Masculine Imperative

She’s Not Yours

My colleague and friend, Rian Stone, took it upon himself to breakdown the brilliant simplicity of a common Manosphere idiom:

She was never yours, it was just your turn.

This phrase has been around since the earliest days of the Pickup Artists’ (PUA) online communities. And like many of the old wisdoms of that time the reasoning for it gets distorted by the various factions of what’s become the Manosphere today. In 2020 the more extreme end of MGTOW communities – Black Pill, Doomers, and VolCels – are what most mainstream audiences conflate with Red Pill. What they, along with Success Porn niche marketers, have done is pick and pull the parts of Red Pill praxeology that resonates with their personal beliefs and circumstances and demonize what doesn’t. Both factions have an interest in misconstruing what the Red Pill has taken 20 years to develop. It doesn’t really serve the ends of either perspective to spend too much time thinking about a contentious Red Pill principle when misrepresenting it is more valuable in confirming their belief sets – especially when doing so generates views, subs and ad revenue.

To the Doomer mindset She’s not yours… is confirmation of women’s duplicitous, fickle or evil nature. That’s not to say the nihilistic perspective doesn’t approach women’s nature from an objective Red Pill understanding, it just means they focus on surrendering to it and giving up on women. This confirmation bias also gets mixed up in the Doomer understanding of Hypergamy. Hypergamy resonates with them because it confirms the idea that all women will dump a guy at the first sign of his losing an Alpha Frame veneer; an act which he must constantly maintain in a world of endless options and online attention for women. Slip up once too often and at the first opportunity she’s gone. It’s the fallacy of Hypergamy as a straight jacket, and She’s not yours… justifies the defeatism. You will never find a lasting contentment with a woman because she holds first right of refusal in any intimate relationship (i.e. Briffault’s Law). Ergo, sooner or later your turn will be over and all the effort, time and emotion you invested in her will be for nothing (i.e. Sunk Cost, Relational Equity). In fact, it may be worse than nothing when you consider the opportunity cost of having bothered with trying to make her yours in the first place. While the juice might taste really good in the short term, it’s never really worth the squeeze in the long term. This conclusion is what really upsets the Success gurus because it’s a hard logic to refute – at least from their own Man Up! perspective.

That’s the Doom Pill interpretation. It’s based on reflexive, immutable binary extremes – the default reaction of this generation – because it confirms a hopelessness that defines them. Ironically, it was the very PUAs of the 2000s they despise so much who originally coined the phrase. Back then it served as a reminder to guys to never get too attached to one particular woman while dating several women concurrently. It was almost a mantra to ward off ONEitis because they were spinning plates and “catching feelings” for one girl tended to end up destroying them. It was a maxim that worked best as a preventive medicine since most practitioners of Game saw it as a means to achieve the monogamy their Blue Pill social conditioning convinced them was possible. Average men build lives around serial monogamy; it’s always been the surest way to solve the average man’s reproductive problem. So when you open them up to an abundance of sexual/intimate potential via Game they tend to use it to get their Dream Girl and ignore what the Red Pill says about women’s nature.

In today’s ‘sphere, She was never yours, it was just your turn is a salve for guys who’ve already invested in a woman and she dumped or divorced them. The presumption is that despite all their best Blue Pill qualifications or their Game savvy, Hypergamy gets the best of all women and she’ll move on to the bigger and better deal. This perspective presupposes a stable monogamy, not spinning plates, is the goal-state for every guy. Notice the maxim here is cast in the past tense. She was never yours,…At some stage a man believes she is his (or should be) and she no longer is now. Thus, She was never yours becomes a post-facto rationalization to the guy who’s probably feeling gutted by his breakup. The real issue is the guy’s want for a permanent solution to his desire for intimacy. We see this all the time among simps who spend small fortunes (monthly) to achieve some kind of virtual intimacy with his favorite OnlyFans cam-girl. In this case, She was never yours is reconfirmed for simps over and over as they move from one cam-girl obsession to the next.

For the Success Porn guru, all this is grist for the mill. On one hand, men struggling with confidence (see social skills), achieving intimacy/sex and finding purpose are their bread and butter. On the other hand, what they’re usually selling is the Blue Pill ideal of a sustainable contentment for otherwise discontent men. That contentment includes the hope that a permanent, loving and monogamous relationship with one woman is not only possible, but is also a sign of his authentic manhood. When Dr. Phil sells this hope we write him off as a naive Pollyanna and old order thinker. However, this same Blue Pill hope is repackaged and sold online as a return to masculine virtue by today’s Life Coaches in the Hustle Economy. The permanence of your contentment amounts to your ability to qualify for it and sustain it with their (usually repackaged) concept of masculine virtue. Any discontent on the part of the client is reflective of his own lack of determination or hard work to achieve it. 80’s Televangelists and 90’s Multi-level Marketing hustlers used similar graft. It’s really a monetized version of the philosophy of personal responsibility — which has always been a darling of traditional conservatism and now a staple of personal development. Any failure of the concept is always attributable to the man’s deficient effort and investment, which can then be attached to his character. This isn’t to say that all personal development guys are unscrupulous hustlers, just that the true responsibility of education rests with the student.

She’s not yours, it was just your turn, and other unignorable truths that the Red Pill makes men aware of, defeats the self-reinforcing circular logic of the personal responsibility hustle. It forces the hustler to admit that something outside men’s control might have an effect on a their lives. Rather than accept this and work within the framework, the response is more of the same; deny the phenomenon exists, or presume that even acknowledging it is indicative of a defeatist mentality – thus, a shirking of personal responsibility which completes the circular logic.

This is the origin of the “Truthful Anger” fallacy. Around 2015 the instructors working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD) started getting a lot of questions about the material in The Rational Male from students attending RSD seminars. At some point they had to address these questions, but to do so would mean acknowledging the validity of the concepts in my book – concepts that challenged the positivity grift they were rapidly converting over to during this time. The solution was to acknowledge the truth in my work, but tacitly disqualify it by presuming it came from a place of anger. They then cautioned against internalizing it at the risk of becoming angry or bitter against women — both presumptions commonly used by mainstream gynocentric norms. It was misconstrued as “truthful anger”; poignantly true, but best not to dwell on it if a guy wants to be happy. In other words, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Happiness is always easier to sell than truth.

Now that we understand the opposing sides of the impermanence of women debate, we also have to consider the Lie of Individuation that usually gets thrown into the mix to dismiss the She’s not yours maxim. The Individuation Fallacy is most easily understood as:

“People are all individually special cases; each a unique product of their environments and experiences, and are far too individually complex to understand via generalizations according to sex, etc.”

The individual supersedes any commonalities attributable to biology or evolution, and usually focuses solely on social constructionism and personal circumstance as a basis for motivating behavior, developing personality and influencing others accordingly. The supremacy of the individual is the natural extension of an underlying belief in The Blank Slate. When you start from a belief that we’re all functional equals everyone is an angel or a devil according to the choices they made. But depending on the person’s circumstances they can be forgiven or damned for the consequences of those choices according to how we interpret their character as individuals. This is how we get rationales like, not all women are like that and “People are too complex to categorize” to dismiss the unignorable commonalities we see in men and women in the information age. No one likes to think they aren’t in some way unique as much as they don’t like to think determinism has influenced (in some way) what they think makes them unique. And since I’m sure you’ve made this connection already, yes, the Individuation Fallacy dovetails nicely into a doctrine of personal responsibility.

When we read some example of a woman opting out of a relationship (or sex) with one guy to take up with another, the reflexive response is to individualize her behavior according to her individualized circumstances. She’s damaged, she’s got Daddy Issues, she’s insecure because you weren’t Man Enough, etc. — any and every consideration that points away from categorizing her actions as commonalities in women’s innate nature are the reflexive thought process. She’s not yours, it was just your turn defines her actions in a concrete visceral understanding of women’s nature that conflicts with the Blank Slate‘s individualism. In this case the maxim is a description, not a prescription.

Men have an evolved need to know paternity. Unhindered by social strictures or women’s Hypergamous filtering men would opt for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality as our innate and preferred mating strategy. I’ve written a lot about this so I wont belabor it here, but a majority of men, over the course of history, will never be able to actualize this strategy. Ergo, socially enforced monogamy became the best mating strategy compromise for men as modified by the selection pressures of women’s mating strategies. The risk in this compromise is the assurance of paternity. If a man is going to compromise mating opportunities with many women to parentally invest in one woman, the deal must come with one condition: the child must be his genetic stock or the compromise invalidates his existence (evolutionarily speaking). To ensure this men evolved a mental firmware that predisposes us to jealousy, mate guarding and desire to possess a woman. This is why we develop a A Sense of Ownership with our girlfriends, wives and children. The dynamics of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism all find their root in men’s imperative to ascertain their paternity and protect their genetic legacy.

The need to control women’s sexuality is nothing less than men’s evolutionary compulsion to ensure that their compromise in parental investment is not for nothing. In a social order where masculine responsibility to wife and children was balanced with a commensurate masculine authority to enforce those responsibilities, men could nominally control the reproductive process. Part of that process included possessing a woman. This was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative.

Every man loves a slut, he just wants her to be his slut.

In today’s gynocentric social order the thought of owning a woman is an affront to the female-primary sensibilities that stem from individuation. Feminism and gynocentrism have conditioned generations of women to believe they are autonomous ‘things‘ with no need for anything outside themselves – least of all men – to find true contentment. They are Strong Independent® women who believe their fulfillment comes from self-ownership. Eschewing a man’s surname in marriage, or even marriage at all, is a sign of independence and stiff middle finger to the idea of passive femininity or notions of ever submitting to a man’s authority. The evolved complementarity between men and women is replaced with the social contrivance of an idealized egalitarianism. Husband and wife is replaced with “Equal Partners“.

For women, the problem with this equalist fantasy is biology and evolved impulse are excused, if not encouraged, in a social order that prioritizes women’s mating strategies. Literally anything goes when the worst consequences of women’s Hypergamy can (enthusiastically) always be attributed to men’s inability to accept them as individuals.

The problem for men is that we still have an innate want to possess a woman to ensure our paternity and invest in our genetic legacies. As mentioned, this desire for permanency with one woman was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative in a patriarchal social order. In a gynocentric social order the evolutionary imperative to possess a woman still remains, but the social imperative says…

She was, is, will, never be yours, it was just your turn.

And that is why this maxim rubs so many men the wrong way.

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies

monogamy

When I first began writing on SoSuave over a decade ago I used to get into what I consider now some fairly predictable arguments about monogamy. It was an interesting time since it was around then I was getting into some heated arguments in my behavioral psychology classes in college.

I had just written what would later become my essay, There is no One and a good majority of my classmates and all of my teachers but one were less than accepting of the theory. I anticipated most of the women in those classes would be upset – bear in mind this was around 2001-02 and the Red Pill was yet to be a thing – what I was surprised by was how many men became hostile by my having challenged the soulmate myth.

I got a lot of the same flack from women then that I get from uninitiated women when they read my work now; “Aren’t you married? Isn’t she your soulmate? Don’t you believe in love? You must’ve got burned pretty bad at some time Mr. Hateful.” Those were and are what I expect because they’re the easy subroutine responses a Blue Pill ego needs to protect itself with. There was a time I probably would’ve mouthed the same. That’s how the conditioning works; it provides us with what we think ought to be ‘obvious’ to anyone. And at the same time, we feel good for ‘defying the odds’ and believing in what we take for granted, or common sense.

This is how deep the subconscious need for assuring our genetic heritage goes. For women this assurance is about optimal Hypergamy, for men, it’s about assurances of paternity. In either case, we need to believe that we will reproduce, and so much so that we will attribute some supernatural influence to the process of doing so. The fulfillment of your own sexuality is nothing less than your battle for existence, and on some level, your subconscious understands this. Thus, for the more religious-minded it gets attributed to fate and faith, whereas for the more secular-minded it’s about the romanticized notion of a soulmate.

Monogamy & ONEitis

I contemplated the idea of ONEitis for a long time back then. I’d most certainly been through it more than once, even with the BPD ex-girlfriend. By then I understood first hand how the belief absorbs a Beta and how it is an essential element, effectively a religion, for a Blue Pill life experience. I didn’t realize it then, but I was maturing into a real valuation of myself and I had the benefit of some real-world experiences with the nature of women to interpret and contrast what I was learning then.

Honestly, I had never even encountered the term ‘ONEitis’ prior to my SoSuave forum days. I referred to the soulmate myth in my writing as best I could, but it wasn’t until (I suppose) Mystery had coined the term. Outside the ‘sphere people got genuinely upset with me when I defined it for them.  Back then I attributed this to having their ego-investment challenged, and while that’s part of it, today I believe there’s more to it than this.

The old social contracts that constituted what I call the Old Set of Books meant a lot in respect to how the social orders prior to the sexual revolution were maintained. That structuring required an upbringing that taught men and women what their respective roles were, and those roles primarily centered on a lifetime arrangement of pair bonding.

It’s interesting to note that the popular theory amongst evolutionary anthropologists is that modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years. Needless to say, it’s a very unpopular opinion that human beings are in fact predisposed to polyamory / polygyny and monogamy is a social adaptation (a necessary one) with the purpose of curbing the worst consequences of that nature. We want to believe that monogamy is our nature and our more feral impulses are spandrels and inconveniences to that nature. We like the sound of humans having evolved past our innate proclivities to the point that they are secondary rather than accepting them as fundamental parts of who we really are.

Women, in particular, are far more invested in promoting the idea of ‘natural’ monogamy since it is their sex that bears the cost of reproductive investments. Even the hint of men acknowledging their ‘selfish gene’ nature gets equated with a license to cheat on women. This is an interesting conflict for women who are increasingly accepting (if not outright flaunting) of Open Hypergamy.

I’ve attempted in past essays to address exactly this duplicity women have to rationalize with themselves. The Preventive Medicine book and posts outline the conflict and how women internalize and ‘hamsterize’ the need to be both Hypergamously selective, but to also prioritize long-term security at various stages of their lives. Ultimately a woman’s position on monogamy is ruled by how she balances her present Alpha Fucks with her future prospects of Beta Bucks.

Seed and Need

It might be that women would rather share a confirmed Alpha with other women than be saddled with a faithful Beta, but that’s not to say that necessity doesn’t eventually compel women to settle for monogamy with a dutiful Beta. In either respect, the onus of sustained, faithful monogamy is always a responsibility placed upon men. The indignation that comes from even the suspicions of a man’s “straying”, a wandering eye, or preplanned infidelity is one of the most delicious sensations a woman can feel. Women will create syndicated talk shows just to commiserate around that indignation.

But in an era when the likes of Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to fully embrace their Hypergamous natures and expects men to be equally accepting of it, it takes a lot of psychological gymnastics to reconcile the visceral feelings of infidelity with the foreknowledge that a less exciting Beta will be the only type of man who will calm her suspicions.

It’s important to also contrast this with the socialization efforts to make women both victims and blameless. As I mention in the last post, men who lack the appreciation of the necessity to prepare for a sustained monogamy with a woman are considered ‘kidults’ or prolonging their adolescence. They are shamed for not meeting women’s definition of being mature; that definition is always one that centers on the idea that men ought to center their lives around being better-than-deserved, faithful, monogamous potentials for women’s long-term security and parental investment.

On the other hand, women are never subject to any qualifications like this. In fact, they are held in higher regard for bucking the system and staying faithful to themselves by never marrying or even aborting children along the way to do so. So once again, we return to the socialization effort necessary to absolve women of the consequences that the conflict Hypergamy poses to them – they become both victims and blameless in confronting a monogamy they expect from men, but are somehow exempt from when it’s inconvenient.

Pair Bonding

Arguably, pair bonding has been a primary adaptation for us that has been species-beneficial. It’s fairly obvious that humans’ capacity for both intra- and inter-sexual cooperation has made us the apex species on the planet. However, the Feminine Imperative’s primary social impetus of making Hypergamy the defining order of (ideally) all cultures is in direct conflict with this human cooperativity. A new order of open Hypergamy, based on female primacy (and the equalist importance of the individual), subverts the need for pair bonding. There is no need for intersexual interdependence (complementarity) when women are socialized and lauded for being self-satisfying, self-sufficient individuals.

Add to this the conditioning of unaccountable victimhood and/or the inherent blamelessness of women and you get an idea of where our social order is heading.

Both sex’s evolved sexual strategies operate counter to the demands of pair bonded monogamy. For millennia we’ve adapted social mechanisms to buffer for it (marriage, male protectionism of women, etc.), but the cardinal rule of sexual strategies still informs these institutions and practices:

 

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

In this respect, it is men who are expected to make the greater compromise due to an evolved sense of uncertainty about paternity and the social mandate to accommodate women’s sexual strategy.

The counter to this is that women have always borne the responsibility of parental investment if they chose a father poorly (or didn’t choose), but in our post-sexual revolution social order, the consequences of this responsibility have been virtually eliminated. In fact, those consequences are now viewed as evidence of women’s independent strength.

Even aborting a child is a source of pride now.

Men bear the greater effect of compromising their sexual strategies to accommodate and resolve the strategy of women. When we account for the normalization of open Hypergamy, soft cuckoldry, and the legal resistance to paternity testing (ostensibly centering on the emotional wellbeing of the child in question) it is much clearer that men bear the most direct consequences for compromising their sexual imperatives.

From Warren Farrell’s book. Why Men are the Way They Are (h/t to SJF):

Why are men so afraid of commitment? Chapter 2 explained how most men’s primary fantasy is still, unfortunately, access to a number of beautiful women. For a man, commitment means giving up this fantasy. Most women’s primary fantasy is a relationship with one man who either provides economic security or is on his way to doing so (he has “potential”). For a woman, commitment to this type of man means achieving this fantasy. So commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. — P.150

Men who “won’t commit” are often condemned for treating women as objects — hopping from one beautiful woman to the next. Many men hop. But the hopping is not necessarily objectifying. Men who “hop from one beautiful woman to another” are usually looking for what they could not find at the last hop: good communication, shared values, good chemistry. — P.153

The meaning of commitment changed for men between the mid-sixties and the mid-eighties. Commitment used to be the certain route to sex and love, and to someone to care for the children and the house and fulfill the “family man image.” Now men feel less as if they need to marry for sex; they are more aware that housework can be hired out and that restaurants serve meals; they are less trapped by family-man image motivation, including the feeling that they must have children. Increasingly, that leaves men’s main reason to commit the hope of a woman to love. — P.159

Dr. Farrell is still fundamentally trapped in a Blue Pill perspective because he still clings to the validity of the old order books/rules, and the willfully ignorant hope that women will rationally consider men’s sexual imperatives as being as valid as their own.

That said, Farrell’s was the germ of the idea I had for the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies, he just didn’t go far enough because he was (and still is) stuck in Blue Pill idealistic hopes of monogamy. Bear in mind, Farrell’s book is based on his intrasexual understandings of everything leading up to its publication in 1986, however, this does give us some insight into how the old order evolved its approach to monogamy then into an open, socially accepted form of Hypergamy now.

He relies on the old trope that men are afraid of commitment by reasoning that men only want to fulfill a fantasy of unlimited access to unlimited sexuality – all shallow, all superficial, while women’s priority of commitment is correct, selfless, valid and blameless. Farrell also reveals his Blue Pill conditioning by making the presumption that men only Game women in the hope that they’ll find a unicorn, and they’re endlessly fucking women for no other reason than to find a woman with good communication, shared values, good chemistry, etc.

I sincerely doubt that even in the mid 8os this was the case for men not want to commit to a woman, or essentially compromise his sexual strategy to accommodate that of women’s. Farrell never came to terms with dual nature of women’s sexual strategy and how it motivates women over time because he believes men and women have, fundamentally, the same concept of love and mutually shared end-goals.

Mandates & Responses

In the decades since this publication, the normalization and legal mandates that ensure men will (by force if necessary) comply with this compromise is something I doubt Farrell could’ve ever predicted. Legal aspects, social aspects, that used to be a source of women stigmatization about this compromise have all been swept away or normalized, if not converted to some redefined source of supposed strength. Abortion rights, single parenting (almost exclusively the domain of women), postponing birth, careerism, freezing women’s eggs, sperm banks, never-marrying, body fat acceptance and many more aspects are all accepted in the name of strong independence® for women.

Virtually anything that might’ve been a source of regret, shame, or stigmatization in the old order is dismissed or repurposed to elevate women, but what most men never grasp (certainly not Dr. Farrell) is that all of these normalizations were and are potential downsides to a woman’s Hypergamous decisions.

MGTOW/PUA/ The Red Pill, are all the deductive responses to this normalization, but also, they’re a response to the proposition of the compromise that the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies presents to men in today’s sexual marketplace.

In all of these ‘movements’ the fundamental, central truth is that they all run counter to the presumption that men must compromise (or abandon) their sexual imperatives – long or short term. Thus, these ideologies and praxeologies have the effect of challenging or removing some of the total control of Hypergamy women now have mandated to them. Even just the concepts of MGTOW/PUA/TRP are equatable to removing this control.

However, it is still undeniable that there is a necessity for monogamy (even if it’s just temporary) or some iteration of pair bonding that ensures men and women raise healthier, stronger, better-developed children. We are still social animals and, despite what equalism espouses, we are different yet complementary and interdependent with one another. Mutual cooperation, tribalism, monogamy and even small-scale polygamy have been beneficial social adaptations for us.

Gynocentrism and the respondent efforts against it defeat this complementary cooperative need.

Gynocentrism / egalitarianism defeat this cooperation in its insistence that equalism, self-apart independence, and homogeny ought to be society’s collective mental point of origin in place of the application of differing strengths to differing weaknesses.

So we come to an impasse then. It’s likely it will require a traumatic social event to reset or redefine the terms of our present social contract to ever make monogamy a worthwhile compromise for men again. We can also contrast this ‘raw deal’ compromise against the Cardinal Rule of Relationships: In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least. It’s easy to think women simply have no need of men when their long-term security is virtually assured today, but fem-centrism goes beyond just separating the sexes by need. It wasn’t enough to just separate male and female cooperation, fem-centrism has made men’s compromise so bad that they must be made to despise their sex altogether. Men had to be made not only to accept their downside compromise but to feel ashamed for even thinking not to.