dread game

Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany

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About three weeks ago I was made aware of Jenny Bahn’s article, 30 is the New 50 which I thought was timely as it went beyond the xojane pablum where it first appeared to wider readership being picked up by Time. It was timely (heh) because it was right around the same week I published Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma and, coming from a fairly attractive woman, it highlighted many of the points I’d made in that post.

Commenter myreality asked me:

To what extent, if at all, do you think that validation hunting is part of male preference for large age differences when a man is in his late 30’s and beyond? It is definitely not 0%…

I think this is presuming a truth that isn’t.

The idea that men “seek validation” for their earned status or to ‘right’ past wrongs to their egos while they were working their way to that status is a social convention. The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

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

Have a look at my Sexual Market Value Graph. (click to enlarge)

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Although I’ve gone into explaining the loose metrics I’ve based this graph on several occasions, I’ve added some arrows here to illustrate a point that often gets missed or simply blown over because the truths it represents aren’t very flattering. Women would rather men not be aware of their own SMV potential prior to women being able to consolidate upon her sexual strategy.

Popular culture never presumes women are ‘validation hunting’ when they’re enjoying their peak SMV potential at 23 and (by order of degree) indulging that opportunity with men while at their peak. Women are acculturated to feel “empowered” by their sexuality, and really, no guy who wants to bang a hot 23 year old woman is ever going to rebuke her for it, much less develop social conventions to limit their odds of doing so.

However, men enjoying peak SMV in their mid to late 30’s are (by default) presumed to be vindicating themselves and validating their “fragile egos” by dating the younger (and in Jenny Bahn’s case an SMV peaked 23 year old no less) women they naturally find more attractive.

If there is any ‘validation’ for SMV peaked men it’s less about the sense of deserving a hot piece of ass or vindication for the women of his peer age who found him sexually invisible until he hit his peak, and more about validation in a new self-awareness that he finally is in a position of choosing and qualifying women for his intimacy rather than being filtered for his own acceptability for so long.

It’s not about turnabout or fair play now that the sexual selection shoe is on the other foot, but simple deductive pragmatism for a man who is aware of his own SMV and, assuming he’s hasn’t hamstrung his ability to maneuver, wants to exercise that value at (presumedly) the top of his game.

It’s not (usually) that he’s made a conscious effort to make himself an Alpha Agent of Righteous Karma, but that he steps into that role by default when the SMV balance shifts to his favor, and he naturally prefers sexual access to the best physical, and most sexually available woman his newly recognized SMV will afford him. That may not be a 23 year old coed, but it might be with a necessitous 29 year old looking for a solution to her long term investment.

About Those Arrows

One very common (or deliberate) misunderstanding about this chart is the presumption that like should necessarily attract like. A lot of critics claim indignation over the idea that I was suggesting a 23 year old woman should be attracted to a 36-38 year old SMV peaked man. I’ve never proposed this scenario in any post I’ve ever written about SMV, but it’s important to understand the prioritizations of attraction women make during the later phases of their maturation.

Critics who like to presume that this attraction is only based on looks, prowess and virility often don’t take this attraction prioritization into account. Obviously a more youthful man is in better physical shape when he’s younger, and if all we were considering was short term mating prospects and the Alpha Fuck side of feminine hypergamy this graph would look much different. However, once a woman has reached 30 (thank you Ms. Bahn) those attraction (not arousal) priorities look much different.

The primary reason I placed men’s peak SMV in his mid to late thirties is because, if he’s made the most of his potential, this is when he is most likely to have established himself in his status, affluence and achievements while (if he’s maintained himself) still retaining the looks of a more mature man.

It’s exactly women’s sexual prioritization at their most necessitous which puts men at the top of their SMV game. As I’ve detailed in many prior posts, hypergamy wants optimization (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). Women’s pluralistic sexual strategy is optimized when a woman can consolidate a monogamous commitment from a man who can deliver a better genetic benefit and a better personal (providership) investment than her own SMV should realistically be able to warrant her.

In general, at no other point in a man’s life does he possess the a better potential to optimize women’s innate hypergamy.

If you follow the pink arrow, from about women’s 30th year that established SMV peaked man has the best potential to satisfy both aspects of the dualistic nature of hypergamy. It’s important to consider that when a woman reaches her 30s her sexual prioritization is affected by her own capacity to attract and hold male attention. What happens is a sort of subconscious establishing operation – as her capacity to attract becomes diminished, and as the next generation of SMV peaked women comes into their own, the urgency to cash out of the sexual market place increases.

So it’s not that the expectation should be one of 23 year old women wanting to get after it with 38 year old men (though this is exactly the scenario in Jenny Bahn’s story), but rather that 38 year old men increase exponentially in value to 30 year old women at a time when what he possess is what she needs the most.

Back in May a data set was released on Twitter from OKCupid founder Christian Rudder is his book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). It’s a fascinating read actually and reinforces much of what I speculate about with regard to my own SMV graph.

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It’s important to remember that this data is based primarily on looks, but it illustrates the point of my adding the blue arrow to the graph. Men’s arousal and attraction triggers are virtually static. While men’s attraction value variates for women, it is a locked value for women.

While in her SMV peak – as we can see averaged her to around 22 – women enjoy the benefit of having the most sexual selectivity of their lives. However, the power of this selectivity declines as she ages and is further stressed by sexual competition as she does. And while men compete for sexual access to women, the sexual market value of the woman being competed for is still rooted in her capacity to attract attention and arouse men.

When in her SMV peak years, women’s preferences and sexual strategy supersede those of the men who would compete for her, however as she moves towards maturity, and as men ascend to their own SMV peak, a man’s preferences gradually take precedence over women’s.

Jenny Bahn, a reasonably attractive (former model) woman provides us with an excellent example of this transition.

Alex is 38. I’m 30. Technically, there are no “people our age.” But I’m starting to feel that a 30-year-old woman might as well be a 40-year-old man, though infinitely less desirable, culturally speaking.

At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.

[…]A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.

As I mentioned in The Threat:

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

Jenny, like most women in their Epiphany Phase, is now coming to terms with the transition of sexual selection power from what she once no doubt enjoyed to a man who’s made the most of his maturity and potential she wants to consolidate on in long term monogamy.

Jenny has a rare honesty and insight to recognize this, but naturally the ‘validation’ social convention is there to assuage her predicament. Even in her self-acceptance of her situation Alex is colored with an uncooperative attitude. His perspective is ‘incorrect’ in a fem-centric social order. If he were really ‘mature’ he would be dating and marrying Jenny (a victim of her own past decisions) instead of seeking ‘validation’ with a 23 year old hottie.

The presumption of Alex validating himself with a hot 23 year old makes men his age, in general, more shallow or manipulative, or uncooperative with the mandates of a feminine-primary social order. A mature, established man shouldn’t want to date women in their 20s, he should cooperate with the Feminine Imperative and validate Jenny’s sexual strategy by becoming monogamous with her.

What Alex is doing isn’t seeking validation, it’s simple SMP pragmatism – the power of sexual selectivity (though by no means unilateral) has switched in degree to his favor. Alex is enjoying his peak SMV and a large portion of that value comes from his desirability from women like Jenny; women who delayed capitalizing on their SMV peak and now, at 30, find themselves on the necessitous side of that sexual selectivity.

Game Works

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Game, for lack of a better word, is good. Game is right. Game works.

After listening to myself on this weekend’s interview with Christian McQueen and Dagonet I realized that as I became more comfortable with the interview I found myself verbally ‘dialoging’ in much the same way that I scribble down fragments of ideas in my notebook or when I’m fleshing out a draft for some topic I’m considering in-post.

It’s always been a strange sensation for me to hear myself speak. Even when I record a voice message on my iPhone it always makes me self-conscious to listen to the message play back. However, as I was in the midst of listening to myself on the show I had the same familiar internal conversation and I picked up on a thought I had planned to write about, but I think it slipped my mind until now.

Towards the middle of our conversation I considered a few things about the benefits of Game, and it made me think about how Game has progressed to what it is today. One of the chapters in The Rational Male I specifically wrote for the book – and later converted to a blog post – was called The Evolution of Game. I added this as an effort to help uninitiated men have a better grasp of just what Game really is.

There’s been a lot of redefining of exactly what Game is over the past 12-13 years, but I’ve always considered Game an abstract term for a much larger concept.

Naturally, critics predisposed to a blue pill worldview want to portray “those red pill game guys” as throwbacks to the PUA set of the early 2000’s. This is a very shortsighted evaluation, usually proffered by guys ego-invested in a blue pill mindset and in need of easy definitions and buzz words to ridicule and move onto the next distraction.

Facing red pill truths is uncomfortable, and I understand the need to casually pass them off for fear of really having to critically reconsider ego-investments; that type of insight requires either real depth of character or an experience traumatic enough to shake one from beliefs that, in essence, make up part of their personality.

Both require a concentrated effort to learn from, and honestly, most people are too lethargic to consider red pill truths when there are more entertaining distraction to inure themselves with.

It’s just this lethargy that prevents them from understanding that Game and red pill awareness have matured far beyond the PUAs techniques of the past. Neil Strauss published The Game in 2003 – that’s 15 years since Mystery was wearing top hats and elevator boots.

Those caricatures may be comforting to laugh at, but in fifteen years the developed techniques and observations Game practitioners failed and succeeded with fed into what we would eventually come to understand as red pill awareness today.

Even some well meaning red pill Men may want to self-affirmingly ridicule the PUAs of the past and present, but if you have embraced a red pill awareness today, at least partially, you have these Men to thank for risking rejection and practicing techniques that laid a foundation for contemporary red pill awareness.

Now, imagine for a moment that, today, all men had to build on was the antiseptic studies and controlled experiments of a social science academia firmly steeped in a feminine-primary, feminine-correct social context. Imagine what red pill awareness would be if not for the guys in the field doing ‘experiments’. Imagine what marriage counselors and ‘relationship experts’ would (and honestly, still) advise men to do in order to change their lives with an understanding based solely on what a feminine- primary, controlled social science approved of.

Only the PUAs of then and now have had the unfettered freedom to perform in-field social experiments, and relate their collected evidence and observations with other men; the types of which social science has been forbidden from due either to ethical considerations or by feminine-primary social conventions.

Game does not Occur in a Vacuum

Recently the comment threads here have had a tendency to devolve into a “looks are all that matters so why bother learning Game?” line of reasoning. The commentariat can lean towards go-your-own-way defeatism, then to resolving to live in the gym until one inspire female arousal, or, to appeals to positive confidence.

And while I have always recognized – more than most other manosphere bloggers if I dare – the obvious truth that Looks are a prime requisite for arousal (and attraction), I also recognize an effort to discredit Game and red pill awareness by absolutes, extremes and absurdities.

For anyone with the sense that Game and red pill awareness is valueless and superfluous in the face of women’s primary drive for physical arousal, I suggest you read Advocatus Diaboli’s treatise on how to pragmatically use escorts (either that or relocate to the state of Nevada). Honestly, I hold no disapproval for men who feel this is the best way to satisfy their need for sex and female contact. It may indeed be your best option under the current social environment.

For anyone else, I think it’s very important to look at the benefits of Game both in an intergender and interpersonal context. If you consider yourself “red pill” (another useful, but abstract term) Game has benefitted you – because it was the early trials and errors of Game that led to red pill principles we understand now.

If you have even a cursory grasp of how women’s biology and menstrual cycle influences ovulatory shift behaviors in mate preferences and you’ve altered your perception of women, Game has benefitted you.

If you understand the basics of feminine hypergamy and the sexual strategies women use to optimize their mate selection, and then changed your intergender tact as a result of it, Game has benefitted you.

If you’ve internalized the core psychological principles underlying women’s perceptions of Amused Mastery, Command Presence, Agree & Amplify, Cocky & Funny, Social Proof, Dread and even Chick Crack, whether you’ve applied them or not, Game has expanded your consciousness of women’s behaviors and their motivators.

If you’ve had the insight to understand your blue pill conditioning, the reasons for your predispositions towards a Savior Schema, feminine identifying, why a LJBF is a rejection, why Beta Game comes naturally to men but is self defeating, or why SMV accrues and decays over the course of a lifetime, Game and the red pill have benefitted you.

If you’ve used or modified any of these principles to better your marriage, your dealings with co-workers, your daughter, mother or even your best friend’s domineering wife, you’ve benefitted from Game.

If you’ve saved or bettered another man’s life, or bettered his intergender relationships, you’ve both benefitted from Game.

I could go on, but if you honestly believe that women’s primary physical arousal cues trump any value that Game or red pill awareness really has, then you’re wasting your time here reading and commenting on what I have to offer. You’d be better served by focusing all your attentions to lifting in the gym and shifting your career goals toward a job that is physically demanding and keeps you at your physical best.

Ironically, getting in shape is also an aspect of Game. Even if your belief is “Looks are everything”, but yet your understanding of this comes as a result of your red pill awareness of the Alpha Fucks side of hypergamy, Game has benefitted you.

Just a familiarity with Game concepts, whether you accept them or not, still influence your perception of women and the motivations behind their behaviors.

Red pill awareness challenges feminine-primary thinking. Why do you think the mass dissemination of red pill awareness is so threatening to the Feminine Imperative?

Doing Something

What is the manosphere actually ‘doing’?

This is the first critique I expect from from a poor debate opponent – disqualifying the strength or validity of a premise by the ‘success’ or lack thereof of a proponent’s efforts to enact or convince others of that premise.

By this logic, one could make the case that the MRM is an utter failure, but it still doesn’t mean they aren’t correct in their efforts.

As I mentioned on the Christian McQueen Show, I’m of a bottom up, or an inside – out mind when it comes to enacting red pill ‘change. The manosphere is raising awareness and this needs time (maybe even a generation) to mature into personal consciousness and then popular consciousness.

It’s difficult to quantify the ‘results’ of the manosphere, red pill awareness and Game because its effects are individually subjective at this stage. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t receive an email, a forum/blog comment or a tweet about how my book or what I’ve written on the blog has changed (or literally saved) a man’s life.

That’s not meant to gloss myself, but rather to illustrate a point – the red pill (and Game) is doing something, it’s changing minds and lives. It’s not rallying men in the streets and waving banners, nor is it effecting legal or social policy (yet), but it’s making men aware of their condition and changing their beliefs.

No hate for what the MRM is doing, I recognize the intent and applaud it, but thus far it’s been impotent in effecting “real change in policy”, while red pill awareness has done more for men individually. For all of the MRM’s efforts to enact public change, all it takes is one White Knight in a position of authority to say “GTFO you misogynist creeps!” Now imagine in the future a man who’s red pill aware in a position to effect that policy.

Real change isn’t going to happen directly it’s going to happen indirectly, on a man by man basis. And not just publicly but personally.

That change will happen in men’s relationships with their wives, daughters and sons. That change may simply be a form of ‘civil disobedience’ in not marrying at all, or holding women accountable for their open embrace of hypergamy and their AFBB sexual strategy and only marrying / supporting women who make an effort to control their hypergamy.

That change will happen in the workplace and hiring practices. That change will filter into men’s better understanding as the red pill spreads and men reassume some of the social frame control the Feminine Imperative unilaterally legislates and provide to women now.

The red pill is ‘doing’ something, it’s planting the seeds for a greater shift in gender power with every man who becomes aware of how women ‘are’ and what they will predictably do.

The Burden of Performance

performance

 

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

One of the most fundamental misconceptions plugged-in men have with regard to their intersexual relations with women is the issue of performance. Back in late March of this year I read an interesting article from Roosh, Men are nothing more than clowns to the modern woman and it struck me that although I certainly agreed with him in the context he presented it, there was more to the ‘entertainment’ factor than simple amusement on the part of women.

Women don’t seek out comfort or stability in men anymore—they seek entertainment. They seek distraction. They seek hedonistic pleasure. This is why provider men (beta males) are so hopelessly failing today to secure the commitment of beautiful women in their prime, and this is why even lesser alpha males fail to enter relationships with women beyond a few bangs. Once the entertainment or novelty you provide her declines—and it inevitably will—she moves on to something or someone else. In essence, the only way you can keep a girl is if you adopt the mentality of a soap opera writer, adding a cliffhanger to the end of each episode that keeps a woman interested when being a good man no longer does.

After reading this I tried to imagine myself being a recently unplugged man or a guy just coming to terms with the uncomfortable truths of the red pill and learning that all of the comforting “just be yourself and the right girl will come along” rhetoric everyone convinced me of had been replaced by a disingenuous need to transform oneself into a cartoon character in order to hold the attentions of an average girl.

That’s kind of depressing, especially when you consider the overwhelming effort and personal insight necessary in realizing red pill awareness. Roosh later tempered this with How to be a good clown and Clown Game vs. Good Man Game, and although he clarifies things well in Game terms, the root of the frustration most guys will have with the ‘clown factor’ is that, in these terms and in this context, their performance isn’t who they are.

In this environment it’s easy to see why the MGTOW option seems like an understandable recourse for red pill men. It’s a very seductive temptation to think that a man can simply remove himself from the performance equation with regards to women. I’ll touch on this later, but what’s important here is understanding the performance game men are necessarily born into. Like it or not, play it or not, as a man you will always be evaluated on your performance (or the perception of it).

I think what trips a lot of men up early in their red pill transformation is sort of a sense of indignation towards women that they should have to “be someone they’re not” and play a character role that simply isn’t who they are in order to hold a woman’s interest. I covered this idea in Have A Look and developed how women are like casting agents when it comes to the men they hope will entertain them.

This was really about a sexual context when I went into it, but as I read Roosh’s original article I began to consider that women’s “character” role they expect men to perform changes as their own phases of maturity dictates and their SMV can realistically demand for that phase. In other words the “characters” they want performed in their Party Years will be different than the ones they want after their Epiphany Phase, which may be different than the character they want for their mid-life years.

How realistic it is for men to be that character becomes less and less relevant as women are socialized to expect disappointment from men actually living up to the characters they’re conditioned to believe they should realistically be entitled to at various stages of their maturity.

Living Up

Right about now I’m sure various male readers are thinking, “fuck this, I’m gonna be who I am and any girl who can’t appreciate me for me is low quality anyway.” This will probably piss you off, but this is exactly the blue pill mentality most ‘just be yourself‘ Betas adopt for themselves.

It’s actually a law of power to despise what you can’t have, and deductively it makes sense, but the fact still remains, as a man you will always be evaluated by your performance. So even with a ‘fuck it, I’ll just be me’ mindset you’re still being evaluated on how well ‘you are just you’.

The simple fact is that you must actually be your performance – it must be internalized. In truth, you already are that performance whether you dictate and direct that, or you think you can forget it and hope your natural, undirected performance will be appreciated by women (and others), but regardless, women will filter for hypergamous optimization based on how well you align with what they believe they are entitled to in a man in the context of their own perception of their SMV.

Looks, talent, tangible benefits and other core prerequisites may change depending on the individual woman, but to be a man is to perform. Even if you’re a self-defined man going his own way who enjoys escorts to fulfill his needs, you still need to perform in order to earn the money to enjoy them.

It Doesn’t Get Easier, You Get Better

For Men, there is no true rest from performance. To believe so is to believe in women’s mythical capacity for a higher form of empathy which would perdispose them to overriding their innate hypergamous filtering based on performance.

Women will never have the same requisites of performance for themselves for which they expect men to maintain of themselves. Hypergamy demands a constant, subliminal reconfirmation of a man’s worthiness of her commitment to him, so there is never a parallel of experience.

Women will claim men “require” they meet some physical standard (i.e. performance) and while generally true, this is still a performance standard men have of women, not one they hold for themselves. There simply is no reciprocal dynamic or prequalification of performance for women, and in fact for a man to even voice the idea that he might qualify a woman for his intimacy he’s characterized as judgmental and misogynistic.

Social conventions like this are established to ensure women’s hypergamous sexual strategy is the socially dominant one. Expecting a woman to perform for a man is an insult to her ‘prize status’ as an individual.

From a humanistic perspective there’s a want for a rational solution to this performance requirement, but as I’ve outlined in prior posts, appeals to women’s reason are no insulation against the subliminal influences of hypergamy.

I read many a ‘dating coach’ who’s approach is complete honesty and full disclosure in the hopes that a like-minded, rational woman will naturally appreciate a man’s forthrightness, but this presupposes a preexisting equal playing field where subliminal influences are overridden by mutual rationalism.

The real hope is that women will drop their innate hypergamous performance requisites in appreciation of this vulnerable, inadequate honesty.

What they sweep under the rug is that you cannot appeal to a woman’s reason or sentiment to genuinely forgive a deficit in a man’s performance. Love, reason, both demand a preexisting mutual appreciation in a common context, but neither love nor reason alleviate the necessity of performance for a man.

Women simply are not motivated to compromise hypergamy on their own accord. They will not be reasoned into accommodating a situation of mutual needs by overt means.

It is a Man’s capacity to perform and demonstrate (never explicate) higher value that motivates women to accommodate mutual needs in a relationship – whether that’s a same night lay or a 50 year marriage.

Demonstrating Higher Value

I get the impression that DHV tends to get a bad rap both from blue pill critics as well as red pill aware men. A lot of that gets wrapped up in technique and practice. It’s easy to dismiss this concept as posturing or bluster, but DHV, as a principle isn’t defined by egotistical measures or how well a guy can ‘showboat’ himself around women.

A lot of DHV is unintentional. In fact the best most genuine forms of DHV are exhibited when a Man doesn’t realize he’s actually performing in a way that demonstrate his higher value. This can be as simple as walking int a room in the right context or environment. Even humility can be DHV in the proper context.

What I’m driving at here is that after reading all of this you might think I’m saying you need to be superhuman to qualify for women’s performance standards, and again that’s kind of depressing – that’s not what I’m getting at. A woman’s performance standards are dependent on many varied contexts and according to the priorities she places on the type of character she finds both arousing and attractive and according to what her conditions dictate for her.

It’s not how you perform so much as that you perform. Ambition and personal drive to perform and be the best and most successful you you can be may have absolutely nothing to do with your intention of attracting a woman, but you are still performing and you will be evaluated on that performance.

DHV or DLV is performance whether intentional or not. You cannot remove yourself from this performance equation. You can cease to direct your part in this performance, but until you die you cannot exit the game.

 

 

 

Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma

Karma

Reader Keyser Soze had an interesting comment last week that I thought would be a good jump off point for today’s topic:

@Siirtyrion: You said, “Many scientists still go by this notion because it explains the frequent tradeoffs in mating and gives us a more complete picture for sexual selection as a whole. I understand that I uphold physicality as king, but understand that hypergamy isn’t completely about a short-term mating strategy, regardless of what some people may think. Women may be able to fund their our lives currently but rest assure, they still seek out Beta Bucks in other forms aside from monetary or material gain (i.e they still seek out physiological and emotional comfort from less than ideal males).”

Question for all:

Reading this, I had a thought. We often talk about women hitting the wall at 35ish and their sudden willingness to be me more reasonable with their expectations in a mate as they realize their SMV has decreased. I wonder if the above quote also plays into this. By the time women hit 35ish, historically (without modern methods of assisted conception) they are past their childbearing years. I wonder if their mating strategy changes at this age not only because of diminished SMV, but also because they are no longer looking for prime genetic material for reproduction as much as they are looking for “physiological and emotional comfort”. Perhaps this was implied all along, but I never thought about it this way before.

I hate to think this is going to come off as sympathy for the aging spinsters who had their cake in their youth and now, late in life, are looking to make honest amends for their past decisions, but it probably will.

A few months ago I broke-down Robin Korth’s aging sexual denial and in response we got a glimpse into the rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) at work in feminine solipsism:

http://twitter.com/RobinKorth/status/486636301207093248

My intent here isn’t to pick on Korth personally or really any woman in the post-Wall demographic in particular, but this self-insight is an excellent illustration of the feminine solipsism I often refer to on this blog. Furthermore, this sense of ego-blamelessness is then combined with the easy rationales and social conventions ready-made by the Feminine Imperative to affirm her self-importance.

Deti comments:

Robin Korth should be reposing in the love of her husband of the past 35 years, give or take. She should be doting on children and grandchildren as the esteemed matriarch of her family.

Instead, Ms. Korth is still out there acting as if she’s 25 years old. She’s still trying to navigate the sexual and dating minefields. In the end she’s trying to show everyone (but really herself) that she’s still “got it”; that she can still arouse a man sexually. It is all really about self aggrandizement. It is all about self- validation and affirmation. In the end, it’s all about Robin Korth. It’s pathetic and sad, really.

And no, Ms. Korth, your life is not the result of what you think about yourself. You are what you do. You are NOT what you think, read, or write. You are not what you were or what you’d like to be.

You are what you do. Period. Full stop.

And from The Difficulty of Gaming Women by Age Brackets by (the old) Roissy:

36 to 38 year olds

She is at peace with her spinsterhood and her failure in the dating market. She will acquiesce easily and gratefully to sex with very little game, as long as you don’t look like a grandpa. Her expectations are so low, it will be a challenge to disappoint her.

If you are prone to guilt, you might feel it when you inevitably dump a woman in this age range. Don’t. Remind yourself that her past is littered with her insouciant dumping of many beta men before you. You are merely an alpha agent of righteous karma.

Granted, Robin is well past the 38 year old mark by over 20 years, however even at 59 the description is still remarkably apt in light of Deti’s overview, however, the real lesson here is for men.

There comes (or should come) a certain empowerment for men after a point of maturation in life where he grows into an understanding of how the Game is played by women. As I’ve noted in the past month, this game, the former secret of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, is becoming more and more of an open secret amongst a feminine-primary culture becoming increasingly more assured of its primacy. If anything this plan for women’s optimizing hypergamy is just this side of proudly flaunting it to men.

As I pick my way through exactly this ‘plan’ in writing the next book, I’ve actually become less surprised by so many examples I find of this willingness with which women will overtly share their strategy for assuring short-term Alpha sexual desires during their SMV peak, and then consolidation on the security a Beta provider represents as their SMV decays beginning at around 30 years of age.

My purpose in writing this next volume of The Rational Male is to make men aware of just this life-schedule and sexual strategy, but even with my own efforts and the glaring willingness with which women will now confirm it, a larger whole of men simply don’t mature into this overall understanding.

For all the education the Red Pill represents for men, the larger blue pill whole simply don’t want to accept the ugly reality of women’s sexual strategy even when women openly confirm this for them – or when they do it’s too late for anything but pensive self-reproach and then signing the alimony/child support check anyway.

As this understanding becomes more widespread some social change will have to follow. Men will either become so pathetic as to ‘normalize’ it for themselves, and personally identify with what amounts to their open (proactive or reactive) cuckolding under women’s grossly overt championing of their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy – or Men will come to the realization (hopefully sooner than later) that the fantasy of monogamous bliss based on a notion of intergender compromise and the ‘give & take’ (but mostly give) they were sold on was never in the best interests of feminine-primacy.

The Feminine Imperative was (and is) only ever concerned with men’s imperatives or male-specific priorities insofar as they align with the superseding, primary imperatives of women. Thus, as open hypergamy becomes more common and the truth of this duplicity and imbalance (really disinterest) of mutual sexual imperatives becomes more evident, men will again (as with Game) evolve methods and mentalities to consolidate on their own imperatives or simply live in denial of it all.

The Long Game

For almost 6 months I’ve had this post from Cail Corishev bookmarked. It’s an excellent driver for exactly this point: prior to the digital age men tended not to play a long game when it came to socio-sexual strategies. The short game is all that matters in the moment, and all that stimulates, but until the advent of digital forums where men could figuratively compare notes, most men were simply unable, and perhaps too distracted to ask the obvious questions about women’s hypergamy and how it plays out over the course of 10-30 years and the roles women expect men to play during those stages of their lives in order to accommodate their strategy.

In Cail’s piece he describes a woman he knew at age 30 and how attractive she was, and his consideration of starting a relationship with her. After a failing interest and 10 years of no contact, she reinitiated with Cail:

But while we were chatting, I saw some of her recent pictures, and whoa!  She’s gone from a 7-8 to maybe a 5, and that would be adjusted for age.  She hasn’t gotten fat, but that’s about the only positive note.  She looks so rough that I found myself wondering what I was thinking ten years ago, but I looked back at some old pictures, and she really was pretty at 30 — not a model or anything, but enough to turn heads.  Now she looks like she’s lived 20 hard years in 10.  She works nights at a pretty demanding job and has had some serious health problems, so I guess it’s no surprise, but it was really striking: ten years ago I ached for this girl, and now I wouldn’t look twice at her if I passed her in the grocery store.

That got me thinking about Rollo’s chart.  My own SMV, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much from mid-30s to mid-40s, just as his chart would predict.  I’m about the same weight, same build, maybe a little less hair, but I’d lost quite a bit of it already back then.  I’m not much better-off financially, but at least not worse, and I have more of a sense of direction in my life.  I’m certainly more confident, especially with women, and more established in my communities.  So some pluses and some minuses, holding steady at about the same level.  The amount of interest I get from women seems to support that.

She, on the other hand, going from 30 to 40, has gone from fertile to not likely.  She’s also a grandmother now, so instead of looking to start a new family, she’s focused (and rightly so) on helping her kids with theirs.  (If single moms don’t have much spare attention to give a husband, imagine the single mom of a single mom.)  An additional ten years of dating and relationships under her belt certainly doesn’t add to her appeal.  On top of those reasons, add the drastic decline in her looks, and now I not only don’t want to marry her, but as we chat I’m mostly thinking, “How soon can I politely say goodnight so I can get to sleep already?”  Harsh, but true.  Just as Rollo’s chart predicts, her SMV has been on a steady decline since we met — maybe more of a free-fall in her case — and now mine is well above hers.

I had a similar post to this I published back in December of 2011 – Protracted SMV:

It’s a simple matter to tell a guy he’s dodged a bullet in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s altogether different to provably show him how he’s dodging it. For all the evils of facebook at least it gives him [men] an ability to see the forest for the trees, but the feminine can’t even afford him that. You must stay dumb, you must stay plugged-in for the feminine to maintain primacy. For all the benefits of a globally connected world, the feminine imperative expects you to accept a feminine-centric normalization of it.

What the Feminine Imperative fears is men becoming what Roissy terms Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma. Due to a lifetime of feminine conditioning, men tend to underestimate the leverage their SMV has in the context of women’s biological imperatives.

Pity for Reneé

I have a similar story to Cail’s. When I was a senior in high school I had a ‘friend‘ named Reneé, she was a gorgeous auburn-red head with a fantastic 17-18 year old body. We were good ‘friends‘ in the sense that it was clear I wasn’t ever going to see her naked and she had all of the personality trappings of a girl who knew she was attractive (she did modeling after high school), but also had the beginnings of a very self-important ego-invested feminist mind set.

I never really stayed in touch with her after graduation since by then I had moved on to women who enthusiastically reciprocated my interests and I moved along in life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got on FaceBook and began having old friends look me up – Reneé was among the first. Very similar to the woman in Cail’s story we started to catch up with what the other had been doing through their 20s, 30s and now 40s.

As it turned out she was still fairly attractive for having had one daughter and never marrying the father, or any other guy for that matter. Most of the predictable single mommy issues and false-empowerment memes were bandied about by her, but the short version is here she was at 41 and her daughter was a year away from leaving for college. She was between jobs, but the one she had and the one she hoped to get were mediocre low to mid-management type, subsistence level employment.

She was and still is single 5 years later. The predictable questions about what my wife was like and how long we’ve been married came up, how we met, and where I’ve travelled in my work, etc. and I can honestly say I felt bad for her just recalling all of the life I’ve lived in the interim and basically forgot about her since high school.

She’s 46 now, and loves FaceBook as much as any aging spinster, but I really don’t want to call her that. In between the many pictures of her 4 cats (no lie) she occasionally posts some lament about how lonely she is now that her daughter has gone away to school and she comes home to an empty apartment these days. She makes not-so-subtle pleas to her FB community friends to set her up with ‘a great guy’ and all the dutiful Betas come out of the woodwork to tell her how pretty she (still) is and to keep her chin up and the right guy will “come along” – not so unlike the advice she gave me and at least half a dozen other guys I knew back in the day.

Reneé still clings to all of the feminist memes and mantras (reposts all the most popular), and complains of not being able to find a “great guy” anymore. This is of course infantile men’s faults for not manning up to her fem-correct standards, or else it’s a complaint about the ‘creepy’ men who really just want to bang her when she out with friends.

Unhappy Feminists

I hadn’t really ever considered using Reneé as a blog post subject until I read this article in Psychology Today:

According to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning the cash would increase if you skipped any 40-something, single female professionals and focused on the middle-aged male managers with one child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered “profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers.” And here it is:

  • Male
  • 39 years old
  • Married
  • Household income between $150,000 and $200,000
  • In a senior management position
  • 1 young child at home
  • A wife who works part-time

And the unhappiest profile?:

  • Female
  • 42 years old
  • Unmarried (and no children)
  • Household income under $100,000
  • In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)

Minus the professional status, essentially Reneé fits the profile for the most unhappy person in the western world today. Now, return back to Robin Korth’s comment, her life is the result of what she thinks of herself. What does this say about the decision making both she and Reneé have made in their lives?

I can’t say I have any sympathy for the likes of Korth, but for Reneé I do feel a pang of pity (in spite of Roissy’s advice for women of this age). For all of the accusations of red pill “misogyny” I genuinely do like women, and I’m not rooting for them to smash into the Wall. However I can see why my observations make this seem so – hard truths are often warnings that we don’t like to heed.

I often wonder if women of this profile aren’t as much victims of an ideological conditioning as Betatized men are over the course of their lives. Much of what’s resulted in Reneé’s life are the consequences of having (and still subscribing to) a mindset that’s based on equalist individualism, and she’s now beginning to reap what she’s sown – knowingly or not.

I don’t know the father of her daughter, but my red pill instincts (and knowing how hot she used to be) tell me the guy was likely a pump and dump Alpha bad boy. Reneé never struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never consider a Beta for a relationship.

Observations

So my observation is this; while granting that women’s decisions are their own, and they should in all ways be accountable for the consequences that follow from them, how much of those decisions are based on a conditioning that promotes an idealized ideology of feminine, equalist independence?

For the same reason I can’t entirely fault a man with an internalized blue pill mindset over his conditioning, shouldn’t we also consider that women are likewise mislead by a similar influence? Are we (again) giving women too much credit for being rational independent agents under different circumstance?

For men’s part, it’s hardly avoidable that we become Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma by default for women in this cohort. Perhaps not as Alpha as we’re perceived, but as our SMV ascends in our 30s and (sometimes) through our 40s, it’s almost unavoidable that, even with a baseline of ambition, we’re seen as more desirable long term prospects.

In all honesty, were I to find myself single tomorrow, Reneé or women like her would never make my ‘to date’ list. Women love to complain that mature men really aren’t, and all they want is a young girl to fuck and coo for them. I would argue that men in my demo (at least should) have the depth of experience to know what the Feminine Imperative (and its social arm feminism) has bred and conditioned into women, and we honestly don’t want the hassle of dealing with it.

There is precious little reward for a man, and no appreciation, for having a big enough heart to save a woman from the consequences of her past decisions. That’s not meant as a callous punishment, just simple pragmatism.

As I stated in The Threat,

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

When you’ve spent your whole life attempting to ‘have it all’ on your own, perhaps men can’t help but be an agent of Karma when that ‘all’ includes a man’s participation.

The Myth of the ‘Good’ Guy

Janus

For as often as I’ve made my best attempts to define what I believe constitutes feminine Hypergamy on this blog, it seems that critics of the red pill, and even newer, well-meaning  red pill advocates, are beginning to think of Hypergamy as some convenient trope that manosphereans refer to when they want to explain away some annoyingly female trait.

Is she shit testing you? Must be Hypergamy. She broke a nail? Must be Hypergamy.

There is a very real want for understanding things in as simplistic a solution as possible, but feminine Hypergamy isn’t a dynamic that lends itself to a simple definitions. One of the reasons the early proponents of PUA ran into issues with legitimizing their ideas was due to so many of their ‘students’ seeking out easily digestible answers to solve their ‘girl problems’. As I laid out in Dream Girls and Children with Dynamite, these guys wanted the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) footnote version of what to do in order to get to the silver bullet, magic formula part of the lesson to either get with their dream girl or “start fucking hot bitches”.

It is exactly this mentality that’s now causing such frustration in understanding Hypergamy and seeing how it works, not just in individual women’s personal decisions, but as a societally influencing force of the Feminine Imperative. Hypergamy is not a “math is hard” dynamic, but because it requires a comprehensive (and evolving) understanding it seems like the go-to throwaway answer to women’s behaviors and mental schemas to men (usually new to the red pill) without the patience to really invest themselves into grasping it.

I’ve defined Hypergamy so often on this blog that if you search the term “hypergamy” in Google, the Rational Male blog is the number two return below the wikipedia definition. As I write my way through the second volume of the Rational Male book I’ve found that a concise understanding of feminine Hypergamy is vital to grasping so much of the social and psychological dynamics that are a result of it. Every PUA technique, every common frustration MGTOW experience, and every gender-biased social injustice MRAs set themselves against, all find their roots in feminine Hypergamy, women’s pluralistic sexual strategy and the social and legal manifestation employed to ensure maximal feminine social primacy in optimizing Hypergamy.

Looks vs Character (Game)

Over the course of the past five or so posts, the topic of discussion in the comment threads has eventually found its way back to the basics of Looks versus Character (or Game, depending on your perspective of how learning affects character). Only discussions over what constitutes ‘Alpha’ in a man are so contentious as the importance women prioritize physical arousal in men.

I’ve already covered this debate and what I believe influences women’s arousal priorities in the Looks Count and Have A Look posts. My intent with today’s post isn’t to reheat these old debates, but rather to investigate a bit further into the connection between Hypergamy and this arousal prioritization.

First and foremost it’s important to understand the part that women’s biologies play in influencing Hypergamy and how women’s biology is more or less the point of origin for how they conduct their sexual strategy. To review, I’ll ask that readers refer to my post Your Friend Menstruation, but the basis of women’s sexual pluralism is found in the natural attraction predispositions that women experience as a result of (healthy) ovulation.

In her up cycle (proliferative) phase of ovulation, women are psychologically and behaviorally motivated to prioritize physical arousal above all other breeding considerations. In her down cycle (post-ovulation, luteal phase) women are similarly motivated to prioritize comfort, rapport, and long term security to ensure parental investment and benefit survival.

What I’ve described here, in as brief a fashion, is the foundation of Ovulatory Shift. There exists over a decade’s worth of experimental psychological and biological evidence supporting this theory. Due to biological and psychological influence, women become subliminally predisposed to behaviors which maximize fertility odds with the best available breeding opportunity, and maximize the best potential for long term provisioning and parental investment.

Whether this behavior is manifested in a preference for more masculinized male faces and body type, greater ornamentation and lower vocal intonation for women during ovulation, or a predisposition for more comforting, nurturing and supportive male characteristics during her luteal phase, the end result is optimizing Hypergamy, and ultimately reproduction.

For further reading on Ovulatory Shift, see the research of Martie Hasselton.

Arousal vs. Attraction

From last week’s post, in one of his less long-winded comments, commenter Siirtyrion inserted this bit of evolutionary truth:

Females only receive two quantities of evolutionary value from males – direct benefits (observed in long-term mating, with implications for the survival of offspring), and genetic benefits (observed through indications of physical attractiveness in her mate). And since females can receive genetic benefits outside of marriage (i.e. through casual sexual encounters), and no longer need rely upon mates for the survival of their offspring, there is no pressure for them to compromise on holding out for an unlikely (long-term) fantasy partner.

This current social pattern increases highly male variance in mating success, because female sexual choices always tend towards small male breeding populations (narrow range of male phenotypes), while male ‘preferences’ are inclusive of a broad range in female variance.

I believe one of the main contentions Siirtyrion kind of needles with this is that, as described, modern conveniences of female social empowerment (actual or imagined) discounts the need for hypergamic assurances of long term security. I’m not so willing to accept an overall disregard for the provisioning aspect (Beta Bucks) – you’re not going to reprogram millennia of psychologically evolved firmware overnight – but in discounting this need, the characteristics for which women would seek out a male exemplifying the best long-term security are deemphasized if not considered entirely.

If you read through any woman’s online dating profile you undoubtedly come across some variation of what Roissy has described as the “483 bullet point checklist” of stated prerequisites a man must possess in order for her to consider him a viable candidate for her intimacy. While I don’t think there are quite that many items on the checklist, you’ll find a host of common-theme personal qualities a guy has to have in order to be her boyfriend – confident (above all), humorous, kind, intelligent, creative, decisive, sensitive, respectful, spiritual, patient,..I could go on or you could just read this old joke.

The point is that all of these characteristics that women list as being ‘attractive’ have absolutely no bearing on how sexually, physically, ‘arousing’ a woman finds a man. As I’ve described in the past, while Game and personality can certainly accentuate arousal, all of these esoteric personal qualities have no intrinsic  “‘gina tingle” value if a man isn’t an arousal prospect to begin with.

The confusion that most Beta men make is presuming that what women list as being necessarily ‘attractive’ IS what makes him ‘arousing’. So when he models himself (often over the course of a lifetime) to personally identify with this checklist of attractive prerequisites he’s often frustrated and angered when all of that personal development makes for little difference when a woman opts to regularly fuck men of a better physical standard.

It’s duplicity of a sort, but it is also a strategy of deliberate confusion.

It may not be a woman’s conscious plan, but this deliberate confusion makes the best pragmatic sense to effect an optimized Hypergamy. Remember that Hypergamy is not just Alpha Fucks, it’s also Beta Bucks … if a bit delayed in her life in order to maximize Alpha Fucks. So when a woman describes what she finds “attractive” in a man this list will include all of the above bullet point characteristics because they “sound right” – because they shine her in the best light, yes, but also because in being so concerned she imputes the idea that she’s following the ‘right’ plan of looking for a good man to have a future with, and raise kids with.

Then and Now

This is going to sound like I’m glossing myself, but bear with me – I can remember how effortless sex used to be for me when I was in my 20’s. I had sex outdoors, in cars, hotel rooms, in hot tubs, in the steam room of an all women’s gym (after hours), I even got after it with a girlfriend in the balcony of a church in L.A. once (again after hours, no one around, only for convenience I assure you). Mostly I didn’t have a dime to my name, but I still had one of two fuck-buddies who would literally come to the bedroom window of my apartment to fuck me in the morning once or twice a week before I went off to the community college I was going to.

The point is there was no pretense of ‘attraction’ being anything other than a girl and I enjoying ourselves then. There was no ‘checklist’ of acceptable pre-qualifications for intimacy. The providership necessity that dictates a need for long-term consideration wasn’t even an afterthought; in other words, the Beta Bucks / Character / Integrity aspect of Hypergamy that women publicly claim is a dealbreaker for real intimacy was prioritized far below Alpha Fucks sexual urgency.

You can say these were just the types of girls I was getting with at the time, but courtesy of social media, I assure you, you would think these women would never have had that capacity now. They were all “sooo different when they were in college.”

It’s not until after a woman’s Epiphany Phase at around the time she becomes aware of her SMV decline that she begins to consider making that Beta Bucks checklist any kind of prerequisite for sex and intimate partnering. However, this epiphany isn’t the sudden revelation women would like men to believe it is.

For the life of me I can’t remember where I read the link, but I was reading a ‘Dear Abby’ sort of advice seeking article from a young girl (early 20’s) who was exasperated over finding the “perfect guy” only she couldn’t ‘get with him now‘. Her words were something like “He’s so great, awesome personality, funny, in love with me, supportive, etc., but I wish I could freeze him in time so he’d be the same guy and waiting for me when I turn 29 or 30.”

On some level of consciousness, like most women, she knows the dictates of what her own Hypergamy is predisposing her to. She knows she’ll eventually need that ‘perfect’ supportive, in-love guy to live out the long-term aspect of her Hypergamy with,…after she’s exhausted her short term breeding potential with men who better embody the Alpha Fucks dictates of her Hypergamy.

Arousal Preparation vs. Provisioning Preparation

For all of Siirtyrion’s vernacular, I will have to agree (to a point) that the balance between women’s short term breeding impulse and the long term provisioning needs Hypergamy predisposes them to now strongly favors the Alpha sex side of that optimization.

In Open Hypergamy I made a case for the aspect of an ‘old order’ of Beta Provisioning being a previously ‘attractive’ element for women’s determining long term suitability with a man, and that this old order was being replaced with other, extrinsic means of ensuring a woman’s security needs. Whether by social funding, or by indenturing men to provide for women’s wellbeing through other social conventions the effect is an imbalance between the dual nature of women’s sexual strategy.

However, I also feel it goes beyond just the social element now. Men are still confused by a feminine conditioning which wants to ‘freeze’ him in time in order to be the dutiful ‘perfect’ guy, ready to be thawed out and ready to serve the Feminine Imperative at a woman’s convenience.

While still convenient, men must be conditioned to confuse him that ‘attraction’ qualities are ‘arousal’ qualities in order to have him ready to be ‘perfect’ at his appointed time – and it is women who need to believe for themselves that this is what they think should be true.

The Myth of the ‘Good’ Guy

In the beginning of one of my earliest posts, Schedules of Mating, I briefly refer to the ideally balanced guy who would satisfy the optimization purpose of women’s Hypergamy:

There are methods and social contrivances women have used for centuries to ensure that the best male’s genes are selected and secured with the best male provisioning she’s capable of attracting. Ideally the best Man should exemplify both, but rarely do the two exist in the same male (particularly these days) so in the interest of achieving her biological imperative, and prompted by an innate need for security, the feminine as a whole had to develop social conventions and methodologies (which change as her environment and personal conditions do) to effect this.

There is a dichotomy that exists for men in this respect, which really has no parallel for women.

I am aware of certain (formerly red pill) bloggers who promote the archetype of a ‘Good’ guy as some role for men to ideally aspire to. The ‘Alpha Cad’ archetype must necessarily become the ‘douchebag’ caricature of an overtly distasteful masculinity (for men less able to embody it) and yet, the opposite caricature of the doormat, supplicating ‘Beta Dad’ is equally distasteful and certainly untenable when we consider that ‘attractive’ qualities are never ‘arousing’ qualities.

So the archetype of the ‘Good’ guy is offered up as some sort of livable, compromised ideal. If men could aspire to embody the best of the Alpha and temper that with what they define themselves as the best of the Beta, well then he’d be the ‘perfect’ catch for any woman of course.

The problem with this ‘Good Guy’ myth is not because men can’t or wouldn’t want to try to balance women’s Hypergamy for them, but simply because women neither want nor expect that balance in the same man to begin with.

It comes back to the Just Get It principle for women – any guy who needs to make a concerned effort to become what he expects women will want from him to be ‘the perfect guy’ doesn’t get it. They want Mr. Perfect because that is who he already is.

I mentioned above that there really is no parallel for this in women and I’m sure the Madonna / Whore dichotomy will be mentioned in the comments later, but allow me to point out that there is no concerted parallel social effort on the part of women in which women prompt each other to become a ‘Good Girl’ in order to satisfy the ideals of men. If anything a hostile opposite resistance to this is most true.

Women neither expect nor want a ‘Good Guy’ because he’s not believable, and his genuineness is always doubtable. That may sound jaded, but throw away any idea of being a ‘Good Guy’ balance of Alpha and Beta, because the Beta side of ‘good’ is so reinforced and common in men that it’s become the default template for women’s perception of you.

There is no Alpha with a side of Beta, there is only the man who’s genuine concern is first for himself, the man who prepares and provisions for himself, the man who maintains Frame to the point of arrogance because that’s who he is and what he genuinely merits. There is only the Man who improves his circumstance for his own benefit, and then, by association and merit, the benefit of those whom he loves and befriends.

That’s the Man who Just Gets It.

Equalism and Masculinity

masculinity

What a lot of feminists hate about red pill theory is that it simply does a better job of predicting social behavior than feminism ever has. I’d like to think that red pill awareness has fundamentally altered (or enlightened if you’d like) intergender interpretations and understanding in a relatively short time, but that would be a mistake.

There’s a distinct group of self-evincing red pill guys who like to remind us in various comment threads that it hasn’t always been thus. Their story is our forbearers “knew better” with regard to how men and women ought to interact with one another, and essentially spelled this out for future generations in the religious and philosophical texts of antiquity.

While I can’t deny the merit of this, I also know that the men of those bygone eras didn’t have anything approaching the mass of information and the connectivity men possess today. It’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of the idea that back in some Golden Age of manhood, men knew about the dangers of allowing women’s hypergamous natures to run amok. I’m sure those men knew of the consequences of allowing women to control their fates. I’m sure there were Beta men and cuckolded men as well, but even the most wise Alpha among them could never, for instance, understand the impact that a unilaterally feminine-controlled form of birth control would effect upon a globalized society.

The sages of manhood-past may still have many relevant lessons for the men of today, but they simply lack the compounded experiences and understanding men possess now. Though they undoubtedly were keen observers of human behavior, the greatest thinkers of antiquity simply didn’t have an inkling as to the evolved, biological motivators of the sexual strategies our psyches developed in our hunter-gatherer human past.

What frustrates the advocates of this bygone manhood wisdom is that for all of our collective experience and knowledge, for the past sixty or so years, men struggle to come to terms with what that masculinity should mean to them. For all of the accumulated male experience and relation of it that’s led to red pill awareness, men still grapple with ‘what being a man means to them’.

Undoing of a Man

When I do consults with men of all ages I have to begin from a presumption that what these men’s concept of masculinity is usually is the result of a deliberate attempt by the Feminine Imperative to confuse men about what being a man should be for him.

Even the men who tell me they were raised by the most dominant, positively masculine fathers still suffer the internalized effects from this feminized effort to cast doubt on men’s masculinity.

Recently NPR began a series of articles attempting to suss out what it means to be a man in the 21st century. I do listen to NPR, and while I know bias will always be an inevitable part of news stories, I couldn’t help but assess what a morass attempting to define masculinity has become for contemporary men. Each story, each attempt to redefine masculinity, relied on the same tired tropes the Feminine Imperative has been using for men since the start of the sexual revolution.

Weakness, vulnerability, is sold as strength. Submissiveness and compromise to the feminine is sold as “support” and deserving of praise and a reciprocal appreciation (which never manifests in women). Beta is Alpha and Alpha is insecurity, bluster and compensation.

Those are the main premises, and, to a large degree, most red pill aware men realize that behavior is the only true determinant of motivation, and reject the feminized, egalitarian equalist messaging. However, what still surprises me is that this same, deliberate effort to cast doubt on what masculinity should be for a man hasn’t changed its message or methods of conditioning men to accept this masculine confusion for almost 40 years now.

Through the late 80’s and up to now, the idea of anything positively masculine is either ridiculed, cast as misogynistic, or implies a man might be gay if he’s too celebratory of his maleness. Since the start of the sexual revolution, any definition of what masculinity truly should mean has been subject to the approval of the Feminine Imperative.

In the absence of a clear definition of what masculinity is for men, the Feminine Imperative is free to create as grotesque a straw man of ugly masculinity, or as beatific a feminized model of masculinity as it needs to serve its purpose. With the aid of the Male Catch 22, blurring and distorting masculinity, raising and conditioning men to accept ambiguity and doubt about the security of a ‘manhood’ they’re encouraged not to define for themselves, are all the methodologies employed to ensure a feminine-primary social order.

Equalism vs. Complementarity

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests.

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

The mistake is applying a humanistic, egalitarian equalist ideal to human sexual strategies that evolved over millennia to be complementary to each other, not an equitable exchange of resources to be negotiated over. This is one reason genuine desire cannot be negotiated – this fundamental is rooted in our most primal, complemetary understanding of sex.

The point at which egalitarian equalism (the religion of feminism) fundamentally fails is presuming that intergender relations should ideally exist in a goal-state of egalitarian equalism and / or a reciprocally equal state of mutually supportive interests.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about equalism and reciprocity.

The sexes evolved to be complementary to each other for the betterment of the species. Why do you think women form the most secure emotional attachments to men 1-2 SMV steps above themselves? Why is masculine dominance such an attractive male aspect for even the most feminist of women who’d otherwise plead for equality among the sexes?

I have a bit of a weird relationship with “traditional masculinity”. I’ve looked critically at it enough to know how much damage it does as a paradigm. I’ve seen the harm it can do to both men and women on an individual level. I’ve been subject to the violence it encourages. But despite all that, holy shit does it ever turn me on.

[…]

There’s just something about assertiveness (let’s be real, sometimes flat out arrogance) that does it for me. No matter how much I can be attracted to someone emotionally and intellectually, my swoons only happen when confronted by a powerful, competent man.

This has lead to some issues in my personal life. Who knew being attracted almost exclusively to men that inherently make bad partners wouldn’t work out well for me?

What we’re observing here is a rudimentary conflict between an internalized humanist idealism (the way equalism teaches thing’s should be) versus evolved, impulsive realism (the way things are).

The doctrine of equalism presumes a socialized expectation of being turned-on or attracted to men exemplifying a ‘gender equitable’, equalist-correct, mindset and the evolved, visceral arousal / attraction to a man exhibiting the dominant characteristic traits of masculine complementarity.

Another example of this conflict can be found in my essay on Choreplay.

In 2008 the transactional nature of sex-for-equitable-services was an over blown meme. The message then was that men needed to do more feminine-typical chores around the house, and the equitable exchange would be his wife reciprocating with more frequent and more intense sex as a result of his “equitable” participation in that negotiation.

Fast forward to 2013 and now (by the same author mind you):

Hey, fellas, put down those vacuum cleaners and pull out the lawn mowers.

Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and sex.

“Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher sexual frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor,”…

So what you see illustrated here, in just the space of 5 years, is the frustration and conflict between an equalist idealized model vs. the evolved complementary model of gender relations. It’s not about the equitability of like for like exchanges or like for like reward/benefit, but rather the way that equitability is expressed and how it grates against instinctually human expectations of behavior.

Sex differences, biologically and psychologically, didn’t evolve for hundreds of thousands of years to be co-equal partnerships based on humanistic (or moralistic) idealism. They evolved into a complementary form of support where the aspects of one sex’s strengths compensated for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

For every behavioral manifestation of one sex’s sexual strategy (hypergamy in females), the other sex evolves psychological, sociological and behavioral contingencies to counter it (mate guarding in males). The ideal state of gender parity isn’t a negotiation of acceptable terms for some Pollyanna ideal of gender equilibrium, it’s a state of complementarity between the sexes that accepts our evolved differences – and by each individual gender’s conditions, sometimes that’s going to mean accepting unequal circumstances.

Feminists (and anti-feminist women), humanists, moral absolutists, and even red pill men still obliviously clinging to the vestiges of their egalitarian blue pill conditioning, will all end up having their ideologies challenged, frustrated and confounded by the root presumption that egalitarian equalism can ever, or should ever, trump an innate and evolved operative state of gender complementarity.

And thus we come full circle, back to a new model of masculinity that is found upon the evolved complementary order and aided by red pill awareness. I have no doubt that it will be an arduous process of acceptance for blue pill, masculine-confused men vainly attempting to define their own masculinity under the deliberately ambiguous contexts laid out for them by the Feminine Imperative, but I do (hopefully) believe that red pill awareness is already making a positive impact on countering a presumption of equalism that only truly serves feminine primacy.

It’ll take time, but with every aware man utilizing red pill awareness to realign his masculine identity and benefit from it, other men will begin to come to the same awareness or else fall off into their own ambiguity.