When Neil Strauss was writing The Game there was an interesting side topic he explored towards the end of the book. He became concerned that the guys who were learning PUA skills and experiencing such success with women of a calibre they’d never experienced before would turn into what he called “Social Robots.” The idea was one that these formerly Game-less guys would become Game automatons; mouthing the scripts, acting out the behaviors and meeting any countermanding behaviors or scripts from women with calculated and planned “if then” contingencies.
The fear was that these Social Robots “weren’t themselves”, they were what Mystery Method, Real Social Dynamics, etc. were programing them to be and the relative success they experienced only reinforces that “robot-ness”. My experience with guys from this blog, SoSuave and other forums has been entirely different. If anything most men transitioning to a Red Pill mindset tenaciously cling to the ‘Just Be Yourself and the right girl will come along’ mentality.
A strong resistance guys have to Red Pill awareness will always be the “faking it” and keeping it up effort they believe is necessary to perpetuate some nominal success with women. They don’t want to indefinitely be someone they’re not. It’s not genuine to them and either they feel slighted for having to be an acceptable character for women’s intimate attention or they come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain ‘the act’ indefinitely. Either way there’s a resentment that stems from needing to change themselves for a woman’s acceptance – who they truly are should be enough for the right woman.
I’ve written more than a few essays about this dynamic and the process of internalizing Red Pill awareness and Game, but what I want to explore here is the root idealism men retain and rely on when it comes to their unconditioned Game. In truth this Game is very much the result of the conditioning of the Feminine Imperative, but the idealistic concept of love that men hold fast to is what makes that conditioning so effective.
What’s Your Game?
I’ve written before that every man has a Game. No matter who the guy is, no matter what his culture or background, every guy has some concept of what he believes is the best, most appropriate, most effective way to approach, interact with and progress to intimacy with a woman. How effective that “Game” really is is subjective, but if you asked any guy you know how best to go about getting a girlfriend he’ll explain his Game to you.
Men in a Blue Pill mindset will likely parrot back what their feminine-primary conditioning had him internalize. Just Be Yourself, treat her with respect, don’t objectify her, don’t try to be someone you’re not, are just a few of the conventions you’ll get from a Blue Pill guy who is oblivious to the influence the Feminine Imperative has had on what he believes are his own ideas about how best to come to intimacy with a woman.
For the most part his beliefs in his methodology are really the deductive conclusions he’s made by listening to the advice women have told him about how best to “treat a woman” if he wants to get with her. A Blue Pill mindset is characterized by identifying with the feminine, so being false is equated with anything counter to that identification.
When you dissect it, that conditioned Blue Pill / Beta Game is dictated by the need for accurate evaluation of men’s Hypergamous potential for women. Anything that aids in women’s evaluating a man’s hypergamous potential to her is a tool for optimizing Hypergamy. The dynamics of social proof and pre-selection are essentially shortcuts women’s subconscious uses to consider men’s value to her. Likewise the emphasis Blue Pill Game places on men’s ‘genuineness’ is a feminine conditioning that serves much the same purpose – better hypergamous evaluation. If men can be conditioned to be up front about who they are and what they are, if they internalize a mental point of origin that defers by default to feminine primacy, and if they can be socially expected to default to full and honest disclosure with women by just being themselves, this then makes a woman’s hypergamous evaluation of him that much more efficient.
This is where most Blue Pill men fail in their Game; who they are is no mystery, their deference and respect is worthless because it’s common and unmerited, and just who he is isn’t the character she wants him to play with her.
So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is. However, it’s important to consider that this genuineness is still rooted in his idealistic concept of a mutual and reciprocal love.
From Of Love and War:
We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.
We want to, so badly.
If we do, we soon are no longer able to.
In The Burden of Performance I made the case for men’s need to perform for feminine acceptance and how men’s idealistic concept of love centers not on a want for unconditional love, but rather a love free from the performance requirements women’s opportunistic, Hypergamous, concept of love demands of him. This quote sums up that idealistic want for rest from having to perform to earn a woman’s love and acceptance.
The problem of course is the supposition that a performanceless love would ever really be love, but men’s idealistic nature still believes that the state is realizable. On a social scale the Feminine Imperative sees the resource utility in this and so encourages the idea that both men and women mutually share his concept of idealized love. Thus men, unaware of the respective differences in concepts both sexes hold with regard to love, enter into a perpetual state of qualifying for a love they believe women should be capable of. Men will work hard, build empires and amass fortunes to come to that state of performanceless rest they idealize should be possible with a woman.
The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism
About two weeks ago I was called to the carpet in the commentary by George Weeks (a.k.a. Not Born This Morning, one of many aliases) for what he believes was an inconsistency in my assessment of men’s idealistic concept of love and how that idealism is really symbiotic with women’s opportunistic concept of love. I’ll spare you his autistic attention trolling, but he did raise a few points I do need to clarify about how men and women’s separate, but purpose driven, concepts of love developed.
From Intersexual Hierarchies:
In the beginning of this series I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can really see how the two dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two come together.
When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.
From Heartiste’s post:
7. Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance were highest in couples where the woman made all or most of the decisions. Female decision-making status was an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.
8. Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers. Lesson for men: You can have a happy relationship with a woman who makes more than you as long as you remain the dominant force in her non-work life. Or: GAME SAVES MARRIAGES.
When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.
This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.
In and of itself, a man’s idealism can be a source of strength or his greatest weakness. And while unfettered Hypergamic opportunism has been responsible for many of women’s worst atrocities to men, in and of itself Hypergamy is the framework in which the human species has evolved. Neither is good nor bad, but become so in how they are considered and how they are applied.
Men’s idealistic concept of love is a buffer against women’s opportunistic concept of love. When that idealism is expressed from a Beta mindset women’s opportunism dominates him and it’s debilitating. When it’s expressed from an Alpha mindset it supersedes her opportunism to the relationship’s benefit.
Conditioned Idealism
If you want to use Blue Valentine (the movie) as an example, the guy in the relationship abdicates all authority and ambition over to his wife’s opportunism. He idealistically believes “love is all that matters” and has no greater ambition than to please her and ‘just be himself’, because his conditioning has taught him that should be enough. His Beta conditioning convinced his idealism that his wife would shared in that idealistic concept of love in spite of his absence of performance. Consequently she despises him for it. She’s the de facto authority in the relationship and he slips into the subdominant (another child to care for) role.
Now if a man’s Alpha, willful, idealism propels him to greater ambition, and to prioritize his concept of love as the dominant, and places himself as his mental point of origin for which a woman accepts you can see how this leads to the conventional model. His idealism is enforced by how he considers it and how he applies it.
Men’s idealistic concept of love can be the worst debilitation in a man’s life when that idealistic nature is expressed from a supplicating Beta mentality. It will crush him when that idealism is all about a bill of goods he idealistically hopes a woman shares and will reciprocate with. This is predominantly how we experience idealism in our present cultural environment of feminized social primacy.
From an Alpha perspective that idealism is a necessary buffer against that same feminine opportunistic concept of love that would otherwise tear a Beta apart.
There was a time when men’s idealistic concept of love was respected above the opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love. I explored this social control of Hypergamy in Women Behaving Badly.
Under the old set of books, when men’s attractiveness (if not arousal) was based on his primary provisioning role his love-idealism defined the intergender relationship. Thus, we still have notions of chivalry, traditional romance, conventional models of a love hierarchy, etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this love-idealism.
There was a time when men’s idealistic love concept pushed him to achievements that had social merit and were appreciated. Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles would not be the human icons they are if that idealism weren’t a driving force in men and society. Likewise, women’s opportunistic, hypergamy-based concept of love, while cruel in its extreme, has nonetheless been a driving motivation for men’s idealistic love as well as a filter for sexual selection.
Under the new set of books, in a feminine-centric social order, the strengths of that male idealism, love honor and integrity are made to serve the purpose of the Feminine Imperative. Men’s idealistic love becomes a liability when he’s conditioned to believe that women share that same idealism, rather than hold to an opportunistic standard. This is what we have today with generations of men conditioned and feminized for identifying with the feminine. These are the generations of men who were conditioned to internalize the equalist lie that men and women are the same and all is relative. From that perspective it should follow that both sexes would share a mutual concept of love – this is the misunderstanding that leads men to expect their idealism to be reciprocated and thus leads to their exploitation and self-abuse.
A man’s idealism becomes his liability when he enters a woman’s opportunistic frame still believing they both share a mutual concept of love.