Rational Male Book

The Truth About Standards

Most men never vet women for anything like long term acceptability. A lot of guys would have you believe they have high standards for the women they self-righteously allow into their lives, but for the most part this is internet posturing from Trad-Cons and ‘spergs‘ who’d like their circle of virtual friends to believe they have more options, or more learn-ed wisdom, than other men. After-the-fact rationalizations about how discerning a guy was in choosing his wife or girlfriend are a necessary insulation for men’s egos when they come into the Red Pill community. They get uncomfortable when the Red Pill Lens forces them to take a better look at their own choices.

The flip side to this are the guys who’ve already been burned by a woman, and by association the totality of Gynocentrism. They also tend to reverse engineering their lack of vetting. A wife who was once his Quality Woman becomes the bitch who turned on him – the living example of all women and their Hypergamous nature. Likewise, these guys never truly vetted their ex. In someways they may have been as equally naive about the nature of women as the guy still married and self-convinced that he’s done his due diligence in selecting the perfect mate.

Now add to all this a religious belief-set that is founded on marriages staying solid foundations of family formation and resistant to divorce (thus ensuring contentment and righteous living). Here we add another layer of self-blinding on top of men’s haphazard long-term mating strategy founded on his necessitousness. Surely a man’s true religion is the key to a loving and happy wife, appreciative children, strong family ties and quality of life? Men will always seek validation in the choices they invested their lives in – particularly in the face of realities that contradict them.

All of this is related to men’s long term mating strategy. I’ve written extensively on men’s innate mating strategy and the existential importance of men ensuring their own paternity. But just as women’s Hypergamy is a manifestation of their biological nature, so too are men’s imperatives in their own mating strategies. However, a distinction needs to be made with respect to Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks equalist comparisons with women’s strategies. Men and women’s mating imperatives are both antagonistic and complementary depending on the nature of the men and women coming together to reproduce.

Men’s innate, unconditioned, biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Left to his own volition, and unimpaired by women’s Hypergamous filtering strategies, men’s innate drive is to opt for variety of sexual experience.

Critics will counter with “Well, women look for variety too dontcha think?”

While there is some truth in this, women’s desire for broader sexual experience is motivated by a search for better quality in the men she has sex with, not quantity per se. Monogamy (as we know it) is really a tool for low SMV men to socially ensure reproduction and paternity (at least in theory).

For men the motivation is about quantity. Yes, men love variety in women. Yes, men would rather there be no hindrance to getting to that sexual experience with that variety. This is why pornography is ubiquitous today, and has always been a motivator for men – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. There’s a reason why young Muslim men are promised 70 virgins in paradise if they martyr themselves. Variety and ensured paternity, even if it has to be in the afterlife, is clearly a strong motivator for men. Rockstars and religious zealots all strive for the same goal, they just come to it in different ways.

Priorities

Men are so motivated by sexual experience that it supersedes the need for food. Research shows brain cells specific to men fire up when mates are present and override the need to eat. Take this as you will, but it does reinforce the idea that for men, sex is in fact a biological need.

Left unhindered human (Alpha) males will opt for securing multiple breeding partners; in some cases sequestering them for his long-term use. Locking away harems in secured compounds is something powerful men have done since our tribalistic past. Secure mates – secure paternity with them. There’s a reason why eunuchs guarded harems. The notion that men and women were ever naturally monogamous is an idealistic social convention. True monogamy in the animal kingdom is an extreme outlier. It’s just this prioritization of sexual opportunity that makes vetting women for monogamy compete with reproductive opportunism.

Strategic Pluralism

Most men are not Alpha males. The vast majority of men in this life and in eras past only had sexual access to a precious few women in their lives – if at all. Even in social conditions that rewarded monogamy and punished infidelity men and women have always found ways to manifest their antagonistic mating strategies. As few as 8,000 years ago (post agrarianism) 1 male reproduced for every 17 females. And as few as 4,000 years ago women were out-reproducing men. Again, read and make your own conclusions, but the point is human mating strategies find ways to circumvent social conventions.

On paper, monogamy is not a bad idea. As a social convention monogamy has been a stabilizing force in human evolution, but it in no way aligns with our innate sexual proclivities. Monogamy is a sexual strategy that primarily benefits low SMV men because most men will never experience (relatively) unlimited access to unlimited sexuality outside of pornography.

In Red Pill spheres we encourage men to consider themselves the prize. I personally believe that the most important step in unplugging a guy from his Blue Pill conditioning starts by internalizing the concept of Mental Point of Origin, but why is this often the most difficult step for men? It’s hard to think of oneself as a ‘winner’ when all a guy has done is lose for most of his life. The numbers don’t add up, and all the pep rallies a guy can pay for wont account for much until the day a girl actually responds to the “new you“. Feeling good about yourself is great, but most men want a solution to their sexlessness. Remember, sex really is that important to your male hindbrain. Food < Sex, got it?

According to Strategic Pluralism Theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests Of The Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

A lot of men get confused about the masculine imperative, but for the most part I think Strategic Pluralism Theory outlines most of mens’ mating strategies. In the Pareto Principle I delved into how women separate men into different sub-groups. The popularized oversimplification of this goes something like this:

“20% of men are fucking 80% of women.”

This is a misnomer. Granted, it used to have the good intention of getting men to believe that a small percentage of guys are having sex with a majority of women, and well, it might as well be them, right?

I’m sure that was meant to be a kind of motivational encouragement for guys learning Game, but it’s effectively wrong. The reality is 100% of women are interested in fucking about 20% of guys. We can see this repeatedly illustrated in various online dating stats and the realities of what Tinder has done to the SMP. But that’s the principle, not the practice. Just because a woman wants to get with a twentieth percentile man in no way means she will be getting with that guy. The issue here is the want not the get.

The Scarcity Mentality

Most men live in a state of sexual scarcity. So to implore a man to believe he’s actually the prize, or he should consider himself the prize, is an alien thought to him. Whether he acknowledges it consciously, his hindbrain understands the realities of his present-state sexual market value and it understands the reproductive equation it’s tasked with solving in (hopefully) a prosocial way.

Any time a woman actually shows an intimate interest in a low SMV man he will instinctively overlook the “deal breakers” his rational mind would otherwise give him pause to consider. Remember, sex supersedes hunger in the evolved scope of things for men. There are no considerations for ‘red flags’ with a woman when reproduction is of more strategic importance to his hindbrain.

When I’m listening to shows like Before the Train Wreck I hear the same predictable problems voiced by young men over and over again. There are consistent red flags these man should’ve seen before committing to a woman. And as a third party to this, we’re always dumbfounded by how the guy couldn’t have seen the signs before acting or committing to a woman’s mating strategy in order to facilitate a compromised version of his own strategy. Men’s rational process (particularly young men’s) are bypassed by sexual instinct and the hindbrain realization that his breeding opportunities are few and far between.

75% of college men would agree to have sex with a (semi-attractive) female they just met on campus while 0% of women would do the same with an unfamiliar male. Most men simply do not vet women for long term compatibility. The nature of our biology and our access to reproductive opportunities makes vetting a hindrance to solving a reproductive equation. In short, most men can’t afford to miss out on breeding opportunities.

As I outlined in Instinct, Emotion and Reason, our rational process requires time to be fully useful to us. The Instinct and Emotional processes are far quicker in their assessments and immediate effect on us. While men may innately prioritize reason before emotion, Instinct beats all other processes in speed and efficiency – if not accuracy. In our feminine-primary social order we further complicate (and disadvantage) men today by teaching them that their emotional response is the “correct” one to base decisions on. We conditions men to prioritize the Emotional process from a very early age. Again, all this makes actually vetting a woman for intimate acceptability almost offensive to the average (Beta) man today.

And this discomfort with holding any standards for women to receive his intimate approval also serves women’s sexual strategy.

You Just Got Lucky

There is a social aspect that comes into play with respect to men pairing up with women. As western societies have become more gynocentric the need to establish limitations on men’s mating strategies, and the simultaneous unfettering of women’s strategies, becomes apparent. In short, men simply aren’t allowed to hold standards for women to follow. And it’s offensive for men (not women) to even suggest the criteria women might need to ‘live up to‘ for men’s consideration of commitment.

Rich Cooper’s engagement on this one Tweet should illustrate what I’m getting into here. I’ve seen other variations of this message serve as outrage fodder for local news programs. The point is that a man making even marginal requirements for a man’s investment in a woman is met with extreme hostility. If your goal is getting social engagement there’s no better way to get it than by having the audacity to tell women they should qualify to a man – in any context. The idea that there is a man somewhere on planet earth who would voice his conditions for intimacy with women is unconscionable in gynocentric society.

But why? Why do women and their ‘allies‘ become so incensed by this? Because it commits the cardinal sin of the female power structure; it removes a degree of control away from women’s Hypergamous choice. If a woman must qualify to a man – in any context – it also sins against the maxim of the Strong Independent Woman®:

Never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.

Notice how hostile women become when any man would place conditions on his terms for intimacy/commitment. This is a challenge to women’s unilateral control of Hypergamy in the social order. But more so, it is an affront to women’s Existential Fear:

The Existential Fear in women is that their innate Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.

That a Beta male would ever hold conditions for his commitment triggers indignation in women.

Even Alpha men must never put terms on their commitment; men should feel blessed that any woman would have them. When Beta men reflexively default to social self-deprecation around their wives or LTR we see this social convention confirmed. We are conditioned to feel “lucky” that a woman lowered her standards to accept a man as her mate.

This is the intersexual poker game women play with men on whole. Entitlement, solipsism, anxiety over optimizing Hypergamy, all that competes with the foreknowledge that her attractiveness will decay over time. Women’s hindbrains know that their sex appeal, their agency in achieving that optimization, is ultimately perishable. Now add to this the anxiety that a Beta male might ‘trick’ her into choosing him as a mate and you can see why the Sisterhood will rally against men holding any demands for their interest in a woman.

Men often acquiesce to the mindset that they ought to feel fortunate that a woman would ever have them. They also foster this necessitousness in other men, usually as a form of Beta Game.

This endemic sense of metaphysical gratitude is what prevents men from even considering having standards for women. It also polices other men from holding standards themselves. How dare you be so arrogant as to expect a woman to live up to your demands? Just be glad the gods took pity on you and granted you a wife when so many Incels are at home with dick in hand. Tsk, tsk.

When a man ever has the temerity to evaluate women’s worth he’s made into a pariah. Today we expel boys from school for making lists rating the girls in their classes. Meanwhile women develop apps to do exactly the same for the men they’ve dated to inform other women. In a fem-centric social order only women are allowed to hold standards. This fact is a manifestation of a larger power dynamic between the sexes today.

A list of qualities a woman should have to please a man, to hold his long-term interests, goes viral and makes the evening news. Those men then become the easy, chauvinistic, villain to hate – “Can you believe that men like this still exist?!”

Eligible Bachelors

In my last post I made mention of how women were in crisis mode about the lack of ‘economically attractive’ men today. The articles about this crisis center on the idea of “eligible” men. Even the wildly popular show The Bachelor is built around the idea of men’s ‘eligibility’ to be considered for women’s approval. Qualify. Prove your quality. Be worthy of a woman’s love. Be ‘eligible’.

A female-primary social order – an order dedicated to maintaining feminine social control – needs to ruthlessly control which man is eligible for women’s consideration. It’s never the other way around. ‘Eligible’ is a way of psychologically maintaining a superior station of value for women.

Always bear in mind, women break rules for Alpha men and make rules for Beta men. But on a social scale it helps maintain the power imbalance if even Alpha men believe the same mythologies as Beta men.

This essay is the first in a series meant to establish a hierarchy of relationship needs that men might consider to help them accurately vet the women they allow into their lives and to enact these standards.

Are Men Adapting to the New Sexual Marketplace?

I revisited the topic of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) last Saturday on Rule Zero. I don’t like rehashing old debates I’ve learned will ultimately go nowhere. You simply wont reach most people who don’t want to be reached. Once they’ve had some experiential lessons in life, reinforced it with the tribalistic need to affirm the beliefs derived from that experience and then invest their egos in them it becomes kind of pointless. I’m not saying just give up on people, far from it, but do understand what you’re up against. This is why I say unplugging men from the Matrix is dirty work, and a lot like triage. Know what’s worth expending energy for.

Most men, and nearly all women, don’t form a belief set based on multiple, independently funded, peer reviewed studies or statistical analyses. We go with experience first and then modify it from there.

I did a bit of preparation for this talk. My schedule last Saturday only permitted me an hour so I wanted to be succinct and throw out at least something new to the conversation. There’s a lot of tribalism in the Manosphere today and it’s no surprise that MGTOW as a tribe in growing – but likely not for the reasons most MGTOW would be willing to admit. MGTOW is becoming atomized and commercialized in the same manner as I predicted the Red Pill would (and has) last year.

What that means is MGTOW is rapidly becoming the same commercial vehicle for grifters that the Red Pill was just a year and a half ago. Life Coaches, Relationship Experts, Fitness Gurus, even Christian men’s ministry pastors are all looking online to find out ‘where have all the men gone?’ When men were found in the Red Pill this is where the grifters would coalesce. Thus, you had every ‘brand-of-me’ self-improvement hack calling himself “red pill”. A few of them still do. A few of them read verbatim from my book(s) and plagiarize it as their own. But more now I see these same grifters referring to themselves as MGTOW without realizing (or even caring) what it really means to men.

MGTOW is the new ‘brand’ that lifestyle ‘coaches’ are adding to their twitter profiles and YouTube channel About pages. They see the potential for growth by association. Even if they get owned in their comments and feeds, adding the tag MGTOW will draw clicks. A few of these ‘coaches’ had a familiarity with the tribe and decided to finally commit in the hopes that it would boost views, others are former ‘power-of-positivity‘ life-coaches who slide into MGTOW because the definition of what makes a man “go his own way” is so loose now that it can align with virtually anything the guy had written about before his new affiliation.

It’s a real short step from “Make yourself your Mental Point of Origin” to “Make yourself #1 in your life” and then to “Go your own way.” I’ve had at least four “dating experts” (one female) claim Mental Point of Origin was their own idea in their subscriber emails as recently as August. Grifters used the Red Pill and are now using MGTOW to legitimize their brands today. In 2015 the MRAs decided to appropriate the Red Pill as their own brand to name a feminist’s “journey of self-discovery” movie The Red Pill. This appropriation is continuing with MGTOW now.

As I said on the Red Man Group back in May, the Red Pill is going to have a real PR problem in the coming year. Everything I predicted in my State of the Manosphere address a year ago has come to pass and I predict it will only intensify in the 2020 election cycle. The Gender War needs a convenient, easy-to-hate villain to point to in order to reinforce the Future is Female narrative.

Very soon MGTOW will have the same PR problem. And once the next Eliot Rodger or Alex Minasian incident occurs you’ll see these grifters scatter from MGTOW like roaches when the lights come on. When there are dead women on the sidewalk somewhere, and the MSM is using terms like ‘MGTOW’, ‘Incel’ and ‘radicalization’ that is when all the ‘tribes’ of the Manosphere will throw each other under the bus. That’s when you’ll know who was ‘playing MGTOW’ for likes.

Adaptation

One thing this re-debate of MGTOW has made me reconsider is whether men are adapting to the new realities of the sexual marketplace or just looking to make their necessities a virtue. At its simplest MGTOW is men refusing to make women the measure of their lives, and then molding their lives to their own plan. This pairs nicely with virtually every pet ideology and ‘positivity’ grift in the ‘sphere today. Even Tradcons will agree with MGTOW if it means “Be the best man you can be“. It agrees with Mental Point of Origin. It agrees with Roissy – “You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority.” It agrees with “Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.“

If that was all there was to MGTOW it would simply be Red Pill. What “MGTOW” life-coach grifters don’t realize is that MGOTW is a derivative of the Red Pill. I’ve always argued that once a guy becomes Red Pill aware he cannot help but live in some different fashion. Even the guys who go into complete denial can’t unsee the truths of intersexual dynamics. It’s what you actually do with that new awareness that sets apart Red Pill praxeology from MGTOW in practice. There’s more to MGTOW than just refusing to make women the measure of a man’s life – it’s also deciding what actually is deference to women. And that’s where it becomes highly subjective.

In my last post I outlined how women were upset there weren’t enough ‘eligible‘ men to marry in the current (westernized) sexual marketplace (SMP) today. Of course the two most common responses were either:

  • Women are the victims of the SMP they created. Women’s solipsistic, socially enabled entitlements to an ‘economically attractive’ man (a man who exceeds her own productivity by 58%) only proves the point that women’s social media bloated egos have made them unrealistic tyrants. Now their beliefs and actions have come home to roost.
  • This is proof-positive that MGTOW is working! Finally women are waking up to the realities of their beliefs and actions. If enough guys abandon the SMP altogether then women will be forced to come back to reality and choose men based on other criteria than ‘economic attractiveness’.

One point I struggled to make on last week’s show was that I wondered if MGTOW believed that, from an evolved perspective, men and women are better together than they are apart. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pursue that question in depth; do MGTOW largely believe that, if social circumstances were different, men and women evolved to be complements to the other and the best social outcome would be for the sexes to be together rather than segregated?

For the last 60 years feminism has effectively driven a wedge between men and women. The Gender War of today exists because of a systematic segregation between men and women (don’t @me with the cultural marxism/’evil juice’ shit for the moment). Honestly, I’m sick of reading about how negative it is to merely point out the realities of this ‘gender cold war’ by Success Porn grifters, but is not MGTOW an adaptation to this segregation? Is not MGTOW an exacerbation of this segregation. When I read mantras like ‘Dogs, Dudes and Dolls’ it sounds an awful lot like ‘Cats, Girlfriends and Vibrators’.

Is MGTOW an adaptation to the conditions in a sexual marketplace that was (and still is) contrived by feminism/gynocentrism?

The following quote is from a long time commenter and friend Deti. This was from a larger discussion that began here if you want to get some context. Sorry guys, I just don’t have the space to repost the whole thread, but I don’t want this to get lost. Hopefully, it will inspire further discussion in this post’s comments:

I read Novaseeker as saying in his comments on this post, that women have adapted within this particular milieu. In other words, women noted the changes and have adapted to them. It helps that the changes were geared to them and prepared with them in mind. But women have adapted, and men have not.

About 100 years ago, it was all geared toward men and the sexual and marriage marketplaces were prepared with men in mind. They were prepared to advantage men and disadvantage women. Women responded to and lived within that milieu in a number of ways.

Using soft power, manipulation, deceit, subterfuge, behind the scenes machinations. Most women were more or less OK with marrying an OK guy, having OK sex, and living an OK life.

Of course, sometimes women cheated on the downlow. Sometimes women cuckolded husbands. I mean real actual traditional definition of cuckolding, which is a married woman getting pregnant by an Alpha and passing the child(ren) off as the Beta Husband’s. There’s no way to know how often that happened, but it wasn’t really rare – Maybe anywhere from 5 to 20% of children then weren’t fathered by their bio-moms’ husbands. In rare cases, not marrying and becoming spinsters, living as bohemians or as “favorite cousins” or “favorite aunts” with male relatives, working as teachers or seamstresses or some other job, and being live in nanny/maid. In rare cases, divorcing and living off family money or a husband’s alimony money. Living as widows and not remarrying.

The point is that women learned how to adapt. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they did adapt.

The main responses men have used today to adapt to changing circumstances have been:

  1. Game/PUA/Seduction – Use the changes to men’s advantage and go for easy sex and the bachelor lifestyle.
  2. MRA – Fighting the changes to advocate for either equalizing the laws or rolling them back to a return to Marriage 1.0 and pre-sexual revolution status.
  3. MGTOW – Check out of the new system, refuse to support or participate in it, and eschew relationships with women to varying degrees.

About, oh, 20 years in, I think we can safely say that option 2) is dead in the water and has been for some time. About the only real reforms here are that divorce and family laws are slowly, very, very slowly, moving toward 50/50 residential custody and away from alimony (except in the case of longer term marriages with breadwinner spouse/dependent nonemployed wife). Unless you have been married more than 20 years and support a housewife, you probably will not be paying alimony except for temporarily. Thats about the entire sum and substance of how “equal” it’s going to get between men and women.

That leaves 1) Game; and (3) MGTOW.

It’s hard to tell what will come out of this. I think we can say:

• Marriage 1.0 is dead and we are never going back to it for at least 2 more generations. If you think you’re going to have a “traditional marriage” where you don’t have to do much to maintain it or you can let up on your attractiveness levels, think again. Because that is not going to happen. If you’re going to marry a woman, you need to improve your attractiveness, marry a woman who is not financially dependent on you, and cultivate your own life separate and apart from her. You need a contingency plan in the event the marriage goes south. And with all that, you need to consider whether you want to risk bringing kids into the mix. You absolutely need a prenuptial agreement, even if it gets judicially torn up or modified later.

The bottom line is, people are still marrying, it’s just that it’s all being pushed out later and later, and people are staying single longer and spending less time married. Many women are meeting the men they eventually marry in their early to mid 20s, and then marrying in their late 20s and early 30s. That’s a paradigm that’s increasing in frequency; this idea of long term dating and engagements lasting 2 to 5 years while both the man and woman establish their careers.

If you want long term relationships you should consider marriage alternatives like living together, or being exclusive while living apart. You absolutely must avoid at all costs these polyamory/polygyny situations, and open marriages. You absolutely must avoid women who want to continue AF’ing it even after they marry. That must be an absolute no go, not an option, ever.

• Men have to improve and increase their sexual attractiveness to create, maintain, and sustain relationships with women. You can’t let up here. That’s IF you want relationships with women.

• More and more men will go pure MGTOW and will severely minimize if not eliminate their relationships with women. For a growing number of men, this option is going to be the best one, because (a) they did the work and still couldn’t attract women; or (b) they don’t want to do the work and it’s easier to stay as is than to try.

For most men, avoiding women entirely, except for paying hookers, is a no go. The thirst is that strong. The male sex drive is that potent. Most men want to have some contact with women, even if it’s just random hookups now and again. And the only way to do that is to make yourself as sexually attractive as possible. That just is so. Women are the ones who pick sex partners, and they have no problem with sharing attractive men with other women. So if you want sex partners, you have to make yourself sexually attractive. And you have to know male and female sexual nature, so that you know what you’re getting into, you know what you’re seeing, you know what women are doing, and you know what women really mean when they talk.

For men, improving one’s own attractiveness increases one’s power in the market. It increases his ability to control some of the selection process. It gives him an abundance mentality. It gives him the power to walk away from situations that disadvantage him. It gives him the ability to tell women “no” and to reject women who cannot or will not give him what he wants and needs.

On the other hand, going your own way can also increase your power in the market. It maximizes your control over your own life. It sharply reduces your responsibilities to others, and increases your opportunities. It frees up your resources to expend the way you want. Sharp reductions in responsibility means a sharp reduction in the needed resources for day to day living, meaning you can work less and increase your leisure time.

I think that more and more men will go pure MGTOW, which is essentially “make the best of a tough situation, be single, and don’t have a family. At least that’s better than getting divorce raped and it’s less work than going to the gym, getting in shape, and eating clean. This way I can eat what I want and work 30 hours a week, and live by myself in my apartment”. It’s kind of similar to women 100 years ago, where the path of least resistance was for Bertha BigGirl, Martha Dumptruck, and Plain Jane to “find a decent, OK man to support me, and probably have at least 3 of his kids. At least it’s better than living with Mom until she dies, and then having to live with my brother and his wife, and taking care of their kids.” And similar to the spinster, the MGTOW will be low status, or at least perceived as low status. But for the spinster and the MGTOW, their lifestyles will be at least better than whatever else they could have gotten.

Guys, Nova is absolutely correct in that men by and large are not adapting.

I think that what’s going on is that many men are saying “want to stay the same, don’t want to do a lot of work, but I still want women to be attracted to me and to be able to date a lot and eventually get married and have a family like (a) mom and dad had when I was growing up; or (b) like I didn’t get to have growing up.” Well, you can’t have that, at least not without working for it. If you want something you’re going to have to work for it. If you want women and sex, you’re going to have to make yourself attractive to women. And the way you’re going to do that, the only way to do that, is to stand out. And the way you stand out is by improving every area of your life – your job, your body, your finances, your lifestyle, your hobbies, your social acumen, and everything else that involves you going through your life.

The funny thing is that when a man stops caring so much about it, forgets about women, and sets about improving his life, he starts attracting women.

That’s the current state of things, I think.

I don’t disagree that we’re presently at a turning point in intersexual relations. After the advent of unilaterally female controlled birth control and the Sexual Revolution that followed the upheaval in how men and women come together and relate was inevitable. Now that we’re 50 odd years past that point we’re figuring out how reproduction, love, marriage, and something as simple as boy-meets-girl is going to look for future generations. The internet and a social media acculturation on a global scale has seen to it that it will likely never look like it did under the old social contract. There’s a theory that post-agrarian societies experienced a similar shift in intersexual dynamics in our ancestral past. Socially enforced monogamy was the obvious intersexual shift.

Right now we’re seeing a similar shift in intersexual relations. Is it simply better for men and women to live segregated lives? I don’t believe so, but it seems like a larger cultural narrative believes it’s time for both men and women to go their own ways. Until one side concedes, fuck any notion of evolved complementarity is the narrative I guess.

I do disagree with Deti in that I think men are adapting. They always have. It’s that the adaptation is counter to what we might hope is the natural order between men and women.

Unmarriageable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aww Quit Complaining

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

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

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

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

Confirming the Red Pill

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

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

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

And then the Trad-Cons join the chorus,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selective Breeding

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

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

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

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

Manspreading

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

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

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

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

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

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

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

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

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

The Inner War

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

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

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

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

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

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

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

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

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

Bargain Abasement

“Men conquer worlds, women conquer men.” – Pook

From the time boys are about five years old, we’re taught self-control. Anyone with a young son  understands the challenge in this, but for the most part the control we teach our boys differs from what we teach (or don’t teach) our girls. For the most part, this control is necessary to curb boys’ natural proclivities to take risks, but in a feminine-primary social order this inhibiting risk comes from a need for female security . Our young minds, boys and girls, lack the capacity for abstract thought. In fact, our brains continue to develop to their fullest potential right up to 20-21 years of age. 

For millennia, adult men, fathers, mothers, the Village that is our larger social order, understood the need to place limitations on boys innate impulsiveness – usually for their own good. While these restrictions and discipline have always been a needed part of boys’ upbringing, today that self-control is taught in the context of how a young man can be more ‘correct’ by his female teachers. In the time of our old social contract teaching young men self-control and self-discipline was a means to self-mastery as an adult man. In the new social contract our gynocentric education system (and socialization) teaches boys discipline in the hopes that they will provide the security that women need.

And the way this is taught is by embedding a deep sense of shame and self-loathing of the male gender into ever-younger generations of future men. Mental Point of Origin is a constant theme in all of my literary work. I want to stress here that crushing any sense of self-priority or self-importance from boys and young men is the prime directive of a gynocentric education system. Last Saturday we discussed the “worshiping of women” on our new show Rule Zero. In this episode I pointed out that men are taught to place womankind on a pedestal from an early age. This meta-pedestalization of the feminine begins when boys are taught self-abasement as part of self-control. Essentially, all control becomes for boys is reducing themselves while aggrandizing (supporting) girls and later women. This is the main reason why wrapping your head around Mental Point of Origin is so difficult for men later in life. Their Blue Pill conditioning taught them to be servants as a means of proving their self-control.

Most women, certainly all feminists, will do their best to convince us that it’s still little girls who are taught to repress their naturally boyish natures. But it’s a cliché now to believe that little girls would be every bit as ‘curious about how the world works’ if not for a nebulous society that represses their passion for discovery. Since the Sexual Revolution our social order has done its damnedest to reverse gender roles – boys are taught to emulate the feminine, girls emulate the masculine. The Disney corporation has been the most active social agent in western culture in fomenting this reversal. Every story across all genres follows the same plot; a repressed little girl would make an even better boy if not for these Patriarchal rules she must break from. The story of Mulan is a good example. The girl Mulan must impersonate a boy in order to prove herself as a masculine equal – and to get closer to the Alpha male she naturally wants to pair with. Our popular fiction today all follows a similar teaching; girls need to break away from self-control to be more empowered.

The notion that little girls are ever taught to repress their natures is laughable in real life. If little boys are taught like they’re defective girls, then girls today are taught that they can literally do anything – and be free of any lasting consequences. In fact any restrictions, any pretense of a girl/woman requiring a degree of self-control is immediately associated with repression. This old order idea of female repression is a favorite trope for the Fempowerment narrative. The most marginal, well-meaning, criticism of women or the feminine is always steeped in ‘judgmentalism’. Being ‘judged’ is always a concern for women. For the past 3-4 generations of women, being freed from ‘repression’ is also to be free from judgement. They have an entitlement to avoid consequence.

Abasement

On last week’s Rule Zero episode we asked a question: why is it so many men will abase themselves with women? If you’ve been Red Pill aware for a while it’s easy to just dismiss these guys and think they’re all just low self-esteem losers, but the belief is endemic to the 80% of Beta men. The combination of having been raised to prioritize the concerns of women above his own interest, and the notion that doing so will make him a better romantic catch in the eyes of women (who already feel entitled to him being a useful servant) turns self-abasement into a form of Beta Game.

Why does a man get down on one knee to propose marriage to a woman? Surely this old social contract form of abasement was an expectation of men. It’s in practically every romantic story ever told.

Under the old social contract a man was presumed to be above a woman in status. The old intersexual hierarchy of love followed from the man to the woman and then later to the child(ren). It was a natural, understood, dominance hierarchy prior to the Sexual Revolution. In all the old stories Disney has ever retold the presumption of this hierarchy defines the plot of the story. Of course now we’ve grown accustomed to gender swaps and expectation swaps in these retellings, but when a woman gets down on bended-knee to propose to a man – as her empowering teachers have taught her is acceptable – there’s something awkward when a woman abases herself to a man. 

One of the prime directives of feminism is this:

Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.

Anything a woman might do just to please a man is abasement. It smacks of the repressiveness little girls are told still holds them back in spite all the world’s attempts to advantage them. Doing something, wearing something, being something or behaving in a way that might intentionally please a man is the antithesis of the Strong Independent Woman® ideal. But yet, women are taught that they should expect to live in Sadie Hawkins’ World where they should feel empowered to ask the man on a date and ask him to marry her if he merits it. Again, it’s all part of the gender reversal we’re expected to embrace.

But when you see it, when a woman is doing the proposing, it doesn’t feel empowering. It feels awkward, backwards. Social constructionism says that awkwardness is the result of society teaching you stereotypical gender norms; but those norms haven’t been the standard for at least 4 generations. Disney’s taught us different for some time now. But it still looks weird. The man is supposed to initiate. The man is supposed display and she is supposed to choose. The man is supposed to abase himself, right?

Male abasement is a sign of submission in an age that expected him to be an Alpha already. There used to be a time when men were expected to be the masters of their lives. Men understood their  Burden of Performance and built a life around creating (conquering) their own worlds. Certainly this achievement was motivated by finding a wife, but more so because of his innate sense of idealism.

The Ideal Man

The old social order expectations of men are still what women feel entitled to in the new order:

  • Superior Physicality: He must be more than her equal in height and strength. Muscularity is an ideal in men. Women hold far more strict and static ideals of male beauty than men have ever held for women.
  • Superior Dominance: He is respected, deferred to and sometimes feared by his peers. He holds status, power (in the traditional sense) and honor that is confirmed and reinforced by others – but only insofar as it can be useful to a woman. Women tend to have an immature understanding of the nature of power.
  • Superior Confidence/Competence: He must be more innovative and competent than herself. Competence is directly tied to the Hypergamous doubt – “Is he the best I can do?” If she is more competent (or she believes she is) than he is it upsets the natural intersexual dominance hierarchy and ultimately his Frame control. Confident competence is the foundation of a woman’s need for long term security.
  • Superior Mastery: He must be a master of himself and the world he directs. Again, this is tied to a woman’s need for security which he must ensure in the long term; even into his old age. He must “Just Get It” with her and understand women in general – this is derived from experience and being supremely desired by other women.

For all of this mastery the ideal man is expected to possess, the fantasy is that he must abase himself to her due to her uniqueness. The power of love is what he must defer to. Even today, in a post Sexual Revolution era, this chivalric ideal is still an unspoken expectation. That ideal is a superior man who abases himself to her, and only to her. This is the Beauty and the Beast archetypal story. The fantasy ideal man is only beholden to her particular charms. Men conquer worlds, women conquer men.

A few years ago (2012-13) I did a series of posts about the chivalric ideal. In those essays I proposed that the western concepts of chivalry, bastardized by the influence of ‘courtly love’, were an extension of power by the feminine. Essentially chivalry was feminism 1.0 in that it leveraged men’s obligations of honor to benefit the Feminine Imperative. Chivalry was a Male Space into which women inserted themselves (via courtly love), assimilated the principles and rewrote the rules to better fit themselves. We still see vestiges of this today when women post something on Facebook or Twitter stating that “only a ‘real’ man does the things that benefit me, my sexual strategy and my ensured survival and happiness.” 

Male sacrifice now extends to a man abasing himself for an entitled benefit of womankind. It’s no longer just an expectation of undying love and commitment, it’s a surrendering of his evolved imperatives.

Alpha Widows

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

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

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

What is an Alpha Widow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fantasy Ideal

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

Five Minutes of Alpha Trumps Five Years of Beta.

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

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

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

Social Enabling of the Alpha Ideal

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

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

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

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

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

Misconceptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Illustration, Stefan Schmidtz

Paternity, Promiscuity & “Poly”

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

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

Foxguy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Cuckoldry is a Beta Male Sexual Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 33-34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead pg. 43

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

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

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

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

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

The New Paternity

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

Law 32, The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provider Dads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic Pluralism Theory

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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