physical attractiveness

Strength of Interest

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I had a couple of questions from the SoSuave Forum‘s (yes, I’m still a mod there) Judge Nismo I thought I’d take a crack at:

G’ morning Rollo. I got a couple questions for you that I don’t think you touched on in your book…or I may have overlooked.

1. What is your opinion on the Celebrity Maxim?

That is, I know you see it a lot in your Rational Male comments and on this board (i.e. Would she flake out on Brad Pitt? Would she make George Clooney wait for sex? She wouldn’t confuse Channing Tatum, etc.) I’ve even used it a lot on here, usually saying you wouldn’t fall asleep if you had a date with Katy Perry, and you wouldn’t pull a last minute flake text with Kate Upton, and you wouldn’t have to babysit if you had Shakira ready to bang!

If there’s three things I’ve learned from writing in the Manosphere for the past 12 years it’s this; no matter how apt, never use an allegory to illustrate a point, never try to relate a fictional story, movie or character to a real world dynamic and never hold up famous celebrities as common reference examples of broader, mundane dynamics.

The temptation to do so stems from a want for a common point of reference. However, appealing to a highly recognizable exemplar of a dynamic only makes picking apart the known particulars about that individual a priority – not on really grasping the dynamic itself.

I see this in the ‘sphere occasionally, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never committed these sins myself. For the most part, and certainly as far as my own readership goes, I think many of the best writers and the commentariat of the ‘sphere are very intelligent men. That’s not to account for the occasional troll, but I’ve found that even an OCD troll still needs to be clever in the ‘sphere.

That said, it’s just this preponderance of intelligence that makes men take illustrative examples as face value facts. Using celebrities as examples of commonality in purpose just smacks of the Apex Fallacy.

“….the Apex fallacy is the idea that we assign the characteristics of the highest visibility members of a group to all members of that group.”

If you’re at all familiar with the controversy surrounding the Apex Fallacy, feminists and manginas alike decided to commandeer wikipedia to paste this as a Men’s Rights misappropriation of the definition, but in actuality the true definition cuts both ways. So while women misappropriate the highest visibility men to associate a totality of the “patriarchy”, men, on the other hand, misappropriate the highest echelon men with examples of common inference of a dynamic.

In English, those celebs aren’t you or me or any layperson you deal with daily. I get the inference of course, and the message is usually one about incentives being strong enough to prompt behaviors. However, what Nismo is getting at is really less about the validity of those illustrations and more about genuine desire:

I ask since it’s quite a big trope in the manosphere…

2. What is your take on the one strike rule?

You do have a 3 strikes article on Rational Male, and I did read it. On this board, it’s quite common to see situations with chicks go like this:

– She flaked on me, she is deleted.
– She stopped responding to my texts and calls, automatic out.
– She wants to bring some friends along, sorry this is one on one.

I could go on and on, most of these situations often get read by red pill men as low interest, thus move on or become a beta orbiter. Yes, I do online dating and work 2 jobs, but I do have a one strike policy.

Sure, sometimes life will truly get in the way, but most men who are red pill will likely move on if there’s low interest. We all know not to waste time with uninterested chicks because they won’t put out. Heck, the sick excuse is often times a blow off, and lately, death in the family has been disguised as blowing someone off.

Zero Tolerance

The problem most men have with a Zero Tolerance policy is that you’re not George Clooney and you’re not Brad Pitt, but moreover, most men still cling to Blue Pill idealisms and the conditioned hope that women will see the “real” men they think women have a magical sensitivity to detect. Thus, they play by the script and hold out for the real desire they believe women should have a capacity for with them.

This is why Blue Pill men get angry at the 3-Strikes rule; that scarcity mentality colors their interaction with women to the point that anything counter to playing the patient, devoted, “prove-my-quality” white knightery role invalidates everything they’ve sacrificed and waited so patiently for up to that point.

They’re afraid of throwing the baby out with the bath water, and damn it, if you suggest doing anything other than what makes their patience worthwhile you’re a misogynistic prick.

If these men could pause with any insight they’d understand that any threshold – one strike, three strikes – suggested by myself or the manosphere isn’t about punishing a woman’s indecisiveness, but rather a pragmatic vetting meant to be efficient for men. That tolerance policy is about conservation of resources and time, not so much retribution (though I’me sure some men entertain that).

  • She flakes on you with no counter offer or marginal reframe? –
    Message: Insufficient interest
  • Stops responding to communications (and possibly resumes after a period)? – The Medium is the Message
  • Wants to bring friends along to a date? –
    Message: you are a rich resource to be exploited, or her interest is so low that she foresees a need to bring friends along to make her date with you entertaining.

The Prince with Interest

What Nismo is comparing here is really an evaluation of interest a woman has in you. I’ve gone into this in the past:

Women with high interest level (IL) wont confuse you. When a woman wants to fuck you she’ll find a way to fuck you. If she’s fluctuating between being into you and then not, put her away for a while and spin other plates. If she sorts it out for herself and pursues you, then you are still playing in your frame and you maintain the value of your attention to her. It’s when you patiently while away your time wondering what the magic formula is that’ll bring her around, that’s when you lean over into her frame. You need her more than she needs you and she will dictate the terms of her attentions.

From an evolutionary perspective Hypergamy can’t afford to wait once a woman’s filtering mechanism is satisfied that a man passes for an Alpha. Women will break rules for Alpha men and create more rules for Beta men to have access to her. Keep in mind that first part; women will make access easy for a man she perceives as an SMV superior. Hypergamy always seeks a better-than deserved SMV benefit.

So to use the apex example, no, a woman can’t afford to confuse Channing Tatum. Mix in the behavioral influences a woman’s ovulatory chemistry predisposes her to with that SMV+ benefit perception and you’ve got dilated pupils, seductive ornamentation, lower vocal intonations and an elevated heart rate – Estrus.

As you might guess, this poses a problem for most guys because, lets face it, most of us aren’t examples of this apex. Even when we make dramatic leaps in self-improvement and physical transformation it’s hard to shake our former self-impressions and our previous degrees of self-confidence.

Back in the early days of SoSuave there was a concept we’d use that I think had a lot of merit – the concept of the Prince. For many men just coming into a Red Pill awareness meant re-imagining oneself in a new, more intrinsically valued light.

For instance, after you understand the basic psychology of why a technique like Cocky & Funny or Amused Mastery works with women, personally applying those dynamics requires a man to view himself in a more valuable context.

As I said, Hypergamy always seeks a better-than deserved SMV benefit, so it follows that a man should at least reconsider himself as that “better-than her SMV” prospect. Irrespective of that being a reality or not, the idea is a sound one. In fact it’s a law of power:

Law 25 – Re-Create Yourself

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you.  Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience.  Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

And also:

Law 34 – Be Royal in your Own Fashion:  Act like a King to be treated like one

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated; In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you.  For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others.  By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

In Amused Mastery, it helps to actually have some context of mastery to source as amusement.

Needless to say, asking a former Blue Pill Beta to simultaneously digest a new Red Pill awareness and revalue his self-worth is a pretty tall order. As I mention in Rejection & Revenge as a man, your existence will be defined by how you deal with rejection, so for a majority of men who’ve been hammered flat for the better part of a lifetime by women’s rejection telling him to adopt the mindset of a Prince is alien to him.

Furthermore, much of his feminine-conditioned self-perception has always taught him to be self-conscious and respectful of women’s default authority. It’s part of men’s previous Beta Game to want to identify with the feminine in order to prove how alike a man is with a woman. This conditioning is really a plan to force compliance to women’s sexual strategy from men, but it’s sold on the belief that being more feminine-like, feminine-sensitive, will set a Beta man apart from other brutish men who aren’t.

When you consider his previous degree of ego-investment in his conditioning, you can get a real appreciation of the unlearning a Red Pill man must do. It’s very difficult for most guys to consider themselves a Prince when they’ve been taught reverent deference to women all their lives.

Qualities of The Prince(ss)

A Prince’s time is valuable. His efforts and attention are gifts he bestows on the woman he’s interested in, and as such that woman’s esteem should be validated by it. She is envied by other women because of the Prince’s interest in her; it confirms there is something about her that sets her apart from other women. Her role becomes one of both humbling gratitude and excited, almost childlike, anticipations of him.

If that comes off like a pipe dream or a fake-it-till-you-make-it motivational screed, it’s because most men are so inured by a lifetime conditioning designed to hold them in the role of expectant, reverent, and deferring lover if they can perform to a woman’s standards. So ingrained is that subservience that a Princess’ acceptance of a man is exalted to an appreciation of spiritual, metaphysical, significance. God ordained her acceptance of him, the fates conspired or he “just got lucky”.

Beta men, in their Blue Pill expectations of women being rational agents, are often dumbfounded by the woman who compulsively returns over and over again to the Alpha ‘asshole’ who doesn’t respect, appreciate and love her like she deserves – like he would if she’d just come to her senses. We call that guy the emotional tampon, but what he doesn’t get is that the woman he’s orbiting is locked in a cycle that only a man with an SMV above her own can induce.

Even if that valuation is just perceptual, a woman’s Hypergamous optimization efforts will predispose her to wanting to lock that man down. This is the danger of relying on apex examples of a dynamic – women must still operate within their respective frames and within their capacity to accurately evaluate the SMV of the men she can realistically attract.

That semi-abusive Jerk boyfriend she loves so much? He’s not Channing Tatum or Brad Pitt, but contextually he’s the guy with the strength of her interest.

Obesity Culture

Protein_World

In the almost 4 years I’ve had The Rational Male up and running I have neither monetized nor commercialized the blog. I began with the explicit intent of making everything I do accessible and in the past year and a half since the first book published I’ve turned down at least seven different (lucrative) requests to put ads or promos on the blog.

I’m happy to say I’ll still never monetize this blog, but if I were to offer ad space my first spot would be reserved for Protein World. I can’t vouch for the quality of their products beyond what I know in general of protein supplements from years of bodybuilding, but that’s not the point. The point is that these guys had the balls not only to stick to their guns, but to double down when social justice warriors and body fat acceptance “activists” took it upon themselves to systematically vandalize their most recent ad campaign.

Protein_World_2 Protein_World_1

I’ve made my living in brand development for over 20 years now, these guys deserve some respect. Granted, at this point they have no option but to go on offense, but in today’s fem-centric social order this is an anomaly.

I’m drawing attention to this selective vandalism to illustrate a larger point; in a feminine-primary, feminine-dominant social order any reminder of how that order might be challenged (especially on a visceral level) must be met with a selectively sexist countermeasure.

You see, what Protein World’s campaign does is remind less than physically ideal women that despite all social efforts to convince them otherwise, men still evaluate a woman’s sexual market value based on her physical appeal. No amount ‘personal acceptance’ or clinging to internal worth and validation will change the sexual response men evolved to optimize over a hundred thousand years.

I covered this briefly when I explained the misconceptions of Robin Korth in Separating Values:

Conflating Values

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

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

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

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

[…]

Feminist ‘equalism’ is always shocked that evolved human biology and its feral predispositions won’t cooperate with it, but such is the frustration with any social order or ideology which fails to account for the realities of human being’s natural states and biological imperatives. There is a conceived, higher-order expectation that, through freewill, conviction or some other learned, reasoned means, people will rise above the influence of their base nature and comply with what they believe will make for an idealized existence.

What egalitarian equalisim, struggles against is basic human instinct, nature and impulse.

This refusal of understanding base motivations is at the heart of these “activists” outrage. Feminized egalitarian equalism fosters the idea that men and women are essentially equal beings with different genitalia and a co-equal capacity for rational agency. Under those auspices men and women should be able to bypass their inherent, evolved, sexual prompts and make the conscious rational effort to focus their arousal and attraction on the more intrinsic personal worth of the opposite sex.

In the egalitarian plan Hypergamy should be as self-consciously sublimated for women as men’s should be for repressing any expression of being sexually aroused by a woman for anything other than her intrinsic personal worth. Any man with a baseline awareness of female behavior knows how effective this plan is.

But that’s not to stop women from simultaneously being offended by visceral expressions of men’s sexual ideals while holding a double standard for their own physically ideal men.

Protein_World_3

You see Protein World applies an equal standard across their ad campaigns, and the message, when paired like so, is one of encouraging a physical ideal for both sexes. To my knowledge there was no initial outrage over the male version of the ad on the right. There was no outcry or messages scrawled on these ads stating “Contrary to popular opinion, men’s bodies do not need to be changed for the beach or anywhere else.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the indignation of yet one more female double standard, so lets back up for a moment and examine why this is.

The most common refrain you’ll hear from Blue Pill trained men and less than physically ideal women is that men have a predilection to sexually objectify women, to see them as objects rather than their esoteric notion of “human beings”. What they fail to understand is that this objectification is exactly what the male brain evolved for.

Objectification Your Honor

In our tribal beginnings men’s sexual response, his very reproductive survival, depended on his capacity for sexual immediacy. While women may require foreplay and pre-coital stimulation, men had to be ready to fuck and go at a moment’s notice. Survival, mate poaching, even the uncertainty of women’s ovulatory/estrus phase of her menstrual cycle, all these factors and more predicated a need for instant sexual reflexiveness for men.

That reflexiveness required a capacity for a man to see a woman, evaluate her sexual/fertility value to him (the boner test) and take action accordingly. About two years ago on another forum, I’d gotten involved in a discussion regarding this sexual evaluation reflex and how women were literally dumbfounded that men would “size up” a woman sexually within the space of a few short seconds. Even men who were only peripherally aware of women outside of their visual focus would make SMV assessments of those women.

In order for this assessment to take place the mental construct of perceiving women as objects was a necessary evolutionary step. The simple truth is that it’s part of men’s neurological firmware to see women’s bodies as objects. It’s a well studied fact that when men see an arousing woman’s semi-nude body it triggers the same area of our brains associated with tool use. Sexual objectification is a survival feature for men, not a bug.

On a limbic level women understand this aspect of male nature. In a very visceral way women know that men put a primary value on their bodies and sexual availability. Ads like this only remind women of, and highlight the fact, that despite all of its concentrated social effort the Feminine Imperative simply cannot undo thousands of years of men evolving that physical objectification – and successfully reproducing as a result of it.

Generation Hypergamy

In a social order that follows the dictates of female sexual strategy it’s unsurprising that women would seek to eliminate that aspect of the male sexual response. Only by controlling that response can women completely enforce Hypergamy as the predominant socio-sexual strategy. These ads offend that desire for control. They remind a woman that her Hypergamous sexual selectivity is (at least presumptively) still mitigated by men being aroused by their physicality, objectifying them and desiring them for reproduction.

Women’s innate solipsism prevents them from ever truly attaining the egalitarian equalist fantasy they ride in order to consolidate that control. Women’s hindbrains want a better-than deal with regards to Hypergamy. Hypergamy doesn’t seek its own level, it wants, it expects a better than deserved exchange for its investment with a man, and it desperately wants assurances that its getting it.

Thus, on a Hypergamous social scale we see that Protein World’s male focused ad gets no such vandalism. The message is clear – It is Men who must perform, Men who need to change themselves, optimize themselves and strive for the highest physical ideal to be granted female sexual approval. Women should be accepted, respected and expected to inspire genuine desire irrespective of men’s physical ideals.

In 2011 I wrote Women’s Physical Standards and I think it bears quoting here:

This may come as a shock to the “men have impossibly high beauty standards” gnashing of feminist teeth, but it is in fact women who have a much higher standard for an idealized male physique. For all the endless kvetching from women about men wanting “living barbie dolls”, it’s men who’ve historically displayed much broader interests in female body habitus than women ever have.

You see, men will very readily cater their physical sexual “preferences” in accordance with what has proven sexually successful for them in past experiences. In other words, men tend to return to the same watering hole they found to be plentiful in the past. These preferences of convenience manifest themselves as ‘fetishes’ for men. And you don’t even need all that extensive research to prove this.  All one need do is search the vast variety of porn available catering to the physical attributes that men will fetishize. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass, small ass, every hair color of the rainbow, shaved snatch, hairy snatch, teen girls to MILFs and older, tan, pale, ultra-thin to the ubiquitous BBWs (Big Beautiful women). Ladies, name the physical attribute(s), and there’s a fan-group just waiting to bang you. Rule 34 was never more provable than in men’s willingness to fuck damn near any physical demographic of women – just ask the female midgets catering to that fetish of porn.

On the other hand, from a purely physical perspective, it’s women’s idealized masculine form that hasn’t changed in millennia. While there may have been a rubenesque period when men loved the fatties of the 1600′s, no such era ever existed for women’s physical preferences. The classic broad chest, wide shoulders, six-pack abs and squared jaws of greco-roman athleticism are still the idealized male form that has graced EVERY romance novel cover in existence. I’m still waiting for someone to post me a link for a dating site that caters exclusively to women’s fetish of BBMs – average to good looking, fit women specifically looking overweight men. Executive Introductions caters to women seeking affluent, influential men, but women just looking for overweight men, that site doesn’t exist.

On more than a few occasions I’ve made the connection that what we see in a feminine-primary societal order is really a reflection of the female sexual strategy writ large. When we see a culture of obesity, a culture of body fat acceptance and a culture that presumes a natural evolved order of innate differences between the sexes should be trumped by self-impressions of female personal worth, we’re viewing a society beholden to the insecurities inherent in women’s Hypergamy.

A feminized, feminist, ordered social structure is one founded on ensuring the most undeserving women, by virtue of being women, are entitled to, and assured of, the best Hypergamous options by conscripting and conditioning men to comply with Hypergamy’s dictates.

End Note

It’s been brought to my attention that Roosh will be appearing on the Dr. Oz show tomorrow.

I’ll admit I’m a bit apprehensive of this “interview” as it smacks of red meat for Dr. Oz’s largely overweight viewing demographic (not to mention his obese wife). That said, this interview came at a good time since it should give readers a first hand look at exactly the rationales and social conventions I illustrated in today’s post. Keep this material fresh in your mind while you watch.

Spring Break

https://twitter.com/BroHumors/status/589900393632690178

I apologize in advance for dropping this now, but I felt it would benefit my college age readers at this time. Your regularly scheduled introspectives will resume shortly.

I had this clip tweeted to me this morning and it reminded me of a very old post I started on SoSuave with regard to the statistical probabilities of a breakup throughout the year. Keep in mind, these stats were from a survey 5 years ago.

amazing_facts_facebook_breakups

I watched a TED talk the other day from David McCandless called “The beauty of data visualizations“. It was quite amazing and included lots of different datasets. One of them was about Facebook and breakups. David and his team scanned over 10 000 status-updates and set out to learn more about when people broke up. 

This is what they learned:

  • A big peak right before Spring Break
  • Most breakups are announced on Mondays
  • People like to start the summer being single
  • A big peak right before Christmas
  • The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day (thank God)

Back when I first published Wait For It? (it was actually based on a much older post I did on SoSuave) I took a lot of shit for suggesting women in the proper ovulatory disposition were more than open to casual sex with the right guy, in the right place, in the right time:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #3

Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait.

When a woman makes you wait for sex you are not her highest priority. Sexuality is spontaneous chemical reaction between two parties, not a process of negotiation. It’s sex first, then relationship, not the other way around. A woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. She will fly across the country, crawl under barbwire, climb in through your second story bedroom window, fuck the shit out of you and wait patiently inside your closet if your wife comes home early from work – women who want to fuck will find a way to fuck. The girl who tells you she needs to be comfortable and wants a relationship first is the same girl who fucked the hot guy in the foam cannon party in Cancun on spring break just half an hour after meeting him.

If I have an addendum to this it would be that, in light of the growing pride women are taking in Open Hypergamy today, women in their Party Years actively schedule their “casual” indiscretions. Those mate guarding instincts you feel with your “great girlfriend” around Spring Break? They’re not for nothing. You can choose to ignore your gut, but understand those instincts get triggered for a reason.

Standard caveats apply of course – self-conscious (or not drunk enough) Quality Girlfriend® at 0:11 duly noted.

This may seem like so much red meat for my younger readership, but it does illustrate a point I made about women following the Sandberg Plan in their party years. Young man, remember this clip when your Quality Girlfriend® comes back to campus next week and says “I don’t know what happened. I’m not usually like that. I was drunk, he was cute and well,…one thing led to another.”

Remember this clip when when you’re this side of 30 and the 29 year old woman you’re dating is going through her Epiphany Phase and trying to “do the right thing” tells you, “I used to be a different person back in college” and presses you to ‘Man Up’ with an ultimatum for marriage. It may not be as damning as, I don’t know, finding an amateur porn video of her, but you’ll have a better idea of the context of the time line I detailed in Preventive Medicine.

Remember what I’ve written about proactive cuckoldry.

Remember that even if your great girlfriend / wife would never do such things, her girlfriends likely did and regaled her with all the stories about it during her own party years.

Remember this when you’re helping to pay off your wife’s student loans and the credit card debt she accrued buying the hot little thong she bought just for Spring Break.

So, plan accordingly, respond appropriately and never forget…

Women will break the rules for men who turn them on and create rules for men they don’t respect.

Dancing Monkeys

Dance Monkey

From the Unbearable Triteness of Hating:

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.

Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

After this week’s post the expected debate of who are you really being you for came up. In managing your expectations in accord with the reality of women’s nature there’s always going to be some indignation for needing to do so. The perception of having to cater to the whims needs of women in order to broker some reward that’s never going to be an equitable trade is not only senseless, but it pisses off men who spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to better themselves for themselves and not be appreciated for it.

I’m cursed with a broad spectrum of interests, passions and hobbies. At the risk of glossing myself, I’ve been blessed with a lot of natural gifts and talents, and I developed the skills to better enjoy them, to profit from them and to explore things I simply find fascinating. For the greater part I don’t do these things for me, but rather because I’m genuinely curious and interested in them. I didn’t get into competitive fencing in college because I thought chicks would dig it. Nor did I pick up the sport as some “doing it for me” personal validation – it just looked like a hell of a lot of fun and even when I have my ass handed to me I still enjoy it to this day.

The outcome of having developed those competitive skills combined with the physical prowess I also developed, provided some side benefits to my enjoying fencing, lifting, martial arts and all of the other sports I’ve engaged in over the years. The good peripheral rewards are fairly obvious when it comes to physical interests, but I have hobbies and artistic pursuits that would probably surprise even my readers here.

I use those to my benefit in my personal and professional life, but some are most definitely not the things women would be drawn to in a guy. Of course, I don’t really care, but that doesn’t erase the preconceptions women (or anyone really) have of those interests. It’s easy to say, “well, that’s just me, take it or leave it”, but the fact remains that there are always going to be things you like that will never be an attraction for women – in fact, they’re likely to be an obstacle to attraction.

The Intelligence Paradox

There’s a subset of Blue Pill men who’ve bought into the social advertising that women find intelligent men more attractive. Attractive for long-term security and dependability as a provider? Yes. Arousing as a Hypergamous sexual prospect? Doesn’t matter. The Feminine Imperative likes to promote the ‘intelligence is sexy’ meme so as to have better prepared providers dutifully waiting for women once they’ve had their bad boys and are ready to cash out of the SMP.

That’s kind of bitter medicine for men who’ve invested themselves in intellectual interests they were at one time genuinely fascinated by. Once the imperative takes what it can benefit most from those interests and labels it ‘sexy’ they cease to be genuine fascinations and places them into the realm of sexual attractions. The question then becomes “Who are you really doing this thing for? To be a better prospect for women, or do you do it for you?”

Most intelligent men eventually come to realize that their interests simply aren’t sexy to women; if anything those pursuits usually become an insufferable bore to women. While the idea of a ‘hawt’ intelligent lover is appealing to the female hindbrain, the application of that intelligence is another thing entirely. Hypergamy doesn’t care about your grasp of philosophy, your love of mathematics, your Master’s degree in political science or that you can recognize impressionist painters from cubists. Hypergamy does care about your capacity to apply that intelligence in the service and fleeting contentment of women.

The opportunistic side of Hypergamy might enjoy the benefits that intelligence generates for a woman’s security, but your intelligence itself is not ‘sexy’. If intelligence by itself were a sexual predictor guys like Stephen Hawking wouldn’t find women to be “such mysteries.”

Unfortunately for most men this realization only comes after they’ve played to the script the Feminine Imperative had set for them and they’ve committed themselves to a woman he believed found his beautiful mind so attractive.

I detailed a bit of this dynamic in Compatibility:

However, I do think the desire of finding a common interest prior to, or in order to hook up with women is an interesting one. The MGTOW crowd will of course use this as a prime illustration of how men autonomously shape themselves to the ideals of women. And in the terms of living in the feminine reality they’d be right. You see, whenever a Man engages in any leisure activity, passion, hobby, etc. that doesn’t directly benefit his wife or girlfriend it’s always perceived as a waste of time. If she cannot realize a tangible result that benefits her – or by way of her, the potential “family” or the “relationship” – your effort is pointless and frivolous in contrast to engaging her, entertaining her or relating with her. Again we see the hypergamous feminine imperative of girl-world. If it’s not directly benefiting women, it’s not benefiting humanity in general.

It’s easy to apply this dynamic to something that’s directly relatable to women’s arousal/sexual interests. I covered this in Crisis of Motive; men ostensibly lift weights for their own personal validation – they do it for them – but when it’s obvious that a man can leverage that motivation and good physique to arouse women that’s when his motives become suspect:

I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard guys at Gold’s tell me the same thing as to why they workout.

“I do it for me! Yeah, of course, chicks check me out more now that I’ve dropped the fat and bulked up, but this is all for me man.”

I’ll admit, I was that guy at one time. For a guy it makes sense to cop the story of singularity of purpose since it implies that he’s his ‘own man’ and not improving himself to become more acceptable to the women he observably and admittedly wants to get with. This is the paradox of self-improvement – are you doing it for yourself or because you want to others to respond more positively to you? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both.

When your personal interests can be directly relatable to attracting women that is when your motives will come under scrutiny. Saying I enjoy reading books on astrophysics in my leisure time wouldn’t draw the same suspicions of my motives as my saying I’ve been a bodybuilder for most of my life because I just enjoy it and like to maintain my health.

Thoroughbred had a good comment about this:

JCL – “If I didn’t know any better I’d think the Red Pill is feminism for men, even though women are shit you still have to perform under the new agenda.”
See…

This is the subtle distinction where I think most of us get it drastically wrong. There is a huge chasm between performing for a woman and performing for yourself. Hell, I’m still guilty of the former at times still, but I at least recognize it now and am doing a better job of putting myself at the center of the frame rather than a woman. A woman’s love, attention, loyalty (such as it exists), empathy, sympathy, etc. are all *byproducts* of a man who unapologetically takes care of himself, his needs, his desires first. Here’s what I’m getting at… Flip the script on each of these:

“Women want alphas – become a top tier man.” — Become a top tier man for YOURSELF and only for YOURSELF. Women’s attention, loyalty, etc. will be the byproduct of you putting yourself at the center of the frame.

“Women want promiscuous sex – plate them.” — I’m married and was as blue pill as they come before discovering these hallowed halls two years ago. So, this one is modified for the married set.

Bottom line: Sex with wife sucked for years. Rollo’s concept of dread game has literally saved my marriage, but again there’s a subtle and very important distinction. When I initially conceptualized dread game it was with my wife in the center of the frame (in other words “If I use dread on the wife, she’ll want to fuck me more”). The results were meh. However, when I put MYSELF in the center of the frame as in “If I were suddenly single tomorrow how quickly could I get laid?”, the results were dramatic. The difference is this: In the first scenario I was counting on my actions causing a change in someone else (the wife). In the second scenario, my actions caused a radical change in MYSELF and in my conceptualization of myself.

Thoroughbred speaks to two issues here. A Man must place himself as his own Mental Point of Origin. In doing so he prioritizes himself as his primary importance which women find attractive, but you see the dual nature of this prioritization. Thoroughbred making himself his first priority has the effect of improving his life from an overall personal perspective and has the effect of attracting / arousing female interest in him. Does it matter what’s motivated that change in his performance?

Men must perform; and even when they’re performing as the result of genuine curiosity and interest they will make an impression on women. You cannot remove yourself from the Game. There’s a misnomer that Red Pill advocates believe all men need do is be good looking, aloof and let women come to them, but the truth is that even if you’re not approaching you’re still performing, you’re still presenting a presence that women (and other men) will evaluate.

The genuineness of your motive is only realized by you. One thing I addressed in Just Be Yourself is the you others would like to make of you:

We are who we say we are

We can alter our own personalities and have them altered by our conditions or any combination of the two, but to suggest that personality is static is a falsehood. The trap is to think that altering personality is in anyway disingenuous – there are certainly teriffic ‘actors’ or ‘poseurs’, and the like, that when we are confronted with them we sense (or even know) that they are pushing an envelope that they may not be entirely comfortable with, but there is merit to a ‘fake it till you make it’ doctrine. We only percieve it as being ‘false’, ‘superficial’ or as “trying to be something your not” when we have a concept or knowledge of a previous set of personality behaviors. If you met a likable cocky-funny guy at a club this weekend, how are you to know whether he’s the real deal or stretching the limits of his personality if you’ve never met him before?

If you have a look at the picture I used for my post Idealism you can get an idea of how men and women experience their existence. This masterfully encapsulates the mental directions of the genders. For men’s part, it’s their outward looking interests and curiosity that not only make them better Men, but also makes them attractive. Their attractiveness is a byproduct of a curiosity that is indifferent to the inward, self-importance of women.

As I’ve repeated many times, women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life never the focus of it. This is because women’s focus is primarily on themselves and once your primary focus becomes women they quickly lose interest. Men’s attractiveness lies in the results of that outward facing fascination that excludes women from its attention.

Focus on the things you genuinely find interesting, not the personal validation you think they represent. Saying you do things for you only echoes the self-importance of women’s self-focus. It alludes to a desire to be perceived as more attractive for a self-conscious awareness.

Admiration & Respect

admiration

One thing I really enjoy about doing the few interviews I’ve done is that they allow me to do a stream of consciousness dialog with another person. I like this because it’s very close to the internal dialoging I do when I’m writing notes or researching a topic. While I was talking with Christian McQueen last week the topic of respect came up and I riffed on this for a bit.

“Be with a woman that admires you… admiration creates a different kind of respect”

I’ve delved into the dynamic of respect in the past, but what I was getting at with this was the ways in which women and men differ in their views of respect. Towards the close of last weeks post I made mention of Girl With A Dragonfly Tattoo’s post on the womanly art of seduction. What I found interesting in her list of seductive qualities was that these aren’t really means of seduction, but rather mindsets women should adopt to maintain a healthy relationship.

As I mentioned in that post, women’s methods of seduction are a lost art, but those means lack real significance if there is no genuine desire for that man. Women can very easily seduce men today. So starved for intimate attention are the majority of men that they create the seductive narrative for themselves; all a woman need do is make it easy for him to believe.

On a woman’s part, seduction doesn’t require much. There was a time I did some investigation into the profiles of professional online escorts. I had followed some links Advocatus Diaboli had offered in a few of his posts about his dealing with escorts, and while there were the prerequisite “pros’ with pornstar bodies and manners to match, the majority of these women were semi-attractive “amateurs” you’d be surprised by if you saw them in casual clothes. These women tended to be in their 30s-40s but what was telling was how each gal sold herself to potential clients.

To the average frustrated husband or sexless mature man I have no doubt these women were like a tall glass of water in the desert. By my own standards they were average, but what I noticed was each woman’s profile offered some variation of “you’ve worked hard, isn’t it time you enjoyed the appreciation you deserve?”, “let me treat you the way you should be appreciated” or “you’ve earned a good time with a woman who knows how to please her man.”

For part-time semi-pro escorts I was impressed by how well they knew their demographic. My guess is more than a few were divorced, but found their ‘niche’ so to speak once they were set up with spousal support. Each of them sold themselves based on at least the feigned mindset which Girl With A Dragonfly Tattoo proposed women (wives) adopt to seduce their men (husbands).

In that list the first of the two articles stood out the most:

Admiration

Virtually all men crave a woman who admires him.  A woman who will listen to him when he’s talking about something he finds interesting, or when he’s giving his opinion.  They want a woman who will be interested and fascinated with what he says – yes, I said fascinated.  It turns them on to be in the presence of a hot woman (his wife) who is also giving him her entire attention and the right kind of feedback that says, “You are such an interesting man!  Omg I want you!  Now!!!”

When was the last time you reacted to your husband like that?  I know… us wives are ridiculously tired, over-achieving, too much to do, have kids hanging off our legs at any moment when we’re at home (or out… at the store trying to deal with a meltdown).  I understand, I’m a wife and mother of two now.  But guess what?  Your husband craves this kind of thing, and if this need is met by you, he will move mountains to ensure your happiness.

Of these two, admiration is the most important. Feigned admiration is the stripper’s secret (as well as the semi-pro escort’s). To the man unused to genuine admiration (that is to say 80%+ of them) this becomes his worst thumbscrew and source of manipulation. Sexual ‘thirst’ is certainly a factor, but men inherently realize the sexual attraction value that a woman’s admiration represents for themselves.

Part of men’s conditioning is recognizing the effect that simple social proof to overt fame has on women. Smart men figure out how to leverage this to their advantage as a part of Game, but most are so starved of that admiration that even marginal displays from women are enough to convince him her intents are genuine.

Truth or Compliments

Private Man had an interesting post regarding his tweet on compliments from women:

My response was thus:

“Compliments = IOIs (Indicators Of her Interest in the man). 80%+ of men are Betas, thus compliments are a rare. Can’t have Betas get the wrong ideas.”

Compliments are considered an expression of admiration for men, but largely supplication for women. In the past I’ve gone into detail about how compliments for women need to be sparse because, for the greater part of women, compliments have very little value to them. In an age of social media and ‘quick-hit ego boosts’ from her girlfriends and symps, compliments are common.

What’s scarce is valuable, so the rare compliment from a high-value Alpha is a solid reinforcer for a woman – from a Beta compliments are a liability; they are an overt expression of interest from a man she has very little interest in beyond his utility to her.

For that same reason, women giving compliments to men they have no genuine admiration for also becomes a liability – even if that liability is just implied to herself. Ergo, women rarely express admiration for a man they genuinely have no true admiration of – it’s too risky. This is why women must be taught (as in Girl With A Dragonfly Tattoo’s post) to be conscious of, and attentive to, delivering compliments to men they’ve committed to, but regard as Beta. Left to their natural impulses women simply avoid complimenting men they have no desire to be held accountable to.

Private Man asks:

What’s wrong with reinforcing a man’s confidence through a compliment? Women adore confident men. The compliment is the opposite of the shit test where a woman tests the mans adversity by artificially creating that adversity by herself.

Not to run him up the flagpole (I have a deep respect for PM), but Private Man answers his own question inadvertently. Women do adore confident men, but by definition a confident man wouldn’t need any reinforcement of that confidence. Once again, women want a man who ‘Just Gets It‘. Any (Alpha) man a woman has a genuine admiration of doesn’t need a confidence boost from her – in fact that boost, and the implied need of it, only raises Hypergamous doubt for her.

Just as with the differing concepts of love and communication, men tend to presume that their concept of admiration is the universal one. The aspects and considerations men base their admiration of other men on are not the same that women use for men. I outlined this a bit in Hysteria, but there is a uniquely female precondition of unqualified social proof women entertain for themselves as a component to their arousal that men (at least heterosexual ones) don’t have for other men.

In other words men who women are unfamiliar with are an unverified commodity to women with regard to arousal / attraction. As you can see in the videos I linked in Hysteria, this unfamiliarity with a man’s real social value (and associated SMV) are easily mimicked when they control the environment and situation. It’s this unfamiliarity and a want to believe in the possibility that a man may possess fame or even simple third-party social esteem that leads to an easy admiration for a man women have just met or are only casually familiar with.

Imaginings

Women’s imagination is one of the best tools in a man’s Game toolbox, but this is so because Hypergamous doubt is also Hypergamous prospect. The same Hypergamy that predisposes a woman to opportunistic sexual strategy also drives her imaginings about its potential fulfillment by unfamiliar men. It’s far easier for a woman to imagine she should admire a man she doesn’t know than for her to appreciate a man she’s already intimately familiar with anything close to that same admiration.

This is what men idealistically want to believe about admiration coming from their wives and long-time girlfriends – that it’s just as sincere as the expressions of admiration, the compliments and inspiration, she’s naturally disposed to give to men she’s unfamiliar with, even when that man was himself when they first met. Compliments and admiration are less believable, not to mention far less forthcoming, when a woman is aware of the person you “really” are in an LTR because hypergamous prospect turns to hypergamous doubt.

As I mention in Frame, the dominant frame you establish and enter into a relationship with sets the tone for that relationship. Sincere admiration and genuine desire are key components to setting that frame before you enter into an LTR or marriage.  You will never experience a more sincere admiration from a woman than while you are single and uncommitted. Her imagination fills in the blanks for her perception of you because you represent the potential of fulfilling her sexual strategy (either Alpha Fucks or Beta Bucks). Once you are committed and a woman has had those blanks filled in by her familiarity with you, admiration and compliments (if any) become something women need to be taught and reminded are something they ought to maintain to keep men interested in them by necessity.

If there is no admiration expressed from a woman while you’re single, or you’ve got to fish for compliments, or you’ve got to plead your case to her that you are someone she should admire, never enter into any kind of commitment with her.

Girl With A Dragonfly Tattoo’s next article of seduction was respect:

Respect

How many men crave respect?  All of them.  They want to be known as the leader of their house, they want their wives to defer to them for decisions – but they want their wives to genuinely do it out of the feeling of respect, not just half-heartedly ask their husbands what they think, but to let them know that they are expressly interested in their husband’s response because of who he is.

They want a woman who looks up to them – who doesn’t try to outshine them or put them down – but who greatly esteems them and their opinions on matters (this ties in directly with Admiration).  They don’t want a wife who will constantly argue and bicker with them over decisions and details, or one who challenges them and their headship constantly.

Respect amongst men and respect amongst women are, again, two differing concepts. GWADT describes her impression of what she perceives men would want in terms of respect from their spouses, but this outline ignores the basic principles of the Desire Dynamic – respect is valueless if it’s an obligation, you cannot negotiate a genuine respect. Men understand this because respect between men is something that is earned, whereas constant social conditioning makes respect for women something to be expected.

Respect for a woman is a given and as such, like compliments, it becomes so cheap a commodity to women they have no concept that it means something entirely different amongst men. In fact, Blue Pill conditioned men are so socially insaturated in a default “respect” for women that it’s become an article of Beta Game among them. Properly trained White Knights make a competition of “out-respecting” one another with their declarations of respecting women. They believe it sets them apart from “other guys” who don’t respect women and thus make them uniquely in touch and identifying with what they’ve been taught women want.

The next time you see some self-evincing meme declaring “a real gentleman does X for a woman” posted on Facebook by one of your Blue Pill friends you’ll understand how valueless the term respect really is to women. I hit on this in my post Respect:

Masculine Respect

So this is my point, women don’t respect men, or rather, they don’t respect the masculine – and most certainly don’t have a default respect for it. They’re taught to be adversarial, not cooperative. Women are taught to relinquish respect, and then only begrudgingly when a man has proven his quality beyond the reach of most men. Masculinity is popularly ridiculed in western culture as it is, but to respect a man is to compete with him, to out-masculine him. Cooperation or even recognizing that the genders could be complimentary is viewed at best as antiquated, at worst, sublimation to the male imperative.

Women have very little incentive for learning to defer to a man with a default respect when respect for women is already a social entitlement – that is the frame of reference women have with respect. Even average fathers seldom experience an organic respect from their daughters unless they are taught (usually by example) to appreciate the qualities that make him respectable. Women in the workplace presume they’re being treated with a default professional respect, but any respect that’s afforded them generally begins with that default ‘Respect for Women’® dynamic that 80%+ of men already believe is their due.

When men express respect for other men it’s usually because they’ve in some way earned it or earned a respectable office. That’s not always the reality, but it is the general presumption that respectable men are “leaders of their house” (business, position, team or rank) and makers of the decisions others follow because they have earned it. Think about the men you genuinely respect. Why do you respect them? What have they done to merit your deference of respect to them?

The way a man considers these aspects differs from how a woman considers these aspects. Respectable Men are keenly aware of a respect offered to them due to obligation as opposed to a genuine, considerate and introspective respect. So when a woman who presumes she holds a default authority humbles herself, and magnanimously allows a man she’s told she should respect a degree of deference, that man understands it’s her obligation and not a genuine respect he’d experience from other men.

Indeed, men do want a woman who looks up to them, admires them and respects them, but too many men don’t recognize the motivators behind women expressing them. Many Beta men make a joke out of their wives being “the real boss” or how she “puts up with him.” They have no concept, much less any expectation, of an organic, uncoerced masculine admiration, respect or even a compliment, so it’s no surprise when they can’t discern between a real expression of sincerity and one motivated by manipulation or obligation.

Lastly, ladies, the best compliment you can give a man is with your body and consideration. Unexpected gestures, being an imaginative lover, staying in shape because you want to please a man, are the best expressions of genuine desire, admiration and respect. Nothing conveys real appreciation for a man better than the unsolicited desire you reserve for Alpha Fucks. You want him to know you admire and respect him? Initiate sex with him, often and with intensity.

Women Behaving Badly

behaving_badly

This week Black Poison Soul has decided that Hypergamy is less about the well established, biologically sound  and well-studied aspects of feminine Hypergamy and all about women behaving badly. For the most part this essay is so scattered, angst-ridden and poorly reasoned it hardly bears responding to – the author is obviously unfamiliar with the well documented biological, neurological and hormonal influences of ovulatory shift – however he does provide an excellent illustration of how sociological dynamics have also evolved to compensate for women’s inherent mating strategy:

Let’s look at it from a different angle. Let’s say that these characteristics attributed to hypergamy are simply learned bad behavior – or a lack of learned good behavior. Let’s say that these characteristics are becoming more commonly-noted because society has gotten a lot easier on women simply because they’re women (aka we give them the pussy pass).

Take a dog. It develops bad habits. Do you leave it with those bad habits? Shit no! You train it. Positive and negative reinforcement, depending upon what’s appropriate. Eventually you end up with a well-trained and well-behaved dog.

In the old days they had ways of controlling (training) their women. Punishments. Social ostracism which was a force that actually meant something. They were married young before they started messing around, then it became the new husband’s job to train and deal with her appropriately. Even boot her out if she was far too obstroperous, the children (if any) going to him because he had the income and could afford to raise them.

Hypergamy is an evolved sexual strategy that’s worked for women for millennia. The behaviors associated with women’s sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks) is a deductive manifestation of Hypergamy. On a societal level, the very fact that men would need to effect social control of Hypergamy validates the inherency of Hypergamy in women.

In the past polygamy, arranged marriages, courting rituals, petitioning a father for permission to marry his daughter and many other traditions that are now characterized as oppressive and antiquated were direct contingencies for men’s ambient awareness of women’s innate predilection for Hypergamy. It’s interesting that BPS should analogize women as untrained dogs without considering a dog is still going to do what a dog’s going to do. The operative condition being that a dog is going to be motivated by what’s been coded into its instinctual firmware as a result of what’s been evolutionarily beneficial to the survival of the canine species. The operant conditioning is training that dog to perform desired behaviors counter to that instinct.

But, I get it, there’s a real want for men frustrated by women’s Hypergamously motivated behavior to effect control by appealing to notions of personal responsibility. BPS makes the common error of (indirectly) appealing to women’s reason, as the rationally independent agents, who should logically want to be personally responsible for their bad behavior, or need some extrinsic correcting of them. A lifelong conditioning of egalitarian equalism has taught them that women should be as equitably deductive as men.

Men shouldn’t need to train women to act in both sexes’ best interests; as rational agents they should want to do this of their own accord.

It just doesn’t make sense that women would publically express a logical interest in, and desire for the comfort, dependability, provisioning and nurturing of a devoted Beta, yet overtly behave counter to that sentiment during the proliferative phase of her ovulatory cycle by directly inviting the sexual attentions of the most Alpha men her attractiveness can afford her.

What BPS has inadvertently illustrated here is the base conflict in the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:

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

For the better part of human history, by violence or by social convention, men controlled, and instinctually understood, women’s Hypergamous natures. By rape, religion or resources men effectively made women compromise their sexual strategy. In fact to be a man was to understand one’s social station as being above, and responsible for, directing that of women’s.

Prior to the advent of courtly love, bastardized chivalry and romanticism being promoted to the highest ideal of love, Hypergamy was very pragmatically controlled by men. Dalrock has published some very convincing material on how romantic love has dethroned this old-order practical model.

What nearly all modern Christians have done is place romantic love above marriage.  Instead of seeing marriage as the moral context to pursue romantic love and sex, romantic love is now seen as the moral place to experience sex and marriage.  This inversion is subtle enough that no one seems to have noticed, but if you look for it you will see it everywhere.

Lifetime marriage, with separate defined roles for husband and wife and true commitment is what makes sex and romantic love moral in the biblical view.  In our new view, romantic love makes sex moral, and the purpose of marriage is to publicly declare that you are experiencing the highest form of romantic love.  Thus people now commonly refer to a wedding as “making our love official”.

The gradations we now apply to romantic love are symptomatic of the problem.  We take great care to distinguish between “pure love” or “true love” and mere “infatuation” or “puppy love”.

[…] Because it is love and not marriage which now confers morality upon sex, sex outside of marriage is now considered moral so long as you are in love.  Thus we have the modern harlot’s defense/anthem “but we were in love!”

When you remove the moral connotations, what Dal describes here is an excellent parallel to the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies. On a meta-societal scale, contemporary men have abdicated any claim to directing the process of how or with whom their genetic legacy will be preserved. And while the Feminine Imperative will expend great efforts to convince men, socially and legalistically, that their involvement in that decision making process isn’t important, on a societal level the fact remains – men must be made to (sometimes forcibly) abandon their sexual strategy and their genetic interests in favor of feminine Hypergamy.

One reason a father would symbolically ‘give’ his daughter away to her husband as part of the marriage ritual was a tacit acknowledgment of his approval of this man’s quality and direction of his genetic potential. Similarly, a suitor asking a father’s permission to marry his daughter was part of the qualification. In both instances, there is a presumption of a male-directed process of directing a woman’s Hypergamy and prospectively directing his involvement with that new family. The presumption was one that men would directly influence feminine Hypergamy.

As human society evolved a precedence for romantic, feminine-controlled Hypergamy gradually supplanted this male-directed Hypergamy. I’ve written in the past of how courtly love’s bastardization of the original intent of chivalry was indirectly designed to be the feminism of the middle ages. By co-opting men’s sense of chivalric honor with feminine social importance, (if not primacy) the Feminine Imperative gradually established the social conventions that would lead to a feminine-primary direction of Hypergamy.

Romantic, feminine-defined love progressively delegitimized the old-order, male-directed definition of love. Marriage ceased to be the condition in which romantic love could be experienced and was supplanted by the prerequisite of a romantic love condition in order for a marriage to be legitimized. In so doing the meta-social dynamic of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies shifted to feminine control.

At this point, I should note that the socially legitimized definition of love is not the same as each sex’s concept of love which is mirrored in either sex’s evolved sexual strategies. It’s important to remember the latent purpose of ensuring control over Hypergamy is the motive of forcing the romantic definition on a larger social order to the benefit of the feminine sexual strategy.

For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed, the other gender must compromise or abandon its own. In the old-order, men controlled  and directed Hypergamy to a large extent and women had to compromise their strategy. In a post-sexual revolution social order, where women have effected a socially mandated, unilateral control over the direction of Hypergamy, a majority of men are forced to abandon their sexual strategy, and even the elite minority must eventually compromise their own. Legally, socially and psychologically men are expected to relinquish any claim to directing their own sexual strategy while deferring to women’s Hypergamy. Today, women qualify men for their Hypergamy with a right swipe on a Tinder profile.

The frustration BPS is writing about stems from the Old Set of Books expectation that women are predisposed to the functional, equitable equivalents of men’s rational based decision-making. The evolutionary nature of Hypergamy makes any notion of equalitarianism a recipe for men’s frustration. Hypergamy isn’t just a label, it’s a useful term for the very real dynamic of women’s sexual strategy.

BPS isn’t the first guy in the manosphere to blame men for their complicity in women behaving badly in their hypergamic interests. He’s lamenting a lack of men’s control over Hypergamy by making appeals to how it was in the good ole days and how men need to put their foot down and demand women to shape up or else they’ll stop playing their game. It’s bad men who permit women to behave badly and raise the next generation of yet more boys and girls who’ll behave even worse.

This then leads to the very appealing concept of personal responsibility – men are responsible for women’s irresponsibility, and exploring the nature of Hypergamy seems to only amount to a “the devil biology made her do it” excusability for that irresponsibility.

 

The Devil Biology Made Me Do It

A large part of the red pill perspective leans on evolutionary psychology. Of course evo-psych isn’t the only factor in red pill awareness, but for the vast majority of Game deniers (people unaware of the origins of their conditions) this poses a problem of convenience. When the revelations of evo-psych agree with our comfortable social models and ego-investments we’re all too happy to embrace the science. But when the science shows us the more uncomfortable truths about evolved human nature, the reaction is to either question the ‘science’ or blame the moral conviction, resolve and character of the person/people expressing that aspect of human nature.

[…]Hypergamy (an evolved species-survival schema) doesn’t care about personal conviction, freewill or definitions of moral behavior, it just is.  So in the interests of perpetuating the best interests of one sex (and by extension the entire species) social and cultural norms fluidly evolve around it to accommodate what’s really an uncomfortable aspect of our humanity. Can Hypergamy be controlled? Can men’s sexual impulses be tempered? Of course, but not without the effort of freewill, conviction and social structures. I know of precious few men who’ve blamed their infidelity or sexual impulsivity solely upon their biological makeup. With the exception of the more natural Alphas, more often than not it was a carefully calculated (Game) and coordinated event.

The Art of AMOG

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

One of the more contentious aspects of intersexual competition the early PUAs hit upon was the phenomenon of the AMOG – Alpha Male Of Group – and how ‘that guy’s’ apparent social dominance focused all interaction within a peer group on himself. The AMOG was an easy parody of a guy to hate on for early Game practitioners because his archetype was so relatable for men looking to improve their chances with women they’d never been able to consider before they discovered Game. The nefarious AMOG was their worst cock-blocking villain.

For a recovering Beta experimenting with Game for the first time it was bad enough that the very real, in-his-face proposition of rejection by women was always to be considered, but to have to account for a guy that looked (in his mind) like the typical jock who regularly out-Alpha’d him back in high school seems like an unfair obstacle to need to overcome. I think that a lot of men’s competition anxiety focuses on a very overdramatized caricature of the Alpha ‘bullies’ they were familiar with when growing up.

This characterization is also the basis of the long-clichéd plot of every boy-meets-girl, boy-overcomes-shyness, boy-overcomes-bully-to-get-the-girl story ever told, and not just by Hollywood.

While female written romance stories revolve around multiple suitors for a woman protagonist to tame the most Alpha among them – usually ending with the one who’s a misunderstood asshole to everyone but her – male written romance generally centers on an underperforming Beta male (with a heart of gold) who, through extraordinary circumstance is placed in a position of  outperforming all of his previous rivals for his dream girl, or the girl he ‘should really be with’ instead of the shallow girl he thought would be so great. Instead of selfishly abusing his newfound Alpha powers by kicking sand in the faces of lesser Betas, he fashions himself as the hero exemplar of how Betas should act if they find themselves in a similar empowerment.

The stories of Spider Man, Captain America and even Back to the Future follow these male-romance scripts to the letter, but in every case the Beta-with-a-chance has to teach the bully a lesson before he can qualify for the girl’s attention, much less her intimacy. This clichéd story arch is a manifestation of men’s internalized understanding of their burden of performance. And while I can’t entirely assert this is an intrinsic part of men’s own mental firmware, I have to speculate that the fantasy of fulfilling it is part of men’s ubiquitous need to adequately perform for women’s intimate approval.

Regardless, the objective purpose is still to ‘get the girl’.

Examples of this Alpha bully archetype are part of most men’s formative learning. Not all men learn the lesson of the bully (some play the role with relish), but if we hold to the 80/20 rule of the manosphere we’re statistically looking at around 80% of (Beta) men who do. From grade school to high school to college, that guy, the douchebag, the guy who can’t help but actively or passively draw attention to himself, becomes the AMOG – and damned if he’s not the most contemptible bastard (or type of bastard) you know.

I’m highlighting that guy because more often than not he’s less a real person and more a manifestation of the anxiety that results from men’s insecurity about performing adequately for feminine approval. It’s easy to poke fun at the guys you see on hotchickswithdouchebags.com because they’re representations of the bully you hate. They’re the Jerks that every woman loves and every ‘normal’ guy vainly tries to make women rationally understand are the worst possible romantic option for them.

One very difficult hurdle men have in unplugging is getting past what they believe is the emulation of the Alpha Jerk who so regularly outperformed them, if not bullied them – yet, his asshole ways were still undeniably effective with the women he wanted to get with. Thus, for men who come to Red Pill awareness there’s a natural resistance to become that guy.

This AMOG archetype impression is tough to confront for men, but it’s important they do so.

This impression for men is an incredibly useful tool to effect women’s sexual strategy later in life when the woman (or type of woman) he’s held in such high regard and pined to be intimate with for so long finally “comes to her senses” around her Epiphany Phase and accepts him. For men with this AMOG mental impression, that woman’s acceptance comes with a certain degree of (sometimes smug) vindication. He waited her out and finally she’s “realized” what he’s been trying to make her see for so long – he’s actually the ‘perfect boyfriend’ for her.

He doesn’t realize he’s just playing the convenient ‘savior’-provider role women’s sexual strategy has conditioned and prepared him for, but believing his Beta Nice Guy life track has finally won out over the nefarious AMOG in his head is a strong reinforcer of a belief women need him to strongly believe when it’s time to cash in their Beta Bucks chips and her SMV starts its decline.

And therefore those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle and are not brought there by him.

I’m going to flip your AMOG impression upside down now. That AMOG isn’t the one you should concern yourself with.

Most of the first PUAs always suggested a process of containment and isolating your target woman in order to ‘poach’ her from that guy. I understand the proposed isolation idea is to remove a girl you like from her social group, but the effect is really similar to Mate Guarding – isolate her awareness of all other sexual competitors and focus her on yourself. 

However, unless you’re making your approaches in clubs or loud bars it’s likely the context you’re working on a woman in isn’t one where an active, in-your-face AMOGing is happening. Isolation becomes a security measure to focus her on you being her best immediate prospect.

Roissy once stated that there are groupies for every male endeavor, I should also add that there are AMOGs in every male endeavor. Every group of nerdy programmers, geeks, chess club, your bowling team and even in your Bible study group, there’s an AMOG. Some are more significant than others, but rest assured, you know him, or you will.

Most men will compartmentalize themselves socially so as to best facilitate their chances of meeting, banging, marrying or otherwise interacting with women. This compartmentalization is really a form of Buffering against rejection, but it’s also a logical social positioning of a man putting himself into an environment where he can (hopefully) excel and be noticed for it.

All warfare is based on deception – Bear this in mind when you enter into a new social group dynamic or an unfamiliar social environment. You are an unknown commodity and therefore your strengths are novel to the group. Your weaknesses (your Beta-ness) will be more obvious than your strengths and thus more easily attached to you.

Playing to one’s strengths usually involves defining a man’s social environments. King Douchebag at a Vegas pool party is excelling in his environment, just as Bobby Fisher is at a chess tournament. One reason less ‘socially adept’ men enjoy more confidence at a ComicCon is because the environment buffers their social deficits, but emphasizes their particular talents. The first mistake most men make when considering an AMOG situation is underestimating the importance of that environment. In high school the environment was probably set for you, but as an adult you’ve got a greater degree of control over it.

Bear this in mind when you’re confronted with a guy “all the girls love”. There’s a tendency on the part of Beta leaning guys to think the AMOG is a ‘natural’ Alpha when in fact he’s really domain dependent on the social environment you share with him. Of course there will always be guys who excel in almost any environment because Hypergamy is universal to women and a ‘hawt guy’ is ‘hawt’ to all women, but remove him from his preferred domain to one you’re better adept in, or, outperform him in his domain with a particular strength or expertise you possess in such a way that he’s forced to acknowledge your skill.

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.

The caricature of an in-your-face belligerent AMOG is really a social anomaly, and usually your experience of him is the product of an environment you’re not at home in. Far more common however is the AMOG who is unassuming, affable, and honestly a guy you probably can’t help but like. In fact this likability is his primary appeal. Obvious Alpha superiority combined with even a marginal humility makes for an irresistible AMOG to women.

One of my best friends to this day was a guy I despised when we were in high school. We ended up becoming lifelong friends, but initially I hated him for having such a natural Alpha affinity with the girls I wanted to get with. I actually attribute part of my early 20s sexual success (and if I’m honest some proto-Red Pill awareness) to many of the lessons women’s behavior around him taught me.

Both the nervous Beta and the PUA like to encourage the idea of an AMOG as being the drunk, loud-mouthed frat boy who pushes you aside to get to the girl at the bar you’re sarging (“Step aside McFly!”), but the Alpha Male of the Group to really consider is the guy women can’t stop talking about when he’s not even present. He’s the guy who leaves the room and girls giddily huddle together to agree about how ‘hawt’ he is. He doesn’t even have to be in the group to be the Alpha of it.

The best form of social proof is the unsolicited kind. The kind where women can’t help but talk about a guy, and ask his Beta-chump friends how they can get to know him better.

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.

In the immediate sense, unseating this AMOG would be a challenge only the most exceptional men could hope for. He’s established in his environment and his status and social proof is perpetuated for him within his social group. This situation may seem hopeless, and if your goal is to supplant him you’d have to really consider what the rewards would be in doing so, however there is much to learn from him within your shared environment.

Pose as a friend, act as a spy. Befriending the AMOG may be your best option as it opens you up to his social proof as a peer. You may not replace him in the short term, but if you’re spinning plates as you should, his confirmation of you as a peer will only benefit you. This confirmation will allow you an insight into the dynamics of that social environment. Your ultimate success doesn’t lie in destroying the AMOG, or becoming one yourself, but mastering a shared environment in which your strengths are best applied.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

This tact is useful for both the in-your-face AMOG as well as the non-direct, status affirmed AMOG. Sometimes proving one’s superiority is simply allowing the mediocre enough time and opportunity to self-destruct. The trick of course is in being prepared to swiftly capitalize on that AMOG’s missteps.

Law 33 – Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew
Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall.  That weakness is usualy an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure.  Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

In the early part of my career in liquor branding I worked for a very rich man in his mid 60s. This guy had quite the resume of “successes”, but for the greater part they’d come from his self-importance and borrowing money than any real talent of his own. He was the owner, but had a reputation for attention seeking and a love of flattery that bordered on arrogance. Usually this would come at the expense of whomever happened to be outshining him as the master.

He was a consummate AMOG, but with no real legitimacy. At one point we had an important negotiation with a Chinese distributor to get our brands into an Asian market and as he’d typically do he wanted to entertain the reps over dinner after a big trade show we’d met them at. They were impressed with me because I was responsible for the creative side of the company, but even with my own deferential credits to my ‘boss’ he took it as an opportunity to AMOG me in front of his new ‘friends’.

I actually saw this coming (it’d happened on other occasions) and I had a good prior knowledge of the sensibilities of the Chinese from my time in doing casino marketing, so I diplomatically let him hang himself with his self-aggrandizement and bluster at my expense. Predictably the reps were off-put by this and we lost the distribution. The good news was that about a year and a half later I was offered a string of very lucrative branding contracts for several of this Asian company’s holdings (2 of which I still front now) because of this patience and letting my boss implode. And all I did was see it coming and let him convict himself.

Every AMOG has a weakness to exploit. Sometimes discovering this requires a patience most guys simply don’t want to wait around for, but with a bit of tact and attention it doesn’t take long. I think the older a man gets the easier it is to judge the character of others (or it should) – you experience the “types” enough to gauge a predictable character action.

There’s an old, but fantastic breakdown of the classic Boyfriend Destroyer script on RSD Nation. I wont repost it here, but if you take a moment to read the script, the premise is one of breaking down a boyfriend’s reputation by indirectly whittling away at the most predictable areas of contention in most relationships. Emphasize his Beta attributes while leading (not telling) her to consider and appreciate your Alpha attributes.

Yes, it’s bad form, and yes, your efforts would be better applied to new prospective plates to spin instead of working on some girl with a boyfriend. However, it is an excellent study in understanding how to deconstruct an AMOG and learning his thumbscrews.

Amused Mastery isn’t just a technique to hold women’s attention, it’s also an effective tool in defusing an AMOG. Once you have an understanding of that AMOG’s weakness – a penchant for self-aggrandizement, a taste for booze or a kind of woman, lack of legitimate ambition, Beta thinking/behavioral tendencies, etc. – the plan then becomes one of emphasizing those character flaws indirectly by exemplifying counter-strengths to those weaknesses.

Women love a man who Just Gets It, and the best, playful way of expressing that is with Amused Mastery; but it’s even more sexy when that Mastery extends to men who she perceives are your intersexual rivals. This then, by association, compliments her ego for your Amused Mastery of her.

Estrus

 

Thomas_Doherty

Last week saw the publication of the latest paper by Dr. Steven W. Gangestad and Dr. Martie Hasselton titled Human Estrus: Implications for Relationship Science. Anyone who’s read the Rational Male for more than a year is probably familiar with my citing Dr. Hasselton in various posts (her catalog of research has been part of my sidebar links since I began RM), but both she and Dr. Gangstad are among the foremost notable researchers in the areas of human sexuality and applied evolutionary psychology. For this week’s post I’ll be riffing on what this paper proposes with regard to a condition of estrus in women.

In the introduction section of The Rational Male I relate a story of how in my Red Pill formative years I came to be a connector of dots so to speak. While I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies a great many issues jumped out at me with regards to how many of the principle of behavioral psychology could be (and were already being) applied to intersexual relations. For instance, the basic concepts of intermittent reinforcement and behavioral modification seemed to me an obvious and learned practice of women in achieving some behavioral effect on men by periodically rewarding (reinforcing) them with sex ‘intermittently’. Operant conditioning and establishing operations also dovetailed seamlessly into the Red Pill concepts and awareness I’d been developing for several years prior to finishing my degree.

Since then the ideas I formed have naturally become more complex than these simple foundations, but what I only learned by error was how thoroughly disconnected both students and my teachers were with what I saw as obvious connections. I met obstinate resistance to flat denial when I wrote papers or gave a dissertation about the interplay between the foundations of behaviorism and interpersonal relationships. It was one thing to propose that men would use various aspects to their own advantage, but it was offensive to suggest that women would commonly use behavioral modification techniques to achieve their Hypergamous ends.

This peer resistance was especially adamant when I would suggest that women had a subconscious pre-knowledge (based on collective female experience) of these techniques. I never thought I had brass balls for broaching uncomfortable considerations like this – I honestly, and probably naively, assumed that what I was proposing had already been considered by academia long before I’d come to it.

I was actually introduced to the work of Dr. Hasselton during this time, and along with Dr. Warren Farrell, she’s gone on to become one of my go-to sources in respect to the connection between contemporary behavioral ‘dots’ with theories of practical evolved function in intersexual dynamics. I owe much of what I propose on Rational Male to this interplay, and while I doubt Hasselton would agree with all of what I or the manosphere propose, I have to credit her and her colleague’s work for providing me many of the dots I connect.

I understand that there are still evo-psych skeptics in the manosphere, but I find that much of what passes for their piecemeal “skepticism” is generally rooted in a desire to stubbornly cling to comforting Blue Pill idealisms. That said, I’d never ask any reader to take what I propose here on faith, but personally I’ve found that the questions proposed by evo-psych reflect many of the observations I had in my college days.

Hypergamous Duplicity

For the social theater of the Feminine Imperative, one of the more galling developments in psychological studies to come out of the past fifteen years has been the rise of evolutionary psychology. The natural pivot for the Imperative in dealing with evo-psych has been to write off any concept unflattering to the feminine as being speculative or proving a biased positive (by “misogynistic” researchers of course), while gladly endorsing and cherry-picking any and all evo-psych premises that reinforce the feminine or confirm a positive feminine-primacy.

Up until the past two years or so, there was a staunch resistance to the concept of Hypergamy (know as sexual pluralism in evo-psych) and the dual natures of women’s sexual strategy. Before then the idea of Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks was dismissed as biased, sociologically based and any biological implications or incentives for Hypergamy were downplayed as inconclusive by a feminine-centric media.

However the recent embrace of Open Hypergamy and “Sandbergism” of the last two years has set this narrative on its head, and the empowered women who found the idea of their own sexual pluralism so distasteful are now openly endorsing, if not proudly relishing, their roles in a new empowerment of Hypergamous duplicity.

Your Beta qualities are officially worthless to today’s women:

For those of you that aren’t aware, women now are often out earning men and more of them receive college degrees than men. As of now there aren’t really any programs to help guys out. Assuming this trend continues what do you think will happen to dating? I think that attractive women, will have their pick regardless.

However, for a lot of women, trying to lock down a guy in college will be more of a big deal. I don’t think hook up culture will disappear, but will definitely decrease.

With the exception with my current boyfriend, I have always earned more than any guy I have dated. It has never been an issue. I just don’t have to think about their financials, my attraction is based on their looks and personality. I am guessing the future will be more of that.

I thought this TRP subred was an interesting contrast to the Estrus theory proposed in the Gangstad-Hasselton paper (comments were good too). Yes, the woman is more than a bit gender-egotistical, and yes her triumphalism about the state of women in college and their earning is built on a foundation of sand, but lets strip this away for a moment. The greater importance to her in relating this, and every woman embracing open Hypergamy, is the prospect of better optimizing the dual nature of her sexual strategy.

In many a prior post I’ve detailed the rationales women will apply to their sexual pluralism and the social conventions they rely upon to keep men ignorant of them until such a time (or not) that they can best consolidate on that dualism. Where before that strategy was one of subtle manipulation and pretty lies to keep Betas-In-Waiting ready to be providers after the Alpha Fucks decline at 30, the strategy now is one of such utter ego-confidence in feminine social primacy that women gleefully declare “I’m not just gonna have my cake and eat it too, I’m getting mine with sprinkles and chocolate syrup” with regard to Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks.

The Estrus Connection

For all of the ubiquitous handwringing the manosphere imparts to the social implications of today’s Open Hypergamy, it’s important to consider the biological underpinnings that motivate this self-interested conceit.

From Human Estrus: Implications for Relationship Science:

In the vast majority of mammalian species, females experience classic estrus or heat: a discrete period of sexual receptivity – welcoming male advances – and proceptivity – actively seeking sex – confined to a few days just prior to ovulation, the fertile window. Only at this time, after all, do females require sex to conceive offspring. The primate order is exceptional. Although prosimians (e.g., lemurs, tarsiers) exhibit classic estrus, the vast majority of simian primates (monkeys and apes) are sexually active for at least several days outside of the fertile period [2]. Humans are an extreme case: Women may be sexually receptive or proceptive any time of the cycle, as well as other nonconceptive periods (e.g., pregnancy).

Do Women Retain a Functionally Distinct Fertile Phase?

Graded sexuality. Women’s sexual activity is not confined to an estrous period. But are women’s sexual interests truly constant across the cycle? Many female primates (e.g., rhesus macaques and marmosets) are often receptive to sexual advances by males outside of the fertile phase, but they initiate sex less [2].

In fact, women’s sexual interests do appear to change across the cycle. Women exhibit greater genital arousal in response to erotica and sexually condition to stimuli more readily during the follicular phase [5-8].

A recent study identified hormonal correlates of these changes by tracking 43 women over time and performing salivary hormone assays [9]. Women’s sexual desire was greater during the fertile window, and was positively related to estradiol levels (which peak just before ovulation), but negatively related to progesterone levels (which rise markedly during the luteal phase).

Changes in the male features that evoke sexual interest. Since the late 1990s, some researchers have argued that what changes most notably across the cycle is not sexual desire per se but, rather, the extent to which women’s sexual interests are evoked by particular male features – specifically, male behavioral and physical features associated with dominance, assertiveness, and developmental robustness. Over 50 studies have examined changes across the cycle in women’s attraction to these male features.

The importance of behavioral features? Whereas preference shifts of major interest early on concerned male physical features (e.g., facial masculinity; scent), several recent studies have focused on women’s reactions to men’s behavior and dispositions. Previous research had found that women find male confidence, even a degree of arrogance, more sexually appealing during the fertile phase [e.g., 15-16]. Recent studies replicate and extend that work, finding not only that fertile-phase women are more sexually attracted to “sexy cad” or behaviorally masculine men (relative to “good dad” or less masculine men), but also that, during the fertile phase, women are more likely to flirt or engage with such men [17,18]. Females of a variety of species, including primates [2], prefer dominant or high ranking males during the fertile phase of their cycles. These males may pass genetic benefits to offspring, as well as, potentially, offer material benefits (e.g., protect offspring). Women’s fertile-phase sexual attraction to behavioral dominance appears to have deep evolutionary roots.

Much of what’s explored here I laid out in Game terms in Your Friend Menstruation over two years ago, but the implications of the behaviors prompted by women’s menstrual cycle and biochemistry strongly imply an estrus-like predictability. This estrous state is a foundational keystone, not just to developing Game, but a keystone to understanding the dynamics behind Hypergamy, women’s dualistic sexual strategy, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks, and can even be extrapolated into the drive for ensuring feminine social dominance in both overt and covert contexts.

When women embrace a social order founded upon a feminine state of openly revealed Hypergamy they confirm and expose the reality of this estrous state.

Whereas before, in a social order based on concealed Hypergamy, this state could be dismissed as a social construct (and a masculine biased one at that), or one that had only marginal influence to reasoning women with a “higher” human potential. No longer – the confirmation of a true estrus in women via open Hypergamy literally confirms virtually every elementary principle Game has asserted for the past 13 years.

Dual Sexuality

Within the dual sexuality framework, fertile-phase sexuality and non-fertile-phase sexuality possess potentially overlapping but also distinct functions [22,23]. In a number of primate species, extended sexuality – female receptivity and proceptivity at times other than the fertile phase – appears to function to confuse paternity by allowing non-dominant males sexual access [e.g., 24]. These males cannot rule out their own paternity, which might reduce their likelihood of harming a female’s offspring. In humans, by contrast, extended sexuality may function to induce primary pair-bond partners to invest in women and offspring [e.g., 22].

I found this part particularly interesting when you contrast this dynamic with the social resistance that standardized paternity testing has been met with. In a feminine-primary social order based on open Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative can’t afford not to legislate a mandated cuckoldry. If Beta provider males will not comply with the insurance of a woman’s long-term security (as a result of being made aware of his place in Open Hypergamy) then he must be forced to comply either legally, socially or both. The old order exchange of resources for sexual access and a reasonable assurance of his paternity is replaced by a socialized form of cuckoldry.

Some studies have found that women’s sexual interests in men other than partners are strikingly rare during the luteal phase, relative to the fertile phase [25,26]. Other research has found moderating effects; for example, women who perceive their partners to lack sex appeal experience increased attraction to men other than partners, less satisfaction, and a more critical attitude toward partners, but only when fertile [27,28]. Fertile-phase women in one study were more assertive and focused on their own, as opposed to their partner’s, needs, especially when attracted to men other than partners during that phase [29].

Most research on cycle shifts has been inspired by theory concerning women’s distinctive sexual interests during the fertile phase. One study explicitly sought to understand factors influencing women’s sexual interests during the luteal phase, finding that, at that time, but not during the fertile phase, women initiated sex more with primary partners when they were invested in their relationship more than were male partners [30]. This pattern is consistent with the proposal that extended sexuality functions, in part, to encourage interest from valued male partners. Others have proposed that women’s estrus phase has been modified by pair-bonding.

Initiating sex or being receptive to a primary partner’s sexual interest during the luteal phase (the Beta swing of the cycle) follows when we consider that a woman being sexual during this phase poses the least potential of becoming pregnant while simultaneously (rewarding) reinforcing that primary partner’s continued investment in the pairing with sex (intermittent reinforcement). This is a very important dynamic because it mirrors a larger theme in women’s socio-sexual pluralism – it’s Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks on a biological scale.

Compare this intra-relationship predisposition for Beta sex and contrast it with the larger dynamic of open Hypergamy Alpha Fucks during a woman’s prime fertility window in her peak SMV years, and her post Epiphany Phase necessity to retain a comforting (but decidedly less sexually exciting) Beta provider.

Women’s sexual strategy on a social scale, mirrors her instinctual, estrous sexual strategy on an individual scale.

Cues of Fertility Status
Females across diverse species undergo physical and behavioral changes during estrus that males find attractive: changes in body scents in carnivores, rodents, and some primates; changes in appearance, such as sexual swellings, in baboons and chimpanzees; changes in solicitous behavior in rodents and many primates [2,31] Because women lack obvious cyclic changes, it was widely assumed that cycle shifts in attractiveness were eliminated in humans, perhaps with the evolution of
pair bonding [32].

In 1975, a pioneering study documented increased attractiveness of women’s vaginal odors midcycle [33]. A quarter century later, research revealing other detectable fertile-phase changes began to accumulate, including increased attractiveness of women’s upper torso odors, increased vocal pitch and attractiveness, and changes in women’s style of dress and solicitous behaviors [34]. Meta-analysis of this literature confirms that changes across the cycle in women’s attractiveness are
often subtle, but robust (K. Gildersleeve, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2014).

A notable recent study demonstrated that hormones implicated in attractiveness shifts in non-humans also predict attractiveness shifts in humans [35]. Photos, audio clips, and salivary estrogen and progesterone were collected from 202 women at two cycle points. Men rated women’s facial and vocal attractiveness highest when women’s progesterone levels were low and estrogen levels high (characteristic of the follicular phase, and especially the fertile window).

Emerging evidence suggests that these changes affect interactions between males and females. During the fertile window, women report increased jealous behavior by male partners [25,29,36]. A possible mediator of such changes – testosterone – is higher in men after they smell tshirts collected from women on high- than on low-fertility days of the cycle [37; cf. 38]. A recent study examined related phenomena in established relationships by bringing couples into the lab for a close interaction task (e.g., slow dancing) [39]. Following the interaction, male partners viewed images of men who were attractive and described as competitive or unattractive and noncompetitive. Only men in the competitive condition showed increases in testosterone from baseline – and only when tested during their partner’s fertile phase.

What remains less clear is how we can understand shifts in attractiveness from a theoretical perspective. It is unlikely that women evolved to signal their fertility within the cycle to men [22,34]. In fact, the opposite may have occurred – active selection on women to conceal cues of ovulation, which could help to explain weak shifts in attractiveness relative to many species. Concealment might have promoted extended sexuality with its attendant benefits from investing males, or
facilitated women’s extra-pair mating. Possibly, the subtle physical changes that occur are merely “leaky cues” that persist because fully concealing them suppresses hormone levels in ways that compromise fertility. Behavioral shifts, by contrast, may be tied to increases in women’s sexual interests or motivation to compete with other women for desirable mates [e.g., 40].

Usually after first-time readers have a chance to digest the material I propose in Your Friend Menstruation the first frustration they have is figuring out just how they can ever reliably detect when a woman is in this estrous state. On an instinctual level, most men are already sensitive to these socio-sexual cues, but this presumptuousness of sexual availability is rigorously conditioned out of men by social influence. In other words, most guys are Beta-taught to be ashamed of presuming a woman might be down to fuck as the result of picking up on visual, vocal or body posture cues.

Beyond this perceptiveness, there are also pheromonal triggers as well as behavioral cues during estrus that prompt a mate guarding response in men.

I would however propose that the evolved concealment of an estrus-like state and all of the attendant behaviors that coincide with it are a behavioral mechanic with the purpose of filtering for men with a dominant Alpha capacity to “Just Get It” that a woman is in estrus and thus qualify for her sexual access either proceptively or receptively.  Women’s concealed estrus is an evolved aspect of filtering for Alpha Fucks.

In addition, this concealment also aids in determining Beta Bucks for the men she needs (needed) to exchange her sexual access for. A guy who “doesn’t get it” is still useful (or used to be) precisely because he doesn’t understand the dynamics of her cyclic and dualistic sexual strategy. Her seemingly erratic and self-controlled sexual availability becomes the Beta Bucks interest’s intermittent reinforcement for the desired behavior of his parental investment in children that are only indeterminately of his genetic heritage.

Evidence of this intermittent reinforcement can also be observed in what Athol Kay from Married Man Sex Life has described as wives “drip feeding” sex to their husbands. The confines of a committed monogamy in no way preclude the psycho-sexual influences of estrus. Thus placating a less ‘sexy’, but parentally invested man with the reinforcer of infrequent (but not entirely absent) sex becomes a necessity to facilitate the prospect of a future sexual experience with an Alpha while ensuring the security of her Beta.

In closing here I think the importance of how this estrous state influences women on both an individual and social level can’t be stressed enough in contrast to the social embrace of open Hypergamy. The Hypergamy genie is not only out of the bottle, but women are, perhaps against their own interests, embracing the genie with gusto.

Just today Vox posted a quick hit article about how men are discovering that pornography is now preferable to relating with the average woman. In an era of open Hypergamy I don’t believe this is a rationalized preference so much as it’s simply a pragmatic one. Men are rapidly awakening to a Red Pill awareness, even without a formal Red Pill education, and seeing the rewards (the intermittent reinforcement) simply aren’t worth the investment with women who blithely express their expectations of them to assume the role they would have them play in their sexual strategies.