neural software

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.

Primordial Archetypes

This morning I was made aware of another example of open Hypergamy. A Russian Alpha Widow admitted to her duplicity in switching her Beta husband’s sperm with that of her ex lover’s in her IVF insemination. Now, at the risk of throwing red meat to the wolves here, I wanted to dissect this situation a bit to explain a larger concept I’ve been considering lately. It would be enough to use this situation as one more example of women’s prime directive – Hypergamy before all else – but, there’s more involved here that illustrates the sociological reach that Hypergamy has for women.

You see, Yana Anokhina, 38, couldn’t have pulled off her deception of Maxim Anokhin without enlisting the aid of Dr. Liya Kazaryan and her staff in swapping out his sperm for that of Yana’s former lover; the Alpha for whom she was ‘widowed’. I’m not entirely sure that her former lover (now her current relationship) was aware of the swap, but there’s no question about Yana’s motives.

Ms Anokhina has not spoken about the swap but reports say she wanted the father of her baby to be the man she loved – not her husband.

‘It was found out during the investigation in court that Maxim’s wife Yana was the one who initiated the process of replacing her husband’s biological material,’ reported Vesti.

‘Allegedly, she wanted to give birth to a child by a man with whom she was in love, and her husband was the one who paid the costs.’

So this isn’t just as simple as she got knocked up by her Alpha lover and tricked her Beta husband into believing the inseminated sperm was his own. She had to actually go to the trouble of collecting two samples of sperm, convincing the IVF clinic’s doctor and staff into making the swap (and then withholding the truth from the father) and then carrying the pregnancy to term and keeping her husband ignorant of the ruse for a year. This may seem like the deviousness of a particular woman, but remember, she had to enlist the confidence of Dr. Kazaryan and other clinicians (I presume also female).

And she does all this with a laugh.

I’ve written quite a bit on what I call the Sisterhood Über Alles and this is one more example of how that collective female consciousness intuitively understands and both consciously and unconsciously promotes the interests of the Feminine Imperative – even for unfamiliar, anonymous women.

Now you might say, “Well Rollo, this is just one horrible example of a few women who got in cahoots to deceive a hapless Beta chump. Not all women are like this.” Or I’m sure the more morally conscious of ‘red pill women’ would simply point out that they would never do such a thing and convince us that ‘quality women’ regularly police their own Hypergamous impulses – these Russian women just lack their moral superiority. Well, be that as it may, it’s not too difficult to find online forums dedicated to women collaborating with other women in order to trick a man into marrying a woman via false pregnancy claims. In fact there’s a lucrative black market for positive pregnancy tests sold to women wanting to press their boyfriends into a marriage commitment by way of a false-positive pregnancy scare.

The fact behind all this still remains – women evolved for a subconscious, collective duplicity when it comes to optimizing on Hypergamy.

We can see this in popular culture; a culture defined by the Feminine Imperative now. Dalrock once said we have replaced the monogamous marriage model of child rearing with the child support model of child rearing today. I believe he’s right, but how is that child support model effected today and how doe it align with women’s evolved, instinctual predilections?

Humankind evolved from small tribal collectives, but in each collective there were commonalities of behaviors that developed similarly to solve various personal and collective (tribal) problems. For instance, an instinctive (unlearned) fear of snakes or spiders in women is an evolved part of humankind’s collective mental firmware. A small boys natural propensity to throw an object with strength and accuracy might be another example.

How women interact today in what I call the Sisterhood is a gestalt of the various instinctive behaviors that the women of our tribal ancestors developed to aid them in collective support as well as ensuring long-term security in reproduction. In other words, women evolved to do exactly what Dr. Kazaryan did, and so many other women in various “trick him into marrying you” forums do, to enable another woman’s sexual strategy. From an evolutionary perspective it follows that women who aided their ‘sisters’ in Hypergamy would themselves be aided and insure that this archetypal behavior became a characteristic of women’s collectivist nature.

I once watched a video of some daytime women’s talk show that centered on how women could justifiably trap a man into commitment by essentially lying to him about a faked pregnancy. I apologize for not having a link to it here, but while I was looking for it on YouTube I was inundated with videos of shows on this topic – I literally couldn’t find the one I was thinking of because there were so many returns. Watching this show I was hit by just how many women in the audience rallied behind the women doing the ‘trapping’ and the myriad justifications offered to allay any feelings of guilt, remorse or doubts about having a child.

This is particularly emphasized if the ‘father’ in question fulfills an ideal of women’s collective Hypergamy. To the collective hivemind of women, a woman is, by nature, entitled to a child with the most perfect father (high SMV) she can attract. Remember, shows and online forums like this are only small representative examples of that global Hypergamous archetypal expectation and the support women offer each other to optimize Hypergamy. I’ve stated before the the Sisterhood Über Alles (above all) transcends all considerations of tribe, race, religion and even political stripe. All women are part of ‘team woman‘ before any other affiliation; this is how the Feminine Imperative has remained a social influence since our hunter/gatherer beginnings. As we’ve progressed from small tribalist beginnings to larger collectives, to nations and now to globalism, this female collectivism has expanded to encompass the totality of womankind.

Love Me Vampire, Fuck Me Werewolf

Anyone who’s been reading my work for a while is probably scratching their heads as to why I’m referring to the concept of ‘archetypes’ here. As most of my readers know, I’ve never been a fan of Carl Jung. I’ve written about why this is a few times and I’ll probably write a more comprehensive essay about it in the coming year, but suffice to say that while Jung might be synonymous with the new agey metaphysical concept of archetypes, it was from anthropology that he lifted the term and that’s the basic reference I’m using here. That said, I don’t necessarily disagree with Jungian archetypes, it’s at the point where the concept takes on metaphysical aspects that I part ways with them.

However, the idea of archetypes is necessary to explain the last bit of the puzzle here, because it’s my belief that a primordial understanding of Hypergamy is part of our collective consciousness and unconsciousness. I say collective consciousness because since the time of the Sexual Revolution our global understanding of intersexual dynamics has become part of our social discourse. When I refer to something like Open Hypergamy I’m talking about the almost triumphant, open embrace of women’s sexual strategy. The generations that came after the Sexual Revolution scarcely remember that there was a time when intersexual truths we take for granted now weren’t something that was discussed in polite conversation. Hypergamy, while unconsciously understood, was secretive. A woman who other women called a ‘gold digger’ was disparaged by women not on moral grounds, but rather because she was open about the sexual strategy all women employ and they’d rather be kept secret so as to use it effectively.

In 2018 it’s almost quaint to think that women would be coy about Hypergamy. With the advent of the internet it became impossible for women to keep Hypergamy concealed, and really, why would they care to in an age when the necessary provisioning-side of Hypergamy is veritably insured? But it wasn’t always so obvious. Up until the mid 1960s the understanding of Hypergamy was an unconscious knowledge. Certainly it was discussed and written about by men contemplating the duplicitous nature of women. Ancient religious texts are rife with proverbs warning against the nature of women, so the basics of Hypergamy were something our tribal ancestors we’re well aware of.

I received this Tweet from a reader a few days ago:

This guy’s ‘revelation’ prompted me to consider the primordial understanding we have of Hypergamy. I’ve read dozens of articles by, and listened to dozens more interviews of, ‘popular psychologists’ who explain the commonalities of our classic human stories and myths. I got into this topic in Storytelling. The basic premise is that our common evolution has led to common themes in all human stories. The same elements and the same character archetypes pursue the same motives from culture to culture. Yet all of these commonalities are centered on similar aspects of our evolved mental firmware. The hero, the villain, good vs. evil, the wise old sage, the beautiful damsel to be saved, ect. are all founded on common human development. They are semi-conscious expressions of what our evolution has embedded in our mental firmware.

Now, what if I told you that the reality of women’s Hypergamous nature is also a part of that collective consciousness?

My theory is this: human beings have an innate understanding of the Alpha Seed – Beta Need nature of intersexual dynamics. On some level of consciousness we know, we feel, that it’s true, how it functions and why does. As a result, social institutions (religion and familial) created moral strictures around this unconscious knowledge to buffer against the worst effects of it on society. Only after the Sexual Revolution and men ceding virtually unilateral control of Hypergamy to women did these strictures change.

The concepts of men who represent Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are similarly part of this instinctual understanding of Hypergamy. These too are archetypes, but more so, they form the basis of more complex male archetypes (love me Vampire, fuck me Werewolf). They are the men women want to fuck and the men women want to be provided for by. And we can trace the root of these archetypes through our evolution and even the evolution of other primates. These Hypergamous archetypes then manifest themselves in our era-specific, cultural specific, stories, narratives, mythology, etc.

A Sense of Ownership

When I was studying behavioral psychology there was a point when I came across this phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. A friend showed me this video recently and it reminded me of when I’d studied it.

It’s really fascinating how early our sense of ownership develops. There is a school of thought (one I happen to agree with) that this need for ownership is an innate part of out psychological firmware – it’s something we’re born with. We value things more highly once we believe we own something. It makes perfect sense that this would a selected-for part of our evolution. Individuals that possessed this Endowment Effect, theoretically, might have been more adaptable to their surroundings by having something on hand that would aid in their survival at the cost of a competitor. For early man this was likely to be physical tools, but this Endowment Effect would also extend to our progeny and long-term female partners – more on this later.

By extension, our belongings literally become a part of us. This is observable even on a neurological level. Furthermore, our belongings have an essence that becomes unique to us. In other words, we wont settle for (even exact) imitations of our stuff even when they are exact duplicates.

As you might expect from a TED video, the bias towards making this ownership dynamic one of being a bug, rather of a feature, of human development is evident. The new-agey narrative goes like this – if we’re ever to reach the utopian state of egalitarian equalism the Village would have us believe in, we need to somehow unlearn this innate Endowment Effect we evolved to hold. This anti-materialist sentiment is part of a larger socialist/collectivist message that seeks to disempower us by convincing us that this connection to our things is innately bad. Issues of socialism, communism, collectivism, capitalism, etc. are beyond the scope of this blog, but it’s important to consider the drive behind this ‘anti-materialism’ push and how it affects our sense of ownership in intersexual dynamics.

I think it’s interesting that we have a part of our psyches that evolved for ownership; a part of our nature that is decidedly unegalitarian.

If you’re ever read Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene, you kind of get a clearer picture of it. Selfish, self-concerned, organisms tend to survive better than overly altruistic or egalitarian ones. Now before you tell me, “On no Rollo, Bonobos are the peacenik, free loving hippy example of egalitarianism in the wild” have a read of The Naked Bonobo and you’ll understand how deliberately false that impression is. If anything Bonobos are far better examples of the more visceral side of Hypergamy in humans. Self-interest is the driver of a great many survival instincts and adaptations in all animals.

Getting back to humans here, combine that evolved, adaptive, selfishness with a hindbrain level, intrinsic sense for ownership – one in which we feel as if it has a direct connection to ourselves – and you can see what social constructivists and equalitarians are trying to undo in humans. If you watch today’s video you’ll better understand this deep connection we have with the things we, selfishly, consider our own. There is a neurological connection between our sense of self and our things.

I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in our belief systems many times throughout my past essays. Briefly, ego-investment is phenomenon of being so intrinsically connected with our beliefs and ideologies that they become part of our personalities. So, to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. In a similar fashion the connections we apply to our things also become (to varying degrees) part of who we are. In essence we invest our egos into the things we consider ours – and the greater the effort, cost or the applied significance involved in getting those things the greater the injury is to the self when they are lost, destroyed, damaged or stolen.

In the video there is also a mention of how original items are more valued than an exact copy of those items. Again, this is part of the evolutionary side of humans investing their egos into those things. There is a limbic level need to know that these items are our things because only those things somehow contain the essence of us. Also in the video it’s postulated that the higher price of common items owned by celebrities we admire are a cost we’re willing to pay because we believe part of that celebrity’s essence is somehow contained in that item.

Why is it that we evolved to place such importance in knowing that some thing is ours, and only that thing is ours? Why do we, sometimes obsessively, need to imbue that thing with the essence of us? Why is this (apparently) part of our evolved mental firmware?

The Need to Know

I’m going to speculate here a bit. I think a strong argument can be made for men’s intrinsic need to verify his own paternity being linked to the Endowment Effect. In fact, I’d suggest that this ownership need can extend to not only a man’s children, but also to the women (even potential women) in his life. This isn’t to say women didn’t also evolve this sense – women display the Endowment Effect as much as men – but I’m going to approach this from the male side for the moment.

The video refers to this compulsive need to verify the authenticity of a thing as ‘magical thinking’, but is it really so magical? I think the writer and researcher would have us think this dynamic is silly because it’s ‘just a thing’ right? We shouldn’t place such a high degree of importance on a bicycle or an old guitar. That’s just vulgar materialism, right? Granted, some things, heirlooms maybe, can have sentimental value, but ultimately even those might well be replaceable too. It shouldn’t be so important to know something is magically your own.

Unless the thing that’s your own is your only shot at passing something of yourself into the future.

The butter knife that Elvis used to spread peanut butter on his peanut butter and banana sandwiches could be anything you can find at Walmart, but if his ‘essence‘ was in someway invested in that knife (and anyone cared to know about it) that part of Elvis might go on into perpetuity. That seems like childish magical thinking until you realize that the only part of the average person’s essence that might actually do this is their children. And until just recently, evolutionarily speaking, there wasn’t any completely dependable way to know if a man was 100% invested in his own ‘things’ – his progeny. His kids would carry on his essence, so in our evolved past it made sense to be obsessive-compulsive about the things that we’re one’s own.

As I stated, women also exhibit this effect as well, and I’d argue for much of the same reasons. Though, in none of the research related in this video was this Endowment Effect controlled for by sex – at least none that I’m aware of. Again, this is conjecture, but I would think that with the intrinsic certainty a woman has in knowing a child is her own, and the collectivist communal nature of women in hunter-gatherer society from which we developed, it might be that women place a higher ‘endowed’ value on different things than men do. I think this effect may be more pronounced in an era where women are almost unilaterally in control of Hypergamy.

I recently saw a video of a fertility doctor who had either used his own sperm to fertilize women’s eggs, or completely random samples to father about 40 children. The women, the children (mostly female) were absolutely aghast that he was their father or some donor who they would never know had contributed to half their DNA. The idea that the selection and control of Hypergamy was taken from them was worthy of the death penalty. Yet this is exactly the control we expect men to relinquish in this age. We will pat men on the back for abandoning their evolved instinct to ascertain paternity. We’ll tell a man he’s a hero for wifing up a single mother and “stepping up to be a father” to a child he didn’t sire and at the same time pretend that father’s are superfluous. We’ll change ‘Father’s Day’ to ‘Special Person’s Day’ and tell men they’re insecure in their masculinity for preferring a son or daughter of his own – but try to remove that control from a woman, try to tell her that Hypergamous choice wasn’t hers to make and it’s tantamount to rape.

“She was never yours, it was just your turn.”

I think it was my fellow Red Man Group friend Donovan Sharpe who coined this phrase. I might be wrong. I’ve read this around the usual Red Pill Reddit subs and other manosphere forums, but it wasn’t until last month (July) when I read yet one more story about a husband whose wife was leaving him and was in the process of Zeroing him out when he decided to kill her, their three kids and then himself. You can read the Twitter reaction to this here:

Naturally women were appalled at the deaths of the wife and kids, as they should be. Pre-divorce women will prep months in advance for their new singleness. Often they’ll check out of the marriage and live without any real connection to their, usually Beta, Blue Pill conditioned, husband who languishes in this Blue Pill hell for the duration it takes his wife to establish a new mental persona and finds a way to exit the marriage. She’s already gone from the marriage, but the typical Blue Pill husband believes that he is the source of her discontent and resorts to anything he can to ‘keep things fresh’ or ‘rekindle the old flame’ that a feminine-primary popular culture tells him should be his responsibility. Unfortunately, this guy’s situation is typical of middle aged men today, and I honestly believe is the source that drives suicides and murder-suicides in this demographic. This man was going to be Zeroed Out and he knew it was coming.

That’s when I thought, ‘Was this guy’s turn with her just over?’ Was it as simple as that? If you read this couple’s story there wasn’t a history of him losing his mind. If anything Matthew Edwards was a pretty dedicated and invested father. No history of depression, suicidal tendencies or abuse; just another average frustrated chump who built a life for himself likely based on his Blue Pill conditioning.

But his turn was over and he likely believed the soul-mate myth. How was he supposed to live with out her?

The fem-stream media offers up their standard pablum – “Misogynistic society teaches men that they’re entitled to women’s bodies. Men need to be taught that they don’t own women.” or something similar that goes entirely against a man’s evolved Endowment Effect. What exactly does a man get to think is his own if not his family? When a woman finds out that her Hypergamous choice was made for her by a fertility clinic doctor rather than herself they’re out for blood – again, rightfully so. Then why are we surprised that men, particularly men in Matthew Edwards demographic, resort to murder and suicide when faced with losing everything they’ve invested themselves in.

Now this week we see another, almost identical, tragedy in Colorado this week.

And once again we have what looks like another guy being Zeroed out and another quadruple homicide. How man more of these murder-suicides (or just murders in this case) is it going to take before we collectively see the commonalities in all of them?

I had a conversation with several women in the wake of this latest tragedy and every one of them couldn’t wrap their head around why the guy would kill his kids? They could understand why he might kill his wife – the assumption being her unborn child was sired by guy who wasn’t him – but not his kids. I think this is interesting in the light of how men and women approach paternity/maternity and the Endowment Effect. The best answer I could come up with is that a man doesn’t want that part of him to go on into the future without him. The idea that his kids bear some of his essence and he would rather erase that essence entirely than live or kill himself with the knowledge that his children wouldn’t have him in their lives. Killing a wife might be the result of an uncontrolled rage, but killing your kids takes premeditation – there has to be some point to the act, some reasoning (corrupted as it may be) that made sense to him.

The Strategic Pluralism Theory is from a research study by Dr. Martie Haselton:

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 a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).

The commonalities in every one of these murder-suicides is a Blue Pill conditioned, Beta husband who by all indications was playing by the First Set of Books. By all indications these men would fit into the second type of man mention in Strategic Pluralism Theory – they did everything right, they played by the rules, they did their best to invest themselves in their mates and offspring and likely believed they’d earned some Relational Equity from it. But then, their turn was over with their wives. For whatever reason they were faced with a complete loss, a Zeroing Out, of everything they believed they owned. The things they invested so much of their lives in, the things they worked so hard for, the things that retained his ‘essence’, the things they invested their egos in were all being taken away from them. When faced with such a reality men tend to look at only two options; remake and rebuild what they had in the knowledge that this too might be taken from them, or they can simply erase all themselves and all the ‘things’ they were attached too.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

On last Saturday’s Red Man Group we took a call from a woman who has apparently just discovered the “red pill school of thought” and looked up what ever convoluted definitions she could find from the ‘normie web’ to better understand it. For context, the whole exchange began around the 2:04:00 mark here, but the bit I want to dissect I’ve cued up to 2:09 in the above video. The Red Pill as a praxeology is often something most uninitiated people don’t have the patience to really want to understand. So when they’re confronted with a Red Pill truth that conflicts with some ego-invested belief they often just resort to what I call “point and sputter” – they spit out some school yard taunt, tell you how unbelievable it is anyone could ever believe such a thing in this day and then move along to whatever ideological site they’re comforted by.

Credit where it’s due, this woman (and I apologize for not getting her name) at the very least was prompted to ask some questions about how we come to whatever misattributed ideas she read were what it is we think. Listen to the whole exchange for context. In the beginning I was asked the standard “what do you tel your daughter about all of this?” as if this is going to somehow shame me back down to earth, but the part she was most distraught over was the idea that “women are only valuable for what they look like”.

My response to her was based on an essay I wrote 4 years ago titled Separating Values. In that piece I tried to outline how women today have trouble separating their sexual market value from their self-perceived personal worth:

Conflating Values

One of the major problems women have, and more than even some red pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.

It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.

What [Robin] Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.

It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.

Listening to this woman’s concerns, it’s a fairly common refutation and one we come to expect from a mindset that presumes men callously objectify women out of hand, or due to their being taught to be so by a chauvinistic toxic masculinity. Women cling to this because it sounds right and reinforces the victimhood narrative that defines the collective identity of the Sisterhood. So when they read it or see it openly embraced, or spoken about men in a positive context it’s confirmation of an offense they want to believe is endemic in men. Thus, we get the “literally shaking”, sound of a quavering voice.

However, all of this gets in the way of women really understanding that they’ve been conditioned to conflate their personal worth with their sexual market value. As I mentioned in my response, a woman can be a wonderful humanitarian, a great mother, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone who adds value to the depth and breadth of humankind, but it won’t make her look any better in a bikini. And that is where sexual market value starts for women when it comes to men’s arousal and attraction. For as long as I’ve been writing this blog I’ve tried to explain this in as simple a way as possible; men and women are different. Part of our differences is that what constitutes sexual market value for one sex is not an equal evaluation for the other. For as much as the equalist mindset pervades our social consciousness, the reality is men and women are different in many fundamental ways.

One reason Red Pill awareness in men gets vilified by women is because it nakedly exposes, discusses and develops sexual and life strategies around some very Darwinistic and unflattering realities of intersexual dynamics based on those differences. But exposing these differences is only offensive to this social order because there is a presumption of a blank-slate equalism that’s been embedded into every aspect of our gender understanding for almost 70 years now. This offensiveness is less about the actual nuts and bolts of evolution, biology and psychological differences between men and women, but more so it’s about the ego-invested idea that men and women should be blank-slate, functional equals in all respects. Even this presumption is a horse-shit cover story for the latent purpose of feminism floating the lie of “equality” – fundamentally disempowering men so women can aspire to be their masters in various ways.

The woman from our discussion expressed this barely containable angst that men only value her as a sexual object, and it’s important to suss out the reasoning for this confusion and rage. As I mentioned, the problem women have is an inability to separate their sexual market value from their personal value a ‘basic human being‘. A quote I’m known for is “virtue is anti-seductive.” No guy ‘virtues’ a woman into bed, and while I get push back for devaluing the importance of virtue occasionally, what I don’t get is any disagreement from men or women on that point. Virtue, intelligence, honor, duty, wisdom and any number of other esoteric features that would make a man a terrific human being do nothing (or sometimes work against him) for his raw visceral sexuality that women are aroused by. For men, however, these traits and many more will definitely add to his attractiveness as a long term prospect for women.

In men, affluence, status, intelligence, improvisation, creativity, ambition, drive, perseverance, humor, positive-conventional masculinity, and many more aspects make this man an attractive choice for a long term relationship with women. These are attributes that contribute to a man’s sexual market value, but they are incomplete without a raw, visceral physical component. Hypergamy serves two masters, Alpha seed and Beta need – and as such it hates the one and loves the other depending on what a woman’s most pressing necessity happens to be at that point in her life. Women have an innate, limbic understanding of what makes a man a complete package – a great catch.

Where this and most other women fail is that their own Fempowerment conditioning teaches them that what makes a man attractive, what makes his SMV appealing to women must necessarily be what makes for her own personal value and sexual market value. The reason this woman is shaking here is because this conditioning has convinced her and generations of women to build a life predicated on a fallacy: What makes her a “good person” should necessarily make her attractive and arousing to men. This is a great falsehood that is the root of many of the gender conflicts and misunderstandings we see around us today.

Gendered Differences in Attraction

The things that make a woman’s sexual market value high are not the same things make her sense of personal worth high. Yet, this is exactly what the Feminine Imperative conditions women to believe and seeks to shame men for not complying with this fallacy. When men opt for younger, hotter, tighter at all ages of their own maturity, the visceral message is clear – it makes no difference what a woman’s personal value is when it comes to sexual valuation. Where women fall short is they presume that men cannot appreciate women for anything but their sexual value.

This is an interesting dynamic since the Imperative teaches women never to implicitly do anything for a man.

The prime directive of feminism for the past 50 years has been founded on women striving to achieve the ideal of the Strong Independent Woman® (SIW). This SIW ideal is the carrot that gets the mules to pull the cart. That ideal is never fully attainable because if it were it would make an end state for feminism a realizable goal rather than the self-perpetuating social mechanism it is. The SIW ideal is intentionally ambiguous, but the concept is based on selling women the idea that they can not only “have it all” but they can be it all too. The ‘independence’ feminism sells predicated on being a self-sustaining, self-satisfying, autonomous ‘thing’ that doesn’t need for anything. A woman is every bit as good a feminine role model as she is a masculine one, ergo, she has no need for men beyond the physical aspect. In fact, an independence from men, from any form of dependency on men, has been part of the feminist charter since Seneca Falls in 1848.

From a Red Pill perspective, and in my opinion, this independence from men has been the single most damaging aspect of feminism in its history. Men and women evolved to be complements to the other and in evolutionary terms are far stronger together than apart. Each compensates for the one’s innate weaknesses with the other’s innate strengths. Feminism preaches two lies in this respect – the first being that a woman can “have it all”, but also she can be an autonomous being with no intrinsic needs beyond what she can provide for or address herself. The lie is that she “don’t need no man” when a hundred thousand years of evolution says different. Men and women need each other, but it’s feminism that’s selling the lie that they don’t.

The ironic part about this socialized lie is that in emancipating women from the ‘dependency’ of men feminism has founded the basis of ‘having it all’ on how closely a woman can emulate a man. The definition of a successful Strong Independent Woman is how closely she can replicate the success of men. This ideal for SIW success is based on a masculine ideal. As feminism has refocused women’s goals on these masculine ideals it has systematically altered the definition of femininity to align with its ideal of ‘success’.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

As part of that new masculine ideal of female success, along came the concept of the Alpha Female. I’ve read dozens of articles about this fantasy creature; how she’s a boss who takes no shit and turns companies around from the brink of bankruptcy by virtue of being female. A woman of the future who emulates and exceeds the successes of any apex-male CEO of those sexist Fortune 500 companies. Even if she’s not a high powered exec, the match (literally) of any man, women still love to imagine themselves in this “alpha” role in their own little worlds.

“I’m an Alpha Female, and maybe I’m not a jet setter, but I’m a Type A personality and as such I’m headstrong, a go-getter woman who knows what she wants.”

This sloganized mental model is part of the new Strong Independent Woman® costume that feminism is selling to women today.

If you’re a woman who’s bought into the Confidence Porn narrative that’s so popular today, allow me to ruin that image for you. There is no such thing as an “alpha” female – at least not in the respect of the idealistic Fempowered fantasy you think applies to you. The Feminine Imperative likes to convince women that they are ‘Alpha’ using that same masculine model definitions I detailed above here. The Strong Independent Woman meme only holds up insofar as it emulates masculine success and a masculine defined concept of ‘Alpha’. By this definition every woman has a potential to be an ‘alpha’ female in her own little way. Like I said, the Confidence Porn women gobble up is so tasty because it’s so achievable – all you have to do is cop the “I’m the boss, I’m a Type A person” attitude, put some foam inserts in the shoulders of your ‘power suit’ and you too can be Alpha because you say so and you walk the same walk as an Alpha Male.

The push for female-primacy has conditioned generations of women to expect an entitled, default respect, and a deference to their authority from men. They’re told at every opportunity from the time they’re 5 years old that they can do anything, have it all, be it all, and they’re the “natural leaders of the future”. By extension this leads women to the Alpha Female trope.

Ironically, the same people who love to ridicule the idea of ‘Alpha Males’ completely accept the concept of an Alpha Female. They’ll make funny videos ridiculing the Red Pill for using ‘alpha’ as a referential term – “These jokers think they’re wolves or Silver Back Gorillas, hur hur!” – but they’ll eagerly embrace the idea of an ‘alpha’ female. That conditioned deference of the feminine makes it believable; and they like the idea that identifying with women’s delusions of empowerment might get them laid.

Attribution Bias Error

The error that women and feminism make in the ‘Alpha Female’ respect is an attribution bias error. Women are conditioned to believe that if they value the aspects of what makes men attractive, what makes them a good pairing, that men must also value those traits in women. If status, power, social proof, affluence, careerism, drive, etc. is what gets them hot for men (in the long term) then possessing those traits themselves must also be attractive in the reverse. Unfortunately for women, they’re painfully (but slowly) learning that men and women are in fact different and the lie of egalitarian equalism has essentially cost them a future with a husband, children and family living.

In order to counter this harsh reality an industry in biotech egg-freezing has sprung up around the very real female insecurity that these confident Alpha Women wont find a suitable man to start a family with now that they are well past the Wall. Feminine-primary society is capitalizing on this fear.

But the reverse is true; men’s sexual selection criteria is far more simplistic than women’s. From an evolved, naturalist perspective men select women based on looks and sexual availability – and on a subconscious level women know this, yet they rationalize that men should be interested in their coequal professionalism, status and any number of intrinsic qualities they believe they possess. The root of this misunderstanding is once again the socialized lie of egalitarian, blank-slate equalism. Only now women expect that if they invest themselves in the same pursuits as Alpha men that this should compensate for their lack of physical appeal. If men and women are functional equals what defines male dominance should also define female dominance. Evolution says differently.

The woman on the left (Reneé Sommerfield) is the true Alpha female by the standards of evolutionary realities. The woman on the right (Sheryl Sandberg) is what our gynocentric social order would have men believe should be considered an ‘alpha’ female. This is the conflict that’s at the heart of so many manufactured crises of attraction for women and the failure of their long-term plans to have a family.

The Alpha Female is really the woman who best embodies what men’s evolved, biological imperatives determine what makes her an attractive breeding and long-term mate choice. Men’s criteria is very simple; fitness, youth, assertive sexuality, playfulness, conventional femininity and genuine desire to please him. Beyond this, submission, respect, nurturing (potential mothering qualities), a natural deference to male authority, humility, admiration and an unobligated desire to recognize that man as her complementary partner are just some of the long-term attributes that make a woman someone a man might want to invest himself in a family with.

Unfortunately all of this criteria is counter to the message ‘alpha‘ Females are taught are valuable today. They are taught that anything a woman might do for the expressed pleasure of a man is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman® meme. The presumption is that a desire to meet any of this criteria is a failure on the part of a woman who demands to be the ‘equal’ of a man. Even acknowledging the innate, complementary natures of men and women is an affront to the equalist narrative. Furthermore, any man who would base (much less express) his own decision making criteria as such is shamed via social conventions. The narrative is that he must be needy, or threatened by a “strong woman” or he must want this woman to be his Mommy substitute. All of this is a social mechanic meant to force fit that natural complementary criteria into the box of egalitarian equalism.

Value Added

I don’t write for a female readership per se. In fact, I don’t really direct my writing towards any audience, but in this instance I want to end here with a message for my female readers. Take this message to the bank: the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, not adversarial. But that adversarial feeling you get when you read me describing some unflattering aspect of female nature is the product of your own Blue Pill conditioning that’s taught you the lie of egalitarianism-as-female-empowerment. If you truly want to ‘empower‘ yourselves set aside your self-importance, look inside yourselves and ask this question –

What is it about me that a man would find attractive from a naturalistic perspective?

What do I possess that a man would truly believe is Value Added?

That may feel a bit counterintuitive to you, but understand that the reason this introspection is alien or offensive to you is because you’ve been conditioned to believe that your masculine qualities are what men should find attractive about you. You turn this offense back on men and make it their fault for not finding your ‘alpha femaleness’ the root of their attraction to you. Is the idea of changing yourself, to add value to your package, for the pleasure of a man a source of anger for you? Why is that?

I see far too many otherwise beautiful women who destroy themselves on the lie of the ‘alpha’ female and a never ending struggle to perfect an equalist archetype in themselves. They rail on about infantile men, or bemoan that men are afraid to ask them out, or ask “Where are all the good guys nowadays?” Understand that these efforts to shame men into finding something attractive about you based on your masculine criteria for attraction will always fail; leaving you a lonely childless middle aged wreck all because you refused to accept that you need to be someone worth marrying.

Men and women are better together than they are apart. We evolved to be complements to the other. But, feminism, the Feminine Imperative and an endemic Fempowerment culture have taught you to believe “you are enough”, you are complete, you don’t need a man because you can satisfy all of your own needs. This is the most damning lie ever perpetrated on womankind – that you can be it all – and only when it’s too late do women realize that they’ve been had.

The Goddess Movement

Six years ago I wrote a post outlining what the PUA community referred to then as “Chick Crack“. It was a pretty straight forward post that I delved into just to explain why playing to women’s propensity to believe in the spiritual – or what women would consider spiritual – is an effective technique in Game. I always thought it was funny how accurate this presumption about women was when I came across it.

Of all the strippers I’d ‘dated’ in the past every one subscribed to some form of non-mainstream spiritualism. This girl Angie I used to bang kept Tarot cards in her pink lady’s devotional Bible, another professed to be a psychic; in fact the only people I’ve ever known who self-seriously wanted me to believe they were in fact psychic were all women.

[…] For the stripper set this seems to be par for the course, but I wish I could say this chick-crack phenomenon was limited to just women who had some vacuous spiritual/emotional hole in their lives to fill. No, all women (yes I said all) are predisposed to the intrigue that metaphysical imaginings sparks in them. If it smacks of secret, covert knowledge, privy only to a chosen few, then you’ve got an attentive listener in a woman. UFOs, palm reading (always a classic), psychic premonition, ‘gifts of prophecy’, really anything that hints at knowledge beyond the ordinary is fair game. Chick Crack is not just limited to off-brand spiritualisms either, you’ll find that far more women than men will develop (conveniently) an affinity for, and are more invested in, religion than men.

In the wake of the Anthony Bourdain “suicide“, and the scramble to absolve Asia Argento of any complicity in his decision to hang himself, I came across this post about Asia’s penchant for Witchcraft. Apparently Wicca is somewhat more than a hobby for her. As you look at these pictures it’s important to remember that this is a 42 year old woman (and her friends) who sincerely believes in this stuff.

In Chick Crack I also made reference as to why I believe women’s being predisposed to beliefs in the supernatural is a desire for secret power from an innate position of female powerlessness.

Feminine Mythology

Women’s natural pull towards the mysterious and metaphysical has its roots in the sex’s historical characterizations. In keeping with the very useful associations of women’s unknowability and feminine mystique, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we find most mythologized representations of women and femininity cast as brooding, fickle, rapacious and often as a temptress, possessing secret knowledge that foolish men (the mere mortals) are neither capable of, nor encouraged to understand. Sometimes childlike, often conveniently eroticized, women are literally cast as forces of nature – whether sexualized nymphs or tempestuous witches, each characterization relies on women possessing some form of secret or forbidden connection to the metaphysical. Even the commanding presence of Joan of Arc, while leading the armies of France, had a connection to something otherworldly. By their very nature, feminine mythology, by default, presumes women are more in tune with the nature of reality, while surpassing the ignorance of brutish men.

Women revel in their mythology. Since covert forms of communication are the preferred language of women, their affinity for secret information is a natural fit. Ever wonder why gossip seems to be uniquely endemic to women? Look no further than women’s innate impulse to acquire secret knowledge. Take away the Vampires and Werewolves – the metaphysical component – from the Twilight series and what you’re left with is a relatively bland romance novel. Add the otherworldly and you have a runaway hit popular with every female age demographic, from tweens to octogenarians.

In women’s evolutionary past, concealment meant everything. Confusing a man as to the true genetic heritage of his children was often a matter of life or death. Pursuing pluralistic sexual strategies depends upon creating a characterization of women as legitimately unknowable, thus the feminine mystique is instituted. Ergo, the sociological PR campaign over the course of millennia has been to perpetuate the mystery of woman.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that physically weaker tribal women would seek some sort of mastery over the men in their lives who could punish or kill them and their offspring at will. As I’ve covered in many essays, women are biologically and psychologically more attuned to deeper communication and the emotive states of other people. Women have a far greater capacity to understand subcommunications and subcommunicate themselves among their own sex. This is borne out by multiple brain scan studies and research on the architecture of men and women’s brains.

To the blunt, overt, relatively nuance-less interpretive processes of men this subcommunication can be both frustrating and mysterious. It’s the mysterious part that women learned to reinforce and exploit in their dealings with men long ago. This is where we get the idea of the seductress or the ‘keeper of mysterious secrets’ archetype (witch, midwife, nature goddess) for women. It’s less important that women would actually be more in tune with the supernatural, but rather it’s more important that they believe it’s a general truth about all women. Men might be skeptical, or they may buy into that mystique, revere it and encourage other men to believe something similar. Usually how a man adopts or rejects that archetype is determined by his own self-understanding and his Game according to it and his sexual market value.

There are a lot of derivative character archetypes that stem from the basic ‘mysterious woman’ root. That might be anything from a healer, nurturer, mother type rooted in what used to be the mystery of women’s life-giving capacity, to the force of nature sorceress, to the eroticized sexual seductress (nymph, siren) or even the high-priestess of the holy temple of prostitution (an ancient brothel madame). Over the course of history, since our hunter-gatherer beginnings, this means to influence and power for women has coalesced into what we popularly imagine about women’s mysterious nature. Only today we call it a ‘woman’s intuition’ and we make appeals to fortune and fate when a guy get’s “lucky” and a woman favors him with her sexuality. It’s all socialized solutions to evolutionary problems, but if we add an element of ‘magic’ to the equation it makes explaining failures and appreciating successes that much easier.

Today, the belief in this nature is still very much reinforced in society. Thus, we get women subscribing to what amounts to a collective pathology – they are encouraged to believe in their ‘magical’ sensitivities to spirits and forces beyond the sensitivities of (ostensibly) “powerful” men. To fight the mythological Patriarchy women rely on a mythological tool. In Chick Crack I made mention of a stripper I used to have as a friend-with-benefits who was very attuned to the “spirit world”. As such the whole gamut of the supernatural was free game for her to use. She’d read my Tarot cards, my palm, throw in some eastern mysticism and wash it all down with a read through her pink ladies’ devotional Bible. Granted, ‘Angie‘ was an extreme case, but all women are in someway, or say they are in someway, privy to metaphysical understandings which men are not. And today we read and listen to male leaders in mainstream religions adopt and parrot back this “women are closer to God than men” mantra which is directly linked to the ‘spiritual women’ mystique.

The old trope of a Woman’s Intuition is an example of this belief in something beyond the ken of men. And this is also an important aspect of boys’ Blue Pill conditioning – girls/women possess some unearthly connection to God or something supernatural which further cements the idea that they should to defer authority to girls and women if they want to “please God the Goddess”. You might think this hard to believe in our age of technology, but only the context of the supernatural has shifted. Even the most objectively rational boys and men strongly believe in the ‘soul mate myth‘ despite atheism or agnosticism. This belief of the faithless is directly related to the unknowability of the female. Even modern atheists have a tendency to fall prey to the “someone for everyone” religion when it comes to connecting with the opposite sex.

It’s my belief that this presumption of a greater sensitivity to the supernatural is an aspect of women’s evolved mental firmware. Regardless of how false it may be, a woman with the disposition to encourage men to believe that she has some otherworldly connection despite the world or circumstances around them, one that would lead men to venerate her in the long term, would’ve been a powerful social adaptation in ensuring her and her children’s security. No doubt women readers will trot out the reflexive “Well men have been shamans and soothsayers and the patriarchal leaders of churches too”, and this is true, but those men lacked the female elemental advantage in their believability. Even their own belief sets encompassed the ‘spiritual woman’ tropes for better or worse. The wise old wizard is definitely an archetype, but that wizard lacks the feminine mystique and the sexual components only women possess in exercising that power.

Modern Witchcraft

Today we see a distinct falling away from the old order of acknowledging the supernatural. Less and less people subscribe to religion in its conventional sense. The Millennial generation wants nothing to do with “organized religion”, yet they still seek the structure to life it used to provide. So instead we hear the compromise about being “spiritual, but not religious” as if accepting the possibility of the metaphysical is something expected, but the taint of the “religious” is left for older generations. Even in what passes for contemporary religion the influence of the Feminine Imperative is ever-present. The spiritual, the metaphysical, the religious, all are still useful tools for women to consolidate power with. As men abdicate more authority to the feminine, as they themselves are the products of a continuous social feminization, we see a wholesale handover of the spiritual to the direction of women. The male leadership of mainstream religions is itself compromised with the imperatives and priorities of women who are already presumed to be “more in tune with God or the supernatural”. As such they exercise the Feminine Imperative and assimilate women’s stake on the spiritual by being proxy agents for women’s authority.

Today I was linked a story about how Episcopalians have begun to Remove the Man from their religion. Apparently this marks the beginning of rewriting the doctrine of this religion by erasing all masculine pronouns for God. Of course I expect the predictable retorts that Episcopalians aren’t real Christians, but theirs is just one of the more glaring examples of how the feminization of religion progresses. The latent purpose is a wholesale removal of anything conventionally masculine from religion, and/or placing the feminine as the primary connection with the supernatural. Whether it’s mainstream religion or psychic reading, a woman is at the center of that mysticism. If you want a perspective into the things to come for a female-led mega-religion look no further than the teaching of Rev. Shannon Johnson Kershner (dual surname noted). God is not male is the clarion call of the priestesses (and their male ‘ally’ priests) of this new religion.

Why should we view God as female? Well, it’s so that little girls can become pastors, with Kershner saying, ““I wanted to make sure that little girls knew that God could call them to be pastors, too.”

For the MeToo / Time’s Up generation God is female, the supernatural is more aligned with the feminine. I’ve made this observation before (before the #MeToo moral panic arrived) but there’s been a growing push on the part of men to relinquish any spiritual authority from a masculine perspective for decades now. The largely secular impetus of the MeToo movement is now finding its way into a religious environment that has been primed and ready for it (largely due to its acquiescing, complicit, and thoroughly Blue Pill male leadership) for a long time. MeToo was a natural fit for a feminine-primary church that needed its push to consolidate power even in the most patriarchal of religions. MeToo has given women license to finally be overt in their design on religion and spirituality – not unlike Open Hypergamy has been embraced in the mainstream.

In celebration of this conversion of religion to feminine-primacy we get the feminist Beyoncé “worship” services in formerly traditional cathedrals. Millennials may be falling away from the old church, but they fill the new church to overflow-capacity when ‘god’ is female.

The take home message for this essay is this; womankind has been intimately aware of the complicity of men in granting them a default connection to the supernatural. While we may not profess a formal belief in such, men are eager to accommodate female power in this arena – especially if in doing so it endears women to the men who play along with it. Professing a belief in the supernatural is simply good Game. The early PUAs picked up on this and used it to their advantage. However, this abdication of moral authority – an authority founded in masculine pretenses – goes far beyond getting your palm read by an earthy stripper you want to bang. This compromising of moral authority to the feminine by men is just the next phase in conceding all social and political authority to the Feminine Imperative. If God or a ‘higher power’ is the foundation of moral authority, and women are universally presumed to be more in touch with that higher power, the next step is to cede that authority to the sex that has a more direct line to that power.

What prompted me to consider writing this essay was a link I was sent in response to the story about Asia Argento’s involvement in modern day Wicca. I listened to a bit of a podcast by Vox Day recently in which he was asked his thoughts about modern paganism. He said, and I paraphrase, “Paganism today is just kids LARPing to the idea of old world religions. They’re role playing something akin to Dungeons and Dragons with no real belief.” I thought this was interesting in light of the article I was sent on Neo-Paganism and the Feminist Spirituality Movement:

However, some women were not willing to identify themselves as “witches”, and there arose a form of Goddess worship without any of the trappings of witchcraft. As Nevill Drury explains, “Although some Goddess-worshippers continued to refer to themselves as witches, others abandoned the term altogether, preferring to regard their neopagan practice as a universal feminist religion, drawing on mythologies from many different ancient cultures.” This has been called “Goddess worship” and the “Goddess movement”. These terms are frequently used interchangeably with, but should be distinguished from, “feminist spirituality”, which includes the Goddess movement, but also feminist Christianity, feminist Judaism, etc.

[…]

The principal beliefs of the Goddess movement are that the Goddess is a radically immanent deity and she can be experienced directly. The Earth is seen as the body of the Goddess and women are understood to connect to the Goddess through their experience of their own bodies, as well as the “body” of the earth. Goddess feminists also believe that the Goddess is constantly changing, manifest in the changing of the seasons and the human life-cycle, and perpetually self-renewed.

The Goddess movement offers women a new self-image and facilitates women finding their own innate goodness and natural divinity. It enables women to redeem and revalue the “feminine principle” and offers them positive images and symbols of female empowerment.

It may seem easy to dismiss the influence of the feminine on what is re-evolving into a new feminine-world order of spirituality, but I think it would be foolish dismiss the influences of the Feminine Imperative – the Goddess Movement – that is manifesting itself incrementally in the power vacuum left by the abdication of masculine moral authority to the feminine. We read that Millennials may not be “as religious” as previous generations, but that doesn’t mean they don’t seek out ‘spiritual, but not religious’ metaphysical connections. They seek direction, and connection in religion, but they seek it in the secular, gynocentric terms they’ve been conditioned to believe they should define themselves by. A similar parallel exists on the masculine side too. One of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is his ‘ministering’ to a generation of “lost boys” seeking direction in life. He is every bit one of the Lords of the New Church in the same way that the Goddess Movement speaks to another demographic of lost souls who seek absolution in the “divine feminine” – also a term Peterson is fond of.

The Rational Process

 

One of the most vexing things a lot of Red Pill aware men encounter when they interact with women today is the expectation that women are coequally as rational agents as men. We were taught from the earliest ages by our blank-slate equalist teachers that boys and girls are all the same, having coequal potential for coequal successes in life (as they define them), then primarily focusing on the ‘correct’, female way of educating both sexes. This education isn’t limited to just the classroom; the Village uses many ways (media, pop culture, religion, etc.) to deliver what is fundamentally the same message – boys and girls, men and women, are essentially, effectively, the same with respect to their potentials. Now, that’s the message not the practice. Even when they are forced to recognize definitive differences they simply dismiss them by saying “We’re more alike than different” in the presumption that this should be enough to refocus and reinforce their blank-slate belief set.

So when men and women consider differences in gender, differences in double standards, inequalities in gender-specific issues and pretty much any empirical debate about these and other differences, men presume that the women they are ‘debating’ with are also looking for earnest, equitable answers beginning from the same coequal state of mutual interest. This is almost never the case.

The pretense that’s been embedded into men from the earliest years of their Blue Pill conditioning is since men and women are coequal agents they should both be interested in finding an objective truth together. But the frustration in this ‘debate’ comes from the simple fact that our differences are actually much more significant than the dismissals of equalists would want them to be. The roots of this deliberate misunderstanding are twofold: First, the innate solipsistic self-interest of women, and second, women’s predisposition to interpret information using the Emotional (versus Rational) interpretive processes.

When men and women debate intersexual issues of contention men opt for their innately preferred Rational interpretive process; we look for factual evidence to support a premise. Women opt for the Emotional process and then consider evidence. This difference in processing is where a lot of personal and ideological obstacles come into play between men and women. Our educational priorities of both men and women prioritizes the importance of emotion and its expression before a consideration of the Rational process. We teach boys/men to sublimate their natural proclivity towards reason by replacing it with the Emotional process. Thus, we’ve seen the push to encourage men to get in touch with their feelings or their feminine sides since the late 60s.

As I mentioned last week, women prioritize context (how a conversation makes them feel) in communication while men prioritize content (the information of the conversation); these differences are part of our biological/neurological evolved inheritances. This is where the misunderstanding starts between the sexes; however, calling this a ‘misunderstanding’ is a bit of a misnomer.

I’m sure a lot of readers think this is a longwinded way of saying women’s emotions blind them to the facts that men present to them when they debate. While this is true in a sense, this is shortsighted because, in the interests of simplifying things, most guys will just blow off the dynamics that build up this (often deliberate) miscommunication. Women don’t like the way a Rational-prioritized conversation makes them feel. Often the reality is unflattering to their solipsistically defined egos – but the communication feels wrong because women’s presumption is that men should just know to acknowledge their feelings in that debate (all communication really). On the female side the presumption is that men and women, being blank-slate equals, already know to prioritize the Emotional process, while on the male side men presume women will prioritize the Rational process because, again, we’re all the same, right?

This presuming that one sex sees the same way as the other is endemic in our time. I had a reader pose me with a similar example:

I had a conversation with my LTR at dinner tonight where I did a thought exercise with her. I asked her to imagine what it would be like if people visually saw different colors when they looked at various objects but had consistent names for those colors in their own minds. For example, person A sees what person B calls Blue, but it looks like what would be called green if person A could peer into person B’s mind. The point was we can’t know what colors actually look like from an individual subjective perspective. Although I tried several times to walk through this, she couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to explain. I then realized that this exercise involved imagining a first person conscious experience from multiple perspectives. This test could be a proxy test for (women’s) solipsism.

This thought experiment is a good way to illustrate solipsism in women, but it’s an even better example of the default presumptions men and women have of each other in other areas. As it stands today, in our feminine-primary social order, the Blue Pill conditions us to default to cognitive models that are defined by the female experience. Thus, whatever best satisfies a female-primary purpose is always considered the correct purpose. The way women think, the way women prioritize their Emotional interpretive process, is the right way for men to think – and the mutual presumption is that men already do (or should) think and process stimuli like women do. Anything else, anything that would recognize a difference in men from women, always feels wrong.

This default presumption of a female-correct way of interpreting and experiencing the world isn’t limited to our differences in communication. This misalignment of interpretive differences also extends to the false presumption that men and women approach the concept of love from a mutually understood perspective. Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically, yet men’s presumption is that both men and women approach love from the Disneyesque idealism they believe women are capable of. Men too believe that women see the same colors they do and have the same names for those colors. In this case those colors are the concepts and approaches women have towards love. I may write a new essay outlining this dynamic soon, but I’ve already written many prior posts on this experiential difference.

Rationalism vs. The Rational Process

As a result of pushing the Emotional process as the correct way of interpreting our world the Rational process necessarily gets demonized today. It feels wrong to a social order predicated on the Emotional process, so the truths that the Rational process reveals seem cruel, biased or vindictive when they refute the interpretations of the Emotional process. The importance of Emotion has been elevated above an interpretive process to where it’s now entered a metaphysical realm. This is where the Emotional process becomes Emotionalism. In the light of this, the Rational process is overshadowed and sublimated in importance. But the Rational process is what exposes emotionalism for what it is: Emotion is an evolved, biological interpretive process that serves our species well, but the feelings it generates are biological responses to environmental stimuli, not evidence of some higher consciousness or mythic existential importance that goes beyond anything in the physical realm.

The Rational process throws a cold bucket of truth on lofty emotionalism. As a result, and because emotionalism has been a basis of our social order for millennia now, the Rational process had to be debased in importance.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5

This scripture is an example of the conflict between emotionalism and the rationalism that popular social consciousness would like to apply to the Rational interpretive process. The Rational process is based in our collective and subjective intelligence. Healthy men and women both have the mental hardware to use the Rational process well, but where we differ is in our gendered mental firmware. When we collectively prefer one process to the other, this is where we decide which gender’s process will define our social order. In order for emotionalism to supersede rationality and ensure its preeminence appeals to the emotional above the rational have to be popularized.

If we could depend on an unbiased, unadulterated form of reason the Rational process would be a superior methodology. But as I stated before, rationalism is dependent on intelligence and that intelligence takes time. In some ways the Rational process is sensitive to both instinct and emotion, in other’s that reasoning is painfully, sometimes fatally slow. The world happens fast and vacillating in the reasoning process might easily kill an individual. Fortunately we have instinct and emotion to carry us through. The Rational process requires time because it requires learning, contemplation, theorizing and any number of high-order thinking processes to be effective. And even then, that effectiveness depends on reasoning’s accuracy. For the past three or four hundred years we’ve increasingly had the luxury to develop our Rational process, but for all the advancements it’s given us, when it comes to intersexual dynamics emotion is still the priority.

We have placed such importance on emotion at the expense of reason that we’ll risk personal safety in our ‘right’ to express it. No doubt most men are familiar with repressing their emotional responses, but it’s interesting to consider that even with this self-control and even with our innate predilection to process emotion differently than women, men are the ones accused of failing to be ‘in touch with their emotions’. On first glance Robert Greene’s quote here appears to be wisdom (I think it is) – self-control, mastery of one’s emotional state, is a virtue. Yet, in our emotional-primary social order we’ll hear women complain that men are less emotionally available. And this conflict illustrates again that whatever is expedient to the female imperative is what is to be considered ‘correct’ at that moment.

Empiric reason is the foundation of what humanity has made of itself. Setting aside emotionality and considering challenges in a Rational interpretive process is fundamental to understanding the emotional and instinctive process and their advantages and weaknesses. For the record it’s my belief that all of these interpretive processes in union are are necessary elements in the human experience, but my focus on these processes is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of them. It’s easy to get caught up in the demonization of the instinctual and the rational when the emotional is defining what’s bad or good for our collective experiences.

When I wrote Appeals to Reason I was exploring the futility of expecting women to transition into a logical reasoning of why she should logically be with a guy who was more than happy to embody all of the aspects she stated she wants in a man. The manosphere idiom is “no woman was ever reasoned or logicked into bed with a guy”, women don’t follow the Rational process when it comes to interrelating with men. It’s all Instinctual and Emotional, and usually in that order. A man might be able to use his rational facilities to better understand women’s evolved instinctual and emotional responses, and what prompts them, but reason itself isn’t the key to that interrelation.

Appealing to women’s logic and relying on deductive reasoning to sort it out is the calling card of a Beta mind. There is nothing more anti-seductive for women than appealing to her reason. Arousal, attraction, sexual tension, subcommunication of desire, all happen indirectly and below the social surface for women. It’s not that women are incapable of reasoning (hypergamy is one logical bitch) or are crippled by their emotion-based hindbrains, it’s that if you’re asking her how to be more attractive you don’t Get It. It’s in the doing, not the asking.

If you’ve stuck with me to the end of this series I want to say thanks. I really felt that these interpretive processing models needed to be fully outlined as what I’ll get into in the coming months will need this as a basis for it.

The Instinctual Process

I want to thank you if you’ve made it through the first part of this series and you stuck with it. In some respects I can see why it might be odd that I’m covering cognitive processes, however, these are really the foundational premises for so many other Red Pill intersexual dynamics, as well as interpersonal and even social dynamics between humans that they deserve some sort of fleshing out. Again, I want to stress that these cognitive processing models are ideas I’m coming to and not settled science. However, they are based on both classic interpretations combined with the benefit of what we know about the biological, evolutionary and anthropological aspects of the cognitive processes today.

If you made the connection to Freud’s components of personality models – the Id, Ego and Super Ego – in the last post you at least grasp something of the initial theory I’m building on here. Useful as they are, Freud’s models lacked anything like an understanding of how the human mind works or how it evolved to the degree we take for granted today. Freud made his best guess at these processes from an inner psyche perspective. He formed his theories from what he deduced was operating inside our heads. My belief is that his (and others’) cognitive process models evolved and developed in response to interpreting our environment and the stimuli that our senses translated to them in our formative evolutionary past. Really, all of these interpretive processes, Instinct, Emotion and Reason, are the result of our experiential lives and the many benefits they provided us in surviving and reproducing.

All of that is not to discount the internal psyche and how these processes define who we are. Freud’s model proposed the Id, Ego and Superego are components of personality, what I’m proposing is that these components are the result of evolved cognitive processes – Instinct, Emotion and Reason – that served to create these inner models which later became those components of personality. I should say that I’m not entirely sold on these Freudian components, but I can see how cognitive processes would’ve led to developing them. I propose that these components of personality, Freud’s or other’s, are the products of these interpretive processes.

The Ego is a result of the Rational (Reason) process, while the Superego is a summation of the Emotional process. Since I don’t want to veer off into the psychology lesson in all this I’ll leave this proposition for another essay, but I do want to make a distinction here; What I’m proposing in this series is that our evolved interpretive processes are the means by which we interpret our reality, which in turn shapes who we are individually, socially and sexually.

Base Instincts

Stripped down, the Id is a result of the Instinctual process and largely resides in our unconscious or preconscious experience. Instinct is reflexive, and the behaviors it prompts are directly related to our basic survival and reproductive needs. Instinct operates outside our consciousness because of the inability of the human brain to focus on the endless sources of stimulus we experience in life. As good as we’d like to think we are with multi-tasking our interpretive cognition can only process so much; the rest is pushed into our subconscious periphery and hindbrain subroutines. This is the auto-pilot part of our instinctual cognition.

Since we largely see our Rational and Emotional processes (not to mention our social consciousness) as “higher order” processes, we tend to downplay the importance of Instinct. Our Instinctive process evolved to sustain our physical survival and reproductive imperatives in as pragmatic and practical a way as would be expedient. In most respects Instinctual interpretation and cognition is, by necessity, based on immediacy. By comparison, Emotion and Reason are slower forms of cognition, and, in the case of Reason, requires a period of learning, development and internalization. As such, there is no complication of conscience or morality, nor time for rational or emotional reflection when instinctual awareness and action is necessary. All the things we call sin or immoral, unethical or duplicitous, are manifested by our Instinctual process. But so too are ennobling aspects like self-sacrifice, violence-in-protection, mate guarding and parental investment. Hypergamy is also a behavioral and psychological dynamic that is deeply rooted in the Instinctual process.

Because of all that instinct often carries a negative preconception, at least by modern standards. And thus the Id becomes the part of the human psyche inseparably connected to the instinctual process. The desire for immediate gratification, the direct, unmitigated satisfaction of our most basic needs, and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure; all of these we associate with the Id. However, all of these basic gratifications are directed towards elements of our evolved, instinctual needs for survival and insurances of thriving in the future. Much of what we think of as impulsivity is connected to the immediate aspect of instinct, but even this often serves some latent biological or survival purpose.

Gendered Differences

In psychology 101 we’re taught to think of the Id as our ‘childish’ selves. How many times have we read in the manosphere about how men can better relate with women via Amused Mastery or relating to them like a bratty younger sister? This process, this PUA technique, is a subconscious appeal to women’s Id via the Instinctual process. When I proposed that women want a man who Just Gets It a huge part of that dynamic relies on a man appealing to a woman’s Instinctual cognition. This is exactly why demonstrating an intent serves so much better than explicating an intent. Actions speak louder than words because actions always speak clearly to our Instinctual processing. Yet one more reason I, and most of my Red Pill contemporaries, advocate for the Medium being the Message – behavior almost always appeals to instinct.

One of the questions I’m always asked by guys is, how do I know when a woman is in whichever phase of her ovulation? Usually this is prompted by some reasoned want to be able to know when to turn up the Alpha around their girlfriend’s proliferative phase and ease off when she’s in her luteal (down cycle) phase. When you look at this in terms of cognitive processes, a man’s Reasoning process wants to deductively solve a problem that is rooted in the Instinctual process. It certainly makes sense, like a lot of other problems, to use our smarts to solve that reproductive problem. The real problem is that the use of Reason is what defeats the Instinctual cognition. There are actually many subconscious, instinctual mechanisms men have evolved to determine a great deal of information about women reproductive states, but our Reason and what goes into influencing it, tends to make us discount what out Instinctive process is telling us.

Most guys get frustrated with Game at some stage of their learning (Reason) it. The most common complaint is “I can never hope to remember all of this shit perfectly all the time. I can’t calibrate the way I need to, or, this is all an act, when can I let my hair down and just relax with a girl?” Another common question/presumption guys hit me with is how I manage to continually Game my wife. The answer I almost universally give is that I don’t, in fact, consciously Game my wife. Rather, my success in our marriage and really all of my relationships with all the women in my life is the result of having internalized what I’ve learned from Red Pill awareness and made it who I am. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and internalized it to the point that Game became my instinctual response to women’s instinctual process.

Game is not an act for me, it’s an instinct. If you were to put a guitar in my hands today I could play it with a good degree of proficiency. I can play by ear and instinctually I anticipate where notes and chord progressions go if I’m trying to play a song I’ve never played before because I’ve been playing guitar for the better part of my life. However, there was a point in time where all of that was foreign to me. I could play by rote memorization, but playing music wasn’t instinctual. Playing an instrument wasn’t part of who I was at that point in time.

The same is true for internalizing Game. It is entirely possible for your Rational process to inform your Instinctual process as well as your Emotional processes. This interplay can work for all our cognitive processes, but as I’m focusing on instinct today I want to stress again that Rational and Emotional processes can alter the, largely subconscious, Instinctual process. I have pretty good pitch as a result of being a musician for so long. If you asked me to play a particular note or chord I would instinctively do so. What I wouldn’t do is hunt around the fretboard counting frets and string to come to it. This is the best illustration I can give you with regards to internalizing other things.

Martial arts is another good example. There are certain innate, instinctual reactions we have when we’re confronted with conflict or protecting ourselves. When something flies at our faces we flinch. When we hear a sudden loud noise we startle. These are inborn parts of our firmware that evolved in us for very good reasons. What martial arts training does is forces us to sublimate those natural instincts and replace them with more efficient instinctual responses. Again, this is the Rational process rewriting the instinctual process via internalization.

Art has always been something I’ve had an innate ability for. I have do doubt that many of our natural cognitive ‘gifts’ are in some way gene expressions. So when we see a ‘natural’ at something our rational/emotional minds tend to think of it as something almost supernatural. However, I had to learn to play music because I was determined to express myself creatively in that fashion as well, and that took perseverance and internalization of skills. I think the same can be said for guys we think are ‘naturals’ with regard to Game and women. They may have an instinctual affinity for Game. They may be blessed with good genetics. But Game can be learned and internalized down to the Instinctual level.

All of that said, there are still fundamental parts of our mental firmware that are ‘pre-loaded’ into us at birth. Shit tests, Hypergamy, mate guarding behaviors, ovulatory shift behaviors, and many more are in-loaded in women and every bit as Instinctual as breathing or eating or self-preservation. Just as there are physical gender differences in our brains and bodies, so too are their differences in men and women’s Instinctual processes. The easiest one for us to consider is in sexual imperatives. I’ve noted in many essays that only women are Hypergamous. Men and women’s sexual strategies are reflective of their differing physical and mental make up, but those strategies are also different (and often contradicting) as a result of the Instinctual process unique to men and women as well.

One of the more powerful instincts men have is our sexual impulse and as a consequence it’s one that we are taught to control the most. Hypergamy is also a product of women’s Instinctual process, however, since about 60 years ago, prosocial control over Hypergamy has become something individual to a woman. Men’s self-control over their sexual nature is something that’s been part of our upbringing for millennia, women today are just now being expected to self-police their own sexual impulsivity.

These innate gender differences in instinct are a very difficult aspect of human nature for both egalitarian equalists and traditional moralists to accept. Equalists chomp at the bit with respect to their ego-investments in blank-slate idealism. Even the idea of a gendered difference in human nature, much less a human “nature” at all (a concept most deny) conflicts with the social constructivism that forms most of their ideology. Moralists tend to think that acknowledging (much less embracing) our instinctual selves is endorsing the worst of it, or it’s some kind of license to shirk the personal responsibilities for it. And, for both equalist and moralist, accepting our instinctual natures seems deterministic in a way that conflicts with their sense of existential control.

Well, the good news for both is that understanding men and women’s Instinctually processed natures is something our other two processes (for better or worse) have an influence over. There’s a common refrain from equalists today that presumes we’ve “evolved beyond” our base instincts (if they acknowledge them at all). From moralists we’ve always been ‘higher minded’ and above our instincts, that is if we accept some ideological ‘truth’. The root of both of these presumptions can be traced to the Emotional and Rational processes influencing our Instinctive process.

I’m of the opinion that very few of us are actually ruled by our instincts, but they are always the favorite scapegoat for ideologues. As a Red Pill aware man I think it’s important to have an objective understanding of how the Instinctive process operates in ourselves and women. Denying or disqualifying the importance of instinct and why it evolved is usually one of the biggest blindspots for a Blue Pill conditioned mind.

In the next part of this series I’ll explore the Emotional process and how it’s become the preeminent social-defining experience for us.

 

Instinct, Emotion and Reason

Before I dig in here today I want to give credit where it’s due. I was inspired to consider what I’m about to go into here by a quick-hit Tweet from Illimitable Man. I didn’t bookmark it so I apologize for not linking it here today, but the general gist of it was about the mental processes humans go through when we’re presented with environmental stimuli that demands interpretation and a behavioral response. I considered this process quite a bit while I was studying behavioral psychology – Instinct, Emotion and Reason (or rationality if you prefer) – and I’m almost embarrassed that I haven’t covered this in terms of a Red Pill perspective in over 600 essays now.

The idea is fairly simple; when we are prompted by environmental (and sometimes internal) stimuli human beings process this information using three psychological mechanisms – our primal instincts, our emotional interpretations and our rational (reason) facilities. I’m not sure these processes get their proper due in Red Pill theory today.  I’ve detailed all of these processes individually for years on this blog, but generally they were outlined in the context of whatever topic I was focusing on. In this essay I’m going to elaborate on these aspects individually. Later, as part of this series, I’ll explore how they act in concert for our overall cognitive process, and then how they influence intersexual and intersocial dynamics. I think this is a useful exercise because a lot of foundational Red Pill ideas stem from these processes as well as the social conventions and interpretive priorities the Feminine Imperative relies on today.

For sake of clarity I am going to use a few behavioral psych terms like stimuli in this essay. This isn’t to throw $10 words at you, it’s just easier to elaborate on these processes with abstract terms. For example, when I use stimuli I mean any physical, environmental or cognitive prompt that our conscious or unconscious mind demands an interpretation, processing of and response to. That can be a wide variety of things so, stimuli serves as a general term.

Lastly, the following here is my interpretation of these processes. While a lot of this will align pretty well with established theories, this is my take on them and not some official, settled science of facts. If you think I’m full of shit please tell me why, this is still a work in progress for me.

Instinct

Instinct seems like the easiest of these processes to understand, but it’s really the cognitive aspect that’s most misunderstood, marginalized and often demonized. The reason for this is because our instincts reside in our subconscious (hindbrain) processing of stimuli. When I refer to men or women’s evolved mental firmware in my essays it’s our instinctual process that I’m referring to. These are the unlearned, inborn aspects of our human nature that influence the other processes and remain largely in our subconscious. Our instinctual processing is a direct result of our evolution. It evolved as a vitally necessary aspect of our cognitive processing in that it aided in our ability to survive in, and adapt to, a chaotic, primal environment when food was scarce, predators and rivals wanted us dead, and reproductive opportunities and raising a child to a survivable age were at a premium.

There are a lot of examples of our instinct level processing and each instinctual response triggers more complex processing up the cognitive chain through emotion and reason. If we were presented with a dangerous stimuli (a sabertooth tiger) our instinctual process triggers a fight or flight response physically in our bodies (adrenaline release). Needless to say this was an evolved adaptation that served our species well and was passed along genetically as part of our mental firmware. I’m going to use some simplistic examples here but, if you really want to dig into our preloaded mental firmware and how we developed it I would suggest looking into the earlier works of Dr. Steven Pinker and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (I’ll post links in the comments).

Another example is human beings’ innate fear (reservations at least) of snakes and spiders – poisonous animals that looked easy to kill, but could kill humans without warning. That’s an example of relatively beneficial firmware, but the reason instinct gets a bad rep is due to the instincts that once were beneficial to us individually, but are less beneficial to us socially. Greed and gluttony were very practical, instinctually motivated behaviors that stemmed from a need to survive in a time when resources were scarce. Today greed is (mostly) seen as anti-social and a compulsion to overeat in a time when food is abundant is why we presently have an obesity epidemic.

Those are easily understood examples, but where things get more complex is in how our instinctual process influences the other processes (emotion and reason). Instinct gets demonized because in our ‘enlightened‘ era we like to believe that instinct is more trouble than it is beneficial. Most of that is due to a belief that our other processes are superior to (or at least should supersede) our instincts. Most of what we call sin or immoral behavior is motivated by the instinctual process. In fact, the only time our instinctual awareness and reactions are really credited with anything positive is when it gets us out of some life threatening situation or it leads to some prosocial outcome. For instance, the male instinct to protect women by putting ourselves between them and danger; that’s an instinct and resultant behavior (seemingly altruistic male self-sacrifice) that gets a lot of praise in our feminine-primary social order. However, for the most part, we tend to judge ‘baser instincts’ as a net negative.

The truth about the instinctual process is that none of our other processes function at full efficiency without it. Today, as a result of our feminine-primary acculturation, we want to relegate instinct’s influence to something “we’ve evolved beyond”. The popular consensus is we’ve raised ourselves above base instincts by either acknowledging the importance of the emotional process or that rationality and the self-control based on it immunizes us from its influence. Not only are these belief foolish and hubristic, they’re provably untrue. When it comes to concepts like the ‘selfish gene‘ and the physical differences in the evolved instinctual processes of men and women, it becomes necessary for a social order based on blank-slate equalism to demonize and marginalize the influence of, and behaviors attributed to, instinct.

The survival benefits and behaviors that make up the instinctual process were so necessary that they had to become part of our unconscious species firmware. Because the instinctual process is part of our animalistic hindbrain mental subroutines it’s something we have little or no direct control over until its effect is brought (often forced) into our conscious awareness. As such, and because we prefer to think of ourselves as emotional and rational beings, we tend to think of the influence of instinct as something we either have or need to have mastery over, and to a large extent this mastery makes sense. The truth is that instinct is an aspect of ourselves that needs to be controlled as well as embraced depending on circumstances.

Emotion

From an evolutionary perspective, the emotional process of interpreting stimuli is a mechanism of how our brains and biochemistry interact to affect our moods, demeanor and ’emotionality’ in response to both instinctual cues and the raw information of stimuli itself. Furthermore, the emotional process can also be influenced and/or modified by the rational process. I’m trying to be concise here, but our emotional response to information/stimuli is very much an evolved dynamic with latent purposes and practical functionalities. I’m making this distinction here because for millennia we’ve raised the effects of emotion to a mythical, metaphysical, importance.

While emotion often has immediate effects on us, emotion also has long term effect with regard to the stimuli it processes. There are dozens of definitions of emotions and there’s no way I’m going to lay them all out for you here. However, popular psychology asserts that there are as many as ten and as few as six base emotions:

  • Anger.
  • Disgust.
  • Fear.
  • Happiness.
  • Sadness.
  • Surprise.

Sometimes Contempt is added to this list. If these seem overly simplistic they are, again, abstracts to build more complex emotions on (some paleo-researchers insist there are only four base emotions across our evolved ethno-histories). For our purposes these base emotions will serve to show the connections between the instinctual process which prompts them and the rational process that modifies and sometimes informs them.

Each of these emotional responses is prompted by how our senses, brain and then instinctual process interprets a stimuli. Again, using our sabertooth tiger example, the instinctual process determines imminent danger and triggers a synaptic and hormonal response to that danger. As a result of that instinctual process an emotional process and response is triggered – likely fear (flight in most cases), but sometimes anger (fight).

Another example: you see an arousing woman (stimuli) at a party who is displaying behavioral cues and environmental indicators of interest (IOIs). Your instinctual process determines a high potential for a reproductive opportunity. From there the emotional process kicks in: hormones and dopamine (and not a small testosterone spike) that your instinctual process triggered flushes your system and serves as the basis for your emotional process to form an emotional response to the same stimuli. If it all passes the smell test that response (hopefully) will be happiness (and a little surprise mixed in).

There is a visceral biochemical interrelation between emotion and the stimuli/instinct relation that prompts the reaction. Adrenaline is one easy example, another is oxytocin or the “love hormone”. This is a bit of a mischaracterization of the hormone. Oxytocin induces feelings of trust and comfort and is thought to be a significant factor in human’s forming pair bonds and parental investments. There’s a lot more to oxytocin’s implications to our evolution than that, but for now lets look at how our biology influences the emotional process.

We proceed from stimuli to an instinctual response. If there is nothing mitigating that response (such as a rationally learned buffer to mitigate it) the next step in the chain is a biological reaction to that instinct – such as dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream or a post-orgasm flush of oxytocin after sex. From there the emotional process picks up the interpretation of this information as prompted by the cocktail of chemicals moving through our bloodstream and affecting our mental and physical interpretation of that stimuli. That biochemical factor prompts one, or a combination, of the base emotions listed above.

From there more complex emotions (feelings) and combinations thereof begin to form an emotional interpretation and response. This emotional response can be anything from a fast, reflexive one to a more nuanced and contemplative one. Furthermore, this emotional interpretation and response can also be modified by our rational mental process as well as our gendered capacity to process emotions. One thing to bear in mind about our emotional process is that it can imprint its interpretations into our ‘hard memory’ – sometimes so significantly that the memory of that stimuli can re-trigger that physical and emotional response.

Gender-modified interpretation of our emotion process is an important aspect to consider in Red Pill praxeology and one I’ll be elaborating on in the next part of this series. Until recently the accepted ‘science‘ about our emotional process has been based on a blank-slate equalist approach to emotion. In fact we still suffer from the outdated presumptions of academia that both men and women process emotion in the same manner, and, in theory, ought to be expected to have an equal capacity to interpret, respond and express emotion. In light of new technology and new research in a variety of interrelated disciplines we know this is old presumption is patently untrue. Men and women have different mental hardware and are born with different mental firmware. Both sexes interpret and process emotion in gender-specific manners.

I’ll be getting into the personal and social implications that the legacy of this (deliberate) misunderstanding presents in the next essay. For now it’s important to consider that human beings have an innate predisposition to elevate the emotional process above instinct and reason. Likely this is due the to the survival dependency we had on our feelings in our evolutionary past. In a time when we lacked the greater rational facilities and information we’ve developed in our more recent past, depending on and learning from emotion, and the latent purposes it serves, was a species-beneficial system. We depended on our emotions to guide our behaviors (long and short term) for us more in our prehistory when we lacked the more developed rational process we take for granted now. Emotions served latent evolutionary purposes for us in our prehistory and today are still overly emphasized – often to metaphysical attributes – as superior to reason. More on this soon.

Reason

The final piece of our interpretive process is reason, or rationality (I’ll use these interchangeably). Ironically, for all of the social preconceptions that our emotions have made us “more evolved” above instinct, it is our rational process that has evolved us above both instinct and emotion. From and evolutionary standpoint our rational process is a relatively recent development; pushing us past the limitations of instinct and emotion. The definition of rationality is the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. It is the quality of being able to think sensibly or logically and being endowed with the capacity to reason.

Biologically it’s postulated that our larger brains allowed us to develop a capacity for reason, but that doesn’t mean other animals lack the same facility, it’s just that the rational process is less developed (some would say less environmentally necessary) in those animals by order of degree. Dogs, for example, rely primarily on the instinctual process and the mental (vestigial) firmware they’re born with to solve most of their existential/environmental problems. That doesn’t mean that they lack the ability to learn and form novel (adaptive) behaviors using a rudimentary form of logic. Animals can be taught things, but their capacity to form novel ideas and behaviors is limited to their cognitive abilities. Humans, being the apex species on the planet, had the leisure to take the time necessary to evolve a capacity for logic and as such the rational process developed in us.

Of all our interpretive processes reason is the one that takes the longest to function. Our rational process forms our interpretation of stimuli based on information dissociated from the interpretations of instinct and emotion. Reason requires (accurate) knowledge derived from learning and experience, but there is also an improvisational element to the process.

Before I get too far in the weeds here I need to make a distinction; what I’m outlining is the rational mental process we employ to interpret and interact with stimuli, not rationality, the concept of reason or rationalism. That’s important because it’s all too easy to get lost in philosophical implications of reason when we look at the process of how we come to it.

As mentioned above, the rational process modifies the instinctual and emotional processes. Example, in high school, in drivers ed class, we’re taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid. When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our instinctive impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is make a precarious situation worse. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, we make this our default reaction and we avoid disaster. This is the rational process interpreting a stimuli and forming a novel behavior that modifies the interpretation of the instinctual process.

The limitation of the rational process is in its necessity to take time to interpret information and develop a new apparatus. Where instinct and emotion are intimately linked with our biological hardware and psychological firmware, the rational process is dissociated from them in the same immediacy. Instinct and emotion are processes that evolved from a survival-need for fast interpretation and reaction. The rational process requires time, repetition and the right biological structures to be effective. Human beings are remarkably fast learners (even with complex challenges), but the learning that the rational process leads to is slow in comparison to instinct and emotion – which are essentially preloaded firmware in humans.

The rational process deals with the nuts and bolts of what we can understand of our reality. From there it can modify the other processes or it can serve to interpret stimuli on its own.

In the next part of this series I’ll be exploring how these cognitive processes interact and cooperate and conflict with each other. I will also consider the gendered advantages and disadvantages these processes represent to our individual experiences as men and women and the influence they play in intersexual and intersocial dynamics.