hypergamy doesn’t care

Why We Fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortune Favors the Bold. 

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

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

Let’s You and Him Fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrasexual Competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respect Reconsidered • Part II

Respect comes very cheap today. In the last essay i made the case that there are gendered forms of Respect, each with their gendered understanding of what a universal idea of respect should entail. The same misunderstanding applies to our gendered concepts of Love; each sex presumes the other accepts and acknowledges their own ideals about love – men approaching love from outwardly expressed idealism, while women’s is rooted in inwardly (though increasingly outwardly) expressed opportunism.

For the most part this division of approaches to Love is something both sexes hold personally, and unless that person is an artist or a poet the expression of that approach to love is something we reserve for those we come to love. Love, like religion, is usually something we have a personal belief about, but it’s generally something we don’t broadcast to those we don’t love.

Respect is different. Our ideas of what defines respect is something we will broadcast because that ideal for Respect is something that’s socially expedient in getting the things we want. The first time I was told, “You don’t respect women!” was when I was 19. Even then, in my Blue Pill delusions, I saw a contradiction. The women (and sometimes men) who were telling me I didn’t Respect women were almost always after something. No one tells that you ought to be more respectful because they want you to be a better person, nor are you corrected because the ideal of respect was even a primary concern. No, people tell you to show respect when they want something or they have an interested invested in you deferring respect to the person or thing they believe you ought to be paying respect to.

Pay Tribute or Pay Respect?

In fact, the idea that one ought to “pay” respect to something or someone else really sets the context for the utility that Respect represents to them. You “owe” respect to an ephemeral ideal in the same way you “pay your dues”, like a personal debt that someone insists you owe because you want to be reverent of the concept of Respect. And this basis for Respect is why I say Respect has been cheapened today.

Even when I was 19 and women would attempt to shame me into deference to women with Respect, I saw the contradiction between women and men’s concepts of Respect. My male idea of Respect was one of the few things my father had imparted to me. So, naturally, I questioned the idea, “What do women actually do that’s worthy of my respect?” Respect was earned. Lord knows I hadn’t done much to deserve anyone’s respect at 19, but I did know that deeds and acts were something a man had to do to gain respect – and maybe somewhere along the way acquire integrity (another container word). My smart ass response was “I don’t know any women who deserve my respect.” And that was true, but every Blue Pill conditioned guy I knew then would tell me, “You’ll never get girls to like you with that attitude mister.”

So, basically, if I wanted a girl to be intimate with me I had to feign respect for her because she’s a girl? The Blue Pill teaches men, yes, and the better you are at pretending it the more a woman will appreciate you. This is where the debasement of Respect (as an ideal) in our feminine-primary social order begins. Unmerited respect for women only reinforces the Women are, Men must become principle. Men must become, men must qualify, men must perform. As such, male respect is something that is almost always in flux. Women’s respect just is, and thereby female respect is something more static.

Respect for the Sake of Respect

In a gynocentric society the predominant definition of respect, the one that is transferred to virtually all aspects of that social order, is the female concept. Automatic, deferential, but ultimately unmerited respect simply for being – female respect – is considered a useful tool, but cheapens the ideal of respect and what makes a person respectable.

When I outlined the difference between male and female concepts of Love, one of the first things men do is get indignant. They don’t like the idea that women don’t share their own ‘love for the sake of love’ idealism. My point was that women “fundamentally lack the capacity to love a man in the way he thinks should be possible for her.” This is difficult for a Blue Pill conditioned guy to wrap his head around. Much of who they are was built on the premised goal that women will “love him as much as he loves her”, so to suggest that this isn’t possible for him means that “women fundamentally lack a capacity to love men, period.” They conclude that if women cannot share his idealistic approach to Love then they cannot legitimately love him. His concept should be the only acceptable concept and therefor rejecting his concept is rejecting its legitimacy.

This same singleminded interpretation applies largely to women and their form of respect. If men would hold a woman to a merited, male, standard of respect, rather than a default deference to respecting her for no measurable reason, then those men don’t believe in Respect at all. It’s her way or it isn’t real.

Most men are afraid to appear disrespectful to women. This fear is compounded by the mass effect of a globalized sexual marketplace

When I was 19 I was concerned that I’d done something wrong. Why would women presume I didn’t respect them? I was perceived as a Jerk and I just knew that that wasn’t what women really wanted. I didn’t know it then, but this was a shaming tactic being used to keep me in line as a prospectively useful Beta. In a way I suppose it was a meta-shit test. An Alpha man wouldn’t care if women thought he was respectful. A sure sign a guy is Beta would be reflected in how he responds to being accused of disrespect of women (really ‘womankind‘).

In truth, a default respect for women is really worthless from a male perspective. I’m sure that just my typing this out will be enough to trigger most women, but if you are triggered, it’s more important to consider why you are. A default respect for females may seem like a socially correct perspective for an “upstanding leader of men” Blue Pill Alpha archetype, but it is men who adopt the attitude that women must qualify themselves to him who engender genuine respect among women.

Flipping the Respect Script

This is an important lesson in Game as well. One of the first things many of the old school PUAs would teach an AFC (Average Frustrated Chump) is to flip the script with respect to who is qualifying whom. The natural presumption for most Blue Pill men is that they must always qualify to a woman. Usually this entails proving his quality in various ways (buy her a drink, pay for dinner, carry the conversation, etc.), but the operative assumption is that she is the one whose Frame he is entering into. The PUA fundamental then was to flip this ‘natural‘ script; to get her to pursue him. In doing so, her subconscious confirms his high value – why else would she pursue? If a guy could cleverly tease this pursuit out of her it then creates a perpetuating feedback loop about him [until he fucks it up somehow by reverting to qualifying to her].

Flipping the qualification script with a woman presents one very difficult hurdle for the AFC: he must risk offending the social convention that tells him he must never disrespect a woman. This is where the larger, social, respect dynamic becomes apparent.

From a Beta male, Respect is cheap. Most Betas’ attention comes for free and is steeped in the idea that he must never upset the respect dynamic. But just like love, attention and interest, women don’t value Respect that is easily had. Too much circulation makes the price go down, and scarcity makes the price go up. We constantly tell men to make, and consider, themselves ‘the Prize‘, but to do this a man must risk offending a default female respect to shift the Frame to a default male respect. This is counterintuitive part of unplugging and learning Game.

That deference is what is expected. To respect women is common. What is uncommon is a lack of female respect. Therefor a default respectful deference is basic and plain to a woman. But it is the man whose respect a woman must earn who make the most significant impact and inspire the greatest emotional investment on her part. As I’ve stated in many essays, never deny a woman the satisfaction of believing she’s figured you out with her feminine intuition. Women expect a worthy Alpha to command respect amongst his peers, but also to expect her to earn his respect. And in her meriting it, she then holds a new respect for him.

Respect, as social dynamic, is an attempt to govern the terms of communication. Respect also has its utilities. It’s a rational for an easy dismissal of uncomfortable facts. For instance, Mansplaining presumes a lack of respect for women by a man who is trying to define what ought to constitute respect. It is a means of controlling a narrative. A “lack of respect” is an easy way to poison the well in any debate and also serves as the basis of a lot of straw man arguments.

Higher Love

Respect is defined by the party who decides what it is, and who should have it. In this way Respect is intimately linked with Frame, and since women’s form of respect is the socially predominant one today, the starting point of most intersexual exchanges begins with the presumption that a woman should control the Frame by means of a default, unearned respect. And to some hopelessly Blue Pill men who invariably mix that conditioning with religion, this respect then becomes a form of Reverence for the female.

In Part I of this series I dropped this line:

God is Love
[…] I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience.

To which a commenter left me this in the comments thread:

“God is love”. Rollo, this is just one more on the heap of things I am struggling with regards to my “christian faith”. I am very much looking forward to reading Alpha God and eventually your 4th book.


Unconditional love is the main message of the new testament. Could it be that Christianity is really that feminized not just by “the village” and feminized church today but actually? Could the New testament be a watering down of the old Jahve Religion? 

Zoltan

While I’m not planning on exploring Red Pill concepts of “unconditional love” on this blog, I will be picking apart the implications of how men and women’s differing concepts of love come to define, or set the understanding of an ideal of a ‘higher love’ (don’t sing the song, don’t sing the song,…).

So what does this have to do with Respect?

Everything if you consider the gender whose definition of what Respect should be is the socially predominant on at any point in history. Performance defines men’s existences. Performance determines respectability for men and earning one’s way into Heaven might be the highest form of respect, right?

More next week.

Respect Reconsidered – Part I

Thank you for your patience in my absence. I’ve been focusing intensely on the 4th book for the past 2 months and I will be for the foreseeable future. The good news is I’m ‘in the zone‘ so to speak. I have the ability to occasionally get myself into a flow state where an idea I was originally working on branches off into other ideas that I have to follow or else I risk losing the branch altogether.

This is just how my mind works. Regular viewers of my podcasts understand this in real-time. I can start off with a solid premise – often one I’ve been considering (repeating) since the early days – and as I’m making it I consider how it affects other ideas and I have to follow that thread. I know, it’s annoying sometimes, but I do my best to organize my thoughts once they’re all out on the table.

I do this in my ideation process when I’m writing too. Right now I’m looking at no fewer than eight notebooks (9 if you count my gym log) that I keep to return to when I’m exploring ideas. Two of these are full. The oldest I’ve had since my first book was published, but I keep returning to it because I scribbled down ideas regarding religion and the Red Pill back then. This was from an era when I was much more active on Dalrock’s blog and I was hammering things out with a lot of guys struggling with Red Pill awareness, and reconciling it with their religious convictions. It was then I came across an unpublished reconsideration of the concept of Respect. I titled it Respect Reconsidered with the intent of coming back to an essay I wrote in 2012 called Respect. This original essay was inspired by some of my earliest conversations on the venerable SoSuave forums circa 2002-2010. I still think it holds up pretty well, but my reinterest in the topic of respect has come anew from my working on this fourth book.

So, at the risk of giving away a little bit of book 4, I’m going to delve into the concept of respect today.

God is Love?

Book 4 is about squaring Red Pill praxeology (deal with it) with religion. As a part of this I’ve had to re-outline my original premise on Love and how men and women approach love from different concepts. I wont bore you with reiterating it here (there’s a whole category on love in the side bar), but suffice to say that men and women come to love, and have an understanding of love, based on gendered ideals that are specific to our biological and psychological differences as men and women. Most intersexual conflicts between men and women are rooted in the presumption of a mutual, commonly understood concept of what love is to both sexes. The truth is men and women hold differing mental models of what legitimate “real” love means to them. Each sex arrives at this understanding as a result of their experience as a man or a woman, and then molded by outside influences and innate idealism.

This was an important distinction to consider while I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience. It’s this presumption and misunderstanding that is the source of conflict between men and women and how they expect the other to Just Get It with respect to how they’d have the other sex love them.

But if men and women have different, innately gendered concepts of love is it possible that there are other higher concepts they might not share the same ideas about, but presumes the other sex just gets? I believe so, and Respect is at the top of the list of those higher concepts.

Respect is earned?

When I was having my now infamous discussion with Andrew Tate a month ago we (quite unintentionally) hit upon the concept of respect and how men and women view it differently. A lot of my female viewers – particularly the newer female viewers – despised the truths that we were discussing about the nature of women:

“No woman would ever agree to ‘share a hot Alpha’! Any woman who would must not respect herself.”

“No woman wants to have sex with a guy she doesn’t respect! If she’s not fucking you with any real desire it’s because she doesn’t respect the guy she’s with.”

“You can’t expect a woman to submit to a man she doesn’t respect.”

These were a few of the comments and responses that got me thinking; Respect is an idea that men and women hold different concepts of as a result of our innate sexual differences. The criteria that would prompt respect in a woman is not the same that prompts it in a man.

A lot gets made about mutual respect being a keystone of a good relationship. It’s one of those sayings like “Open communication is the basis of a healthy relationship” or “Relationship take a lot of work.” Respect is another truism that sounds right. Because it’s so ambiguous, and it’s generally only legitimized according to one sex, it’s easy (mostly for women) to use a “lack of respect” as leverage or an alibi to excuse behavior or a misunderstanding between men and women.

The concept of respect today is cheap. We use it far too readily to explain away why we, or someone we identify with did what they did. We use a convenient, subjective understanding of respect as a qualifier for describing what we agree or disagree with. And we use this cheapened “respect” to grade a person’s integrity according to what we think others should agree or disagree with – usually by how it aligns with our own interests.

Male Respect is not the same as Female Respect

The popular concept is that Respect is something that should be a default setting. People deserve respect. Disrespecting someone, or ambiguously implying a ‘dis‘ might be enough to get your ass kicked. Today’s globalized concept of respect is the subjective female concept – respect is always on. This is a respect based on ‘grace‘, it just is, and it should be freely given to discourage the idea that anyone is greater or lesser than another. We all deserve respect is very much a collectivist form of respect.

At first I thought that maybe Respect was something being confused with common courtesy, but no. There are two main dictionary definitions of what respect is, and this is where we will see the gendered difference between these concepts:

Respect

1. A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

2. Due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.

Courtesy

1. The showing of politeness in one’s attitude and behavior toward others.

Courtesy and the feminine form of Respect (2.) are very similar. Today’s global respect is rooted in the feminine form. I’ll explain this below, but a default respect based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, religion and other aspects of human diversity is the feminine concept; unearned and by default always ‘on’.

Women just are. Men must become.

This is an old Manosphere maxim. I’ve used it many times to describe the male Burden of Performance. To be a human male is to exist in a dominance hierarchy until your last day. Men must perform. In fact, it is part of our inborn nature to want to perform for women because it is the most deductive way to solve men’s reproductive problem. When a young boy sees a pretty girl for the first time his natural impulse is to find a way to draw her attention. Ride a wheelie down the street on his bicycle or some other, usually risk taking, feat to prove physical prowess and a capture her attention. Most male animals do some form of this showing off to get a female interested in eventually breeding with him. The PUA concept of Peacocking and why it’s effective finds its roots in this dynamic. Call that being a Dancing Monkey if you like, but performance comes naturally to men.

Competence, physical prowess, creative intelligence, dominance, social proof and preselection are the metric by which we rate a man’s respectability. The Burden of Performance is not only about women determining who they’ll choose to mate with, it’s also about men’s merit-based ranking of respectability and admirability. This applies to all social interactions (family, career, military, athletics, etc.). It is a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements that makes a man respectable. How we define this respectability by context of cultural, moralistic or personal metrics is the topic for the next essay in this series.

Male Respect is for Male Space

Of course, this definition can apply to exceptional women, but this concept of respect is male in origin. This male form of respect is part of a male dominance hierarchy. Women can insist on being included in this definition, but it rarely works out in their favor – at least not in the same way that a default female form of respect works for women. One reason women (the Feminine Imperative) insists on assimilating Male Space is in order to restructure it to have access to this male form of respectability. The problem is that in restructuring that space to accommodate their deficits, women fundamentally alter the nature of that male form of respect.

TheWarrior Princess strong female lead mythology that Hollywood writers think is empowering to women isn’t believable because our hindbrains understand the deception that’s being played on it. We’re supposed to respect this fictitious archetype in a male form of respectability, but it falls short for us because 100,000 years of evolution prevents our hindbrains from suspending our disbelief.

We know what usually happens when women are called to measure up to a male Burden of Performance. Today, transgender male athletes competing and dominating in female-division sports are a sharp reminder of this performance-to-respect distinction in gender. The gynocentric element that squawks the loudest about gender being a social construct is the same element that complains about male athletes putting female athletes to shame in the same sport or activity while masquerading as female. As a result, we don’t respect men who pretend to be women, and then outclass them in competency, in order to appeal to a male form of performance-based respectability. Our hindbrains, men and women’s, reject the legitimacy of what we’re expected (by a gynocentric social order) to respect by merit.

Men earn no admiration from beating girls, but women always are afforded admiration for defeating men. Why? Because our hindbrain presumes a state of performance superiority on the part of men.

Female Respectability

Women’s respectability comes by default.

Respect by virtue of just being female is due to all women, irrespective of performance. In a gynocentric social order this form of respect is the common one applied to social forms of respect. I’m still on the fence as to whether common courtesy is a part of this form of respect. As I mentioned above, default courtesy and respect are due to any and all based on race, creed, religion, etc. This is the due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others. So it could be that courtesy is the expression of this default respect when we’re talking about larger narratives of respect (race, religion, culture, etc.) In either instance, respect is unmerited and really cheapened in a feminine-primary context.

But for women, just to be a female is to be entitled to respect; and only in the circumstance of intra-sexual competition among women is this form of respect ever challenged. Default respect for women is utilitarian for virtually all women. The entitlement to respect is constantly leveraged for advantage and special dispensation among women with men.

Women just are, is the premise here. Female respectability is never merit based, though it can be lost if a woman is convinced that she “has no respect for herself” or if someone casts that woman as self-loathing, but this is only effective when it comes from other women. In a feminine-primary social order men can never challenge a woman’s respectability without the risk of incurring some social backlash or damage to his own performance-based respectability. And labels of sexist, misogynist and chauvinist await any man who would challenge the default respect that is due to women.

Chivalry, Virtue and Female Respectability

A lot of this impression is the result of the old social contract and men’s evolved instinct to protect women. This protector instinct will also be the topic of another essay, but suffice to say that the evolved imperative to protect women (sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive) crosses over into the chivalrous notion of protecting the honor of a lady. At various points in human history (western and eastern) this protector instinct has crossed over into societal practices. During the era of Courtly Love a woman’s virtue became something to defend – and by defending that virtue a man merited respect by earning a woman’s favor. I’ve detailed this dynamic in prior essays; the romanticized form of Chivalry was a means to female power in an epoch when the entire social order was effectively a Male Space. Romanticized Chivalry was the feminism of its time.

The Feminine Imperative understood the protector tendency in men and exploited it in the practices of courtly love or romantic love being elevated to a requisite criteria for male respectability. The social pedestalization of women that forms the basis of the old social contract we know today was started in the ideals of romanticized chivalry. A big part of men’s Burden of Performance under the old social contract was his dedication to protecting a woman’s honor if he himself was to be respectable in the male form of respect.

Feminists will of course bleat that “In the past women were treated like property“.

Yet at some point along the way, even while a woman was a man’s ‘property’ (arguable) she was still held above the male form of respect and a female form of respect became her due. Even in the old Patriarchal Abrahamic religions wives and most in-group women were held in high regard and served as role model archetypes for female respectability. The only way to really lose this due-respect was to be a prostitute or an adulterous woman – both bad bets for men’s parental investment trade-offs and ensuring his own paternity in the long run. Being a nag was also something a respectable woman would avoid, but the operative here is that, default respect for women didn’t require anything like the male Burden of Performance.

Respect Your Elders – “Okay, Boomer,…”

One last point to note is that respect for one’s elders used to be included in this default form of respectability. This is no longer the case today, at least for men. My theory is that by virtue of being older the presumption was one of attained wisdom. Maturity implies mastery, or at least it used to. So, a default respect for one’s elders entered into religious canon. Honor thy father and mother, for instance, is a reflection of this default respect.

But in today’s gloablizing social media marketplace being old is a weakness and a liability unless what makes that man respectable is relatable to his prior performance. And even then respect is just a courtesy if it appears at all. Default socialized respect for women is generally a given in gynocentrism, but mature men are held to the performance burden of young men, because we have such access to seeing this performance difference in real time today.

There is a similar questioning of respect based on a position of authority for men. School teachers, martial arts instructors, policemen, civil authorities and military officials are examples of this diminishing respect. There is a saying that even if you don’t respect the man you should respect the office, but today this is no longer the case. Position no longer indicates respectability the way it used to under the old social contract.

Next week, I’ll be publishing part two of this series.

An Essay for Women

A Hierarchy of Relationship Needs • Part II

Hypergamy is a dualistic mating strategy. Women have two conflicting mating strategies. I wonder how many of you have stopped and actually considered what that’s like for a woman?

It’s not easy, and it’s even worse for those who are aware of it because knowing it doesn’t change it. Like she can’t help it that the thug makes her wet…

Society constrained women from pursuing their short term, Alpha Fux urges in many ways. But it doesn’t now. So all women pursue the hottest guys, the guys who turn them on the most and now that they can earn and support themselves, why the fuck not?

If you were a woman, would you strap in with some chode for the duration cuz he was “steady”? So what he can’t make you cum, I mean that’s not all there is to life, right?

Get this – women were trapped with men they didn’t want to be with in many situations in the past.I know, bringing up a female POV is always verboten here. But in fact, the Red Pill has made me much more empathetic to what it’s actually like for women. You see, if you spend a lot of time with different women, having sex with them, they open up. They tell me how they feel about being monogamous at all. Many young women do not want children at all. And why not? Because it doesn’t serve men? That’s the point – they want to serve their impulses and their needs.

I don’t say it’s good. I don’t think we are headed in a good direction. But I also understand why women behave the way they do. And I don’t feel ill-served by it because it suits my mating strategy.

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For what it’s worth, it’s never been verboten to discuss women’s perspectives on this blog. On the contrary, I think sussing out why women are the way they are is essential to understanding intersexual dynamics. Despite some guys yelling, “Who cares what women think!”, understanding women’s innate motivations is key to understanding intersexual dynamics.

And that disinterest is the first obstacle I think a lot of guys, especially in today’s Manosphere, need to get past in order to figure out what would work best for themselves in the new sexual marketplace. PUAs have always been interested in what makes women tick. Understanding their motivations and mating strategies is key to solving a reproductive problem. MGTOW and others may feign indifference to those motives, but even their ‘solutions’ are still rooted in knowing why women do what they do.

For the most part, my blog has been dedicated to understanding the mechanics of how both sexes go about solving their reproductive problem. My critics seem to think that just asking questions about those mechanics or coming to a consensus about them based on the dots I connect is negative and/or bitter. And I get it from both sides. There are the guys who’ll say the Red Pill is obsessed with getting laid, and therefore is pointless because it gives women an undue importance in a guy’s life. And then there are the guys (and a lot of women) who’ll say “Rollo, all you ever do is focus on men, why isn’t there a Rational Female book you’re working on?“

When I get asked about writing a book for women my first impulse is to suggest they just read the The Rational Male first. I have no plans to write a female specific book in the future (nor will I be participating in any misguided convention marketed a “making women great again”) because I think that what I outline in all my books is, or should be, equally relevant to female readers. Women will complain about ‘tone‘ and why can’t I just wrap up this information in a nice pink-covered edition of the book, but it’s the content that’s important. Women are innate solipsists and would love nothing more than to read about themselves and their own natures – if for no other reason than to get off on the indignation I might inspire – but they really don’t want a rational discourse about it. They want an emotional delivery.

And this is the difficulty I’m facing in coming to this part of my series; most women really don’t want to learn anything objective about themselves. It doesn’t feel good. In this essay I’m going to outline a few things women can do to make themselves a better catch in the sexual marketplace. So, yes ladies, this is finally a Rational Male post directed at you.

If you read the the six simple directives Rich Cooper enumerated in his tweet from the last essay you’ll already be ahead of the curve. However, I understand I am committing a Red Pill sin here in that I am attempting to appeal to your reason. Despite the accusations of misogyny I do, in fact, believe women can use a capacity to reason – and therefore do have agency – it’s just that reason is always downstream from emotion in women’s mental firmware. And I should add that the larger social narrative of feels before reals is a direct result of this prioritization of women in a female-centric social order.

Women don’t wanna be told shit.

There’s even a cute name for when men try to explain something to a woman her ego doesn’t want to acknowledge – Mansplaining. This is the next obstacle. The Fempowerment narrative (really an effort in social engineering) has conditioned generations of women since the Sexual Revolution to presume an inherent correctness in whatever it is that satisfies the Feminine Imperative. If something benefits womankind it must therefor be the correct solution for a woman personally and society on whole. I sometimes refer to this as The Sisterhood Über Alles. The cultural meme The Future is Female is a recent example of this.

This resistance to acknowledging anything even marginally objective or unflattering about female nature (or even that humans might have an innate nature) is the primary reason I rarely bother with trying to explain anything Red Pill to women. Women don’t wanna be told shit, and when I get a request for a female-focused approach to something it’s because women want to feel something (usually indignation), not learn anything. Even in a social scope women refer to their organizations and movements as the resistance. This cultural meme is an extension of women’s personal edicts as taught to them by Fempowerment.

Asking women to drop their own, learned, hubris is the first hurdle to educating them. The next is confronting their innate solipsism. In Girl-World everything is about them. This proclivity for self-importance and self-aggrandizement in women has been ruthlessly exploited by commercial and ideological interests for almost two centuries now. It is also the key component in the spread of feminism and the embedding of feminist ideological ideas in our social fabric.

A Blue Pill for Women

In a few videos I’ve detailed how there is a similar effort in western(izing) culture to condition women to fit a new social contract. Feminism and the Fempowerment narrative is just one aspect of this Blue Pill for women. But the next hurdle for women to understand a Red Pill praxeology can be distilled to one message Fempowerment teaches women:

Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.

A woman’s Blue Pill conditioning is founded on the 70s feminism era notion of the Strong Independent Woman meme. She don’t need no man. She is independent – independent of what? She is not dependent on any man, and anything she might do to specifically please a man is antithetical to that independence. To please a man is to participate in their own “oppression” by the Patriarchy.

That’s the origin of the mechanics of the meme we now take for granted. Ladies, from the time you were five years old this independence of men message has been hammered into your psyche by everything from popular culture, to your schooling, to your religion, to your single mothers and your Blue Pill conditioned fathers.

The present-day social segregation of the sexes I keep harping on this year is a direct result of this independence meme being baked into women’s souls from the earliest ages for generations now. I have to laugh when I read women tell me how ‘little girls are so repressed still today’ when a Fempowered social order has eliminated even the thought of not giving girls and women every form of advantage and special dispensation imaginable for over 50 years now.

So, ladies, you must unlearn that which you’ve learned. Understand that solipsism is in your mental firmware.

  • Understand that you’ve been conditioned to feel that men and any opinion they have are irrelevant to your being. Men should serve you and be thankful you gave them the opportunity to do so.
  • Understand that this social order is predicated on the female experience superseding, and being more legitimate, than the male experience.
  • Understand that Hypergamy and your innate self-interest are being fed by a social order that profits on your self-absorption – only to discard you when you figure out the game too late in life.
  • Understand that there are social conventions established at every phase of your life to explain away why you aren’t living the life of strong independence that narrative conditioned you for since the age you started watching Disney Princess movies.

Most importantly, female reader, understand it’s okay that you should want to do something for the express pleasure of a man. It’s okay to appreciate the masculine for the sake of it. This is the number one thing you have to unlearn. Men and women are different. Our natures are complements to each other, but we are not equals – and it should be a source of pleasure for you to appreciate and enjoy those differences.

Yes, a man must live up to his Burden of Performance in order for you to evaluate his merits. I’m in no way suggesting that you drop anything with regard to your Hypergamous filtering. I’m saying you need to unlearn the hubris you’ve been conditioned for. Unlearn the ego-inflation that social media has deliberately instilled in you. And most importantly, unlearn the notion, the pride, of independence from men.

Learn this now ladies, you will never get close to the connection you want to feel with a man until you learn to appreciate him as a masculine complement to your feminine nature. You are not his equal, you are his complement, and as Roissy once said, a woman wants to submit to a worthy man’s mission as his complement. We are better together than we are apart. The sum can be greater than the parts, but not if you are the independent, self-fulfilling, autonomous ‘things‘ that feminism and the Blue Pill would have you believe is the key to its fantasy of an egalitarian, androgynous, goal-state for human beings.

Triggered

So. Was any of that triggering for you? Illuminating women to the reality of their own conditioning is in some ways even more dangerous and difficult than unplugging guys from their own Blue Pill delusions.

Most women fancy themselves as “Alpha Females” but never really understand that the fantastical Strong Independent Woman® archetype (really it’s a brand) they hold in their heads is actually based on a masculine dynamic. They’re actually alpha males with breasts and a vagina. It’s really hard for women to give that fantasy up, particularly when they live in an era when men are portrayed as vile, stupid, untrustworthy and ‘dependent‘ on women’s powerfulness to save them from themselves.

The female Blue Pill instills this sense of empowerment in women based on false narratives about a straw-man masculinity. Hypergamy is dualistic – Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, Cads/Dads – but half of that desire, the desire for provisioning, parental investment, familiarity and comfort, is rooted in a need for security. Women are the weaker sex. In our ancestral past women (and their offspring) were dependent on men for protection from a chaotic environment. That need for security is still something women seek out in today’s men.

But in this era, men are weak. Bumbling buffoons. “Economically unattractive” and largely incapable of protecting her or her young. This is the message the female Blue Pill teaches little girls and old women. As a result, men cannot be trusted to provide anything like physical protection, and increasingly they can’t be relied upon to help pay the bills. So, women must step up and fulfill their own security needs – often by direct resource transfer from men, but that’s immaterial to the message that Fempowerment embeds in you ladies.

To compound this impression of men, women (and men) are taught that they are in fact blank slate equals of the other. All individuals are really just chaotic, unknowable products of whatever social order constructed them. There are no natures or differences between the genders – and there are at least 68 of those that we know of, right?

The female Blue Pill teaches women that not only are men not to be trusted for security, but that part of that independence from men will be necessary for their own survival. This insecurity about men being capable of providing security is the basis of women masculinizing themselves.

In turn, this is the reason all of what I write here and elsewhere is so triggering for women. How dare I suggest women ought to ‘man down’?! Man can’t be trusted to ‘be men’, just look at them!

This is why women resist the awareness that the Red Pill brings to them. It presumes they must drop all their preconceptions about the nature of men and adopt a femininity that is now alien to them. The Blue Pill will tell you that the discomfort you feel in being more feminine is ‘just how you are‘, but it’s really due to decades of constant social conditioning to make you feel self-conscious in being feminine.

But, most of all, dropping that masculine pretense needed to provide her own security implies she make herself vulnerable to emotionally investing herself in a man who’s dishonest in his own quality. The Existential Fear for women is to invest herself in a man (and his progeny) who tricked her Hypergamous filters into believing he was Alpha when he was in fact Beta. By flipping the Blue Pill script, by suggesting that women drop the masculine pretense and adopt conventional gender complementarity (submission), it is akin to me suggesting she ignore her Hypergamous instincts.

That is why this is triggering you ladies.

Value Added

All that said, how can a woman make herself more valuable to a man once the sexual side of the equation is satisfied? Women constantly complain about being “sexually objectified” by men. They want to be appreciated for more than just being a piece of ass, but in the same world advertise their sexuality as their primary value virtually everywhere. From a very early age women understand that their primary agency in this life is their sexual value to men – and they quickly learn how to leverage it.

Ladies, if you want to be valued for more than your sexuality your going to have to develop actual value beyond your sexuality. Sex is the glue that holds a relationship together. Learn that, accept that. But once you have that down, what else are you to him? What can you do to expressly please him and what can you do to express your appreciation for him?

You must learn the concept of value added. For women this value comes from an inherent understanding of her own femininity and what it offers to the masculine that it cannot provide for itself or does only with greater effort.

If you want a dominant, Alpha, conventionally masculine man to be your boyfriend/husband start by living like a man like that can actually exist in the world. Most guys adapt to whatever it is that will get them laid. When a guy believes in the fantasy of an egalitarian relationship with a woman it’s because he believes it’s the best path to solving his reproductive problem. You can counter this by expecting him to adopt conventional masculinity.

One of the biggest favors my wife did for me was in her expecting me to “be the man” in our relationship and later marriage. Until I met her damn near every woman I was intimate with was convinced that egalitarianism between men and women was ‘natural’, or should be at least. It was a shock to my Blue Pill system when my wife expected me to drive her car when we were dating. From the earliest days of our relationship she insisted that I fill the dominant masculine role and she was going to fill the feminine role. This expectation and our filling those roles modeled masculine and feminine behavior for our daughter who now also has a conventional perspective on gender that most of her peers do not.

New Old Ideas
  • Learn to cook.
  • Do laundry.
  • Keep the home organized and clean.
  • Stay thin.
  • Be sexy, learn to seduce him.
  • Initiate sex with him.
  • Have genuine sexual desire for him (and let him know when you don’t) and be a genuinely enthusiastic lover.
  • Wear a dress.
  • Embrace his family.
  • Take his surname.
  • Have a job, but not a career.
  • Trust him to be your source of security.
  • Encourage him when you face challenges.
  • Reassure him.
  • Play with him, and play with him

These are just a few of the acts that you can do to manifest your femininity, but they must be part of a genuine desire and willingness to be his complement. You cannot negotiate desire. This primarily applies to sex, but the resentment that comes from obligation also flows over into other aspects of your relationship.

You have to want to be feminine. Just as men eventually need to internalize the Red Pill and make that awareness deeper than just the situational, so too must you want to be his complement. He has to be the guy you want to be feminine for. He must be the man whose babies you want to have for him.

If you find yourself making rules for him, if you make sex a reward for desired behavior, he’s not that guy.

Women make rules for Beta men to comply with. They’re like little ultimatums he must follow, but understand that this is your hindbrain asking that Hypergamous question; ‘Is he the best I can do?’ Recognize this in yourself.

Women break rules for Alpha men. Is your desire for this man so significant that you will break the rules that the female Blue Pill has taught you? Will you break with the conditioning that taught you never to do anything for the express pleasure of a man? Even the most staunch feminists confess to loving a dominant Alpha male who exercises his will over her own. Why do you suppose that is?

Will you break the greatest rule you have for yourself and submit to him because you have the genuine desire to do so? You’ll be happier and healthier if you can answer ‘yes’, but if not, do both him and yourself the courtesy of breaking it off and go sort yourself out before you try again.

The Truth About Standards

Most men never vet women for anything like long term acceptability. A lot of guys would have you believe they have high standards for the women they self-righteously allow into their lives, but for the most part this is internet posturing from Trad-Cons and ‘spergs‘ who’d like their circle of virtual friends to believe they have more options, or more learn-ed wisdom, than other men. After-the-fact rationalizations about how discerning a guy was in choosing his wife or girlfriend are a necessary insulation for men’s egos when they come into the Red Pill community. They get uncomfortable when the Red Pill Lens forces them to take a better look at their own choices.

The flip side to this are the guys who’ve already been burned by a woman, and by association the totality of Gynocentrism. They also tend to reverse engineering their lack of vetting. A wife who was once his Quality Woman becomes the bitch who turned on him – the living example of all women and their Hypergamous nature. Likewise, these guys never truly vetted their ex. In someways they may have been as equally naive about the nature of women as the guy still married and self-convinced that he’s done his due diligence in selecting the perfect mate.

Now add to all this a religious belief-set that is founded on marriages staying solid foundations of family formation and resistant to divorce (thus ensuring contentment and righteous living). Here we add another layer of self-blinding on top of men’s haphazard long-term mating strategy founded on his necessitousness. Surely a man’s true religion is the key to a loving and happy wife, appreciative children, strong family ties and quality of life? Men will always seek validation in the choices they invested their lives in – particularly in the face of realities that contradict them.

All of this is related to men’s long term mating strategy. I’ve written extensively on men’s innate mating strategy and the existential importance of men ensuring their own paternity. But just as women’s Hypergamy is a manifestation of their biological nature, so too are men’s imperatives in their own mating strategies. However, a distinction needs to be made with respect to Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks equalist comparisons with women’s strategies. Men and women’s mating imperatives are both antagonistic and complementary depending on the nature of the men and women coming together to reproduce.

Men’s innate, unconditioned, biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Left to his own volition, and unimpaired by women’s Hypergamous filtering strategies, men’s innate drive is to opt for variety of sexual experience.

Critics will counter with “Well, women look for variety too dontcha think?”

While there is some truth in this, women’s desire for broader sexual experience is motivated by a search for better quality in the men she has sex with, not quantity per se. Monogamy (as we know it) is really a tool for low SMV men to socially ensure reproduction and paternity (at least in theory).

For men the motivation is about quantity. Yes, men love variety in women. Yes, men would rather there be no hindrance to getting to that sexual experience with that variety. This is why pornography is ubiquitous today, and has always been a motivator for men – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. There’s a reason why young Muslim men are promised 70 virgins in paradise if they martyr themselves. Variety and ensured paternity, even if it has to be in the afterlife, is clearly a strong motivator for men. Rockstars and religious zealots all strive for the same goal, they just come to it in different ways.

Priorities

Men are so motivated by sexual experience that it supersedes the need for food. Research shows brain cells specific to men fire up when mates are present and override the need to eat. Take this as you will, but it does reinforce the idea that for men, sex is in fact a biological need.

Left unhindered human (Alpha) males will opt for securing multiple breeding partners; in some cases sequestering them for his long-term use. Locking away harems in secured compounds is something powerful men have done since our tribalistic past. Secure mates – secure paternity with them. There’s a reason why eunuchs guarded harems. The notion that men and women were ever naturally monogamous is an idealistic social convention. True monogamy in the animal kingdom is an extreme outlier. It’s just this prioritization of sexual opportunity that makes vetting women for monogamy compete with reproductive opportunism.

Strategic Pluralism

Most men are not Alpha males. The vast majority of men in this life and in eras past only had sexual access to a precious few women in their lives – if at all. Even in social conditions that rewarded monogamy and punished infidelity men and women have always found ways to manifest their antagonistic mating strategies. As few as 8,000 years ago (post agrarianism) 1 male reproduced for every 17 females. And as few as 4,000 years ago women were out-reproducing men. Again, read and make your own conclusions, but the point is human mating strategies find ways to circumvent social conventions.

On paper, monogamy is not a bad idea. As a social convention monogamy has been a stabilizing force in human evolution, but it in no way aligns with our innate sexual proclivities. Monogamy is a sexual strategy that primarily benefits low SMV men because most men will never experience (relatively) unlimited access to unlimited sexuality outside of pornography.

In Red Pill spheres we encourage men to consider themselves the prize. I personally believe that the most important step in unplugging a guy from his Blue Pill conditioning starts by internalizing the concept of Mental Point of Origin, but why is this often the most difficult step for men? It’s hard to think of oneself as a ‘winner’ when all a guy has done is lose for most of his life. The numbers don’t add up, and all the pep rallies a guy can pay for wont account for much until the day a girl actually responds to the “new you“. Feeling good about yourself is great, but most men want a solution to their sexlessness. Remember, sex really is that important to your male hindbrain. Food < Sex, got it?

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 Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests Of The Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

A lot of men get confused about the masculine imperative, but for the most part I think Strategic Pluralism Theory outlines most of mens’ mating strategies. In the Pareto Principle I delved into how women separate men into different sub-groups. The popularized oversimplification of this goes something like this:

“20% of men are fucking 80% of women.”

This is a misnomer. Granted, it used to have the good intention of getting men to believe that a small percentage of guys are having sex with a majority of women, and well, it might as well be them, right?

I’m sure that was meant to be a kind of motivational encouragement for guys learning Game, but it’s effectively wrong. The reality is 100% of women are interested in fucking about 20% of guys. We can see this repeatedly illustrated in various online dating stats and the realities of what Tinder has done to the SMP. But that’s the principle, not the practice. Just because a woman wants to get with a twentieth percentile man in no way means she will be getting with that guy. The issue here is the want not the get.

The Scarcity Mentality

Most men live in a state of sexual scarcity. So to implore a man to believe he’s actually the prize, or he should consider himself the prize, is an alien thought to him. Whether he acknowledges it consciously, his hindbrain understands the realities of his present-state sexual market value and it understands the reproductive equation it’s tasked with solving in (hopefully) a prosocial way.

Any time a woman actually shows an intimate interest in a low SMV man he will instinctively overlook the “deal breakers” his rational mind would otherwise give him pause to consider. Remember, sex supersedes hunger in the evolved scope of things for men. There are no considerations for ‘red flags’ with a woman when reproduction is of more strategic importance to his hindbrain.

When I’m listening to shows like Before the Train Wreck I hear the same predictable problems voiced by young men over and over again. There are consistent red flags these man should’ve seen before committing to a woman. And as a third party to this, we’re always dumbfounded by how the guy couldn’t have seen the signs before acting or committing to a woman’s mating strategy in order to facilitate a compromised version of his own strategy. Men’s rational process (particularly young men’s) are bypassed by sexual instinct and the hindbrain realization that his breeding opportunities are few and far between.

75% of college men would agree to have sex with a (semi-attractive) female they just met on campus while 0% of women would do the same with an unfamiliar male. Most men simply do not vet women for long term compatibility. The nature of our biology and our access to reproductive opportunities makes vetting a hindrance to solving a reproductive equation. In short, most men can’t afford to miss out on breeding opportunities.

As I outlined in Instinct, Emotion and Reason, our rational process requires time to be fully useful to us. The Instinct and Emotional processes are far quicker in their assessments and immediate effect on us. While men may innately prioritize reason before emotion, Instinct beats all other processes in speed and efficiency – if not accuracy. In our feminine-primary social order we further complicate (and disadvantage) men today by teaching them that their emotional response is the “correct” one to base decisions on. We conditions men to prioritize the Emotional process from a very early age. Again, all this makes actually vetting a woman for intimate acceptability almost offensive to the average (Beta) man today.

And this discomfort with holding any standards for women to receive his intimate approval also serves women’s sexual strategy.

You Just Got Lucky

There is a social aspect that comes into play with respect to men pairing up with women. As western societies have become more gynocentric the need to establish limitations on men’s mating strategies, and the simultaneous unfettering of women’s strategies, becomes apparent. In short, men simply aren’t allowed to hold standards for women to follow. And it’s offensive for men (not women) to even suggest the criteria women might need to ‘live up to‘ for men’s consideration of commitment.

Rich Cooper’s engagement on this one Tweet should illustrate what I’m getting into here. I’ve seen other variations of this message serve as outrage fodder for local news programs. The point is that a man making even marginal requirements for a man’s investment in a woman is met with extreme hostility. If your goal is getting social engagement there’s no better way to get it than by having the audacity to tell women they should qualify to a man – in any context. The idea that there is a man somewhere on planet earth who would voice his conditions for intimacy with women is unconscionable in gynocentric society.

But why? Why do women and their ‘allies‘ become so incensed by this? Because it commits the cardinal sin of the female power structure; it removes a degree of control away from women’s Hypergamous choice. If a woman must qualify to a man – in any context – it also sins against the maxim of the Strong Independent Woman®:

Never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.

Notice how hostile women become when any man would place conditions on his terms for intimacy/commitment. This is a challenge to women’s unilateral control of Hypergamy in the social order. But more so, it is an affront to women’s Existential Fear:

The Existential Fear in women is that their innate Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.

That a Beta male would ever hold conditions for his commitment triggers indignation in women.

Even Alpha men must never put terms on their commitment; men should feel blessed that any woman would have them. When Beta men reflexively default to social self-deprecation around their wives or LTR we see this social convention confirmed. We are conditioned to feel “lucky” that a woman lowered her standards to accept a man as her mate.

This is the intersexual poker game women play with men on whole. Entitlement, solipsism, anxiety over optimizing Hypergamy, all that competes with the foreknowledge that her attractiveness will decay over time. Women’s hindbrains know that their sex appeal, their agency in achieving that optimization, is ultimately perishable. Now add to this the anxiety that a Beta male might ‘trick’ her into choosing him as a mate and you can see why the Sisterhood will rally against men holding any demands for their interest in a woman.

Men often acquiesce to the mindset that they ought to feel fortunate that a woman would ever have them. They also foster this necessitousness in other men, usually as a form of Beta Game.

This endemic sense of metaphysical gratitude is what prevents men from even considering having standards for women. It also polices other men from holding standards themselves. How dare you be so arrogant as to expect a woman to live up to your demands? Just be glad the gods took pity on you and granted you a wife when so many Incels are at home with dick in hand. Tsk, tsk.

When a man ever has the temerity to evaluate women’s worth he’s made into a pariah. Today we expel boys from school for making lists rating the girls in their classes. Meanwhile women develop apps to do exactly the same for the men they’ve dated to inform other women. In a fem-centric social order only women are allowed to hold standards. This fact is a manifestation of a larger power dynamic between the sexes today.

A list of qualities a woman should have to please a man, to hold his long-term interests, goes viral and makes the evening news. Those men then become the easy, chauvinistic, villain to hate – “Can you believe that men like this still exist?!”

Eligible Bachelors

In my last post I made mention of how women were in crisis mode about the lack of ‘economically attractive’ men today. The articles about this crisis center on the idea of “eligible” men. Even the wildly popular show The Bachelor is built around the idea of men’s ‘eligibility’ to be considered for women’s approval. Qualify. Prove your quality. Be worthy of a woman’s love. Be ‘eligible’.

A female-primary social order – an order dedicated to maintaining feminine social control – needs to ruthlessly control which man is eligible for women’s consideration. It’s never the other way around. ‘Eligible’ is a way of psychologically maintaining a superior station of value for women.

Always bear in mind, women break rules for Alpha men and make rules for Beta men. But on a social scale it helps maintain the power imbalance if even Alpha men believe the same mythologies as Beta men.

This essay is the first in a series meant to establish a hierarchy of relationship needs that men might consider to help them accurately vet the women they allow into their lives and to enact these standards.

Are Men Adapting to the New Sexual Marketplace?

I revisited the topic of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) last Saturday on Rule Zero. I don’t like rehashing old debates I’ve learned will ultimately go nowhere. You simply wont reach most people who don’t want to be reached. Once they’ve had some experiential lessons in life, reinforced it with the tribalistic need to affirm the beliefs derived from that experience and then invest their egos in them it becomes kind of pointless. I’m not saying just give up on people, far from it, but do understand what you’re up against. This is why I say unplugging men from the Matrix is dirty work, and a lot like triage. Know what’s worth expending energy for.

Most men, and nearly all women, don’t form a belief set based on multiple, independently funded, peer reviewed studies or statistical analyses. We go with experience first and then modify it from there.

I did a bit of preparation for this talk. My schedule last Saturday only permitted me an hour so I wanted to be succinct and throw out at least something new to the conversation. There’s a lot of tribalism in the Manosphere today and it’s no surprise that MGTOW as a tribe in growing – but likely not for the reasons most MGTOW would be willing to admit. MGTOW is becoming atomized and commercialized in the same manner as I predicted the Red Pill would (and has) last year.

What that means is MGTOW is rapidly becoming the same commercial vehicle for grifters that the Red Pill was just a year and a half ago. Life Coaches, Relationship Experts, Fitness Gurus, even Christian men’s ministry pastors are all looking online to find out ‘where have all the men gone?’ When men were found in the Red Pill this is where the grifters would coalesce. Thus, you had every ‘brand-of-me’ self-improvement hack calling himself “red pill”. A few of them still do. A few of them read verbatim from my book(s) and plagiarize it as their own. But more now I see these same grifters referring to themselves as MGTOW without realizing (or even caring) what it really means to men.

MGTOW is the new ‘brand’ that lifestyle ‘coaches’ are adding to their twitter profiles and YouTube channel About pages. They see the potential for growth by association. Even if they get owned in their comments and feeds, adding the tag MGTOW will draw clicks. A few of these ‘coaches’ had a familiarity with the tribe and decided to finally commit in the hopes that it would boost views, others are former ‘power-of-positivity‘ life-coaches who slide into MGTOW because the definition of what makes a man “go his own way” is so loose now that it can align with virtually anything the guy had written about before his new affiliation.

It’s a real short step from “Make yourself your Mental Point of Origin” to “Make yourself #1 in your life” and then to “Go your own way.” I’ve had at least four “dating experts” (one female) claim Mental Point of Origin was their own idea in their subscriber emails as recently as August. Grifters used the Red Pill and are now using MGTOW to legitimize their brands today. In 2015 the MRAs decided to appropriate the Red Pill as their own brand to name a feminist’s “journey of self-discovery” movie The Red Pill. This appropriation is continuing with MGTOW now.

As I said on the Red Man Group back in May, the Red Pill is going to have a real PR problem in the coming year. Everything I predicted in my State of the Manosphere address a year ago has come to pass and I predict it will only intensify in the 2020 election cycle. The Gender War needs a convenient, easy-to-hate villain to point to in order to reinforce the Future is Female narrative.

Very soon MGTOW will have the same PR problem. And once the next Eliot Rodger or Alex Minasian incident occurs you’ll see these grifters scatter from MGTOW like roaches when the lights come on. When there are dead women on the sidewalk somewhere, and the MSM is using terms like ‘MGTOW’, ‘Incel’ and ‘radicalization’ that is when all the ‘tribes’ of the Manosphere will throw each other under the bus. That’s when you’ll know who was ‘playing MGTOW’ for likes.

Adaptation

One thing this re-debate of MGTOW has made me reconsider is whether men are adapting to the new realities of the sexual marketplace or just looking to make their necessities a virtue. At its simplest MGTOW is men refusing to make women the measure of their lives, and then molding their lives to their own plan. This pairs nicely with virtually every pet ideology and ‘positivity’ grift in the ‘sphere today. Even Tradcons will agree with MGTOW if it means “Be the best man you can be“. It agrees with Mental Point of Origin. It agrees with Roissy – “You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority.” It agrees with “Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.“

If that was all there was to MGTOW it would simply be Red Pill. What “MGTOW” life-coach grifters don’t realize is that MGOTW is a derivative of the Red Pill. I’ve always argued that once a guy becomes Red Pill aware he cannot help but live in some different fashion. Even the guys who go into complete denial can’t unsee the truths of intersexual dynamics. It’s what you actually do with that new awareness that sets apart Red Pill praxeology from MGTOW in practice. There’s more to MGTOW than just refusing to make women the measure of a man’s life – it’s also deciding what actually is deference to women. And that’s where it becomes highly subjective.

In my last post I outlined how women were upset there weren’t enough ‘eligible‘ men to marry in the current (westernized) sexual marketplace (SMP) today. Of course the two most common responses were either:

  • Women are the victims of the SMP they created. Women’s solipsistic, socially enabled entitlements to an ‘economically attractive’ man (a man who exceeds her own productivity by 58%) only proves the point that women’s social media bloated egos have made them unrealistic tyrants. Now their beliefs and actions have come home to roost.
  • This is proof-positive that MGTOW is working! Finally women are waking up to the realities of their beliefs and actions. If enough guys abandon the SMP altogether then women will be forced to come back to reality and choose men based on other criteria than ‘economic attractiveness’.

One point I struggled to make on last week’s show was that I wondered if MGTOW believed that, from an evolved perspective, men and women are better together than they are apart. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pursue that question in depth; do MGTOW largely believe that, if social circumstances were different, men and women evolved to be complements to the other and the best social outcome would be for the sexes to be together rather than segregated?

For the last 60 years feminism has effectively driven a wedge between men and women. The Gender War of today exists because of a systematic segregation between men and women (don’t @me with the cultural marxism/’evil juice’ shit for the moment). Honestly, I’m sick of reading about how negative it is to merely point out the realities of this ‘gender cold war’ by Success Porn grifters, but is not MGTOW an adaptation to this segregation? Is not MGTOW an exacerbation of this segregation. When I read mantras like ‘Dogs, Dudes and Dolls’ it sounds an awful lot like ‘Cats, Girlfriends and Vibrators’.

Is MGTOW an adaptation to the conditions in a sexual marketplace that was (and still is) contrived by feminism/gynocentrism?

The following quote is from a long time commenter and friend Deti. This was from a larger discussion that began here if you want to get some context. Sorry guys, I just don’t have the space to repost the whole thread, but I don’t want this to get lost. Hopefully, it will inspire further discussion in this post’s comments:

I read Novaseeker as saying in his comments on this post, that women have adapted within this particular milieu. In other words, women noted the changes and have adapted to them. It helps that the changes were geared to them and prepared with them in mind. But women have adapted, and men have not.

About 100 years ago, it was all geared toward men and the sexual and marriage marketplaces were prepared with men in mind. They were prepared to advantage men and disadvantage women. Women responded to and lived within that milieu in a number of ways.

Using soft power, manipulation, deceit, subterfuge, behind the scenes machinations. Most women were more or less OK with marrying an OK guy, having OK sex, and living an OK life.

Of course, sometimes women cheated on the downlow. Sometimes women cuckolded husbands. I mean real actual traditional definition of cuckolding, which is a married woman getting pregnant by an Alpha and passing the child(ren) off as the Beta Husband’s. There’s no way to know how often that happened, but it wasn’t really rare – Maybe anywhere from 5 to 20% of children then weren’t fathered by their bio-moms’ husbands. In rare cases, not marrying and becoming spinsters, living as bohemians or as “favorite cousins” or “favorite aunts” with male relatives, working as teachers or seamstresses or some other job, and being live in nanny/maid. In rare cases, divorcing and living off family money or a husband’s alimony money. Living as widows and not remarrying.

The point is that women learned how to adapt. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they did adapt.

The main responses men have used today to adapt to changing circumstances have been:

  1. Game/PUA/Seduction – Use the changes to men’s advantage and go for easy sex and the bachelor lifestyle.
  2. MRA – Fighting the changes to advocate for either equalizing the laws or rolling them back to a return to Marriage 1.0 and pre-sexual revolution status.
  3. MGTOW – Check out of the new system, refuse to support or participate in it, and eschew relationships with women to varying degrees.

About, oh, 20 years in, I think we can safely say that option 2) is dead in the water and has been for some time. About the only real reforms here are that divorce and family laws are slowly, very, very slowly, moving toward 50/50 residential custody and away from alimony (except in the case of longer term marriages with breadwinner spouse/dependent nonemployed wife). Unless you have been married more than 20 years and support a housewife, you probably will not be paying alimony except for temporarily. Thats about the entire sum and substance of how “equal” it’s going to get between men and women.

That leaves 1) Game; and (3) MGTOW.

It’s hard to tell what will come out of this. I think we can say:

• Marriage 1.0 is dead and we are never going back to it for at least 2 more generations. If you think you’re going to have a “traditional marriage” where you don’t have to do much to maintain it or you can let up on your attractiveness levels, think again. Because that is not going to happen. If you’re going to marry a woman, you need to improve your attractiveness, marry a woman who is not financially dependent on you, and cultivate your own life separate and apart from her. You need a contingency plan in the event the marriage goes south. And with all that, you need to consider whether you want to risk bringing kids into the mix. You absolutely need a prenuptial agreement, even if it gets judicially torn up or modified later.

The bottom line is, people are still marrying, it’s just that it’s all being pushed out later and later, and people are staying single longer and spending less time married. Many women are meeting the men they eventually marry in their early to mid 20s, and then marrying in their late 20s and early 30s. That’s a paradigm that’s increasing in frequency; this idea of long term dating and engagements lasting 2 to 5 years while both the man and woman establish their careers.

If you want long term relationships you should consider marriage alternatives like living together, or being exclusive while living apart. You absolutely must avoid at all costs these polyamory/polygyny situations, and open marriages. You absolutely must avoid women who want to continue AF’ing it even after they marry. That must be an absolute no go, not an option, ever.

• Men have to improve and increase their sexual attractiveness to create, maintain, and sustain relationships with women. You can’t let up here. That’s IF you want relationships with women.

• More and more men will go pure MGTOW and will severely minimize if not eliminate their relationships with women. For a growing number of men, this option is going to be the best one, because (a) they did the work and still couldn’t attract women; or (b) they don’t want to do the work and it’s easier to stay as is than to try.

For most men, avoiding women entirely, except for paying hookers, is a no go. The thirst is that strong. The male sex drive is that potent. Most men want to have some contact with women, even if it’s just random hookups now and again. And the only way to do that is to make yourself as sexually attractive as possible. That just is so. Women are the ones who pick sex partners, and they have no problem with sharing attractive men with other women. So if you want sex partners, you have to make yourself sexually attractive. And you have to know male and female sexual nature, so that you know what you’re getting into, you know what you’re seeing, you know what women are doing, and you know what women really mean when they talk.

For men, improving one’s own attractiveness increases one’s power in the market. It increases his ability to control some of the selection process. It gives him an abundance mentality. It gives him the power to walk away from situations that disadvantage him. It gives him the ability to tell women “no” and to reject women who cannot or will not give him what he wants and needs.

On the other hand, going your own way can also increase your power in the market. It maximizes your control over your own life. It sharply reduces your responsibilities to others, and increases your opportunities. It frees up your resources to expend the way you want. Sharp reductions in responsibility means a sharp reduction in the needed resources for day to day living, meaning you can work less and increase your leisure time.

I think that more and more men will go pure MGTOW, which is essentially “make the best of a tough situation, be single, and don’t have a family. At least that’s better than getting divorce raped and it’s less work than going to the gym, getting in shape, and eating clean. This way I can eat what I want and work 30 hours a week, and live by myself in my apartment”. It’s kind of similar to women 100 years ago, where the path of least resistance was for Bertha BigGirl, Martha Dumptruck, and Plain Jane to “find a decent, OK man to support me, and probably have at least 3 of his kids. At least it’s better than living with Mom until she dies, and then having to live with my brother and his wife, and taking care of their kids.” And similar to the spinster, the MGTOW will be low status, or at least perceived as low status. But for the spinster and the MGTOW, their lifestyles will be at least better than whatever else they could have gotten.

Guys, Nova is absolutely correct in that men by and large are not adapting.

I think that what’s going on is that many men are saying “want to stay the same, don’t want to do a lot of work, but I still want women to be attracted to me and to be able to date a lot and eventually get married and have a family like (a) mom and dad had when I was growing up; or (b) like I didn’t get to have growing up.” Well, you can’t have that, at least not without working for it. If you want something you’re going to have to work for it. If you want women and sex, you’re going to have to make yourself attractive to women. And the way you’re going to do that, the only way to do that, is to stand out. And the way you stand out is by improving every area of your life – your job, your body, your finances, your lifestyle, your hobbies, your social acumen, and everything else that involves you going through your life.

The funny thing is that when a man stops caring so much about it, forgets about women, and sets about improving his life, he starts attracting women.

That’s the current state of things, I think.

I don’t disagree that we’re presently at a turning point in intersexual relations. After the advent of unilaterally female controlled birth control and the Sexual Revolution that followed the upheaval in how men and women come together and relate was inevitable. Now that we’re 50 odd years past that point we’re figuring out how reproduction, love, marriage, and something as simple as boy-meets-girl is going to look for future generations. The internet and a social media acculturation on a global scale has seen to it that it will likely never look like it did under the old social contract. There’s a theory that post-agrarian societies experienced a similar shift in intersexual dynamics in our ancestral past. Socially enforced monogamy was the obvious intersexual shift.

Right now we’re seeing a similar shift in intersexual relations. Is it simply better for men and women to live segregated lives? I don’t believe so, but it seems like a larger cultural narrative believes it’s time for both men and women to go their own ways. Until one side concedes, fuck any notion of evolved complementarity is the narrative I guess.

I do disagree with Deti in that I think men are adapting. They always have. It’s that the adaptation is counter to what we might hope is the natural order between men and women.

Alpha Widows

As today’s Purple Pill Manosphere tries to sort out what it wants to pick and pull from ideas the Red Pill has been debating for decades now it requires a lot of deliberate misdirection of the old concepts they struggle with. This is actually nothing new. If you look at any of the exchanges I had with Aunt Giggles (Susan Walsh ret.) or various notables from the golden years of this blog you’ll recognize the pattern – Distort the premises of the concepts that conflict with your ego-investments, straw man them, then offer some redefinition of what they ‘really’ mean.

One of these maligned concepts is the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow. I’ve written extensively on this idea for well over a decade now. I’m fairly certain I even coined the term back in my SoSuave days. Back then Alpha Widow was a designation we used to describe a woman’s tendency to become fixated on an Alpha lover she had in her Party Years and still pined for him into her 30s or 40s after marriage. We didn’t just pull the idea out of our asses back then. We came to it because of the overwhelming number of married or LTR men who reported that their wife or girlfriend were pining for old lovers they thought were “the one that got away” or they left them to pursue a new relationship with an old flame.

Back then it was just a useful reference, but it quickly became such a predictable and confirmable phenomenon I thought it deserved more investigation. I mentioned Alpha Widows in The Slut Paradox but it was around this time that Roissy (Heartise) had proposed a simple maxim: 5 Minutes of Alpha Trumps 5 years of Beta. That’s when I decided to look deeper in my own short essay Five Minutes of Alpha. With a Red Pill Lens I began to see this Alpha Widow narrative played out in popular culture. Katy Perry had a song out then called The One That Got Away and it accurately described everything that goes into making an Alpha Widow.

What is an Alpha Widow?

To understand the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow we must look at women’s evolved mating strategy – Hypergamy, a woman’s intrinsic desire to balance the best quality sexual/reproductive male with the best provisioning/parentally invested male. Since a woman’s mating strategy centers on quality in a long term partner(s) women tend to focus on ideals in men. The imperative drive for mate quality extends to both sides of women’s Hypergamous equation; the best genetic, sexual experience and the best long term security potential. Only women are Hypergamous, and Hypergamy never seeks its own level – it is always seeking a better-than-merited exchange in SMV compared to her own. For more information on this concept read False Equivalencies.

When a woman misses the opportunity to consolidate on a confirmed, high SMV (sexual market value) male that man becomes the new standard for what she believes she can attract as a potential mate.

“I’ve had an SMV 8 guy before so in the future no man below an 8 will be my optimal choice.”

Even if a woman’s perception of her own SMV isn’t realistic her Id wants what it believes it can get.

The setting of a mating strategy metric in men is largely a subconscious process for women, but, more often now, high-ego women do consciously acknowledge that one man does (or doesn’t) meet the SMV benchmark of a previous lover. As women have become more comfortable in embracing Open Hypergamy, amongst their girlfriends, on social media, they will readily debate this SMV metric of past boyfriends. The Alpha Widow dynamic is no secret among women. Usually this involves women bemoaning the lack of “eligible” men in their lives when their prime SMV years are behind them. Please note that eligible implies an entitlement to a man who would be an ideal.

This qualification process is a constant for women, and it’s a complement to mens’ Burden of Performance. Women’s Hypergamous filtering process evolved from an Existential Fear of pairing with any man beneath her own (self-perceived) SMV and risking her life on a bad reproductive bet.  The worst existential prospect for a woman is to have her mating strategy superseded and controlled by that of a suboptimal man. 

The flip side to this dynamic is that, evolutionarily speaking, a woman’s subconscious cannot afford to miss out on an optimal Hypergamous pairing. If a woman’s Existential Fear is to be forced to reproduce with a lesser man, the next fear is to lose or miss out out on the opportunity to consolidate on monogamy with a high SMV man. When I talk about how a woman will make rules for Betas, but break rules for Alphas this is the root of that principle. 

As such, a man who exceeds a woman’s SMV, and creates a benchmark of her ‘personal best’ ideal male to breed with and parentally invest with, makes a significant impact on her psyche; sometimes in the long term. When a woman has had this man – one for whom she has genuine, organic desire for – but she cannot consolidate on him (i.e. lock down in monogamy), this represents a critical loss of the ideal Hypergamous/Reproductive/Life strategy option. Mentally this is what a woman will strive in some way to recreate with subsequent men in her life – a return to that ideal state.

This then is the basis of the Alpha Widow:
A mental fixation on the man who made the most significant impact upon a woman as her Hypergamous ideal.

The Fantasy Ideal

Usually this male ideal is an actual man from her past with whom she had some sort of relationship with, but not always. Sometimes the fantasy of that ideal will make a mental impression and sometimes a brief, seemingly insignificant, encounter with an ideal man may be enough to imprint on her psyche. 

Five Minutes of Alpha Trumps Five Years of Beta.

Sometimes the smallest brush with an ‘alpha’ male is enough to trigger the ‘what if?’ possibilities of consolidating on a guy like that. This might be one-night sex, the one guy in the foam cannon party on spring break in her wilder college years, or even just a missed opportunity to fully develop a hoped-for connection at a social gathering. The ‘Missed Connections’ forum on Craig’s Lists are filled with these regrets. All that matters is that the guy, knowingly or not, instilled a sense of Hypergamous urgency that she just knew represented a prospect for consolidating on that ideal.

An Alpha Widow can also be ‘widowed’ from the fantasy of her ideal male. This is fairly common among women who marry early in their Party Years. Most feel like they missed out on having made a good Hypergamous choice (or had it made for them by circumstance or social pressures). That missed opportunity leads some women to be widowed from the fantasy of an Alpha who would have been a better choice. Thus, an ideal Alpha mental model is what she pines for. An interest in romance literature is usually exaggerated in this type of widow. The formulaic stories are a form of vicarious fulfillment of an unrealized Hypergamous ideal. I should also add, this this widow, when married, is a prime demographic audience for divorce porn fantasies.

In any of these instances what’s at issue is the fact that women’s mating strategy always moves them towards a “better-than-merited” SMV exchange and a psychological fixation on the man, or the type of man who best embodies it. It’s as if a woman’s Id is imprinted with the model of the optimal Hypergamous pairing (evolution-wise a life or death proposition) and believes that only in recreating it will that male again save her life. This is the source of that unconscious pining.

Social Enabling of the Alpha Ideal

In 2019 it has never been easier for a woman to explore her reproductive options with an ever-increasing pool of potential Alphas from which to be widowed from. Since the Sexual Revolution western cultures have done little else than facilitate women’s mating strategies. In terms of “sexual liberation” the goal has always been to ensure provisioning and support – the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy – in order to give women the impression that they have an indefinite window of time in which to find their optimal Alpha man. We see this reflected in the age of first marriages getting older and older. And in the age of social media women take for granted that they can remain sexually viable if not indefinitely, then at least as long as a man would. This facility exacerbates the Alpha Widow effect.

Women will fixate on the “one that got away”, but today we have social conventions in place to pander to that predictable insecurity in women. In fact, there are numerous industries that now thrive on exactly this.

Ladies, will you ever find your soulmate? Our Life-Coaching, our 12 step plan, our positivity training, our magic personality test will help you find him today.

I should add here that the very concept of a soulmate began with women pining for their bygone ideal man. That ‘One’ is much easier to justify cheating with, or agonizing over, if you mix in the metaphysical to aid in rationalizing it. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and Eat, Pray, Love also find their root in the Alpha Widow dynamic. Popular culture tells women they are entitled to that ideal soulmate; and the only way they can remain true to themselves, the only way to live their best lives (even the life they believe God meant for them), is to pursue the ‘ONE that got away.’

The Plan B mating strategy is another social convention that forgives women of the consequences of pursuing that Alpha ideal while concurrently holding on to her next best male option. And lastly, the ongoing normalization of a female-initiated Polyandry is also a social convention predicated on allowing women to hedge their Hypergamous bets with respect to finding that Hypergamous ideal mate.

Misconceptions

The following are a couple of the more common misconceptions critics like to presume is meant by “Alpha Widow”. For the most part these are attempts to straw man the phenomenon with no real interest in how anyone came to understanding the dynamic. 

• Alpha Widows are the result of “players” who fiendishly used these poor impressionable women before they left them high & dry

Blue Pill conditioned White Knights in particular use this to build their own heroic narrative around women. Of course, not all women are victims of the Alpha they were widowed by. The first part of this misconception is the presumption that no woman would volunteer for her own widowing; the second is that an Alpha “Player” was implicit in his motives to thoroughly imprint himself upon her. The truth is that any seduction requires a willing participant (Art of Seduction, Greene) and in accordance with women’s mating strategy women will eagerly participate in their own seduction. These are Alpha Widows, not rape survivors. 

The misconception is that the woman being widowed was somehow traumatized by her former lover. The truth is that the more positive the experience was for her the more impactful the widowing is likely to be. If women didn’t think fondly of the “one that got away” she wouldn’t be an Alpha Widow in the first place. The emotional despair some women feel over that Alpha is usually the result of having missed pairing in the long term with a better prospective man than the lesser man she settled on by necessity. 

This is an easy misconception for most Blue Pill men to follow along with because often enough women will refer to their ‘asshole ex boyfriend(s)’ as the man (men) who was responsible for her being damaged. Women in their Epiphany Phase will usually incorporate into it some narrative of their having been used by the Bad Boy Jerk who came before the Nice Guy Beta they found it necessary to settle on. This damaged narrative then locks in with a woman wanting to “do things the right way this time”. Women will often use this narrative as a failsafe to excuse their hesitancy to be as sexually available to the Beta as she was with the Alpha she was widowed from. So, you get a Saving the Best situation for the Nice Guy in the relationship and he’s apt to believe her claims of being damaged by the asshole who had her before he did.

Self-righteous Beta men love this damaged by the Player narrative because it allows them constant opportunities to prove to his woman how positively different he is compared to the asshole Alpha she’s still covertly pining for.

• “Alpha Widows” are just men making shit up and thinking the worst of women because they’re bitter and burned.

Yes, it is entirely possible that despondent Incels may exaggerate the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow to rationalize their giving up on women. This still doesn’t invalidate phenomenon. This misconceptions is generally dropped by critics of the Red Pill who’d rather attack the source than have to address a concept that rattles their comfortable Blue Pill understanding of women. That said, I understand how it might be convenient to disqualify the concept based on the bitterness of the individual piecing together why his wife or girlfriend still seems to be having a relationship with her ex even if just in her head. Self-loathing Incels will then use this as an excuse to give up for the same reason they believe Hypergamy is this insurmountable obstacle to their connecting with juice they don’t want to bother squeezing for.

For the record, no, not all women turn into Alpha Widows. All women are Hypergamous, but buffers and learned self-control have historically been the checks and balances needed to protect against this Alpha Widow dynamic. The problem is that these buffers are popularly considered sexual repression of women today. Women simply wont police the worst aspects of their mating strategy and any interference, personal, political or social, that would prevent a woman from exercising her Hypergamous sexuality is viewed as misogynist, sexist repression.

Statistically women with more sexual partners have a higher incidence of divorce and find it more difficult to form healthy attachments in LTRs based on their partner count. Men do not appear to follow these stats or dynamics, why?

Because men and women have different evolved mating strategies and priorities. Men, it appears, have a much easier time compartmentalizing the sex act and separating it from the emotional aspect women apply to sex. Men’s obsession with pornography is a good illustration of this, but it is reflective of the differences in our evolved mating strategies developed in our ancestral past. Men found it necessary to breed quickly and then move out – ejaculate and evacuate.

However, in a social order where Hypergamy is unbuffered women have more access to more men and have more opportunities to be imprinted by Alpha men while in their peak fertility years than in any other era before. This abundance of reproductive opportunities, and a lack of any social stigma or moral reservations are putting women into a position where their Blue Pill husbands turn their denial into hate for the ‘Players’ who violated and ruined their ‘soulmate’ before he came into her life. They refuse to acknowledge that in most cases his girl eagerly chose to give herself to the man she told her husband was a ‘Player’ from her past.

Blue Pill married men have the hardest time accepting the idea that their wives may be Alpha Widows for a man that came before them. They struggle with the possibility their wives gave a part of themselves to a guy that they’ll never experience, so denial and anger becomes their ego’s protection.

They throw shade at the men who have the Game to seduce women (who enjoy the seduction as well) because they “ruin women for great guys like him”. Thus, they turn it into a moral issue for those men or a personality flaw because it absolves their wives of their modern mating choices.

– Illustration, Stefan Schmidtz

Choose Wisely

Potential vs. Struggle

“Women don’t care about the struggle. They wait at the finish line and fuck the winners.”

Rich Cooper

This is a popular belief in the Manosphere today. Hypergamous stress is so intense that women have turned into mercenaries with respect to vetting the men they’ll accept to plan a future with. I’ll admit, a lot of well-meaning Red Pill men believe women’s Hypergamous Filter is necessarily amoral if not overtly cruel. The ill-informed critics of Hypergamy believe in a binary extreme. They presume that all those Red Pill guys are self-defeated by the idea that all women are prostitutes and only “out to get theirs“. This is simplistic ignorance of the concept of Hypergamy meant to dissuade the curious from Red Pill truths that they refuse to process. But do they kind of have a point though?

Virtually every extreme of MGTOW and the Mens Rights Movement have some open variation of how Hypergamy is a straight jacket and

“Why bother with a woman for anything other than a short term fuck if her Hypergamous nature will just predispose her to jumping ship to the first guy who comes along with a bigger dick or a bigger wallet?”

I covered all of these is detail in Hypergamy – The Misconceptions a while ago in case you’re curious as to why these are unfounded, and more often deliberate, misunderstandings of women’s nature. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m backpedaling on anything I’ve ever written about Hypergamy.

A couple weeks ago I got wrapped up in a Twitter exchange about the conflict between whether women indeed wait for the winners at the finish line or they make calculated bets about a man’s future potential.

From a pragmatic point of view I’m very much inclined to agree with this assessment. Yes, it makes women seem overly mercenary with respect to Hypergamy, but I’ve said it as much myself in any number of prior essays:

Women can only willingly want to please a man whose Frame is the dominant one. You’ve got to have that world established that she wants to enter and become a complementary, supportive (of you) and willing participant in. This world-building takes time. Women evolved to seek competency in men. Hypergamy cannot afford to bet all of a woman’s genetic legacy on a guy who has “potential” – they want the proven commodity. This is one reason women look for men older and taller than they are. More importantly, you need a woman who is playing on your team, not against you. And sadly this is the state of marriage promoted by the Feminine Imperative today. Egalitarianism doesn’t promote complementary cooperation, it promotes an adversarial state of competition between husband and wife.

The Marriage Game

In a purely evolutionary context it’s true; because a woman’s sexual market value – and ultimately her only agency with men – is perishable Hypergamy cannot afford for a woman to waste her time on a ‘good bet‘. This truth is a basic, Darwinistic, rule for women’s sexual strategy.

Despite all the social conventions to make them believe otherwise, women’s hindbrains know that their sexual agency and prime fertility window in life is limited. This creates a degree of urgency in a woman as she gets closer to, or ages past, the Wall. This understanding necessitates tradeoffs, but optimally a woman would prefer not to take chances with her reproductive future – and ultimately her life’s future.

For the more nihilistically inclined men of the ‘sphere, this Darwinistic determinism seems like a reproductive death sentence. If women only fuck the winners at the finish line, and you’re a loser, you may as well give up and go jerk off, right? This defeatism is a core tenet of the Black Pill.

All that said, a lot of people disagree with this assessment:

Jack knows I love him, but he is living with a girl much younger than himself. While I think that’s cool, and proof of Red Pill concept, he is actually living out the point being made here. Statistically, women tend to prefer men who are 5 to 7 years their senior. Another aspect of women’s evolved mental firmware is the natural attraction to older men as prospective long term mates. Women know that it takes men longer to mature into the genuine value that her Hypergamous Filters test for. An older rich man is always more believable than a younger rich man. Women tend to pair with a man their senior because Hypergamy doesn’t need to wait on his potential when he’s already a proven commodity.

Most of the criticism in this thread centers on exaggerating the age of “marriageable men” to the point of absurdity, but women do look for long term security as a prime requisite of the men they hope to pair for life with. There is a root-level presumption in women, correct or not, that an older man will have established the status and resources a woman needs in a long term partner. In fact, our feminine-primary social order shames men for not preparing to assume this role of security provider for women by a certain age (usually 30ish).

Alexander is also a good friend, but I’m going to disagree with half of his assessment. Women don’t readily recognize potential in men. In fact most of them are piss poor at it. This is because they’ve been socially conditioned to focus more on themselves (and exacerbated by their innate solipsism) than be concerned with making a good assessment of men’s potential for future success.

Now, before you think I’m siding with the Hypergamous nihilists, this did give me pause to step back and assess my stance on women reading men’s potentials to provide for their future security. And that last part is the most important because women’s sexual strategy has two parts: Alpha Fucks – short term sexual needs – and Beta Bucks – long term provisioning and security needs. It’s the latter that we’re discussing in this debate.

Women want to fuck the winners in the short term, but they will also assess a man’s potential for the long term.

Hypergamy cannot afford to wait for 100% perfect confirmation of a man’s Alpha status before she has sex with him. This Hypergamic bypass is actually one vulnerability women have with respect to well calibrated Game.

The Epiphany Phase Revisited

In the essay Women’s Existential Fear I also made the following proposition:

The Existential Fear in women is that their innate, Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.

Making Choices

All of this presumes that a woman is in some way testing for a man’s potential. Even women’s autonomous shit testing is a confirmation of this. So yes, women do look for potential in men. Some better than others. The Hypergamous Filter is an imperfect tool which is exactly why women needed to mystify their feminine intuition in popular understanding. Men had to be kept in the dark as to a woman’s motives because their filters have always been intuitive guesswork. This is a vulnerability that men might exploit – with good Game for instance – if women were ever honest about it.

Not all women can fuck the winners so they have to make calculated bets on men. This is also a reason women rely on social proof and the preselection cues of other women. If other women find a guy to be a ‘good bet’ it provides her a short cut to getting to intimacy. Again, Hypergamy cannot afford to miss out on a socially confirmed ‘good bet’. And yes, this is also a vulnerability in women’s vetting process that men with good Game regularly exploit.

So, the tradeoff is this: when a woman is at her peak sexual market value (SMV) she has the leisure to fuck the winners at the finish line. The more her SMV decays the fewer her options become, and the more likely it is that her necessity requires her to make a ‘bet’ on a man’s future potential. This is the primary reason women opt for the Beta in Waiting around her Epiphany Phase. Necessity forces her to go with good potential.

One of the ways feminism and female-primacy sabotages women’s ability to vet for good potential is in the mythology surrounding their sexual viability as they get older. Social conventions constantly reinforce the false idea that a woman’s SMV is indefinite – and by extension her agency over men should also be indefinite. This is why Blank Slate idealism and Social Constructionism are a preferred mythology for women. Without the Blank Slate a woman would be forced to accept the evolved realities of her sex. The Blank Slate is a prime source of women’s solipsistic denial of her own nature.

Turnkey Men

Do women care about the struggle? Do women ever appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate their own realities? I explored this topic a long time ago in Appreciation and I’m still going with my old assessment, no.

It may be that a man of Rich Cooper’s age, affluence and status only attracts the ‘finish line girls’ because he’s already a made man. He’s an attractive catch because he’s already a proven commodity. Thus, he tends to attract women who are looking for a ‘Turnkey’ man with an established world into which they want to move.

I should also add that most middle aged women, past their sexual prime and well past any long term potential they may’ve had themselves universally look for the ‘Turnkey’ man – once they’re done playing cougar immediately after their divorce. This is another illustration of women’s sexual strategy from the post-Wall side. Alpha Fucks – Beta Bucks never changes, only the context does. Post divorce women go through a second Epiphany Phase right after the divorce. Play cougar and fuck the fun college guys if they can because it’s easy, but be on the lookout for a ‘Turnkey’ winner who’s still ignorant of his Blue Pill conditioning at 45.

Whether it’s a woman in her late 20s or a post-Wall ‘mature woman‘ a man’s struggles to become her ideal is largely irrelevant to her. WHile women are speculators with respect to men it’s the end result of those struggles that’s the operative for her. Almost every woman who disagreed in the Twitter thread above all had some success story of how their brilliant feminine intuition led to them investing in the man they’re so proud to call a husband now. None of them were about how they made a horrible mistake in betting their future on a losing horse. So it’s important to see how the results skew for women.

Women will readily make claims on Relational Equity as an insurance against his leaving her later, once he’s achieved that potential. His struggle and her bearing through it with him is only important in that it produced the positive results she’d hoped for. That ‘dedication’ of seeing it through is her relationship insurance. It’s why women despise and reinforce the “trophy wife” meme. It’s prime indignation to have a man betray her speculation on him by rewarding a younger, hotter, tighter woman at the finish line.

Your struggle is her burden despite you having to bear it under duress of her abandoning you if you failed. Women will never appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to facilitate a reality, her sexual/life strategy, she believes was always her due. You just did what you were supposed to do as a man. Women believe it is their due to pair with a man who is worthy of her social media inflated ego. If that sounds harsh remember that women regularly bemoan the lack of men who are their “equal partners” in both money and education well after their prime SMV years are past.

Finally, the reason the finish line metaphor is apt is because more women than ever are postponing marriage in the expectation that ‘Turnkey’ made men will be waiting and available when they hit 31-33 years old, rather than investing in men with good potential in their early to mid 20s. Doing so would mean sacrificing their peak SMV Party Years when someone like Sheryl Sandberg convinces them to wait for the ‘Right Guy‘. It’s simple pragmatism for a woman not to bet her reproductive future on an unproven commodity so early in life. If she does, and it works out for the best, she’s practically sainted by the Sisterhood for her prudence and sacrifice for him. Behind every great man is a woman, right?

But if she chooses unwisely and her life goes to hell she’s wasted her own potential on a bad bet. Social conventions can mitigate this of course. Men can always be blamed for her downfall, but she’s still saddled with the consequences of that bad bet. And it is exactly these consequences of a bad Hypergamous choice that the Feminine Imperative will bend all its power to legally and socially insure against for women (i.e. legal abortion, child support laws, #MeToo, the Duluth Model of feminism).

All of this is why women are pushing their decision to marry, if at all, back to older and older ages. The average age of first marriage today is 27-28 for women, and the overall marriage rate has been in free-fall for decades now. This is why. This evolved dynamic is conflicting with our present age’s social imperatives for women and the falsehoods they are conditioned to believe about their sex from the earliest ages.

If you liked this topic you can also listen to my discussion about it with Donovan Sharpe here: