One of the dichotomies I consistently see in the manosphere is the differences in how men approach the importance (or feigned unimportance) of sex. I got a bit sidetracked in last week’s essay. I was planing on writing about this phenomenon when I saw the need to explore how it impacted a larger social narrative. So, let’s consider this essay an addendum to The New Polyandry.
How men publicly and privately prioritize sex is always something that leads to a judgement call about that particular man, how he lives his life, and what it says about his integrity. If you openly make sex a “big deal” in your life, or you acknowledge its importance in intersexual relationships, you open yourself up to men’s Beta Game virtue signaling. The presumption is that if you were a real Alpha sex is just something you should have mastery over. If sex is at all important to a man, and he expresses this, that guy runs the risk of being seen as “obsessed with sex“, a “pussy beggar” or in someway less of a man for allowing sex to control his decisions.
Why is this the perception?
Two weeks ago I had a lively debate with the producer of Pat Campbell’s morning show. While we did have other topics to hit on that morning, she and I dug in and talked about how “sex is the glue that holds relationships together.” You can listen to the full segment here if you like.
As I mentioned last week, the notion that men need sex is nothing I haven’t covered in the past. In You Need Sex I made a case for the importance of sex and how it was, until recently, something that constituted part of a man’s life experience. Now it seems that being a sexless virgin at age 40 should be considered an accomplishment by certain factions in the manosphere:
One very common dismissal of Red Pill awareness I read from Blue Pill men is this feigned, blasé indifference to sex.
For the most part this false-indifference is really a conditioned, response couched in Beta Game. The idea is for the Blue Pill guy to promote the public perception that he’s above his sexual impulses in the hopes that any girl within earshot (or reading his comments online) will recognize his uniqueness in not letting his cock do his thinking for him. From a male deductive logic standpoint it makes sense to the feminized male – women have all told him how off-put they are with guys who only think about sex, so he’ll identify with the women he’d like to get with and “not be like other guys.”
“All that Red Pill, PUA shit is for guy’s who obsess over sex. They only go to the lengths they do to get laid and never see the bigger picture. You don’t need sex you know? You wont die from not getting laid.”
[…]Thats the Beta Game behind the “you don’t need sex” Buffer, but there’s more to this rationale than that. Technically the Beta reasoning is correct; physically, you’re not going to die if you don’t get laid. You could probably masturbate to relieve yourself or live a sexless existence due to a physical disability and live a productive life as satisfying as you can manage it. If you don’t know what you’re missing or if a sexual substitute does the job, what’s the difference, right? The line of reasoning is that if it isn’t food, water or oxygen it isn’t really a necessity for existence.
You’re All Obsessed!
Self-righteous Blue Pill men always look to make their necessities into virtues. It also helps the men who fall on the 80% side of the Hypergamous Pareto curve to convince themselves and others that their sexual strategy – one that follows enforced monogamy – is the moral one; or the logical, common sense one absent the moral context. If you cannot get laid yourself, at least you can make getting laid into an ‘obsession‘ for the 20% of men who can. By doing so you encourage the 20% of men, who women desire to fuck, to police themselves and women by adopting your own, self-superior, one-woman-per-man sexual strategy.
Pretty much every MRA I’ve listened to, most Traditional Conservatives and a few MGTOWs, like to qualify men who can get laid as being in some way obsessed with getting laid. We’re told how morally superior they themselves are for essentially thinking with the big head instead of the little one, thus confirming their own part in a monogamous sexual strategy. As I mentioned in the last essay, a majority of men tend to fall on one side of the Strategic Pluralism Theory with respect to their sexual strategy.
Low SMV (sexual market value) men are basically forced to invest in one woman at a time if they are to successfully reproduce. This is the basis of a socio-sexual order founded on enforced monogamy. The larger pool of men benefit reproductively if the majority of men can be relied upon to follow the dictates of socially accepted, socially enforced, form of monogamy.
In the past this emphasis also had a culling effect on the worst aspects of women’s Hypergamous tendencies. If all men – including the 20% who could enjoy many women – agreed to play by the old social contract and adopted monogamy as their sexual strategy (in spite of being able to reproduce outside it) then more men would have the opportunity to reproduce. Furthermore, women’s Hypergamy would also be forced to accept lower SMV men’s monogamous strategy as a buffer to worst aspects of their own.
In the past, religious and social mores used to act as a buffer against Hypergamy, but the compromise for women was that they could expect to have the Beta Bucks provisioning aspects of their Hypergamy more or less provided for by the majority of men who adopted this strategy. In an evolutionary sense, protection and provisioning are already an integral part of the male mental firmware. But all of that went out the window after the Sexual Revolution, unilaterally female-controlled hormonal birth control and the socio-sexual/socioeconomic landscape that sprang from the Fempowerment narrative.
Today there is a radical imbalance between the old social contract upon which enforced monogamy was a key element and the new social contract dictated by a gynocratic social order that places women’s sexual strategy well above that of men’s. So it’s small wonder that men would revert back to 80% of low SMV men insisting on, and shaming, the 20% of high SMV men comply with a sexual strategy that women readily confirm isn’t in their best interests.
On the male side of the strategic equation a majority of low SMV men cannot afford to have Alpha men playing by the rules of polygyny.
That polygyny is really a form of female-directed polyandry (see last week’s essay), but to the 20% of men who enjoy the benefits of falling on the enthusiastic consent side of Hypergamy it just makes sense to go with it. As such, low SMV men are compelled to find ways of discouraging these Alphas from following their r selected sexual strategy. They realize women will want, and pursue, Alphas. And in a polyandrous socio-sexual order based on the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy low SMV men drew the shortest straw.
Intrasexual Combat
When Beta men shame women for wanting to fuck Alpha men it has the effect of making those Beta men seem more insecure. In a feminine-primary social order one of the highest crimes is to attempt to challenge Hypergamy in any way. Even in a religious context, to challenge Hypergamy is to be guilty of repressing women’s sexuality. Today, just this impression is conflated with ‘toxic’ masculinity.
In truth, it would never occur to most low SMV men to shame women for their sexual strategy because they know that in doing so they reduce their own chances of reproduction. Women simply deem them ‘losers’ in the SMP (sexual marketplace). They become scolds, or worse, they become men who are “insecure in their masculinity” because they confirm their low SMV status in doing so. In today’s socio-sexual environment men policing women’s Hypergamy is a lost cause.
The solution then becomes an effort to disqualify the Alpha men they compete with by changing the rules that “real men” are supposed to play by. If you can’t win the Game, change the rules to better fit your strengths.
The ‘Real Man®‘ becomes the guy who exclusively invests himself in one ‘Quality Woman‘ – just like they do.
The apex of masculinity becomes whatever definition best aligns with what they believe they represent.
The’Real Man®‘ is the guy who best fulfills a woman’s, often duplicitous, sexual/life strategy by adopting the K mating strategy of socially/religiously enforced monogamy – just like they do. Oh, and the Quality Woman becomes whatever woman whose necessity compels her to agree with and adopt that strategy (Epiphany Phase).
The Real Man®‘ is the guy who plays by the old social contract rules of enforced monogamy, so more Betas might have a better shot at reproduction. True ‘Manhood‘ becomes a title Betas now feel qualified to bestow on other men; just as women also do with men who help complete their Hypergamous life-strategies.
Trads vs. The Playboy Lifestyle
In order for Beta men to effect this reigning in of the Alpha men women want to tame and breed with, the high SMV man must be demonized and disqualified from the SMP for following his sexual/biological imperatives. The most common way to do this is by conflating his strategy with a degenerate hedonism. he must be made to seem as if he’s not in control of his sexual nature. So the effort becomes one of building an archetype around the ‘Playah‘ – A man who would be a bad long term bet for women’s Hypergamy because he lacks self-control. For this straw man character his little head does the thinking for the big head making him unreliable as a prospect for parental investment.
If enforced monogamy defines the accepted SMP, and women are presumed to be coequal, co-rational participants in it the ‘Playah’ needs to be cast as the outsider. The latent message is the same intrasexual combat method women use with ‘slut shaming‘; the ‘Playah‘ is a bad bet for long term security even if he is the guy women want to fuck.
However, that Playboy is a cruel reminder to low SMV men that they’ll never be able to fully exercise their own masculine imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. The closest the majority of men will ever get to this is online porn; which of course is why it’s so popular. There is a reason why 68% of Christian men watch porn. They understand that it’s the only viable substitute for their sexual imperative that they’re likely to experience in this lifetime.
While MRAs and MGTOW tend to reserve a special hate for ‘Playahs‘, it’s the Trad-Con mindset that is the most vocal against the Playboy lifestyle. There’s an overarching need amongst Trads to confirm their ego-investment in locking themselves into enforced monogamy.
There’s two complications to this:
First, Trad men (and women) tend to superimpose their religious and social belief set on their own sexual strategy. It’s a sin if they don’t accept monogamy as the standard. Today, this belief is a vestige of the old buffers that used to guard against either sex getting too far into their primal sexual impulses and strategies. It’s much easier to impose your sexual strategy on other men, effectively policing their strategy, if it’s ‘God’s Will’ that everyone behave according to that old social contract. I should add that this is the primary reason most Trad men suffer the worst from having their belief in the old set of books destroyed by Red Pill truths. It is galling for men who’ve invested their whole lives in the old social contract to have it vividly disproved by ‘Playahs’ (and women’s behaviors that confirm it) who understand the new social contract well enough to make it work for them.
Second, there’s the self-fulfilling idea that a man who opts for the traditional monogamous lifestyle is in some way more progressive or evolved, or life-satisfied than the ‘Playah‘ with the option to enjoy his non-exclusive sexual strategy. These are the guys who play up the ‘sour grapes’ Law of Power:
Law 36 – Disdain the things you cannot have
If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.
MRAs and Trads alike don’t like being reminded that sex has always been an integral part of a healthy life experience for the majority of men who’ve ever lived on this planet. However, to them, sex is almost always a reward for desired behavior that they believe women expect of them. For most of them sex is always transactional so they never live out any frame of reference of having sex with a woman in a validational sense. It’s likely that they will never experience sex in any other context than the transactional. This is simply one of the visceral realities of a Darwinian sexual marketplace. As such, this pretext colors all of their understanding about what is, or should be accepted as, a legitimate sexual strategy – which unsurprisingly is his enforced monogamy strategy.
“Meaningful” Sex
The low SMV majority have many contrivances to corral uncooperative Alphas to adopt their sexual strategy. However, there’s also an involved necessity to convince themselves that their Blue Pill conditioning is the best sexual strategy that would benefit everyone if we’d all just see the validity of it as they do. To effect this they apply a subjective “meaningfulness” to their enforced monogamy (K selection) and “meaninglessness” to pursuing men’s biological imperatives (r selection) or the Alpha sexual strategy.
As a result, low SMV men tend to deemphasize the importance of sex in life. I asked this in the introduction; why is there a perception that a man who enjoys many women is somehow having sex that is less ‘meaningful’ than a man whose sex live is dependent on his relationship with one woman – or, a man who is ostensibly celibate?
The tactic involved here is the control over what constitutes meaning in sex. Low SMV men need this control to direct a meta-Frame that foments their sexual strategy; sex is only valid if it’s ‘meaningful’ in a way that aligns with an enforced monogamy sexual strategy. Thus, they can disqualify high-SMV men by delegitimizing his sexual experience. The higher the notch count, the less meaningful the sexual experience – and the likelier he can be seeen as “obsessed‘ with (meaningless) sex.
“Meaning” is deliberately ambiguous to better salve the egos of low SMV men, but meaning only aligns with what better promotes the enforced monogamy strategy. This strategy conflict actually serves Hypergamy in the long run as well. Women will endorse the importance of meaningful sex since it helps to convince the r selected Alphas that they should (eventually) shift to K selected commitment and parental investment with them. To the Beta moralist, any sex that doesn’t implicitly lead to marriage, children and the formation of families it’s always ‘meaningless’.
For the less moralistic low SMV man the idea that sex is something easily had, something inherently cheap, serves in devaluing Alpha men’s sexual experience. A popular idea among MRAs is that meaningless sex is something any guy can realistically achieve in a random club on a Friday night. This also serves to debase the value of learning Game; something MRAs never seem to have any facility with. By unrealistically cheapening the process of Game the same ‘meaninglessness’ imperative is created.
If any guy can find a worthless club slut with minimal effort then the low SMV man can raise his value by appearing to have higher standards than to lower himself to doing so. See how that works? This is a variation of the ‘sour grapes’ strategy I mentioned earlier. The Alpha who can easily get women becomes common. And by enjoying what Beta men believe should be a common sexual experience that man is reducing himself to his baser instincts. They say he’s “obsessed with pussy” or a “pussy beggar” because he’s applied himself to learning, in the most marginal way, how to have sex on his terms. And if he plays by a rule set that doesn’t align with the “correct” rules all his efforts become “meaningless”.
I should add here that MRAs and some Trad-Con men also like to foment the idea that because they eschew all that easily-had “meaningless” sex that Alpha men and Low Quality women are engaging it frees him up to pursue more esoteric, philosophical and creatively productive pursuits. Again, this helps to boost their esteem while presenting the appearance of uniqueness in spite of the fact that few of them ever have anything concrete to show for it. Along these lines they also love to imply that famous celibate men of antiquity were somehow more accomplished because they had the forbearance of mind to understand sex was a hindrance. When no one believes you aren’t making your necessity a virtue it’s sometimes necessary to paint men more famous than you with the same false-virtues.
The common refrain is that they’ve reached some Nirvana state of higher purpose or that they’ve evolved above the common need for sex. They shame the Alpha’s intelligence by claiming they allow their sexual nature to dictate to their rational nature. This too is a sexual quality signaling (or they believe it should be). They hope that their coequal, co-rational, Quality women will respond to it because they presume they’re using the same enforced monogamy rule book. Most Beta moralists are egalitarian blank-slate equalists. If they are evolved above their sexuality, then evolved, rational women should be too – but only if they are quality.
