feminine imperative

The Myth of Sexual Peak

The following is a re-blog from the archives of the (unfortunately) defunct aggregate blog The Spearhead. I want to archive this on my own blog because I think it was a fantastic exposé for its time and Chuck Ross deserves props for it too.

by CHUCK ROSS on NOVEMBER 16, 2009

A common myth is that men hit their sexual peak at the age of 18 while women hit theirs at 30-35. Despite literally no scientific support for this theory, this meme has become “common knowledge” in our society.

The myth never sat well with me. And to be clear, this myth is no straw-man concocted by this writer. It has entrenched itself in our culture to the point that most believe it is true without considering the implications or reasons for such an illogical development.

“Well we all know…” is a precursor heard before recitation of the myth. I worked with three 30-something women as a bank teller. Their excuse for their child-like antics, raunchy sex-talk, and monthly vibrator parties was that they were at their sexual peak. They said it as if they had a moral obligation to live up to their billing as sex-crazed mynx. While I’m not proud of it, when I was 20 or 21 I had a year-long sexual relationship with a 30 year-old woman whose fiance couldn’t keep up with her horniness. She justified her behavior by saying she was at her sexual peak and had a right to satiate her hunger. I got into an argument the other day with a female Bulgarian friend of mine who off-handedly recited this meme. The myth has infiltrated the Eastern bloc. I’ve had many encounters with the myth; I’m sure most readers have too.

I’ve never understood why our creator – natural selection – would put men and women at their sexual peaks at such different points in their lives. More importantly, why would women be at their peaks and more horny when they were less fertile? Every thing we know about evolution and sexual behavior indicates that natural selection has made it easy peasy for our genes to be passed on through sexual reproduction – why throw a wrench in the system by making horniness levels – or “desire to copulate” levels – incongruent between the sexes and less conducive to reproduction? Since women are most fertile from the ages of 20-24, it would make sense that they would desire sex more than when they were a decade older and half as fertile.

Those purveyors of the myth don’t account for Dr. David Schnarch’s dichotomy between genital prime and sexual prime. As spouted by the masses, the myth advocates the notion that these women want sex more rather than the more plausible argument that they are more experienced and comfortable with sex. If the myth is fully perpetuated, it grants 30-something women sexual liberation while offering nothing to men of the same age.

From Dr. Schnarch’s book Passionate marriage:

“Most textbooks on human sexuality, adolescent development, and family life teach that men reach their sexual prime before they even hit their twenties. Women supposedly reach their prime several years later…and therein lies our problem. Health-care providers make the same mistake as the rest of us: We’ve confused genital prime with sexual prime.

Genital prime occurs when a person has fully developed sexual organs and are most fertile. This occurs during adolescence and shortly after for both men and women. The myth holds men to the genital prime model while holding women to the other; it doesn’t compare apples to apples. This has the effect of making 30-something female sex some sort of animalistic expression rather than a more mature concept of sex that men of the same age achieve. The widely-accepted meme of late female sexual peak is a false dichotomy.

So why has this meme succeeded in entrenching itself so deeply in our collective mythology? First, it prevents us from being able to call 30-something sexually-peaking women sluts. Saying that a 30-something woman is at her peak is a PC way of saying she’s a slut. But given that “slut” implies something bad (and we know that a woman doing what she wants with her body can never be bad) those myth-sustainers prefer to say she is peaking. A peak implies something grandiose and wonderful. Peaks are achievements of milestones deserving rewards and ticker-tape parades. When the sexual prime myth is used to encourage and support these womens’ shady sexual behavior, it violates Schnarch’s dichotomy. Myth-purveyors seek to use the genital peak behavior of men at the age of 18 to condone womens’ slutiness at later ages by citing the need for equality of opportunity to express sexuality.

Second, older women HATE HATE HATE younger women. Sex is power. Younger women have held it in spades over their elders. Being that everyone desires to wrench power out of the hands of people who hold it, older women and those soon to be of that demographic have an incentive to glamorize the twilight years.

Says sex and relationship expert Pepper Schwartz:

“The bottom line for me: The evolution of the cougar concept is good for every woman and her partner. It keeps sexual possibilities and eroticism alive. And that continued capacity for passion creates lifelong desirability to younger men, older men, or anyone who can recognize a vital spirit when meeting one.”

The myth has sustained because it gives women hope as they venture into the twilight of their ability to be incubators of seed and the commensurate degradation of their looks. Sex is power, and attaching that power to women of ever-increasing ages allows women to hang on to it longer. Older women have declared war on younger women. Through wishful thinking they seek to destroy every benefit and short cut that younger, prettier women have even though they benefited from the same attitudes at an earlier point in their lives. We see this by observing the attitudes towards female celebrities who act in sexual ways. When Madonna was younger, she was considered a slut. Her book Sex was considered raunchy and disgusting. Now that she’s old and in her “sexual prime” she is given a free pass to perform in sexually-suggestive ways. Her behavior today, while not as risque as that when she was younger, is lauded as empowering and even artistic.

Young starlets are hazed by a certain segment of the population for capitalizing on their sexiness, but that same segment glorifies Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon, Madonna, Cher, Jennifer Aniston, and Halle Berry for rocking it at older ages.

We can easily see that the sexual peak meme is widely touted for the empowerment it gives to older women. Rather than being a quirky feature of our sexuality, the myth that 35 year-old women are on the same level as 18 year-old boys attempts to allow women to hold more leverage over men. As feminism achieves its goal of female economic empowerment, we begin to observe “peak inflation”. The peak shifts upward as women delay marriage and children and seek to have fun of the sexual variety at increasing ages. Cougars are a case in point. These women are over 40. Even though the myth hasn’t explicitly increased the age range of women at their peak, the cougar phenomenon idolizes women’s sexual power at these late ages and glorifies their sexuality as empowering.

You see, the sexuality-as-power lobby wants to shift the reins of control from men to women and from younger women to older ones. Younger women are fulfilling their biological imperative thereby submitting themselves to men or to a scheme that plays into men’s strategies. Older women expressing their sexuality is a way for them to hold sway over the purse strings to power. They are having sex on their own terms rather than due to some ingrained chore or obligation. The sex peak myth is a catalyst for creating sexual autonomy.

In terms of species propagation, men and women are most horny whenever they are most fertile; their genital peak occurs at a young age. Both men and women reach their “sexual peak” – their mental maturity – at later ages. The key here is that each maturity occurs at similar ages for both sexes; the myth loses its power when we realize this. The first maturity is biological while the second is social. The myth of the late female peak says that women are hornier in their thirties by trying to equate the 30 year old’s behaviors and urges to that of an 18 year old man. This is simply a perversion of Dr. Schnarch’s dichotomy. Both sexes have had many years of sexual experience and they have had more time to rid themselves of debilitating sexual hang-ups and phobias. They aren’t hornier at later ages, they’re just more relaxed with the ideas of sexuality and have thus reached “sexual prime”. The late sexual prime myth is a convenient tool that excuses perverse sexual behavior in older women. Sex is power, and it is used as a weapon to pry control from those that have traditionally held it; men and young, beautiful women. By ratcheting up the expectations of older females’ sexual inhibition, they wrangle pawns to line their battlefield.

While I feel this is one of the better outlines of the Myth  of Sexual Peak, there’s a few thing I think Bob didn’t touch upon. What prompted me to dig this article up from Wayback Machine was a Twitter exchange I had about the recent New York Times article outlining a study on the ages of peak desirability for men and women. This article raised the hackles of online women in precisely the same way that this myth has always triggered women. The Myth of Sexual peak for women is a social convention that refuses to die since it was created in the free-love era to now. Even Bob’s piece here is almost a decade old. And yet, in spite of the statistical evidence that damns the myth, the next generation of women don’t even realize they are parroting back the same tropes their mothers did in their day.

Michelle Drouin, a developmental psychologist who focuses on technology and relationships, was not surprised by the new study — in part because they “align with evolutionary theories of mating” in which youth suggests fertility, she said.

Dr. Drouin pointed out, though, that there are also theories that suggest that “men are just less interested in earning potential or power, and more interested in physical attractiveness.”

When I first published my now infamous SMV Graph in 2012 I took a lot of heat for allegedly not being thorough enough in my  estimation process. Honesty and hindsight, I was a lot more intuitive than informational then, but I knew I had it right; at least from the visceral physicality of it from an evolutionary perspective. Since 2012, I’ve had study after study and correlation after correlation sent to me by readers, or simply fall into my lap, that corroborated the bell graphs, time lines and circumstances I had a basic inkling of. While I think that women peaking at 18 and men peaking at 50, as per this study, might be somewhat exaggerated for outrageousness, it still, once again, confirms the basic form I set out in my original graph.

One issue I think Bob didn’t touch upon is the evolutionary logistics of why this myth is timed conveniently at the stage in life that women’s sexual market value (SMV) is in decline. He’s correct about about older women wanting to compete with younger women, but there’s a hindbrain understanding that women’s only real agency in this life is their sexuality. The Myth of Sexual Peak is a tool in this competition, but it is squarely directed at shaming men for their evolved preference for youth and fertility in women. In a raw, evolutionary reality, men only really need women to reproduce, thus, the most desirable age for this in women stays relatively the same. Conversely, women need men with different qualities for different, and opportunistic, reasons at various stages of their lives and how their necessity dictates. Thus, women can find men desirable to fulfill those purposes at ages from 15-50. And before you give me a ration of shit about including 15 year old boys in that mix I’ll point you to the rash of mid twenties female teachers on trial for banging their high school students.

All women (yes, all) have an innate understanding of their sexual agency, and all understand its perishable nature. However, there’s a trade-off inherent in balancing this agency with optimizing Hypergamy. The longer a woman waits the more that agency declines, but the longer she has to consolidate on a man (or men) who represents her Hypergamous ideal. The reason the social convention of women’s “sexual peak” is set at the age of 30-35 is because it attempts to create an artificial sexual value for men. It pretends that their later age makes them better sexual experiences than women 22-24 years old. It’s a disqualification of those women for men’s long term provisioning considerations, but it also plays on male-shame while simultaneously (artificially) inflating women’s self-image. This is why the myth is so pervasive – it satisfies a lot of insecurities. It’s ’empowering’ for women to believe that men are too infantile to appreciate the better sexual experience they believe they represent.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to argue against because it seems plausible and it’s almost entirely based on how women feel about themselves sexually. What a tragic joke that evolution should make women’s sexual peak occur when she least able to make it work for her, right? Wrong. In fact it’s comical when you see how a study that finds women’s peak age of desirability is 18 and mens should be 50 – almost the inverse of what the myth wants us to believe; that 18 year old men and 30 year old women are at their sexual peaks.

Male Authority – Be a “Man”

How women and a feminine-primary social order control men by reserving the title of “manhood” for men who comply with female primacy.

In the Manosphere we often discuss the dynamic of men holding the burden of 100% responsibility yet are conferred 0% authority when it comes to intersexual relationships. This didn’t used to be the case. There was a kind of default authority imbued in men that was part of simply being a male under the old social contract. A lot of western societies still presumes this is the case in fact. It’s one reason popular culture presumes such a thing as ‘male privilege‘ exists today. They may even have a case with respect to the Old Set of Books; being a “man” inferred that a male had some degree of power, authority and decision making capacity over the course his life would take, as well as the lives of any women or children or extended family members who were dependent upon him being a “man”.

Responsibility is what defines men to this day, but the utility in this being hammered home into the psyches of men has become something the Feminine Imperative has found very useful in consolidating power in the hands of women. We’re ceaselessly told that responsibility is something men need to assume, but under the old set of books the incentive for a man assuming that responsibility came with a commensurate portion of authority (power). That was what used to earn a man the title of “manhood”; men were expected to possess the competency to produce surplus resources, enough to ensure the security and survival of his immediate and extended family, and then his tribe, his clan, his nation, etc. We still call this “being a productive member of society”, but now the incentives of a default authority that made assuming that responsibility a reasonable exchange have been stripped away along with all the grounding that a family name or tribal identity used to mean to men. In their place is all the same expectation of responsibility, but not even the pretense of male authority that stems from it.

In prior posts I’ve defined power thusly:

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.

How many men today have real power; power to direct the course of their own lives? As we commit to various aspects of life, family, business, the military, a woman, we incrementally exchange power for responsibility. Wealth often enforces will, but unless we can be one of the moneyed outliers in life there is no true authority granted to men now in exchange for that responsibility. A man who would even presume to use an authority that might still be implied in these exchanges is labeled a tyrant; a vestige of a Patriarchy that’s now painted as a net negative to society. And that’s just the societal level. In a legal sense that man has no authority with respect to his power over virtually every aspect of his interactions with women or a wife. A gynocentric social order’s prime directive has been to remove all vested male authority and by extension almost all power the man has to dierct the course of his own life.

There are numerous ways a feminine-primary social order removes the teeth from male authority today. First and foremost is the social pretense of blank-slate equalism. A default presumption that men and women are coequal agents in every aspect – physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual – is the cover story necessary to remove an authority that was based on the conventional differences between the sexes. To the blank-slate equalist gender is a social construct, but gender is only the starting point for a social constructionist belief set. Social constructionism is a necessary foundation upon which blank-slate equalism is built, but ultimately it’s a means of control. By denying each sex its innate differences social constructionism denies men their innate advantages and strengths. Once this became the normalized social convention it was a simple step to remove male authority.

In order to destroy that authority it was necessary to destroy men’s grounding in the identity of their own gender. The first step was to deliberately confuse men about the evolved nature of conventional masculinity. Thus, masculinity became subjective. Never has the idea of being a ‘man’ more reviled, obfuscated, blurred, ridiculed, demonized and loathed by men themselves. Wait for the “masculinity is toxic” articles to follow the next mass shooting incident. The worst shame, the worst clichéd vitriol, will come from male authors stepping up to apologize to women on behalf of all men for the violent ignorance of what they think is a learned toxic masculinity. It’s these Vichy men who’ve been taught that gender is a social construct, so there’s really no definitive answer to what makes a man a Man. These ‘men’ who’ve been conditioned in their feminine-primary upbringing who are so confused or gender-loathing with respect to masculinity that they feel compelled to believe they speak for all of ‘mankind’ when they apologize for all of us.

Blank-Slate Equals

But none of this works unless men and women are blank-slate equals. One reason a guy like James Damore is hammered down and erased with such zealotry for suggesting men and women are inherently different is because so much of gynocentrism rides on the social belief in the blank-slate. What’s offensive about it isn’t the idea that men and women might be prone to innately different strengths or weaknesses so much as it’s about the entire system scaffolded by the falsity of equalism.

You see, the confusion, the subjectification of masculinity has a design underneath it. This confusion is a means of control; a means of not just denying men authority, but to systematically remove anything inherently male from the whole system. I’ve detailed this removing the man in prior essays so I wont dig into it here, but it’s a means of control in an age when men are expected to know their utility and their role in women’s sexual and life strategies.

As we progress towards a social order based on a consolidated gynocracy it becomes more important that men not only be confused about masculinity, but also that men be dispersed and isolated. Men who would challenge this social order must be made into suspects and the suspicious of an “outdated masculinity” – a masculinity that pretends to be about innate authority based on evolved gender differences. Male Spaces must be outlawed, ostensibly for the misogyny they will surely lead to, but actually because men gathered together as men is a threat to a gynocentric power base. This is why the Manosphere and events like the 21 Conventions are so egregious to the feminine-primary social order; they connect men and their experiences about women. So men must be taught to be suspicious of each other. While masculinity might be loathed or confused, men gathered together can only mean homosexuality – because what other purpose could men exclusively gather for other than to fuck one another?

This is where the facade of blank-slate equalism conveniently slips when it suits the purpose of gynocentrism. Men and women can be innately different, but only on the occasions when innate differences would prove that men are violent, abusive, potential rapists, sex addicts or incorrigible homosexuals. On those occasions, the occasions when it serves the Feminine Imperative, women will gladly agree that Boys will be Boys and men are naturally beasts. Through this caveat in the blank-slate society men can be justifiably hated for being men if only because some nebulous male-chauvinist ‘society’ taught them to be so. So the clichés and the old lies get perpetuated because only a belief in the ‘masculinity-is-toxic’ narrative can justify teaching the next generation of boys to hate their own sex and sustain a gynocracy.

Men must be taught to hate themselves for their maleness. Thus, a form of institutionalized gaslighting of men about the nature of masculinity became necessary, and it is primarily men who sustain it. When men are conditioned to be both gender loathing and suspicious of the worst aspects of ‘masculinity’ in other men the result is a self-perpetuating cycle of policing ones thoughts while policing the thoughts of other men. There’s a default belief that this policing is part of identifying with the feminine that will make these Vichy Males more attractive to women of the gynocracy.

But what makes a man a Man in this social order?

As we’ve moved from a blank-slate basis of gender to an ambiguous, subjective definition of what a man is the Feminine Imperative has found a utility in assigning the title of ‘manhood’ to whichever man best exemplifies this utility to the gynocentric social order. In other words, the more a man meets the shifting needs of women the likelier he is to merit the title of being a “man” or a “real man”. In fact we hear this last one all the time in the memes that serve the Feminine Imperative. A “real man” does [insert whatever serves women’s long term sexual strategy] and Betas gleefully retweet it to prove their quality. In our feminine-correct paradigm, the authority that was inherent in masculinity which allowed men to declare what qualities make a ‘man’ has been casually assumed by women to be tossed around as whim and necessity makes convenient.

In Rites of Passage I elaborated on how, to an older conventional masculinity, Manhood was something merited and conferred onto a boy by his adult male peers. There were rites of passage, rituals, tests and qualifiers that transitioned boys into the world of men. This was a part of his grounding in a tribal belonging that used to at least somewhat direct his purpose in life. To be a ‘Man’ was to be a part of a sum whole – E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. It was the collective of men who conferred manhood onto another. How this actually played out in real life and the integrity of that collective was always particular to the character of the tribe, but prior to the rise of gynocentrism conferring manhood on an individual was something unique to masculinity.

Today, the Feminine Imperative’s efforts to disempower and subdue men means destroying the legitimacy of the tribal aspects of all this. As I mentioned earlier, men gathering together, and pretending to authority is something threatening to a gynocentric power structure. Destroying, shaming, ridiculing, etc. the whole of men, keeping them dispersed and isolated, meant usurping the authority men had in assigning ‘manhood’ to one another.

Aspects of the old masculine social order, including men’s natural inclinations towards duty and honor amongst each other, have always been dynamics that could be turned to the uses of the Feminine Imperative.

From The Honor System:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

In a gynocentric social order both the concept of honor and masculine responsibility is set by whatever is ‘correct’ for feminine utility. If that means only ‘real men‘ do something to satisfy women’s imperatives, it implies that men who don’t are ‘false men’. Those men are outside the tribe called ‘men’ as well as being unacceptable for reproduction, intimacy and love.

It also implies that only women have the authority to bestow ‘Manhood’ on men, and then only for performing specific behaviors or believing correct beliefs as set by womankind. It’s as if women uniquely hold the ‘medal of manhood‘ to give exclusively to men who can qualify for her wanton needs. The authority men used to claim innate legitimacy of in the past is now only legitimate when a woman wields it.

Men need to retake this authority and own it as is their birthright once again. I realize that sounds kind of LARPy but it’s the best way I can put it. One thing the Red Pill has made men aware of is the social machinations of the Feminine Imperative. Amongst Traditional Conservative ‘thought leaders’ a popular idea is that we find ourselves in the intersexual conditions we do today because men have dropped the ball. Men have shirked their manly responsibilities and women are the way they are because not enough men care to correct women’s behaviors. This argument fails on two counts. The first is that it presumes women bear no moral or behavioral agency and as such cannot be blamed for their own participation in our social condition. This presumption, I should add, is actually indicative of exactly the manipulation of honor I mentioned above.

And secondly, more importantly, it presumes men hold an authority they simply don’t have. Even claiming masculine authority would smack of misogyny today. Churchy, moralists pretend that men have a headship / authority that our gynocentric social order empirically contradicts. To paraphrase the MGTOWs, your headship counts for shit when all a woman has to do is call 911 and police will physically remove what you think is your authority from the family home, no questions asked. This is a result of the Duluth Model of Feminism which I’ll be covering in an upcoming part of this series on Male Authority, but the short version is feminism’s design is to remove men, maleness, masculinity from our social consciousness and this begins and ends with which gender has an enforceable authority.

There are guys who’ll challenge this idea of female authority. Red Pill thought emphasizes men disconnecting their sense of identity from a female-correct paradigm. In my own work I’ve stressed that the most important aspect of Red Pill awareness is men making themselves their Mental Point of Origin and this necessitates a realigning of oneself as his first priority. It’s easy to make declarations about how your self-worth begins and ends with you and that no woman can influence that image, and in a way that seems liberating. Like you’re taking at least that much authority back for yourself. But it’s another thing entirely to wrestle with a social order that’s now founded on a consolidated female-primary authority.

In the coming series I’ll get more into this question as well as what men can do to take back the authority of assigning manhood. Thanks for reading, more to come.

Reminders of Myself

I’m writing this post on the day before I head off to this year’s 21 Convention and I thought I’d just do something a bit freeform to get a few ideas on the page and let you all know where my head is at these days. I generally don’t make a habit of using The Rational Male as a sounding board for my personal thoughts. Most of what you read here is what I can best describe as crafted essays. Last week’s post was a good example of that. I took about 2 weeks to to write that essay, but the the germ of the idea for building an essay on body language and implied meanings was something I’d had percolating for almost 6 months. When you write about what I do for as long as I have I’ve learned it pays to be thorough, and I enjoy the building process.

Now that I’ve said all that, I’m going to break this rule today and do a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing here now.

One thing I’ve learned since I decided to write intentionally is that I’m never off-duty. I’ve always been an artist and I’ve always kept sketchbooks with me to scribble down ideas for larger work, but it wasn’t until I started really writing that I began to keep notebooks for my posts and then my books; and now my talks. I presently have 4 small notebooks that I put ideas in. I just finished filling one up and now I need another one. I was never that Emo writer kid who was so artsy and self-absorbed he had to write a diary because he thought people must find him fascinating. In fact, I’ve always thought of art as something temporal.

Now this is changed for me. I find it an absolute necessity to keep notebooks with me to capture ideas in. I think my brain has changed somewhat since I began being a ‘serious’ author. My mind now works in a way where I get ideas that don’t stay for long, but the internal conversations I have to flesh out those ideas can get pretty involved. I’ve freaked my wife out on more than one occasion when I got up to take a piss in the middle of the night, had an idea and then had to go write it down knowing that it would fade from memory by the morning. I think I’m kind of torn between being a creative thinker and a deductive thinker as a result of applying myself to writing .

I guess that makes me a writer, but I still don’t know what I am in that respect. I do know I have an obsessive compulsion to write, but not so much to write as an author of books but a capturer of ideas. Occasionally I read about authors’ writing processes and rituals and it sounds really artsy. Honestly, I think a result of the self-publishing revolution is that it created a lot of writers who just wanted to be writers. Like they just revel in the identity and love to say ‘I’m special, I’m a writer‘. The same thing happened in desktop publishing when computers started replacing all the analog ways of graphic design. Everyone you knew was a ‘graphic designer’ because anyone could do it then.

I think it was Stephen King who said writing for him was like excrement. Not in the way that his writing was shit, but rather it was something that just came out of him, something he excreted like hair or fingernails. I think I understand that now. I never set out to be a writer, I’m an ideas man. Sometimes those ideas are great and help change men’s lives. Then sometimes I think maybe I’m a messenger for something that just needs to be conveyed in this day and this time. 

The Rational Male, my first book, just turned 5 years old on October 1st. Granted, it still needs to be cleaned up and I’m in the process of a reedit with the help of two editors now. Nothing will change as far as content is concerned, but lets be honest, the font size needs to be kicked up a couple points and there are a fair amount of grammatical errors that need to be corrected. So, I’m reading back through the whole book these days and in doing so I almost can’t believe that the voice is my own. Although the book was published in 2013 all the material is from essays I wrote as far back as 2002, and a lot of that was from conversations and debates I’d had on SoSuave from back in the day. Re-reading it is like having a conversation with myself from when I was 34 years old.

The book is important in so many ways to so many people now. That’s something I have to keep in mind today. The Rational Male is a living text. It’s not a book you you read once and put on a shelf. Readers keep returning to it when the need to be reminded of a relevant truth that they’re experiencing in life.

A year ago, when I was at the 21 Convention the thing that struck me the most was signing men’s copy’s and seeing how well-worn they were. Every one had liner notes and highlighted in at least 2 different highlighter colors. It was then I realized this book was something more than a self-published book turned out from the print-on-demand mill.

I’m sure I’ll see the same this year and it makes me happy to have been the instrument to bring these truths to men. I still get chills when men tell me it saved their lives or it fundamentally changed them for the better. I re-read my work and think ‘who is this guy?’ I wonder how my grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren, will see what I was about. And this is what concerns me most when I consider the ease with which I could be erased from the online world.

I would be lying to say that recent social events haven’t flustered me. The fact that Roosh’s books could be so casually deleted from all of his distribution sources is unsettling. He wrote about this, prophetically, about five years ago in The Most Insidious Method of Control Never Devised. Roosh has had his bread taken from him. And yes, I understand, his right to ‘free speech’ hasn’t been impinged, he still has the right to say what he thinks, but this is a reminder that for all the high-minded talk about being ‘anti-fragile’ we’re all more fragile than we think.

I don’t know what Roosh’s revenue situation looks like, I know he’s put Return of Kings on indefinite hiatus, but I wonder what men who’ve made the manosphere their sole source of income will do when their ability to generate revenue from it dries up. This is the main reason I advise men against becoming revenue-dependent on the manosphere. It’s too easy to have their convictions compromised for the sake of profit, but it’s also one keystroke away from being deleted by platforms they depend on for that revenue.

My main fear is that the vital work I’ve done with The Rational Male might be casually undone through the ignorant vindictiveness of a feminist critic somehow made an authority over what men should and should not read in digital publishing. My fear is that the men’s lives who might be saved by my book would be prevented access to it. I made a joke on Twitter a few years ago; I said, ‘there will come a day when The Rational Male will have to be read in secret, by candle light among secret societies of men like Christians in Mao’s China had to do. I don’t laugh at that prophecy anymore.

I’ve always encouraged men to buy the physical, print copy of the book. Mainly this is because I’ve always hoped men would in fact discuss it among themselves. It was meant to be a conversation (debate) starter because I’ve always believed in the bottom up approach to making people think in new ways. I want men to physically pass the book on to the next guy they think will need it. I make the least amount on royalties from the print book, but it’s what I think is most important – but also because it is a permanency that digital books cannot insure.

The Red Pill community has grown exponentially since I began writing almost 20 years ago. While I don’t believe we’ve hit critical mass just yet I do think we’re becoming too big to ignore now. The Red Pill forum on Reddit was ‘quarantined’ last week, and unsurprisingly the latent message sent in that act was one that aligned with a pseudo-concern over what an appropriate expression of masculinity is. Ironically, the redirect from the quarantine was linked to the ‘masculinity studies’ department of Stony Brook University – every bit the Vichy male plantation for men to align with the definition of masculinity approved for them by the Feminine Imperative – and led by, the now condemned for sexual assault allegations, Michael Kimmel. 

What the Red Pill reveals is dangerous and threatening to a gynocentric world order. As the #MeToo movement evolves into the opportunistic weapon of social and political control, our online presence and our message stand out in sharp challenge to its false foundations. I can remember when I wrote Fem-Centrism and The Feminine Reality and the hostility those posts generated among critics. It’s always been a man’s world they said; how dare I suggest women were the true power behind the throne. That was 7 years ago. I had a new WordPress blog and although I was semi-well known on SoSuave I was just another blogger who wrote about this new thing called the ‘Red Pill’.

The Gestalt Feminine vs. The Gestalt Masculine

In 2018 the stakes are much higher, the game has changed and the tolerance for challenges to an ideology intrinsic to our feminine-primary social order is at its breaking point. There is now a presumption of authority to go along with the presumptions of entitlement for women and default guilt for men. The very platforms that made our coming together possible are ruled by the world views we’ve always warned against.

I once wrote a post called Appeals to Reason and in it I made a rational case as to why it is never in a good idea for a man to try to reason his way into intimacy or sex with women. Most Beta men subscribe to a very literalist mindset. Our Rational Interpretive process evolved to make men natural, deductive, problem solvers. As such, we evolved different strategies and different communication methods apart from those of women. We believe in the statistics, the empirical data, the proven methods, the ‘science’ behind the processes to make informed decisions. We prioritize information when we communicate.

To the contrary, women prioritize the context of communication – they feel the communication before they apply a rational interpretation to what’s been communicated. Even when confronted with a succinctly reason position founded on empirical facts, their first priority is to personalize how that data makes them feel. Their Emotional Interpretive Process is their evolved default.

What I see happening today on a larger meta-social scale is a collective gestalt of the masculine trying to assert their deductive reasoning to assess the disposition of the meta-female gestalt which is firmly founded in how issues of monumental social importance make the whole of the feminine feel.

In Appeals to Reason I used a guy’s petition of women as an example of this. The kid had created a list of questions for women to fill out as to why they didn’t want to go out with him on a date and to assess what it is that women want. This is classic male deductive reasoning. For millennia men have tried to apply reason to dealing with women only to find themselves confounded by what women say and what they do. The same is now true in a social scope and about decisions that have global importance today.

However, in today’s scenario it is women who presume an authority that is just on the cusp of totalitarianism. It’s like we’re collectively, as Beta, Blue Pill conditioned men, attempting to logically deduce what it is women want in order to satisfy their desire for a total authority. And when that woman doesn’t get what she wants, when men try to reason her into bed, she reacts like a violent child having a tantrum. She says what she feels, not what she needs.

And the gestalt of men turn on one another and blame the other for setting her off. “If only you assholes would give her what she wants we wouldn’t be in this mess” they say. Then to make matters worse we pander to her tantrums, we believe her insanity, we take her feelings as facts and the other half of the gestalt masculinity wonders why the other can’t see the real story while the other is swept up in female hysterics.

Then the gestalt female is pandered to so thoroughly that we come to the point that we follow their Emotional Interpretive process as the only measure of legitimate discussion. This is where we are today, only, to compound things, we’ve collectively approved for the gestalt feminine a universally effective means of destroying the parts of the gestalt masculine who would dare to challenge their feelings, their emotional priorities. We’ve given the feminine the power to wish us away to the cornfield if we upset the child.

And so here we are, at the figurative mercy of the gestalt feminine (and their Vichy male “allies”) keeping our collective heads down for fear that they’ll deny us our bread if we upset the insane, collective female Id.

There will be more to this essay in my address at the 21 Convention this Friday. I will also be doing various videos from Orlando on my Periscope, Twitter and possibly my new YouTube channel. I hope to see you there.

Primordial Archetypes

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she does all this with a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Me Vampire, Fuck Me Werewolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sense of Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Need to Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of the Alpha Female

On last Saturday’s Red Man Group we took a call from a woman who has apparently just discovered the “red pill school of thought” and looked up what ever convoluted definitions she could find from the ‘normie web’ to better understand it. For context, the whole exchange began around the 2:04:00 mark here, but the bit I want to dissect I’ve cued up to 2:09 in the above video. The Red Pill as a praxeology is often something most uninitiated people don’t have the patience to really want to understand. So when they’re confronted with a Red Pill truth that conflicts with some ego-invested belief they often just resort to what I call “point and sputter” – they spit out some school yard taunt, tell you how unbelievable it is anyone could ever believe such a thing in this day and then move along to whatever ideological site they’re comforted by.

Credit where it’s due, this woman (and I apologize for not getting her name) at the very least was prompted to ask some questions about how we come to whatever misattributed ideas she read were what it is we think. Listen to the whole exchange for context. In the beginning I was asked the standard “what do you tel your daughter about all of this?” as if this is going to somehow shame me back down to earth, but the part she was most distraught over was the idea that “women are only valuable for what they look like”.

My response to her was based on an essay I wrote 4 years ago titled Separating Values. In that piece I tried to outline how women today have trouble separating their sexual market value from their self-perceived personal worth:

Conflating Values

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

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

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

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

Listening to this woman’s concerns, it’s a fairly common refutation and one we come to expect from a mindset that presumes men callously objectify women out of hand, or due to their being taught to be so by a chauvinistic toxic masculinity. Women cling to this because it sounds right and reinforces the victimhood narrative that defines the collective identity of the Sisterhood. So when they read it or see it openly embraced, or spoken about men in a positive context it’s confirmation of an offense they want to believe is endemic in men. Thus, we get the “literally shaking”, sound of a quavering voice.

However, all of this gets in the way of women really understanding that they’ve been conditioned to conflate their personal worth with their sexual market value. As I mentioned in my response, a woman can be a wonderful humanitarian, a great mother, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone who adds value to the depth and breadth of humankind, but it won’t make her look any better in a bikini. And that is where sexual market value starts for women when it comes to men’s arousal and attraction. For as long as I’ve been writing this blog I’ve tried to explain this in as simple a way as possible; men and women are different. Part of our differences is that what constitutes sexual market value for one sex is not an equal evaluation for the other. For as much as the equalist mindset pervades our social consciousness, the reality is men and women are different in many fundamental ways.

One reason Red Pill awareness in men gets vilified by women is because it nakedly exposes, discusses and develops sexual and life strategies around some very Darwinistic and unflattering realities of intersexual dynamics based on those differences. But exposing these differences is only offensive to this social order because there is a presumption of a blank-slate equalism that’s been embedded into every aspect of our gender understanding for almost 70 years now. This offensiveness is less about the actual nuts and bolts of evolution, biology and psychological differences between men and women, but more so it’s about the ego-invested idea that men and women should be blank-slate, functional equals in all respects. Even this presumption is a horse-shit cover story for the latent purpose of feminism floating the lie of “equality” – fundamentally disempowering men so women can aspire to be their masters in various ways.

The woman from our discussion expressed this barely containable angst that men only value her as a sexual object, and it’s important to suss out the reasoning for this confusion and rage. As I mentioned, the problem women have is an inability to separate their sexual market value from their personal value a ‘basic human being‘. A quote I’m known for is “virtue is anti-seductive.” No guy ‘virtues’ a woman into bed, and while I get push back for devaluing the importance of virtue occasionally, what I don’t get is any disagreement from men or women on that point. Virtue, intelligence, honor, duty, wisdom and any number of other esoteric features that would make a man a terrific human being do nothing (or sometimes work against him) for his raw visceral sexuality that women are aroused by. For men, however, these traits and many more will definitely add to his attractiveness as a long term prospect for women.

In men, affluence, status, intelligence, improvisation, creativity, ambition, drive, perseverance, humor, positive-conventional masculinity, and many more aspects make this man an attractive choice for a long term relationship with women. These are attributes that contribute to a man’s sexual market value, but they are incomplete without a raw, visceral physical component. Hypergamy serves two masters, Alpha seed and Beta need – and as such it hates the one and loves the other depending on what a woman’s most pressing necessity happens to be at that point in her life. Women have an innate, limbic understanding of what makes a man a complete package – a great catch.

Where this and most other women fail is that their own Fempowerment conditioning teaches them that what makes a man attractive, what makes his SMV appealing to women must necessarily be what makes for her own personal value and sexual market value. The reason this woman is shaking here is because this conditioning has convinced her and generations of women to build a life predicated on a fallacy: What makes her a “good person” should necessarily make her attractive and arousing to men. This is a great falsehood that is the root of many of the gender conflicts and misunderstandings we see around us today.

Gendered Differences in Attraction

The things that make a woman’s sexual market value high are not the same things make her sense of personal worth high. Yet, this is exactly what the Feminine Imperative conditions women to believe and seeks to shame men for not complying with this fallacy. When men opt for younger, hotter, tighter at all ages of their own maturity, the visceral message is clear – it makes no difference what a woman’s personal value is when it comes to sexual valuation. Where women fall short is they presume that men cannot appreciate women for anything but their sexual value.

This is an interesting dynamic since the Imperative teaches women never to implicitly do anything for a man.

The prime directive of feminism for the past 50 years has been founded on women striving to achieve the ideal of the Strong Independent Woman® (SIW). This SIW ideal is the carrot that gets the mules to pull the cart. That ideal is never fully attainable because if it were it would make an end state for feminism a realizable goal rather than the self-perpetuating social mechanism it is. The SIW ideal is intentionally ambiguous, but the concept is based on selling women the idea that they can not only “have it all” but they can be it all too. The ‘independence’ feminism sells predicated on being a self-sustaining, self-satisfying, autonomous ‘thing’ that doesn’t need for anything. A woman is every bit as good a feminine role model as she is a masculine one, ergo, she has no need for men beyond the physical aspect. In fact, an independence from men, from any form of dependency on men, has been part of the feminist charter since Seneca Falls in 1848.

From a Red Pill perspective, and in my opinion, this independence from men has been the single most damaging aspect of feminism in its history. Men and women evolved to be complements to the other and in evolutionary terms are far stronger together than apart. Each compensates for the one’s innate weaknesses with the other’s innate strengths. Feminism preaches two lies in this respect – the first being that a woman can “have it all”, but also she can be an autonomous being with no intrinsic needs beyond what she can provide for or address herself. The lie is that she “don’t need no man” when a hundred thousand years of evolution says different. Men and women need each other, but it’s feminism that’s selling the lie that they don’t.

The ironic part about this socialized lie is that in emancipating women from the ‘dependency’ of men feminism has founded the basis of ‘having it all’ on how closely a woman can emulate a man. The definition of a successful Strong Independent Woman is how closely she can replicate the success of men. This ideal for SIW success is based on a masculine ideal. As feminism has refocused women’s goals on these masculine ideals it has systematically altered the definition of femininity to align with its ideal of ‘success’.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

As part of that new masculine ideal of female success, along came the concept of the Alpha Female. I’ve read dozens of articles about this fantasy creature; how she’s a boss who takes no shit and turns companies around from the brink of bankruptcy by virtue of being female. A woman of the future who emulates and exceeds the successes of any apex-male CEO of those sexist Fortune 500 companies. Even if she’s not a high powered exec, the match (literally) of any man, women still love to imagine themselves in this “alpha” role in their own little worlds.

“I’m an Alpha Female, and maybe I’m not a jet setter, but I’m a Type A personality and as such I’m headstrong, a go-getter woman who knows what she wants.”

This sloganized mental model is part of the new Strong Independent Woman® costume that feminism is selling to women today.

If you’re a woman who’s bought into the Confidence Porn narrative that’s so popular today, allow me to ruin that image for you. There is no such thing as an “alpha” female – at least not in the respect of the idealistic Fempowered fantasy you think applies to you. The Feminine Imperative likes to convince women that they are ‘Alpha’ using that same masculine model definitions I detailed above here. The Strong Independent Woman meme only holds up insofar as it emulates masculine success and a masculine defined concept of ‘Alpha’. By this definition every woman has a potential to be an ‘alpha’ female in her own little way. Like I said, the Confidence Porn women gobble up is so tasty because it’s so achievable – all you have to do is cop the “I’m the boss, I’m a Type A person” attitude, put some foam inserts in the shoulders of your ‘power suit’ and you too can be Alpha because you say so and you walk the same walk as an Alpha Male.

The push for female-primacy has conditioned generations of women to expect an entitled, default respect, and a deference to their authority from men. They’re told at every opportunity from the time they’re 5 years old that they can do anything, have it all, be it all, and they’re the “natural leaders of the future”. By extension this leads women to the Alpha Female trope.

Ironically, the same people who love to ridicule the idea of ‘Alpha Males’ completely accept the concept of an Alpha Female. They’ll make funny videos ridiculing the Red Pill for using ‘alpha’ as a referential term – “These jokers think they’re wolves or Silver Back Gorillas, hur hur!” – but they’ll eagerly embrace the idea of an ‘alpha’ female. That conditioned deference of the feminine makes it believable; and they like the idea that identifying with women’s delusions of empowerment might get them laid.

Attribution Bias Error

The error that women and feminism make in the ‘Alpha Female’ respect is an attribution bias error. Women are conditioned to believe that if they value the aspects of what makes men attractive, what makes them a good pairing, that men must also value those traits in women. If status, power, social proof, affluence, careerism, drive, etc. is what gets them hot for men (in the long term) then possessing those traits themselves must also be attractive in the reverse. Unfortunately for women, they’re painfully (but slowly) learning that men and women are in fact different and the lie of egalitarian equalism has essentially cost them a future with a husband, children and family living.

In order to counter this harsh reality an industry in biotech egg-freezing has sprung up around the very real female insecurity that these confident Alpha Women wont find a suitable man to start a family with now that they are well past the Wall. Feminine-primary society is capitalizing on this fear.

But the reverse is true; men’s sexual selection criteria is far more simplistic than women’s. From an evolved, naturalist perspective men select women based on looks and sexual availability – and on a subconscious level women know this, yet they rationalize that men should be interested in their coequal professionalism, status and any number of intrinsic qualities they believe they possess. The root of this misunderstanding is once again the socialized lie of egalitarian, blank-slate equalism. Only now women expect that if they invest themselves in the same pursuits as Alpha men that this should compensate for their lack of physical appeal. If men and women are functional equals what defines male dominance should also define female dominance. Evolution says differently.

The woman on the left (Reneé Sommerfield) is the true Alpha female by the standards of evolutionary realities. The woman on the right (Sheryl Sandberg) is what our gynocentric social order would have men believe should be considered an ‘alpha’ female. This is the conflict that’s at the heart of so many manufactured crises of attraction for women and the failure of their long-term plans to have a family.

The Alpha Female is really the woman who best embodies what men’s evolved, biological imperatives determine what makes her an attractive breeding and long-term mate choice. Men’s criteria is very simple; fitness, youth, assertive sexuality, playfulness, conventional femininity and genuine desire to please him. Beyond this, submission, respect, nurturing (potential mothering qualities), a natural deference to male authority, humility, admiration and an unobligated desire to recognize that man as her complementary partner are just some of the long-term attributes that make a woman someone a man might want to invest himself in a family with.

Unfortunately all of this criteria is counter to the message ‘alpha‘ Females are taught are valuable today. They are taught that anything a woman might do for the expressed pleasure of a man is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman® meme. The presumption is that a desire to meet any of this criteria is a failure on the part of a woman who demands to be the ‘equal’ of a man. Even acknowledging the innate, complementary natures of men and women is an affront to the equalist narrative. Furthermore, any man who would base (much less express) his own decision making criteria as such is shamed via social conventions. The narrative is that he must be needy, or threatened by a “strong woman” or he must want this woman to be his Mommy substitute. All of this is a social mechanic meant to force fit that natural complementary criteria into the box of egalitarian equalism.

Value Added

I don’t write for a female readership per se. In fact, I don’t really direct my writing towards any audience, but in this instance I want to end here with a message for my female readers. Take this message to the bank: the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, not adversarial. But that adversarial feeling you get when you read me describing some unflattering aspect of female nature is the product of your own Blue Pill conditioning that’s taught you the lie of egalitarianism-as-female-empowerment. If you truly want to ‘empower‘ yourselves set aside your self-importance, look inside yourselves and ask this question –

What is it about me that a man would find attractive from a naturalistic perspective?

What do I possess that a man would truly believe is Value Added?

That may feel a bit counterintuitive to you, but understand that the reason this introspection is alien or offensive to you is because you’ve been conditioned to believe that your masculine qualities are what men should find attractive about you. You turn this offense back on men and make it their fault for not finding your ‘alpha femaleness’ the root of their attraction to you. Is the idea of changing yourself, to add value to your package, for the pleasure of a man a source of anger for you? Why is that?

I see far too many otherwise beautiful women who destroy themselves on the lie of the ‘alpha’ female and a never ending struggle to perfect an equalist archetype in themselves. They rail on about infantile men, or bemoan that men are afraid to ask them out, or ask “Where are all the good guys nowadays?” Understand that these efforts to shame men into finding something attractive about you based on your masculine criteria for attraction will always fail; leaving you a lonely childless middle aged wreck all because you refused to accept that you need to be someone worth marrying.

Men and women are better together than they are apart. We evolved to be complements to the other. But, feminism, the Feminine Imperative and an endemic Fempowerment culture have taught you to believe “you are enough”, you are complete, you don’t need a man because you can satisfy all of your own needs. This is the most damning lie ever perpetrated on womankind – that you can be it all – and only when it’s too late do women realize that they’ve been had.

Blue Pill Trauma

Something I’m asked a lot is,…

“How do you unplug a guy from the Matrix? All of this Red Pill awareness about intersexual dynamics has radically changed / saved my life for the better!  I want to let my friends, my brothers, my dad, know about how this knowledge will help them in their relationships, with the women their involved with, and dealing with women in life in general.

This stuff is SO IMPORTANT. But I run into such resistance from even my close friends and family. What can I do? I want to give these guys your book and discuss it rationally with them. I want to pass on this awareness like you encourage, but it’s like they’re just unwilling to see the truth. They don’t even want to talk about it. They just want to persist in doing shit that’s frustrating them and dealing with women from a blue pill perspective. Rollo, how do I help my brother?”

There was a time when I was a moderator on the SoSuave forums when we would discuss exactly this question. The frustration of knowing that your brother or your best friend could be living such a better life if only they would open their eyes and see how they’ve been trapped in a way of thinking about intersexual relations that they were conditioned to accept from a very early age. Believe me, I still get frustrated today. I see stories about how a guy like the one in the discussion above here is on the verge of despondency or suicide because they’re unable or unwilling to consider anything outside the box that the Blue Pill will allow for.

That’s a pretty serious thought. Blue Pill conditioning, and a guy’s capacity to break away from it, is literally a matter of life and death. Now, imagine you’re a Red Pill aware man and you have the experience of seeing your best friend or brother’s descent into relationship madness only because his ego-investments in the Old Set of Books wont permit him to think any other way. They’d rather put a noose around their neck than reconsider their investments in how things ought to be between men and women.

She’s My Everything

We’re going to come back to this question later in this essay, but now I’d like you to have a look at the IM exchange I had a reader make me aware of on Twitter this week. I apologize for the resolution; the tweet was deleted not long after I commented on it and I had to rely on screen captures. What you’re looking at here is an exchange between a very invested Blue Pill guy and the thought process guys like this typically go through when the woman they’ve made their ‘everything’ wants them gone. There’s a lot going on in this and I wanted to parse it out here. When you’re Red Pill aware for any length of time it can sometimes be confusing to see the thought process that Blue Pill conditioning predisposes a guy to. The Red Pill Lens is one of the gifts (and curses) of having unplugged, and internalizing the awareness can make us somewhat confused or jaded to the experiences of guys who are still plugged in and trying to make their blinded understanding of intersexual dynamics work for them.

“Can this guy really not see why this girl wants to get away from him?” From a Red Pill perspective we might think this guy is an idiot for not seeing what he’s doing. It’s plain as day for us so their must be something wrong with him, right? Usually, the only thing wrong is that these guys’ Blue Pill conditioning has limited them to understanding their situations from that old set of books – the rule set that they believe (like a religion) that ‘quality women’ acknowledge and play by too. Lets try to put this jadedness aside for a moment.

[…] I can’t take my mind off of you no matter what I do and yesterday I literally cried for an hour in my room because I didn’t know what to do. I just really need you in my life and it kills me to know that I have messed our relationship up,…

This kid’s (it reads like he’s an adolescent) whole exchange is riddled with self-incrimination. This is an intrinsic part of Blue Pill conditioning – the guy is always at fault in any break up. Even with his now ex’s admission of her own complicity in their split, he’ll have none of it. If a relationship, a marriage, fails it is always because a guy wasn’t invested enough; even if she cheated on him the Blue Pill conditioned mind will only accept his complicity in her looking outside the relationship. I should also add that this is an integral part of the Promise Keepers mentality as well as the ‘Oprah-Marriage Counselor Approved’ notion that “relationships take a lot of work” and it’s always a man’s responsibility to qualify himself for a woman’s intimacy by maintaining that work.

As a result, the Blue Pill mind automatically defaults to self-blame and looks to find ways to negotiate some kind of new work-program that will ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ relationship he somehow caused. Blue Pill conditioned men are still men, and as such they default to the deductive reasoning that we’re largely predisposed to. So in that Blue Pill state it seems like logic to look for solutions that will put the relationship back together again. This is how Blue Pill men’s minds work; they have a set of (Old Books) rules they believe everyone is, or ought to be, playing by and since he also believes the lie of coequal agency (blank-slate) between men and women he thinks a woman’s desire and intimacy can be deductively bargained with.

He realizes his failing and will be sure to correct it. But that’s not how all this works. In fact, it’s this very acknowledgement that only reinforces this woman’s decision to leave him. Hypergamy is rooted in doubt, and it turns out he is as Beta and optionless as her Hypergamous hindbrain suspected. His reaction to her confirms it.

[…] how can you just cut me out of your life so quickly? I want to make things better and work on our relationship because I know what it can be, why don’t you want to work on it?

I’m trying to avoid most of the clingy emotional shit in this exchange. Blue Pill guys will pepper in their emotive state even in the best of times in a relationship, but when they’re facing a break up, that’s when all the stuff he’s been taught about vulnerability being a strength turns into a huge liability for him. Not to mention it disgusts the woman leaving him.

Here we see the standard Blue Pill bewilderment over why this woman he’s deeply invested in can so casually blow him off and move on. Isn’t she playing by the same rulebook he’s been playing by since he learned to dutifully put women as his mental point of origin? I linked my War Brides essay in his quote above because this is the nuts and bolts reason as to how women can, and often do, move on so quickly. It is literally part of women’s preinstalled mental firmware to have the capacity to turn on a dime with their emotions.

Next he makes the Blue Pill appeals to Relational Equity and declares his willingness to ‘work on the relationship’ in order to fix it. In a breakup this ‘work on the relationship’ narrative works against women; particularly if the guy they’re leaving is overly invested in equalism. He’s been taught that “open communication is the key to any healthy relationship®” so he’s confused as to why his coequal ‘soul mate’ wouldn’t want to work on things and patch it up. When things are good the ‘work on things’ narrative is a benefit for women getting the things they want, but when she wants to leave a Blue Pill guy (usually because she wants to open herself to better Hypergamous options) it’s a leash around her neck. Why doesn’t she want to ‘work on the relationship’?

This is really what defines his outlook on this breakup, but he can’t see that it’s what his Blue Pill conditioning has embedded in his ego. He is incapable of interpreting his situation in any other way.

So, yeah, it gets worse. Now we discover that this guy has done exactly what I explained most Blue Pill men do when they define themselves by their ego-investments: the Blue Pill kills their capacity not to just achieve their dreams, but to have dreams or ambitions at all. We have a guy whose dreams center on being the “perfect boyfriend”; the guy who’ll literally do anything to make it work. A ‘good relationship’ is his highest aspiration, so when that woman isn’t playing her part – playing by the ‘do anything to make it work‘ rule set – the response is usually to find fault in himself, because to find fault in his ‘soul mate’ is to question the whole Blue Pill mental apparatus.

But still, she won’t play ball, so there are 3 possibilities: The first and go-to reason is that he must’ve fucked something up somehow. The next is that there’s something wrong with her because she’s not playing by the same rules he was conditioned to believe women play by. And lastly there’s something wrong with his entire ego-invested Blue Pill outlook on the whole rule set. That last one is the most difficult and unlikely conclusion a guy will ever come to.

Out Come the Knives

More often than not this is the stage at which the woman involved begins building her defenses against the attacks her ex Beta boyfriend is lobbing at her in an effort to explain why “working on the relationship” isn’t solving his fear of having to be single (and optionless) again. You’ve got a Blue Pill conditioned guy who believes he’s done everything by the books and is now very confused that his commitment to ‘making it work‘ hasn’t earned him the Relational Equity that any coequal, co-rational, woman should count towards his value to her. Whatever he did that was ‘wrong’ should be paid for by that equity. And anyway, the rules clearly state that open communication and negotiation are what’s expected from her too, right?

Only, that ‘equity’ isn’t protecting him from a Hypergamy that can’t afford for her to spend a minute longer with him. But he doesn’t know this, so, like any deductive Beta he pleads his case and this is what sets off her defensiveness.

Even the sweetest, most unassuming wallflower of a girl has her ego intimately linked with Hypergamy. Optimizing Hypergamy is her Darwinistic prime directive in life. So when just the notion of her being forced to compromise that optimization looks like a possibility she rebels with the intensity of a survival instinct level of self-preservation. There was a time when social controls were expected to buffer the worst exploits women would use to optimize Hypergamy. Arranged marriages, social and religious conventions, peer pressure, etc. were all, in some part, a means to controlling this survival instinct, gut level anxiety – and instituting a degree of control over Hypergamy by men and society.

Today, in our post Sexual Revolution dystopia, the idea that a woman might be personally or socially expected to compromise her Hypergamous stakes in life is met with that reflexive, feral, survival instinct. This is why women bristle at the idea that they might ever need to “settle” on Mr. Good Enough once they reach their sexual market expiration date. It’s like telling their hindbrains that they need to consider spending the rest of their lives invested in children that aren’t as good as they might be had they held out a little longer. Hypergamy bets a woman’s life on a future with a given man, so yes, it’s very muck a survival instinct.

All of this gets compressed into the hostility a woman feels when a ‘lesser man’, one confirmed to be unworthy of that lifetime bet, essentially tells her she wrong for betting on him and then removing her bet. That feral response comes at him full force, but only after she’s absolved her complicity in playing along with his Blue Pill paradigm. She needs to be able to explain to her ego that she did try to ‘let him down easy’ before she ripped off the bandaid in one go. Now he’s “crazy”, “needy”, has “mommy issues” is “insecure” and various other rationales as needed to keep her ego blameless for what she really knew was his dedication to the Blue Pill.

He’s Blue Pill, but He’s Crazy

I’m sure there are men and women alike reading this and thinking, well, this guy is genuinely disturbed. Maybe he’s just an Incel who made good for a while and then his codependency surfaced and she wisely ejected from the relationship. That seems like an obvious take, but I’m going to argue that all Blue Pill conditioned guys are this guy. That life-long conditioning plays on men’s innate Idealism and fosters exactly his way of thinking. When women are your conditioned Mental Point of Origin, rearranging your life to accommodate “working on the relationship” is a natural progression. Getting Zeroed Out is a lot easier when you’re taught to believe that you literally cannot live without a woman.

Finally, we come to the point where this guy – maybe the friend you’ve been trying to unplug before something like this happened – is confronted with staying the course, self-righteously accepting his dumping and clings even more so to his Blue Pill Lens on the world, or he develops some introspect and confronts the idea that his outlook on the set of rules he’s been playing by is not valid. The most common way men find the Red Pill community is via an experience like this. Unfortunately, it often requires a significant life trauma to shake the sleeping man awake, but having your outlook on intersexual dynamics challenged is the only way most men will ever be open to anything contradictory.

When men ask me, “Rollo, my friend, brother, dad, are heading towards something awful, how do I get them to realize they need to unplug?” I have to say wait for the right time. There are some guys who will make this transition on their own and all it might take is your handing him my book and talking about it. There are some guys who will come to it because what they’re doing isn’t bearing fruit in their personal lives and they become Red Pill aware because circumstances pushed them that way. But most men are Betas. Most of them have lived through an extensive conditioning that put them right where this guy is, and most of them will fight you tooth and nail for trying to convince them they were raised the wrong way.

It’s sometimes just easier to ghost on these men, but what do you do when it’s your brother who White Knights at any opportunity in spite of being run through the machine of a Blue Pill social order?  My best advice is to wait for your moments. A lot of people will tell you that it’s manipulative to lay the Red Pill on a guy who’s at his most vulnerable, but it requires a stripping away of all the Blue Pill pretense and mind-fuckery to really make a cogent case and unplug the guy.

I would always advise that you stay honest, open and forgiving of the guy. Most likely he’s told you how fucked up or misogynistic your world view is in his White Knighting efforts in the past. It’s like he ridiculed you for thinking you could ‘educate him’. You have to let that go when you make your case for Red Pill awareness. It would be better to ghost him than to be vindictive, gloating or tell him “I toldja so.” Let him tell you you told him so when he thanks you later.

As an aside here I need to draw readers’ attention to just how vulnerable this shit makes Blue Pill, Beta mindset men to the predations of what I call “Success Porn” brokers. One of the most fucked up outcomes of understanding how Blue Pill idealism affect men is the desire to capitalize on this weakness by Purple Pill life-coaching hacks. One in particular is RSD’s (Real Social Dynamics) new “get me a girlfriend game” program that, in my opinion, plays directly on this hopeful Blue Pill “make it work” idealism.

“Life Coaches” see this neediness as a perfect niche to sell Blue Pill dreams back to guys who want to cling to their Blue Pill security blankets in Red Pill awareness. How miraculous would it seem to think you’re Red Pill savvy enough to make all your old Blue Pill dreams – the ones you went through hell to disabuse yourself of – come true. Hacks like this are too happy to ruin your life for you in rekindling that fantasy as long as you buy the premier edition of their “program”. Caveat emptor.

 

Love and Ambition

I’m a psychotherapist working with couples, especially men who get left by their wives. I’ve studied your material for over a year now and the hypergamy stuff is dead on. I just wanted to share and maybe talk with you about the red pill rage that results — women love opportunistically yes, but many men who comment on your material are missing a component I believe. And it’s not one I’ve heard you allude to much either.. When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship. When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

I had this sent to me recently. It’s actually a pretty standard trope for Trad-Con women who want to justify their leaving a husband or having left an old lover/baby-daddy. They like to pretend they’re ‘red pill’ and so the only men who might qualify for their expired sexual market value will be Red Pill men who meet their new qualifications. One thing I’m seeing more and more of in this sub-section of the manosphere (really femosphere) is aged-out divorcé women who want to rebrand the ‘red pill’ to justify their unmarried, unpaired, state in the new sexual marketplace. As you might imagine, their solipsism gets combined with what they convert into a convenient rationale about what Red Pill men ought to be like. The lack of ‘real men’, real ‘red pill’ men is ostensibly why they’re still single – no man is actually ‘red pill’ enough to satisfy their hamstering and thus, it’s not they who have the problem, but rather the men who lack the balls to live up to those expectations.

If this sounds familiar – like maybe a feminist spouted off a version of it – you’re right. I wrote about this rationalization back in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, Hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” – an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

Red Pill Women – A Convenient Rationale

I wrote this back in 2012. Some of my earliest posts were about predicting exactly this phenomenon in the future. The more Red Pill aware a woman is – or I should say, the more she consciously acknowledges it – the greater the need will be to find fault in men for not living up to what they redefine as ‘red pill’ canon. The more widespread Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics becomes, and the more accepted it is, the more it will serve as an alibi for women trying to rebuild a life they destroyed themselves. It becomes a Red Pill man’s ‘duty’ to forgive their indiscretions and help them recover too.

Over the years Dalrock has gone into how women detonate their marriages as a result of divorce porn fantasies. I’m not sure he really dissects the aftermath of their divorces. And this is only one way in which women may find themselves single around middle age. In Preventive Medicine I detail how women go through at least to periods of crisis level Hypergamous doubt during a marriage. Women’s prerequisites for attraction (not arousal) shifts radically once she reaches the Epiphany Phase (29-31). She becomes far more compromising in terms of physicality in exchange for aspects of a man she finds desirable for long-term prospects of security. Whereas she may have only dated banged guys 1-2 inches taller than herself in her Party Years, now she’s willing to entertain the idea of banging dating a guy slightly shorter than herself so long as he has a capacity for success and provisioning for her.

This is an interesting phase to pick apart because it’s likely the first time in a woman’s life that she’s considering a relationship with a guy based on transactional sex as opposed to the prime directive of validational sex she’s been pursuing for most of her Party Years (18-26). For the first time her long-term attraction is based on different aspects of a man’s Burden of Performance.

During the Epiphany Phase a woman plays a complex game of internalized mental gymnastics. Her hindbrain understands that her sexual market value has been decaying for at least a couple of years prior to this conscious recognition of it. The enjoyment of the Party Years has to be weighed against the fact that she’s progressively losing the attention of the men she would like to have ‘enthusiastic’ validational sex with, and the necessity of a long-term security with a long-term partner. Thus, the rationalization engine kicks into overdrive. She must convince herself that the less exciting (arousing) but better provisioning guy who’s happy to have her at 30 represents the type of guy she ‘should‘ have been with all along.

This is a self-bullshitting contrivance of course, but in her mind the guy who she’s marrying or pairing long term with must be an example of a ‘good prospect’. This is when she does the self-conditioning of turning her necessity into a virtue. She was “so crazy in college, but now she’s matured and not like that anymore.” Or she’s “Getting right with God” or she’s “Learned her lesson in dating banging those Bad Boys” who’ve characterized her intimate life up until this point.

Those are the easy self-contrivances; what’s more difficult is convincing her hindbrain (that desperately wants the exciting validational sex with the Bad Boy) that the unexciting ‘Good Guy’ is really what’s best for her. This is where women like to rearrange what’s really important to them in a man.

This is the internal conflict that takes place in the Epiphany Phase, but what happens to the woman who never gets to consolidate on the ‘Good Guy’? For a variety of reasons (mostly overvalued evaluation of their SMV) more and more women find themselves ‘never marrieds’ and/or they follow the timeline in Preventive Medicine and find themselves divorced of their own doing. In either case, women still work through a similar series of self-rationalizations with respect to what they’re looking for, and what they feel they are entitled to, in a man around 38 to 45, sometimes as late as 50.

And this is where the Red Pill feeds that female entitlement schema. The logic goes like this:

If I’m a Red Pill woman and I agree with all of these Red Pill men who, despite all my misgivings, align with my (self-defined and sanitized) definition of what it means to be “red pill”, then these men owe it to me to unplug from their Blue Pill delusions and see me for the jewel in the rough that I really am.

I think the time a woman is most likely to discover she’s a “Red Pill Woman” is conveniently at the point in her life when she’s at her most necessitous. You will almost never find a girl of 22 who’d want to identify as a Trad-Con “Red Pill” woman – the incentives to do so simply don’t exist at this age. The fact that it is predominantly Traditional Conservative women who are either just pre-Wall or post-Wall, single-mothers, never married spinsters, divorcés or married-to-lesser-Betas who wish to redefine ‘Red Pill’ to use as a litmus test for the type of men they believe they’re entitled to is no coincidence.

Message to the ladies: Men don’t owe you shit. If you happen upon a man who shares your entitlement belief-set, a man willing to forgive your past indiscretions and marry you despite a ruthless marriage/divorce industrial complex arrayed against him, then thank whatever God you pray to and fuck that guy’s brains out to keep him happy, but don’t pretend it’s because either you or he is “Red Pill”. The fact that he would entertain the idea of a relationship with you disqualifies him from being “Red Pill”.

If you find yourself single, never-married at 38 and it “just never worked out for you” it’s time you look past your solipsism and find some real introspect. The problem begins and ends with you.

Love and Opportunism

Now, all that said, the ‘psychotherapist‘ who sent me this does have some legitimate points.

When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship.

First of all this is flat out false; I’ve written several posts that illustrate exactly this perspective. From Setting the Rules:

Once a woman understands the gravity and legitimacy of your purpose / passion, only then can she come to appreciate the significance of you foregoing or postponing the dictates of that purpose for her. She will never feel more important to you than when you (occasionally) lift her above that legitimate, verified purpose.

Women will never appreciate a relationship that is a Man’s greatest ambition.

That’s an old (obscure?) post I wrote some time ago, but the basic principle is that a man must be fearless in his pursuit of his passions both before and after he’s entered into some kind of committed exclusivity. In Acing the Test I point out that women tend to shit test for different things while single and when in an LTR. In a long term relationship these test are characterized by the need to quell the Hypergamous doubt that she paired with a guy who is, or has the potential for competency. In other words her Hypergamous hindbrain wants to know it made its best ‘bet’ on you.

And while that’s all fine and well, her hindbrain’s insecurity wars with the need for you to retain your ambition and your being emotionally available for her. When these two aspects come into conflict it is up to a man to retain the world, the Frame, he’s established in which she feels comfortable and yet uncomfortable enough to know he’s competent to be powerful in directing his own course in life.

When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

Again, this is a perfect illustration of the differences in the concepts men and women each independently hold when it comes to love. Men love Idealistically, women love Opportunistically and this quote spells this out in no uncertain terms – in fact it’s so ironic I’m not sure the woman relating this to me even realizes what she’s doing. Women intimately associate a man’s ambitiousness, his drive for mastery and power, his want for dominance, with her Opportunistic concept of love. She’s correct here, when men get lazy women feel discarded. However, this is because a man contenting himself with how things are and dropping all ambition confirms what her Hypergamous nature fears most – he’s really incompetent.

This is especially salient when a man trades his ambitions (assuming he had them) for a relationship with her. This reverses the Burden of Performance to her and as a result she feels unloved because her concept of love is founded on his capacity for competence. She feels unloved because opportunism defines her concept of love; and he only confirms his worthlessness by abdicating his Burden of 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.

A lot of this relates to the standard Mental Point of Origin conversation.

Blue Pill men are conditioned to think two things:

1 When they get married their troubles are over with respect to the sexual marketplace. Because they believe women share their own idealistic concept of love for love’s sake that it shouldn’t matter how they perform now. The Burden of Performance, if they ever accepted it, gets replaced by the idea that she’ll love him “for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer” and therefore he doesn’t consider it as a prerequisite for her love and intimacy.

What he fails to ever grasp or accept is that men and women have different concepts and approaches of love. His Pollyanna Blue Pill Disney preconditioning leads him to believe in happily ever after and his failings and vulnerability and fears will not only be accepted by his wife, but will be a source of their marriages strength and intimacy. This is exactly why the transvaluation of vulnerability-is-strength is so dangerously wrong in modern LTRs.

2 This is the husband who lives in a Blue Pill fantasy land, so rattling his cage about the visceral realities of Hypergamy and telling him his wife never shared what he believes is a mutual, universal concept of love is like telling him God is dead. When Beta/Blue Pill husbands enter into marriage their singular goal is ensuring his wife’s satisfaction and happiness. He still suffers from never making himself his Mental Point of Origin and making womankind his reflexive mental priority.

He makes her his world. If he had a sense of his Burden of Performance he diminishes or replaces his own ambitions with the ambition of making his wife ‘his world’ – and God forbid anyone tell him anything counter to the “you gotta work to keep things fresh” mantra he learned about marriage throughout his single years. Telling him he needs to be more self-important is the antithesis to this conditioning, but it’s exactly the catalyst that will cause his divorce. Women don’t want to marry their Beta orbiters, so how would you expect them to feel when the man they’re supposed to live the rest of their lives with turns into an orbiter. But he’s been taught to sacrifice EVERYTHING to keep the relationship “healthy”.

From Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.