red pill

The Advantages of Now

As of this writing my second talk at last year’s 21 Convention is now available for free public viewing on 21 University. I worked this ‘talk’ a bit differently as you’ll see. I find that I can address what most of my readers are concerned with most in and open discussion rather than my delivering a sermon from the stage. I think I’m more comfortable with this as I’ve been aggregating information with other men in a forum style discourse for so long. My time at SoSuave really taught me the value of that back and forth exchange of information, and it’s really what led to so much of the material I’ve covered on the blog for almost 7 years now.

For the sake of clarity, this talk was the second I did and took place a day after my first, Hypergamy, Micro to Macro. I had originally intended to cover aspects of my third book, Positive Masculinity, since it had been released about 2 months prior. I had an extensive lecture all ready to go, but I decided to switch up my talk that morning. The day and night before I had gotten into at least 8 different “sub-conferences” with spontaneous groups of about a dozen guys that went on for any where between 20 minutes to an hour. It occurred to me then that the best way to address my topic would be to have an open discussion about masculinity with the guys I was talking to just a few ours before.

As much as I liked the first talk – and I still feel understanding Hypergamy in its entirety is a keystone element in understanding intersexual dynamics – I think this talk was much more personal. I’ve always felt that the Red Pill should remain ‘open source’ and be an aggregate of the experience of men from all over the world. To this end I’ll always feel that a roundtable discussion style is the best way to encourage men not just to put in their two cents, but also as the best way for men to learn. I am first a writer and then a speaker, but my speaking will always be better when a man is expressing his concerns, problems, critiques and experiences within a group of men focused on untangling Red Pill awareness. I’m always humbled when an interviewer calls me one of the Godfathers of the Red Pill, but the truth is there is no father of the Red Pill. For as much as some writers would like us to believe they fathered the manosphere, Red Pill awareness is the result of a consortium of men who came together, offered their input to the whole and made it something greater than it was before.

I got to watch both my talks before the post-production and release, and while I was reviewing them it occurred to me how fortunate this generation is to have access to such information today. I’m from a generation that didn’t have the internet when I was in my early 20s. There were no Game Gurus and the only “how to pick up girls” books we’re only available from mail order ads you found in the back of a Penthouse or Hustler magazine. I did read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell in 1993, but other than that book there was nothing about the nature of women that would ever be published by the major publishing houses then.

After I reviewed my video here I watched a TED talk given by Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, and in it he recounted all of the dead end jobs and life experience he’d accrued up to around 1996 when a friend of his fronted him $30,000 to keep him going while he wrote the book. He’d always wanted to be a writer, but until the mid 2000s publishing was locked by a monopoly of a handful of ‘traditional’ publishing houses. Even the 48 Laws of Power had to get past their review processes. Now I think Robert Greene is one of the greatest minds of our time in his articulating power dynamics, I attempted to model my own writer’s voice on his example, but there was a time when anything resembling Red Pill awareness or truths that would be less than flattering to the status quo would never have seen the light of day. Print on demand and digital publishing (eBooks) wasn’t even a dream at that time, but today we take them for granted.

I never had a childhood dream of being an author, writing is just something I’ve always done as one more outlet for my creativity. I never thought I’d be a published author of one book, much less three. Nor did I imagine I’d have audio versions of them (book 3 is coming soon Sam promises). But now is the time. With digital publishing anyone can be an author so long as their ‘content’ is good.

We are living in an era in which certain things we take for granted are the only time in history that they could occur. That might sound self-evident, but think about it; our technology today is such that certain ideas that could never have been brought into popular consciousness could only be considered because of that technology. We have an advantage of now. It’s kind of humbling in a way – having witnessed the transition from a time when all of the dynamics we invested so much of ourselves in then are now made common, cheapened in some cases, and the legitimacy of having earned them is lessened as a result.

In my rock star 20s it took 4-5 months of all of the guys in my band to scrape together enough money to pay for a 3 song demo tape (no CDs for us then) in a recording studio, and that was with us having friends in the industry. Today I can do everything that very expensive studio could on my iMac. I have tools now to create the dreams I’ve had since I was in high school, but the challenge is no long the access, but the ideas themselves. We live in an age when access to the tools and means of creation has never been greater, but the ideas, the imagination, the abstract unrefined concepts is what I think is lacking today. We can produce masterpieces of music in our homes, but today music is only getting worse.

I’ve seen videos of brilliant instrumentalist virtuosos on YouTube. Kids not older than ten playing complex pieces of music they learned and absorbed themselves online, yet few could actually create an original song with any expressiveness themselves.

We also live in an age where access to information has never been more ubiquitous. We have access to the knowledge of all human history in a device that we can put in our pocket, yet we’re still too lazy to actually use the search feature or cite an easily had source. We have a connectivity today that spans the globe, yet we readily factionalize and atomize our social networks according to ideological biases.

A lot of this disconnect from real genius, from true creativity, I want to chalk up to the constant distractions we’re bombarded with daily. It’s really the price we pay for having unlimited access to information and the tools of creation. Paraphrasing the late Chris Cornell, there are no more writers like Shakespeare because all he had was a table, a candle, a pen and some paper. Today, learning to avoid distractions and focus on a single task is an art itself, but there’s another reason for this lack of honest genius and that is we’re gradually seeing a new generation of men and women who are themselves the product of a social order that has never known a time or condition where this access didn’t exist.

I think it was Dave Grohl who said something like kids today think rock stars are generated from talent shows on TV. Even with all the easy access to creative expression there’s still this idea that the process is somehow out of their control.

So why am I freestyling this post just to introduce my next talk video? Because I want my readers to get some insight about the radical nature of the information that the Red Pill presents today. I’ve written essays about how the 1990s really represented the pinnacle of the Feminine Imperative’s social influence. This was due to the limitations of information inherent in that time. In those essays I wanted to stress just how influential the Imperative was on western culture, but more importantly just how ignorant we were of ever perceiving it then. Today, the jig is up.

The internet has exposed the influences of feminism and it’s opened up a dialog – one that the controllers of the means of it would like to censor – in which it can no longer hide its true intent. The nature of women, the mechanics of intersexual dynamics, the good, the bad and the ugly of everything the Red Pill makes us aware of is increasingly expanding. It’s expanding so much that I fear we’re reaching a point where the means to explore new ideas in the ‘sphere are being limited by the means itself.

When you watch this video, any Red Pill aware video, when you read the latest essay here or anywhere else, keep in the back of your mind that knowing this information is only possible in this time. I wrote Preventive Medicine in response to men telling me how they’d wished they’d had this information back when they were younger and didn’t know better so they could make better, informed decisions. The truth is that the information I’ve been spreading since 2002 could only be realized in this age. Some will say, “yeah, but ancient scholars (and deified psychologists) knew this stuff a long time ago”, to which I’ll say ‘no, they didn’t’. Not to the extent we do today. Not with the degree of accuracy we know now. Only now is this possible, and only later will we have an even greater understanding of the Red Pill – for better or worse.

You are fortunate to be here in the now. Some of what you’re made aware of will frustrate and anger you, some of it will depress you and some of it will bring you to that “Ah Ha!” moment. The Red Pill can enlighten you or stifle you, but you are better off knowing it now in an age where this is finally possible.

Big Fish

It’s likely readers here have been following my twitter threads about the Anthony Bourdain suicide and I’ve been discussing the particulars about his death on Pat Campbell’s show and the Red Man Group for almost 2 weeks now. As readers know I’ve personally dealt with two suicides under circumstances  like this and I’ve picked apart dozens more over the years I’ve been writing. I’ve got a pretty good idea why old Beta guys off themselves.

But the Beta part is only one aspect of the story. Anthony being a ‘paper alpha’ is certainly an aspect too, but the more I dig into the background of the “love of his life”, Asia Argento, the more the puzzle pieces fit together. This bitch was a piece of work. If you watched the Red Man Group last Saturday I explained why I don’t think she was a BPD case (borderline personality disorder), but after reading this thread I’m beginning to change my mind:

So, she’s a witch. A literal witch, and all of her ‘sisterhood’ are witches are too. You can digest that however you feel is necessary, but this is a 42 year old woman who practices literal witchcraft – which is an extension of feminism with a pagan spiritual  woo woo magical thinking whipped into the mix. I really need to do a more expansive post on Chick Crack soon.

But, even this isn’t what I want to confront you with. What I want to raise your awareness to is something I’ve never really had an occasion to explore until now; Anthony Bourdain was a very big fish.

Anthony Bourdain (AB) was a long term, life-long, Beta. He was every bit of what I call a ‘terminal Beta‘. Yes, he had the Bad Boy thing working for him and if you want to get a more complete idea about his past Black Label Logic has a great piece on his blog you really ought to read. But, with respect to Bourdain’s understanding of intersexual dynamics he was very much a Beta.

People immediately gave me shit for naming him such. That was expected. He’s Anthony-fucking-Bourdain and I’m just some “half-assed self-published Red Pill writer, what the fuck do I know, right?” Well, I knew enough to recognize the profile of a Contextual Alpha who’d been plugged into his Blue Pill conditioning for 61 years and the huge mark he put on himself by being so publicly co-dependent on the idea of the soul mate myth. Anthony had been through 2 wives. The most recent one cheated on him with her MMA fighter / personal trainer he no doubt was paying to “train” his soon-to-be ex wife. I have no doubt AB would’ve attempted to lock down Asia Argento because this is what overly possessive, perpetually mate guarding Beta men do when a woman approaches his “dream girl” ideal. His social media was rife with declarations about how happy he was to have finally met his ‘kindred spirit’ soul mate (and self-avowed Wiccan) Asia Argento. AB sincerely believed his ship had come in. The woman who would finally complete him (this time) was at last in his life.

In every Instagram image, every Tweet, AB was gushing about how he’d never been happier as he cuddled with Asia like a boy who loves his mother. Intermixed with these images were many others with him in classic possessive-Beta encroaching posture – interposing arms like an affectionate headlock, while she looked away wistfully, or directly at the camera with the look of a woman who knows the Beta she’s with is deadweight to her Hypergamy.

Big Fish and the Cookie Lady

There is a larger dynamic at play in all this, one I probably could add an addendum to in my second book, Preventive Medicine. An aging Beta male, and particularly one with a notable amount of money, success, fame or status is a big fish for a necessitous woman. A woman who’s long practiced in using her sexual agency to its best advantage with men knows a prime target in an older man who’s never unplugged himself from his Blue Pill conditioning. Bourdain was one such big fish, and his Blue Pill conditioning, his eager white knighting and immediate deference to the feminine, his soul mate idealism would’ve been instantly recognizable to a 42 year old woman long accustomed to being the center of orbit for many a prior Beta.

I don’t want to call it an epidemic, but there is a set of women who look for aging men with resources to befriend and pretend they have a genuine interest in. Men with even moderate means and a Blue Pill conditioned idealism that ‘love springs eternal’ are prime targets for women who can read and assess that man’s state from years of practice. A woman who shows interest in a man who’s been starved for affection, sex and a real connection with a woman (married or not) will seem like more than an oasis in the desert. She’ll appeal to his romantic, idealistic Beta soul; a last chance at ‘true happiness’, a true miracle, as he enters his old age.

My own father was one such target for a woman we called the ‘cookie lady’.

My dad passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s/dementia before he was 72, but before his dementia had really become apparent the ‘cookie lady’ had already made a mark of my dad. My father was also what I’ve called a terminal Beta. He never unplugged to his dying day and lived a life based on the old set of books, being a good provider, dutiful, responsible and he was perpetually disappointed by the women in his life never reciprocating with their intimacy and appreciation the ‘rules’ clearly stated should happen. They never loved him in the way he thought women ought to be capable of loving him. Nevertheless, dad always clung to the (noble?) belief that if he saved his pennies and was of the highest service to women that eventually, one day, his efforts and quality would be appreciated by the right woman. He was a good example of the Savior Schema.

The ‘cookie lady’ understood all of this – all of dad’s Blue Pill conditioning, the way he thought the world and women should work, the old social contract investments, his idealism about women, everything – all of it in less than a week. She really wasn’t all that different from my step-mother in that respect, but at this late in the game, at her age, and noticing the subtle hints of cognitive degeneration in dad, the stakes were much higher for her long term security. I should also add that I would include my own mother in this schema; she’s a lovable loon, but she knew a good opportunity for security back in the 60s, so it may be my father had a knack for attracting this type of woman due to his Blue Pill idealism.

The reason we called this woman the ‘cookie lady’ was because she always brought my dad fresh baked cookies when she was trying to play into his Blue Pill end-of-life last ditch hope for happiness. We never knew her real name and if it hadn’t been for my dad getting very upset with us for preventing him from rewriting the ‘cookie lady’ into his will and power of attorney within the first month of her ‘dropping by’ we may very well have been suckered into her scam too.

Respect Your Elders

It was this incident that opened up a whole new understanding of the Red Pill and intersexual dynamics for me. I think it may be important going forward in Red Pill awareness to consider how intersexual dynamics and the Feminine Imperative affect generations of older men. My brother and I had to really watch out for similar scams to take advantage of my dad’s condition and his Blue Pill mindset that was making him a target. It wasn’t until this incident that I did a bit of research to find out how common this scam really is. In a sense it’s one more angle on the ‘stripper effect’ for younger, desperate, men for whom the feigned attention of the stripper, the kino, the deferent concern, is more seductive than her sexuality. It feeds a deeper emptiness. In a young man, in an Incel, just the possibility for that connection can become an obsession. For an older man, who’s been starved of the same (in or out of marriage) for the better part of his life, it seems like a storybook ending all his Blue Pill conditioning told him was possible. And what would a man like that give for on last shot at that idealistic ‘love’?

When Will We Face the Facts about Suicide in Older Men?

The instance of elderly men’s suicide is something not too many people want to talk about. Much of what I’ve read about it throws out a lot of feminist boilerplate about how old masculine ideals are to blame, but as expected, it uses this ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative to cover the uglier truths. Most men are Betas. Most men spend their lives wondering why all the Blue Pill hopes they sincerely believe are possible just don’t happen for them. They blame themselves, or they blame others, but they never really unplug because their existence was centered on the certainty that Blue Pill dreams come true if they can just work on the relationship harder or they made more money or if they’d only met a more perfect ‘soul mate’ in the story that is their life.

Anthony Bourdain fit this profile to the letter. And while it may not have been Asia Argento’s conscious, forethought purpose to gravy-train him, his Blue Pill, Beta, perspective had to have been apparent to her. On some level of consciousness she knew he had the capacity for self-harm as an extension of this. It’s exactly why she pleaded to the paparazzi who photographed her on the streets of Rome with her far more Alpha lover Hugo Clement, not to publish the photos. For all the guilty foreshadowing from Rose McGowan trying to convince the public who adored Bourdain about their “relationship without borders”, the truth is deathly apparent that Bourdain’s idealism believed otherwise.

Asia Argento didn’t kill Anthony Bourdain, but in what she represented to his Blue Pill mind, her actions were the catalyst that prompted his suicide. Yes, he was depressed. Yes, maybe he was on Chantix (we’ll never know now that his body was cremated unceremoniously, without a toxicology screening and against his family’s wishes). Yes, he was a hard drinker, drug addict and had suicidal thoughts before (after his 2nd divorce), but he killed himself 3 days after the pictures of his “soul mate” and Hugo Clement were published.

I think the bigger lesson here is a wake up call for older men who are still plugged into the Blue Pill Matrix as well as those who’ve become Red Pill aware much later in life. I’m of the opinion that it’s never too late to unplug and live a Red Pill aware life, but I will concede it’s a lot to lay on a guy who’s lived most of his life plugged in. Looking back on decision after decision influenced by a Blue Pill conditioning, influenced by a set of rules you believed others were playing by and then seeing the results of those decisions and wreckage that followed. It’s one thing to be “awakened while married” when you’re in your early 40s, but it’s quite another to realize Red Pill truths when you’re 70 and maybe have another good 10 years to live if you took care of yourself. That’s a rough realization.

In Positive Masculinity I stressed the importance of Red Pill aware men being mentors for boys and younger men and helping to raise them out of the influences of the Feminine Imperative’s Village, but I think it’s going to be important to mentor and protect the interests of older men as they age in a Blue Pill mindset and become Red Pill aware.

The Nature of the Game

I had a reader ask me some questions recently and in answering it gave me some food for thought.

Are we stuck in our Alpha fucks/Beta cucks categories? Should we attempt to blend the two categories into the ultimate hybrid?

Or is there nothing we can do, but attempt to use the information that you have (brilliantly) given us as a navigational tool to find our way through this world and godspeed to every fellow?

Before this I came across these Tweets from Rian Stone:

I think a lot of guys new to Red Pill awareness tend to apply qualifiers to the ideas of what is Alpha and what is Beta. In a similar respect a lot of plugged-in Blue Pill conditioned ‘Beta’ men like to make similar qualifications, but their understanding is rooted in what their conditioning has convinced them of. For the newly unplugged guy, Alpha is whatever he hadn’t been doing before with women that is now working for him once he flipped his own script. For the plugged in guy, whatever he’s been convinced of that women say they want is ‘Alpha’ to him – and usually that means whatever benefits a woman’s sexual strategy in terms of long term provisioning, parental investment and security. They just don’t realize their own utility to women in that game.

That said, I don’t disagree with Rian here. Over the course of fifteen years and three books I have made every effort to correct critics who insist that “all those Red Pill guys think Alpha men are Silverback Gorillas or Wolves.” Roissy once called this Etymology Hate:

5. Etymology Hate

Hater: Your definition of an alpha male is false. In the animal kingdom, the alpha male is leader of the pack, not a cad/badboy/jerk who pumps and dumps women.

Isn’t it just like a nerd to get hysterical over the appropriation of a narrow-sense scientific term to conveniently illustrate broader truths about men and women.

These “broader truths” are why I still use Alpha and Beta as descriptions for men and their mindsets. Critics and disingenuous haters like to think that even considering men or behavior sets as being Alpha or Beta is cause for dismissing whatever is being said. There’s a reason for this blanket disqualification which I’ll cover in a moment, but what they (willfully) misunderstand is that these classification are abstractions for bigger ideas. Alpha and Beta are placeholder terms necessary to consider more complex ideas in intersexual dynamics. For the most part, when I hear or read Blue Pill conditioned men mock the idea of Alpha men and insist that it’s a direct derivative of believing those ‘idiot Red Pill guys thinking they’re Alpha wolves or Silverback gorillas’ I know that I’m not dealing with a serious debate. More on this later.

Rian is also correct in his observation that both Red Pill aware men and critics alike tend to think of Alpha and Beta as specific archetypes of men. I’ve written almost a dozen essays about the nature of Alpha, but in each one I make an attempt to dispel the archetype of what an Alpha or a Beta man is. The Beta archetype is easy to agree on because almost no guy wants to be a “beta male”. As would be expected we tend to think of betas as the stereotypical ‘cuck’ or ‘soy boy’, or the Nümale with his fear grimace agape.

I should point out that even the guys who we would categorize as Betas don’t think they are. Very few Beta men look in the mirror and go “damn, I gotta Alpha up”. They believe that they are the vanguard of the new definition of Alpha; that they and women have evolved beyond the visceral realities of Hypergamy and Beta is the new Alpha. Recently there’s been a concerted social effort to redefine what is acceptable masculinity in the wake of the narrative shift that would have us accept that all masculinity is toxic.

For men there will always be a want to believe that whatever qualities make up their own personality and their own lifestyle is what should define what is “alpha”. From Alpha:

Guy’s like Corey [Worthington] infuriate men who have invested their self-worth in the accomplishments of what they think ought to be universally appreciated and rewarded. So when they’re confronted with a natural Alpha being undeservedly rewarded for brazenly acting out of accord with what they think the rules ought to be, they seethe with resentment. The natural response in the face of such an inconsistency is to redefine the term ‘Alpha’ to cater to themselves and their accomplishments as “real men” and exclude the perpetrator. The conflict then comes from seeing his new definition of Alpha not being rewarded or even appreciated as well as a natural Alpha attitude and the cycle continues. Your respect (or anyone else’s) for an Alpha has nothing to do with whether or not he possess an Alpha mindset. 3 failed marriages and 100+ lays has nothing to do with his having or not having an Alpha mindset.

In the same way that a Blue Pill conditioned “beta male” believes he best represents the new “alpha” definition, so to do a lot of Red Pill aware men who play the same game of applying their own traits to what should be considered or appreciated as “alpha”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Trad-Con circles – an Alpha is a guy who takes care of his family and is respected as the head of the home. He takes care of his duties to family, God and country, etc., etc. Really all this is is another grab at affirmation of personal worth. Blue Pill “betas” believe exactly the same self-fulfilling thing from a different set of ideological beliefs.

In the process both the plugged-in and the unplugged create convenient archetypes for the opposite of the apex they want to believe they are and what they hope will be confirmed and rewarded. Usually these are binary caricatures: the Alpha ‘Chad’ is usually whatever image of the popular high school jock that used to be their nemesis fits, while the Beta ‘doormat’ is the George McFly character whose introversion and lack of social intelligence places him at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. Either one of these guys can be seen in a positive or negative light depending on the perspective of who’s doing the viewing. To the Nümale, whatever that classic Beta does should be what’s appreciated as ‘alpha’ and to the Trad-Con an Alpha is the guy who dominates, but only insofar as he sticks to what they think is his ‘duty’.

Funny how both tend think the Alpha Playah, the self-important ‘Cad’ who women tingle for, who follows his own sexual strategy shouldn’t be considered ‘Alpha’ in spite of women consistently, predictably rewarding him with sex and genuine desire.  Rian nailed this part; Alpha makes her wet, Beta makes her secure. Our Instinctual interpretive process understands the visceral reasons why women get worked up for that physically ideal guy who also completes the fantasy of the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. But our Emotional and Rational processes want to recreate a reality in which what we have is what women really want. So we try to persuade and convince women to act against their own Instinctual interpretive process with respect to what they should find sexy and genuinely desirable – us, just as we are. We want to change the Game to fit our capacity, our skill, our genetics, to excel in it.

Beta men don’t just hope that women will perceive their own redefinitions of ‘alpha’ as the accepted ideal, they build lives and systems of belief around convincing others and themselves that we’ve evolved past the visceral realities of what arouses women. Trad-Con men, even Red Pill aware men, do something similar – they hope that their own definition of what should constitute Alpha, and best describes themselves, will likewise supersede the natural evolved impulse of what a woman’s hindbrain perceives as an ideal Hypergamous opportunity.

Alpha Seed, Beta Need

T-rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress sixty-five million years of gut instinct. – Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park

Hypergamy wants what Hypergamy wants, but it’s also important to remember that Hypergamy has two sides; Alpha Seed and Beta Need. When we look at the dynamic of Ovulatory Shift we see this play out. In a woman’s proliferative phase of her menstrual cycle she is predisposed to seek out sexual opportunities with high SMV, masculinized, dominant (to the point of arrogance) men. In her luteal phase she seeks comfort, rapport, security and protection qualities in men. Alpha Seed, Beta Need. As Rian pointed out, we’ve made archetypes (and caricatures) of the type of guy who embodies these needs, but we do so to persuade a woman’s evolved Instinctive understanding of what they are. Women’s hindbrains want to hunt for Hypergamous opportunity, men’s rational (and emotional) process wants to ‘feed’ Hypergamy by redefining what that Instinct should want.

Where both Nümales, Trad-Cons and more than a few Red Pill aware men get it wrong is believing that the security Beta represents should also be what gets her wet. We live in a day and age where men are so feminized that 80%+ default to ‘beta’ behaviors and mindsets because they believe it’s what arouses women. I’ve also written many essays about how anxiety, urgency and (sexual) tension are necessary factors in the ‘enthusiastic’ sex women have with men they genuinely desire. When it comes to comforting a woman, rapport, honesty, emotional investment and security the Beta men of today have been acculturated to have it all in spades. Where they fall short is the Alpha capacity to generate tingles based on making women uncomfortable. One reason men have a tough time with Red Pill awareness is because it all seems so counterintuitive to everything they’ve ever been conditioned to believe about women and sex and how to initiate it.

If you read Roissy’s old categories of Beta to Alpha it follows a predictable pattern. The same applies to Vox Day’s socio-sexual hierarchies (Omega, Gamma, Sigma, Delta, Beta, Alpha, etc), but what we’re really defining in these ranking is a male dominance hierarchy as it applies to women’s sexual selection process – Alpha seed, Beta need – and according to any individual woman’s capacity to demand any particular rank of man.

To answer the first question I began with here, I don’t think the “categories” ever really end because dominance hierarchies are something innate to our world. So, rather than think we can change this, change the nature of reality as equalism attempts to, I think men ought to learn to play it better. The nature of the game doesn’t change. In fact, the equalist mindset that wants to change it ends up making those who accept it and play it well appear that much more exceptional. 

Why? Because the game doesn’t change and our hindbrains know this. So when we see a man who is a “good player” of the game we evolved to play, who became so in spite of all the foolish efforts to change the game to better fit those who don’t play it well, our instincts are attracted to that person that much more. In other words the guy who Just Gets It is even more attractive in a world that women’s hindbrains know is trying to convince her that he shouldn’t just get it. This is why even the most staunch, egalitarian equalist feminist of women still adore a conventionally masculine man who looks and plays the natural role of Alpha man well. They still want to bang him, they still want to submit to him in spite of their ego investments. And they’ll coyly, shamefully, but without any self-consciousness admit they love being loved, fucked, protected, secured, etc. by that guy.

As an adaptation to increase the likelihood of reproduction men and women seek to change the Game that we’ve been playing for 100,000 years now. Only in our age of “gender enlightenment” are we so deluded as to think that prioritizing our emotion or reason above the realities our evolved instinct is spelling out for us might be a way to get intimate and reproduce. Women want to change men’s evolved sexual natures – via social constructionism, feminism, feminine-primacy – in order to reproduce with men they would naturally never have a chance breeding or pairing with, and without any burden of their own performance or merit. They want to change the Game to suit their deficits in playing it the way it is.

Similarly, men seek to improve their own reproductive success by also redefining the terms of the Game to also breed and pair (mostly breed) with women that their own Burden of Performance would merit them. This is why transvaluation (vulnerability is strength, etc.) features so prominently in this mindset. It is an effort in achieving reproductive success and intimacy without excelling in a man’s performance burden. This is precisely why Blue Pill men insist on defining Alpha and Beta in as literal a sense as possible. By rejecting and mocking these terms it self-reinforces the misbelief that they, and ‘quality’ women, have evolved beyond the visceral aspects of Hypergamy. By denying the realities of Alpha and Beta aspects in men the belief is it sets them apart from any natural dominance hierarchy. They’re “above all that”, “women (at least the ‘quality’ ones) are rational agents too and above their own Hypergamous impulses” and “people are all unique individuals set apart from all that human nature stuff.” Each of these rationales is linked to a core misbelief in blank-slate equalism (I’ll address in another essay), but they are also representative of an effort to remove these men from a natural dominance hierarchy and place them into a new Game they believe women are also playing and in which they, by default, are at the highest degree by virtue of having progressed beyond the old Game.

 

The Rational Process

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rationalism vs. The Rational Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotional Differences

The following was from a reader’s comment exchange I had back in March. I wanted to add this here before I move on to the Rational process, because it think it encapsulates a lot of the (often misguided) presumptions we have when it comes to the primary importance we apply to our Emotional process. As I mentioned last week, for millennia now we’ve elevated our Emotional process of interpreting our reality to mythical importance. So insaturated is this importance in our personal and cultural being that to even question it seems sacrilegious. We are literally born into a dependence on emotions for our own survival. That is part of our earliest development, but the conditioning that gives rise to the primacy of emotionalism is layered onto us for the rest of our lives. Emotionalism is the religion that we’ve fashioned from our Emotional interpretive process.
Women practice emotional manipulation and men practice emotional detachment. It’s been a game playing out for thousands of years. Somehow the roles got scrambled in the last century. Things will balance out one way or another in the coming future.

What’s been popularized in our social consciousness as ‘emotional detachment‘ is not a manipulation tactic of men. Men’s mental firmware processes emotion differently from women, but because we live in a feminine-primary social order we’re conditioned to believe that the way women process emotion is the “correct” way for men to process them as well. I made the point a little while ago in another essay that what we think is men’s incorrect way of communicating with other men is really men’s natural way of communicating. I’d linked to an article in the Boston Globe about the problem of “lonely middle aged men” and how they don’t do communication and friendship like women do. Men’s natural, general, indifference to their emotional state isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our mental firmware.

This isn’t to say men don’t get lonely or share the same emotional states as women, but it is to say that men do emotions differently than women. We are naturally predisposed to prioritize information above emotion; the Instinctual and Rational processes come before emotion in our interpretive process. I can remember early on in my marriage when I would talk to a buddy of mine on the phone and then abruptly just say “see ya” or hang up. He knew I’d call him back to relay whatever info we were discussing sooner or later, but my wife thought something was wrong. “Is everything OK with Ray?” she’d ask, and I said “Yeah, why wouldn’t it?” She explained that she thought my ending the call like that was rude or that we’d had an argument. She was used to long drawn conversations with girlfriends or her sister and then ending them by some confessions of how much they would miss each other or some other meaningful way.

She thought my way of communicating was wrong, but this is how men interact with each other – say what you mean, mean what you say and get to the point. This was also the presupposition of the Boston Globe article and many other posts; men do communication wrong, men do emotion wrong, and therefore they must be conditioned to do them correctly. That is to say, like women do.

Men lack the hardware and the firmware to do this, but they are conditioned to reflexively respond as women do from the earliest age. Thus, when a man processes emotion naturally it appears he’s not “feeling” correctly or isn’t “emotionally available” to female-correct sensibilities. In this context a man doing emotion as his innate predispositions compel him to seems like he’s deliberately playing out some ’emotional detachment’ game. But rather than accept that men and women are different and deal with emotions in different ways our egalitarian Blue Pill conditioning makes us presume the man is being inauthentic.

“He’s not really that way, it’s an act, or he’s just withholding his emotions to hurt a woman.” This is the rationale that female-correct society has to resort to because accepting that men evolved to process emotions differently would also mean that men and women are not the functional “equals” that blank-slate equalism is founded on. Thus, their emphasis is to pathologize this emotional detachment and make it one more negative aspect of maleness in need of a ‘cure’.

I think your comments are pertinent and you brought good rational arguments. However they are along the lines of “that’s how we are, men and women”, that’s how we evolved and we can’t do anything about it because it’s in our DNA and our mental programming. Feminism is marching on the fact that we’re born equal, even if there are obvious biological differences. Yes, women emote more and have the means to be greater emotional manipulators. But men can learn the so called feminine behaviors (The so called Game actually involves this and I noticed some of the PUAs mentioning that it’s the bisexual men who are actually the greatest players) and women can also learn the so called manly behaviors (there are a lot of examples especially in our current society). Is it good, is it bad? Hard to say. The thing is that the family is an artificial construction that helped our civilization flourish and it’s been lately systematically destroyed due to what you’re calling feminine primary social order.

Evolution is a continuous process and my opinion is that it’s either people will somehow transcend their biology (see AI or some kind of other conscious evolution) or after some “dark” times of men being more like women and women more like men the things will come to the previous “normality” of feminine women and manly men.

Human beings will not transcend their own evolution, they will adapt with their environments, but they will not be removed from its influences. We’ve been force fitting and conditioning men to be women for the past five generation. We presume that the feminine is the correct, unitary way that humans should be. We call that egalitarian equality, but what it comes down to is adopting a universal correct mode of being and it’s founded on feminine/female control of what is right and wrong – at least for the time being.

However, this force-fits boys and men into an unnatural state they never evolved for and all because the feminine is the presumed correct gender norm that we base equality on. We’re all expected to be equally female. What has that got us in those past five generations? A male suicide rate five times that of women. Boys prescribed sedatives for acting like boys instead of ‘correct’ girls. I can go on.

The fact remains that you and many others of your mindset believe that evolving or being in control of that process only progresses if boys and men “transcend” their biology and think like correct females. It is the height of new agey metaphysical woo woo hubris to expect one sex to behave counter to its 100,000 years of evolved nature and become like the other to accommodate what it thinks should be correct. This is the crux here; the feminine-primary social order we live in today is predicated on the infallibility of the female experience, however, this experience is only validated if both men and women are prioritizing women’s Emotional process as a way of interpreting the world.

The Emotional Process

Of the three cognitive, interpretive processes it is the Emotional process that people are most familiar with, and yet it’s also the most glorified when it comes to determining reality and truth. I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this essay – people invest a lot of themselves in their emotions. The reason for this is because for a very long time we’ve been taught to deify (sometimes literally) the importance of emotion to the human experience. We want to impart our emotions with a metaphysical quality to the point that understanding those feelings is something we expect our omniscient Gods to have a relation with. This is the mythic apex of the grandeur with which we regard emotion, but on a visceral level, the opposite end of that understanding, emotion is something very understandable and very ‘knowable’.

We interpret stimuli via the Emotional process, but we also express our emotional state through art and personal means. And this is the dual nature of emotion; it’s interpretive, but those interpretations are subjective to an individual. As such, these interpretations and expressions become part of our personality and identity. I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in many prior essays. A person can invest themselves so much (ego) into personal beliefs that they become a component part of who they are. Thus, an attack on the belief is literally an attack on the ego, but’s important to point out that those investments are integrally linked to the Emotional process. Emotion is not just an important filter through which we interpret the world, but its effects often shape us as individuals. So because of this subjective, ego-investment dynamic it’s hard not to step on a few toes or challenge the emotionally-inspired belief sets by considering emotion in an objective way.

As with most other aspects of Red Pill awareness. parsing out the nuts and bolts of how and why emotions work, how they evolved and the important survival functions they serve often has a way of dispelling the magic we apply to emotions. From a biological perspective we can prompt certain emotions (or buffer them) by creating the stimuli that evokes them. We can chemically induce an emotional response. We can alter moods with drugs and we can chemically compare the endorphins released into our bloodstream when we experience the ’emotional’ effects of love, lust and infatuation. There are many studies comparing love to addiction, and the effects of a breakup being comparable to ‘withdrawal’ symptoms.

Emotion has prompted virtually all of mankind’s greatest art, music, literature and so many more cultural effects it’s hard to think that emotion doesn’t define us as a species. Emotion has started wars, prompted self-sacrifice, moves us to mercy, ensures that our children are nurtured and sees that we care and cooperate with each other. Emotion is a blessing and a curse as environment and circumstance demand, but for all of that the Emotional process is a result of our evolved biology. Emotion is firmly rooted in our evolved capacity to experience and interpret our environment and circumstances. Emotion is rooted in the physical. And while it inspires us to acts that may seem divine or diabolic the fact remains that emotion is very much dependent on our evolved capacity to physically experience it.

I begin this essay stressing this point because the concept (not the process) of emotion has been elevated to such a mythic degree of importance in our present times that it supersedes almost all other considerations in life. We’re largely taught and conditioned to prioritize the importance of our emotional states above both the Instinctual and Rational processes, so to reduce emotion to a physical dynamic runs counter to what we feel it should mean to us. Unless we’re dealing with a clinical, physical depression we rarely consider that emotion is an interpretive process. We want to apply meaning to emotion rather than see it as the evolved tool it is to human beings.

Both Instinct and Reason influence and modify the Emotional process, and like both, Emotion is interpretive and functional. If we look at base emotions we can make inferences as to what their latent purposes might be. In the first post of this series I drew the lines between the effect of oxytocin inspiring feelings of trust and caring, and how the environmental prompts that trigger this hormone have a practical ‘real world’ function. We can speculate that the instinctual prompts that trigger the oxytocin then lead to the emotional processing of the feeling of trust/caring which then prompts physical behavior (nurturing a child, etc.) Hunger is another good example. Our physical state of hunger prompts feelings of anger or discontent which then compels us to action. In our evolutionary past this anger prompt would’ve been beneficial in that it motivated us to seek/kill food.

Those are just a couple of the many different basic prompts for the Emotional process, but emotion is much more complex and nuanced than this. The Emotional process is multi-layered, so when you combine various emotional interpretive processes with emotional responses you get various new iterations of emotion which then builds into more complex emotions. While instinct is the fastest of these processes, emotion can be more time intensive. Base emotions are relatively quick interpretations (though slower than instinct), but the more complex, compound emotions take time to interpret, build and then reinterpret. Because of this compositing process humans have a tendency to fixate on the emotion itself as being of primary importance; often forgetting or dismissing entirely the stimuli that originally prompted it. Furthermore, we forget or dismiss the latent purpose of that initial emotional interpretation that caused that composite cascade of emotions.

An understanding of this emotion compositing is necessary to understand why we tend to imbue emotions with such importance and power. While base emotions are linked to the ‘fast-twitch’ Instinctual process, the more complex emotions – the ones we subconsciously craft over more time – tend to be the ones we build belief sets around. This is very important to Red Pill awareness because it explains the motivations for, and foundations of, feminine-primary belief sets of both men and women, as well as the feminine-primary social order that is a result of those belief sets.

Gender Differences

Despite all the protestations of egalitarian minds, men and women are fundamentally different. Biologically, neurologically, endocrinologically and psychologically our gender-specific differences are significant. This isn’t a revelation to my Red Pill aware readers, but it’s a radical statement for the past generations who are emotionally invested in the idea of a blank-slate parity between the sexes they’ve been conditioned to believe is true. As I mention above, an ego-investment is component part of the personality of the individual so invested. To attack the investment, the belief, the ideology, the educated-but-misinformed opinion, is to attack the person. That belief set, like the emotions that compounded to develop it, is subjective to the individual experiencing the emotions that led to it.

One presupposition that has been a part of the manosphere for as long as I’ve been a part of it is that women put “feels before realz”. In several essays I’ve made a case for women’s innate communication style being context based – women focus on how the communication makes them feel; the information conveyed is secondary. For men this is reversed; men prioritize the content (the information) of the communication and the context is secondary. I’ve written a lot about how each sex evolved into their communication priorities, but down to the biological level, per our sex, the answers can be found in how our brains differ.

There are many multivariate studies that reveal similar findings and brain imaging, and the uncanny complementarity between men and women’s brains. For the most part studies indicate that women tend to prioritize the Emotional interpretive process above the Rational interpretive process and vice versa for men. That is not to say women are entirely incapable of reason, nor does it imply that men are emotionally stunted. What I’m suggesting is that our innate, biological predispositions prioritize our interpretive processes to emotion in women and rationality in men. Women can be taught to prioritize reason over emotion and, as I’ll illustrate next, men most definitely can be taught conditioned to prioritize emotion above their innate reason.

There are also numerous studies on how these interpretive prioritization function as a result of neurological gendered differences in men and women. Women process negative emotions differently than men. Men largely lack the brain architecture (wiring) to process emotion in the same manner and with the same degree of prioritization as women do. This is simply how we’re built, but before any woman pops off about their ‘superior’ emotional capacity, bear in mind, women’s brains are not wired for the rational and spatial tasks men’s brains are more suited to. Out of the womb, a boy is predisposed to throw an object with greater force and more accuracy than a girl. And that’s just one easy illustration of the mental firmware men are born with.

None of this, however, is about one sex being superior to the other’s innate predispositions. It’s not a contest, it’s just about which disposition is better suited to a task. But still, the first inclination today is to presume women’s greater emotional capacity should be the normative in our present-day feminine-primary social order. For the past 60+ years we’ve lived in a social condition that has made every attempt to feminize men; to get them more in touch with their emotions – to condition men, despite their brain wiring, to prioritize the Emotional process above both instinct and reason.

To reiterate, women are not necessarily handicapped because the Rational process isn’t their innate, predisposed preference, but neither are men handicapped for lacking the interpretive hardware to prioritize the Emotional process as women do. That said, for the past 4-5 generations we’ve lived in a social order that has presumed a blank-slate equalist perspective of men and women. We live in a time when men not emoting like women is a disorder to be treated and conditioned. We presume today that boys are defective girls because they don’t prioritize the Emotional in their communications or their interpretive process. Today the Emotional process that women innately prefer is the ‘correct’ way for all, egalitarian, blank-slate equals to prioritize their interpretations of the world and each other with.

As most of my readers already know, I see the presumption of equalism as being little more than a cover story for feminine primacy. For several generations now, and especially since the Sexual Revolution, the pretense of gender equality has been the vehicle for female social primacy. At first it was subtle and inoffensive, but today this social engineering effort is out in the open. And with more and more empirical evidence mounting that proves the sexes are far less “equal” in nature than prior egalitarian doctrines would allow anyone to accept, we see an intensifying effort to retain the social narrative on the part of equalist. Only now it’s focused on the innate ‘wrongness’ of masculinity by demonizing and pathologizing anything conventionally masculine. This new intensive effort is only able to find legitimacy because prior feminized generations base their belief sets on the the inherent ‘correctness’ of prioritizong the Emotional process – a process that is fundamentally, biologically linked to women’s preferences in interpreting the world around them.

So today we look at men as if they’re stunted and ‘wrong’ for communicating with other men in a way that prioritizes information before how it makes them feel. We still today implore men to get in touch with their feminine sides – the last vestige of Car Jung’s bastardized and now disproven animus theories – but pity men for lacking the hardware to emote ‘correctly’ like women. We don’t teach boys emotional control because in our emotional-prioritizing social order anything that looks like control seems like masculine oppression of emotional expression. Instead we create new, more intense, ways of discouraging men of ever embracing or “getting in touch” with their masculine sides. We discard masculine discipline for emotional pretense. We teach boys at younger and younger ages to fear and despise their innate masculine selves. We create programs to cure masculinity as if it were a health crisis. This effort will only intensify as gender differences become more and more unignorable and the social engineering of the last 60 years becomes more obvious.

As a basis of that cure is the fundamental presumption that interpreting our world through the filter of Emotion should supersede or entirely disqualify the Rational interpretive process. As you might guess, men’s innate predisposition is to interpret our world through Reason. Today we live in a world where feelings trump both instinct and reason. This is why the current generation makes the Emotional process and their feelings more important than any other consideration – they are the cumulative result of having prioritized women’s emotional preferences above all else, while simultaneously engineering consecutive generations of feminized men to facilitate it for the last seven decades.

In the next and final installment in this series I’ll be addressing the Rational interpretive process and how we might imagine better future generations based on seizing and instituting a social order founded on masculine reason.

The Instinctual Process

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

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

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

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

Base Instincts

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

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

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

Gendered Differences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Instinct, Emotion and Reason

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

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

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

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

Instinct

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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