marriage

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.

Your Mission, Her Mission

Does your woman think of you before herself? 

Does she make your priorities her own priorities?

Does she surprise you with acts of kindness and appreciation?

Does she inherently know that your success is her success?

Does she admire you? How does she show it?

Does she know what you need before you know it yourself?

Does she plan ahead to ensure you’re taken care of?

Does she care to know who, not just what you are?

Does she take time to learn about or participate in the things you are passionate about?

Does she look forward to having sex with you?

Does pleasing you please her?

Does she do any of these things with genuine desire or is she fearful of your displeasure?

Or

Is your woman ‘high maintenance’?

Is pleasing her or avoiding her discomfort your mission in the relationship?

Is your relationship defined by how well you measure up to her expectations?

Is your woman’s success more important than your own?

Are you the sentimental one in the relationship?

Do you plan ahead to ensure she’ll be in the right mood?

Do you perform chores in the hopes that it will make her amenable to you sexually?

Do you believe your relationship is (or should ideally be) an equitable one?

Does her family take priority over your own at holidays?

Is your relationship based on quid pro quo?

Is she ever surprised by your anger?

Is your relationship perpetually a “work in progress”?

Is your relationship’s success defined by qualifying to her metrics?

Do you measure the quality of your relationship by how well you meet her needs?

These are tough questions for most guys. I’m often asked how to vet a woman for a relationship or marriage and the hard part of coming up with a list of qualifications is that you have to actually be in a relationship with that person to really judge a woman’s suitability for a long term commitment. Hot sex is a great ‘up-sell’ for women to convince a man to commit, and it’s usually at the top of a guy’s list of must-haves for his commitment, but you don’t really understand her motivations or genuine desire until you are already in a relationship. Now you have emotional investment in her (caught feelings) at the same time you’re realizing she’s really not the person you thought you were vetting her for.

The ‘Asshole Alpha’

A hard thing for most Blue Pill, Beta men to appreciate is the genuine desire a woman has for an Alpha man. When that guy sees a relationship that’s based on a woman’s dedication to please her Alpha man, his Beta Hamster goes into action. A lot of things don’t line up with what he’s been conditioned to believe about women and how a relationship should go.

His first presumption is that the Alpha guy is a ‘manipulative asshole’ and if he ‘respected’ her she would be better off for it. It’s certainly not how he would treat her. Default respect for women plays well for a Blue Pill mindset. If you read through my first set of questions above the most common impression a feminized mind will have is that I’m implying a woman ought to be beholden to an Alpha man. While it’s true that, ideally, a solid conventional relationship is founded on a man’s ambition and success, and his woman sharing that mission, she has to want to be a part of it. Forcing a woman to be a part of a man’s world is actually the methodology of a Beta man.

Monogamy can occur either because a female chooses to be faithful to a male, or as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead

Exploring the Desire Dynamic has been a key feature in all of my writing. Understanding that genuine desire cannot be negotiated is usually one of the toughest parts of the Red Pill to accept when a guy is just coming into it. It’s hard because most men already realize the principle; they’ve just been building lives around the contingencies, and forming deep rationales, to avoid accepting it. I have readers tell me all the time that what I put forth in my books and essays is stuff ‘they already knew in the back of their heads‘, they just didn’t have the words to articulate it. Your relationship sucks, or your marriage is soul-destroying not because you can’t seem to live up to a false ideal (which is true), but because your woman has no genuine desire to be a part of your world. Modern marriages fail, not because of trust issues, or security, or even ‘her needs not being met’ – they fail due to a lack of genuine desire.

Most women today are in monogamous relationships as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Blue Pill men have a hard time with this as well. A relationship based on a woman’s choice to be faithful to a man, based on her genuine desire, looks a lot like what he’s been taught a lopsided manipulative relationship is all about. The prime-directive of feminism (the female Blue Pill) is that a Strong Independent Woman® should “never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.” Part of a Blue Pill man’s lifelong conditioning is to think like a feminist woman thinks.

Most Blue Pill men are male feminists by default. Whether they vocally identify as one is largely a formality; Blue Pill men think like feminist women, because their social education came from feminist women.

When a Blue Pill male encounters the rare conventional relationship – one based on a woman’s genuine desire and a man’s Frame and ambitions – and he sees a woman doing things for the express pleasure of an Alpha man, his first impression is that she is with him by coercion. That conventional relationship model doesn’t fit with what his female teachers taught him was the egalitarian ideal. Thus, rationalizing that a beautiful woman would only feel obligated to please an asshole is because she has low self-esteem, she’s forced to please him because she’s destitute, she’s codependent, he overtly uses Dread on her, etc. This becomes his ego defense of his Blue Pill conditioning. His default presumption is that she is with that guy as a consequence of a particular lifestyle. It never enters his thought process that she is with that Alpha by choice.

Objects of Desire

Most men are uncomfortable with being the object of genuine desire. Even the idea of having a woman do something inspired for his express pleasure makes them feel like they’re falling into the role of Asshole Alpha. Promise Keepers in particular hate this impression of themselves and will go to great efforts to quash it in themselves, by deriding it in other men.

If you read the first list of questions above and thought, “Damn, that sounds harsh or manipulative. What about her needs?” this is your Blue Pill training coming to the surface of your consciousness. Just the thought that, as a man, you might ever be truly desired by a woman gets conflated with ‘abuser’ status. Either that, or the first consideration is to default to Bank Slate thinking – “What about her?” This is the egalitarian, presumption of ‘equal-and-opposite’ as the ideal thinking. 

Most Blue Pill conditioned men, and virtually every Fempowered woman, defaults to “What about her?” as their Mental Point of Origin. Guys do this because it’s been hammered into their brains since grammar school that ‘putting women first’ is the surest way to gaining their intimate favor. As such, the idea that they might ever ‘come first’ with a woman becomes an alien thought to them. Not only that, but they see the hypothetical Alpha I mentioned above as the villain to defeat in order to prove his quality. That ‘quality’ is based on his ‘putting women first’, so an Alpha Asshole becomes a golden opportunity to display how well he’s learned his Blue Pill lessons from his female teachers.

Without the Red Pill, without the insight to question his conditioned belief-set, this mindset is impossible to break in a guy. For the most part he’s attached his Game – his hope of solving his reproductive problem – to that Blue Pill, Village training. Some guys may never break the cycle. They never see the code in the Matrix. Most men fall into a grind of constant qualification to women because they have never, and will never, be the object of genuine desire of a woman. Their mental models prevent them from ever being that object to a woman. They would feel awkward, dirty, for making anything about them.

When a man’s Burden of Performance can be directed towards qualifying himself to women, men will begin to conflate their masculine identities with how well they can ‘put her first’.

The religious Trad-Con mindset revels in this, but the ideal comes from the same source – feminine primacy. Directionless, purposeless, men find a purpose in making the pleasing of a “quality woman” ideal the metric by which they measure their manhood. The Feminine Imperative figured out how to make women’s security the measure of a man long ago. It was written into men’s sense of duty and his Gods’ will. They must become less so she becomes more. It didn’t always used to be that way, but since the advent of romantic love as an ideal, it’s been the game men were told they had to play. And now, men’s natural competitiveness is channeled to outperforming his rivals in how better he can serve the Feminine Imperative.

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest.

16 Commandments of Poon, Roissy

I can make appeals to men to make themselves their Mental Point of Origin, but few actually wrap their heads around the concept. Fewer still will give themselves permission to do so. The reason for their difficulty is that their reproductive success was pinned to the Blue Pill mindset they’d had beaten into their psyches a long time ago.

The equal partnership ideal is antithetical to how men and women evolved to be complements to the other. That ‘equal’ partnership is predicated on a man endlessly proving his dedication to ‘putting her first’ that his hindbrain believes will lead to a woman’s genuine desire for him. His hope, his understanding, is that if he works at his relationship long enough, if he puts her first, eventually she will appreciate him and desire him based on his efforts and performance. But it is just this priority in his life – the priority he’s linked to what little sense he allows himself to have of his manhood – that defeats his ever getting to that state of a woman’s genuine inspired desire.

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.

Unmarriageable

This week there’ve been a rash of articles all outlining the latest statistics about marriage in this decade. US marriage rates are at a 150 year low and, if you believe the all-female article writers, it’s of course men’s fault for failing to be marriageable. These articles are referencing a study published last week titled Mismatches in the Marriage Market and this study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses. One implication is that the unmarried may remain unmarried or marry less well‐suited partners.

That’s right gentlemen, you’re unmarriageable and the ladies want you to shape up. If you want to experience marital bliss – despite all the inherent personal dangers for men in today’s “marriage economy” – you must make yourself “economically attractive“:

“Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult,” says lead author Daniel Lichter in a press release.

The stats don’t lie and they are pretty bleak. More women are enrolled in college than ever before and more are expected to enter through the middle of the coming decade. Now, a degree doesn’t guarantee a woman a job, and it says nothing about the majors and job sectors women prefer, but a college education does reinforce the idea that women are entitled to marry an economically attractive man who himself has an education and enough aspiration to make something of himself to become marriageable.

That’s some real shit right there and we’re not even half way through this post. We’ve gotten to the point where the truth of the past five decades is apparent; gendered politics has actively, openly, disadvantaged men in terms of education. Whether this hobbling of men is via educational dispensations (Title IX) or social conventions (divorce, child support, Duluth model feminism) the outcome is now unignorable.

In most western societies today there is a separate standard of justice that applies to women. Women are receive far fewer consequences and are sentenced much more leniently than men for committing the exact same crimes. These are easily proven statistics, but even when they are brought to light the gynocentric social order doubles down and justifies them because, women.

My intent here today isn’t to depress anyone. Neither am I drawing attention to this because I’ve made a new turn to the Men Rights Movement. No doubt there’ve been many article already written about the female hubris inherent in these revelations – revelations the Red Pill community has been pointing out for almost two decades now.

The manifestations of about 50 years of social changes produced by a feminine-primary social order are unignorable. Even mainstream media sources are finally seeing these stories as the red meat du jour for the masses now. A lot of the Red Pill principles and I and many other men in the Manosphere have been drawing attention to about intersexual dynamics are now coming to light in popular consciousness.

Aww Quit Complaining

Last year I delivered the State of the Manosphere Address, and in that talk I outlined the rise of what I saw as a new Gender War (or gender cold war). Naturally I was called a reactionary, and have been since described as “overly negative” even by the organization that asked me to deliver that speech. But yet, everything in that outline has come to pass in less than a year. Of course, the easy dismissal is to blame this on election year propaganda. More than one mainstream talkshow conservative has jumped on the Toxic Masculinity bandwagon, pointing out how the Left and mainstream feminism are one and the same.

However, there have been many swings of the political pendulum in the past 50 years. Conservative zeitgeists have contributed to the same feminine-primary social order that’s resulted in men being unmarriageable today. It’s just been good politics to appeal to the Feminine Imperative no matter what side of the political aisle you happen to sit on.

But I’m a man. I’m not supposed to be overly concerned with issues like this. As long as I’m measuring up to my Burden of Performance any marginal raising-of-awareness to truths like the ones above make me seem like I’m complaining. And that’s something men are never allowed to do. It’s a very effective way of silencing men. Get them to feel like they ought to silence themselves. Real men don’t complain.

Meanwhile, it’s Broke Men who are hurting American Women’s Marriage Prospects. My good friend Dalrock once wrote a series of post around the idea that feminism would be so much more successful if men would only cooperate with it. When women are unable to optimally complete their mating (and life’s) strategies it’s men’s fault for being uncooperative. It’s men’s fault when women’s life plans don’t come together as Sheryl Sandberg told them it would. It’s men’s fault when they won’t play the approved role they should when women hit their Epiphany Phase and their sexual priorities shift.

Confirming the Red Pill

If you needed a better illustration of the Solipsism inherent in women’s nature you’ll be hard pressed to find it on a bigger scale than the dozens of stories bemoaning the lack of marriageable men today. Furthermore, it goes to prove another Red Pill truth: as a man, women don’t care who you are as much as what you are. I’ve taken a lot of heat over the years over my assessment of how men and women have different concepts of love. Men love idealistically. I rarely get any pushback on that assertion, but when I layout how women’s Hypergamous natures predispose them to a concept of love based on opportunism men and women lose their minds.

Yet, here we are. Women enthusiastically proving my point for me without me having to do any heavy lifting. As women become more comfortable in Open Hypergamy we see this embracing of their nature proudly flaunted. Naturally women will double down on this.

“Of course women don’t wanna marry no bum!”

And then the Trad-Cons join the chorus,

“It’s men’s fault they aren’t measuring up to being the men all women are entitled to.”

There are dozens of studies that correlate divorce with women earning more than their husbands. In fact, women are reluctant to admit that they out-earn their husbands. Throughout the history of this blog I’ve shown the evolved reasons for this dynamic, but what the articles all dance around is women’s natural evolutionary desire for men who exceed them in all aspects. But because we’ve opted to believe in, and standardized on, social constructionism we lay all of that on “societal expectations” of men and women. In a future essay I’ll be defining how the cope of humans being ‘above it all’ in their evolved instincts is the root source of many deliberate misgivings about intersexual conflict. For now, understand that blaming any inconvenient intersexual truth on a nebulous “society” is the go-to rationale for a feminine-primary social order.

“If only men would evolve and rise above what society foists on them we women would be happy” versus “Men need to accommodate women’s success by making themselves more ‘economically desirable’“

And “Oh, but love is important too, *wink wink*.”

“Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors’,” Lichter says.

It’s interesting that some articles advocate for marriage as a “stabilizing force” in society, all while never (maybe deliberately) seeing the economic risks of disaster that the divorce industry incentivizes in women. There’s nothing stabilizing about promoting marriage between men you’ve deemed “economically unattractive” and women who feel entitled to a man who exceeds their Hypergamous expectations. There’s nothing ‘stabilizing’ about the incidence of divorce between couples where the man is unable to out-earn his wife.

Naturally we want to make this a ‘his‘ problem. He can’t get over the fact that she makes more, has more education, etc. He’s insecure in his masculinity and must feel threatened by Her success. Or it could be the fact that on an instinctual level he understands that it’s an evolved imperative for a man to provide for and protect his family. This is the fallacy of Rise Above It. No matter how enlightened and progressive we’d like to think we are nature drags us back to reality. It’s not a socially constructed problem – if it were it would be easily solved – it’s a human nature problem. Women reveal the true Hypergamous nature in articles like these. They want a man who they can naturally look up to, respect and admire. That’s the natural truth coming out, but they source the problem in a socially constructed fantasy that it’s men’s insecurities that are holding them back from completing women’s mating/life strategies.

Women don’t need to get married anymore. The average age of first marriage is hovering around 27 years old for most couples. Studies also show that more than half of young people in America don’t have a romantic partner. We’ve all but eliminated the Beta Bucks side of the Hypergamous equation for women. Open Hypergamy (and Open Cuckoldry) are the logical outcomes of this provisioning insurance we’ve made ubiquitous for women over the last 40 years. Yet, women still want to be married to a man who outclasses them in all areas of life. They feel they deserve that guy. Their hindbrain knows they do, but the nebulous society still encourages women to believe there’s never been a better time for them to be single. This is the message women are being fed as they complain about men’s not living up to being their “equals”.

Nearly half of working-age women will be single in 2030, a new Morgan Stanley study predicts, a demographic that will drive increased sales for companies in the athletic wear, cosmetics and clothing sectors.

The investment bank’s “Rise of the SHEconomy” report says 45 percent of working-age women between 25 and 44 in the U.S. will be single women in 10 years, Forbes reported.

Single women will drive the economy in the next decade and savvy businesses are already planning on exploiting this demographic. But yet it’s men’s fault for not being marriageable and/or avoiding marriage altogether?

Too many people think I’m down on marriage. Apparently 23 years of what most guys would consider an ideal marriage isn’t enough to convince them. Honestly, as an institution – socially enforced monogamy – I think marriage, based on evolved gender difference complementarity has been the foundation of the success of western culture. But maybe we’re at a turning point in human history where traditional marriage is left behind, replaced by feminine-primary polygamy with all its inherently violent risks. It seems we’re heading in a direction where we convince Beta men it’s in their reproductive interests to abandon their evolved need to be invested in their own paternity – and that attending to and raising the children of men that women selected before them makes them ‘better men’.

There’s a lot more to the anti-marriage reasoning than just the “losing half my stuff” arguments.

It really sucks for a guy like me who’s managed to make a Red Pill aware marriage work in spite of all this. Guys get confused. How can I be anti-marriage and still married? But it’s just that dichotomy that tells the you about the nature of what marriage has become for men today. The way we do marriage today has the potential to be the most damaging decision a man can make in his life. It may even end his life. But despite all that I still believe men and women are better together than we are apart. We still evolved to be complements to the other.

It’s the coming together and living together, and all the downside risks to men today that I have no solution for at the moment. Maybe it’s going to take a war or a meteor striking the earth to set gender parity back in balance, but at the moment there’s only a future of sexual segregation to look forward to.