. If she’s fluctuating between being into you and then not, put her away for a while and spin other plates. If she sorts it out for herself and pursues you, then you are still playing in your frame and you maintain the value of your attention to her. It’s when you patiently while away your time wondering what the magic formula is that’ll bring her around, that’s when you lean over into her frame. You need her more than she needs you and she will dictate the terms of her attentions.

From an evolutionary perspective Hypergamy can’t afford to wait once a woman’s filtering mechanism is satisfied that a man passes for an Alpha. Women will break rules for Alpha men and create more rules for Beta men to have access to her. Keep in mind that first part; women will make access easy for a man she perceives as an SMV superior. Hypergamy always seeks a better-than deserved SMV benefit.

So to use the apex example, no, a woman can’t afford to confuse Channing Tatum. Mix in the behavioral influences a woman’s ovulatory chemistry predisposes her to with that SMV+ benefit perception and you’ve got dilated pupils, seductive ornamentation, lower vocal intonations and an elevated heart rate – Estrus.

As you might guess, this poses a problem for most guys because, lets face it, most of us aren’t examples of this apex. Even when we make dramatic leaps in self-improvement and physical transformation it’s hard to shake our former self-impressions and our previous degrees of self-confidence.

Back in the early days of SoSuave there was a concept we’d use that I think had a lot of merit – the concept of the Prince. For many men just coming into a Red Pill awareness meant re-imagining oneself in a new, more intrinsically valued light.

For instance, after you understand the basic psychology of why a technique like Cocky & Funny or Amused Mastery works with women, personally applying those dynamics requires a man to view himself in a more valuable context.

As I said, Hypergamy always seeks a better-than deserved SMV benefit, so it follows that a man should at least reconsider himself as that “better-than her SMV” prospect. Irrespective of that being a reality or not, the idea is a sound one. In fact it’s a law of power:

Law 25 – Re-Create Yourself

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you.  Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience.  Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

And also:

Law 34 – Be Royal in your Own Fashion:  Act like a King to be treated like one

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated; In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you.  For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others.  By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

In Amused Mastery, it helps to actually have some context of mastery to source as amusement.

Needless to say, asking a former Blue Pill Beta to simultaneously digest a new Red Pill awareness and revalue his self-worth is a pretty tall order. As I mention in Rejection & Revenge as a man, your existence will be defined by how you deal with rejection, so for a majority of men who’ve been hammered flat for the better part of a lifetime by women’s rejection telling him to adopt the mindset of a Prince is alien to him.

Furthermore, much of his feminine-conditioned self-perception has always taught him to be self-conscious and respectful of women’s default authority. It’s part of men’s previous Beta Game to want to identify with the feminine in order to prove how alike a man is with a woman. This conditioning is really a plan to force compliance to women’s sexual strategy from men, but it’s sold on the belief that being more feminine-like, feminine-sensitive, will set a Beta man apart from other brutish men who aren’t.

When you consider his previous degree of ego-investment in his conditioning, you can get a real appreciation of the unlearning a Red Pill man must do. It’s very difficult for most guys to consider themselves a Prince when they’ve been taught reverent deference to women all their lives.

Qualities of The Prince(ss)

A Prince’s time is valuable. His efforts and attention are gifts he bestows on the woman he’s interested in, and as such that woman’s esteem should be validated by it. She is envied by other women because of the Prince’s interest in her; it confirms there is something about her that sets her apart from other women. Her role becomes one of both humbling gratitude and excited, almost childlike, anticipations of him.

If that comes off like a pipe dream or a fake-it-till-you-make-it motivational screed, it’s because most men are so inured by a lifetime conditioning designed to hold them in the role of expectant, reverent, and deferring lover if they can perform to a woman’s standards. So ingrained is that subservience that a Princess’ acceptance of a man is exalted to an appreciation of spiritual, metaphysical, significance. God ordained her acceptance of him, the fates conspired or he “just got lucky”.

Beta men, in their Blue Pill expectations of women being rational agents, are often dumbfounded by the woman who compulsively returns over and over again to the Alpha ‘asshole’ who doesn’t respect, appreciate and love her like she deserves – like he would if she’d just come to her senses. We call that guy the emotional tampon, but what he doesn’t get is that the woman he’s orbiting is locked in a cycle that only a man with an SMV above her own can induce.

Even if that valuation is just perceptual, a woman’s Hypergamous optimization efforts will predispose her to wanting to lock that man down. This is the danger of relying on apex examples of a dynamic – women must still operate within their respective frames and within their capacity to accurately evaluate the SMV of the men she can realistically attract.

That semi-abusive Jerk boyfriend she loves so much? He’s not Channing Tatum or Brad Pitt, but contextually he’s the guy with the strength of her interest.

The Political is Personal

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Dalrock had an interesting post this morning – Black Fathers Don’t Matter – that mends nicely with a topic I was poking at in Obesity Culture:

While HHS (Health and Human Services) says any man currently shacking up with mom counts as the father, the Census says any man currently shacking up with mom counts as the father so long as mom says so.  Either way, fathers clearly can’t matter that much to the US government if distinguishing between the actual father and the man currently banging mom isn’t important.

There are other ways we can tell that fathers don’t matter (and therefore Black fathers don’t matter).  Under our current family system fathers are a sort of deputy parent. Just like a sheriff’s deputy serves at the pleasure of the sheriff, a father in an intact family serves at the pleasure of the mother.  Our entire family court structure is designed to facilitate the removal of the father should the mother decide she no longer wants him to be part of the family unit.  How important can fathers really be, when we have a massive and brutal bureaucracy devoted to helping mothers kick them out of the house?

What Dal is pointing out here has a far broader implication than simply how various governments define fatherhood. Many critics of my defining the Feminine Imperative like to think it’s a work in conspiracy. However, as I’ve explained before, there really is no need for a conspiracy; the Feminine Imperative has no centralized power base because feminine-primacy is so ensaturated into our collective social consciousness. It needs no centralization because feminine social primacy is literally part of women’s self-understanding – and by extension men’s understanding of women and what women expect of them.

Thus, on a Hypergamous social scale we see that Protein World’s male focused ad gets no such vandalism. The message is clear – It is Men who must perform, Men who need to change themselves, optimize themselves and strive for the highest physical ideal to be granted female sexual approval. Women should be accepted, respected and expected to inspire genuine desire irrespective of men’s physical ideals.

[…]

On more than a few occasions I’ve made the connection that what we see in a feminine-primary societal order is really a reflection of the female sexual strategy writ large. When we see a culture of obesity, a culture of body fat acceptance and a culture that presumes a natural evolved order of innate differences between the sexes should be trumped by self-impressions of female personal worth, we’re viewing a society beholden to the insecurities inherent in women’s Hypergamy.

A feminized, feminist, ordered social structure is one founded on ensuring the most undeserving women, by virtue of being women, are entitled to, and assured of, the best Hypergamous options by conscripting and conditioning men to comply with Hypergamy’s dictates.

I’m quoting this again here because, in light of Dalrock’s observations, it’s important for men to really understand that the power struggle women claim to be engaged in with men has already been settled on a meta, social scale. When a father is whomever a woman says he is, that’s a very powerful tool of social power leveraging.

  • A father is anyone a woman/mother claims he is
  • A father is legally bound to children he didn’t sire
  • A father is prevented at great legal and social effort from access to DNA testing of children he suspects aren’t his own
  • A father is legally responsible for the children resulting from his wife/girlfriend cuckolding him
  • A father is financially obligated to the support of children that he didn’t sire or he had no power in deciding to sire

These aren’t just examples relating to men’s lack of power in parenting; these are examples of determining the degree of control a man can exercise over the direction of his entire life. From Truth to Power:

Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.

The inherent insecurity that optimizing Hypergamy poses to women is so imperative, so all-consuming, to their psychological wellbeing that establishing complex social orders to facilitate that optimization were the first things women collectively constructed when they were (nominally) emancipated from men’s provisioning around the time of the sexual revolution.

Ensuring the optimization of women’s biologically prompted Hypergamy is literally the basis of our current social order. On a socio-political scale what we’re experiencing is legislation and cultural mandates that better facilitate Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks.

Driver had a good comment from the last post that illustrates another aspect of this feminine-power consolidation (emphasis mine):

“All the “feeling good about your body” that a fat woman can muster is NEVER going to be an aphrodisiac or a substitute for having a great body that men are aroused by.”

It’s funny how women are very attracted to a guy who works out, eats rights and takes care of his body but they fully expect men to love them (or be attracted to them) for “who they are” – thin or big. You would think that these overweight women would get the memo by now but women (and more of them) keep getting bigger each year.

Feminine-Primary Social Doctrine is the Extension of Women’s Hypergamy

In a feminine-primary social order women presume, without an afterthought, that they are entitled to an attractive guy who works out and meets or exceeds women’s very stringent and static physical ideal. At the same time they expect an entitlement to absolute control of that attraction/arousal process regardless of, and to the exception of, any influence or difference in men’s control of that process. And they expect this without any thought to meriting it beyond appeals to a nebulous and inflated concept of their personal self-worth.

When we consider the present, ambiguous state of sexual consent laws we begin to understand the latent Hypergamous purpose those laws serve – absolute consolidation of women’s Hypergamous strategies as the motivator of any sexual encounter.

Furthermore, they expect an entitlement, either directly or indirectly, to the material support and provisioning of men for no other reason than they were born female.

Any deviation from this is on the part of  men is met with a cultural reprisal designed to convince or coerce men to accept their inevitable role in providing those entitlements to women. When those social contingencies fail, or become played out, the Feminine Imperative then appeals to legal legislation to mandate men’s compliance to what amounts to women’s social entitlement to optimized Hypergamy.

Legislating Hypergamy

From the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy this amounts to socially shaming men’s sexual imperatives while simultaneously empowering women’s short-term sexual strategies and fomenting men’s societal acceptance of it (i.e. the Sandberg plan for Open Hypergamy). This is further enforced from a legal perspective through consent laws and vague “anti-harassment” legislation to, ideally, optimize women’s hypergamous prospects.

When we read about instances of the conveniently fluid definitions of rape and harassment (not to mention the pseudo-victimhood of not being harassed), this then turns into proposed “rape-by fraud” legislation. Hypergamy wants absolute certainty, absolute veracity, that it will be secured in its optimization. And in an era when the only restraint on Hypergamy depends on an individual woman’s capacity for being self-aware of it, that Hypergamy necessitates men be held legally responsible for optimizing it.

Even the right for women to have safe and legal abortions finds its root in women’s want to mandate an insurance of their Hypergamous impulses. Nothing says “he wasn’t the right guy” like the unilateral power to abort a man’s genetic legacy in utero.

Feminist boilerplate would convince us that expanding definitions of rape is an effort to limit men’s control of women’s bodies – however, the latent purpose of expanding the definition is to consolidate on the insecurity all women experience with regard to optimizing Hypergamy.

The Beta Bucks insurance aspect of Hypergamy is evidenced by cultural expectations of male deference to wives’ authority in all decision making aspects of a marriage or relationship. And once again this expectation of deference is a grasping for assurances of control should a woman’s Hypergamous choosing of a man not meet her expectations. This is actualized covertly under the auspices of egalitarian equalism and the dubious presumptions of support and feminine identification on the part of men.

Beyond this there are of course the ubiquitous divorce, support, child support and domestic violence legalities that grossly favor women’s interests – which should be pointed out are rooted in exactly the same Hypergamous insecurity that her short-term Alpha Fucks mating strategies demand legislation for.

As Open Hypergamy becomes more institutionalized and made a societal norm by the Feminine Imperative, and as more men become Red Pill aware (by effort or consequences) because of it, the more necessary it will become for a feminine-primary social order to legislate and mandate men comply with it.

Going Mainstream

I’ve addressed this before, but I’ve never done politics on TRM. I will never do screeds on race or multi-culturalism or religion on TRM for a very good reason – it pollutes the message.

We now are seeing the results of this pollution as the manosphere is attacked from both sides of the political spectrum.

I’ve given this example before, but if you put Gretchen Carlson and Rachel Maddow on the same show and confronted them with red pill truths and Game-awareness they would eagerly close ranks, reserve their political differences and cooperatively fight for the Feminine Imperative.

This is the degree to which the Feminine Imperative has been saturated into our western social fabric. Catholic women in the Vatican may have very little in common with Mormon women in Utah, but let a Mormon woman insist the church alter its fundamental foundational articles of faith with regard to women in favor of a doctrine substituted by the Feminine Imperative and those disparate women have a common purpose.

That is the depth of the Feminine Imperative – that female primacy should rewrite articles of faith to prioritize women’s interests.

Religious doctrine, legal and political legislation, cultural norms, labor and economic issues; all are trumped by the Feminine Imperative. All have been subverted to defer to the Feminine Imperative while maintaining a default status of victimhood and oppression of women and women’s interests necessary to perpetuate that covert decentralized power base.

It doesn’t matter what world view, ideology or political stripe the opposition holds; men, masculinity and anything contrary to the feminine-primary social narrative will always be a common enemy of the Feminine Imperative, and both liberal and conservative will climb over one another to throw the first punch if it means defending women and defending the feminine social order by proxy.

This is why anything even marginally pro-masculine is vilified in mainstream society. Anything pro-masculine is always an easy, preferred target because it’s so hated, so incorrect, in a feminine-primary context that it can unite people of hostilely opposed political and ideological differences.

It’s my opinion that red pill awareness needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, non-racial and non-religious because the moment the Red Pill is associated with any social or religious movement, you co-brand it with an ideology, and the validity of it will be written off along with any preconceptions associated with that specific ideology.

Furthermore, any co-branding will still be violently disowned by whatever ideology it’s paired with because the Feminine Imperative has already co-opted and trumps the fundaments of that ideology. The fundamental truth is that the manosphere, pro-masculine thought, Red Pill awareness or its issues are an entity of its own.

This is what scares the shit out of critics who attempt to define, contain and compartmentalize the manosphere / Red Pill awareness; it’s bigger than social, racial, political or religious strictures can contain. It crosses all of those constructs just as the Feminine Imperative has co-opted all of those cultural constructs. The feminized infrastructure of the MSM that’s just beginning to take the manosphere seriously enough to be critical are discovering this and trying to put the genie back into a bottle defined by their feminine-primary conditioning.

The idea that one of their own, whether in a liberal or conservative context, is genuinely Red Pill aware and educating others of that awareness is unnerving for the Feminine Imperative that’s already established strong footholds in either ideology.

Obesity Culture

Protein_World

In the almost 4 years I’ve had The Rational Male up and running I have neither monetized nor commercialized the blog. I began with the explicit intent of making everything I do accessible and in the past year and a half since the first book published I’ve turned down at least seven different (lucrative) requests to put ads or promos on the blog.

I’m happy to say I’ll still never monetize this blog, but if I were to offer ad space my first spot would be reserved for Protein World. I can’t vouch for the quality of their products beyond what I know in general of protein supplements from years of bodybuilding, but that’s not the point. The point is that these guys had the balls not only to stick to their guns, but to double down when social justice warriors and body fat acceptance “activists” took it upon themselves to systematically vandalize their most recent ad campaign.

Protein_World_2 Protein_World_1

I’ve made my living in brand development for over 20 years now, these guys deserve some respect. Granted, at this point they have no option but to go on offense, but in today’s fem-centric social order this is an anomaly.

I’m drawing attention to this selective vandalism to illustrate a larger point; in a feminine-primary, feminine-dominant social order any reminder of how that order might be challenged (especially on a visceral level) must be met with a selectively sexist countermeasure.

You see, what Protein World’s campaign does is remind less than physically ideal women that despite all social efforts to convince them otherwise, men still evaluate a woman’s sexual market value based on her physical appeal. No amount ‘personal acceptance’ or clinging to internal worth and validation will change the sexual response men evolved to optimize over a hundred thousand years.

I covered this briefly when I explained the misconceptions of Robin Korth in Separating Values:

Conflating Values

One of the major problems women have, and more than even some Red Pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.

It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.

What Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.

It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.

[…]

Feminist ‘equalism’ is always shocked that evolved human biology and its feral predispositions won’t cooperate with it, but such is the frustration with any social order or ideology which fails to account for the realities of human being’s natural states and biological imperatives. There is a conceived, higher-order expectation that, through freewill, conviction or some other learned, reasoned means, people will rise above the influence of their base nature and comply with what they believe will make for an idealized existence.

What egalitarian equalisim, struggles against is basic human instinct, nature and impulse.

This refusal of understanding base motivations is at the heart of these “activists” outrage. Feminized egalitarian equalism fosters the idea that men and women are essentially equal beings with different genitalia and a co-equal capacity for rational agency. Under those auspices men and women should be able to bypass their inherent, evolved, sexual prompts and make the conscious rational effort to focus their arousal and attraction on the more intrinsic personal worth of the opposite sex.

In the egalitarian plan Hypergamy should be as self-consciously sublimated for women as men’s should be for repressing any expression of being sexually aroused by a woman for anything other than her intrinsic personal worth. Any man with a baseline awareness of female behavior knows how effective this plan is.

But that’s not to stop women from simultaneously being offended by visceral expressions of men’s sexual ideals while holding a double standard for their own physically ideal men.

Protein_World_3

You see Protein World applies an equal standard across their ad campaigns, and the message, when paired like so, is one of encouraging a physical ideal for both sexes. To my knowledge there was no initial outrage over the male version of the ad on the right. There was no outcry or messages scrawled on these ads stating “Contrary to popular opinion, men’s bodies do not need to be changed for the beach or anywhere else.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the indignation of yet one more female double standard, so lets back up for a moment and examine why this is.

The most common refrain you’ll hear from Blue Pill trained men and less than physically ideal women is that men have a predilection to sexually objectify women, to see them as objects rather than their esoteric notion of “human beings”. What they fail to understand is that this objectification is exactly what the male brain evolved for.

Objectification Your Honor

In our tribal beginnings men’s sexual response, his very reproductive survival, depended on his capacity for sexual immediacy. While women may require foreplay and pre-coital stimulation, men had to be ready to fuck and go at a moment’s notice. Survival, mate poaching, even the uncertainty of women’s ovulatory/estrus phase of her menstrual cycle, all these factors and more predicated a need for instant sexual reflexiveness for men.

That reflexiveness required a capacity for a man to see a woman, evaluate her sexual/fertility value to him (the boner test) and take action accordingly. About two years ago on another forum, I’d gotten involved in a discussion regarding this sexual evaluation reflex and how women were literally dumbfounded that men would “size up” a woman sexually within the space of a few short seconds. Even men who were only peripherally aware of women outside of their visual focus would make SMV assessments of those women.

In order for this assessment to take place the mental construct of perceiving women as objects was a necessary evolutionary step. The simple truth is that it’s part of men’s neurological firmware to see women’s bodies as objects. It’s a well studied fact that when men see an arousing woman’s semi-nude body it triggers the same area of our brains associated with tool use. Sexual objectification is a survival feature for men, not a bug.

On a limbic level women understand this aspect of male nature. In a very visceral way women know that men put a primary value on their bodies and sexual availability. Ads like this only remind women of, and highlight the fact, that despite all of its concentrated social effort the Feminine Imperative simply cannot undo thousands of years of men evolving that physical objectification – and successfully reproducing as a result of it.

Generation Hypergamy

In a social order that follows the dictates of female sexual strategy it’s unsurprising that women would seek to eliminate that aspect of the male sexual response. Only by controlling that response can women completely enforce Hypergamy as the predominant socio-sexual strategy. These ads offend that desire for control. They remind a woman that her Hypergamous sexual selectivity is (at least presumptively) still mitigated by men being aroused by their physicality, objectifying them and desiring them for reproduction.

Women’s innate solipsism prevents them from ever truly attaining the egalitarian equalist fantasy they ride in order to consolidate that control. Women’s hindbrains want a better-than deal with regards to Hypergamy. Hypergamy doesn’t seek its own level, it wants, it expects a better than deserved exchange for its investment with a man, and it desperately wants assurances that its getting it.

Thus, on a Hypergamous social scale we see that Protein World’s male focused ad gets no such vandalism. The message is clear – It is Men who must perform, Men who need to change themselves, optimize themselves and strive for the highest physical ideal to be granted female sexual approval. Women should be accepted, respected and expected to inspire genuine desire irrespective of men’s physical ideals.

In 2011 I wrote Women’s Physical Standards and I think it bears quoting here:

This may come as a shock to the “men have impossibly high beauty standards” gnashing of feminist teeth, but it is in fact women who have a much higher standard for an idealized male physique. For all the endless kvetching from women about men wanting “living barbie dolls”, it’s men who’ve historically displayed much broader interests in female body habitus than women ever have.

You see, men will very readily cater their physical sexual “preferences” in accordance with what has proven sexually successful for them in past experiences. In other words, men tend to return to the same watering hole they found to be plentiful in the past. These preferences of convenience manifest themselves as ‘fetishes’ for men. And you don’t even need all that extensive research to prove this.  All one need do is search the vast variety of porn available catering to the physical attributes that men will fetishize. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass, small ass, every hair color of the rainbow, shaved snatch, hairy snatch, teen girls to MILFs and older, tan, pale, ultra-thin to the ubiquitous BBWs (Big Beautiful women). Ladies, name the physical attribute(s), and there’s a fan-group just waiting to bang you. Rule 34 was never more provable than in men’s willingness to fuck damn near any physical demographic of women – just ask the female midgets catering to that fetish of porn.

On the other hand, from a purely physical perspective, it’s women’s idealized masculine form that hasn’t changed in millennia. While there may have been a rubenesque period when men loved the fatties of the 1600′s, no such era ever existed for women’s physical preferences. The classic broad chest, wide shoulders, six-pack abs and squared jaws of greco-roman athleticism are still the idealized male form that has graced EVERY romance novel cover in existence. I’m still waiting for someone to post me a link for a dating site that caters exclusively to women’s fetish of BBMs – average to good looking, fit women specifically looking overweight men. Executive Introductions caters to women seeking affluent, influential men, but women just looking for overweight men, that site doesn’t exist.

On more than a few occasions I’ve made the connection that what we see in a feminine-primary societal order is really a reflection of the female sexual strategy writ large. When we see a culture of obesity, a culture of body fat acceptance and a culture that presumes a natural evolved order of innate differences between the sexes should be trumped by self-impressions of female personal worth, we’re viewing a society beholden to the insecurities inherent in women’s Hypergamy.

A feminized, feminist, ordered social structure is one founded on ensuring the most undeserving women, by virtue of being women, are entitled to, and assured of, the best Hypergamous options by conscripting and conditioning men to comply with Hypergamy’s dictates.

End Note

It’s been brought to my attention that Roosh will be appearing on the Dr. Oz show tomorrow.

I’ll admit I’m a bit apprehensive of this “interview” as it smacks of red meat for Dr. Oz’s largely overweight viewing demographic (not to mention his obese wife). That said, this interview came at a good time since it should give readers a first hand look at exactly the rationales and social conventions I illustrated in today’s post. Keep this material fresh in your mind while you watch.