paternity

She’s Not Yours

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

She was never yours, it was just your turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Empress has no Clothes

Tomi Lahren vs. Rollo Tomassi.

I’ve had a lot of my YouTube subscribers tell me that my admittedly “long form” live stream videos are being chopped off at the 2 hour mark. I’ve been aware of this problem for a month now and as much as I’d like to suspect it’s YouTube/Google censorship, it’s really a compiling error between StreamYard (my streaming app) and how YouTube saves the video after it streams. I had to search for a fix right after the Will Smith / Jada Pinkett breakdown video I did was likewise chopped at the beginning. That was easily my most popular and best watched video on the channel and people wanted the whole damn thing.

I discovered a workaround. I noticed the entire video was in fact compiled on YouTube when I opened it in their editor software. However, the playback was limited to only 2 hours from the end of the clip back up to wherever the 2 hour mark was. The fix was simple: delete about 6-10 seconds of the silence before the intro music starts and then resave/recompile the video. Presto! The whole video is now watchable. Well, not exactly Presto!, it takes about half a day to recompile a 2:45:00 video on YouTube’s very slow encoders.

Needless to say, this is kind of frustrating when I dig into videos like Will Smith and now my dissection of Tomi Lahren’s dating/men ragequit video. Tomi’s fem-screech has been all the rage du jour in the Manosphere and on ProRevenge doompill YouTube since last Wednesday. You just can’t pass on that kind of Grade A, USDA Choice, Red Meat. Even Trad-Con women holding “legitimate” opinionist positions at some of the bigger news aggregate blogs had to put something out about raging Tomi’s meltdown. And as expected they were either piling on with her frustration about men not “living up to the responsibility of being Real Men®“ or else it was more unwitting anti-feminist feminism; the same thing Tomi has suffered from since she was 20.

Even with that ‘fix’ of recompiling the original video I’m still getting guys emailing/Tweeting to me that they can’t watch the whole thing on various formats (mobile, web, tablet, etc.). Maybe that’s because they need to clear their video cache, I don’t know, but I’ve taken it upon myself to host the full video on my own server here. This is the whole analysis of Tomi’s PSA to Boyish Men.

The Empress has no Clothes

This task gave me an occasion to review the whole thing in a better light. There’s so much going on in this video it’s hard to sum it up. Tomi’s will be 28 this month (August 2020). She’s right on schedule for her Epiphany Phase, and as a Farm League celebrity who happens to be reasonably attractive the end of her 20s are weighing heavy on her ego. For the record, I’ve been privy to some DMs from guys in my and Jon MLD’s communities who’ve dated (banged) Tomi and had some interesting details as to what prompted her to this ragequit. I’m not going to make these public. Honestly, it’s TMZ style salaciousness, but these conversations confirmed my initial assessment: Tomi is barreling headlong into the Epiphany Phase and it’s not pretty.

In the video I mention that Tomi needs to find some kind of humility. She’s arrogant, entitled, self-aggrandized and completely oblivious to the fact that her opinions of herself and her “attractive” girl-friends are in fact the product of the feminism she claims to despise. Insight, humility, grace and poise are among the many conventionally feminine characteristic the women of Tomi’s generation (and older) desperately lack. I’m sure Tomi and Co. would disagree, but increasingly more men today are realizing the Empress has no Clothes. Women today like to believe they already have these feminine traits – this is part of the Fempowerment narrative that teaches women they uniquely hold the attributes that make a woman a Quality woman, while also possessing all the best traits that make men admirable and respectable.

As mentioned in An Essay for Women, feminist ideology and gynocentrism has conditioned four generations of women to believe they can be the embodiment of the best of both genders. Self-fulfilling, independent and needing for nothing outside themselves (“You are enough girl.”), the women of Tomi’s generation are now discovering that the elite men they desire the most have the least use for them. Why would they? I’m not talking about MGTOW here, I’m talking about high SMV men in the global sexual marketplace who are in the Game and would like to eventually start a family with a devoted wife who needs him. If the best a woman of can be is a self-fulfilled, ego-assured, independent thing with no needs outside herself, why would she ever seek out an elite man? Why would a man be attracted to a woman who screeches at the top of her lungs,…

“It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I EVER CHASE A MAN!”

By definition, high value men – the men with their “shit together“, the men with a plan, the men who “value value” – have no attraction for a woman who publicly expresses she doesn’t need him. Now, Tomi and her Sisters doth protest too much. Her frustration with men is the result of her inability to accept that she does, in fact, need men; and her standards would predictably crumble given the right incentives. Granted, Tomi correctly assesses that the men of today are increasingly more effeminate, pussified, rudderless and apathetic than any generation that came before them. But ironically, she misses that the sad state of men today should make her even more hyperaware that her bitchy, self-entitled and decidedly masculinized sense of self is unattractive to the elite men she believes she and her sisters deserve.

The prime directive of feminism is:

Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.

Since the post-Sexual Revolution rise of gynocentrism, this feminist maxim has played well with women’s empowerment messaging. There was a time (from the late 60s to late 90s) when men identifying with the feminine – getting in touch with their emotions – was a form of Game. Misguided as it was, men were taught that by supporting, identifying with, and empowering women they would be adapting to that era’s sexual marketplace. Today, this is old order thinking, but the legacy of those generations’ beliefs about women are what is causing such frustration in Tomi’s generation.

It’s too easy to just dismiss her as another entitled, stuck up bitch heading for her date with the Epiphany Phase and the Wall. The problem, and the solution to it, is right in front of her generation’s face. No man needs a woman who has no need for him. Men and women evolved to be complements to one another. This Complementarity and gender interdependence is one of the greatest adaptive strengths of our species, yet the surest way to debase and destroy it is to foment the idea of autonomous, androgynous, independence of one sex.

Tomi Lahren is a Feminist in the truest sense of the term. In one breath she screams men are trash, and in the next she claims to love men. This is the cognitive dissonance that generations of feminism embeds in women. Years of socio-psychological upbringing trains them to distrust, despise and emancipate themselves from men, while at the same time their evolved, biological, mental firmware cries in frustration for a need of men to love, protect, provide and sexually satisfy them.

This inner conflict becomes more and more stressful as this generation of young women approach the Epiphany Phase. One conflicting shift I see among this crop of young women is a greater, and earlier, awareness that they will be less likely to optimize Hypergamy with an acceptable, elite, man they are taught to believe they all deserve. Settling for anything less than optimal is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman ideal; settling for a suboptimal man is the main source of inner conflict for the Equal-but-Better expectations women place on today’s admittedly lacking men.

This is what Tomi is screaming and crying about.

Why We Fight

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

In the almost nine years of of this blog I have only hit upon violence on a couple of occasions. I’ve only been in a physical altercation a handful of times in my life. And by that I mean real fights; the kind of violence that requires you to physically harm another person. I’ve been in lots of sparring fights and martial arts tournaments, mostly when I was in my 20s and 30s. While I’ve been hurt and caused hurt to my opponents, I can appreciate that there is a qualified difference between competitive sport fighting and real violence. The one mutual interest my younger brother and I had when we were growing up was beating the shit out of each other. By the time I got to high school I was no stranger to taking a fist to the chops or various headlocks and “wrassling” holds.

Most of the times I’ve been in real fights were in high school. It’s interesting just how Darwinistic our teenage years really are –we’re just too immature to appreciate it then. Unless you grow up in a sheltered family, learning about sex and violence is usually part of our adolescent experiences. After high school I got into a few fights when I was playing gigs in the late 80s-90s Hollywood scene. Depending on where we played and who we happened to piss off, those kind of fights were something you had to keep in the back of your head as being a possibility. Usually you had friends or bandmates who had your back, but not always.

Of those scuffles most of them were versus a drunk guy who presumed he could kick my ass, or my bandmate’s ass, because, well, we weren’t exactly the most physically imposing guys to be honest. And a lot of those fights were initiated in one of two ways; the guy was fed up with guys like us because the women (usually in some sexy outfit) preferred to fuck guys like us – or, the fight was provoked by a woman and the guys fighting were coming to blows over who’d fucked whose girlfriend. Often enough it was the girl herself who’d later admit she “made a mistake” and one or the other found out.

All of that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. Things have definitely changed with respect to how violence is initiated, normalized and respected (or delegitimized) today, but the basis of that violence will never change. Violence is part of human nature. We do ourselves no favors in denying this simple fact. I can remember in 2001-02 when I did casino promotions for this new ‘sport’ called King of the Cage. It was the forerunner for today’s MMA fighting, but back then it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it is now. I believe Nevada was one of the only states that could legally host such an event. The outcry then was that it was an underground ‘bloodsport’ and legitimizing it as a true sport was the first step towards degenerate social savagery. Or something like that. People used to be appalled by it.

Now MMA fighting is something I’ve seen some Evangelical Christian churches use as a draw to get their men to attend a ‘masculine revival’ weekend. Warriors for Jesus with a ‘saved’ MMA fighter speaking about using his sport as a ministry. I think there’s a primal, evolved side of men’s nature that makes violence attractive. And like love and respect, violence is another aspect of the human experience where men and women’s approach and understanding is innately different.

Boys and men are innately drawn to competition, combat and violence. We make ‘guns’ out of our fingers. We craft weapons from scraps we find in the garage to defeat our ‘foes’. We love our plastic army men and G.I. Joes, our cowboys & indians, and we play ‘war’ with our friends. Our video games from the first coin operated arcades to our immersive virtual reality consoles are about combat and strategy. Even sports have been called a “proxy for war”. Team sports are a facsimile of tribal competition. Human males’ physiology, by and large, evolved for combat and physical stresses. I realize that might be hard to believe by today’s standard of masculinity, but the evidence is there.

The male Burden of Performance began with a need for testing that performance against our primal environments and some very real opponents. I have read some interesting research that suggests human beings are innately risk averse. Most humans would rather avoid conflict than voluntarily engage in a fight that they could very well lose, if not die from. The logic is that humans’ success as a species is at least partly due to our evolved sense of caution for life and limb. If you cooperate and play it safe it’s likely your risk-averse genes would propagate into future generations.

Of course the flip side to this can summed up in an old Latin proverb,…

Fortune Favors the Bold. 

There’s also research that shows men experience a spike in testosterone levels after defeating a rival in combat, and/or killing their opponent. This doesn’t even have to be actual violence; some studies show men experience a similar spike when their sports teams win a significant game. So, while in some instances avoiding conflict and backing down from a dangerous engagement has survival benefits, risk taking and enacting one’s will by force also has some reproductive benefits. 

For as much as they rail to the contrary, women do have an affinity for violent men. Women get turned on by men with a capacity for violence. Modern psychology attempts to pathologize this arousal prompted by dangerous men (hybristophilia), but, by order of degree, women evolved to select for men with at least the perceived capacity to do harm to another man. I would speculate that this attraction stems from women’s evolved need to seek security and protection from men, and sympathetically, men evolved an innate protectionist aspect to our own evolved firmware. Competing with rival men for sexual access, sometimes violently, is part of our ancestral programming. As we developed into a more ‘civilized’ species that competition shifted to contests of performance between men, but the old violent firmware is still part of humans’ starting package.

Let’s You and Him Fight

On Twitter and a few past livestreams, I’ve pointed out that women today have developed a false sense of security with respect to the potential of real violence. This is equally a result of the masculinization of women as it is our accommodating the Feminine Imperative in mainstream cultures. In the age of social media, as the globalization of women’s entitlements have spread, so too has women’s entitlement to personal safety. 

One very real downside to the Fempowerment narrative is that it has convinced women that the fantasy of the “strong female” is something they can aspire to personally. This is what I’ve called the Warrior Princess fallacy: Over the course of generations our feminine-primary social order has convinced women that they can realize the same warrior role as men. Via storytelling in various media the ideal that physical differences in men and women are relative, and women can be “just as tough and dangerous as men” is pervasive. This is a dangerous precedent, and one that is a direct result of old order beliefs in, and popularization of, Blank Slate equals. 

In the idealized fantasy society of equalism, masculinized Amazon Warrior Princesses can give as good as they get from any man. But in the real world, men evolved for physical performance, competition and combat; women evolved to endure the rigors of childbearing and nurturing. And as the introduction of transgendered biological males into biologically female sports divisions is proving, the realities of our physical differences is unavoidable.

However, the idea that women are always entitled to physical protection in the new order presents some interesting dichotomies. Women mix an entitlement to personal safety with an expectation of clichéd female bravado. Remember, this all happens in the context of women’s innate solipsism; add a bit of alcohol and the social posturing of a group of women all vying for attention on a Friday night and you begin to see the volatile potential. Today’s women have grown accustomed to initiating or escalating inherently unsafe circumstances for themselves – to say nothing of the men they’ll involve.

Women have a limbic understanding that, for the most part, they can be violent with relative impunity. If a male ever strikes a female, even in self-defense, she can be assured that a mob of random males, following their evolved protectionist directive, will spontaneously form to beat the shit out of the guy. In today’s Blue Pill engineered society, even the most passive male waits for an opportunity to prove his quality to womankind by becoming ‘justifiably’ violent in defense of a woman. It’s what most men are conditioned for for most of their lives.

“Sorry babe, I don’t know what came over me. I just can’t abide by any man assaulting a woman!”

The old, vestigial, evolved response of violence is something our male hindbrains know will trigger ‘gina tingles in women. The primal ideal of the nobleman with the capacity to unleash justifiable fisticuffs is Blue Pill conditioned psychological red meat. That the woman provoked or escalated an unsafe situation isn’t even an afterthought – the guy raised a hand to a woman, opportunities to prove a legitimate capacity for violence are rare for low SMV men.

As such, women presume safety. Women will raise hell about feeling unsafe around men. They’ll bleat about fantasies of enforcing a ‘male curfew’ (only for undesirable Betas of course) out of safety concerns. We’ll hire security staff to walk a woman across a dark parking lot and install emergency call boxes on college campuses. But in social situations (particularly when drinking) will escalate inherently unsafe situations knowing that men will play by the old order rules.

There is an old PUA maxim that picked up on women’s penchant to provoke men to violence. It was called the Lets You and Him Fight dynamic. Whether women are aware of this and deliberately provoking a fight between men, or, their subconscious motivates the conflict is a debate that’s been around for a while. But the LYHF dynamic is a shit test women will use in assessing a man’s Alpha status. Women need indignation as it is, but in this dynamic is a woman’s hindbrain wants a visceral response from a man.

I first became aware of the LYHF shit test when a friend had told me how annoyed he was by his girlfriend starting fights with guys that she expected him to finish. She would honk the car horn from the passenger seat if someone had even slightly cut them off in traffic. Even flip off other drivers if the opportunity presented itself. She would start fights with other women which would provoke their boyfriends to step in on their behalf and he was tacitly expected to kick their ass to defend her provoking them. “What are you a pussy? Go beat his ass!”

I’ve tackled the subject of shit tests numerous times on this blog so I won’t belabor them here, but this test plays upon some very deep, evolved, intersexual and intersocial dynamics. On some level of consciousness a woman wants to know her man can get violent. Most Blue Pill men find that suggestion appalling. We’re supposed to be “above all of that”, right? For the most part I’m sure the majority of men would rather not be put into a position of taking a fist to the face. As such we build social conventions and rationales around not engaging physically in a real sense. So, to consider a woman might desire a man with a predilection for violence prompts them to qualify that woman for his own safety.

Intrasexual Competition

“Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

When a group (tribe) of primates reaches a certain number of members the potential for ‘hostile takeover’ by lesser males becomes almost a certainty. Beta male primates form coalitions to overthrow an existing Alpha leader. Most dominant Alphas instinctively cull this coalition building to ensure their position. A smackdown, abuse, punishment for anything that looks like a challenge to his position from lesser male troop members is something Alphas do to infrequently teaming up on him. Partially this is a display of dominance (social proof reinforces it), but it is also a curbing function.

Eventually the Alpha becomes weaker and less effective at enforcing his dominance, and the Betas grow in number until such time that they can band together and depose him. Then the cycle repeats with the most dominant male among them assuming the Alpha role. He gets access to the most fertile females, kills off his rivals’ offspring (which prompts the females into estrus) and reproduces for as long as he’s able to remain in that position.

And yes, I’m aware of the theory that pro-social Alphas that build loyalty-exchanges among other males, and display a willingness to share resources with females, tend to make for better ‘leaders’ within a tribe. What most of that research conveniently leaves out is the element of envy and jealousy that develops (even among primates) in the Beta male population until the sentiment reaches a point of challenge. Even the good-guy, prosocial Alpha has to watch his back.

As you might guess, many of these behaviors are paralleled in humans. Alpha displays of violence, even if by proxy, are ‘sexy’, but mostly we manifest male prowess in social displays. Athletics, resource acquisition, peacocking, conspicuous consumption, really any costly signaling of high sexual market value. To compete with these Alpha displays, lesser males must either: 

  • Increase their own value, and learn to display it effectively, 
  • Find ways to convince other men, (coalition building) and reproductively viable women, that those displays are worthless, while propping up his own displays as more valuable.

In the age of social media and mass communication Beta males are constantly reminded of their lesser positions. There’s no respite. Even the most well-meaning, prosocial Alpha’s presence is a reminder of Beta male inadequacies. High school bullies and ‘Jocks vs. Nerds’ is a constant theme across human cultures because the evolved human male experience is always one of competition and a Burden of Performance. To be male is to compete, and as such there will be winners and losers.

Deposing, or disqualifying, an Alpha – much in the same way primates do – is also a constant theme in human cultures. Beta males enacting ‘justice’ on an ‘evil’ Alpha or an Alpha proxy has always been a teenage fantasy for boys. Spiderman, Captain America, the wimp who incredibly transforms into a powerful Alpha himself will prove to the world how that Alpha power should be ethically used. The geek who gets the girl because she magically sees his superior quality that aligns with the terms he’s establishing as valuable is also a fantasy. All of these cast the Alpha as ‘oppressor’.

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” – Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Why is using strength, displaying value and exercising will an act of ’tyranny’? Why is restraint of power a moral imperative? How did we come to disqualifying value displays? I’ve seen a few talks by Jordan Peterson where he promotes the idea that a real man is a dangerous one who possesses the capacity for violence and oppression, but has the strength of will not to use it. This then begs the question, how does anyone know a man even possesses this capacity if he’s not to display it? Concealing strength is awesome, but it is, by definition, indistinguishable from weakness. No one knows if you’re a black belt or a white belt until you get in the ring and fight. However, the moral consensus is that it’s unacceptable for men to display value.

This then is the global, social coalition that was formed by the majority of lesser men. To continually disqualify the merits of superior men is individually taxing and makes lesser men look worse for doing so. But build a social order around men self-policing their displays of value; then you have higher value men doing the heavy lifting for lesser men. You may be powerful, but the social mores of the time (created to serve the majority of lesser men) will tell you to conceal it. In fact, they’ll build social conventions to convince the whole of men that displaying vulnerability, not strength, is a display of value.

Most of what I’m digging at here is old order thinking. Socially enforced monogamy has primarily served the greatest number of Beta men. And while it’s definitely been a stabilizing factor for civilization, I can’t ignore that the social expectation of monogamy is also the result of society-wide coalition building among lesser men to ensure that greater men wouldn’t out-breed them. Most male-specific social conventions are designed to control men’s innate directives. Their latent purpose is to teach rules that limit displays and usage of strength.

And in the new order we see this old order intersexual competition struggle to keep pace with a global sexual marketplace that centers on women’s innate mating strategies reseting context of intersexual dynamics. Open Hypergamy incentivizes men’s overt displays of higher value – and now on a worldwide scale. In response, men form online coalitions to disqualify those displays in an attempt to devalue the strengths of men they couldn’t hope to compete with in the old order. Meanwhile, women in the global sexual marketplace continue to reward men who display genuine value according to their mating strategy’s needs. 

Unconscious Contempt

Today’s essay was inspired by the lead image you see here and the subsequent exchange I had on Twitter about it. What you see here is a rather nebbish looking husband, I presume post-surgery, recovering from his vasectomy in bed. He is surrounded by cutesy post-it note jokes his wife left him (kind of like the notes your mom might put in your school lunch when you were a child) on a plethora of sugary snacks from the pantry.

The number of kids we’ll be having in the future – Zero

Forgive me if I Snicker

Sorry your dong got dinged

Good-bye to your swimmers

Mini Nonuts

Your berries got crunched

These are just a few of the ‘jokes’ his wife spent an awful lot of time creating.

Beta men and their wives joking about their vasectomies has become the meme du jour on all the usual social media sites where women congregate to appease their egos, gloss their girlfriends’ and commiserate about their fates of being wives and mothers. Before I dig in here I think I need to point out the utility that social media has evolved to serve in most women’s lives now. There was a time when a woman’s indignation needs could be met by daytime television, talkshows and romance novels when living vicariously through their girlfriends’ lives wasn’t sufficient. Today, women’s innate need for indignation is provided on-tap courtesy of the internet, social media and cutesy-but-insulting images of a husband are almost passé. I know, I’ve discussed this topic on a few podcasts, but it’s becoming increasingly more important for a man to understand what social media is providing to women’s nature and how their relationships are indirectly influenced by the exchanges their wives and girlfriends are having online.

I’ve seen a few of these “I got a vasectomy and my wife thinks it’s funny” social media posts before this one. Creating little post-it note jokes to apply to the snacks in the pantry might seem cute, but why is this even a thing? Why is it women/wives think it’s cute to publicly ridicule their partner about the impotence he elected to have? Amongst the Facebook and Instagram shots of her life, amongst the motivational quote memes, and among the complaints about kids, marriage and domestic life a moment of ridiculing their husband seems par for the course. And it’s all acceptable so long as the context is one of being ‘all in fun’.

Marriage today is a dicey proposition for men. I talk and write a lot about the overwhelmingly high risks of life and livelihood men should consider when it comes to how we do legal marriage in this era. MGTOW or not most men understand that marriage is basically for women now – at least with respect to the legal protections and the win-win incentives that are advertised for women. If all a woman ever did was read about marriage from social media and popular culture one would have to wonder why she would ever want to sign up for a lifetime of dealing with a husband, or the caricatures of average men, at all. The contempt for men, even in the most good natured, humorous, ways is palpable on most social media. It’s entirely acceptable, even expected, to deprecate the foibles of men in marriage. We literally can’t do anything right in a ‘female correct’ online world.

And like the “child-in-a-man’s-body” that women complain about, most of these average husbands are okay with being the butt of the joke. In fact, most are enthusiastic about their self-deprecation because they’ve been conditioned to think that doing so endears them to the women who married them and proves they’re “secure in their masculinity”.

Can’t you take a joke?

The first thing any woman, and any Beta male, will say is, “C’mon Rollo, it’s all in fun. Imagine being so humorless as not to get this? Who hurt you?” I think there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the passive aggressiveness that inspires this ‘humor’. When a comedian like Dave Chappell throws caution to the wind and does a 90 minute comedy routine that is funny as hell, but attacks the unassailable ‘correctness’ of our present social narrative we laugh along knowing the latent message of the humor. So, what is the latent message of making a man’s (elective) impotency a joke?

Imagine what the outrage would be on social media were you to make ‘cute’ jokes in the same way about your wife’s uterine ablation or tubal ligation. At the very least women wouldn’t think it was funny. No one tells women, “Lighten up. What, are you so insecure in your femininity that you can’t take a joke?” When a woman is rendered infertile it doesn’t occur to anyone to make light of it, but for a man to be neutered – and at the mutual agreement with his wife – we find the hit to his masculinity hilarious. Why is this?

I realize I’m focusing on one incident here in this image posted on r/funny, but this is an example of a larger dynamic. It’s socially acceptable to ridicule the impotency of Beta men. As I detailed in Selective Breeding, women will openly attack men’s genitals as a reflexive response to the possibility that a lesser man might try to fool her Hypergamous filters. A guy getting kicked in the nuts by a woman is always funny.

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her.

In Selective Breeding I made the argument that women’s existential fear is the possibility of having her Hypergamous filter (feminine intuition) fooled by a Beta male and becoming saddled with his shitty genetics for the rest of her life. This is a primal, evolved, fear for women that manifest itself, often unconsciously, in many of women’s behaviors that we either take for granted or we have social conventions that accommodate them. Decidedly gynocentric societies will legally mandate against this existential fear.

But what about women who are already married or pair-bonded with men that their evolved subconscious knows is a suboptimal choice for her? What about women who are trapped in a marriage with a guy that her hindbrain confirms is not the ‘best she can do’? How does that primal fear of being saddled with a faithful Beta manifest itself? 

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Sigmund Freud

Unconscious Contempt

I would argue that women today have never been more comfortable in expressing their contempt of the men they married. My recent essays on Polyamory and the deconstruction of men’s Paternity imperatives have been an exploration of how a feminine-primary social order is reimagining itself with respect to how men and women will come together and form families in the future. People will claim that women’s lack of respect for the masculine is the result of generations of men not living up to some old-school ideal. That might be so, but women have no respect for the masculine, the male experience, simply because they have no need to. 

Why do women feel comfortable – to the point of taking it for granted – in expressing contempt for their husbands? We can argue the basis of where this passive-aggressiveness comes from, but why is it okay to veil this contempt in humor?

Before I get run up the flagpole for being a humorless boor let me reiterate that I’m not saying men ought to read more into things like this. My point is the bigger picture here; why do we find this funny at all? I believe it’s a form of anxiety release for women who’ve committed to a lifetime of parental investment with a man that her hindbrain knows is less than what she believes is best for her.

These images were pulled from an Instagram account called Motherhood Through Letterboards. What’s interesting about this is the contempt for fathers and husbands that bleeds through what we should probably have a sense of humor about. You can have a look at some of these to get the context, but the latent purpose of this exercise is a release of the anxiety created by women’s pairing and reproducing with men that their hindbrains cannot accept as Alpha.

Again, we talk a lot in the Manosphere about how social media contributes to the gross overinflation of women’s sense of self. It’s easy to see how women overestimate their sexual market value, and then conflate it with their personal value, but there’s more to this than just the woman on OKCupid who thinks she’s a 9 when she’s really a 6. There comes a time when that woman with the overblown sense of self must “settle” on a man who her hindbrain believes isn’t the best she could do. The metric by which she judges what is the best she can do is also subject to this ego-overinflation.

The main reason most women agonize over the question of whether she should “settle” for Mr. Good Enough is rooted in this Hypergamous conflict that usually comes at a time in her life where her SMV and her options with men are decaying. Today, the reason we see the age of first marriage being pushed later and later in life for women is due to women prolonging this indecision. She knows she can do better than the less-exciting Beta who seems like her best option in her Epiphany Phase because she’s had better in her Party Years. She also knows she can do better because social media and a constant steeping in the new Global Sexual Marketplace has convinced her she’s actually a 9, not a 6, and anything less than perfect is a waste of her potential. All of this plays on women’s primal, Existential Fear of pairing with a suboptimal mate choice – for life.

But now she’s committed. She married the only guy who would date her in that phase of her life given her circumstances. She married the Beta in Waiting, who’s overjoyed that he’s finally found his Quality Woman who appreciates his type. He’s thanking God for bringing him a woman who tells him “I’m done with the Jerks” and wants to do the ‘right’ thing now – while her hindbrain is contending with her existential fear becoming reality due to her own necessity. Now add 1-2 children into this mix (his or not) and you get this passive-aggressive manifestation of her existential angst.

Fortunately for her there’s an unending number of women experiencing exactly the same unconscious contempt for the men they married online in dozens of popular social media groups. The desire to “punch him in the face” is always tempered with “love”, humor and platitudes about relationships always being “hard work”.

End Note: Vasectomies

I feel it’s incumbent upon me to address what will be the predictable binary responses of literalist critics here:

• No, I’m not saying don’t get a vasectomy.

• No, I’m also not saying that if you did get a vasectomy you’re a pathetic loser Beta.

I will however point out that when I see stories about how a Beta husband did come to the decision to get a vasectomy there are always a lot of subconscious reasonings that go along with it. For all the notions of egalitarian marriages and self-praise for being rationally evolved above the hindbrain interpretations, on some level of consciousness a man electing to sterilize himself is a confirmation of the value he puts in his masculinity. This is why women think it’s funny to ridicule your impotency. Her hindbrain has 100% confirmation that you know your reproductive viability has no value.

A man’s reasons for getting a vasectomy may be valid and in some ways empowering for him. I imagine there’s at least some confidence to be derived from knowing you wont be held responsible for any “accidental” pregnancies. I get why men would opt for it, but the way a woman’s feral brain interprets a man sterilizing himself is what I’m getting at here. You may think, “Well, I don’t give a damn what women think about it.” Fine. Totally valid, but I’m outlining a woman’s instinctual response to a man permanently preventing his own reproduction. There is a subcommunication underneath this decision that denotes emasculation, and this is what women resent.

In some ways I see wives celebrating their husband’s vasectomy for reasons that have nothing to do with improving their sex lives. In the original Twitter thread I had men tell me that they got a vasectomy at the suggestion of their wives, believing it would lead to greater sexual frequency (or any sex in a sexless marriage) only to admit that it never improved anything for them. So, why the goading to get a vasectomy? The dots I keep connecting are a subconscious desire on the part of women to geld a husband to ensure he never reproduces with other women. It’s almost like a service she’s doing for the Sisterhood. She’s making sure that her mistake never becomes any other woman’s mistake.

Selective Breeding

Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?

The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the most recent Avengers movie Starlord (Chriss Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story) permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness; a kick in the nuts.

We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.

 If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rodgers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc. are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the next “Thor” movie. And this is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Woman® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that’s been written for them to fill.

Manspreading

Earlier this year I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured what we were told was a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye you can sort of tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve see similar protests before, and if you look at the linked video here today you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in commercials. 

Recently there was another woman who’s won some sort of design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys just sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man so I need to take up space.”

But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. It’s a hindbrain signaling of confidence in men. Now, before you write me off here, think about this; if women’s primary concern was about men taking up space, then why attack a man’s genitals to force him to close it up? Why not simply ask him to close up a bit? Why is pouring water (bleach) on his crotch an acceptable punishment? Why is a hit to the balls a reflexive retaliation?

Women’s existential fear is having their Hypergamous filters bypassed by a clever Beta male impersonating an Alpha, breeding with him, and thereby saddled for a lifetime of support with the child of his inferior seed. Women’s evolved sensitivity to this filter extends to subconscious cues men display in their posture. Ergo, a man ‘spreading’ is perceived by a woman’s hindbrain as a false signal of Alpha by a Beta male. This triggers the existential fear response, thus attacking his manhood is doing all of womankind a favor by humiliating him for his attempt to deceive women’s filters.

I’m sure there’ll be some women (and their ‘allies’) who’ll think this is a stretch, but then, why is it acceptable to kick a man in the nuts when he’s spreading? Why is it that Starlord gets kicked in the balls and we laugh? Because a Beta male tried to pass himself off as an Alpha and retaliation was due. If a guy like Jason Mamoa was sitting spread-legged on a bus it would serve as an arousal cue for most women. Alpha status recognition is an automatic subconscious subroutine, fine tuned over millennia of evolution, in women. Women’s subconscious awareness instinctively reads SMV status and prompts behavior accordingly.

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

Or your shitty genetics for that matter. Patrilinear surnames are a symbolic stamp of ownership for men. They give a name to his genetics – a surname is associated with a specific genetic line. A man’s legacy is his genes and those genes need an identifier. One of the more controversial topics I debate online is the refusal of men’s surname by their wives. Women keeping their last names or hyphenating them in marriage is now a common sign of their independent spirit. Marriage is only acceptable to the Strong Independent Woman® when it looks more like an egalitarian business arrangement rather than a complementary pairing of a man and a woman who understand (and accept) the nature of their own gender. Traditional marriage looks too much like “ownership” for feminist wives and nümale husbands.

Blue Pill conditioned men are far more likely to be okay with their wives’ decision to keep her name, hyphenate it, or even take her name. After all, it’s the progressive thing to do and most believe on some level of consciousness that his accepting her independence in this way will make him more appreciated by her. The truth is this: his acquiescing to her in this way only reinforces what her hindbrain has already confirmed – she’s paired with a Beta male who wouldn’t give an afterthought to insisting his genetics bear his name. He confirms the low quality of his genetics to her hindbrain.

There are a lot of convenient social conventions that come along with a woman’s insistence on keeping her surname. Just like the excuse of men “taking up space” warrants terms like “manspreading”, women and nümales will appeal to pragmatism:

“She’s a doctor, lawyer, soon-to-be-famous-person and she need to maintain her identity for public relations reasons. Otherwise she’d totally take my last name dude.”

“I don’t want her to have a crummy last name like ‘Butts’ or something.”

“Taking a man’s last name is an antiquated symbol of patriarchal ownership of women. Haven’t we evolved past this yet? Are you so insecure in your masculinity that you’ll insist on her taking your name?”

These are a few of the cover stories, but the latent purpose is the same; women’s hindbrains must hedge their Hypergamous bets with men they know are Beta before pretending to commit to a lifetime of breeding and parental investment with them. For a woman marrying a man whom her subconscious acknowledges as Alpha, not assuming his name isn’t an afterthought to her. Women paired with a man who is a confirmed Alpha will often say “I didn’t want children, but I wanted to have his babies.”

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

We’re getting into sexy sons theory here, but the idea is that a significantly high SMV male can inspire women to become submissive/supportive wives and mothers. See my essay on Alpha Widows for more about this.

A woman in a good Hypergamous pairing accepts – desires – his authority, but also his genes. She doesn’t just want children, she wants his children. This then is signified (codified?) in his name passing on to her and their children. Even in ostensibly egalitarian marriages the kids generally retain the name of the male who fathered them (unless single-mom throws useful step-dad a bone and the kids change their name to his). Human beings are innately tribalistic (sorry Jordan). This tribalism is expressed in Selective Breeding practices extending from the personal to the social.

In 2019, and in the reproductive aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, these tribal distinctions are now left to women to determine in a confusing global sexual marketplace. Men’s innate drive for paternal certainty falls away in this environment. The existential fear and frustration that manifests from that drive still persists in men, but the practice of it gives way to women being the primary influencers in selective breeding – and how it will or won’t be expressed. It’s now a common practice for a woman to change the surname of children of a genetic ‘asshole’ father to that of the adoptive step-dad-who-stepped-up. Or the noble Promise Keeper son and holy protector of his single mom (and by extension all of womankind) who changes his last name to something else. 

But why? Why bother to go to that trouble if names are unimportant? If paternity doesn’t matter anyway, why go to the trouble of changing a name?

What Happens When She’s the One Who’s Out of Options?

As I mentioned, women’s existential fear is pairing herself with a Beta male who, through guile and deceptions, convinced her he’s an Alpha. But what happens when that woman runs out of options in her  Epiphany Phase? What happens when she’s forced to settle on the good-enough Beta (the guy Sheryl Sandberg assured women “nothing’s sexier”) because she can’t lock down the Alpha whose babies she wants to have?

She can continue searching indefinitely. The social conventions established by the Feminine Imperative convinces women that their sexual market value (SMV) is unending and imperishable. Those conventions also combine with others that shame men for being so infantile in preferring women who are ‘younger, hotter, tighter’. This shaming gets extended to convincing Beta men they should “align their dating strategies” to prefer mature women who “now have their heads on straight”. The idea that an older woman is more mature and therefore ought to be considered more desirable by men is conveniently positioned in women’s Epiphany Phase – so is the Myth of the Biological Clock.

Or she can settle for the less-than-ideal Beta male she’d never have opted for in her Party Years. Women have various psychological and sociological mechanisms in place to help them rationalize this settling on a Beta in Waiting.

  • Plan B: There’s always a fallback guy. Generally this is one Beta for another, better positioned Beta though. If one were “alpha” he’d already be the Plan A. (Be the A Guy). It’s important to note that if the Plan B Beta eventually ‘alphas up’ in some perceivable way, this generally throws a woman into a psychological conflict.
  • She convinces herself that ‘settling’ is really who she is in that moment. Most women genuinely believe in their Epiphany Phase rationales. Most would probably pass a polygraph test if you asked them if they genuinely felt the way they do about their decisions during this time of their lives. However, Hypergamy and its fundamental rules don’t change for women even when they believe something new about themselves. And often enough that ‘genuine’ belief is motivated by their subconscious understanding about their state n life as a result of their mating strategy.

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

This is a fundamental understanding for Red Pill awareness. It’s one of the easiest indicators men can use to determine a woman’s interest in them, or her subconscious understanding of your status as a man. Is she making more rules for you to obey, more hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for her ‘love’ (i.e. sexual access)?  She probably sees you as a Beta. Is she breaking her rules, the rules she believes she needs to follow in her new (Epiphany) phase of life, in order to get into situations where she can facilitate sex with you? Is she putting off responsibilities in order to enjoy herself with you? She probably sees you as Alpha.

This rule-setting or breaking is a basic litmus test for genuine desire. Women’s hindbrains grasp this  too. If a woman is setting rules for a man, her subconscious understands that he’s predominantly Beta. Because she needs to set rules, because it seems like logic to refuse his surname (another rule) and because he accepts these rules – even encourages them in himself and other men – his status is confirmed as a Beta. Only a Beta would need rules. Only a Beta would comply with those rules.

I should add that this is the basis of all transactional relationships. Jump through hoop (obey rule), get sex. An Alpha, by nature, would have options to replace a woman who made rules for him. Furthermore, it wouldn’t occur to a woman to issue rules with an Alpha man whose babies she wants to have. Hypergamy can’t afford to issue rules to Alpha men.

The Inner War

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her. There are more than a few Purple Pill “relationship experts” who cater to this demographic of women, and they do very well marketing new age magic and cutesy aphorisms to resolve this inner war.

I characterize this war as a conversation between a woman’s Id and her Ego. 

The Epiphany Phase forces her sensualism-seeking, ‘hawt’, short-term sexual (breeding) opportunism to come to terms with the necessity of her long-term security needs. Alpha Fucks (her Id) wars with Beta Bucks (her Ego) in her head – and all with the urgency of knowing that her SMV is decaying to the point where she must either take action or convincingly rationalize why she doesn’t need to take action. Her Ego knows her SMV is in decline and long-term security / parenting / family is becoming less and less available to her. But her Id still wants what it wants; ‘hawt’ sex with ‘hawt’ guys. And she’s still ‘hawt’ too – the feminine-primary world says it all the time “Never Settle Gurl!” – she ‘deserves’ only the best.

Thus, the conversation leads to varying degrees of compromise to outright self-delusions prompted by outside influences (i.e. social media). Plan B is a compromise. Refusing his last name is a compromise (or hedging of her Hypergamous bets). Making rules for, and endlessly testing, a Beta to assuage the Hypergamous doubt (“is he the best I can do?”) is a compromise.

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

Today, the new fascination with ‘Poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is also one more methodology women are using to make a compromise between the Alpha Fucks her Id needs and the Beta Bucks her Ego knows is necessary for her future security and happiness. “Alternative relationship strategy” is the latest euphemism for Poly, but it really distills down to a means for women to find a way to balance the Hypergamous equation. She’ll marry the Beta, but it should necessarily mean she has to have sex with him. Poly relationships are a compromise.

Ideally women would love to give themselves to a worthy man. To follow his plan for their lives,…and she’d like to feel the kind of attraction to him that would inspire the trust that he would do so for her and her children’s benefit. 

“I wanted to have his babies.” — this is Hypergamy balancing Alpha Seed with Beta Need perfectly.

Today though, women wait too long. They believe the lies of their own Blue Pill, that their SMV is never depleted. They don’t look for this balance anymore. They don’t even expect to find it; one man is for a same night lay, the other is boyfriend material. 

Alpha Widows

As today’s Purple Pill Manosphere tries to sort out what it wants to pick and pull from ideas the Red Pill has been debating for decades now it requires a lot of deliberate misdirection of the old concepts they struggle with. This is actually nothing new. If you look at any of the exchanges I had with Aunt Giggles (Susan Walsh ret.) or various notables from the golden years of this blog you’ll recognize the pattern – Distort the premises of the concepts that conflict with your ego-investments, straw man them, then offer some redefinition of what they ‘really’ mean.

One of these maligned concepts is the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow. I’ve written extensively on this idea for well over a decade now. I’m fairly certain I even coined the term back in my SoSuave days. Back then Alpha Widow was a designation we used to describe a woman’s tendency to become fixated on an Alpha lover she had in her Party Years and still pined for him into her 30s or 40s after marriage. We didn’t just pull the idea out of our asses back then. We came to it because of the overwhelming number of married or LTR men who reported that their wife or girlfriend were pining for old lovers they thought were “the one that got away” or they left them to pursue a new relationship with an old flame.

Back then it was just a useful reference, but it quickly became such a predictable and confirmable phenomenon I thought it deserved more investigation. I mentioned Alpha Widows in The Slut Paradox but it was around this time that Roissy (Heartise) had proposed a simple maxim: 5 Minutes of Alpha Trumps 5 years of Beta. That’s when I decided to look deeper in my own short essay Five Minutes of Alpha. With a Red Pill Lens I began to see this Alpha Widow narrative played out in popular culture. Katy Perry had a song out then called The One That Got Away and it accurately described everything that goes into making an Alpha Widow.

What is an Alpha Widow?

To understand the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow we must look at women’s evolved mating strategy – Hypergamy, a woman’s intrinsic desire to balance the best quality sexual/reproductive male with the best provisioning/parentally invested male. Since a woman’s mating strategy centers on quality in a long term partner(s) women tend to focus on ideals in men. The imperative drive for mate quality extends to both sides of women’s Hypergamous equation; the best genetic, sexual experience and the best long term security potential. Only women are Hypergamous, and Hypergamy never seeks its own level – it is always seeking a better-than-merited exchange in SMV compared to her own. For more information on this concept read False Equivalencies.

When a woman misses the opportunity to consolidate on a confirmed, high SMV (sexual market value) male that man becomes the new standard for what she believes she can attract as a potential mate.

“I’ve had an SMV 8 guy before so in the future no man below an 8 will be my optimal choice.”

Even if a woman’s perception of her own SMV isn’t realistic her Id wants what it believes it can get.

The setting of a mating strategy metric in men is largely a subconscious process for women, but, more often now, high-ego women do consciously acknowledge that one man does (or doesn’t) meet the SMV benchmark of a previous lover. As women have become more comfortable in embracing Open Hypergamy, amongst their girlfriends, on social media, they will readily debate this SMV metric of past boyfriends. The Alpha Widow dynamic is no secret among women. Usually this involves women bemoaning the lack of “eligible” men in their lives when their prime SMV years are behind them. Please note that eligible implies an entitlement to a man who would be an ideal.

This qualification process is a constant for women, and it’s a complement to mens’ Burden of Performance. Women’s Hypergamous filtering process evolved from an Existential Fear of pairing with any man beneath her own (self-perceived) SMV and risking her life on a bad reproductive bet.  The worst existential prospect for a woman is to have her mating strategy superseded and controlled by that of a suboptimal man. 

The flip side to this dynamic is that, evolutionarily speaking, a woman’s subconscious cannot afford to miss out on an optimal Hypergamous pairing. If a woman’s Existential Fear is to be forced to reproduce with a lesser man, the next fear is to lose or miss out out on the opportunity to consolidate on monogamy with a high SMV man. When I talk about how a woman will make rules for Betas, but break rules for Alphas this is the root of that principle. 

As such, a man who exceeds a woman’s SMV, and creates a benchmark of her ‘personal best’ ideal male to breed with and parentally invest with, makes a significant impact on her psyche; sometimes in the long term. When a woman has had this man – one for whom she has genuine, organic desire for – but she cannot consolidate on him (i.e. lock down in monogamy), this represents a critical loss of the ideal Hypergamous/Reproductive/Life strategy option. Mentally this is what a woman will strive in some way to recreate with subsequent men in her life – a return to that ideal state.

This then is the basis of the Alpha Widow:
A mental fixation on the man who made the most significant impact upon a woman as her Hypergamous ideal.

The Fantasy Ideal

Usually this male ideal is an actual man from her past with whom she had some sort of relationship with, but not always. Sometimes the fantasy of that ideal will make a mental impression and sometimes a brief, seemingly insignificant, encounter with an ideal man may be enough to imprint on her psyche. 

Five Minutes of Alpha Trumps Five Years of Beta.

Sometimes the smallest brush with an ‘alpha’ male is enough to trigger the ‘what if?’ possibilities of consolidating on a guy like that. This might be one-night sex, the one guy in the foam cannon party on spring break in her wilder college years, or even just a missed opportunity to fully develop a hoped-for connection at a social gathering. The ‘Missed Connections’ forum on Craig’s Lists are filled with these regrets. All that matters is that the guy, knowingly or not, instilled a sense of Hypergamous urgency that she just knew represented a prospect for consolidating on that ideal.

An Alpha Widow can also be ‘widowed’ from the fantasy of her ideal male. This is fairly common among women who marry early in their Party Years. Most feel like they missed out on having made a good Hypergamous choice (or had it made for them by circumstance or social pressures). That missed opportunity leads some women to be widowed from the fantasy of an Alpha who would have been a better choice. Thus, an ideal Alpha mental model is what she pines for. An interest in romance literature is usually exaggerated in this type of widow. The formulaic stories are a form of vicarious fulfillment of an unrealized Hypergamous ideal. I should also add, this this widow, when married, is a prime demographic audience for divorce porn fantasies.

In any of these instances what’s at issue is the fact that women’s mating strategy always moves them towards a “better-than-merited” SMV exchange and a psychological fixation on the man, or the type of man who best embodies it. It’s as if a woman’s Id is imprinted with the model of the optimal Hypergamous pairing (evolution-wise a life or death proposition) and believes that only in recreating it will that male again save her life. This is the source of that unconscious pining.

Social Enabling of the Alpha Ideal

In 2019 it has never been easier for a woman to explore her reproductive options with an ever-increasing pool of potential Alphas from which to be widowed from. Since the Sexual Revolution western cultures have done little else than facilitate women’s mating strategies. In terms of “sexual liberation” the goal has always been to ensure provisioning and support – the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy – in order to give women the impression that they have an indefinite window of time in which to find their optimal Alpha man. We see this reflected in the age of first marriages getting older and older. And in the age of social media women take for granted that they can remain sexually viable if not indefinitely, then at least as long as a man would. This facility exacerbates the Alpha Widow effect.

Women will fixate on the “one that got away”, but today we have social conventions in place to pander to that predictable insecurity in women. In fact, there are numerous industries that now thrive on exactly this.

Ladies, will you ever find your soulmate? Our Life-Coaching, our 12 step plan, our positivity training, our magic personality test will help you find him today.

I should add here that the very concept of a soulmate began with women pining for their bygone ideal man. That ‘One’ is much easier to justify cheating with, or agonizing over, if you mix in the metaphysical to aid in rationalizing it. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and Eat, Pray, Love also find their root in the Alpha Widow dynamic. Popular culture tells women they are entitled to that ideal soulmate; and the only way they can remain true to themselves, the only way to live their best lives (even the life they believe God meant for them), is to pursue the ‘ONE that got away.’

The Plan B mating strategy is another social convention that forgives women of the consequences of pursuing that Alpha ideal while concurrently holding on to her next best male option. And lastly, the ongoing normalization of a female-initiated Polyandry is also a social convention predicated on allowing women to hedge their Hypergamous bets with respect to finding that Hypergamous ideal mate.

Misconceptions

The following are a couple of the more common misconceptions critics like to presume is meant by “Alpha Widow”. For the most part these are attempts to straw man the phenomenon with no real interest in how anyone came to understanding the dynamic. 

• Alpha Widows are the result of “players” who fiendishly used these poor impressionable women before they left them high & dry

Blue Pill conditioned White Knights in particular use this to build their own heroic narrative around women. Of course, not all women are victims of the Alpha they were widowed by. The first part of this misconception is the presumption that no woman would volunteer for her own widowing; the second is that an Alpha “Player” was implicit in his motives to thoroughly imprint himself upon her. The truth is that any seduction requires a willing participant (Art of Seduction, Greene) and in accordance with women’s mating strategy women will eagerly participate in their own seduction. These are Alpha Widows, not rape survivors. 

The misconception is that the woman being widowed was somehow traumatized by her former lover. The truth is that the more positive the experience was for her the more impactful the widowing is likely to be. If women didn’t think fondly of the “one that got away” she wouldn’t be an Alpha Widow in the first place. The emotional despair some women feel over that Alpha is usually the result of having missed pairing in the long term with a better prospective man than the lesser man she settled on by necessity. 

This is an easy misconception for most Blue Pill men to follow along with because often enough women will refer to their ‘asshole ex boyfriend(s)’ as the man (men) who was responsible for her being damaged. Women in their Epiphany Phase will usually incorporate into it some narrative of their having been used by the Bad Boy Jerk who came before the Nice Guy Beta they found it necessary to settle on. This damaged narrative then locks in with a woman wanting to “do things the right way this time”. Women will often use this narrative as a failsafe to excuse their hesitancy to be as sexually available to the Beta as she was with the Alpha she was widowed from. So, you get a Saving the Best situation for the Nice Guy in the relationship and he’s apt to believe her claims of being damaged by the asshole who had her before he did.

Self-righteous Beta men love this damaged by the Player narrative because it allows them constant opportunities to prove to his woman how positively different he is compared to the asshole Alpha she’s still covertly pining for.

• “Alpha Widows” are just men making shit up and thinking the worst of women because they’re bitter and burned.

Yes, it is entirely possible that despondent Incels may exaggerate the phenomenon of the Alpha Widow to rationalize their giving up on women. This still doesn’t invalidate phenomenon. This misconceptions is generally dropped by critics of the Red Pill who’d rather attack the source than have to address a concept that rattles their comfortable Blue Pill understanding of women. That said, I understand how it might be convenient to disqualify the concept based on the bitterness of the individual piecing together why his wife or girlfriend still seems to be having a relationship with her ex even if just in her head. Self-loathing Incels will then use this as an excuse to give up for the same reason they believe Hypergamy is this insurmountable obstacle to their connecting with juice they don’t want to bother squeezing for.

For the record, no, not all women turn into Alpha Widows. All women are Hypergamous, but buffers and learned self-control have historically been the checks and balances needed to protect against this Alpha Widow dynamic. The problem is that these buffers are popularly considered sexual repression of women today. Women simply wont police the worst aspects of their mating strategy and any interference, personal, political or social, that would prevent a woman from exercising her Hypergamous sexuality is viewed as misogynist, sexist repression.

Statistically women with more sexual partners have a higher incidence of divorce and find it more difficult to form healthy attachments in LTRs based on their partner count. Men do not appear to follow these stats or dynamics, why?

Because men and women have different evolved mating strategies and priorities. Men, it appears, have a much easier time compartmentalizing the sex act and separating it from the emotional aspect women apply to sex. Men’s obsession with pornography is a good illustration of this, but it is reflective of the differences in our evolved mating strategies developed in our ancestral past. Men found it necessary to breed quickly and then move out – ejaculate and evacuate.

However, in a social order where Hypergamy is unbuffered women have more access to more men and have more opportunities to be imprinted by Alpha men while in their peak fertility years than in any other era before. This abundance of reproductive opportunities, and a lack of any social stigma or moral reservations are putting women into a position where their Blue Pill husbands turn their denial into hate for the ‘Players’ who violated and ruined their ‘soulmate’ before he came into her life. They refuse to acknowledge that in most cases his girl eagerly chose to give herself to the man she told her husband was a ‘Player’ from her past.

Blue Pill married men have the hardest time accepting the idea that their wives may be Alpha Widows for a man that came before them. They struggle with the possibility their wives gave a part of themselves to a guy that they’ll never experience, so denial and anger becomes their ego’s protection.

They throw shade at the men who have the Game to seduce women (who enjoy the seduction as well) because they “ruin women for great guys like him”. Thus, they turn it into a moral issue for those men or a personality flaw because it absolves their wives of their modern mating choices.

– Illustration, Stefan Schmidtz

Paternity, Promiscuity & “Poly”

Nature is cold and ruthless when it comes to reproduction, human reproduction is no exception. Rollo’s essay carries with it some pretty heavy implications. As has been pointed out before, monogamy is a male institution masquerading as a female institution, it ensures some level of paternity and stable bonds and expectations in order to arrive at a semblance of order among males in a community, it’s a tradeoff for order/security/reduced violence among males while at the same time providing sex at a limited scale to a majority of males, it’s a check/taming of nature invented by man that most likely allowed for the rise of civilization. This area yet again is not really about women but about a male structure to reduce intra/extra tribal violence.

We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of monogamy and indirectly the family unit. You can see the beginnings of the violence with the mass shootings by kids without a dad among whites. We see the black community in certain sectors/areas of the U.S begin to disintegrate as a stable social unit now that the family unit is absent. This is not a race issue as the black community in certain areas of the U.S remains solid/stable(the American South is one example), so it is not a race question, it’s a question of pressure brought to bear on certain sectors/areas. Any race is vulnerable to this, the Hispanic community is beginning to face headwinds among the current 18-30 generation, the number of single moms in the community is pretty high, I suspect the numbers in time will exceed that of the black community. This however doesn’t negate that the current inner city black community is the canary in the coal mine, and a picture of a possible future.

Foxguy

I thought these were some really good comments to start today’s essay off with as you’ll read in a moment. I’m going to try something a bit different in this post. There’s a lot to digest in what i’ve been working on lately with respect to evolved and social aspects of men’s innate drive for paternity. So rather than come out with a tightly packed essay on these individual topics I’m going to just throw out some of the concepts I’m working on at the moment. This will be a rare insight into how my writing process works, but I hope these topics will fuel further discussion in the comments and elsewhere.

As I stated in last week’s essay I’ve been reading my way through Tim Birkhead’s book Promiscuity. If you want to know what’s inspiring these ideas this is (still) it. I don’t want to call this book a ‘slog’, but I’m having to take my time with it in order to really digest it in a Red Pill sense. Any of my readers know that I’ve done a lot of work on Hypergamy to the point that I get criticized for being overly focused on women’s sexual strategy. I’m going to change this today and focus on men’s sexual strategies and how they fluidly adapt to women’s strategies.

The rise and acceptance of single motherhood over the past 50 years is a Reproductive Strategy

In The New Polyandry I proposed that with the rise of women’s independence from men, and the social unfettering of their sexual strategy (Hypergamy), women have shifted the prevailing social norms from socially enforced monogamy to a female-initiated form of polyandry. In a social environment where Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks is openly embraced, what follows is the breakdown of women’s old strategy of looking for men who best embody the both genetic and provisioning qualities and focusing primarily on one or the other in separate men depending on her state of need. A state of Open Hypergamy can only result from a social shift from enforced monogamy to female-primary polyandry.

Our feminine-primary social order then (Blue Pill) conditions men, via social reward and punishment, to fulfill these roles to be serviceable to women at various stages of their reproductive and life needs. I’ve joked that today women see men as either breeding stock or draft animals, but there’s truth to this. And men fulfill these roles in an effort to effect their own reproductive strategies that they’ve been socialized and acculturated to believe are in their best interests.

In the wake of the Sexual Revolution western cultures have removed all social stigmas that used to surround single motherhood – and even elective single motherhood. This is the necessary result of transitioning from male-primary monogamy to a female-primary polyandry and social support mechanisms designed to maintain it. Men are only now learning how to maneuver and adapt their own sexual strategies to this transition.

However, in order to accept their roles in this female-primary sexual marketplace they must sublimate their evolved drive to ensure their own paternity.

Open Cuckoldry is a Beta Male Sexual Strategy

In a socio-sexual state of Sandbergian Open Hypergamy the next logical step is convincing men to repress their innate need to know paternity and teach them that cuckoldry (and in particular, self-initiated cuckoldry) is in their reproductive interests. I’ve written about this in Open Cuckoldry. The definition of cuckoldry is tightly controlled to only mean “a woman deceiving a man to believe the children she’s born are his when they are in fact the progeny of another man.” When defined this way “cuckoldry” is perceived to be rare – though even this is changing with the advent of home DNA tests like 23 and Me. However, the latent purpose of cuckoldry is to effect women’s sexual strategy in securing the best genetic material (and validational sex) from one man while procuring the best provisioning and parental investment (and transactional sex) from another man. Socially accepted Cuckoldry is how this is effected in a feminine-primary social order.

In fact, cuckoldry is only socially acceptable when it happens in a gynocentric social framework. In just 60 years cuckoldry has become an accepted reproductive strategy for both men and women. By shifting the social norms to encourage men to sublimate their innate drive to know paternity we prioritize women’s sexual strategy above mens’. By reinforcing women’s ‘cuckolding’ men via socially acceptable means we encourage men to see adopting women’s sexual strategy as their own.

We convince men that this is a “lifestyle choice” when in fact it is social engineering that selects his genetic interests out.

  • Single Mothers —> Stepfathers
  • Female Promiscuity —> Polyandry
  • Open Cuckoldry —> “Poly” Lifestyles

To better come to terms with this shift in contemporary intrasexual strategies I propose that “cuckoldry” be defined as ” The state in which a man, either by deception or being socially convinced, assumes the parental investment responsibilities of a child he did not biologically sire”. Men adopting children due to impotency, and doing so of their own volition might not meet this definition because their choice is considered first in the decision and not as a result of seeing their choosing to be a foster father as an extension of their sexual strategy.

That’s an important distinction; having the choice to adopt versus adopting a single mother’s children as a means to his own reproduction. Many men who involve themselves with single mothers initially do so as a means to reproducing with her himself; ergo, a sexual strategy.

Wifing up a single mother and adopting the children sired by another man is a Beta male sexual strategy that has developed in the wake of feminine-social primacy. The cost of his own reproduction, assuming this occurs is, is an exchange of his reproductive efforts and resources invested in another man’s genetic legacy – a choice that was made for him, via a woman’s sexual strategy, before he ever entered the picture. As reproductive stresses continue to escalate in modern (western) societies, more Beta men will see (subconsciously) accepting their own cuckolding as a necessary state if they are to reproduce at all. With 43% of children being born out of wedlock today it’s easy to see that an ever increasing number of men will chose to exchange their innate drive for paternity for reproductive access.

“Poly” Lifestyles are being socially reinforced to facilitate women’s sexual strategies

Men’s drive for paternity is more difficult to sublimate in Alpha men than Beta men. In Promiscuity Tim Birkhead details the innate drives male animals have with respect to ensuring their own paternity:

The issue of paternity is at the core of much of men’s behavior – and for good evolutionary reasons. In our primeval past men who invested in children which were not their own would, on average, have left fewer descendants than those who reared only their own genetic offspring. As a consequence men were, and continue to be, preoccupied with paternity and this has shaped not only many male behaviors but, perhaps surprisingly, some female behaviors as well. The most obvious way in which men’s preoccupation with paternity manifests itself is in jealousy – watching a partner and keeping her away from potential competitors.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 33-34

In my counseling I have had to deal with the constant of jealousy in every man I’ve talked to about a breakup or divorce.

“Rollo, why can’t I get the thought of her fucking another guy out of my head? The thought makes me physically sick.”

There is a physical aspect to jealousy for men and particularly so for deeply pair-bonded Beta men whose sexual strategy it is to invest more fully into one partner due to a scarcity mentality (see strategic pluralism theory). When I talked about men committing suicide in Zeroed Out I should’ve stressed the importance that mate guarding and jealousy play in a man’s physical condition when he’s had his ‘soulmate’ leave him for another man.

There are two latent purposes in men evolving a capacity for this physical distress – fomenting parental investment and ensuring paternity via mate guarding. Why is it that men take so much longer to get over a woman than women for men? For women the War Brides theory explains this neatly, but for men the long physical disconnection comes from our innate drive to ensure paternity and the confirmation of mate loss to a rival male. This is the degree of preoccupation with paternity Birkhead describes above – it is so existentially important men evolved physical manifestation for it.

Now, if you can stomach the new age sophistry and rationalizations of Dr. Geoff Miller for a “Poly” lifestyle you might want to watch a bit of this video to grasp the next concept I’m developing here:

I’ve included this here because it’s a prime illustration of the cognitive dissonance necessary today to justify a Beta male’s acceptance of his own cuckoldry and laundering it to convince himself that it’s actually in his own best interests. After all the confirmation of the importance of, and preoccupation with, male paternity, (and the sometimes violent fallout that results from it) it seems counterintuitive for a man to convince himself that sharing his woman is at all a good idea.

Have a look at the collage of images I’ve used for today’s header picture. This is a collection of relatively recent articles promoting the idea that “poly”, if not outright cuckoldry, is a positive, progressive trend. Why is poly in its various forms so important to us socially? The free love generation and 70’s swingers didn’t have anything like the impetus we see now. We have more than enough research showing that women’s capacity to pair bond with men in the long term decreases with every new sex partner. We know that (Beta) men can feel a natural, physical jealousy at just the thought of their pair bonded mate copulating with another man. Even Dr. Fleischman admits she struggles with “feelings of jealousy” in their “poly marriage”. But here we have the promotion of the idea that cuckoldry actually makes a man ‘more secure in his masculinity’. Why?

Why pretend to monogamy while openly practicing open cuckoldry? Why not simply stay single, practice non-exclusivity and honestly spin plates?

Because unfettered Hypergamy is the preeminent sexual strategy in this era. And men have adapted their sexual strategies to be contingent on it.

I believe what were observing in all this is men adapting to the changes women have installed in the global sexual marketplace according to feminine social primacy. In Strategic Pluralism Theory, lower SMV men are by necessity predisposed to investing their reproductive efforts in a single woman (K selection) rather than applying himself to spreading those effort to various women (r selection). Across the animal kingdom female sexual monogamy is the exception rather than the rule.

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

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 43

In today’s global sexual marketplace Beta men are socially rewarded for abandoning their sexual strategy and to abandon their innate need to ascertain paternity. This is done by promoting social and status rewards for compliance with the objective roles women need men to play in their sexual strategy. We saw exactly this last Fathers Day. Step-fathers, the dutiful cuckolds, were celebrated while biological fathers are largely vilified. Single mothers who assume the role of “father” are likewise celebrated.

But (Beta) men adapt themselves to the role that they believe will best serve their reproductive interests. Thus, we have a chorus of men police their thoughts and the thoughts of other men to affirm their beliefs in that strategy.

We have men write sanctimonious, self-affirming essays about how they believe they are more “secure in their masculinity” for allowing, encouraging, the women’s they’re ostensibly bonded with to have sex with other men. Then they wait for their male peers to pat them on the back for ‘evolving above their biology’ and their naturally jealous impulses.

This is not seeing the forest for the tree though. What is the larger function of all of this? Why is the ‘progressive’ take on self-affirming cuckoldry one that Beta men are supposed to find rewarding?

Because it’s necessary to perpetuate the unilateral control over the human reproductive process men ceded to women after the Sexual Revolution.

The New Paternity

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment.

Law 32, The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene

I was reminded of this quote as I listened to a woman talk over me on the Pat Campbell show a couple weeks ago. I’ve written several essays regarding the uglier aspects of Paternity and by discussing them I’ve discovered that the evolved realities of how men and women regard paternity is always a touchy subject. I’ve given a lot of thought as to why this is recently.

Before I dig into why I want to throw out a quick caveat. I’m likely going to make people uncomfortable with this. A lot of ego investment is involved in our sexual strategies and the beliefs that underpin them. That means when someone is critical of them it’s hard not to take it as an attack. Robert Greene was right, anger does follow disenchantment when you strip the veneer off beliefs you built a lifestyle on. Just know my intent here is not to attack anyone with what follows. I only want to explore some sensitive material.

As of this writing I’m half way through reading the book, Promiscuity by Tim Birkhead. If you’re a Red Pill evo-psych wonk like me I highly recommend it, but be prepared. If you still cling to comforting Blue Pill idealism about monogamy this material will challenge your presumptions about the nature of men and women’s sexual strategies. It’s a clinical, evolutionary, exploration of the mechanics of promiscuity in animals, however, it explains a lot of unpleasant truths about men and women. What I’ve read thus far confirms a lot of what the Red Pill has been considering for almost two decades now, and this is the objectuve stuff critics like to paint as “negativity”.

If you lean towards the nihilism of the so-called Black Pill this book will give you all the fodder you need to sink deeper into your coma of hopelessness – so be warned. Personally, I’ve found it fascinating and it’s pulling threads for me that I didn’t even know needed unraveling. However, in doing so, just my voicing the mechanics of how promiscuity is intertwined with men’s existential fear of paternity is enough to get me into trouble with people who’d rather not think about such things. Both libertine hedonists and virtuous conservatives will have a problem with the questions the book asks.

Men and women’s sexual strategies are fundamentally antagonistic towards the other.

A long time ago I was asked to write a post about whether I believed Game was Adversarial. And while I don’t think Game necessarily needs to be adversarial (seduction requires a willing participant), the existential fears of men and women are at odds with the other.

Men’s biological, masculine, imperative is to spread the seed – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Men’s compulsion for pornography (over centuries actually) is the most obvious confirmation of this. I’ve made this observation a few times before; men’s sexual strategy, as a result of our biology, is inherently ‘r‘ selected. Because men can potentially reproduce thousands of times per ejaculation, and because men’s investment costs is far lower than women’s in reproduction, men’s most pragmatic, inherent strategy is an innate drive for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.

Women’s sexual strategy is inherently ‘K‘ selection because women’s reproductive investment costs are so high. Gestation, nurturing, provisioning and protection of offspring are a few of the evolutionary imperatives driving women’s innate sexual strategy. Thus, Hypergamy becomes a woman’s prime directive in that strategy. For most of a woman’s life she is the sexual selector while the male is the performer. This selection priority changes as a woman’s sexual market value decays and a man’s value increases, or as defined by her circumstances, but the innate presumption that ‘men perform, women choose’ is the evolved framework in play.

But women’s sexual strategy is dualistic in nature. Women are far more promiscuous than most men would idealistically like to believe. Women evolved to consolidate reproductively on the best genetic potential in men and the best parental investment potential. In the Red Pill we euphemistically refer to this dynamic as Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks. This is the foundation of women’s sexual strategy; ideally pairing in the long term with a man who definitively satisfies both sides of the Hypergamous equation.

The main themes in Promiscuity are sperm competition, the prevalence (and concealment) of female promiscuity (men’s is pretty well expected) and the evolutionary expediency cuckoldry. All of these themes are considered in animals ranging from worms to human beings, but also in respect to general evolutionary function in these themes. My interest in this stems from how it relates to a Red Pill understanding of intersexual dynamics.

My first consideration: sperm competition is a highly contested theory and I’m not a microbiologist. People have a variety of ego invested beliefs riding on whether theories hold up on either side of the sperm war debate. This is a contentious arena of science that’s had social influences try to cover up inconvenient truths or redirect focuses to avoid unraveling those ego-investments. I’m laying this out here because I have no doubt critics will try to dismiss even the questions that point to ugly truths that don’t align with their ideals.

That said, there are many interesting evidences that imply an evolved function in sperm competition. For instance, there are studies showing that men who return to a pair bonded woman after a long separation tend to produce more ejaculate and higher sperm count when they copulate after that separation. This then dovetails into another theory; in the case of multiple male copulations with a female, the last male to copulate with her tends to be the one to successfully conceive with her. If you’re interested in the hard evidence for why human beings are not naturally monogamous, this is your book. Monogamy is a social adaptation that has the latent function of (ostensibly) ensuring male paternity.

Most of the concepts surrounding sperm competition point to one thing – sperm competition in men evolved as a contingency to women’s sexual selection process and their need for concealed promiscuity to pragmatically effect it. As I said, men and women’s sexual strategies are antagonistic towards the other. When one’s evolved interests gains the dominant position the other adapts a contingency. In a Red Pill perspective I see the advent of Game in the age of mass communication as one of those contingencies. There are many others older than Game though.

All of this points to the fundamentals I outlined in Sexual Selection & The Existential Fear: insuring paternity is men’s evolutionary prime directive, even at the biological level. Women’s cuckoldry of men (in its various forms) is an evolutionary adaptation to insure that women’s sexual strategy – ultimately unlimited access to the best genetics and the best provisioning – supersedes men’s strategy. Socially enforced monogamy is also a strategic positioning of men’s reproductive greater good; though, in today’s sexual marketplace, that old advantage has become a crippling liability for men. Legally enforced monogamy (i.e. marriage in its various forms) has been transitioned to an insurance of women’s provisioning needs.

This is the nuts & bolts of the antagonistic nature of out competing sexual strategies. However, in later stages it is in our evolutionary best interests to parentally invest in our offspring. For men this entails the risky prospects of investing in children they didn’t sire. The antagonism between intersexual strategies is more easily observed before pair bonding (in your single days) in a couple, but these strategy conflicts persist into the formation of a long term relationship. The Red Pill adage, “Marriage is no insulation from Hypergamy” has never been more accurate.

Ideally, a pair bond would be found in a long term union of a man and a woman where the compromising of either’s sexual strategy serves to ensure the survival of the offspring created by the two. As I’ve always said, men and women are better together than we are apart, but nature, it seems, prepares us for a less than mutually beneficial union. We have evolved reproductive failsafes that are influential in our belief sets.

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

This is an important maxim to keep in mind here. Even when a loving couple consciously prioritizes their relationship, parenting and family above their visceral natures, that nature pragmatically adapted for a conflict between strategies. In The New Polyandry I proposed that in our present gynocentric social order. women’s sexual strategy is the socially preeminent one. That is to say, we are taught to consider the fulfillment and support of women’s sexual strategy to be the ‘correct’ one for both sexes to prioritize.

On the surface this seems like the most progressive, socially stabilizing strategy to follow. Who’s going to argue against family creation being the foundation of a functioning society? We’re conditioned to think that fulfilling women’s strategy should also be men’s priority because it serves this noble end – family creation – but there’s a lot more to it than what we’re expected to focus on.

In contrast, men’s sexual strategy and even the idea that men’s interests would be a consideration, is demonized in gynocentric society. As a result men’s adaptive strategies are manifested covertly in other ways.

Provider Dads

Prior to the Sexual Revolution a woman having a child out of wedlock was scandalous. The stigma of becoming a single mother was something of a deterrent against the worst effects of women’s Hypergamous nature. Social and religious mores were a check and balance against ‘illegitimate’ births and incomplete families.

Today 40% of children are born out of wedlock. All the stigma of the prior generations have been replaced with women embracing single motherhood as a badge of honor. On a social scale heroism replaced shame, and women laid claim to a right to motherhood irrespective of whether a father was present or even necessary in the formation of a family. Child rearing shifted from a marriage based model to a child support based model.

This Fathers Day the predictable denigration of negative biological father caricatures versus the noble step-father ‘manning up’ to save a single mother’s family were in full effect on Twitter. In a post-SexRev world, in a gynocentric society, the (Beta) male who consolidates and fulfills a woman’s sexual strategy by accepting the parental investment responsibilities of another man’s children is lauded as a hero.

And that’s the connection I’m making in reading Promiscuity; women’s sexual strategy is the socially preeminent one in an era that’s expanded a local sexual marketplace to a global one. Unfettered Hypergamy, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks free from consequence, is what has defined our gender narrative since the late 60s, but in doing so it’s cunningly raised 2-3 generations of men to seeing their participation in women’s reproductive imperatives as a form of Game. In Beta Game and the Adaptations series I outlined how men will adapt social and behavioral contingencies to improve their chances of reproduction (getting laid). Men will readily adopt new methodologies to meet new reproductive challenges presented to them by women. However, there is also an adaptive, self-convinced, belief set that results from the conditioning presented to men in that adaption.

A prime illustration of this ‘programming’ just occurred last weekend. In this era Father’s Day has become an occasion to lift up single motherhood to reinforce the idea that a mother is the only parent necessary in the development of a well rounded child-to-adult. We no longer celebrate fathers. Instead we hold up single mothers and by association the heroic men who “stepped up and became a better father than any biological father was willing to be.” These heartwarming tales of the dutiful Beta who assumed the parental investment responsibilities of irresponsible or abusive ‘biological fathers’ abound on Fathers Day.

This narrative serves two purposes; first, it reinforces the blamelessness of the single mother’s complicity in bearing the children of the horrible biological father. At the same time it builds her up as a wise matron for choosing the dutiful Beta who was willing to fulfill the parental investment / provisioning role that the biological (Alpha) father would not.

Secondly, it reinforces the social convention that prompts Beta men to see fulfilling that role as a means to his own reproduction. The gynocentric social order loudly broadcast, across all forms of media, the idea that men who assume the parental investment responsibilities of other men – men who single mothers chose to breed with – are the highest form of hero. The provider “dad” to celebrate far above that of the male who only provided his sperm is the necessary element to maintaining Hypergamy as the socially correct sexual strategy.

I’ve proposed in the past that women no longer look for, nor expect to find, the man who best embodies the ideal aspects of Alpha Seed and Beta Need. There are only two types of men in the global sexual marketplace: the man women wish to reproduce with and the men women wish to be the provider of their security with. As social media and a feminine-primary social consciousness expands this distinction between Cad and Dad becomes more defined. In response to this reproductive reality men willingly settle into these roles as an adaptive sexual strategy.

Strategic Pluralism Theory

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 most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

from Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

Men today are adapting to the New Polyandry by adopting the role and the rewards inherent in accepting themselves as either breeder or provider male.

This is the new Beta Game then; forgive and absolve a single mother of her sexual strategy and the consequences of it if it means a higher likelihood of reproducing with her in the future. The price for potentially siring offspring with a single mother is assuming the parental investment responsibilities of a (Alpha) man who can exercise his own sexual strategy successfully. For some men this entails the risk of never passing on his genes to the next generation. It means the man we are supposed to hate on Fathers Day will have his genetic legacy ensured by the same Beta males who vilify him at the expense of their own reproduction.

When I’ve made these ugly facts apparent to men and women on Twitter I’m told how callous I am for viewing things so viscerally. “I think it’s noble for a guy to adopt a single mother’s children” is the basic idea. But why do we believe this is a noble, humane, act on the part of a man?

Just 60 years ago single mothers were to be avoided. Providing for ‘bastard’ children was a shame until the Brady Bunch made the idea a bit more popular. Now we hold up being a supportive step-dad above the status of an actual biological father. Why?

Because our social order has successfully convince 2-3 generations (in only 60 years) that fulfilling a woman’s sexual imperatives is the highest good a man can do in his life.

This is one example of how our feminine-primary social order effects women’s sexual strategy (and life strategies) in a societal scope. Mothers provide sexual access to the Beta Provider who completes her reproductive imperatives sometimes at the cost of his own reproductive interests.

In the next essay in this series I’ll be exploring another “new” social convention that effects women’s reproductive imperatives.