love

The Mystery of the Red Dress

Today’s quote is from the Biography of Steve Jobs. I did read the book in its entirety in 2010, but recently had this bit sent to me from a reader as an example of ‘How an Alpha should treat a Gold-digger‘. Mmm? No.

As an example of “alpha behavior” or an illustration of equal justice I can see why this incident might be construed as such, but there’s a much more valuable lesson to be learned in this exchange. The incident took place between Steve Jobs and singer Joan Baez, a woman who Jobs eventually had a relationship with.

In 1982, Jobs was introduced to Joan Baez by her sister Mimi Farina. He was 27 and she was 41. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” said Jobs. Some of his friends believed that one thing that drew Jobs to Baez was the fact that she used to date Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” said Jobs’ college friend Elizabeth Holmes.” The relationship fizzled out when it became clear that Jobs wanted children and Baez did not. 

Rolling Stone, 2011

Using a Red Pill Lens on this situation, we see a few apparent truths. The age difference was definitely a factor, but Jobs was well-known for what was called his “Reality Distortion Bubble“. In effect Steve Jobs had an intrinsic understanding of himself as his Mental Point of Origin. A lot of Type-A personalities have this in common – they innately make themselves the first thought they have in virtually all decisions they make. For some this can border on sociopathy, but most people we consider successes or geniuses had this sense of self as their starting point. Let me make this clear, you don’t have to be a sociopath or a solipsist to make yourself your Mental Point of Origin, but that is where these states begin.

Practically every very wealthy man I’ve ever worked for, or with, had himself in mind before a thought was give to anyone else’s consideration in his decision making process; family, spouse, employees, friends, we’re subordinate to his Mental Point of Origin. For most the process would start and end with themselves and their interests. These were the sociopaths. For a few that process started with themselves and ended with the consideration of others, but the process was a pragmatic one that facilitated a maintaining of power balance. As I’ve said in the past, I’m a proponent of enlightened self interest: I cannot help others until I help myself. Nor can I help others as effectively as when I help myself first. It’s not that you ought to become a selfish prick – you should think of the interests of others – but only after you’ve considered yourself in the scope of your own interests and how your interests facilitate the interests of others.

Now that this is settled, let me say that by this metric, Steve Jobs was none of this. According to the people he worked with, his family and friends, Jobs had all the characteristics of a solipsist. Yes, men can be solipsists too, though it’s more of a learned process rather than the innate proclivity women have to be solipsistic. From a business perspective, from a single-minded determination perspective, Jobs was certainly an Alpha. His mindset was that of an Alpha. His relationship history, however, was grossly influenced by Blue Pill idealism. One commonality you’ll find among men we consider great innovators, inventors, discoverers and entrepreneurial geniuses is they are almost invariably Blue Pill idealists with respect to their romantic lives. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two current examples of this commonality. Argue their greatness if you like, their personal lives are classic examples of what happens to the Nerd, the autist, the high IQ guy, who’s afforded the money and success to live out their Blue Pill fueled impression of what a relationship with a woman should be like. And predatory women, with the savvy to understand (and have the patience for) the nature of Beta men, make these guys their bread and butter.

“There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not sure I would describe Jobs as an autist, or being on the Asperger’s spectrum, but he was certainly on the sociopath spectrum. Try not to conflate ‘sociopath’ with something negative in this instance. Sociopathic behaviors and character attributes can equally be attractive survival traits as they are evidence of megalomaniacal tyranny. Sociopathy is really by order of degree. Jobs most certainly began and ended his thinking with himself in mind.

My Red Pill Lens read on this is as follows: Something in Steve Job’s subconscious was testing Joan Baez for genuine desire.

I’m fairly certain most of my readers will understand the ovulatory shift implications of a red dress being the item in mention here, but there is a method to Job’s madness in this.

“I said to myself, far out, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.”

Joan doesn’t get it from the start here. She presumes that a rich man would want to purchase her affections via the transaction of a gift. Not uncommon for even 41 year old women, and yes, her thinking here is exactly the solipsistic mental point of origin women have a natural default for. Indignant guys will call her a Gold Digger, which is accurate, but moreover you have to look at the process here. She presumes that rich men buy expensive gifts for the women they’re interested in. But in typical Jobs fashion Steve flips the script without knowing that’s what he’s doing.

When they get to the store Steve points out the dress and says, “You oughta buy it.” She looked a little surprised, said she couldn’t really afford it, he said nothing and they left.

“Wouldn’t you think if someone (a rich man) had talked like that the whole evening they were going to buy it for you?”

It would be easy to dismiss this part as default female entitlement, but remember this was 1982, and while women (particularly attractive and famous women) did expect things from well-to-do men, the entitlement levels weren’t anything like they are now. I think she was genuinely confused. She really didn’t get it.

“The mystery of the Red Dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.”

He would giver her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he would be sure to say they were leftover from an event in the office.

“He was both romantic, and afraid to be romantic.”

This end part is Baez’s last attempt to explain why an ‘eccentric‘ rich man wouldn’t buy her a dress he thought she’d look good in. I’m often asked how to go about vetting a woman for a long term relationship, and I’ve written essays about how most men simply never actually have the luxury of holding (much less developing) standards by which to ‘vet‘ a woman’s commitment-worthiness. Most men are not rich men, most men are Betas. Fewer still have the sense of self-value, or the access to so many optional women, as to presume to test a woman’s interest in him in any meaningful sense. Steve Jobs was not a necessitous man, he had, or could easily realize options when he wanted to. But even though he was idealistic in a Blue Pill conditioned sense, his subconscious wanted something it couldn’t buy – genuine desire from Joan Baez.

It’s easy to dismiss the Red Dress Incident as just another quirky personality flaw of a borderline sociopath who didn’t have the Game or the social intelligence to know he was offending or turning off a girl he kind of liked. Indeed, Joan tries to insert her own pop-culture psychoanalysis of Steve in the end; He was afraid to be the romantic she just knew he wanted to be. I expect this kind of rationalization from women who miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to optimize Hypergamy. But what if Steve wasn’t afraid? What if it was a form of his shit testing Joan to determine her genuine desire for him?

As I said, most men don’t have the luxury to shit test women at all. For low SMV men, which is to say most men, the thought of experimenting with testing a woman for desire, much less long term suitability is never a consideration. Most guys can’t believe their luck that a woman actually expressed interest in him because they’ve lacked romantic options for most of their lives. So to consciously experiment with determining honest signals from a woman seems like tempting fate. The Thirst is such that most men would do damn near anything not to screw things up with a girl who’s showing interest in him. Just be thankful your ship’s finally come in, right?

I’ll add again here that most women, particularly in this social media era, are well aware that most men will never vet them for anything beyond baseline arousal and sexual availability. Thirst serves the Feminine Imperative very well, but what about men who are Blue Pill idealists, that can actually afford the options? Men for whom money and access are no object, but still persist in the fairytale the Blue Pill told them was possible?

What I see happening here is Jobs’ request for Baez to buy the dress for herself was a test of her genuine desire for him. Steve could’ve easily bought her the dress, even the whole store, but that wasn’t the point. What Steve wanted was for her to want to please him. His expressing a like for the dress was his subconscious testing her desire to please him.

“I think you’d look good in this; It’s perfect for you” isn’t an offer, it’s a request. Will you sacrifice something to please me? 41 year old Joan Baez, could’ve afforded the dress. Hell, Ralph Lauren would have probably given it to her. But she expected Steve to buy it for her; that was her expectation then and it was the source of her confusion right up to Jobs’ biography interview. Her affinity for Jobs was transactional, not based in genuine desire. She failed the test.

Whether subconsciously or by design Steve wanted what most well-conditioned Blue Pill men want today: a genuine connection with a woman based on genuine (preferably unmitigated) desire. The Desire Dynamic is synonymous with The Rational Male. You cannot negotiate genuine desire is a foundational principle of both my work and all Red Pill awareness that follows from it. Steve’s ego wouldn’t allow him to negotiate for Joan’s real desire. His Mental Point of Origin and marginally sociopathic nature wouldn’t conceive it. But consciously or unconsciously he would test her (and other women he was involved with) for her desire to please him.

What is Your Red Dress?

It’s a cliché now for wealthy men to test women’s true interest in them. “Does she love me for me or because of my money/fame/status?” is a Blue Pill fantasy script for Beta men. This has been the plot of many popular stories and movies for centuries now (Coming to America with Eddie Murphy), but it’s a cliché because it accurately describes men’s subconscious coming to terms with women’s mating strategies and opportunistic concept of love. Women don’t fall in love with who a man is, they fall in love with what that man is. If a woman ever falls in love with who a man is it’s only after loving him for what he is first.

That’s some real cognitive dissonance a man has to confront in his life. The indignation that dissonance produces is very much the Red Meat most low SMV men love to wallow in, and commiserate in.

“She doesn’t love me! She loves what I can afford her! She’s a Gold Digger, I knew it!”

We love having women’s duplicity confirmed for us as men. It means we dodged a bullet by not investing in, and wasting our reproductive potential with, a woman who would be a bad bet for our future paternity. It provides the same chemical exhilaration and relief women feel when they think they’ve figured out a man’s “true” nature (Alpha Cad/Beta Dad). In the same way women get off on the indignation of discovering of men’s attempts to deceive women’s existential fear of false signals, so to do low SMV men get off on the indignation of discovering a woman only wants him for his money – not the real him.

What our subconscious truly wants is a pairing with a woman who has a genuine desire for us. Hot, unmitigated, Darwinistic monkey-sex is usually the manifestation of that genuine desire, but there are many more nuanced ways our male psyches will try to determine it. In past essays I’ve had men and women run me up the flagpole for suggesting a man never buy lingerie for his girlfriend or wife.

“How’s she supposed to know what I like if I don’t buy it for her?”
“I love getting something sexy from my man, sucks to be you.”

These, and more like them, are usually efforts in remaining self-ignorant of never having experienced genuine desire from a woman. If a woman has genuine desire for you she will be interested enough in you, and have the desire enough, to know how to please you without you explaining it to her. Genuine, organic desire is the foundation of all healthy relationships between men and women. Women who have genuine, unobligated desire for a man don’t ask him if they can go to Vegas for a girl’s weekend – her desire is for her man. Plates don’t require an active ‘spinning‘ on your part when she has real desire to be part of that man’s life. Women will eagerly share a worthy Alpha (rather than be saddled to a faithful Beta) if she has genuine desire for him.

…and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Genesis 3:16

When a woman has genuine desire for a man she Just Gets It when he suggests that a Red Dress would be “perfect for her” and she buys it, borrows it or steals it to wear it for him.

If Steve Jobs had purchased the Red Dress for Joan Baez, every time she wore it she would be wearing it for her, not for him. Something inside Steve knew this, and something in you does too.

The Love Experience

experience

Glenn and a few others had a question about last week’s Love Commodity post.:

@Rollo – This seems very inconsistent to me. How can this be true – ” Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. ” While this is true? “In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.”

You’ll have to forgive a long explanation, I couldn’t simply drop this into the commentary, a full post was necessary.

The first thing we need to consider is the Male Experience vs. the female experience. I hate to get too existential, but it comes down to our individuated experiences as men and women. I’m going to give two examples here and this will also cover the Hypergamy is everything thread I noticed the commentary too.

There’s an interesting conflict of societal messaging we get from an equalitarian / feminine-primary social order. This is one that simultaneously tells us that “we are not so different” or “we are more alike than we are different” and then, yet implores use to “celebrate our diversity” and “embrace (or tolerate) our differences” as people.

This is easily observable in issues of ethnicity, but it also crosses over into issues of gender. The most popular trope is that ideas of gender are a social construct and that women and men are comparative equals and only their physical plumbing makes them different in form only.

From a Red Pill perspective we see the error in evidence of this egalitarian fantasy. I’ve written countless posts on the evidential and logical fallacies that make up gender equalism, but the important thing to be aware of is the conflict inherent within that belief – equalism expects men and women’s existential experiences to be the same, while also pleading that we embrace the differences it purports we don’t actually have.

It fundamentally denies the separation, from an evolved biological / psychological perspective, that men and women experience life in different ways. The idea is that it’s the nebulous ‘society’ that determines our gender experiences and less, if nothing, of it is truly influenced by a human being’s psychological-biological firmware.

zdr01dz posted this:

I think maybe this is in part because men have no innate desire to marry up. Hypergamy doesn’t compute for us. I know what hunger feels like and I assume women feel it the same way I do. I’m empathetic to poor, hungry children because I know what they’re feeling. However I have no idea what hypergamy feels like. I’ve never felt it’s pull.

My second example comes from Women and Sex in which I explore the fallacy of the social convention that insists “women are just as sexual as men” and that “women want sex, enjoy sex, even more than men.”

This canard is both observably and biologically disprovable, but the presumption is based on the same “we’re all the same, but celebrate the difference” conflicting principle that I mentioned above. If a dynamic is complimentary to the feminine then the biological basis is one we’re expected to ’embrace the diversity’ of, but if the dynamic is unflattering to the feminine it’s the result “of a society that’s fixated on teaching gender roles to ensure the Patriarchy, we’re really more alike than not.”

The idea is patently false because there is no real way any woman can experience the existence and conditions that a man does throughout his life. I mention in that essay about how a female amateur body builder I knew who was dumbstruck by how horny she became after her first cycle of anabolic steroids. “I can’t believe men can live in a state like this” were her exact words. She was just beginning to get a taste of what men experience and control in their own skins 24 hours a day and it was unsettling for her.

Women are used to a cyclic experience of sexuality, whereas men must be ready to perform at the first, best opportunity sexually. These are our individuated experiences and despite all the bleating of the equalists they are qualitatively different. As zdr01dz observes, no man has an idea of what Hypergamy feels like. To my knowledge there is no drug or hormone that can simulate the existential experience of Hypergamy. Even if there were, men and women’s minds are fundamentally wired differently, so the simulated experience could never be replicated for a man.

I understand how Hypergamy works from observing the behavior and understanding the motivating biology for it. I also understand that our species evolved with, and benefitted from it – or at least it makes deductive sense that what we know as Hypergamy today is a derivative of that evolution – but what I don’t have is a firsthand, existential experience of Hypergamy and I never will. Likewise, women will never have a similar existential experience of what it’s like to be a man.

So it should be an easy follow to deduce that how a woman experiences love, as based on her Hypergamic opportunistic impulses, is a fundamentally different experience than that of a man’s. The equalist social order want’s love to be an equal, mutual, agreement on a definition of love that transcends individuated gender experience, but it simply will not accept that an intersexual experience of love is defined by each sex’s individuated experience.

I have no doubt that there are areas of crossover in both men’s idealistic concept of love and women’s opportunistic concept, but this experience of love is still defined by gender-specific individuation. By that I mean that women can and do experience intense feelings of love for a man based on her Hypergamously influenced criteria for love.

I’m actually surprised that more women have yet to call me to the carpet about their personal experiences of love from the commodity post, but if you sift through the comments on Women in Love and other blog/forum comments you’ll come across examples of women describing in great detail how deeply they love their husbands / boyfriends, and are in complete disarray over being told their love stems from Hypergamic opportunism. Again, I have no doubt that their feelings of love are genuine to them based on their individuated concepts of love; indeed they’re ready to fight you tooth and nail to defend their investment in those feelings. What I’m saying is that the criteria a man should need to meet in order to generate those emotions and arrive at a love state are not universally mutual as an equalitarian social order would have the whole of society believe.

So, yes, men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely – from their own individuated experiences. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. The processes they used to come to this love state differs in concept and existential individuation, and what sustains that love state is still dependent upon the criteria of men’s idealistic and women opportunistic concepts of love.

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

The commodification of that love state is presently weighted on the feminine because the Feminine Imperative is socially ascendant. The importance of satisfying the female sexual (and really life-goal) strategy takes primary social precedence today. Thus men’s individuated experience is devalued to an assumption of an “it’s-all-equal” universality while women’s is blown up out of all real valuation with collective expectations of “embracing their unique difference” set apart from that universality. If men’s experience is one-size-fits-all it’s really a small, and socially blameless, step for a woman to withhold the reward criteria men place on their idealistic love in order to satisfy their own sexual strategy.

Women’s social primacy allows them to feel good about themselves for commodifying the idealistic rewards men value to come to their own state of love, as well as maintain it.

It is one further step to embrace the concept that men’s experience of love, the idealism he applies to it and even his own sexual and life imperatives are in fact the same as those of women’s – while still setting women’s apart when it serves them better. Thus the cardinal rule of sexual strategies comes to a feminine-primary consolidation by socially convincing men that women’s experience and imperatives are, or should be considered to be, the same as men’s individuated experiences. Add women’s already innate solipsism to this and you have a formula for a gender-universal presumption of the experience of love based primarily on the individuated female experience of love.

In other words, women expect men to socially and psychologically agree with, reinforce and cooperate with the opportunistic feminine model of love as the equalist, gender-mutual model model of love while still believing that women share their own idealistic model. It’s the correct model that should work for everyone, or so women’s solipsism would have us believe.

Commodifying Love

commodity

Dalrock gave me something to chew on recently:

In my first post of 2014 I introduced the topic of the ugly feminist.  As I explained at the time, this is an old charge but is typically aimed at the superficial instead of the core problem.  Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.  Several commenters pointed out that this is a devastating charge against feminism, as they could see no viable counter argument for it.

I’m not going to try to offer a counter to Dal’s assertion because in essence I think he’s correct. However I will suggest that this ugliness is the result of a commodification of love (and with it sexual access) that’s resulted from the unfettering of women’s Hypergamy. Love and caring is the commodity women’s Hypergamy uses to fulfill their dualistic sexual strategy.

To this day my most contentious post (and chapter in the book) on RM is Women in Love. This is primarily due to first time readers taking my assertions to their literal extreme. Women’s concept of love stems from opportunism, men’s concept stems from idealism. Most women and Blue Pill men take this to mean that women cannot actually love a man, and absolutist men angry with themselves for having never understood it think much the same thing, “My God! I knew it all along, women cannot actually love a man.”

I assert neither of these positions (really the same position) in that post, nor any of the followup post (that no one seems to want to read once they make up their minds), but what I do assert is:

Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In prior posts I’ve also made the case that men’s idealistic perspective of love stems from an unending need for performance to merit a woman’s opportunistic love. It’s not that men want an unrealistic, unconditional love, but rather they want a woman’s love to be a refuge from having to perform up to, above and beyond the requirements of satisfying an unending optimization of her Hypergamy. It’s not unconditional love they idealize, it’s a love that’s not predicated on their burden of performance.

What frustrates this love idealism is that men are popularly sold the idea that women’s love is based on a mutually similar model. From Disney movies to romantic comedies, to Shakespeare and epic stories, to popular music and the daily talk shows, the message is that love (if it’s real love) is omniscient, conquers all and overcomes all odds. It’s a very seductive message of hope for men whose lives and existences are evaluated on constant performance.

“Could she really love me despite all of my glaring inadequacies?”

“Does she love the real me or is it my money and the lifestyle I provide for her?”

The fact that these themes are a constant in human history illustrates the subconscious, peripheral awareness we have of the differing models of love each sex bases their understanding of love on.

The Commodity

What this selling of idealistic love does for men is keep them in a state of perpetual hope that this idealism is shared by both sexes and they can realistically achieve that ideal goal of a love not founded on his performance. It’s important to note here that this performance isn’t necessarily something a man must make a constant effort to maintain (though this is the usual case), but rather what he represents, not who he is personally. It may be that his effortless looks or inherent status represents a cue for a woman’s optimal hypergamous satisfaction, or it may be the result of years of dedicated performance effort – either way it’s what that man represents; remove the factors a man possesses that satisfy a woman’s Hypergamy and her opportunistic model of love will reveal itself.

Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.

Dalrock’s observation here is profound in that it illustrates exactly the state of opportunism on which women base their concept of love. On some level of consciousness women understand the inherent value their love, concern, attention and caring has for men. It’s repression or expression is a commodity that has reward value for men who also have an awareness that their performance is what merits a woman’s love.

The popular criticism is that this want for an idealistic love is really a man’s preoccupation with his need for sex, but this is to be expected from a fem-centric culture that needs women to ration love and caring for men in order to ensure its social dominance. And God forbid a man express his desire for a performance-less based love and caring; he’s ostracized for wanting a mother’s love (Freudian), being necessitous (thus powerless) and revealing his deficiency in performance.

As Open Hypergamy becomes more proudly embraced and normalized in society, so too will women’s sexual strategy be laid more bare. And in laying that strategy bare, so too will women’s opportunistic model of love become more apparent to men. This new apparentness is already conflicting with the old-order messaging that kept men hopeful of realizing their idealistic love state.

Women cannot sell Open Hypergamy and the love-conquers-all ethereal ideal love at the same time.

Dal is correct, the philosophy of feminism is ugly, but it’s important to consider that feminism is just the current social operative of the Feminine Imperative today. For the moment women can be miserly with love and caring. They can even express resentment for having to be so with men who they doubt are meritorious of it, or for those who don’t measure up to the rigors of an increasingly open and increasingly demanding Hypergamy.

They can do this because they understand that the hopeful, idealistic love they have men convinced can be achieved is still a commodity to men.

Before I close, I’m going to give you a bit of Red Pill hope (again). Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. My point with this essay is to reveal how this love develops and the conditional environments it comes together in. In spite of the strongest bonds, there is a threshold at which men’s loving idealism and women’s performance requirements can test, stress and break that bond.

Men’s idealistic love can be strong, as can women’s opportunistic love – the two models are not mutually incompatible, and it’s my belief that the two are even complementary to each other. Neither is a right or wrong way to love, and neither is the definition of real love. Bear in mind these are models that predicate a condition of love, what happens after that is up to the individuals.

Where these models become incompatible is when one commodifies and exploits the condition of love that the other holds. In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.

For further reading see the Love series of posts:

Women in Love
Men in Love
Of Love and War
Burden of Performance
Love Story

Intersexual Hierarchies –Part II

Hierarchy2

Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lies a living hell. – Charles Bukowski

For my more optimistic readers, you’ll be happy to know I don’t entirely agree with Mr. Bukowski’s sentiment here, however Charles gives us a great introduction to the next progressions of intersexual hierarchies. While I’m not sure every woman is as skilled as the next in betrayal, torture and damnation as Charles’ waxes poetic about, I do believe that his understanding of the male nature is not only accurate, but that male nature is actually the source of his equating women with betrayal, torture and damnation. It’s not that women are inherently evil, it’s that men’s idealism make them so available to being betrayed, tortured and damned.

If you’re at all familiar with Charles Bukowski, you’ll know he was one of the last true son’s of bitches – the unapologetic epitome of gloriously arrogant self-concern and masculine independence. For what he lacked in polish he made up for in talent and a brutal honesty that could never be acknowledged in the fem-centrism of today. In the mid 60’s he was a feral, instinctually red pill Man.

Charles, for all his musing on women, knew that it was the male nature that facilitated women’s damaging of men. The feminists of his generation and today simply dismiss him as a relic of a misogynist era, but his real insight was about men’s inner workings.

“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love.” I’d like to believe that Bukowski was ahead of his time with this, however I think it’s more accurate to presume that, due to a constant feminine-primary socialization, men have been conditioned to interpret love under feminine pretexts, rather than acknowledging men and women approach love from different concepts.

In light of these differing, often conflicting, concepts of male-idealistic and female-opportunistic love, it’s easy to see how a man might find women duplicitous, torturous and damnable – particularly when his feminine ‘sensitivity training’ predisposes him to believe women share the same love idealism he’s been encouraged to believe.

Hierarchy2

The Feminine Primary Model

The Feminine Primary model of love is the idealistic fantasy the vast majority of men have been conditioned to presume is a universal model of love. In this fantasy a woman reciprocates that same idealism he has about how she should feel about him based on his concept of love. That love eventually has to (potentially) include children, but the fantasy begins for him with a woman’s concept of love agreeing with his own love-for-love’s-sake approach, rather than the performance-based, opportunistic approach women require of men in order to love them.

The best illustration I can apply to this model is found in the very tough lessons taught in the movie Blue Valentine. You can read the synopsis, but the plot of this film graphically outlines the conflict that occurs when a man conflates his idealism of the feminine primary model of love with women’s opportunistic model of love. That idealism is exacerbated by a feminine-primary conditioning since early childhood which prepares him to expect girls and women will share in it.

When you look at this model objectively you can’t help but see the Disney-esque, blue pill promise of a mutually reciprocated love. Men being the true romantics predispose themselves to wanting to believe this model is really the only acceptable model. The dispelling of the fantasy this model represents is one of the most difficult aspects of coming to terms with red pill awareness – in fact one of the primary reasons men become hostile to the red pill is an inability to imagine any other possible model.

Most men’s dispelling of this fantasy comes after he’s reached the ‘happily ever after’ part of this schema and he realizes the conditionality his wife places on her terms for loving him. He comes to the realization that women’s love model is based upon what he is before who he is.

While there is a definitive conditionality placed on her love, men don’t necessarily expect an unconditional love. It’s usually at this stage that men are conveniently expected (or expect themselves) to ‘Man Up’ and earn a woman’s mutually reciprocated love by adopting the male responsibility aspects of the first, conventional model. As Gustavo describes, “a man provides” and for all of his previous equalist conditioning that made him believe a woman would “love him as he loves her” he blames his inability to achieve that idealistic love on himself for not living up to being a “man” deserving of the feminine primary model of ideal love.

What he’s really done is convinced himself into accepting a woman’s opportunistic model while retaining the idealism he’s been conditioned never to reject – thereby leaving her blameless in her own concept of love.

It’s hard to consider this model without presuming a woman’s manipulative intent of a man, but let me state emphatically that, for the better part, I believe most women simply aren’t specifically aware of the mechanics behind this intersexual hierarchy model. Through any number of ways women are socialized to presume that their feminine-primary position implies that men should necessarily take the life and maturity steps needed to fulfill women’s opportunistic approach over the course of their lifetime.

We like to bemoan this as feminine entitlement, and yes it can get, and is getting abusively out of hand, but this entitlement and expectation originates in women’s opportunistic approach towards love.

Men are the “romantics pretending to be realists” and women; vice versa.

Hierarchy3

The Subdominant Model

Lastly we come to male subdominant model wherein a man, by conditioning and circumstance, expects love from a woman as he would from a mothering dynamic. Often this situation seems to result from an overly enthusiastic belief in absolute gender equality and parallelism, but the underlying motivation is really an abdication of masculinity and, by association, abdication of conventional masculine responsibility. There simply is no presumption of masculine ‘headship’ prior to, or into a long term relationship.

I outline the origins of this hierarchy model in Pre-Whipped:

These are the men I call pre-whipped; men so thoroughly conditioned, men who’ve so internalized that conditioning, that they mentally prepare themselves for total surrender to the Feminine Imperative, that they already make the perfect Beta provider before they even meet the woman for whom they’ll make their sacrifice.

The social undercurrent of an ideal gender equalism plays an active role in creating these men, and specifically this hierarchical model. Unfortunately the social and / or personal illusion of control this model is idealistically based on is usually overshadowed by the male-dominant / female-submissive expectations of the more naturally fluid conventional love model.

These are the ‘house husband’ arrangements, and the ‘gender is a social construct’ relationships. While the hope is one of a realized egalitarian equalism within the relationship, the psychological struggle eventually becomes one of dominant and submissive gender expectations in the pairing.

From Master and Servant:

In an era when Hypergamy has been given free reign, it is no longer men’s provisioning that dictates her predisposition to want to be a submissive partner in their relationships. To an increasingly larger degree women no longer depend upon men for the provisioning, security and emotional support that used to insure against their innate Hypergamous impulses. What’s left is a society of women using the satisfaction of Hypergamy as their only benchmark for relational gratification.

Men with the (Alpha) capacity to meet the raw, feral, demands of women’s Hypergamy are increasingly rare, and thanks to the incessant progress of feminization are being further pushed to marginalization. The demand for Men who meet women’s increasingly over-estimated sense of Hypergamic worth makes the men women could submit to a precious commodity, and increases further stress the modern sexual market place.

For all of the mental and social awareness necessitated by this equalist fantasy, men subscribing to this model inevitably fall into a submissive (conventionally feminine) role. As the red pill gods would have it Heartiste had a timely post outlining all of the logistical failing of this arrangement today, but underneath all of the trappings that make this model seem imbalanced is the reversal of conventional roles which place women into the love flow state men are better suited for since their approach to love originates from idealism (and not a small amount of martyr-like sacrifice for that idealism).

Essentially this model forces a woman not only to mother her children, but also her husband.

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.

Intersexual Hierarchies – Part I

One of the withdrawal symptoms of unplugging from the Matrix is usually an overwhelming nihilism that results from being torn away from the previous blue pill preconceptions a man has been conditioned to for most of his life. It’s my hope that in the future red pill men will make the necessary interventions and apply what they’ve learned from their unplugging and red pill truths in general towards their sons (and daughters) as well as other men they know or are related to. Until then, the process of breaking away from that conditioning is usually going to begin as the result of a traumatic breakup, a divorce, or having had the relational equity he thought he’d built a long term relationship on proved worthless in the face of hypergamy.

It’s a sad reality of unplugging that it most often starts as a result of emotional anguish, but to pour salt in those wounds is then having to live with the harsh realities that the red pill makes men aware of – that more or less everything they’d held as an ego-investment up to that point was founded on a feminine-primary conditioning. I summed this up in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Try to keep this last part in mind as you read what I propose in these next two posts. I read a lot of guys in various forums getting despondent after having the red pill make sense to them, but that despondency is really a simple lack of not having a path already preset for them to follow. Instead of the easy answers and prerequisite responsibilities that the blue pill and the Feminine Imperative had ready for him to follow, now in his new awareness he’s tasked with making a new path for himself, and that’s both scary and exciting at the same time.

Love Styles

In almost 3 years of blogging and a book written, my three most popular posts have been the Love series – Women in Love, Men in Love and Of Love and War. Though my SMV graph gets the most link backs, these are easily the most viewed posts on Rational Male. Unfortunately they’re often the most misquoted and misunderstood.

One of the toughest revelations of the red pill is coming to terms with the difference in experience and concept that men and women apply to love. The core principle in Women in Love is often misunderstood. For different reasons, deliberate or otherwise, both men and women critically misunderstand the main premise of that post:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

Most critics of my differing assessment of how either sex interprets and considers love tend to blow past this last part. They oversimplify my meaning and sputter out something to the effect of, “That Tomassi guy thinks that women can’t ever really love men, what preposterous crap!”

Of course that isn’t my assertion, but I understand the want to dismiss this notion, particularly for men and women invested in the ideal of equalitarianism. It’s a threat to the ego-investment that men and women are anything less than fully equal and rational agents who come together for each other’s mutually agreeable benefit. The simple fact of women’s innate hypergamy puts the lie to this presumption, as well as confirms the relevancy of women’s constant, qualitative conditionality for whom (really what) they’ll love. I think it’s ironic that the same people who disparage this concept are among the first to readily embrace the pop-psychology notion of Love Languages.

I get why that premise pisses off women (and feminized men); it’s very unflattering to be accused of loving men from a position of opportunism. However, it’s important to understand that I don’t make this observation to condemn the way women approach love – although I’m sure it will follow, my point isn’t to presume a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for women to love men or vice versa. There are beneficial and detrimental aspects of both women’s opportunistic approach to love, and men’s idealistic approach to love. That said, I happen to believe that the differing ways men and women love each other evolved to be complementary to the other and for the betterment of our species.

For all the “OMG I can’t believe this red pill asshole thinks women can’t really love men” misdirection, I should point out that well intentioned men, especially the newly red pill, are also guilty of the same oversimplification. Theirs is an attempt to find validation in the (usually recent) trauma of having been cut away from their prior blue pill conditioning. A similar, “Rollo says women can’t really love men, of course, it’s all so clear to me now” satisfies a simplistic need for confirmation of their former condition.

And again, it’s not a right or wrong way of loving, it’s the lack of recognizing the difference and being on the punishing side of that lack. Most men will want to apply their concepts of honor or justice in assessing how ‘right’ men’s idealistic love is, while women will still see the inherent value in loving what a man is as a prerequisite for loving who a man is. Hypergamy doesn’t care about men’s idealistic expectations of love, but neither does men’s rationality make concessions for what facilitates women’s opportunistic approach to love.

Romantic Souls

From The Red Pill subreddit:

My whole life, I’ve had it nailed into me that I would be able to find true love if I was honest and hardworking. As I grew older it was, “If I’m somewhat fit and have a good job making 60k-80k a year, I’ll find that beautiful girl that loves me as I love her“.

As I’ve stated on many occasions, it is men who are the True Romantics. Granted, it’s the unthoughtful result of centuries of evolved ‘courtly love’, but in the realm of what qualifies as a true act of romance, it’s men who are the primary actors; it’s men who ‘make’ (or want to make) romance happen. And of course therein lies the problem, a man cannot ‘make’ romance happen for a woman.

For all a man’s very imaginative, creative, endeavors to manufacture a romance that will endear a woman to him, his ‘trying’ to do so is what disqualifies his intent. For every carefully preplanned ‘date night’ after marriage, there’s a college girl swooning to bang her boyfriend living in a shithole, sheets over the windows, furniture from the dumpster, pounding shitty beer and sleeping on a soiled mattress on the floor. Romance isn’t created, romance just happens, and it’s a tough, but valuable, lesson when men come to realize that a happenstance bag of skittles, or a ring made from a gum wrapper at the right time meant more to a woman than every expensively contrived ‘romantic getaway’ he’d ever thought would satisfy her need for lofty romance.

An important part of the red pill is learning that the most memorable acts of love a man can commit with a woman are acts of (seeming or genuine) spontaneity and never apparently and overtly planned (and yes, that applies to sex as well). This is a source of real frustration for a man since his blue pill conditioning expects the opposite from him, and his romantic nature – the nature that wants her to love him as he loves her – conspires with his problem solving nature, thus prompting him to ever greater romantic planning for what he hopes will be an appreciated, reciprocated love.

The Hierarchy

The true source of a man’s frustration lies in his misdirected hope that a woman’s concept of love matches his own. His ideal is a beautiful girl that loves him the same way he loves her. The presumption (a romantic one perpetuated by the myth of egalitarian equalism) is that his concept of idealized love is a universal one which women share with men in general and him in particular.

Thanks mostly to men’s blue pill conditioning, what most men fail to ever consider is that women’s hypergamic based love always considers what he is, before who he is. For a more detailed explanation of this I’ll refer you to my post Love Story. This is the root of the intersexual hierarchy of love.

Hierarchy1

Before the rise of feminine social primacy, the above ‘flow chart’ of love prioritization would hardly have been an afterthought for a man. Through any number of evolutionary and sociological progressions the base understanding of how Men’s love began from a position of protecting, provisioning for and directing of the lives of both his wife and children wasn’t a concern worth too much of his consideration. Neither was a prevailing desire for a reciprocal model of love an overshadowing concern.

To be sure, a baseline requirement of a returned love, sex, respect and fidelity were important elements, but this wasn’t the originating basis of male desire for being loved; there was no expectation of a woman loving him as he loved her (and by extension their children). To be a man was to have the capacity to provide a surplus beyond his own provisioning.

“A man provides, and he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it, because he’s a man.”

Gustavo’s monologue in my opening video may seem like an anachronism, especially in the light of a red pill awareness of the potential for injustice and the veritable certainty of a provisioning arrangement that will almost always be a one-sided proposition for a man – whether he’s loved, respected, appreciated, married or divorced.

Undoubtedly there’ll be men reading this bristling at the idea of a non-equitable model for love, but I’d argue that the idea of an equitable model is the result of the conditioning an egalitarian equalism has predisposed men to believe is even possible.

Before the rise of feminine primacy, a man’s expression of love through his support and guidance simply weren’t things women or children had the capacity to reciprocate. The advent of women’s independence, real or imagined, has served to strip men of this core understanding of the differences between male and female concepts of love. In the effort to feminize men more fully, and position men in a condition of confusion about what constitutes masculinity, this concept of love was replaced by a feminine-primary model for love.

While a woman’s respect, and a degree of love may flow back to her man, her primary love and concern is directed towards her children. One reason we’re still shocked by women who kill their children (pre or post natal) is due to an inherent acknowledgement of this natural dynamic. Women’s brain function and biochemistry largely evolved to predispose them to bonding with their children, and thus ensure the survival of the species. Beyond the rigors of physically gestating a child, raising children to self-sufficiency required a considerable investment of effort and resources – not to mention a constant attention. Nature selected-for women with an innate capacity to nurture and direct love primarily towards children.

The internal psychology women evolved to vet for men who displayed traits for both Alpha physical prowess and parental investment / provisioning potential are a result of children being a priority for a woman’s love. While a degree of maintaining a man’s continued commitment to the family unit requires her attentions in the form of sex and affections, a woman’s primary love focus is directed towards children.

Granted, not all women are capable of having children (or some even desirous of them), but even in these instances substitute love priorities still supersede directing her primary attention towards a man. It may seem like I’m attempting to paint women’s love as callous or indifferent, but this ‘directioning’ isn’t a conscious act, but rather due to the innate understanding that a man is to direction his love towards her as a priority.

 

This should give readers a bit to chew on for a while. In Part II I’ll detail the alternative hierarchy models prevalent for modern, post-feminine primacy relationships.