evolutionary psychology

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.

Game and Circumstance

circumstance

“Don’t be mad E. It’s not our fault you were born without the sport fucking gene, come on.”

 

At the start of July, 2011 (a month before I began this blog in earnest) I took a backpacking trip through the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. This was due to my desire to unplug, go off the grid and get back into the real face-to-face world. It was only for 10 days but well worth burning 10 days of PTO for.

It was an educational experience meeting people, most of whom have very little online presence beyond using Twitter or FaceBook occasionally. I didn’t have cell service for most of the hike. The people I met along the way, and I’ll put this politely, were “salt of the earth” people. Some were other hikers, others were people who lived and worked in the few surrounding communities. It was good to reaffirm my ability to survive on my own and realize that there is a whole world of Men out there who live well, far beyond the influence of “men” who’ve never mowed their own lawns, much less lived by their own wit in the country. Guys who build muscle by working outdoors, not in a gym. I met beautiful women who worked in small diners you’ll never hear of. I fished rivers and streams, for dinner some nights, and I saw fireflies for the first time (I grew up in southern California, it’s a novelty).

At some point I think Men need to get back to their primal natures, they need to embrace it fearlessly and without shame. We’re far too insulated by the Buffers of technology. Even the more belligerent rednecks I encountered still preferred to text their girlfriends and came off as pussified for doing so.

I guess what I’ve come to realize is that we tend to view what we ‘know’ about men and women from the experiences we have reported to us from all over the world on blogs, forums, the manosphere  – and I still endorse the purpose of it’s unwritten mission – however, this trip reaffirmed for me that there is no substitute for real interaction. Game will work equally well with the cute blonde serving coffee in a rural diner as it would with the club girl in NYC. Both are equally given to the same feminine fundamentals we’ve untangled about women in the ‘sphere for over a decade, but the one we tend to use as a female archetype is the typical club girl for our examples. Daisy Duke is still subject to hypergamy, she just applies it differently.

I’m not turning into Roosh, but I’m considering burning a couple months doing the entire Appalachian trail all the way to Maine.

In my day to day life I deal with a lot of rich men. Every patron or boss, every general manager I’ve dealt with for the past 15 years has been a millionaire. The primary owner of one of my liquor brand is that many times over. None of the “business friends” I shoot golf with have weeded their own lawns or installed a radiator in 20+ years. When I was on the trail I thought about how ridiculous it would be to see a guy like that or some PUA guru having to dig his own toilet and take a dump in the woods, or hoist his pack in a tree so the damn bears don’t eat the only food he’s got for the next 3 days. These guys are insulated.

I want to run, and fight, and fuck, as well as I deal with the ‘civilized’ things I do. Imagine a guy like Mystery wringing out the sweat and filth of his clothes in a stream somewhere. Now, that’s some funny shit.

Game and Circumstance

I start off with this today because this experience wasn’t just humbling, but it also taught me that what I experience day to day isn’t at all what a majority of men experience. My past, my N count, my 18 year marriage, and what I do professionally sets me apart in a way that I sometimes don’t appreciate or take into consideration when I’m advising men.

It’s also very humbling and affirming when I receive emails or comments from men living in countries I’ve only seen in pictures who nevertheless share a common male experience that reinforces many of the things I write about – but even within that commonality, I have to remember, my circumstance is not theirs.

I walk through a casino almost every day now and I see the same people. Not the fun glamour you see in commercials or ads about Las Vegas (that’s usually night promos), but the real people, the overweight, housekeeping and table crew, the geriatric spending their savings and social security on a hope they’ll win something significant, the desperate and the people just looking for distraction.

I walk by some of these men and think “how is Game going to help a guy like that?” While I do believe that Game is universally beneficial on many levels (primarily between the sexes, but not exclusively) there’s a point where that improvement is going to be limited by a guy’s circumstance, where he is in life and what he’s made of it so far. It’s a manosphere cliché now, but most men aren’t ready for the red pill. The red pill awareness is simply too much for them to accept within the context of their circumstances.

That circumstance isn’t based on age or a particular demographic, but Game is only going to be as liberating for a man in as far as he’s willing to accept it in terms of his own circumstance.

Not Just Sex

Game gets a lot of misconstrued criticism in that ignorant critics presume Game only ever equals PUA and that “those guys are only interested in fucking as many low self-esteem sluts as humanly possible.” It’s much more difficult for them to confront that Game is far more than this, and applicable within relationships, in the workplace (with women and men) and even in their family dealings.

That’s kind of a scary prospect for men comfortable in living within their own contexts and circumstance. Sport fucking isn’t what most men think it is because they’ve never experienced anything beyond serial monogamy, nor is it what most (80%+ Beta) men even have the capacity to actualize for themselves. But, as Game has evolved, it isn’t just about Spinning Plates, or sport fucking, it’s more encompassing than this.

Game is, or should be, for the everyman.

“He only wants me for sex” or “I need to be sure he’s interested in me and not just sex” are the admonishments of women who really have no introspective interest in how a majority of men really approach becoming intimate with women. Oh it makes for a good rationale when women finally “want to get things right” with a provider, but even the excuse belies a lack of how most men organize their lives to accommodate women’s schedules of mating.

Mostly to their detriment, the vast majority of men follow a deductive,but anti-seductive, Beta Game plan of comfort, identification, familiarity and patience with women in the hopes that what they hear women tell them is the way to their intimacy will eventually pan out for them. Their Beta Game plan is in fact to prove they “aren’t just in it for the sex” in order to get to a point of having sex with a particular woman.

I always find it ironic when men tell me that their deductive plan for getting after it with a woman is to prove he’s not actually trying to get after it with her. However, this is what most men’s Game amounts to; deductively attempting to move into a long term monogamy based on what women, saturated in a presumption of gender equalism, tell him he ought to expect from himself in order to align himself with her intimate interest.

I could use the term “appeasement”, but that’s not what most men want to call it. Most men call it being a better man (for her), better than “other guys” who wont align themselves accordingly. It becomes their point of pride in fact.

Male Long Term Security

Most men, average men – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – want a form of security.

Most men are designed, perhaps bred, to be necessitous. To be sure , men need to be constant performers, constant qualifiers, in order to mitigate hypergamy. In the past, and to an extent now, this performance simply became a part of who he was as a man and didn’t require a constant effort, but increasingly, as male feminization has spread, men have been made to be necessitous of security.

I would say that desire for long term security differs significantly from women’s Beta Bucks side of hypergamy need since the drive to secure provisioning is an innate part of women’s firmware. The security average men need is rooted in a need for certainty in his ability to meet with a woman’s performance standards – and ultimately avoid feminine rejection.

In today’s feminine-centric social order, men are ceaselessly bombarded with masculine ridicule, ceaselessly reminded of their inadequacies, and endlessly conditioned to question and doubt any notion of how masculinity should be defined – in fact ridicule is the first response for any man attempting to objectively define it.

It’s this doubt, this constant consideration of his own adequacy to meet the shifting nature of women’s hypergamic drive, from which stems this need for security. The average man needs the certainty of knowing that he meets and exceeds a woman’s prerequisites in a social circumstance that constantly tells him he never will – and his just asking himself the question if he ever will makes him that much less of a man.

The average man will look for, or create his own rationales to salve this necessitousness. He’ll create his own ego in the image of what he thinks he embodies best as being “Alpha” or he’ll adopt the easy doctrines of equalism which tell him women and men are fundamentally the same rational actors and convince himself he’s not subject to the capricious whims of feminine hypergamy because men and women are more ‘evolved’ than that– but that nagging doubt will manifest when the right circumstances and right opportunities present themselves.

Changing Your Programming

I mention in the book that I am not a motivational speaker, I’m not anyone’s savior and I would rather men be the self-sustaining solutions to becoming the men they want and need to be – not Rollo Tomassi’s success stories, but their own success stories.

That said, let me add that I would not be writing what I do if I thought that biological determinism, circumstance and social conditioning were insurmountable factors in any Man’s life. Men can accomplish great things through acts of will, they can be masters of their circumstances and most importantly masters of themselves.

With a healthy understanding, respect and awareness of what influences his own condition, a Man can overcome and thrive within the context of them – but he must first be aware of, and accepting of, the conditions under which he operates and maneuvers.

You may not be able to control the actions of others, you may not be able to account for women’s hypergamy, but you can be prepared for them, you can protect yourself from the consequences of them and you can be ready to make educated decisions of your own based upon that knowledge.

You can unplug.

You can change your programming, and you can live a better life no matter your demographic, age, past regrets or present circumstances.

Nursing Power

matriarchy_rome

Needless to say, last week’s post sparked some interesting, not to mention predictable, conversations and response. After sifting through all of the ego-invested brinksmanship by the token feminist reader of RM, the takeaway was actually a better understanding of the latent purpose of feminism.Perhaps not the understanding she intended, but certainly a confirmation of premise.

A handful of my male readers often ask why I don’t moderate comments, or that the message of Rational Male would be better served if I banned certain commenters. I’ve mentioned on several posts and threads as to why I won’t ever do that (except for blatant spamming), but in a nutshell it’s my fundamental belief that the validity of any premise or idea should be able to withstand public debate. People who aren’t confident of the strength of their assertions or ideas, or are more concerned with profiting from the branding of those weak assertions than they are in truth, are the first to cry about the harshness of their critics and kill all dissent as well as all discourse about those assertions.

That’s the primary reason I’ve never moderated; if people think I’m full of shit I’m all ears – I’m not so arrogant as to think I’ve thought of every angle about any idea I express here or on any other forum. However, the second reason I don’t censor, ban users or delete comments is that I believe it’s useful to have critics (usually women or fem-men) provide the gallery with examples of exactly the mentality or dynamic I’m describing in an essay. With a fair amount of predictability, a blue pill male or an upset woman will just as often prove my point for me and serve as a model for what I’ve described.

I never intentionally try to make rubes out of the critics I know will chime in about something, but I will sometimes leave out certain considerations I may have already thought about something, knowing it will get picked up on by a critic. I do this on occasion because the I know that the “ah hah! I got him, he forgot about X,Y, Z” moment serves as a better teaching tool and confirms for me that a critic does in fact comprehend what I’m going on about.

Take the Power Back

So it was throughout last week’s commentary about the branding of the Strong Independent Woman® social template offered and reinforced by the feminist mindset, and endorsed wholesale by pop-culture and popular media. Considering the new outside awareness the manosphere is receiving courtesy of Return of Kings these days, I expect we’ll see more of the point-and-sputter, dismissive ignorance of offended egos, or we’ll see more cathartic overwritten mission statements repeated by feminists confronted with logical arguments that contradict their comfortably solipsistic world-view.

Doctor Jeremy actually started me back on considering gender power dynamics with his comments here:

As always, your article is insightful. I get concerned with the limit to the progress the manosphere can make, however, because I think the discussions are missing a central concept – power. The goal of this branding, social engineering, and gender-role change you identify is the redistribution of various forms of power and influence within our society. For some reason, however, much of the manosphere’s writing and discussion does not seem to include that level of analysis. This is unfortunate, as feminist and women’s discourse is often focused on redistribution of power – and quite successful as a result of that focus.

As support for my point, please review the quotes I have extracted from livingtree2013′s various comments [emphasis mine]:

“But it is not because women want to eliminate men from the equation. It is because women have historically been entirely dependent on men for their survival, which gave men far too much power over us, and we have worked tirelessly to extract ourselves from that position of inferiority.”

“So why would you expect anything different from us? Its simply not going to happen, at least not until the men in power actually force us to obey their will, which truly, I can see coming in the near future.”

“Unfortunately, you guys didn’t want us doing those things because it negatively affected you in the power balance, but that didn’t stop us from needing it.”

She is not talking about independence. She is not talking about self-esteem. She is talking about who has the power to control the interaction and call the shots…

As far as power is concerned I think anyone who’s read the Rational Male for more than a few posts knows I quote Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power more often than any other resource here, and regularly use those laws to illustrate how they apply to intergender relations. That said, I have dedicated posts to the influence power has in personal dynamics, and I certainly recognize, if sometimes indirectly, the power dynamic in Frame, Dread, and certainly in The Feminine Imperative.

I fully understand the redistribution of power in our gender landscape from a social perspective, but the fundamental question about any form of real power isn’t about who has it or not, but to what ends they apply it.

I felt so strongly about the Truth to Power essay that I included it in the Rational Male book. The salient point in that post was this:

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.

I expect that would align with what our token, self-identifying feminist LivingTree was repeating, but the underlying question is what are women using that power to achieve?

As I stated prior, feminism as a social influence, has never been about its stated goal of egalitarian equality between the sexes, but rather it’s been about restitution and retribution from the masculine it perceives as its historical oppressors. This was the original intent of feminine independence (before it became the brand it is today), a separation from the dependency (perceived or actual) of women on men. However, the problem inherent in that separation is that in creating a new, autonomous sex role for women, the innate differences and deficits that the former complementary interdependence with men satisfied had to be compensated for.

All of the inherent weaknesses of the feminine that were balanced by the masculine’s inherent strengths had to be provided for in order to achieve this new independence from the masculine. I should also point out that in this feminist separation the masculine is also left in a deficit of having its own inherent weaknesses balanced by the compensating strengths of the feminine.

Power Slaves

I’ve quoted that feminism is the mistaken belief that a more equitable society can be achieved by focusing efforts solely on the interests of one sex.

Sarcasm aside, this is exactly the use to which women have applied the power that feminism and the feminization of society has afforded them since the sexual revolution. Feminism is not, and has never been about leveling a playing field or equality amongst the genders, it’s been about power and applying it to separating from, marginalization of, and eventual eradication of, the masculine influence that the feminine imperative wants restitution and retribution from. LivingTree illustrates this for us here:

Independence for women meant we didn’t have to tolerate abuse anymore because we had the option to leave. It meant that if you left us, we wouldn’t be completely desperate. It meant we didn’t have to cling to you guys for support. It meant we could make decisions about our own lives. It meant we didn’t have to be “seen and not heard”. It meant we didn’t have to be a slave to a stereotype anymore. It meant we could be self-actualizing if we wanted to. It meant we could pick and choose which man we wanted to mate with. And it meant we could admit we had sexual desires.

Tucked into LT’s recitation of feminist boilerplate is the true application and intent of use of the power women’s emancipation from the masculine wants to achieve – direct control of the conditions dictating their innate hypergamy.

The gist of LT’s reasoning for women wanting power, and “Independence” (as a brand or otherwise) from men is due to women’s innate need for security. This need for security and certainty is literally written into women’s DNA, their neural wiring and hormones. As the ‘nurturers’ of the next generation of humanity, evolution selected-for, and reinforced the biological and psychological mechanisms of women with the best capacity to filter for situations that would provide her and her offspring with the best possible security in a chaotic and insecure world. This drive for security is what’s at the root of hypergamy, and in all fairness has been a successful survival mechanism for the human species.

Hypergamy’s constant, limbic, survival-level question for women is “Is this the optimal condition I can secure to ensure my wellbeing and my (future) children?” Whether she’s been married for decades or is out on the town with her girlfriends, that question nags a woman in her hindbrain from childhood to death. Hypergamy’s question and doubt is at the heart of every unconscious shit-test a woman will ever deliver. Hypergamy’s unrealizable quest for optimization extends from the individual woman to women’s social influences. From the micro to the macro, Hypergamy’s constant want of an unachievable contented security defines the Feminine Imperative.

Rigging the Game

In terms of women’s pluralistic sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks) that question extends to who she selects as a sex partner to breed with, as well as whom she selects to be the provider for her long term provisioning. At the heart of it, women’s desire for independence and the perceived power they believe it should give them is an effort in controlling the conditions that they believe will satisfy Hypergamy’s question. Every popular woman’s issue you can list will find its way back to the want for control of the circumstances that dictate how well a woman can satisfy her Hypergamy.

Fat acceptance, the right to vote, child custody and paternity laws, divorce laws, slut walks, accusations of rape culture, more women in the boardroom, feminization of men and culture on whole, hell, every item LivingTree mentions in her comment, just name the issue and underneath the social or personal veneer is the clutching after of some usable power to control the conditions that will satisfy her need for security and optimize women’s Hypergamy.

LT is correct, women don’t want to eliminate men, they simply want to control them, both directly and indirectly, socially and personally, subtly and subconsciously as well as overtly when necessary, to comply with satisfying their innate hypergamy. They want independence from men’s influence in the process of satisfying hypergamy – they want to rig the game by replacing his genuine desires by forcing him to comply with her control of his conditions. Women want the power to control men’s desires, their ideologies, their sexual response, their individualism and the decisions that result from them all in order to optimize hypergamy

The problem in all this effort for control is that nature stagnates in homogeny. Androgyny, homogeny, are the first order for inbreeding. For as much as women make efforts to emancipate themselves and change the rules of the game to better fit their deficiencies, they are always confounded by the innate drives and desires of men. They get frustrated with men who wont play their version of the game, or worse, the ones who play it more poorly than they themselves do. So they jail them, they shame them, they pathologize his sexual impulse, they condition feminization into them from their earliest development, they punish them for not playing the game that should  always end with them optimizing hypergamy’s nagging doubt – in spite of falling short of it under organic circumstances. For all the delusions of independence, autonomy and the fantasy of some form of control of the process, they find men will simply not cooperate. They wont give them the satisfaction of optimizing their solipsistic hypergamy, because the Men who have the capacity to do so, the ones women want to be satisfied with simply aren’t playing their version of the game.

The Brand of Independence

independence

The archetype of the Strong Independent Woman® has been culturally reinforced over the last half century in virtually every imaginable media. Whether it’s Disney’s capable Princesses ready to save themselves from certain doom – as well as their quirky, hapless but handsome male heroes – or the now clichéd ‘tough bitch’ of action movies and video game protagonists who measures herself by how well she can kick ass and /or swear as the culturally contextual equal of “any man”. Her template-crafted character is strong, confident, measuredly aggressive, decisive (but usually only when shit gets serious so as to prove to the audience she’s ‘digging deep within herself to discover her yet unrealized resolve), judicious, loving to those loyal or dependent on her (immediate family, children and female friends), capable of solving problems with little more than the feminine intuition men magically lack – but above all, she’s independent.

As this cultural archetype is broadcast to society at large, the want then is to find parallels of this Strong Independent Woman® in the ‘real’ world. The media character is only marginally believable now thanks to endless revisions and replications, so we look for the examples of independent women equalling and exceeding the, paltry-by-comparison, achievements of the unenlightened ignorance of their male “oppressors.” High ranking company CEOs are usually the first rock star independent women to nominally shine (often undeservedly) in such a role, but then, by order of degrees, we can move down the economic social strata and cherry-pick or conveniently create the match of any mediocre man. As most men are, or have been conditioned Betas it’s not too difficult.

It really is the End of Men you see. You’re no longer necessary because, well now, there is nothing men can collectively and uniformly do that women cannot find some individual example of matching and / or exceeding. Women don’t need men anymore, they’re independent.

The Branding

If there’s one thing I know, it’s branding. The Strong Independent Woman® caricature has generously earned it’s registered trademark. I sometimes use that ® to emphasize a particularly long-evolved meme; social conventions so embedded into our cultural fabric that they literally have become their own brand. The Strong Independent Woman® is actually one the best examples of this branding. However, to really understand the gravity of so long a cultural branding, you must go to the root of how the brand of the independent woman was originally intended to evolve by the 2nd wave cultural feminists who spawned it. In a way it’s succeeded far better than any feminist of the period really had the foresight to expect.

An Independent Woman was to be independent of men.

While a lot of feel-good aphorisms like confidence, determination, integrity, and the like became associated with this desire for independence, make no mistake, the original long-term feminist goal of fostering that independence in women was to break them off into individuated, autonomous entities from men. That individuation needed to be as positive and attractive to women as possible, so a social pairing of that independence from men, with a sense of strength and respectability, had to be nurtured over time.

Since the beginnings of the sexual revolution, women were acculturated to believe they could ‘have it all’, career, family, a husband (of her optimal hypergamous choosing) and, if she were influential enough, leave some indelible mark on society to be remembered by for posterity. To achieve this she’d need to be an autonomous agent, strong, and above all independent of men. Women would embody and perfect the maverick individualism that men seemed to enjoy throughout history. If she couldn’t manifest ‘having it all’ then she was still, by male force or by personal choice, not independent enough to realize it. Of course, the irony of all this can be found in the marriages of virtually every ‘high profile’ feminist luminary of the time (all the way up to our current time) to the very powerful and influential types of men their stated independence was to emancipate all women from in order to truly be independent.

The Case Against Male Self-Esteem

Matt Forney’s lightning rod post, The Case Against Female Self-Esteem drew a frenzy of internet hate, but at the core of that post was a question that Strong Independent Women® and their male identifiers don’t like be confronted with; do they truly want independence from men? Do the men they want to be independent from even exist, or are they conveniently useful archetypes; vaudevillian chauvinist cartoons from the 50’s, planted in their heads, courtesy of the feminine imperative?

While I can’t endorse a message that would diminish anyone’s self-esteem, male or female, Matt’s post, even so much as suggesting the idea of limiting female self-esteem, uncomfortably turns a cultural mirror back on over 50 years feminist and feminized social engineering. For over the past 50 years the case against male self-esteem, with the latent purpose of emancipating women from dependence on men, began in earnest — not with some anger inducing blog post, but as a progressive social engineering that would run the course of decades to effectively erase men’s inconvenient masculine identity, or even memory of what that identity ever meant to men. The case against male self-esteem has been the social undercurrent of popular culture since the early 1960’s.

I think it’s important for red pill men to internalize the popular idea of feminine independence. The true message that the Strong Independent Woman® brand embodies is independence from you, a man.

Its latent purpose isn’t the actual empowerment of women, or efforts to bolster self-esteem, strength (for whatever loose definition seems convenient), confidence or any other esoteric quality that might flatter a feminine ego. Its purpose isn’t to foster financial or economic independence (as evidenced by ever evolving fem-centric laws, educational and financial handicaps), or religious social parity, or even efforts to achieve its vaunted social equalism between the sexes. What feminine independence truly means is removing the man – independence from men. Feminine independence’s idealized state is one where women are autonomous, self-contained, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating single-gender entities.

If that revelation seems aggrandized and over the top, it should. It’s extreme, because the purpose itself is extreme. When you consider that the sexes have coexisted in relative gender complementarity, to produce our very proliferate species, for a hundred thousand years, the idea and implementation of separating the sexes into independent and solitary entities is extreme. Obviously effecting this independence is an impossibility for a race of social animals like human beings. We’ve relied on cooperative efforts since our tribal beginnings and the species-beneficial psychological hardwiring of that cooperation is one trait that made us so successful in adapting to changing, dangerous, environments.

For most manosphere readers (especially MRAs) I don’t think I need to illustrate the many manifest ways that women are dependent upon the men; if not men’s generated resources and provisioning, then certainly their parental investment, companionship, emotional and sexual interest. We’re better together than we’ve ever been apart – even when the ugly mechanics of hypergamy, or male aggression, or any number of negatively perceived gender dynamics prove useful survival traits for us, there is no true independence between the sexes. There is interdependence.

This is what equalism makes a mockery of. In its striving for a homogenous goal-state of androgynous gender-parity it fails to account for where the species-success that the complementarity of the past 30,000 years has brought us. From a heroic male perspective we generally accept that no man is an island, but feminism and equalism disagree – a Strong Independent Woman® is an island,..or she will be just as soon as a man gives her her due to become so.

Pseudo-Virginity

There’s a lot being made of sluts recently. Vox, whom I’ve got a great respect for,  just made an (admittedly unscientific) poll attempting to estimate mate worthiness and establish some hard data amongst those aware of it, on rates of fidelity by asking the right questions. I took part in it, but to my disappointment my particular input was useless because I’m a ‘snowflake’ – I’ve been with 40+ women, had 4 significant LTRs, cheated on 2 (was also cheated on by the same 2, but that wasn’t on the questionare), been married almost 16 years, never cheated on my wife, nor have ever been cheated on by my wife (who’s had at least 6 prior BFs I’m aware of) – yep, I guess I’m an outlier. Or at least an outlier in respect to the correlations that other’s wanted to find evidence of.

As expected, Aunt Giggles was eager to gobble up the ‘hard data’ to make her case for fem-centric feminine framed monogamy (despite very loose parameters), but it struck me that, within both the manosphere and team woman, there is indeed an emphasis on the virtues of a woman being as close to pseudo-virginity as is socially manageable. I touched on this briefly in The Slut Paradox, and I do understand the evolved psychology behind it.

If Men are willingly or forcibly going to sacrifice their polygynous sexual strategy in favor of a female specific long-term strategy of parental investment, they innately want reassurances of a woman’s fidelity and that his biological investment is in fact his own. There have been some entertaining experimental studies on men’s innate ability of recognizing their own children’s faces amongst a crowd of uniformly dressed kids; Men are more accurate and faster to identify their kids in a crowd than women. So, for men it’s not a stretch to assume there’s an evolved aspect to confirming paternity if not actual fidelity.

On the feminine side, the psychological fallout ranges from a need for absolution of their sexual pasts (revirginization, spiritual and physical), to notch count revisionism, ASD, and simple cognitive dissonance. With so many coping mechanisms, it would appear that secreting our sexual histories is of paramount importance to ensuring our genetic legacies.

Virgin Pluralism

The problem is that feminine Hypergamy and women’s pluralistic sexual strategies conspire against each other. It is in a woman’s genetic best interests to breed with Men of superior stock (or at least perceptually so) whilst in her prime fertility years. Rationalizations and conscious efforts aside, a woman’s hindbrain subroutine compels her toward striking while the biological iron’s hot. This characterizes Hypergamy in her prime fertility window, but later when long-term security becomes the imperative this Hypergamy fluidly changes toward the best provider of security. It’s at this time that there is a psychological schism for women; as the wall approaches, a need for cognitive dissonance splits between her former sexual strategy and is replaced by a long-term security strategy. This necessitates forming new mental schema to replace the soon-to-be obsolete schemas that allowed her to pursue her sexual imperative when younger. Suddenly she’s concerned not only for her own long-term security, but the sisterhood’s as well. Ask her to tell you the best way to live and it’s always been about monogamy, security, fidelity, relationship,..etc.

All of that doesn’t sit well with a Man’s conflicting sexual strategy. In a woman’s sexual prime, his scattershot sexual strategy makes for a complementary tactic (as far as evolution’s breeding the next crop of humanity is concerned), but when it comes to a strategy of parental investment, psychological contingencies and countermeasures had to evolve to lessen the risk to his genetic legacy. Enter the importance of pseudo-virginity.

The New Virgins

I don’t think I need to reiterate the importance a purported low sexual partner count on the part of women seems to be for men. No wants a slut right? Why?

Vox’s study and the resulting speculations on its indications is evidence enough of this desire, but there is a concerted effort for both parties interested to maintain at least the presumption of a low N-count. The conflict arises in conflating a high partner count as the causation for infidelity.

Is past sexual selectivity / promiscuity an indicator for low / high pair bonding instances, or is it the conditions that prompted those behaviors the cause of infidelity? We definitely would like reliable predictors of infidelity, but I think what we fail to see is the causality of what contributes to the predictability. While infidelity may be morally reprehensible, from an evolutionary standpoint it may actually be the most beneficial recourse depending on circumstance.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if you’ve only ever fucked your wife. For every rare snowflake who moves from a high N-count to life-long marital fidelity, there’s a rare couple of high school sweethearts divorcing who’ve never fucked anyone but each other. We want the True Love couple to live happily ever after because it appeases our emotions and sense of fantasy, while we also expect the slut or the incorrigible cad get their just rewards of a life of self-loathing resentment. Reality doesn’t always cooperate with our idealizations, but the more important question to ask is why we think one couple is deserving of happiness while the other merits scorn?

Notch Count

Women don’t pine away for past beta lovers. All of this handwringing about a woman’s notch count and how numerically close she is to virginity is only so much semantics if you don’t factor in the psychological impact a single Alpha lover has on a woman. Ever wonder why the guy a girl shares/loses her virginity with is so memorable for her? Barring instances of rape, he’s a default Alpha just for having been her first. This is the primary reason I advise Men against deflowering virgin women; the sex is often negligible, but the impact is so significant that it forms an emotional attachement in a girl that most guys are unprepared for.

Once a woman has experienced that Alpha dominance, only another Alpha experience can delimit the previous experience. This is an example of the role conditionality plays in pair bonding. If a woman has had 10 prior lovers who’ve all amounted to beta experiences, an Alpha experience may be all it takes to make her loyal. On the other hand a woman with only one prior Alpha lover may be impossible to convince to be loyal to anyone she sees as a lesser experience.

These are the Alpha Widows. In fact, I’d argue that most female initiated infidelity is a result of hypergamous impulse seeking to find its previous level. Women don’t trade down in experience, they are always perceptually trading up. One of the liabilities of hypergamy is that there is a risk to benefits equation playing in women’s hindbrains that assesses what she can potentially lose. This is a pre-established dread that has to be repressed or ignored in order to for a woman to cheat. Women are prone to infidelity with better options, not worse ones. It’s a mistake to assume that only notch count is the precursor for infidelity.

The Tao of Game

There are a great many concepts in Game Theory that are difficult to accurately define. Understanding the intricacies of intergender dynamics is often a tough road to hoe due to individualized interpretations of what a particular term or concept should mean in a global sense. ‘Game Theory’ is even a term I’m kind of struggling with since people think it seems to exclude the actual practicing, or real world development of the same principles I explore on this blog. For the record, I believe it’s just as important to hone one’s PUA skills / tools as it is to understand why they work.

Ikigai

The concept of Alpha is another sticking point for a lot of men, both plugged-in or unplugged from the feminine Matrix – some even rejecting the concepts of alpha and beta wholesale. I find that for the most part people have a very tough time reconciling the unvarnished principles of Game Theory and, to a greater degree, the way Evolutionary Psychology compliments it, with a learned sense of moral or ethical justice they believe should be essential to human interactions. I think human beings, to varying degrees, have an in-born capacity for revulsion to ideas that reveal a very realistic, unavoidable nihilism existing in the fundamental nature of the world. By that I mean that we seem to have some feral-level refusal for what we think would be a hopeless situation. The Japanese have a term for this called “Ikigai“, loosely translated as “a reason for being”. It would not surprise me in the least if in the future we find that humans (and other higher order animals) have specific neural ‘software’ directly linked to this rejection of the hopeless. Obviously a neural wiring that promotes Ikigai would be a very valuable evolutionary survival asset for a species.

Paradoxically though, just in the suggesting of an evolved, biological root for rejecting nihilism, it confirms the validity of that hopeless condition. In other words, the same evo-psych-prompted root that grants us a capacity to desire justice or provides with us a sense of morality (however defined) is the same root that forces us to obstinately reject the reality of our situations. The same psyche that wants to reject environmentally valid concepts like alpha/beta, hypergamy, the SMP, or a plethora of other difficult to accept Game Theory ideas is the same psyche that wants to reject the hopelessness they may or may not represent.

Bear this in mind when you come across a new concept in Game. The reality we find ourselves in is very cruel when you approach it from a binary, right or wrong, absolutist standpoint. It may satisfy a need to feel self-righteous, but it’s never a good starting point for real understanding that may benefit you later. This is what detractors of evo-psych struggle with; factoring in a human element into environmental and biological determinants. We don’t call a cheetah running down a gazelle on the African savannah ‘evil’ or unjust, or the gazelle undeserving of death. It just is.

If I were to dangle a juicy raw steak in front of the nose of a hungry Doberman, could I blame the dog for taking a piece of my hand off with the steak when he bites at it? He’s just doing what a hungry dog does. When your wife’s vagina tingles in the presence of a Man displaying evolutionarily developed Alpha cues, or you get a hardon viewing the body of a beautiful naked woman, this is the biological imperative at work. It’s not right or wrong, it just is.

Biology Trumps Conviction

This position usually grates against the grain for people invested in the ideology of personal responsibility. They think it means biological determinism, and therefor grants a free pass for all sins. However, what I’m implying is that the overriding influence is that of our biology; there would be no need for convictions if it weren’t. The mistake lies in thinking that convictions are the measure and biology is the limiter. It’s not that you can resist temptation, but rather that the temptation exists in the first place. There is no temptation without motivation. What most people fail to grasp here is that no conviction to alter behavior, mindset, belief, etc. would be necessary for an individual if the operative state (biology in this instance) weren’t conflicting with what we perceive are in our overall best interests. Biology trumps conviction because it is the operative state for us.

Biology determines what convictions we need to construct in order to optimize our existences. We then compound this with progressively more complex layerings of “conviction” upon our state in order to address inconsistencies in our natural desires. And then, conversely, our natural impulses will prompt us to rationalize loopholes in the articles of our convictions which will allow for our biological imperatives to be expressed.

Take sex out of the equation for a moment. As an am-circuit bodybuilder I have to stay cut for an upcoming competition. So I effectively starve myself for the prior 6 weeks of all the food that my body instinctively wants. Every fiber in my body wants to pound down a slice of pizza, but my conviction to look good and be at my optimal best for the competition overwhelms that primal urge. You’d say “well, see, conviction trumps biology”, but the operative state is what my biology is prompting me to do; eat starchy / sugary foods in order to prevent starvation and maximize my survival capacity by retaining energy reserves in case of emergency. My hunger is the operative state; without it that conviction to repress it isn’t extraordinary. Conviction is subordinate to biology, because right after the pose-down I’m at the pizzaria eating 3 slices of suprema.

Because my biology is the operative state, inevitably conviction will be unsustainable to prevent it from manifesting in some form. Some of these are socially acceptable, some of these are socially forgivable, some of these will earn you a life in prison. Sometimes that means the girl gets drunk, he was cute and she bangs the guy in spite of herself. Sometimes it means celibate priests become pedophiles as their only means of sexual expression, and sometimes it means a homosexual comes out of the closet. There are social consequences for all these expressions to varying degree, but again, the motivator is  the biological imperative.

The sexual marketplace as we know it today is the result of biological opportunism intermingling with societal buffers that are in a constant state of flux. Religious convictions and appeals to moralism are no insulation against hypergamy and the sexual marketplace. In fact, often, the more ardent the conviction, the more influential the biological imperative.

I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our biologically derived impulses and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.

Case Study – Creative Intelligence

Below I have posted descriptions of 4 men from a case study I was involved with as part of a graduate study for personality psychology. Before you ask, no, this wasn’t an original study, however it was a measures experiment we performed to see how the results matched with our own university.These descriptions are excerpts from that case study comparing female mate selection. They were presented individually to 101 university women between the ages of 18 and 36. All were single/unmarried and none were aware of the intent of the experiment. I’ll present more details of the experiment after you have chance to respond so as not to spoil your genuine responses. Here are the descriptions:

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M is an art student. M has always had a passion for painting and plans to pursue a career in art. He creates paintings of people and complex landscapes. His paintings are so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photographs. The consensus amongst his art professors is that he is, by far, the most talented student they have seen. One professor, an expert on lifelike paintings, says he believes M is one of the most talented artists ever to produce these paintings. To make extra money to support his schooling, M has sold a few of his best paintings. They have sold for between 100 and 200 dollars. One professor lamented that M’s paintings are worth far more, but like so many other artists, he will probably never make very much money selling them.

L is an art student. He paints abstract paintings. L came into art by chance. He took an art class as an elective because it fit well in his schedule. For his midterm project, he produced an abstract painting after an hour of “fooling around” with the paint and canvas. The majority of the painting actually consisted of paint he accidentally spilled onto the canvas. A very wealthy man who was looking for art for his home discovered L’s painting in the student art studio. He paid L $5,000 dollars for the painting. Some of the man’s other wealthy friends liked L’s painting and commissioned a total of $100,000 in paintings from him. L and his art professors were shocked at the success of L’s paintings, because, in the words of one professor, “he has no real talent, just some good luck.” L continues to capitalize on his success by selling his abstract art.

L and M are considered highly desirable by other women on campus and very attractive. Friends of L and M say that they are dependable, kind, and generous friends.

J is an entrepreneur who had great success in his first business venture. He started a small software business in a friend’s garage. His product was a new kind of software for improving factory designs to radically increase the profitability of manufacturing. Within his first year, J secured contracts with Ford, General Electric, and Boeing. In the next three years, J sold his software to most of the top manufacturing companies in the United States and several of the top companies in Asia. After 5 years in business, J’s company was valued at 120 million dollars and had 250 employees. The Wall Street Journal credited the success of J’s company to the “brilliance and novelty” of J’s product and to J’s “sheer genius as a businessman.” However, J’s company fell victim to misfortune the next year. After J rejected a take-over bid from Microsoft, Microsoft filed a lawsuit claiming that J’s software infringed on some of their patents. Although most experts agreed that the suit had no merit, the cost of defending himself against the lawsuit created huge cash flow problems for J, which drove the company into bankruptcy. Although J has very little money left, he has recently begun a new business venture to sell another of the software products he has invented.

R recently inherited 20 million dollars from the couple who had adopted him when he was a year old. They died in a car crash, having made their fortune in commercial real estate. Before they died, R worked as a sales person at a computer company. Although R worked at the company for several years, he had not advanced past his starting salary or rank within the company. He went to a community college, but after graduation he didn’t feel sure what to do with his life. A friend who was working at the computer company suggested that R join him and work there. In R’s words, “I guess I’m just not very good at this job. At least now I won’t have to worry about money any more.” R and his adoptive parents were very close, and he was deeply saddened by their deaths.

J and R are both attractive and in their mid-twenties. They were recently nominated as two of the most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles.
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Bear in mind, these guys a theoretical archetypes, how they relate to women is irrelevant. How the subject women percieved them is what’s being assessed. Of these 4 men, which do you suppose was rated the highest in desirability with which to have a short-term sexual affair with by these women? And which man was rated the highest in desirability to enter into a long-term relationship with?

This study was done to determine comparative priorities in women with regards to male ‘creative intelligence’ vs.‘provisioning ability’ in female mate selection. I would’ve titled this thread as such, but I wanted to get some unbiased and impulse responses from readers here to see what the perceptions of these archetypes were from men and the reactions guys expected from women to these archetypes.

You’ll notice that care was taken in these archetype descriptions to balance out the physical attractiveness of each man (i.e. both artists were considered equally attractive by peers and both businessmen were ‘eligible’ bachelors). What was at issue wasn’t their extrinsic characteristics – comparative physiques or obvious Alpha presence – but what women chose in regards to these men’s intrinsic characteristics. The theory being that Creative Intelligence is of a higher mating value in the short term while a better Provisioning ability is more desirable in the long term. Bear in mind that hypergamy influences the decision making process for both of these sexual strategies. Also added was the caveat that legitimacy of provisioning ability, and the potential for future provisioning in it’s absence (i.e. the down on their luck men), played a factor in this mate selection.

Creative Intelligence

So what exactly is “Creative Intelligence”? Although there is no firm consensus on how to define it, we often know it when we see it. We also know a bit about it from a century of creativity research. Within humans, creative intelligence is closely associated with the highly heritable general intelligence, and creative intelligence seems to rely on the generation, selective elaboration, and skillful implementation of ideas and strategies. In other words, creativity represents a strong capacity for successful improvisation, thus it became a desirable, selected-for species survival trait.

The problem is that creativity sounds desirable, as does intelligence, so “creative intelligence” can become a vague term that seems useful for solving any behavioral problem, whether technological, ecological, social, sexual, or cultural. Many plausible adaptive functions explain the origins of human creative intelligence. These include: tool-making and tool-using, hunting, foraging, and food preparation methods, social strategizing within and between groups and sexual courtship dynamics (i.e. hunter-gatherer proto-Game).

Sorry for the psych lesson, but we had to be specific.

Trade Offs

As I elaborated in Schedules of Mating, most women face trade-offs in mating. In selecting a long-term mate, it makes hypergamic sense for women to put greater weight on traits that advertise ability and willingness to invest in protection, provisioning, and care of the woman and her offspring. This will favor the evolution of ‘good dad’ indicators – reliable cues of paternal investment ability and willingness to participate in those responsibilities. In our past, women of very high mate value (HB 8 and above) had the luxury of attracting a long-term mate who has both good dad potential and good genes. Fast forward through the ages and women have progressively had to settle for a committed partner who is not ideal either paternally or genetically. Then add to this the increasing complexity of men adapting to mimic these cues in order to facilitate their own breeding strategy. Consequently women are, by order of degree, incentivized to secure better genes or better paternal care from short-term or extra-pair partners, while simultaneously seeking long term provider males. Either would help at any time.

In this study, the idea was that, issues of relative attraction and arousal being satisfied, women will prefer a male possessing a higher capacity for Creative Intelligence in short-term sexual encounters to ensure the best possible future options for her offspring, while choosing a mate with better Provisioning ability for long term parental investment.

Art and business were chosen as two contrasting domains of work. Each requires distinct styles of creative intelligence, but both demand combinations of practical and theoretical skills, individual effort and social interaction. Hence, merit-based success in either domain may function as a mental fitness indicator. In each domain (art or business), one vignette described a man who showed high creative intelligence in his work, but who was poor due to bad luck and adverse circumstances. The other vignette in each set described a man who was average on creative intelligence, but who was wealthy due to good luck and beneficial circumstances. All vignettes made clear that each man’s creativity level was largely endogenous, reflecting natural (and presumably heritable) talent, but that his wealth level was largely accidental, gained through no merit or fault of his own.

Results

Each woman completed two forced-choice questions: (1) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a short-term sexual affair?”; (2) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a long-term committed relationship?” (L or M in the artist vignettes, and R or J in the entrepreneur vignettes). Next, participants rated the desirability of each man as a short-term mate and as a long-term mate on two 9-point scales (where ‘1’ = not at all desirable, ‘5’ = average; ‘9’ = extremely desirable). The rating questions were as follows: “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a long-term partner?” “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a short-term partner?

In this study M was overwhelmingly chosen as the short term partner. 89% of the participants chose the naturally talented, but out of luck artist for a short term sexual encounter. 7% chose L the rich artist, 3% chose J the poor/talented businessman and 1% opted for R the wealthy/untalented businessman.

J was also rated highest for long term relationship, but not as significantly as M in the short term. 67% of our subjects chose J, and surprisingly 17% chose L (rich artist). R was rated at 12% and M took 4% for the long term choice.